We are being bombarded with disrupting chemicals. A lot of them, they're in our products. Okay, let's go to my kitchen. Come with me.
So this is my fridge. So the first thing I noticed is this, because that's like the worst. Can I get a bin bag? This is made from recycled electronics.
What about this? This is a problem also. And this? I think I'm getting this is great.
I'm going to do utensils next. Heating it up, the plastic is getting into your food. You want to bounce? I'll recede.
That's bad, that's covered with BPA and studying adolescent boys show that it was associated with a 50% reduction in testosterone. And then this is one that people often miss. Oh, fuck it. My medical scientist and anti-aging doctor, Rhonda Patrick is back.
This time she's talking about health optimization, maintaining peak performance. And the environmental toxins disrupting your body. Dr. Rhonda Patrick, let's talk about something that I've never heard before.
Peak span. What the hell is peak span? 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. You take it. And the same goes for cognitive function.
So I'm on the way down. Yeah, and I'm definitely on the way down. But we can do things in our life to help maintain that peak span. Like if you exercise five hours a week, do some high intensity animal 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 other 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.
It's not big supplements and being sentary. So I want to talk about what we've got to talk about this in my hands at the moment. So if you have this, it's going to double your risk of mortality. Double your risk.
Okay, so talk me through this. As much detail as possible. Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed.
So when we have our best episodes on the show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And a simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the actual listening to this one right now and hit that follow button.
Thank you so, so, so much. Dr. Ronda Patrick. I am fascinated by so many of the things that you talked about in the front of mine for me at the moment because I'm a 33 year old man.
And I know from doing this podcast and looking at graphs like this one, which we'll talk about today, which I don't think most people have ever seen in their lives, that this is the age where things might start changing 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 really when that can't see.
You should probably look at the screen right now. It's a yellow blob of squidgy, slightly disgusting material. What is this? And why does this matter?
So this represents visceral fat. It's something that most people haven't heard of. Many people have heard of fat, they know fat is bad, but they don't realize there are different kinds of fat. There is visceral fat.
And this is the kind of fat that you can't really pinch at a post-issue 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. And it's surrounding your organs, like your liver, your kidney, your intestines.
This is a very deep belly fat. And it's very different from subcutaneous fat. You can actually be lean, but have a high amount of visceral fat. We call these metabolically unhealthy people.
So visceral fat, you mentioned your 33, the average 33 year old male has how much visceral fat. According to the data, it says roughly 1.2 pounds at the age of 30, and then for a woman, 0.5 pounds of visceral fat to the age of 30. At 40, it's 1.7 pounds for a man, and 0.7 pounds for a woman at 50, 2.2 pounds for a man, 1 pound for a woman, and a 60, 2.7 pounds of visceral fat, and 1.4 pounds for a woman, which is the highest risk for metabolic syndromes at that age. I mean, all of them are pretty scary.
It is. And as you notice, the trend is, as you get older, you have a higher risk of having more of it. 70% of women over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat, 50% of men over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat. This visceral fat, for one, it's going to double your risk of early mortality.
It's going to double your risk. 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 sub-continuous kind of fat, the adipose tissue kind of fat, in several ways. One is that it is metabolically active. It is secreting inflammatory cytokines.
These are molecules that are signaling to the immune system, but they're also involved with damaging ourselves. 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 type of cancer.
They're also more likely, you mentioned metabolic syndrome. This is a big, big thing with visceral fat. This type of fat is constantly breaking down triglycerides into free fatty acids. It's constantly doing it.
What's triglycerides? Triglycerides are how your body is able to store fatty acids and fat, and use them for later energy, right? So they're constantly breaking them down and using them. They're using these fatty acids.
But typically what happens in your body, when you eat a meal, you have your glucose levels go up, 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 glucose up, like your liver, your muscle, your adipose tissue.
Well, the problem is, is this real fat is constantly making those free fatty acids. And so those fatty acids, it doesn't respond, 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 fatty energy, it says, okay, look, I have energy here. I gotta do something with this energy.
Let me store it for later use, right? Well, that doesn't happen with visceral fat. What happens is it just keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. What happens is when your visceral fat is metabolically active like that, it is basically making it where insulin can't work its job.
And so what happens is that glucose can't go into your liver, it stays in your blood system. And you really want it to be stored in your liver, right? You want it to be stored in your liver as glycogen to be used as energy when you're fasting or when you're physically active, whenever you need it, right? Also in your muscle, same thing, stored as glycogen, or stored in your adipose tissue.
And so none of that happens because insulin, it's not able to basically act on your organs. If there's no signal, so nobody's getting the phone call, hey, time to take the glucose up, it's not happening, right? So the glucose sits around. So what happens is your body freaks out because it's not good to have glucose sitting around in your bloodstream for a while, it causes a lot of damage, right?
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 the glucose isn't coming in to the organs like the liver like it's supposed to. So let me put some more out. Everyone that doesn't know, insulin is kind of like the taxi driver that goes and picks up the glucose and takes it home.
Right, 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 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.
Like 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 when you're by crashing, really far far down, not normal levels, but like below that. And so then your body tries to overcompensate by going, oh, I'm hungry, I need to eat.
And so you start to have these cravings for 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 it's constantly metabolizing fatty acids.
It's stopping that taxi car from going and getting the glucose. It's not happening, it's not responding. You're not picking up the driver, right? And so you become insulin resistant.
And that has a lot of problems. One, it's gonna affect your immediate energy levels. It's gonna affect the way you're feeling. And two, it's gonna make you more likely to become type two diabetic.
Because eventually your body won't be able to produce enough insulin to bring the glucose in. And so then you become type two 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'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. So you can feel cognitive liars sharpen. Absolutely well.
Just think about when you have an infection. Your immune system's very active. You're fighting off the pathogen, right? Do you feel like you're tired or do you feel like you are cognitively at your peak?
Yeah, I'm out of action for several days usually. Right, you're tired and your brain isn't working. And part of that reason is because your activation of your immune system is sucking energy away from your brain. And the other reason is because the inflammation being generated gets into the brain and disrupts neurotransmitters and things like that.
So it's like a double whammy. Your brain isn't working properly. And so there's a lot of people walking around constantly feeling tired, feeling lethargic, feeling brain fog. And they might have a high amount of visceral fat and not even know it.
So typically- Looking at the data, I mean, most people have too much visceral fat. Most people do have too much visceral fat. And typically a really high amount is, I would say a proxy for it would be measuring your waist circumference. So if women have a waist circumference of 35 inches or greater, that is a sign of too much visceral fat.
If men have a waist circumference of 40 inches 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 grams of visceral fat. Ideally, closer to zero, the better. Me and my friend went and got a DEXA scan done.
And the remarkable thing is I weigh a lot more than him. And I'm much bigger than him. He's skinny. But after the DEXA scan, they said that he had too much visceral fat, which I thought you must be like big or obese to have visceral fat.
He's a skinny guy. And then a DEXA scan said too much visceral fat. Yes, that's the thing. I was involved in clinical research for many years when I was doing my postgraduate 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, this is an overweight obese person.
So these are lean, but metabolically unhealthy people and a large percentage of that has to do with an increase in visceral fat. You won't even necessarily know that you're getting higher amounts of visceral fat. It's not necessarily gonna 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 can fluctuate a pound from day to day, for sure. If you're talking about 500 grams or less, that's not gonna be reflected on the 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 perimenopause and menopause because estrogen actually helps tell the body how to store energy and it tells it to store energy in fat in adipose tissue, not viscerally.
So when your estrogen starts to go down during perimenopause and then menopause, women really start to gain a lot of this or this belly fat. They gain a lot of 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's sleep is a big one. When you miss sleep, that is something that can really, you can start to gain visceral fat very quickly.
There's a study in healthy young men. These men were sleep restricted. Typically when sleep restrictions studies are done, you're looking at four hours of sleep per night. So pretty severe.
Not out of the ordinary. I did many of those college graduate school deadlines. Definitely has a new parent. I mean, it's unfortunately, drives on for months.
So these men were only speaking four hours a night for two weeks, okay? These were 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 two weeks of not getting enough sleep.
And they weighed the same? Pretty much. So it was the composition of their body that's shifting. Yes.
Also the visceral fat, like I said, you're not gaining pounds and pounds and pounds of it necessarily. You're gaining grams and grams, but it's happening. And any amount that you're starting to gain is unhealthy, right? It's gonna start causing insulin resistance.
It's gonna start causing fatty liver. That's another thing. It does it because it's around the liver. It basically the liver doesn't know what to do with all the fat.
So it starts to make and store it around the fat. And so you start to get this non-alcoholic fatty liver, which is happening now in young people. So sleep is one, another major, major, I would say, liver 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 1200 extra calories a day. And it was mostly from ultra processed foods, right? I mean, there are 1200 calories, so like big mac and a Coke, big mac and fries, whatever.
So you're talking about almost like an extra meal a day. And from processed foods, ultra processed foods. For five days, they were given this extra calorie 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.
So how many calories were they having in excess? 1200 to 1500. In excess. More than what they were usually going to eat.
Yes. So a lot of people are eating caloric excess daily. They're not exercising, and there's no energy expenditure, and they're eating more. And so they're in 1200.
Now this is the extreme end, right? I'm giving you an extreme end, because that's what they do usually in studies like this, because they want to get a significant result. But after five days, they were gaining visceral fat. Their brains became insulin resistant.
So insulin is also very important for the brain. The brain is telling the body how to store the fat and how to store energy. And when insulin's not able to get into the brain and have its action, then you start to not have the brain tell the body how to store this energy. And it ends up storing it viscerally.
It's like this default. You don't bring those two things together. The thing I've noticed impacts my performance the most. As it relates to articulation, cognitive performance, my ability to think is those two things coming together.
You talk about sleep and diet. It's when I eat late, it's when I eat close to sleep. If I do that a couple of nights in a row, I feel like my brain no longer works. Yes, yeah.
You know, obviously we all have to live our lives and their 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 three hours before bed. And three is really the magic number in multiple studies because when you eat a meal, it is activating your sympathetic nervous system, right?
That'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, the same 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 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? So should I stay up them for three hours? If I eat at midnight, should I stay up till 3 a.m.?
No, no, you should just go to bed. But don't do it on a daily basis, right? I mean, the key is the habit, you know, the habit. And so if you need to eat something before bed, you should do something that's light, maybe a protein shake with some almond milk, you know, something that's not super heavy.
I thought you were talking about fiber. Resistance starch does interestingly seem to help improve sleep. And so, you know, maybe some rice or a potato, a little bit of rice or a potato. It's fries or something.
Maybe not a fried potato baked potato and then cool it because then it's resistance starch, right? Because that's good for your gut microbiome. It changes the composition of the fiber. And you can cook it, let it cool and then heat it again, if you like to eat it as long as it went through a cooling part, and then you can eat it.
But that's resistance starch. Resistance 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 make you gain visceral fat are being, basically being in a caloric excess, especially from refined, high fat, high sugar foods, and then not getting enough sleep, move the needle. Quantic 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 this way, I mean, you've seen the beer belly, right? I mean, that's like a thing.
Visceral fat, 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. It's because the parents have a hard time because you're naming those things about like sleep and stress and I think, gosh, parents have it coming from them up from all sides.
They do, but see, this is where the good news comes in because 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 visceral fat causes insulin resistance and insulin resistance causes more visceral fat, right? 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.
So insulin resistance, what is that? That is when your body no longer produces insulin? No, no, insulin resistance is when your body is no longer responding to insulin. So it's like you're waiting for the phone to ring and it's ringing, but you can't hear it, right?
Like you're not getting the signal. And so your cells are not responding to the insulin that's made. Insulin is really helping your body move the glucose out, right? Move it out of your bloodstream where it can cause a lot of damage if it sits around.
And if you put too much pressure on the insulin system, then it kind of shuts down. Eventually shuts down. Everything that puts too much pressure is consuming too much glucose or too much activity. Too much glucose, refined glucose can do that.
Visceral fat is one of the, I would say, bigger causes of insulin. It's actually one of the major, major causes of insulin resistance because if you're physically active and eating a lot of glucose, that glucose is going to your muscles. Physical activity makes your muscles very responsive to glucose without needing insulin. The transporters that transport glucose are super, super responsive when you exercise.
The physical activity, and this is what I was getting out with parents is so important. The visceral fat is the really big concern with insulin resistance. 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 gotta watch my glucose and that's all fine.
I mean, yes, to some degree that's also playing a role, but it's the visceral fat that's the real underlying problem. 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 post-prandial, blood glucose levels. Never. Post-prandial means after a meal. So your levels go obviously much higher after you eat a meal versus in the morning when you haven't had anything to eat.
And my levels were so high, it was prediabetic. 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 animal training and exercise can help almost negate most of those poor effects of causing insulin resistance and causing your glucose regulation to not be normal. That'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. 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 your muscles are gonna be more sensitive to take the glucose in.
But if you wanna lose visceral fat, you're gonna have to do running, jogging, cycling, swimming, you wanna like get your heart rate up a little more. 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 loss program.
So intermittent fasting, caloric restriction, even JLP1 receptor agonist and all the classes of JLP1, anything that is gonna make you lose weight, lose fat, visceral fat's one of the first to go. And in fact, people on these weight loss programs or even on exercise training program, visceral fat's the first fat to go. And so you can lose it quite quickly. So on this point of fasting, are you a fan of fasting to combat visceral fat?
And also, could you give me your thoughts on being in a ketogenic state as it relates to visceral fat? Yeah, people when they think about intermittent fasting, they kind of think about one thing and they think about weight loss, right? But there's a lot going on here. I like that you mentioned being in a ketogenic state because it's also a metabolic switch that happens.
It's a metabolic switch from burning carbohydrates and glucose to burning fatty acids and getting in ketosis, right? That's a metabolic switch. 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 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.
I like the tool that some people like to use because I like it for one because I can not think. I'll skip one meal, making sure I get enough nutrients in the meals that I eat and protein in the meals I eat. But I'll skip a meal and it gets me in a calorie deficit without having to think about and count everything. So it's easier on me.
To fast. To fast versus counting calories. And 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 eight, if you're in bed for nine 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? So the glycogen is like the petrol station? Yes. Everyone's actual.
That's right. Your switch is a diesel. And that's switch is a diesel. And so after that switch, that metabolic switch, when you deplete that glycogen while you're sleeping, or while you're 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 putting a lot of input in there. You keep filling up the fuel tank, right? 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 nothing, no glucose around, right? So you start to switch to, you know, your fatty acids are immobilized. They come out of your adipose tissue. This is why people lose fat.
They come out of the visceral fat. You start to use those fatty acids and burn them as energy. 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 ketotic 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 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 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 gotta find that food. You gotta 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 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'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 antibiotic growth. You 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 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 it in a 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, or running, biking, that stuff I like to do fasted.
I'm not going for a 10 mile 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, 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.
What does that mean? So much of the benefit from exercise, right? Aerobic exercise when you're breathing in, 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 anti-oxidant pathways activated.
Your body needs to burn fat and 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 organelles inside of most of our cells that make energy. And they're very important for everything. I mean, they're running our brains right now so we can talk our heart so we can breathe along to everything, right?
And so exercise does make you increase the amount of those new mitochondria that you make that are young and healthy. If you're fasted. Well, even if you're not, but if you're fasted, it's even better. This is a big debate around whether this applies to both men and women.
Should both men and women exercise fasted? 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. That's it, I'm gonna eat.
When it comes to women versus men and doing exercise fasted, it also depends on, again, are you doing a 30 minute run? Are you doing a two hour run? If you're doing a two 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 afterwards, you're not refueling enough and you're doing very, very long, high volume types of exercise, then you can basically disrupt some of your hormones, your follicle stimulating hormone, these things will make you become ameneritic. So you basically stop ovulating and you stop getting your menstrual period.
And what's the other reason for that? What's going on? Because your body's not enough food and energy around to sustain a growing fetus, like they're growing. So it's not shutting down.
So it's basically like, hey, we're not gonna allow you to have a baby, basically. So you stop ovulating, right? So you can't, you're not making those eggs. Is this often the case with women who exercise a lot and no longer have their menstrual cycle?
First of all, it's not a common thing. This is like, this is something that happens in athletes, elite athletes, women that are not eating enough food. Like I did this to myself when I was in my early 20s and I was racing the earth ons and I was running 10 miles a day, eight to 10 miles a day, five days a week and then I was eating carrots and hummus. And you know, I just, I wasn't feeling myself.
And 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, 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 perimenopause. Thank you, thank you. But I did notice, of course, as I started to reach that perimenopause part of my life, that I had to be a little bit more aggressive and put a little bit more effort in to not get this fat right here on my belly because it started coming up and I didn't want it.
It wasn't an option for me. Speaking of studies done for women, I thought you were talking about the swan study, which kind of relates to what you just said there. When they're relating to women in visceral fat and they found that women experience an accelerated increase in visceral fat starting to years before their final menstrual period. 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 about to go into menopause. 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 if the younger you were, the younger you're going to be when you experienced menopause. So also when your mother experienced menopause is very indicative of when you're going to experience it, but lifestyle and diet player will too. Obesity accelerates ovarian aging.
So you're more likely to go into menopause earlier with obesity, also these chemicals that we're exposed to and we can talk about those as well. A lot of these endocrine disrupting chemicals affect the age of menopause as well and accelerate that. So in some cases, women go into menopause two years earlier than they would have otherwise. And you also, you're 47?
A half. A half. And the data I'm looking at here says, when you think about perimenopause, it usually starts in mid 40s, which is the age range you're in. This is where the eight to 10% annual visceral fat increase begins.
It is, and I know. 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 my perimenopause and maybe hasn't had any other symptoms yet. So they haven't really seeked out any treatment. You can try to do some hormone replacement therapy as well to help with that.
But they start to gain visceral fat and it shows up around the belly quite rapidly. And I noticed this in myself. It almost feels overnight, seriously. This is the only symptom that I noticed in myself where it was like all of a sudden, my belly was growing.
And you know, not super, super large, but enough where I was like, there's something wrong. It's not even necessarily reflected if you get hormone test because I'm all seen 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 other parts of your body, like your thighs and your butt, right? Like your adipose tissue.
And so when that estrogen goes down and declines, it's like, boom, it starts to go right to the belly. 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 very important signal for muscle because the problem is that some people calorie restrict and eat for your meals and then they're not getting enough protein and they start to lose muscle in addition to fat. And you don't want to do that. You want to kind of just lose the visceral fat and keep the muscle, ideally keep gaining muscle. And for men, I was reading that testosterone and growth hormone typically peak in their late 20s.
So I guess mine's peaked already. And starting 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 to the testosterone decline?
Is that what's going on there? What's causing it? Yeah, I mean, testosterone does, you burn, even if you're gaining visceral fat, it helps you burn it. It's also why some women that are in primary men of cause want to do testosterone because it helps them burn the visceral fat.
So it is linked to testosterone decline as well. But also as men are aging, they're becoming more sedentary based on, they tend to eat a little bit, they're consuming more calorie. Like all these things are hand-in-hand. 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 is helping you burn it more. When you're declining, it doesn't work that same way. So even though you're gaining it, you're not burning it as quickly.
So you start to have a net gain in it, if that makes sense. So going back up to the top then, we were talking about things you can do to lower your visceral fat. And we talked a little bit about exercise sleep diet. Is there anything else in that category?
Yeah, I think those are the main ones, obviously avoiding excess alcohol consumption. And also stress, the stress, like, you know, trying to relaxation techniques buffer that stress. That's a big one. It's an amplifier.
Yeah, people don't talk enough about visceral fat. They look at other markers. No, well, most people just want to lose weight and look good. Or, yeah, they look at, you know, HBA1C, your long-term glucose or they're looking at lipids and visceral fat is just, it's insidious, right?
It just starts increasing, increasing, increasing. You can't see it. You can't see it until all of a sudden belly, right? I mean, it's bad.
And it affects the way you feel, daily. But 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 read it down, yeah. Testosterone levels in men have dropped by up to 20% over the last two decades, which is quite terrifying.
It is. So look, there's a lot of factors that can affect testosterone. I mentioned dietary factors. Refined sugar, sleep is a big one.
People aren't getting enough sleep. Lack of sleep drops testosterone. Micronutrients, not getting enough zinc. For example, zinc is very important for testosterone synthesis and magnesium.
Like, 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 also in things that are water resistant, oil resistant, fire resistant, flame retardant. BPA, Bispinol A is one.
Another one is phthalates, pH phthalates. And the last one would be PFAS. 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. Are they really causing a problem? Absolutely. Really?
Absolutely. Because I'm looking at the picture you have there of PFA's. PFAS. PFAS.
And it's got like a coat and shoes on there. You're telling me the clothes that I wear are having an impact on my hormones? They can, but I think it's less of a direct effect and more downstream. So the PFAS chemicals are the forever chemicals.
They're used in things to make them well 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 PFAS on it. We're gonna go into my kitchen in a second. So I'll take a look at the view as they're watching out into my kitchen. Well, I was drawing on my kitchen.
You let me know if this is. Oh gosh, I hope you don't have Teflon. But I mean, my mom used it when I was growing up. I remember the non-stick pans.
That stuff is coming off into your food and so you're eating these PFAS. How do we know that they're dangerous? Okay, well, I'll tell you how we know. Let's start with, so the PFAS 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 gonna get menopause. So you're gonna get it around one to two years earlier if you have a high amount of these forever chemicals. But there's been studies a lot of studies looking at, let's start with BPA. Okay, Bispinale, 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 bounded a lot of water bottles.
It's in those plastic water bottles. Eight lines, the cups of paper cups, like these to-go coffee cups that you're getting at your favorite coffee place. Plastic is lining them, yes. Plastic lines them, because it's protecting it from 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 mimetic. So it kind of mimics estrogen and it binds to the receptors that estrogen do to do its function.
And so it sometimes binds to estrogen and either makes it seem like there's estrogen around or it blocks estrogen from working. So it depends on the dose and the concentration, so it can do both. But it also binds to androgen receptors that interact with testosterone, right? And so there have been studies that have found that men that have high amounts of BPA also have low amounts of testosterone, 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 your life, during puberty. Teens, adolescent boys that had the highest amount of BPA had 50% lower testosterone than the boys, sorry, that had the lowest amount of BPA. The biggest one that's affecting testosterone is the phthalates.
These phthalates, they are present in a lot of PVC piping, they're present in a lot of our food packaging, all those like thin, you go to the grocery store and you get a filet mignon steak and it's wrapped in plastic, poultry, all that plastic wrapping and all the foods that we're eating has phthalates in them. They 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 that, meat, it's getting into that meat, it's getting into that cheese, the phthalates. 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 thalate levels, those men had 20% lower testosterone compared to men with higher levels. 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 phthalates, and also motility, the ability to swim. Pregnant women that get exposed to high levels of phthalates, and if they're carrying a male fetus, they're having a boy, what's been shown is it's also affecting sexual development. So these boys, they're getting something called hypospadia, that's where the slit on the penis is moved backwards, kind of closer to what a woman would have, and they're getting undistended testicles. So one of their testicles is not descending, and that's associated with infertility, cancer, to stick with their cancer being the big one.
This is happening at an alarming rate, something like 20% of boys now have an undistended testicle. I mean, it's crazy. Because their mother had high phthalates. Well, this is definitely something that is known in our environment to cause that.
I don't know if that's the only cause, but 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 plastic wrappers, that we, everything that we're eating. You even getting your meat, or you think it's well, it's meat, but it's wrapped in plastic, and that phthalates 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, ovarian aging, age of menopause, they're disrupting thyroid hormones.
I mean, there's even studies now with women, pregnant women that have high levels of BPA. They have their 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 in androgen receptor, and this is very important, because the androgen, you wanna have, 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, like, oh, what wouldn't testosterone do that? Well, actually estrogen is very important for masculizing parts of the male brain. And so when you have aromatase being inhibited by Bisphenol A, by this endocrine disrupting hormone that is so ubiquitous everywhere. That is found in plastic bottles.
Plastic bottles, yeah, it's found everywhere. So what do you recommend? First of all, I think if you can eliminate and not drink out of plastic bottles as much as possible, if you do want to go coffee, either drink it there in their mugs or bring your own to-go mug, like I bring my, like a Yeti kind of to-go-coffee mug that I'll bring into a Starbucks or whatever, 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.
Cereal, technique, I mean, they don't wanna make sure. So you're getting, the soup has been classically shown in multiple studies to increase BPA levels by a thousand percent. 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 try to avoid cans, drinking out of soda cans, even like 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 fat 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, sulfurophane, activates a pathway that our enzymes involved in making BPA become water soluble, so they come out your urine. Oh, so broccoli's like a cleanser.
It's like a cleanser. It's like we actually do have these, it's called phase two detoxification enzymes in our body. We have the ability to detox a lot of things. We just have to give our body the right input so that it can activate those pathways.
I personally take a supplement of that 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 some people do it, it's great, but I used to do it, I don't anymore. I just take a supplement. That supplement's cool.
The supplement I take is called Avmacal. It's by a company called Nutramax. 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 autism, children and adolescents 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. Yeah, it's interesting. Again, I think that excretion is important, but avoiding the plastic as much as you can.
Make it a habit, don't freak out. I mean, obviously you can make yourself crazy and stress is not good, as we talked about. I see you going, oh my God. Yeah, I'm thinking about, just how should I am about these things?
I could easily make small changes. I could frankly, I could easily make big changes in the position I mean. I could just say, I can say in my company, we no longer buy this kind of stuff. I could say in my kitchen, because it's my team or whatever, let's not buy this.
Can we go to my kitchen now? Let's do it. Let's go to my kitchen. Be right.
You guys can come too. Listen, if you're listening on the dog walk, this might be a nice time to start on a bench and look, because you're about to go into my kitchen, but look at real things that you might not even know in your kitchen, causing you some of these problems. Come with me. You know the little traditional SIM card that goes inside of our phones?
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Keep this yourself, terms, and conditions of life. OK, so the team we've been here for the last couple of days. We've been getting lots of takeaways. And so this is a higgly penalty of everybody's food.
What's wrong? You've got your black plastic. What's wrong with the black plastic? We talked about plastic, it has BPA, it has phthalates.
But it also typically is made from recycled electronics. And the problem here is even is recycled electronics have flame retardants in them because you don't want your electronics touching fire. And there have been a variety of studies now that have found that black plastic has a high amount of flame retardants that are leaching in the food and getting into people's bodies that way. Not only do you not want to eat out of black plastic, you don't want hot food going in there, right?
Because that's like the worst. Can I get a bin bag? I need a bin bag. OK, OK, so let's do that in a minute.
What else? I'm going to take all of it out. OK, this is the other thing that really reaches out. It stands out to me because spicy foods, anything acidic that goes into plastic causes the chemicals to leach into it, even more rapidly, kind of the same way the heat does.
So heat, acidic, foods, not good and plastic. So my spicy sauce, if it comes in a little plastic tub, it's going to leach in. Look, if it's the one off, OK, but not a habit. Yes, a big time leach in.
You're eating BPA hot sauce. It has phthalates and BPA. I mean, look, are you drinking this every day? Or is it the one off?
No comment. No comment. Mind you a bit, sir. OK, what else?