Rhonda Patrick: We are being bombarded with disrupting chemicals. A lot of them, they're in art products.

主持人: Okay, let's go to my kitchen. Come with me. So, this is my fridge.

Rhonda Patrick: So, the first thing I notice is this, cuz that's like the worst.

主持人: Can I get a bin bag?

Rhonda Patrick: This is made from recycled electronics.

主持人: What about this?

Rhonda Patrick: This is a problem also.

主持人: And this?

Rhonda Patrick: Ding, ding, ding. This is great.

主持人: I'm going to do utensils next.

Rhonda Patrick: Heating it up. The plastic is getting into your food.

主持人: What about a receipt?

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

主持人: The biomedical scientist and anti-aging doctor Rhonda Patrick is back.

主持人: This time she's talking about health optimization, maintaining peak performance

主持人: and the environmental toxins disrupting your body.

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

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

主持人: You're joking.

Rhonda Patrick: And the same goes for cognitive function.

主持人: So I'm on the way down.

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

主持人: So I want to talk about all of that but we've got to talk about this in my hands at the moment.

Rhonda Patrick: So if you have this it's going to double your risk of early mortality.

主持人: Double your risk.

Rhonda Patrick: Double.

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

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

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

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

Rhonda Patrick: and it's it's surrounding your organs like your liver, your kidney, you know, your intestines. This is a very deep belly fat and it's very different from subcutaneous fat. You can actually be lean but have a high amount of visceral fat. We call these metabolically unhealthy people. So visceral fat, you mentioned you're 33. The average 33 year old male has how much visceral fat?

主持人: According to the data, it says roughly 1.2 pounds at the age of 30. And then for a woman,.5 lb of visceral fat at the age of 30. At 40, it's 1.7 lb for a man and.7 for a woman. At 50, 2.2 lb for a man, £1 for a woman. And at 60, 2.7 lb of visceral fat and 1.54 lb for a woman, which is the highest risk for metabolic syndromes at that age. But I mean, all of them are pretty scary.

Rhonda Patrick: It is. And as you notice, the trend is as you get older, you have a higher risk of having more of it. 70% of women over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat. 50% of men over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat. This visceral fat, for one, it's going to double your risk of early mortality. Full stop. That's that's you know it's it's going to double your risk. Double your risk. Double double. Visceral fat is as I mentioned different from the other kind of fat. The subcutaneous kind of fat the atapost tissue kind of fat

Rhonda Patrick: in several ways. One is that it is metabolically active. It is secretreting inflammatory cytoines. These are, you know, molecules that are signaling to the immune system, but they're also involved with damaging our cells. And for this reason, people with a high amount of visceral fat are 44% more likely to get metastatic cancer. That's cancer that's going to metastasize. Very dangerous types of cancer. They're also more likely, you mentioned metabolic syndrome. This is a big big thing with visceral fat. This type of fat is constantly breaking down triglycerides into free fatty acids. It's constantly doing it.

主持人: What's triglycerides?

Rhonda Patrick: Triglycerides are how your body is able to store fatty acids and fat and use them for later, you know, energy, right? So, they're constantly breaking them down and using them. They're using these these fatty acids. But typically what happens in your body when you eat a meal, you have your glucose levels go up, right? Your blood sugar elevates, your glucose levels go up and that signals to the pancreas in your body to make insulin. Insulin is this hormone that plays a role in many things. One of it is to tell different parts of the body to take gluc glucose up like your liver, your muscle, your atapost tissue. Well, the problem is is this visceral fat is constantly making those free fatty acids. And so those fatty acids, it doesn't it doesn't respond this this we call it it's not really an organ, but this type of fat doesn't respond to insulin. So whereas the subcutaneous fat will stop breaking down fat and using fat as energy. It says, "Okay, look, I have energy here. I got to do something with this energy. Let me let me store it for later use." Right? Well, that that doesn't happen with visceral fat. What happens is it just keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. What happens is when your visceral fat is metabolically active like that, it is basically making it where insulin can't work its job. And so what happens is that glucose can't go into your liver. It stays in your blood system.

主持人: And you really want it to be stored in your liver, right?

Rhonda Patrick: You want it to be stored in your liver as glycogen to be used as energy when you're fasting or when you're, you know, physically active or when whenever you need it, right? Also in your muscle. same thing, stored as glycogen or stored in your atapost tissue. Um, and so and so none of that happens because insulin, it's not able to to basically act on your your your organs. It's there's no signal. So no, nobody's getting the phone call, hey, time to take the glucose up. It's not happening, right? So the glucose sits around. So what happens is your body freaks out because it's not good to have glucose sitting around in your bloodstream for a while. It causes a lot of damage, right? Mhm.

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

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

Rhonda Patrick: Exactly. It's taking it home. It's taking it back to the liver. And so what happens when you make more insulin, you're overcompensating in such a way that now glucose really does get taken up into these other organs like the liver. And it so much so that it causes your blood glucose levels to go down and and you're crashing. And all of a sudden, this is responsible for that. You know, people that eat a meal and they're kind of insulin resistant. They eat a meal and then all of a sudden they're crashing an hour later. We're like, why am I why do I have no energy? Why am I hungry? Right? Because when you're after you crash, your blood glucose levels go down. That's what I mean by crashing. Um really f far down. Not not normal levels, but like below that. And so then your body tries to overcompensate by going, "Oh, I'm hungry. I need to eat." And so you start to have these cravings for like energy dense foods. And that's part of this cycle of the beginnings of insulin resistance. And so when I'm talking about here with visceral fat, it causes insulin resistance. And that's essentially the take-home here by by it's constantly metabolizing fatty acids, it's it's stopping that taxi car from going and getting the glucose. It's it's not happening. It's not responding. You're not picking up the driver, right? And so you become insulin resistant. And that has a lot of problems. One, it's going to affect your immediate energy levels. It's going to affect the way you're feeling. And two, it's going to make you more likely to become type two diabetic because eventually your body will won't be able to produce enough insulin to bring the glucose in. And so then you become type 2 diabetic. So that is a big consequence of having this visceral fat in addition to those inflammatory molecules that are being generated from this fat. It's just so metabolically active. And that inflammation that you're generating not only does things like raise your cancer risk by 44%. It also makes you tired. It gives you brain fog, lethargy. When your immune system is being activated by this inflammation, you're taking energy away from your brain. It c it's a lot of energy to activate your immune system. And so, yeah. So, that energy is now going to the wrong place. It's not going to your brain.

主持人: So, you can feel you won't feel cognitively as sharp and

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

主持人: Uh yeah, I'm like I'm I'm out of out of action for several days usually,

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

主持人: looking at the data, I mean, most people have too much visceral fat.

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

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

Rhonda Patrick: Yes, that's the thing. You know, I was involved in clinical research for many years when I was doing my post-graduate training. And we were looking at populations of people that were metabolically unhealthy or maybe overweight, obese in some cases, and you would have someone come in that they looked skinny, they looked like they were metabolically healthy because they weren't overweight. And yet all of their biomarker data was showing the opposite. Like they looked on paper, if you would have shown me their metabolic data, I would go, "Oh, this is an overweight obese person." So these are these are lean but metabolically unhealthy people and a large percentage of that has to do with an increase in visceral fat. You won't even necessarily know that you're getting higher amounts of v visceral fat. It's not necessarily going to be reflected on the scale. You know, you mentioned maybe a pound, maybe a little bit more. That's like daily fluctuation in some cases, right? Like I mean I don't know about you, but like I I can fluctuate a pound from day to day for sure. If you're talking about 500 grams or less, that's not going to be, you know, reflected on a scale either. You might be going, well, what why visceral fat? What's causing visceral fat? You know, I mentioned age, that's a big one. Hormones is a big one. Women are very susceptible as they go through pmenopause and menopause because estrogen actually tells helps tell the body how to store energy and it tells it to store energy and fat in atapost tissue, not viscerally. So when your estrogen starts to go down during par p parmenopause and then menopause, women really start to gain a lot of vis this belly fat. They gain a lot of the visceral fat. Testosterone also it doesn't tell the body how to store the fat so much. It helps you burn visceral fat. So men are a little bit more protected when they're younger as well, but as they age, of course, testosterone goes down as well, and that affects the visceral fat. But mostly, it's our diet and our lifestyle that's really affecting visceral fat. It's kind of mind-blowing how quickly you can gain visceral fat. Like there was sleep is a big one. When you're when you miss sleep, that is something that can really you can start to store you can start to gain visceral fat very quickly. Um there was a study in healthy young men. These men were sleep restricted. Typically when sleep restriction studies are done, you're you're looking at four hours of sleep per night. So pretty severe. Not out of the ordinary. I did many of those college graduate school deadlines. Definitely as a new parent, I mean it's unfortunately drags on for months. So these men were only sleeping four hours a night for two weeks. Okay, these are healthy young men, college age students. Okay, young. They gained 11% visceral fat after that two weeks, but not a pound on the scale, but they had 11% higher visceral fat after just, you know, two weeks of not getting enough sleep.

主持人: And they weighed the same

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

Rhonda Patrick: Yes. Also, the visceral fat, like like I said, you're not gaining pounds and pounds and pounds of it necessarily. You know, you're gaining grams and grams, but like it's happening and and any amount that you're starting to gain is unhealthy, right? It's going to start causing insulin resistance. It's going to start, you know, causing fatty liver. That's another thing. It does it because it's around the liver. It basically the liver doesn't know what to do with all the fat. So, it starts to make and store it around the fat. And so you start to get this non-alcoholic fatty liver which is happening now in like young people. So sleep is one another major major I would say lever for gaining visceral fat is your diet quality and quantity. So if you start to be in a caloric excess constantly you can start to gain visceral fat and that's also been shown in studies. So, there was a recent study that again was in healthy young men given about 1,200 extra calories a day and it was mostly from ultrarocessed foods, right? I mean, they're 1,200 calories, so like Big Mac and a Coke, Big Mac and fries, whatever, you know? So, you're you're talking about almost like an extra meal a day and from processed foods, ultrarocessed foods. For 5 days, they were given, you know, this extra caloric intake. After that five days, they started to gain visceral fat. They started to have signs of fatty liver after five days. And their brains became insulin resistant. And this is important. Yes. You

主持人: How many calories were they having in excess?

Rhonda Patrick: 1,200 to,500.

主持人: In excess.

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

Rhonda Patrick: Yes. So, you know, it's a lot of people are eating caloric excess, you know, daily. They're not they're not exercising and there's no energy expenditure and they're eating more and so they're in in you know 1,200. Now this is the extreme end right I'm giving you an extreme end because that's what they do usually in in studies like this because they want to get a significant result but after 5 days they they were gaining visceral fat their brains became insulin resistant. So insulin is also very important for the brain. the brain is telling the body how to store the fat and how to store energy. And when the and when insulin is not able to to get into the brain and have its action, then you start to not have the brain tell the body how to store this energy and it ends up storing it viscerally. It's like this default.

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

Rhonda Patrick: close. It's when I eat close to sleep.

主持人: If I do that a couple of nights in a row, I feel like my brain no longer works.

Rhonda Patrick: Yes. Yeah. You know, obviously we all have to like live our lives and there's social things and it's fun to go out and have a dinner with your friends or an event, right? But it's not a good idea to eat a meal, a big meal three hours before, fewer than three hours before bed. So, you want to stop eating 3 hours before bed. And three is really the magic number in multiple studies because when you eat a meal, it is activating your sympathetic nervous system, right? That's the fight or flight response. That's not what you want active when you're about to go to bed. When you're activating the sympathetic nervous system right before you're going to bed, let's say you eat a meal within an hour of bedtime, you're digesting all that. It's your sympathetic nervous system is active. And even if you're sleeping, it's not good sleep. It's fragmented sleep. And so it's disrupted sleep because you you need to be in that parasympathetic part of, you know, the nervous system. That dominance needs to be parasympathetic, which is the rest restore. It's called rest and digest. But I don't like digest because actually digesting is what activates the sympathetic nervous system. So it's like the recovery, right?

主持人: So should I stay up then for three hours? If I if I eat at midnight,

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

主持人: I've heard you talk about fiber.

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

主持人: a little bit of rice or a potato,

Rhonda Patrick: some fries or something.

Rhonda Patrick: Maybe not a fried potato, baked baked potato and then cool it because then it's resistant starch, right? Because then it's good for your your gut microbiome.

主持人: Why?

Rhonda Patrick: It changes the composition of the fiber

Rhonda Patrick: and and you can cook it, let it cool, and then heat it again if you like to eat it heated as long as it went through a cooling part.

主持人: Wow.

Rhonda Patrick: And then you can eat it. But that's resistant starch. Resistant starch is also in green bananas. very beneficial for the gut and also for interestingly for improving sleep. So things that are really moving the needle to to make you gain visceral fat or being in basically being in a caloric excess especially from refined highfat high sugar foods. And then not getting enough sleep, move the needle. Chronic stress is an amplifier of it. So if you're constantly having cortisol that's kind of stopping the body from storing energy right the right way and it's going viscerally as well. I would say that amplifies especially if it's like in the context of being in a caloric excess and not exercising. Alcohol is another one. If you drink if you're excessively consuming alcohol you're going to store a lot of the energy that you're also consuming is going to be stored visceral. I mean you've seen the beer belly right? I mean that's like a thing. It's visceral fat. It's it's not beer. It's visceral fat. So alcohol is another one. In terms of losing visceral fat, I mean the good news is is that you can lose it quite easily and quite rapidly.

主持人: I was going to say parents have a hard time because you're naming those things about like sleep and stress and and I was thinking gosh parents have like a have it coming from them from all sides.

Rhonda Patrick: They do. Um the but see this is where the good news comes in because you know part of the reason why sleep is causing you to gain more visceral sleep loss is causing you to gain visceral fat is because it's causing your body to become insulin resistant. It's like this vicious cycle. Visceral fat causes insulin resistance. Insulin resistance causes more visceral fat. Right? And becomes this and that's why once you get into that cycle it just spirals out of control, right? And you start to gain more and more and more.

主持人: Sorry. Insulin resistance. What is that? That is when your body no longer produces insulin or

Rhonda Patrick: No, no. Insulin resistance is when your body is no longer responding to insulin. So, it's like it's like you're waiting for the phone to ring and it's ringing, but you can't hear it, right? Like you you're not getting the signal and so your your cells are not responding to the insulin that's made. Insulin is really helping your body bring move the glucose out, right? move it move it out of your bloodstream where it can cause a lot of damage if it sits around

主持人: and if you put too much pressure pressure on the insulin system then it kind of shuts down

Rhonda Patrick: eventually shuts down

主持人: and the thing that puts too much pressure is consuming too much glucose or too much activity

Rhonda Patrick: too much glucose refined glucose can do that visceral fat is one of the I would say bigger causes of insulin it's actually one of the major major causes of insulin resistance because if you are physically active and eating a lot of glucose, that glucose is going to your muscles. Physical activity makes your muscles very responsive to glucose without needing insulin. Your the transporters that transport glucose are super super responsive when you exercise. That's why physical activity and this is what I was getting at with parents is so important. The visceral fat is the really big like concern with insulin resistance. This is and this is the thing that again it's like people don't even know about it. A lot of people are thinking about glucose and oh, I got to watch my glucose. And that's all fine. I mean, yes, to some degree that's also playing a role, but it's it's it's the visceral fat that's the real underlying problem that's that's causing you to become insulin resistant. You mentioned parents have it like bad because they're stressed out and they don't get sleep. I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor when I became a new mother. I was appalled by my fasting blood glucose and by my postprandial blood glucose levels. Never

主持人: postrenal. Postprandial means after a meal. Okay?

Rhonda Patrick: So your levels go obviously much higher after you eat a meal versus in the morning when you haven't had anything to eat.

Rhonda Patrick: And my levels were were so high. It was pre-diabetic

Rhonda Patrick: and and I was just I couldn't believe it. And it's not like I'm eating, you know, drinking Cokes and eating terrible, right? But there was a period of time when I'm not as physically active, particularly in the first couple of months. It's really, you know, that's the time when you're kind of just in this cave. I immediately was looking into the scientific literature and found that high-intensity interval training and exercise can help almost negate most of the those poor effects of causing insulin resistance and causing your glucose regulation to not be normal. That's the good news for parents is that you should prioritize new parents should prioritize exercise and exercise does cause you to lose visceral fat. It's not just any type of exercise really has to be aerobic and the more vigorous the better. So for people that don't know what that means, aerobic and vigorous.

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

主持人: Why? It's energy expenditure. It plays a role in getting you to that caloric more caloric deficit and that's better. So that's one way. And the other thing is weight any any weight loss program. So intermittent fasting, caloric restriction, you know, even GLP-1 receptor agonist and all the classes of GLP1, anything that is going to make you lose weight, lose fat, visceral fat's one of the first to go. And in fact, people on on these these weight loss programs or even on exercise training program, visceral fat's the first fat to go and and so you can lose it quite quite quickly.

主持人: So on this point of fasting, are you a fan of fasting to combat visceral fat? And also, could you give me your thoughts on being in a ketogenic state as it relates to visceral fat? Yeah, people when they think about intermittent fasting, they kind of think about, you know, one thing and they think about weight loss, right? But there's a lot going on here. And I like I like that you mentioned being in a ketogenic state because there's also a metabolic switch that happens. This metabolic switch from burning carbohydrates and glucose to burning fatty acids and getting in ketosis, right? That's a metabolic switch. And it's very important. There are two different things happening here. But intermittent fasting is essentially a good tool that people can use to reduce their calorie intake without having to count their calories. That's why I like it. You can you can lose weight by counting your calories and reducing your calorie intake. I personally think that's a lot of work. Some people love doing it and that's great. I think whatever works for a person. But the way in which intermittent fasting helps people lose visceral fat is by reducing calorie intake. That's what I'm getting at. It's like a tool that some people like to use because I like it for one because I can not think I just I'll skip one meal making sure I get enough nutrients in the the meals that I eat and protein in the meals I eat. But I'll skip a meal and it gets me in a caloric deficit without having to think about and count everything. So it's easier on me

主持人: to fast

Rhonda Patrick: to fast versus counting calories.

主持人: And how how do you do that? So, I like to fast in the morning. And the reason I like to fast in the morning is for the exact reason you mentioned, and that is the ketosis, which I like to call the metabolic switch. You're not eating while you're sleeping, obviously. So, if you're sleeping for 8, if you're in bed for 9 hours, 10 hours, you're not eating during that time. And it takes about 10 to 12 hours for your liver to deplete glycogen. glucose that's been taken up by the liver is stored as glycogen so that you can then use it for energy later if you don't have energy coming in. Right.

主持人: So the glycogen is like the the petrol station.

Rhonda Patrick: Yes.

主持人: So it runs out of petrol.

Rhonda Patrick: That's right. And and so um it takes

主持人: it switches to diesel.

Rhonda Patrick: And it switches to diesel. And so after that switch, that metabolic switch when you deplete that glycogen while you're sleeping or while you're not, you know, not eating after about 12 hours. And by the way, this is all relative because it depends on the kind of foods you eat and how physically active you are. So, if you eat a lot of high carbohydrate, refined sugar stuff, you might take even longer to deplete your glycogen because you're you're putting a lot of input in there. You keep filling up the the fuel tank, right?

Rhonda Patrick: But if you're eating things that are more low carb, you might deplete your glycogen sooner. So, when you deplete your glycogen, you get into this metabolic switch because your body still needs energy, but there's no nothing, no glucose around, right? So, you start to switch to, you know, your fatty acids are mobilized. They come out of your atapost tissue. This is why people lose fat. They come out of the visceral fat. You you start to use those fatty acids and burn them as energy. And as a product of that energy, you're making ketones, ketosis. And the reason I like to do this in the morning is because then I can really get into that ketoic state where if I'm fasting, I do it typically I fast for about 16 hours a day and then I eat my meals within eight hours a day. Typically, that's my what I do. The reason I like to be in that metabolic switch state is many reasons actually. One, the ketones themselves are providing my brain with energy, very e easily utilizable energy, but they're also acting as a signaling molecule to my brain going, "Hey, this is a stressful time. There's no food. You better be cognitively sharp. You got to find that food. You got to like know what you're doing, right? It's an evolutionary adaptation." You know, humans for thousands of years were going through this metabolic switch because we didn't have Instacart. We didn't have Postmates. We didn't have all Uber Eats, right? We had to find our food. We had to hunt our food. And we always didn't always do that, right? And so when I get into that metabolic switch state, I feel it. I feel more cognitively sharp. And I feel less anxious, which is part of it because those ketones also help increase something called GABA. That's an inhibitory neurotransmitter. It's essentially, you can just think of it as like it helps you feel calmer. When I feel calmer, I'm more cognitively focused because it's like the background anxiety is down, right? It it's like you can focus. And so, I love being in that state in the morning because that's when I get my work done. I also like to be in that metabolic switch state. And this is why I like fasting in addition to, you know, the calorie, the fewer calories I'm consuming, right? Your body has to be in that fasted state to repair. If you're constantly in a fed state, fed states are important for anabolic growth. We need it to grow, right? But the repair state is also very important because with the growth comes damage. Damage comes along with that and you want to repair that damage because damage will accelerate aging. And so I like to be and give my body enough time. I don't want to just wake up and eat where it's like, oh, I've only barely depleted my liver glycogen. I'm not even in that repair state very long, right? I want to extend it a little bit. And so I like to have that repair process active and that it is active during it's fasting activates it but also you have some amount of active repair going on even when you're in a fed state. It's just heightened when you're fasted. So those are the reasons I like to be I like intermittent fasting. I feel good when I do it. I also do a lot of training, not all of it. I do a lot of training fasted. Cardiovascular aerobic endurance exercise. So running, biking, that stuff I like to do fasted. I'm not going for a 10-mi run. I'm going for a three- mile run, right? I mean, this is So, if I was going for a 10 mile run, I wouldn't be fasted. I would need some fuel. But there are studies, me, multiple studies showing that if you do aerobic endurance training, this kind of running, cycling, swimming type of training, you actually have better adaptations if you're fasted versus fed.

主持人: What does that mean? So much of the benefit from exercise, right? Aerobic exercise when you're breathing in, you're you're you're you're right, you're working hard is from the working hard, but your body responds to that, right? Because the working hard is causing inflammation. It's causing oxidative damage. And your body is responding to that by going, "Oh, we got to get better at this stuff." So, you have anti-inflammatory pathways activated. You have antioxidant pathways activated. Your body needs to burn fat. You need fuel. And so if you're fasted, you get better at burning the fat and oxidizing the fat and you continue to do that throughout the day better as well. So you have what are called mitochondrial adaptations that are better. You make more mitochondria. Mitochondria are very important little tiny organels inside of most of our cells that make energy and they, you know, they're very important for everything. I mean, they're running our brains right now so we can talk, our heart, you know, so we can breathe, our lungs, everything, right? And so exercise does make you increase the amount of those new mitochondria that you make that are young and healthy.

主持人: If you're fasted

Rhonda Patrick: both, even if you're not, but if you're fasted, it's even better.

主持人: This has been a big debate around whether this applies to both men and women.

主持人: Should both men and women exercise fasted?

Rhonda Patrick: This is my read of the literature and my thoughts on this from also having experts that have studied male versus female responses to exercise. First and foremost, how do you feel when you exercise fasted? If you feel terrible, that's a sign. I think listening to your body is the most important thing that you can do. There are times when I have to eat before I exercise and I listen to my body. I that's it. I'm I'm going to eat. When it comes to women versus men and doing exercise fasted, it also depends on are you again, are you doing a 30 minute run? Are you doing a 2hour run? If you're doing a 2-hour run, you need to fuel. That's a lot. That's a big stress. When it comes to a 30-minute run, you don't really necessarily need to. Now, the problem with women is that they're often if you're in too much of a caloric deficit and you don't eat enough food within, you know, like afterwards, you're not refueling enough and you're doing very very long high volume types of exercise, then you can basically disrupt your, you know, some of your hormones, your your follicle stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone. These things will make you become amenoretic. So you basically stop ovulating and you stop getting your menstrual period.

主持人: And what's the evolutionary reason for that? What's going on?

Rhonda Patrick: Because your body's like there's not enough food and energy around to sustain a ba, you know, a growing fetus like they're growing shutting down.

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

Rhonda Patrick: First of all, this is not a common thing. This is like this is something that happens in, you know, like athletes, elite athlete, women that are not eating enough food. Like I I did this to myself when I was in my early 20s and I was running I was racing marathons and I was running 10 miles a day, you know, eight to 10 miles a day, five days a week and then I was eating carrots and hummus and you know, I just I wasn't fueling myself and I did I did this to myself, too. So, how do you feel if you train fasted? Do you feel terrible? Don't do it. If you want to train somewhat fasted, go for the protein, you know, protein shake with a little bit of almond milk or something like that where you're not eating a full meal, but you're getting something. So, I do a lot of my training fasted and that has helped me. You know, I'm 47 years old and penmenopause.

主持人: You're in phenomenal shape.

Rhonda Patrick: Thank you. Thank you. Um, but I did notice, of course, as as I started to reach that pmenopause part of my life that I had to be a little bit more aggressive and put a little bit more effort in to not get this fat right here on my belly cuz it started coming up and I didn't want it. I didn't it wasn't it wasn't an option for me. Speaking of uh studies done for women, you I've heard you talk in the past about the Swan study, which kind of relates to what you just said there. Um when relating to women in visceral fat, and they found that women experience an accelerated increase in visceral fat starting 2 years before their final menstrual period.

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

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

主持人: And you're so you're 47

Rhonda Patrick: Mhm. and a half

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

Rhonda Patrick: It is. And and I

主持人: Yeah. I can tell you from people in my life that I've seen going through this, it's pretty sudden that you'll see someone in your life that's a woman that's going through Mary Pen Perry menopause and maybe hasn't had any other symptoms yet, so they haven't really see any treatment. Now, you can you can try to do some hormone replacement therapy as well to help with that, but they start to gain visceral fat and it shows up around the belly quite rapidly. And I noticed this in myself. It almost feels overnight. Seriously, this is the only symptom that I noticed in myself where it was like all of a sudden my belly was like growing and um you know, not super super large, but enough where I was like there's something wrong. It's not even necessarily reflected if you get hormone tests cuz mine all seemed normal. The thing is is that the estrogen when it drops that estrogen is so important for telling your body to store energy differently, not around the organs, but to make it around, you know, other parts of your body like your your thighs and your butt, right? Like your atapost tissue. And so when that estrogen goes down and declines, it's like boom, it starts to go right to the belly. So that is why for me intermittent fasting has been really important. Like with any weight loss or calorie restriction protocol, you do need to make sure you're getting enough protein because that's important for muscle, right? Muscle growth and preventing atrophy of your muscle. And you need to also do resistance training. That also is a very important signal for muscle. Because the problem is some people calorie restrict and eat fewer meals and then they're not getting enough protein and they're not training and they start to lose muscle in addition to fat and you don't want to do that. You want to kind of just lose the visceral fat and keep the muscle ideally keep gaining muscle.

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

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

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

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

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

主持人: And also

Rhonda Patrick: stress. Stress.

主持人: Yeah. Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: The stress like you know trying to to relaxation techniques buffer that stress. That's a big one. It's an amplifier.

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

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

主持人: Yeah.

Rhonda Patrick: Or Yeah. They look at, you know, HBA1C, your long-term glucose, or they're looking at lipids, and visceral fat is just it's it's insidious, right? It just starts increasing, increasing, increasing. You can't see it. You can't see until all of a sudden belly, right? I mean, it's it's it's bad. And it affects the way you feel daily. On this point of testosterone, why is it the case that testosterone seems to be dropping amongst men? I think it said something like I wrote it down. Yeah, testosterone levels in men have dropped by up to 20% over the last two decades.

主持人: Um, which is quite terrifying.

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

主持人: Are they really causing a problem?

Rhonda Patrick: Absolutely.

主持人: Really? Like

Rhonda Patrick: absolutely. cuz I'm looking at the picture you have there of Pa Pas

主持人: PAS

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

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

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

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

主持人: How do we know that they're dangerous?

Rhonda Patrick: Okay. Well, I'll tell you how we know. like let's let's start with so the PAS chemicals are ones that are really they're more affecting the thyroid and they're affecting I would say ovarian aging they seem to target the ovaries and accelerate the age that you're going to get menopause so you're going to get it around two one to two years earlier if you have a high amount of these forever chemicals but there's been studies a lot of studies looking at let's start with BPA okay bispenol A that's a big one because you see a lot of marketing around BPA free. This plastic water bottle is BPA free. Well, it's BPA free, but it has another chemical called BPS, which is very similar, if not worse, than BPA. So, BPA is something that's found in a lot of water bottles. It's in those plastic water bottles. It lines the cups of uh paper cups, like these to-go coffee cups that you're getting at your favorite, you know, coffee place. Plastic is lining them. Yes, plastic lines them because it's protecting it from the liquid, right? BPA has been linked to many different diseases, but really really it's an endocrine disruptor. So what it does is a couple of things. One, BPA acts as an estrogen mimemetic. So it kind of mimics estrogen and it binds to the receptors that estrogen do to do its function. And so it sometimes binds to estrogen and either makes it seem like there's estrogen around or it blocks estrogen from working. So it's it it depends on the dose and the concentration. So it can do both, but it also binds to androgen receptors that interact with testosterone, right? And so there have been studies that have found that men that have high amounts of BPA also have low amounts of testosterone. That there was also a study done in teens. This is when you know your sexual development is happening, right? Testosterone is very important during this part of of your life during puberty. Teens, adoles, ad adolescent boys that had the highest amount of BPA had 50% lower testosterone than men than the boys, sorry, that had the lowest amount of BPA. The biggest one that's affecting testosterone is the phalates. These phalates, they are present in a lot of PVC piping. They're present in a lot of our food packaging. all those like thin art or you go to the you know to the grocery store and you get a filet manon steak and it's wrapped in plastic poultry all that plastic wrapping and all the foods that we're eating has phalates in them that make it more flexible and stuff and it's also found in our hair products our cosmetic products our creams and it's also very lipid soluble it likes fat it is drawn to fat so when you have plastic around fat like cheese you know things like fat meat. It's getting into that meat. It's getting into that cheese, the phalates. These disrupt our hormones in ways similar to BPA. So, they're binding to the androgen receptor, but they're also going into the testes and disrupting the synthesis of testosterone. So, there was a study in men that had the highest phalate levels, those men had 20% lower testosterone compared to men with higher levels. And

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

主持人: because their mother had high phalates.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, it's this is definitely something that is known in our environment to cause that. I don't know if that's the only cause, but it in my opinion is a very very concerning cause that nobody is talking about and that should be addressed. And it's everywhere. We have these in all of our all of our plastic wrappers that we everything that we're eating. you know, you you even getting your meat, you're you think it's well, it's meat. It's, you know, but it's wrapped in plastic and that phalates are getting into the food. So, they're getting into our bodies and they're disrupting hormones. They're disrupting sexual development. They're disrupting our ovaries, estrogen, you know, ovarian aging, age of menopause. They're disrupting thyroids, the thyroid hormones. I mean, there's there's even studies now with women, pregnant women that have high levels of BPA. they have they're six times more likely to have a child with autism spectrum disorder compared to women with low levels of BPA. Again, BPA is disrupting the estrogen and androgen receptor. And this is very important because the androgen you you want to have it's it's disrupting aromatase as well, that enzyme that's involved in converting testosterone into estrogen. So, believe it or not, when you're a boy developing in your mom's womb, estrogen plays a very important role in your brain and brain development and what's called masculinizing the male brain. You actually, it's kind of contradictory. You're like, "Oh, well, wouldn't testosterone do that?" Well, actually, estrogen is very important for masculinizing parts of the male brain. And so when you have aromatase being inhibited by bisphenol A by this endocrine disrupting hormone that is so ubiquitous everywhere

主持人: that is found in plastic bottles

Rhonda Patrick: plastic bottles it's it's found in yeah it's found everywhere.

主持人: So what what do you recommend?

Rhonda Patrick: First of all I think if you can uh eliminate and not drink out of plastic bottles as much as possible. If you do want to go coffee either drink it there in their mugs or bring your own to- go mug. Like I bring my like I have like a Yeti kind of to- go coffee mug that I'll bring into a Starbucks or wherever coffee bean and I'll have them fill it up. Soup cans canned soup are lined with BPA. They're lined with plastic and soup usually goes into the can hot sterile technique. I mean they they want to make sure it's so you're getting the soup has been classically shown in multiple studies to me to to increase BPA levels by a thousand%.

Rhonda Patrick: Crazy amounts. So, don't eat canned soup as much as possible. I mean, obviously, this is about the habit, not the one-off, but but you know, try to avoid cans, drinking out of even soda cans, even like your your favorite sparkling water cans. Don't make it a daily habit because they are lined with plastic. That's a source of BPA into your bodies. There are ways that you can excrete BPA. So, the major way to get rid of it is through urine. It's excreted through your urine, but it has to become water soluble first. It's a fats soluble compound. And so there are things that we can eat in our diet that will increase that excretion. Compounds in broccoli. Broccoli sprouts being the big one. Sulurophane activates a pathway that are enzymes involved in making BPA become water soluble. So they come out your urine.

主持人: Oh, so broccoli is like a cleanser.

Rhonda Patrick: It's like a cleanser. It's like we we actually do have these it's called phase 2 detoxification enzymes in our body. We have the ability to detox a lot of things. We just have to give our body the right, you know, input so that it can activate those pathways. I personally take a supplement of that sulfurophane because I want a concentrated amount of it because I used to do broccoli sprouts. Broccoli sprouts have a hundred times more sulfurophane than mature broccoli, but you have to sprout them and then there's contamination issues and it's just, you know, some people do it. It's great, but I used to do it. I don't anymore. I just take a supplement.

主持人: That supplement's called

Rhonda Patrick: The supplement I take has is called Avacol. It's by a company called Neutramax. I don't um you know I'm not like affiliated with them. I like their supplement because one they've got 12 published studies using it. Clinical studies too showing that it actually helps with um autism children and adolescence with autism that take the sulfurophane supplement that they have improved symptoms because it's a detox. It helps interestingly people with autism are like 30 times less likely to excrete BPA. It's a weird thing going on here where BPA increases autism spectrum disorder, but then kids that have it are not able to detoxify it as well.

主持人: Wow.

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

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

Rhonda Patrick: Let's do it. Let's go. Let's go to my kitchen. Be right. No, you guys can come too. So we're going to go to my kitchen. If you're Listen, if you're listening on the dog walk, this might be a nice time to sit on a bench and look because you're about to go into my kitchen and we're going to look at real things that you might not even know in your kitchen are causing you some of these problems. Come with me. You know, the little traditional SIM card that goes inside of our phones, they haven't changed at all since they were invented in the '90s. You have this physical piece of plastic that means you're locked into one carrier, one network, and the second you cross a border, that carrier can start charging you whatever they want. But there are alternatives, and today's sponsor, SY, is one of them. It's an eim app that gives you a safe and secure data connection in over 200 destinations. All of their eims have built-in cyber security, which is great if you're traveling for work and looking at confidential material. I've been using SY whenever I travel because the connection is always reliable and it saves me a ton of roaming fees. It also means I don't have to deal with all of the faf that surrounds sorting out a SIM everywhere I go. If you want to give it a try, download the SY app from the app store now and scan the QR code on screen. And if you want 15% off your first purchase, use my code D O A C when you get to checkout. That's D O A C for 15% off. Keep that to yourself. I've spent the last decade building and investing in companies. And so often the conversation around marketing budgets follows the exact same pattern. The budget gets approved, but then the results don't come back. And most of the time, the creative pitch and the offer is fine. The problem lies with the audience. Ads reach people who will never buy or refer, nor do they have the power to sign off anything at all. And this is why so much budget gets wasted. LinkedIn Ads, who are sponsor of this podcast, lets you reach them specifically by job title, seniority, company size, industry, the skills that they have, and much more. You're no longer hoping your ad reaches the right person. Instead, you're defining exactly who sees it. And LinkedIn Ads drives the highest B2B return on ad spend across all major ad networks. Give them a try at linkedin.com/diary. And if you spend $250 on your first campaign, you'll get a $250 credit for your next one just by going to linkedin.com/diary. Keep this to yourself. Terms and conditions apply.

主持人: Okay, so the team have been here for the last couple of days. We've been getting lots of takeaways. And so this is a higgled piggledy of everybody's food. What's wrong? You got you're pulling

Rhonda Patrick: black plastic.

主持人: What's wrong with the black plastic?

Rhonda Patrick: Um, we talked about plastic. It has BPA. It has phalates, but it also typically is made from recycled electronics. And the problem here, Stephen, is recycled electronics have flame retardants in them because you don't want your electronics catching fire. And there have been a variety of studies now that have found that black plastic has a high amount of these flame retardants that are leeching into the food and getting into people's bodies that way. Not only do you not want to eat out of black plastic, you don't want hot food going in there, right? Cuz that's like the worst.

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

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

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

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

主持人: Okay. So, the black stuff is out and

Rhonda Patrick: it's going in hot.

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

主持人: No comment. No comment. Mind your business. Okay. What else? What about this?

Rhonda Patrick: This is made of paper.

主持人: Here's my little thing I do. See that waxy? There's a waxy

Rhonda Patrick: a pas

主持人: on the edge.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. Does it seem like it has a waxy substance to you?

主持人: Yes.

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

主持人: Okay. And this

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

主持人: And this is a bamboo lid.

Rhonda Patrick: Bamboo lid with with GL Pyrex glass, right?

主持人: Okay. So, this is what this is good.

Rhonda Patrick: This is great.

主持人: So, I need more of this.

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

主持人: because it's cold.

Rhonda Patrick: Because it's cold.

主持人: So, it's not seeping.

Rhonda Patrick: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

主持人: Well, this this

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

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

主持人: Ah, but this is fine, isn't it?

Rhonda Patrick: Eggs.

主持人: Yes, eggs are great.

主持人: There we go.

Rhonda Patrick: Eggs are great.

主持人: We found something.

主持人: Okay, Vonda. So, spatulas and kitchen utensils. Are these good? Are these bad? What's What's the best?

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

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

主持人: But most people at home probably have a plastic spatula. Is that accurate?

Rhonda Patrick: Most people at home have plastic spatula and a lot of people also have black plastic spatulas, which again back to that black recycled electronics, flame retardants, these are cancer-causing chemicals in there. Bromelated chemicals that are causing cancer. So yeah, I would say that even shifting from the plastic to this is probably a step up, but I don't know that this is just pure silicon. I I I I would guess that there's some plastic still in it. And so if you're heating it up, the plastic, it's getting into your food.

主持人: Okay. What about um my my pans? So what about Got my pans here.

Rhonda Patrick: Great. All clad. This is what I use. These are amazing.

Rhonda Patrick: No plastic lining, no PAS, no nonstick. So, most people's pans at home have a sort of a protective layer here that's nonstick so that they can cook their food and their food doesn't stick to the pans. Like scrambled eggs, they're kind of a pain in the butt if they stick to everything. That has the forever chemicals in them and that is being heated up and is leeching into your food and you're eating it. So, really what you want to avoid the most is uh Teflon, right? Anything that's nonstick.

主持人: It's harder to cook with these though.

Rhonda Patrick: It's so much harder. But you know what? you're healthier and that's what you have to imagine.

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

Rhonda Patrick: The blender.

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

主持人: A receipt.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah, don't touch it.

主持人: What What do you mean don't touch it?

Rhonda Patrick: Um so receipts are

主持人: Why are you touching it like that?

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

主持人: I can tell by the way you're like grabbing the corner of it like it's feces or something.

Rhonda Patrick: Oh, it's terrible. And my son, like, you know, kids love paper. And of course I don't want them touching it because we talked about that study in adolescent boys where they had high BPA levels and that was associated with a 50% reduction in testosterone. I mean this is at a part of your life when testosterone is you know important for sexual development and development in general. So really really really important to remember receipts are a very big source of BPA that people are not thinking about particularly people that are routinely handling these receipts. And um the other thing I want to talk you to you about is water.

Rhonda Patrick: So here is one of my water filters. I also have a filter attached to the tap. What are your thoughts?

Rhonda Patrick: So this is filtering water, but it's filtering it into plastic and it's also got plastic filter.

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

主持人: H Okay. So, it takes some good stuff out too.

Rhonda Patrick: It does. Yeah.

主持人: Okay. Is there anything else that maybe is either in my kitchen now or not in my kitchen that is a culprit of BPAs and pouls?

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. Here's the first problem here. And then inside where the hot water is going through is there's plastic pieces. So the hot water is going through plastic to get to your little espresso, you know, cup here. These I actually looked into this cuz at first I thought they were lined with plastic. They're not. My concern is mostly the water going through the system that's heating up. It's going it's got plastic, you know, piping in there that it's going through.

主持人: Okay. So I'm going to just stay there and I'm going to just grab

主持人: Okay. So this is now the coffee that I drink called contier.

Rhonda Patrick: Um they flash freeze it at the perfect moment and it's delivered frozen. So metal and then this is an aluminum lid,

主持人: right? So it shouldn't be lined with plastic, right?

主持人: You go like this, press the little button on top and it goes straight into your glass and then this

主持人: comes out and that's the coffee.

Rhonda Patrick: Oh, I love it.

主持人: So you just drop It's funny cuz they're a sponsor.

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

Rhonda Patrick: So, it's like in instead of instant co It's like instant coffee, but it's real coffee that's been frozen.

主持人: It's from some Stanford engineers who flash freeze it at the perfect moment to lock in the taste. And you can literally smell

Rhonda Patrick: Smells good.

主持人: Smells good. Yeah. Um,

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

主持人: No, no longer do that. Okay. So, this is my supplement cupboard. It's a It's a mess, but I've pulled out things that I that I'm personally interested in, good, bad, indifferent. The first one that jumped out at me when I was looking is reduced and active glutathione.

Rhonda Patrick: This is something that um I think people should be aware of. There's marketing involved here. Glutathione is in a major it's a major antioxidant. We make it in our body. We make it in our brain.

主持人: What does it do? Sorry.

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

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

主持人: So this is just a waste of time. It

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

主持人: So let me repeat that back to you. So I've got it. So if it's liposal, it's basically in a packet which can get through into the cell. If it's not, this one is um reduced and active. Then it's never going to get in the cell. So it's waste of time. It's just going to be excreted. Yeah, I would say that it's really not doing much and that if you're going to want to supplement with liposal glutathione, that's what I have.

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

Rhonda Patrick: right? D3 is the form of vitamin D that you make when you're in the sun. That's the major way we make vitamin D is from sun exposure. There is a plant form of vitamin D called vitamin D2. It's found in things like mushrooms, for example. The problem is is that there have been studies showing that vitamin D2, which is unfortunately what a lot of vegetarians take because they want a vegetarian form. Vitamin D3 is also found in like sheep skin because the sheep are making it in their, you know, skin when they're exposed to sunlight. Um, vitamin D2 is not as effective as vitamin D3. If you are a vegetarian or a vegan, you're going to want to look for vitamin D3 from lychen. Lyken is that like green stuff that you can find on trees and stuff that also makes vitamin D3 and so it's a it's a much better option than getting the vitamin D2 which is what a lot of vegetarians do. So there's actually a a study, recent study showing that people that are vitamin D deficient, so they're not getting enough vitamin D3 because we don't go out in the sun anymore. They have accelerated aging. And if they supplement, this is a very large study, by the way, if they supplemented with vitamin D3, they slowed their their biological aging by almost 2 years. That didn't happen in people that were not vitamin D deficient from the start. So it's not like a vitamin D3 supplement is going to do something miraculous if you already have enough vitamin D. The the point is to avoid deficiency and so you know someone like yourself that does probably doesn't go outside a lot but also well you go outside but you're not you have darker skin so melanin is a natural sunscreen and so people with more melanin have to spend a lot more time in the sun and so that is something to consider as well.

主持人: Well, I can always just take my multivitamin,

Rhonda Patrick: right? Multivitamin. I think I might have talked about one study last time we talked last episode where men and women that were older adults, they were 65 years and older, they took one sententrum silver a day. And I'm not, you know, I'm not advocating for sententrum silver. I'm just saying that was involved in the study. And um after 3 years, they had reversed their brain aging, global brain aging by 2.1 years. And they reversed their episodic brain aging by almost 5 years. So episodic memory is the kind of memory involved in remembering events and people and things like that you know as you get older you know that stuff doesn't come as quick right so it delayed that aging by 5 years well this same study also um just recently published literally like a couple of weeks ago again part of this large study it's called the Cosmos study they looked at the multivitamin use and biological aging epigenetic aging and they found that the Centrum silver multivitamin also slowed slowed biological aging, epigenetic aging by a few months and this was only after two years and you might go oh a few months but that was after two years and that that trial was two years long. So if you add two two years and then you add another two years and then you add and then you're talking about 20 talking about 30 talking about 50 years that is slowing aging the entire time. It adds up. It's cumulative and it's one of the easiest things that someone can do to basically you know make sure that they're aging better. There's things that are harder to do, but that to me is such a lowhanging fruit. It's easy.

主持人: What is it about this? What is in here that's making a male multivitamin have such profound effects?

Rhonda Patrick: If you look at the back at the the supplement facts, there's a lot of vitamins and minerals. Things like vitamin C, vitamin D3, vitamin E, vitamin K, nascin, the B vitamins, folate. You have things like selenium, the essential those essential elements. These are all things that we need to run everything in our body. All of our metabolism, our neurotransmitter synthesis, our immune system, you know, our our liver, all these these these are co-actors that are really important for all those things. And you don't realize how important they are until time goes on and things start to fall apart. It's basically filling the gaps because we're supposed to get this these things from our foods. We're supposed to be getting all these vitamins and minerals from our foods, from from our water, and it's just not happening for many reasons. One, our soils are depleted. You know, the organo phosphates like glyphosate is depleting our minerals. And so the foods that are being grown in the soil aren't getting their minerals that they're supposed to. And then the second problem is we're not eating the right foods because we're taking we're eating takeout. We're eating foods that are not micronutrientdense. Things like dark leafy greens. We're not eating the colors of the rainbow. And those are really important for vitamins and minerals.

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

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. So, you know, the problem with supplements is they're not regulated. I mean, not that I necessarily want them, but it is a problem because supplement companies can kind of put whatever they want in the supplements. They don't necessarily have the amount of active ingredient that they say or they can either have too little or too much. And so that is the problem with

主持人: too much.

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. So for example, some vitamin D3 supplements and some um melatonin supplements have like some in some cases like a,000 to 10,000fold more. And it was a really big problem with melatonin because melatonin is that hormone that you make to help you fall asleep and there was excessive amounts in them. So it's not regulated. So that you really don't know the amount you're getting. So, I would say number one, go to a trust trusted brand that is thirdparty testing. There's so much thirdparty testing now. Consumer lab does it. You can, you know, look up what they've tested. But for a man, I would say the thing that's essential here is you don't want to get iron. You don't want supplemental iron.

主持人: Well, someone told me to start drinking these iron drinks.

Rhonda Patrick: Were you iron deficient?

主持人: No.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay.

主持人: I was just sick one time and they said this would really help.

Rhonda Patrick: So,

主持人: this wasn't a scientist, just a friend.

Rhonda Patrick: Most men do not need to supplement with iron unless they have, you know, a problem with iron and they're anemic. For example, iron can be very bad. I mean, if you're supplementing with iron, it's very reactive and it causes uh oxidative stress easily. It's called free iron. The free iron reacts with other things with your DNA, your cells. And so, most men do not need to sell. In fact, even you know something called he hemocchromattosis where there you're basically you have too much iron already and you if you have those genes it's actually quite common then you're really talking about iron overload. So you really do not need a supplement with iron.

主持人: Women

Rhonda Patrick: women premenopausal women are different because premenopausal women do lose a lot of iron from menration when they're menrating. And so I would say about 16% of of menrating women are iron deficient. And then if you add exercise on top of that, you know, a lot of endurance exercise, you can get licis of your red blood cells. And so you do need iron for your red blood cells. If you're eating meat, if you're not a vegetarian, you know, maybe that would be a case if you're like a vegan or something, maybe some iron could come in, but you have to get your iron levels measured. You don't want to be too high because it is it does cause damage.

Rhonda Patrick: But I would say that premenopausal women, iron is especially around your cycle is good. Post-menopausal women, once you hit menopause,

Rhonda Patrick: it you kind of shift to like what a men needs. You don't need the iron again. So, it's very it's very much just premenopausal women that need iron.

主持人: That's so funny. I've been drinking these. Omega3. Does that

Rhonda Patrick: Yes. Omega-3 fish oil, as we've talked about before. I mean, this is probably one of the best and easiest things that people can do to improve their health, improve the way they age. Um, omega-3 fatty acids. 90% of the US population is not getting enough of them. 80% globally, everyone. Nobody's getting enough omega-3 fatty acids, particularly from seafood. So the EPA and DHA from fish oil are probably the best forms. You know, we talked about studies if you have a high omega-3 index, you have a fiveyear increased life expectancy compared to low omega-3 index. If you're a smoker and you have a high omega-3 index, then you're going to live as long as a non-smoker with a low omega-3 index, right? I mean, so the low omega-3 index is like smoking. Basically, you know, you have a 66% lower chance of getting Alzheimer's disease with a high omega-3 index. And even more recently, there were studies showing that omega-3 slows epigenetic aging. Um, and this is this is not just a in deficiency. I guess because everyone's deficient, maybe that's why, but um, a study showed that omega-3 fish oil supplementation. This was a study out of Switzerland. These individuals are mostly active. There were 88% of them were already physically active at the start of the trial. And I mentioned that because the trial involved omega-3, it involved vitamin D, and it involved resistance training or the combination of all three. And only the omega-3 was able to slow epigenetic aging, biological aging, because for one, they were already physically active. So adding resistance training on top of their baseline didn't do much. And they were vitamin D sufficient. So the omega-3 was able to slow epigenetic aging. The combination of all three slowed it by four months. This was just after one year.

主持人: So slowed it by four months. And if you imagine that, uh, it doesn't sound like a lot. Again, it's compounding, but also within that study, they looked at realworld outcomes. So that also correlated with they had a 60% less likely chance of being pre fail uh pre-frail. So pre-frailty, right? Um they also were less likely to get cancer as well. So I mean it's really kind of translating to these health outcomes that we think of. And all you need to do is supplement with about 1.6 to two grams a day of omega-3 to get a good omega-3 index. But I will mention one thing, Stephen, it's at room temperature. I don't think that's a great idea. Um because fish oil is a polyunsaturated fatty acid. It is prone to oxidation. So you want to put it in a low temperature environment. I keep all my actually I keep all my fish oil frozen. Frozen and then when I'm ready to use it, I put it in the fridge. So like I have a store of it. I have a stock of it I buy and then it's in the freezer and then I put it in the fridge with the the bottle that I'm using from and it's freezing it does nothing. It's fine. It so it's basically just keeping it really really low oxidation.

主持人: So I need to put this in the fridge. You need to put it in the fridge and also make sure you're getting a quality brand, right? So, you're going to third party testing. Again, you want to have a total oxidation, ideally less than 10. And there are brands out there that do have a oxidation less than 10,

主持人: which means it's more fresh and pure.

Rhonda Patrick: It's more It's Yeah, it's less oxidized. You don't want to be consuming oxidized fat because that's also not good.

主持人: Okay. So, what else jumps out to you here? We've got creatine. I mean,

Rhonda Patrick: yeah, creatine is like my new I travel with it everywhere. You got microionized is this this is

主持人: I've got so many different types,

Rhonda Patrick: right? This is the one I take. Yeah, I take I take the creatine monohydrate because it's the most wellstudied

Rhonda Patrick: and you know obviously for I do a lot of training and workout train you I do a lot of resistance training and strength training. So I at least get five grams a day which is what I always was doing in the past. I up that to 10 grams a day as my baseline because I wanted to have benefits in my brain. Studies out of Germany show that once you get to the 10 gram mark, you're actually your brain is able to take it up and it's increasing creatine in certain brain regions. That doesn't happen much at lower doses and that's because your muscles are very greedy. The creatine in my brain, honestly, I've for me, I've mentioned this before, it's a game changer just on a daily basis. I feel like I don't have that afternoon slump. I'm in my mid-4s. My brain isn't as sharp as it was. Creatine has really helped me kind of get a little bit closer to where I used to be. And also when I'm sleep deprived, I go up even higher. Sometimes I do 20 25 grams. And that is because studies have shown if you go up to a higher dose like that, depending on your weight, it's kind of a scale. Um that it helps you basically negate the negative effects on your brain from sleep deprivation where not only are you cognitively functioning, you're functioning beyond what your even normal baseline was, which was kind of mind-blowing. The question I had is around loading and how long it takes to feel the impact. Because when I first heard about creatine, I was 16 and my brother was bodybuilding and they were told that you need to like load up on big loads of it and then in like two weeks time your body would be saturated. What's the truth?

Rhonda Patrick: Right? So the reason that creatine loading was done was because they there's a short window of time when researchers are doing a study

Rhonda Patrick: and they want their muscle stores to be saturated. They want their their muscle stores to be saturated and so you have to do 20 gram loading phase in order to saturate them after you know three or four days.

Rhonda Patrick: If you're not about to compete and if you haven't been using creatine and you're not participating in the study, it takes about four week 3 to four weeks of five grams a day consistently to saturate your muscle. So you don't have to do any loading phase. If you are supplementing with five grams a day and you've been doing it for a month, your muscle stores are saturated until you exercise and you get that five grams in again. They're saturated, right? So, they keep they're they're already that five grams a day is keeping them saturated. And that's why I said your muscles are really hungry and greedy. They're wanting that five grams. They're wanting that five grams. And that's about what it takes daily to saturate them. However, if you're starting from ground zero where you've never taken creatine, it's going to take four weeks to really get the effects. Otherwise, yeah, you'll have to get higher doses. are not going to be saturated after 5 g.

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

Rhonda Patrick: That's a good that's actually a really good point. Yeah, it's about a month-long experiment. I would say close to four weeks. I think some people can saturate it at 3 weeks, but it all depends body size and all that. So, four weeks is a good experiment time and five grams is a good dose to start with. If five grams a day actually help makes you more bloated and nauseous, cut that down to 2 and 1 half and 2 and 1/2 grams so that you split the doses. If you split the doses, if you take it with food, particularly carbohydrates, it seems to help negate some of the bloating and nausea and negative effects people feel. And obviously, if you're not working out, you know, creatine is not going to like grow your muscles. You have to put in the work. You have to put in the effort. It's what it's doing is it's helping your muscles, you know, grow and give you the energy to to do more training volume so that they can grow bigger and also so that you can be stronger. If you're traveling and stressed and all those things, yes, creatine is good for the brain. I was seeing I think it was James Smith did a video about different creatine percentages in the creatine products we drink and um or eat or consume and he looked at creatine gummies and found that some of the creatine gummies don't even have any creatine in them at all. And it was quite shocking because you just assume that if it says creatine there's going to be creatine in there.

Rhonda Patrick: This goes back to the whole problem where supplements are not regulated and so you never really know what you're getting and you have to have third party testing and go to a quality brand. Gummies in general. So, there was a study that was published not long ago. It was a consumer study that was done where people went and got a lot of different creatine gummies off the shelf and then measured how much creatine was in them. And essentially almost all of them had none. And I've talked to some supplement manufacturers and their basically their statement was it's really hard to get active ingredients in gummy in general, not even just creatine in general. But the other thing I did want to mention with creatine is that you do want to make sure it's NSF certified. That's a really important thing because there are contaminants that are even produced in the processing of creatine and creatine monohydrate. And so you want to make sure that you're not getting those contaminants which can be harmful. And some of them are like lead for example, but even some other compounds that are formed. And so you want NSF certification. And that's always what I look for when I'm buying a creatine supplement is NSF certification or any supplement. I really like to have all supplements NSF certified because that really means they've one looked at contaminants and two it's got that active ingredient in there and that's really what you want.

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

Rhonda Patrick: That's it. Yeah. And it's all on websites, too, if you buy online. Yeah.

主持人: Okay. So, I've got one challenge for you. If you had to pick five supplements for me to take, assuming that I am male and female.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay.

主持人: Okay. So, it's neither gender. Um, and it can be things that are either currently in my cupboard or not. What's the top five? And ideally, give me them in order if you can, in order of importance.

Rhonda Patrick: Fish oil

主持人: number one.

Rhonda Patrick: Number one, vitamin D.

Rhonda Patrick: Multivitamin.

Rhonda Patrick: All three very very strong evidence that you're going to slow aging, you're going to improve your brain function, lower disease risk, live longer, and creatine is going to be there.

主持人: So that's one, two, three, four.

Rhonda Patrick: And then the last one is magnesium. Magnesium would be I mean it might be number four and creatine number five actually.

主持人: Really?

Rhonda Patrick: Yeah. Um

主持人: you sure?

主持人: What is magnesium doing for me?

Rhonda Patrick: Magnesium is running. It's important for 300 different enzymes in your body. It's important to repair damage to your DNA that's being done all the time. It's being done from the iron that you're taking. Um, it's being done from normal metabolism, normal immune activation, but when you're in a state where you have you're, you know, not eating a good diet or you're not getting enough sleep, magnesium is really important to repair that damage. And that's why studies have shown that magnesium is really important for preventing cancer. And it also helps with sleep. It's really good for sleep. But more importantly, 50% of the population doesn't get enough magnesium. And I bet you're probably one of those people because most of us are. Do you eat a lot of dark leafy greens or almonds?

Rhonda Patrick: You're supposed to be getting 400 about 350 to 400 milligrams a day. Are you physically active? Yeah. You're sweating magnesium out. Let's make it six supplements. So, there's a new supplement uriththn that I'm pretty excited about. The other thing I take that's really important is that I don't necessarily see here.

主持人: What's it called?

Rhonda Patrick: Um, so curcumin. All those supplements you've mentioned, the first one which I can't say and the second one cumin, we have on the table in the studio. So, let's get back into the studio and we'll pick up from there.

主持人: Steve, what are you doing?

主持人: Uh, just making myself a delicious coffee

Rhonda Patrick: from the freezer.

主持人: From the freezer? Have you not heard about Compier?

Rhonda Patrick: No.

主持人: Oh my gosh, this is going to change your life. A couple of months ago, the founder of this business called Matt sent a big shipment of this coffee to our office in London. What most people don't know is that the processing of coffee takes out a lot of the taste. So what they do is they flash freeze it at the optimal moment when it's most tasty and they send you in the post the coffee in these little frozen ice cubes. Now Max sent a big shipment to my office. I moved it to the kitchen. I said to the team, "Knock yourselves out." And then I saw so many messages in our Slack channel of people going, "Oh my god, what the hell is that? It's so delicious." All I have to do is pop it out in the morning using the little button on the back of this thing. I pour my hot water in and I mix it and that is done. You can get $30 off your first order of Cometier coffee if you go to cometier.com/stephven.

主持人: Try it and please Instagram DM me, LinkedIn me and let me know if you love it as much as I do. You know, every once in a while you come across a product that has such a huge impact on your life that you'd probably describe it as a gamecher. And I would say for about 35 to 40% of my team, they would currently describe this product that I have in front of me called Ketone IQ, which you can get at ketone.com as a game changer. But the reason I became a co-owner of this company and the reason why they they now are a sponsor of this podcast is because one day when I came to work, there was a box of this stuff sat on my desk. I had no idea what it was. Lily in my team says that this company have been in touch. So I went upstairs, tried it, and quite frankly, the rest is history. in terms of my focus, my energy levels, how I feel, how I work, how productive I am. Game changer. So, if you want to give it a try, visit ketone.com/stephven for 30% off. You'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. And now you can find Keton IQ at Target stores across the United States, where your first shot is completely free of charge. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never ever released. And so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So, if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to daccircle.com. I will speak to you then.

Rhonda Patrick: So, phytoal curcumin is another one that I supplement with. And let's just start with curcumin in general. Curcumin is found in the turmeric plant. It's something that is able to pretty robustly and I would say consistently lower inflammation.

Rhonda Patrick: And it's doing it in a different way that like a NSAIDE like an ibuprofen would do it, right? And that is important because

Rhonda Patrick: it's been shown if you take NSAIDE, right? So these non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, something like ibuprofen

Rhonda Patrick: around exercise, it can blunt the adaptations because it's basically lowering inflammation and and prostaglandins and things that are important to cause exercise adaptations. So curcumin doesn't hasn't been shown to do that but it has been shown to lower something called TNF alpha and that is a major inflammatory cytoine that is really really powerfully accelerating aging. In fact those epigenetic aging clocks that we talked about earlier one of the most powerful drugs that's able to slow them are TNF alpha inhibitors. So these are drugs that people take to inhibit TNF alpha. Certain people take them, like people with rheumatoid arthritis, they have a high level of inflammation. Their immune system is overactive. They're making a lot of it. Well, guess what? Those individuals taking TNF alpha inhibitors are like they have a 50% less likelihood of getting Alzheimer's disease than people.

主持人: 50%.

Rhonda Patrick: Mhm. Yes. So, I like it because curcumin is one of the most it is the na most naturally occurring dietary compound that I've seen data showing that it lowers TNF alpha. I haven't seen anything else that's naturally occurring that does it. This does it. It lowers it by quite a bit by almost five pogs per milliliter. Phytoal curcumin is the reason I take phytoal. It's kind of like a liposome but it's phytome. So, it's essentially just making the ingredient get into the cells better. It's more bioavailable

Rhonda Patrick: because curcumin is easily metabolized quickly by the liver. It's a it's what's called a xeninoiotic. It's not a compound that's a vitamin or a mineral or something that the body body normally recognized. It's seen as a drug, a foreign drug, xeninoiotic, right? And so the liver gets rid of it quickly. The phytoal delivery of it kind of slows that whole process where it's not getting rid of so quickly. It's not being metabolized so readily. So that's why I take that. And also it's been shown to improve performance in people that are exercising again because it's reducing inflammation. Inflammation can be dampening for performance.

主持人: And what else have we got here?

Rhonda Patrick: The other supplement that I really want to talk about is the uraliththan A. And as I mentioned, this is a compound that's usually generated in the gut by the bacteria in your gut. It's something that we can get from our diet. So if we eat things like pomegranate, pomegranate has a type of polyphenol in it called elagitanins.

主持人: I've never heard about this before.

Rhonda Patrick: Okay, listen to this. This is this is like you got to try this supplement. Uthin A again, it's made from eating things like pomegranate. However, 50% of the population doesn't have the right bacteria to make it. So you're kind of like a to a coin toss if you eat pomegranate. Am I going to be the person that can make uriththna or am I not? Right? So there was a company that did out of Switzerland these stud a lot of these early studies were done in Switzerland and they ended up making uriththn and then testing you know doing clinical studies doing animal studies first and then clinical studies to test you know what is uriththna doing. So what is it? It is a compound that is able to basically get rid of damaged mitochondria. So it's called mphagy. You've probably heard of autophagy. you know getting clearing out your all the gunk and the trash from your cells making them rejuvenating rejuvenating them right

主持人: which is associated with fasting.

Rhonda Patrick: Fasting activates autophagy. Fasting activates mphagy which is specifically just clearing out damaged mitochondria or pieces of damaged mitochondria. Autophagy is essentially you have a whole cell

Rhonda Patrick: and within that cell you have a lot of different organels they're called. So mitochondria being one and so autophagy kind of helps clear out all the stuff inside of the cell. Mphagy is very specific to just the mitochondria within the cell. Those mitochondria get older and they don't have a really good repair process and so they accumulate damage and as they get older you're you're not going to be making energy as well. You're not going to be using energy as well. It's going to affect all the cell function because energy is at the core of everything, right? So mitochondrial health is at the core of all health basically. This compound very robustly induces mphagy. And so um there have been of course many animal studies that were done preclinally before clinical studies were done. Animal studies were exciting. I mean mice that were given old mice that were given uraliththna were able to like rejuvenate you know tissues but also 20% life extension was found in these mice given uralithn. 20% is pretty big for a mouse mouse study. All right, but we're not mice. So, let's talk about humans and why I'm actually excited about it. For one, urthan A and mphagy was shown to be activated in humans taking it. So, they took muscle biopsies and found that in fact mphagy was activated. It's also recently been shown that this uriththnan A is able to to basically rejuvenate the immune system. So older adults were given a thousand milligrams a day and it it basically as we age our immune system ages our te- cells aren't fighting off pathogens as well and it increased the number of a very specific type of immune cell that decreases with age called CD8 positive tea cells. Those were increased. That's very important because you're able to fight off infection better. And then it also increased a kind of immune cell that's able to kill cancer cells and also kill viruses and pathogens. it's called natural natural killer cells. Um so those cells increased as well with the uriththan a and it also decreased markers of like scinsessence. So this is basically when a cell is still alive but it's not functioning it's basically like it's dead but not only is it not dead and not functioning it's secretreting inflammatory cytoines accelerating aging. I know it's complicated. So the study showed that it was basically able to re rejuvenate the immune system in older adults younger adults that have taken it. So, there's been studies showing that untrained athletes supplementing with 1,000 milligrams a day were able to improve their V2 max um 10% more than just exercise alone. So, if they exercise and took uriththan A, their V2 max went up 10% compared to the exercise alone group. Wow.

主持人: If they were Yes. If they were trained athletes, it only went up 5% because trained athletes already are doing a lot, right? So, you always get a bigger increase in B2 max if you have an untrained athlete. Same with obese people.

Rhonda Patrick: And on top of that, so again, energy, it's you're clearing out damaged mitochondria. If you combine it with exercise, exercise causes you to make new mitochondria. So the way I look at it, Stephen, is a rejuvenation of all your mitochondria within your cells, whether we're talking about your muscle cells or your immune cells. I think it's probably happening in the brain as well. So it's been shown to increase muscle strength in older adults. So, their hamstring strength improved by like 10 to 12% after supplement supplementing versus just exercise alone. I think it's a supplement that's important for aging because it's affecting mitochondria and pretty much everything relies on mitochondria.

主持人: And you can buy this in a normal shop on the high street.

Rhonda Patrick: You cannot buy it in a normal shop. You can buy it online. It's not cheap, unfortunately. Uh that's the other thing. So, pomegranate itself is the next best thing for people. And there are studies showing that people that take pomegranate juice before they exercise they and over over the course of several weeks can actually increase their V2 max by up to 17%. This is analysis of multiple studies showing that. So again I think it's all coming down to the uriththna and it's a new supplement that I'm I've been experimenting with. Again the immune system effects. I think I'm not getting sick but I'm doing the creatine. I'm doing the uriththna and I'm doing glutamine.

主持人: So glutamine is the last one. What what is that? Well, you probably heard of glutamine as an amino acid, right? It's so much more. It's so much more. So, glutamine is something that it is an amino acid, but it gets converted into and metabolized to many different things. So, one, it can be an amino acid. Two, it can form something called glutarate, which is used by your cells for energy. Mitochondria love it. Or it can be converted into that neurotransmitter that we were talking about, right? Glutamate. So, it's really something that can be used for many things. I supplement with it because I came across some studies in the past couple of years where endurance athletes, so these are I'm not an endurance athlete, but endurance athletes are very prone to respiratory illness because they're really just going hard, right? And their im your immune system kind of takes a takes it takes attacks on your immune system. studies were showing that if those endurance ath athletes supplemented with glutamine, they didn't get sick as often. They were having fewer respiratory illnesses. And I remembered back to when I was a graduate student and I was doing research and I used glutamine. And I was doing glucose and glutamine and looking at immune cells and how I could make them active or what happens if I get rid of glucose or glutamine. And I remembered how much they love glutamine. They consume it. They're using it for energy.

Rhonda Patrick: And it started to make sense to me. And this was during a period of time where, you know, again, mid-4s, your immune system is not going doing as well as it used to. I've got a had a young child that was bringing home all sorts of pathogens. And so, I started supplementing with glutamine. And it could be placebo, but again, I you know, the sickness bouts were going down. I wasn't getting sick as often. The other thing it's good for is the gut. And that is because glutamine can be glut uh converted into something called alpha ketoglutarate which is a important energy compound that the gut uses. And so there are studies showing that it's beneficial for gut health. I think that's what a lot of people think about when they take glutamine is their gut. I'm thinking about my immune system. But basically it's very easily used by the gut cells as energy and that really helps the gut heal.

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

Rhonda Patrick: I take them also quite frequently, not daily. Um, you know, so what are they doing? There's different forms of them and why do I take them and I think let's talk about what I think people should realize if they are taking them. So, you know, there it's an it's it's essentially giving you that metabolic switch, right? It's getting getting your ketone levels up as if you were fasted. So you're you're elevating your beta hydroxybutyrate levels. That's the major circ circulating ketone.

主持人: Beta hydroxybutyrate,

Rhonda Patrick: BHB for short.

主持人: Does that just mean ketone?

Rhonda Patrick: It's a ketone. It's there are several ketones. Acid acetone is another ketone, but that beta hydroxybutyrate is the major one, right? So and and that is a major ketone that's in in your body when you're fasted. That's what you're making. And when you're taking these ketone IQs or other exogenous ketones is what you're going to get. So ketone IQ is got the precursor for the ketone. It's got 13 butane dial that in your liver gets converted into beta hydroxybutyrate. I take a ketone that has 13 butane dial but also it's asterified to the actual beta hydroxybutyrate.

Rhonda Patrick: What does that mean? It means that it has both an immediate action, a fast action effect of having your ketones elevated, but it also has a tail end effect. So the 13 butane dial, if you take it, you have to wait for it to get to your liver.

主持人: You have to Can I have one?

Rhonda Patrick: Yes. You have to wait.

主持人: Oh, perfect. Okay.

Rhonda Patrick: Wow, those taste better. M.

Rhonda Patrick: So, so the other ketone exogenous ketone is the beta hydroxybutysterified to the 13butin dial which just means it's going to have a fast acting effect but also a long-term effect. So you you'll get a little bit more elevation in your blood ketones from from the one that has the beta hydroxybutyrate to the 13bin dial. That said,

主持人: the difference is I think from what I know and I don't know a ton is pricing.

Rhonda Patrick: Yes, it's pricing but also again concentration. So, I mean, you know, you're going to get you're going to get a higher peak quicker and you're going to get higher levels of it with the one that's the the Oxford, you know, the Oxford ketone, I guess it's called, but the ketone IQ has 13 butane dial, which does get converted into beta hydroxybutyrate.

主持人: This one I think cost costs a couple of dollars. And I have the Oxford one here as well, which I think is $30 a pop. So, it's quite expensive.

主持人: The reason why this has been able to break into retail, especially across America, is just because it's more affordable for most people to be able to take spend a couple of dollars,

Rhonda Patrick: right? The reason I take it is because I like the cognitive boost that I get from it. And I usually take it on occasions like this when I'm doing a show or I'm, you know, doing a presentation or I just I'm doing a lot of heavy research and I just need to be on because I get a cognitive boost from it. And that cognitive boost does come down to what I was talking about about with why I like to fast. It's mimicking that, right? I have that beta hydroxybutyrate which is increasing GABA, that inhibitory neurotransmitter that's silencing down some of the anxiety in the back of the brain or the chatter and just helping me focus. And also it increases brain drive neurotrphic factor. So beta hydroxybutyrate is a signaling molecule. It's able to increase brain drive of neurotrophic factor in the brain that helps with learning, memory, brain aging. It's also been shown to lower oxidation. So, there's all sorts of reasons why I like to take it. For people that are fasting and they're wanting to burn fat,

Rhonda Patrick: consider that if you take exogenous ketones, you stop you stop burning your own fat because your body thinks it's now got all it's got the ketones there, which is what the metabolism of fat is trying to do is produce ketones for energy. And so, it does shut down what's called lipolysis, which is basically breaking down fat. And so if you're doing fasting and you're doing it for reasons of fat loss, if you take an exogenous ketone during that period of time, it will transiently kind of shut down that process. So keep that in mind. It's one reason why I don't do it every day because I am looking for that effect for losing visceral fat in particular.

主持人: That's a really interesting important point.

Rhonda Patrick: It is

主持人: that people don't talk about.

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

主持人: What I noticed was when I was trying to get into ketosis at the top of the year and I was doing exogenous ketone shots. I was struggling to get into ketosis. And so, what I did is I stopped taking the ketone shots for a couple of days, just focused on my ketogenic diet. I got into ketosis and then afterwards I started taking the ketone shots when I was doing podcasting because just like you, I noticed just such a radical radical difference when I take exogenous ketones or when I'm in a natural sort of dietary ketosis. Radical difference. And as a podcaster, I've said this a million times before, but I'm going to say it again. Two times a week, I do an AB test of how my brain is working. I sit with someone who is an expert in what they do for sometimes four or five hours and I look at them in their face and I have to ask questions and respond and understand big words and hope that my brain is connected to my mouth today. And so I've done 600 or 700 of these AB tests now. And one of the the factors that correlates to good performance as an interviewer, a thinker or a speaker on stage is whether I'm in a ketosis state or not. And it's so profound. In fact, I've actually heard Joe Rogan say this. Rogan said that the upside he gets from being in a ketogenic state is so evident for him as an interviewer that he he's considered being in that state all the time.

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

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

Rhonda Patrick: So it does help. And there's again pros and cons to doing it. You do want your body to be metabolic flex flexible. So I'm glad you did do the keto like the ketogenic diet and let your body kind of do it and adapt and then add the ke ketones on top of that. But um they do help. They help with cognitive function for sure. I mean I I use them every single podcast I do, presentation I'm giving. It's it's part of my routine.

主持人: Let's talk about something different, which is something that I've never heard of before. Um it's a word that you started to make popular in the health and longevity community, which is this idea of peak span.

主持人: I have this graph in front of me, which I'll throw up on the screen. It's fascinating. What the hell is peak span? I've heard of health span. I've even heard of lifespan, but I've never heard of peak span.

Rhonda Patrick: Well, let's start with lifespan and work our way to peak span to give people a frame of reference. I think most people are familiar with the word longevity,

Rhonda Patrick: wanting to extend their lifespan, how many years they live, how long they live, right? But the problem with lifespan is well, you could live longer, but you're going to have per perhaps you have some diseases. So why do you want to live longer if you have Alzheimer's disease or cardiovascular disease or type two diabetes? I mean the qual your quality of life is not as good and that's where this idea of health span came in right so health span is well let's increase the amount of time we live diseasefree

Rhonda Patrick: and that's the new thing that everyone wants to increase and improve their health span I want to live I want to increase my health span so I want