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There are so many supplements out there that, if we believe the advertising, we should be taking.It's confusing, and even when we have the funds to dip our toes in, it's challenging to know where to start.
Today's guest, Ben Greenfield, knows a lot about supplements and ancestral living in general.My family has been learning from his work for over a decade.
We first heard about the light toxicity of modern devices and the benefits of cold exposure from him.
In this episode, Ben and I talk about so many things, light, dentistry, the importance of eating in a parasympathetic state, Ben's daily family routine and his philosophy on parenting and homeschooling.
And then we dive into Ben's expertise on ancestral superfood supplements and cover two different ways of thinking about how to choose supplementation for yourself and your family. Ben really knows his stuff.
This episode is absolutely chock full of information and insight.
Welcome to the Ancestral Kitchen podcast.
I'm Alison, a European town dweller living in England.
And I'm Andrea, living on a family farm in Northwest Washington State, USA.
Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking and living with ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen. Welcome to Ancestral Kitchen Podcast.
Today I have with me a guest, Ben Greenfield, who I first heard about through my husband, Rob.When Rob and I met 15 years ago, Rob was already seriously into health and he soon came across Ben's work.
And we talked earlier today about where we originally found Ben, but it was so long ago, we can't remember. It feels like ages ago, and I know that Ben's been doing podcasts since before podcasts existed.
And his work has given both of us so much in the health field that has moved us forward.In fact, as I sit here recording, I'm reading my notes from an e-book reader. which is the device I use for virtually all of my computer work.
And by e-book reader, there's no flicker and I'm not using a regular computer screen.Listeners to the podcast will know I've talked about that before.
And that journey into the relationship between light and our health was inspired and informed by one of Ben's podcasts over five years ago. Ben comes from a fitness background originally.
He has been a performance coach and is a nutritionist, but he's got a wife and kids and his work covers so many areas of health, many of which we talk about here on the podcast.
And he lives in Washington State, which is where my co-host Andrea lives, as you know, but she's just had a baby.So I'm on my own with Ben today.Hello, Ben, and welcome to the podcast.
That's not a very good excuse to having a baby.I mean.It's lame, isn't it?Of course.Lazy.Hey, by the way, that e-reader thing's pretty cool.Have you heard of this new company called Daylight? No, I haven't.I just got one.
I haven't messed around with it too much, but you should you should look it up or I remember what their website URL is, but they developed this new paper like technology.And it's it's one of the coolest little tablets I've ever seen.
And they're planning on rolling out like a laptop, possibly even a phone in the future. And it is, it's even better than Kindle Paper.It's incredible.It's got like a stylus.You can put all your apps on there.And yeah, they're really interesting.
You should look them up, Daylight.I think they just launched like a month ago.
Oh, I will, thank you.Because it's literally changed our lives, working like that.I have a completely different relationship with screens now, and my eyes, and my state of my brain, you know?My mental health is so much better.
Oh, yeah, it's incredible.I mean, not just for screens.I mean, I use the Iris software on all my computers, which is great, because before that there was one called Flux that did a pretty good job.
But Iris is way more customizable as far as being able to adjust the blue light and the textile. and automatic adjustments for where you happen to be in the world.And then on the phone, at least on the iPhone, the native night mode is not fantastic.
Like it doesn't dim that much, but there's one app called OneTap Zap that you can put on the phone.And there's like three different ways to do this.There's also a shortcut function for it, but you press the button once
And it will suck all the blue light out of the phone, turn off the Wi-Fi, turn off the Bluetooth.And a lot of people don't realize this.
If you put your phone in airplane mode, but location services is still on, your phone is still producing a mild radio frequency signal.So these apps will just disable.
Everything all at once which saves you like 20 seconds every time you want to go to bed or shut down your phone or whatever So yeah, it is so important
Yeah, I remember you doing a podcast about Iris and we got Iris on the computer we were using at the time, you know, quite a few years ago because of that.And we still have it on one of the normal computers that we use.
The phone is the problem I've had because I don't want a normal screen phone at all because I'm so used to the E Ink now that I don't want to go back.So I have a 30 year old phone, which can't do anything.
which actually I've just learned to embrace, but I think in the future I'd maybe like an E-ink phone, so I'm gonna look up that daylight and see what they've got planned.
I don't know how far off they are from developing a phone, and I kind of want one of those stupid phones, but which is what I call them.
But I just I use my phone enough for business and there's certain apps that I rely on for communicating with my clients or my team that I just kind of have to have it.But I'm assuming you also kind of pay attention to the light bulbs in the home.
Completely.That's another thing that completely changed when we learnt about light from you initially, that our light bulbs are all old-fashioned light bulbs and we've got a lot of red light in the evening and that's made a huge difference as well.
Yeah, you'll think this is cool.This is this is a new discovery of mine.
There's two companies one called Bond charge and the other one is called block blue light and they both Now have developed the light bulb that you just it looks like a normal light bulb or you plug it in and all the different light bulb cans in your house and the way it works is you turn
on the light switch once and it starts off in daytime mode and then if you flip the switch off and switch it on again it automatically goes to twilight mode and then you flip it off and flip it on again and it automatically goes to evening mode so instead of let's say having you know some really
reddish or warm incandescent lights in a bedroom and brighter lights in a gym or an office or Twilight bulbs and let's say like a living room You can have the same bulbs all through the house and all you do is flip on and off the light switch for whatever time of day it is and there and there's still low EMF and
low flicker, like a lot of these newer kind of biologically friendly light bulbs.
But I love the convenience of that because you don't have to have different light bulbs in different areas of the house, depending on whether it's a sleeping area or waking area or something like that.
Yeah, yeah.I feel like I need to kind of plug into you.I guess that's what your podcast is.Every couple of weeks you should get the latest information on all of this so I can go away and learn about it.Thank you.
Okay, let's apply that kind of scientist investigation to these two wonderful books that I have in front of me.The first one is called Boundless Cookbook and the second one is called Boundless Kitchen.Oh, no way, you have the new one? Yeah.
Yeah, I have them both.Oh, sweet.Yeah.And they are companion books to your non-cookery book, which came out a little while ago called Boundless, which Rob and I read together.It was our bedtime reading for a few months.And these books
and not only are full of delicious looking family meals, but also draw on and celebrate your slightly mad scientist love of ancestral superfoods, which we will dive into a little bit later in the interview.
The first thing I want to ask you is what we ask all our guests, which is what was the last thing you ate?
The last thing that I ate was stew.
So I've been trying to get better at braising and I like the concept of braising because if you know how to braise or if you learn how to braise, you are having to learn how to select the right meat, brown and spice the meat properly,
And I mean technically you could braise with non-meat like say potatoes and onions for example.And then you need to learn how to add the proper aromatics and spices.You need to learn the right cook or braising times for each different cut.
And so it's kind of like a method of cooking that allows you to learn a lot of cooking tactics all at once.
And the beauty of braising is that especially if you're into eating more ancestral cuts like heart or kidney or liver or some of these bigger cuts like a roast or a shoulder, the long, slow process of braising
not only helps to break down the collagen in those tougher cuts to make them more tender, which is also nicer on the pocketbook because you can get less expensive tougher cuts and make them taste really good, but then the long process of braising releases a lot of the gelatin from those meats, so you get this nice gut-nourishing, gelatinous-like stew.
Uh, probably one of the best books that I could recommend even though there are some braising like recipes in my cookbooks But if you really want soup to nuts to really get good at braising There is a cookbook author Her name is molly.
I think her last name is stevens.I think it's molly stevens, but she's a book all about braising Oh, she does.I didn't know this.
Oh, cool.Well, looks like I'll have to subscribe.So all about braising is fantastic.And so I had three beautiful grass fed, grass finished beef hearts in my freezer a few days ago.
So I took them out and the first thing I did was I soaked them for 24 hours in kefir.
Because a kefir or buttermilk or dairy medium helps to enzymatically break down a little bit of the meat Draw out a little bit of the gamey flavor that some people find unpalatable in heart or liver or something like that and then I
rinse the heart, and then I dredged it in almond flour and browned it.I think the best browning fat for a braising recipe is bacon fat.It's just incredible for braising, but I didn't have any bacon around, so I just used grass-fed butter.
That's really, really beautiful New Zealand butter.And so then after you've browned all of your meat, preferably you got to do it in batches because you want a real even browning or else you can just use multiple pans for the browning process.
So you brown your meat, which takes about six to eight minutes or so.Then you set the meat aside and you take your stock vegetables, your typical stock vegetables like celery, onion, carrot, those would be my top three.
And you caramelize those, cook those in butter over a skillet.Usually that's another 12, 15 minutes or so.And if you have a separate skillet, you can do that at the same time that you're browning the meat, because we're all about time hacking, right?
And then what you do is you'll then combine the browned meat and the vegetables and then cover that about two-thirds or so with your braising liquid.
And so in this case for the stew, that was my last meal, I used a third bourbon, a third wine, and a third apple cider vinegar.
Usually want like an alcohol or a vinegar type of medium for that some people will just use broth But I find you get a little bit of a watery flavor, so I like alcohol a little better Plus it's it's good used for for those extra bottles of whiskey.
You're not gonna drink, but somebody left at the house, so Then once you've once you've brought that all to a boil You're adding your spices and seasonings.
So in this case, I was just using garlic, salt, onion, salt, salt, pepper, bay leaves, and then just a touch of cayenne for flavor.I braised that over the stove top.
uh which is more of an italian brazing method not because it's superior but a lot of italians back in the day didn't have ovens so they used flame and so you want it to stay pretty moist so one little
Pro tip is if you're braising, take some parchment paper and put that between the lid of your braising pot, which is usually like a Dutch pot or a real, real good pot that's gonna hold in heat.
And so I braised that for about five hours under low heat.And I add a little bit of extra flour for thickener.And then I took some of my wife's beautiful homemade sourdough bread that she had yesterday.She had made yesterday.
and I put a little bit of butter and Manuka honey on the bread and then I dipped that in the stew that had the heart and I left all the vegetables in there even though in some braising recipes you'll discard the vegetables and have just the meat and it was just a gorgeous meal.
It sounds beautiful.Did you use almond flour because you're not eating the grains or did you use that for a specific reason in this braise?
I have nothing against grains.You know, especially grains have been properly soaked and sprouted and fermented like my wife's sourdough bread.But if I have the option to use a gluten free grain, I often do.
And for me, that's because I did a special kind of food intolerance or food allergy panel called a zoomer panel.And I tend to have a kind of pronounced white blood cell reaction to a lot of gliadin and a gluten like proteins.
So I'm careful about how much I have.And since probably probably the only source of gluten I really consume these days is my wife's sourdough bread.
So I thought, well, you know, if I got to choose between the sourdough bread or the stew, I'm just going to use gluten free flour in the stew and have the bread.So I'm not getting too much gluten.
Yeah, that makes sense. Nice, okay.I wanted to, before we talk about superfoods, I wanted to talk a little bit about the guidelines and mindset that you outline in the newer book, The Boundless Kitchen.
You talk about the blue zones in there, and we all know how much they've been used as marketing ploys, but you do say that there's no one perfect diet and that there's so much diversity among us, but you also say that there are some key patterns
that come out of those long-lived humans and I wanted to talk about a few of those.The first one is eat in a parasympathetic state.And I think all our listeners know that they should do this.
And I wanted to ask how you physically actually make sure that you eat in a parasympathetic state.
Yeah, the Blue Zones do have some controversy behind them as far as, you know, everything from birth record verification to the fact that the author and inventor of that idea is a little bit skewed towards more of a plant-based approach.
But regardless, you're right, we can learn specific lessons from anywhere where people live a long period of time, or even case studies where people seem to have healthy guts.
And eating in an unstressed state certainly is one of those key principles. If you're eating and you're stressed emotionally, physically, mentally, you tend to see a suppression of digestive enzymes.
You see suppression of these incretin hormones, including many of the hormones that help you to feel full, you know, hormones like cholecystokinin. one called PYY, or the now pretty famous GLP-1, the glucagon-like peptide.
These tend to not be as activated if you're eating in a stressed-out state, so you don't get full as soon.You definitely don't digest your food as well because you're producing fewer digestive enzymes, thus leading to issues like
leaky gut or intestinal gut permeability or the you know the the pesky you know corn and carrot slices in your crap the next day you know all these all these issues tend to pop up when you're eating stress and yet it's so common especially in more of a western industrialized society to suck down your superfood smoothie while you're driving 60 miles an hour down the highway on your way to work or you know be hunched over your desk spooning some you know
I don't know, you know, cereal or stew or whatever else in your mouth or mowing through a sandwich while you're walking to a meeting.
And the fact is that all of these involve eating in a state in which the more sympathetic fight or flight branch of the nervous system is activated compared to the rest or digest branch of the nervous system and.
While I am a fan of moving, like I'm walking on a treadmill while I'm talking to you, I don't sit that much.I'm kind of engaged in low-level physical activity throughout the day.
The one time that I will make sure I'm sitting, I'm relaxed, my heart rate is low, and I even go so far as to make sure that if there has been anything stressful that's happened that day, I've taken care of it.
Like if I've had an argument with my wife or a disagreement with a coworker,
I don't eat like I make sure all those things are taken care of before I go and stuff food in my mouth and that's important for the reasons that I've stated from a you know from a biochemical standpoint and so I sit to eat I get into a relaxed state I pray before a meal which allows for a pause and an act of gratefulness prior to eating and allows me to eat a little bit more mindfully and be aware of my food and then
If you look into some of the research that I think is becoming more commonly known in the process of mastication, you know, there are books now like Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic, or this growing process of mewing, which involves proper tongue posture, proper jaw posture, and almost like a bioaesthetic approach to the mouth.
The idea of chewing and chewing properly and even chewing foods that can be difficult to chew comes up repeatedly in books and in sectors like that.And so I'm very cognizant of chewing now.I chew 25 to 40 times per bite.
And that helps a ton with digestion, with gas, with bloating, et cetera.And yes, I still will have a shot of apple cider vinegar or some lemon juice prior to a meal to enhance the production of digestive enzymes.
If I'm traveling, I'll even travel with like a bottled digestive enzyme supplement.But all of this just helps so much.
with satiety with digestion with gratefulness for the food with with the ability to be able to properly assimilate what you're eating and what's really interesting.
This is not something I've really talked about before ever on a podcast because it's kind of new for me is a couple of weeks ago.I finished.
a treatment with a dentist a biological dentist down in phoenix who i've been working with for about two years this dentist practice practices bioaesthetic dentistry which involves measuring and analyzing via scans and x-rays the alignment of your jaw and your teeth
uh customizing a mouthpiece that you wear for a period of time until your jaw is properly realigned and then redoing the areas of the teeth that have kind of broken down or been worn away from grinding or improper jaw alignment
And as a part of that process, the dentist and her team have been teaching me things about how the tongue should be held in a suctioned posture against the roof of the mouth, just in normal day-to-day life, and how important nasal breathing is, and how important caring for the jaw and even doing specific jaw massage and jaw exercises have become.
And so since that treatment,
I would say that I have about doubled the amount and I was already a pretty good chewer because I was aware of a lot of the stuff I've already talked to you about, but I have about doubled the time that it takes me to eat a meal.
I am I feel so good like my even in the past two weeks.My digestion has improved so much. And that's all from mouth and jaw and teeth work that have almost like retrained my jaw how to engage in proper mastication.
And I swear my food is pure liquid before I swallow because now my teeth are working the way that they're supposed to.My jaw is chewing the way it's supposed to.It's grinding the food properly.I'm no longer ripping with my front teeth.
Everything's kind of getting chewed in the back teeth. And it's incredible.It's a game changer.And I think probably people want to learn more about this.Look up the field of bioaesthetic dentistry and also look into the concept of mewing.M-E-W-I-N-G.
And also that book, Jaws, A Hidden Epidemic, if you want to learn more about the very important link between jaw, teeth, mouth, bite alignment, and digestion of food.
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I think a lot of listeners to the podcast are, you know, they have lots of family things going on.You know, they've got kids, they've got work, they've got family to look after and gardens and perhaps animals as well.
And so they're kind of rushing around and you know what it's like when your kids are around you and they're rushing around and they've got this energy.It's sometimes really difficult to move into that parasympathetic state.And the fact that you said,
that you literally don't eat if something has happened.And that's a strong choice, but one that means that you're not putting that food in your body when you're in a state where it's not going to be digested.
And I know that, you know, you have kids and I've heard you talking on the podcast about how you come together to eat as a family and how you try to slow things down and how you're playing games as well at the table you have done.
Can you talk a little about how you interact with your family during dinner and how you come together to eat as a family and why that's important.
Sure, we were talking about light earlier and I don't know if you've ever heard of kind of the concept.
So you're familiar with the concept of light and one of the reasons that we would limit light later on in the evening is because it would cause a suppression of melatonin and sleep cycles would be deleteriously affected.
But you'll often hear when it comes to discussions of sleep hygiene that a good night's sleep begins in the morning.
And that's because ample amounts of natural light, and arguably even the blue light that you get from backlit screens or phones, or some people will put these special boxes that are often used for seasonal affective disorder on their desks to blast themselves with light in the morning so that you get proper sleep drive.
and so that you're kind of accelerating sleep drive by getting light in the morning and then doing the opposite in the evening.Well, for our family, it's very similar when it comes to dinner.
A good family dinner and good alignment of the family as a whole begins in the morning.So at 7 a.m., our entire family meets on the living room floor or on the back patio.
And that meeting involves reading scripture together, praying, talking about the day, discussing things like, oh, how'd you sleep?Anybody have any cool dreams?
There's about a 15-minute family meeting, just talking and enjoying each other's company and just starting off the day by all of us being together in the same place and even engaging in spiritual activities together.
And as a part of that meeting, there's also a discussion about dinner. Okay, what's for dinner?What did we pull from the freezer yesterday?Who's doing a salad or some vegetables and you know?
What are we gonna do for a starch and who's gonna make a risotto or you know?Do we have some some bread that we're gonna make or some roasted potatoes or some carrot fries and you know usually?Eight times out of ten.
I'm in charge of the meat so you know what's dad gonna do with the fish or the beef or the chicken or the you know heart or the liver or whatever else and so
What that means is at seven o'clock in the morning, everybody kind of knows what they're in charge of for dinner that night.We don't do much breakfast together as a family.
We don't do lunch much together as a family unless it's some kind of a special, you know, weekend outing for brunch or something like that.But we almost always do dinner as a family.And so very similar to how everybody gathers at seven a.m.
It's kind of like the unwritten rule in the house, 7 p.m.everybody's ready to gather in the kitchen.
And when we gather in the kitchen, the expectation is that if there was something that you were assigned to help make for dinner, that you have had that done or near to completion or just about to come out of the oven or off the stove at 7 p.m.
And everybody's got an assignment, so everybody's pitching in.And of course, this is great for kids because they learn how to cook and how to help.And we've been doing this since our kids were very young, like two years old.
So even if mom and dad are cooking something, you know, one, we have two sons, you know, so one son is mom's sous chef and one son is my sous chef.And so, you know, they've, they've grown up very familiar with this concept.
7 p.m we all gather the first thing that happens is that my sons are homeschooled so we always talk about what their book assignment reading for the day was because every week or every two weeks we go through a new book together as fathers and sons
My wife doesn't like to read.She's actually dyslexic and she usually kind of like listens in and absorbs what we're talking about.
But the boys and I, we always are holding each other accountable by all reading the same chapter or series of chapters from a book.
So it starts off with about a 5 to 10 minute discussion about the major takeaway or lesson we learned from that day's chapter. And then we move into song time.So I grab a guitar and we all sing a song together.
And then we move on to prayer and gratefulness, where we pray over the meal and have a moment of gratitude. And then we all start into dinner or grab our plates.
We pile up our plates and we go into the dining room table or if it's nice outside and and the Hornets aren't being pesky, which they have been of late.We go out onto the back patio and we have dinner.
But we we have a game closet and it's got over 100 games and card games and battle games and traditional games like Scrabble and Monopoly.And so Typically, one person in the family chooses what the game for that night is going to be.
And so we all gather around and we open up the game and we eat dinner and we still talk.It's not like we're all ignoring each other.
But while we're talking and catching up on the day, we play a game and kind of similar to that concept of eating slowly.
Not only is playing a game kind of make you, you know, slow down and savor your food and in between bites, you're looking at your cards and laying a card and checking out the points or making a move or, you know, talking to somebody else at the table.
But that's usually usually that means our dinners are about an hour long, you know, start to finish by the time we've finished a game.And then after that, you know, it's pretty, pretty straightforward.We all just we clean up. the kitchen.
We'll usually have something for dessert.Desserts for us are very simple.
Like we're just going to have like yogurt and dark chocolate with blueberries or you know, my wife last night made some, some dark chocolate, uh, brownies that we had with a little bit of, uh, fresh raspberry sorbet that one of my other sons made.
And so we'll usually have dessert.And then we go out in the yard and play a little yard game like cornhole or bocce ball or something like that.And then after that, we actually start to get ready for bed.
And typically, I'll gather up in my son's room and read a book or play some songs or, you know, tell stories and, you know, and then we go to bed.But that's usually what the what the evening dinner time looks like.
I think that the thing with games is a bit like the thing with chewing, you know, people know that they need to chew, but they kind of don't remember to or they're overtaken by something kind of stressing them and they don't.
With the games, what I found with doing things like that at the table is, you know, people always say, well, you should put your fork down between bites because that encourages you to chew more and it's giving more time for you to digest properly.
If you're playing a game, you don't even think about having to do that because it's your go again and so you've got to, like you say, look at the cards in your hand and pick something up.
You've got to move your counter and so you're doing it without actually doing it and at the same time you're connecting with everyone at the table and having fun.So it just seems like a win-win-win, playing games at the dining table, I think.
Yeah, it's fantastic.And we have kind of a, you know, no phone.Well, I shouldn't say it's not a no phone.So at the dinner table, we encourage everyone to not have screens or phones around.
You know, I say it that way because we don't have a lot of hard and fast rules in our home.Like there's no like, oh, you, whatever, you can't have gluten or we don't touch video games or comic books or whatever.We actually use,
I have a parenting book.It's called Boundless Parenting.And in that book, I talk about our parenting approach, which is called love and logic, which means that you don't necessarily have a lot of no's or forbidden fruits in your home.
You instead take the time and presence to educate your children about the consequences of any decision that they might make and then let them deal with the consequences.So
You know, I don't want to get too crass or edgy here, but let's say pornography, right?Like, I don't have a rule for my sons that, oh, you're going to be in so much trouble if you ever look at porn and that's forbidden fruit.
And we don't even talk about that.But I've taken them through the entire, you know, your brain on porn dot com website and taught them about.
What something like that does to neurotransmitters and how much it flies in the face of our natural ancestral hardwiring and how bad that industry is and I've taken them to see movies like sound of freedom, you know about the sex slave industry and just
taking the time to teach them all of this so that they understand the reason why, instead of it just being, oh, that's just a forbidden topic in our home and we don't talk about it, and then one day they're just gonna find a magazine underneath one of their friend's beds or find something on their phone.
So with screens, we don't have a no-screen-time rule or a no-phone rule, but we try and make the house and everything we do and the example we set as parents
so fun and so organic and so analog that phones really aren't something you want at the table.And of course, I've also taught my sons, showed them that research.It's fascinating.I think this is out of Sherry Turkle's book.
I forget the name of it, but even the mere presence of a phone on a table detracts from conversation, even if it's not being used.So it's kind of funny.
We go out to restaurants and at least twice a waiter or waitress will come by, pick my phone up off the floor where it's underneath my chair and
Put it on the table and say you dropped your phone, and I'm like no it's it's it's under there on purpose But anyway, so unless we need to google a scrabble word that someone is challenging or something like that like the phones are off the table anyways and Yeah, playing games playing real analog games at dinnertime also makes it far less likely People are gonna be reaching for the phone because it is an attraction you know
Yeah, completely, completely.
I liked so many things about what you just said, just the whole concept of parenting in that way, you know, because if you're banning something, you're kind of creating this sort of aura around it of attraction in a way, and then by educating instead,
you're giving that responsibility to the child, and then they're learning to manage it, just like you give them responsibility for money, or you give them responsibility for chores, they're learning to manage that, and they learn themselves what the consequences are, and that is so much deeper than anything that you're trying to instill on them.
And then the idea of showing by example, I mean, I think that's huge.For Rob and myself, with our son, Gabriel, who's 10 now, you know, we've, We've never had phones around when he's around.
I had a smartphone until he was about two and a half, and I could see what it was doing to me when I was with him, and I could see how it was affecting me.So literally, I just got rid of it.I thought, I can't do this anymore.
I don't want him to see this.And it extends to other things.He's seen us eating liver, heart, kidney, and he's been eating that and seeing us eating it since he was six months old. And so he just thinks it's normal.
That idea of kind of leading by example and showing rather than telling is such a gift, I think.
Yeah, it is.And I have one more thought on it.Yeah, and the example part is important.But yeah, it's just this idea of forbidden fruit.You know, I grew up in a household where, you know, alcohol was for the adults, and we don't talk about that.
And that's not something that kids should even be exposed to.You know, in our house,
You know, not only is alcohol not, you know, hush hush and not talked about, but when we pour whatever, let's say like a nice organic Merlot and we're staying down to a nice meal, you know, my sons are allowed to have a little sip.
And hey, what do you taste?And what's the aroma?And what's the flavor?And how does this make the palate different in between a bite?And, you know, where'd this wine come from?And what's the terroir?
You know, we do it with olive oil, et cetera, and vinegar as well.
But I guarantee you know my first experience with alcohol was I stole a bottle of scotch from my dad's office And I got drunk on it in my bedroom because it was just something I'd never been educated about and it was just forbidden My sons are never gonna walk into our pantry and grab a bottle of wine And go get drunk in their bedroom like it'd be as silly as them
grabbing a bottle of olive oil, you know, and then drinking a quart of that.It's like, it's just, it's a, it's a condiment and something we enjoy and they do understand.
And I've taught them that, hey, you know, in a young growing adolescent, the liver is not yet fully formed and alcohol in general and excess is bad for anyone's liver, but especially as you're growing, it's not a good choice to have this be a staple in your diet.
You can taste it and you can see what it is and you can learn about it, but
wait until you're older, you know, preferably over the age of 18 to begin using something like this as, you know, like a full glass at the dinner table or something like that.
And so, you know, and in the same way, if I'm sitting down to dinner, you know, and, and I've taught them, you know, for most adults, exceeding two glasses of wine is not good for the body.
And they see me pouring a third glass or they see me checking my smartphone for the third time, you know, in between a hand of cards, you know, more is caught than taught. You know, and kids are going to watch what you do and emulate that.
So an important part of this parenting approach is being a good example yourself.
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Let's switch and talk a little bit about supplements and superfoods.So there are a large number of recipes in both of the Boundless cookbooks that use superfoods. And I kind of wanted to talk about where to start.
I think not many of our listeners will have experienced powders.
I mean, they are used to whole food and perhaps if they've dabbled with superfood rather than just, you know, vitamin or mineral supplements, it would be perhaps collagen powder or liver capsules.
Your book includes so many different superfood supplements.Can you explain why you use them to start with?
Yes, I often say that part of my approach to life is I've got one foot in the realm of modern science and one foot in the realm of ancestral living.
Meaning I'll go do a workout where I'm swinging a kettlebell in the backyard in my bare feet in the sunshine.And I also have a basement with like a half a million dollars of biohacking equipment in it.And I might go in there and do some kind of crazy
you know, cryotherapy, blood flow restriction, you know, oxygen mask on my face type of workout to try out a little bit more of the concentrated scientific approach.
And I have a little bit of a similar approach with cooking is I actually like to see some of these modern newfangled ingredients.Like, you know, I could go outside and I could harvest some Oregon grapefruit.
and some nettle and some wild mint and maybe some miner's leaf and you know food dehydrate that and powder it and make myself a nice wild plant tea that enhances autophagy during sleep.
I could also you know use a supplement that's got these fringe ingredients like spermidine and NAD and resveratrol in it and make a tea that that uses some things that have been synthesized or extracted in a more scientific way.
Another example would be, even though I didn't do this for the recent heart recipe, there's like this
Superfood red powder that's got all these different superfoods from around the world that I can't find my backyard, you know cordyceps and beet and rhodiola and these you know, like eight different kinds of berries and I've used that before as a rub for heart and it's fantastic and tastes wonderful and I'll use that to kind of like amp up the nutrient density and use one of these concentrated superfood powders to do so and it's
it's less scientific and more just loving to play with combining the the scientific concentrated superfood approach with some of the more ancestral cooking methods so it's kind of like you know biohacking meets traditional cookery and so so that's kind of kind of the idea behind it i mean even like my uh
My wild plant pesto which is in the boundless cookbook you know I have this nettle patch for the white-tailed deer feed and grow fat on this Amino acid rich nettle and I'll go harvest some of that a little bit of dandelion from the backyard some of that wild mint that I mentioned and There's a few of the things growing sometimes.
I'll grab those and we also have a little bit of
of some fantastic rosemary that grows nearby and I'll get a little bit of that and I'll go inside and put that all in the food processor after I've rinsed it a little bit and throw some pine nuts and walnuts and olive oil in there.
But even in the cookbook, I have this other powder.It's like a greens powder, right?It's got matcha green tea extract and spirulina and all this other stuff I can't find on my land.And as part of the blending process prior to making the pesto,
I have the optional step of adding this superfood greens powder to your pesto to amp up the nutrient density even more.
One reason for that also is I inevitably as a health podcaster and a blogger and someone who owns a supplements company and helps out other supplement companies with formulations, I always have these odd things around my house that I like to figure out how to cook with.
versus just putting them in water and sucking them down or taking them as a capsule.So for me, it's kind of like, well, this is around.I wonder how I could weave this into a recipe.And it just kind of makes it fun.
You know, it's a unique way of adding some of these modern superfood blends into something you'd be cooking anyways.
And it can really amp up the nutrient density because many of these things, you know, we got like 20 different ingredients in them you aren't going to find in your backyard or the grocery store.
Can you unpick, is it possible to unpick what those superfoods are bringing you above and beyond what your home-cooked nutrient-dense food is?
If I were to, let me think of how I could explain this. When you look at, let's say a superfood for example, let me think of a good example.
Well, we could go with spirulina and chlorella and some of these photosianins from the dark blues and the dark greens of the plant kingdom.
very similar to the dark blacks like uh shiwajit another superfood or the very dark blues like methylene blue which is kind of like something a lot of biohackers use for enhancing cognition when these are present in the bloodstream they produce a melanin-like compound that interacts with photoreceptors of light to allow the product the body to produce more amounts of ATP meaning
You can almost with the right things in your bloodstream allow your body to photosynthesize a little bit like a plant now You know, I've raced triathlons and hunted down in Kona Hawaii where there's giant algal, you know bloom fields out in the ocean where they harvest this stuff, but I don't have that in my backyard necessarily, but
If I add that to, let's say, a morning smoothie or into my wild plant pesto, and then I go to a red light sauna session or go for a walk in the sunshine, all of a sudden I'm equipping my body to produce a whole bunch of extra ATP.
Is that step absolutely necessary?
No, but if you want to have a little bit of better living through science from some fringe ingredient that came from somewhere across the world that you couldn't necessarily grow in your backyard, I think it's a cool concept to be able to play around with some of these things a little bit like that.
Can you explain to listeners who don't know what ATP is what it is?
ATP is adenosine triphosphate.It is considered to be kind of like the body's energy currency.
When electrons are shuttled through the electron transport chain in your mitochondria, there's all these little motors, almost like nanomotors that spin at a very high rate, exchanging electrons back and forth across that membrane.
And at the very end of that process, the end product is ATP.Your body actually makes pounds and pounds of it every single day.And that's what is used for muscle contraction, for thought, for the heart to beat, for just about every
physiological process that occurs.And that process is sped up.There's actually a certain part of the mitochondrial electron transport chains.It has these different things called complexes in it.
And one of the complexes is called a cytochrome C oxidase.And when that interacts with photons of light, it speeds up those nanomotors to produce more ATP.
and one of the ways that you can cause more absorption of that light is if you've consumed something that's very dark bluish green like a photo cyanin from algae or something very black like uh shilajit or like a folic acid from the soil or something like that or something very very dark blue like uh methylene blue which is actually a synthesized compound but
It's kind of this idea of allowing your body to photosynthesize, in a way, extra ATP in response to photons of light hitting the skin and being absorbed.
Do your children eat the superfoods?Do you put them in their food as well?
Uh, they pretty much eat whatever we eat.So if I happen to have, you know, rub down a meat with some kind of crazy red juice or put green juice in a pesto or something like that.Yes.They also take supplements.
So our entire family has done salivary genetic testing to see what type of diseases or conditions or issues that we might be predisposed to.So for example, um,
My sons have a gene that lowers the amount of brain-derived neurotrophic factor that they would naturally make.And brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF as it's called, it's almost like miracle growth for the brain.
And there are certain things that can upregulate BDNF production.Sauna is one.Aerobic exercise is another.And there's a mushroom.It's kind of interesting.You've probably heard of this whole idea of the
the doctrine of signatures, certain things that look like certain things in nature can possibly have that effect in the body.
Like, you know, if you cut open a tomato or a pomegranate, it kind of resembles the atrium, the ventricles of the heart and can be good for cardiovascular function or a walnut can look like a brain or a
pancreas and a sweet potato are shaped a little similarly and sweet potatoes are good for insulin function but lion's mane when you look at it in nature looks like a bunch of axons and dendrites in a brain and it turns out that lion's mane mushroom or lion's mane mushroom extract can help with BDNF so
I have a few little packets of lion's mane mushroom extract that my sons will sometimes have before school.They also have slightly suppressed glutathione detoxification pathways, so they use glutathione.
Another example would be my wife has a very high risk for high blood pressure, so she uses a supplement that contains a lot of nitric oxide precursors in it.
I have some methylation issues, and organ meats are very rich in a lot of these methylated compounds, and so I go out of my way to include a lot of liver and heart and kidney and things like that in my diet.
I usually just choose those from real food sources, not supplements, although I do have desiccated organ meat capsules that I travel with.
So for my sons, yeah, they supplement and anything they supplement with is very targeted based on, you know, just saving off certain genetic risks.
Okay.Where, if our listeners, someone's perhaps listening and hasn't gone beyond perhaps some collagen powder in their breakfast or some liver capsules, Where would you suggest that they start with trying to look beyond that?
There are so many different options in the recipes in your book and it can be a bit bewildering kind of flicking through.Where should people start if they're not used to it?
If you haven't messed around the world of supplementation yet, you have two options.
One is to look at large-scale epidemiological research on supplements, supplement safety, supplement efficacy, and to use a few things that seem to have broad beneficial
Applications to a pretty wide population and if I could say what probably the top 3 of those at this point would be, it'd be creatine.
all the more important for people who don't eat meat but creatine is dirt cheap very well studied amazing for strength for power for mental function for sleep deprivation it's just a huge list of benefits and very well researched and safe so creatine would be one and that's at about five grams or so a day
The second would be some type of omega-3 fatty acid which I use but only on days that I'm not having fish but around 1 to 2 grams of like a fish oil or krill oil Or a cod liver oil or something like that seems to have a lot of benefits particular cardiovascular function And then the last a little bit newer studied compound but fantastic for
DNA repair and cellular membrane repair and that would be something called NAD and That's also something you can find now as a supplement It's also something that's naturally pretty rich if you're eating a wide variety of fermented foods.
It's pretty high in those but your levels of NAD begin to decline at a pretty rapid rate after the age of 40 and many people notice a pretty significant uptick in energy and and recovery from workouts and things like that if they use NAD.
So I would say creatine, fish oil, and NAD, if you're already eating a well-constructed diet, a wide variety of vegetables, herbs, spices, Mediterranean-style fats, proteins, et cetera, those three would be some pretty good additions.
And then the other route to go is You know, we live in a world and was the same type of expensive self quantification that you would have paid tens of thousands of dollars for it.
Like, you know, the Princeton Longevity Institute or something like that can now be done for, you know, pretty inexpensively in the comfort of your own home.
Like you can get a really comprehensive blood test for anywhere from 200 to 500 dollars that you can do from home.You can get the results from that.You can see, oh, hey, you know, my. Vitamin D levels are really low.
I should consider supplementing with vitamin D or I have a lipid panel that's showing, you know, really high triglycerides and high Applebee and high LP little a and high small particle cholesterol count.
So I should consider some vitamin K and some magnesium to help out with. my lipid panel or I have a very high amount of inflammation, maybe I should consider supplementing with something like curcumin or a little bit of extra fish oil.
So that's kind of the other route is to do a little bit of lab testing and that can really help you determine whether a supplement is just going to be making expensive urine or whether it's something that could actually be a good idea for you.
Great.That's really helpful.Thank you.What's your favorite supplement at the moment?
Probably that one I mentioned, NAD.It just has such a broad range of applicability for energy, for repair, for recovery, for mental function.That's one that I just, I feel incredible when I take it.
And again, if you're younger, like under 40, you're probably not gonna notice it as much, but as you age, You know, two things decrease quite a bit, your stem cell pool and your NAD pool.And so it's pretty important to consider those two factors.
And probably the other really important thing from a nutritional standpoint is that the digestive enzymes responsible for breaking down protein, those tend to be produced in smaller amounts as you age.
And so I recommend that for aging individuals, if you're able to use some kind of a protein digesting enzyme prior to meals that contain an appreciable amount of protein, you're gonna break down and make that a little more bioavailable.
Great, thank you.Okay, do you use that NAD, do you just take it with water or have you come up with some weird recipe to put it in?
I haven't found any recipes.Again, I eat a wide variety of fermented foods.That's how I get it from diet.But I just have the brand I'm using right now is called NAD Regen.
And so it's NAD, but they put a few other things in it, like bio pairing from black pepper.
a little bit of others, Veritrol, a little bit of another thing called Spermidine, which is something you normally find in like, again, aged cheeses, fermented foods, et cetera.But it helps to increase the time that NAD stays in the bloodstream.
And so that one's made by a company called Biostack Labs.It's called NAD Regen.And I just take two of those every morning.
OK, wonderful.Thank you. Okay, we're getting close to time.Tell us what you're up to next.What's your, either in the kitchen or with what you're doing with your work or your podcast?
Well, let's see.I just put the finishing touches on Boundless 2.0, which will come out in January, a fully updated and revised version of Boundless, which I'm pretty excited about.And then I am
preparing my twin 16 year old sons to leave in September for their first solo trip around the US and to a few different international locales.
So trying to get a lot of quality father son time in and also help them with the launch of their first card game because they have a gaming business now.No surprises there.And and then, um, I'm also working and this will be in about September.
I'm launching a brand new membership website called the life network where people get kind of insider access to ask me questions and insider podcast with a whole bunch of other experts and coaching and workouts and interpretation of lab results and just kind of like
everything you need in your back pocket to optimize your health.But a lot of this stuff is expensive.So I've kind of put that together for about 15 bucks a month.
So just been working on a really, really nice membership website that's also not going to break the bank for a lot of people.
And is that up yet?Do you have a URL for it or not?
Uh, if you go to go life network.com, it's, it's, there should be kind of like a landing page there, even though you can't get in yet.Cause it's technically not live yet.Okay.
Okay.So for listeners who don't know where you are and how to follow your work and want to, can you tell everyone where you are and how they can connect with you?
Oh, it's pretty easy.You can just Google me or my website's bengreenfieldlife.com.You know, my books are on Amazon and my podcast wherever, you know, wherever podcasts are found.So yeah, pretty easy.
Wonderful.Is there anything else you want to add before we say goodbye, Ben?
Oh, gosh, I'll tell you this.
I had an incredible interview with this guy who's dug into all the ancient training secrets of the ancient Spartan warriors and the, the, uh, the Indian army and the old Chinese warriors and, you know, all these, you know, boxers and martial artists.
And he kind of researched all the different
foods and recipes all the way down to like this nasty black soup that the Spartan Warriors used to eat and so I'm having him assimilate all those recipes and then I'm gonna figure out a way to make them taste good and I think the next cookbook that I'm gonna write is gonna be a cookbook full of all these
Ancient pardon the expression badass recipes from all these old warrior tribes that you could actually eat to become stronger and bigger and faster and a better version of yourself, so I don't know what I'll call it, but It sounds like a really interesting journey I think it could be fun because nothing like that's out there, and I don't know I could make them taste good I'll have to do a lot of test kitchen work on that one, but that'll be the next book after boundless 2.0
Excellent, we should look out for that.Wonderful, thank you for your time, Ben.All right, well thanks, Alison.And enjoy the rest of your day.Thank you.
Yeah, this has been fun.Thank you so much for having me on.No problem, bye.All right, bye.
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