
Cutting Edge Peptide Fat Loss & Muscle Building with Alex Kikel What’s the deal with methylene blue? (2:02) His background in the peptide space. (9:09) How common is it for a professional athlete to have someone work with them who is NOT...
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Sal Destefano
If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump.
Adam Schaefer
Mind Pump.
Sal Destefano
With your hosts, Sal Destefano, Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews, you just found the.
Adam Schaefer
Most downloaded fitness, health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump, right? In this episode we talk about the gray market, cutting edge stuff. This is like you won't hear this anywhere. We have the prep coach on the podcast, Alex Kickle. He's one of the smartest people in the industry and we talk about peptides and supplements, things you won't learn anywhere except from a guy like Alex. By the way, you can find him online@theprepcoach.com or you can go to Instagram @alexkeckel K I K E L. You can also find him on YouTube. Just look him up. Alex Keckle, TPC. Anyway, again, cutting edge, gray market stuff. You won't hear from anyone else, but he knows what he's talking about. This guy works with billionaires, executives and some athletes that he can't even mention. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, eight Sleep. This is the most advanced sleep system you'll find anywhere. It goes on your bed, manages the temperature and it monitors your sleep and uses AI technology to individualize the temperature of your bed and it changes it throughout the night to help you get the best sleep of your life. Go check them out. Go to 8sleep.com forward/mind pump. Use the code mind pump. Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra. Also, final hours for the brand new program sale. So Maps Transform was just launched. It's a 90 day transformational program. Go from before to after. Because it's a brand new program. It's $70 off and we're including two free things. Adam's 90 day body recomp journal and the Maps Transformation Diet Guide. Those are both for free because it's a brand new program. So if you want the $70 off and the two freebies, go to maps transform.com and then use the code transform70. All right, here comes the show. Alex, welcome to the show. You came highly recommended by a friend, Jay Campbell, which I respect him a lot. So when he says somebody knows their stuff, I definitely trust him. I want to start with something that is going all over the place. It's viral. In fact, there was a video of Robert Kennedy taking this methylene blue. What is it? What does it do? Why is everybody talking about this?
Justin Andrews
Why are we concerned about this?
Sal Destefano
Yeah, I do some consulting with the group involved with rfk so, different story. But back to methylene blue. Wow. What doesn't it do? Right? So anytime you talk about any kind of drug supplement, whatever, it always does multiple actions. So methylene blue, if you look what it has the potential to do, it can drive up cerebral metabolic rate, crazy amount. So as an overall nootropic aid, it's kind of one thing. It'll modulate the electron transport chain pretty crazily. So overall energetic aid, there's another one. It'll drive direct fat loss. It can drive indirect anabolism. It can literally start to drive. So it'll be a cool driver of pushing drugs into tumors. So if you have a cancer, you can pair with other compounds that are hyper oxygenate and push those drugs into the tumors. You can activate with some light. You. I mean, you can do a ton of different things. So you look at it as kind of like a. There's a lot of drugs out there like that. They're kind of like miracles. They really are. We're in this renaissance right now, in our age where we can basically fix any problem that talking about. Jad just did his seminar in Tampa. My whole presentation was biohacking the future. And in quotes, it was, we have the tools to fix anything. We basically can because there's tools like methylene blue.
Adam Schaefer
What is methylene blue? Was it a food dye?
Sal Destefano
Dye, yep.
Adam Schaefer
And how long have we had, like, what is it exactly?
Sal Destefano
Forever. It's been around forever. It started off again as that dye, and then they started seeing some different interactions with again, electronic transport chain. And then all of a sudden, you start to realize, oh, there's a lot of carrier spillover. It gets more research, and it kind of goes from there.
Adam Schaefer
Okay, and so now explain the electron transfer. Why is that, like, why is that a good thing? What are we looking at?
Sal Destefano
Yeah, so for energetics, how we get ATP, right? It's all about how we transfer those electrons down a different chain. So you spit off some hydrogen, throw off some oxygen, you eventually get ATP.
Adam Schaefer
Okay.
Sal Destefano
It'll improve that entire process upstream, whereas metformin does it more downstream from a complex standpoint.
Adam Schaefer
Okay, so it'll enhance your body's ability to create ATP, which is one of the primary sources of energy for all of your mitochondria.
Alex Keckel
That paired with creatine. Is there any benefits, I mean, pairing that with something like creatine? Would that do anything else?
Sal Destefano
So actually, yeah, from a neuroinflammatory standpoint, another thing you can do with methylene blue is use it to reverse TBIs, any kind of like Parkinson's, dementia, Alzheimer's. This morning I actually took 50 grams of creatine because I slept 12 hours since Thursday. So from an overall neuroinflammation standpoint, bring that down so I can function properly. So you pair that with methylene blue, which I also took this morning, pulls down even further neuroinflammation and you're, you know, operating like normal, independent of that glymphatic system when we sleep. Glymphatic system cleans your brain, right? If you don't sleep, you're not really getting that cleaning. So this kind of like gives you some leeway there from a cleaning aspect.
Adam Schaefer
You said 50 grams creatine. Yeah, yeah. So I read that taking a big dose a bolus of creatine after being sleep deprived helps a lot, but I didn't know 50 grams is a lot. I mean, you're a big dude. Is that based off your lean body mass?
Sal Destefano
I've tried it a lot. So the traditional 5 grams creatine, 10 grams creatine, it's awesome. But look at all the research. It's the cheapest molecule out there that does everything. So I always have my individuals work it up. 15 grams, 20 grams, 25. You'll either have a point of mason return where more is not better, or you have the GI problems. So once you run into one of those things, like for me I take 20 or 30 grams daily intra workout every single day.
Alex Keckel
How are you, how are you measuring the return on that? Like you've say you're dosing me right now, like what are we watching for you to go? Like, okay, that's it, no more. You don't need more.
Sal Destefano
The metabolic changes. So are you gaining muscle tissue easy? Are you losing body fat faster? Look at the performance based changes. Because it's recycling ATP, right? You can look at all the things that in creatine has to offer and you'll get to a point where you're like, I'm not really seeing anything else. Like I'm not stronger in the gym, I'm not leaner, I'm not bigger. That's usually say you pull back by 5 grams.
Alex Keckel
Okay.
Sal Destefano
Or you take it and you're like pooping your brains out. You know, have that in that diuretic based effect and diarrhea based effect.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
Okay, too much pullback. Or you could switch to like some of this different estroversions, but usually traditional creatine monohydrate pretty much good to go. And you work it up.
Alex Keckel
Based on your response, you just justified me snacking on these creatine gummies all day. I've already been eating.
Sal Destefano
That's what Seema said when I was on Mark Bell's podcast last year. He was snacking them because I didn't know about creatine gummies.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
So I can eat these. I was like, I have a couple, you know.
Adam Schaefer
Sound good? That's awesome. So I heard back to methylene blue. It's an MAOI inhibitor as well. What is that?
Sal Destefano
Monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
Adam Schaefer
Right now what are. So those aren't. Those. Aren't there prescription drugs that are like that for things like depression?
Sal Destefano
Exactly. So it'll basically modulate the breakdown of all those monoamines. So if you look at neurochemistry as a whole, certain things that can drive alertness, focus, dopaminergic, serotonergic cascades, it's modulating that so it's essentially preventing the breakdown. So you have more in that snack cleft to actually do action.
Adam Schaefer
Okay, so and, and what does that feel like then when you're starting to inhibit that?
Sal Destefano
Usually for most people. Good. So again, everyone's different. Right. No matter what, every conversation stays through a lens of that individual. So certain people get that hyper stimulation neurologically. I think that's what you said. Right. Like it was like too much.
Adam Schaefer
It was like, yeah, I got hyper. Trying methylene blue for sure.
Sal Destefano
Yep. So then usually if that's your case, pull the doses down, bring it down. It's usually a dosage problem I've seen as low as 1 milligram and upwards of like 150 milligrams. So the range, huge range depending on what you're looking for. If you're in like the clinical setting and there's you know, hemochromatosis or there's other like actual real diseases, they'll dose it up like you know, 150mg IV. They'll do a bunch of different doses. So you have a huge range at home though. Most people are about 1 milligram to 40 depending on the actual response and goal.
Adam Schaefer
What's the, what are the side effects? Any negative side effects? Aside from maybe oh it's too much, I'm too.
Alex Keckel
Does anything downregulate and then you get addicted to it. You have to use it like anything like that.
Sal Destefano
A lot of these compounds work so well you kind. You can't get addicted to the effects. But there's no direct like cocaine and fit me receptor regulation. So you just Find an addictive based problem. But there's. If you, you have to really dig into the research for this, there's some potential for it to have some renal failure like effects. It's 000-0001% of people. I have only said I believe one time in 13, 14 years. It's because there's a specific genetic mutation. But again that just does not happen. You don't see that that's the only negative effect.
Adam Schaefer
What did they, what did they notice? Was it just blood work? And they saw that their EGFR goes.
Sal Destefano
From like 85 to like 40 overnight.
Adam Schaefer
Okay. And then that person's like okay, this isn't for you basically.
Sal Destefano
Exactly. Stop taking it. EGFR goes right back up now because.
Adam Schaefer
It'S an MAOI inhibitor. Are people on antidepressants or people who are already taking MAOI inhibitors, should they be careful?
Sal Destefano
Definitely, if they're taking anything. So any kind of nootropic compound. Remember we have to find your own perfect neurochemistry. So how do you respond to dopamine, serotonin, how do you respond to norepinephrine? You're trying to figure out. So if you have a stack like I was showing you guys beforehand in my bag of 30 different things, you have to know how they cross interact. So methylene blue for taking anything that's going to affect your brain will also affect that. HRT for example, will also change that voltage effect in the brain. So then it can also potentiate that. If you're taking traditional peptides, that'll also affect the brain. It can also affect that. So you're trying to slowly either start low on the dose or slowly layer things in or pull them out because there can always be cross indications.
Adam Schaefer
All right, before we continue, what's your background? Like, how do you know all this stuff? For Jay to say that somebody knows way more than he does and say.
Alex Keckel
Way more than him too.
Adam Schaefer
Jay's like this guy knows more than anybody. I know this. Obviously talking to you now. You definitely are well educated on this and I know you work with a lot of people who will only hire the best. I guess I could say that loosely. What's your background? How do you know all this stuff?
Sal Destefano
So had my masters was posted on the bodybuilding.com forums back then. It was big. I was getting into bodybuilding myself and I was going to go get my PhD working in a human performance research lab. And I was like, you know What, I'm working 60 hours a week at a gym right now. I'M making more money just, you know, off of the online coaching. Let's see if that's a thing. And then let's not spend the extra money on, you know, Ph.D. if I don't need to. And again, that was 13 years ago. And it started off in bodybuilding, spilled over into powerlifting, strawman. Then a friend of a friend is actually helping this one older lady, she had renal failure, liver failure, like a bunch of different problems, diabetes. And I fixed her. And she goes, oh, you know, you could probably help my son. He's a pretty good athlete. And so I start talking with him and I go, oh, wait a minute, you're in the NBA, aren't you? And I actually started with there, where, oh, he's a pretty good athlete because you know how moms are. And so we started working in there, and then it literally was word of mouth. It spilled over into the NFL, over into every professional sport. I had 23 people at the Paris Olympics, six of them medaled. Actually, after that, I woke up last year, and after we got gold, the last day, I had 400 messages, and I'm like, great. I got spammed. So I'm deleting, deleting, deleting. I read one of the messages. I'm like, oh, my God, these are real people. And so it started off there. And from an education standpoint, I've just. I just love learning. So I read every book, I read every research study. But more importantly than that, how it actually applies in reality. So every time I have a client check in or I hear a certain anecdote from someone, like BPC157, we're talking about beforehand, I have over 15,000 case studies in a chart where I've taken every single effect we've seen, every dosage range. I can compile that, and I've done that with every supplement and drug and everything out there. So I have this database of learning not just what happens, what could happen on paper, but what else, what happens in reality. Because that's where it really kind of got me excited, right? Because it doesn't matter what it says in a research study. Research is awesome. But what's actually happening in our biology today, because we can just be going a different tangent with that. But that's kind of where everything started.
Adam Schaefer
How, how common is it for people at those high levels of performance, professional sports? Definitely bodybuilding. I don't think I need to ask this for bodybuilding, but how often is it that they have someone like you that helps them on the Side that isn't necessarily just their, oh, it's just my doctor or whatever, but it's like, this is my coach that, that, you know, goes down these, these rabbit holes.
Sal Destefano
And I'm the nutrition coach in many corners, you know, all the time.
Adam Schaefer
Really.
Sal Destefano
All the time. I work with a lot of celebrities. Again, just pretty much every different sport out there I'm a part of. And then whether you're drug tested or not, like, take like the big professional sports out there where there's millions and millions of dollars on the line, you better be doing something to improve your performance because you're making millions upon millions of dollars. Now, again, that doesn't mean the traditional testosterone of the world. There's all these different peptides. There's so many things too, because you don't have to break the rules in those sports. We just don't take what's on the banned substance list. So you're not breaking any rules. You're doing things legally. I'm just kind of 10 steps ahead of the curve or synthesizing new things that aren't even out there yet. Like SLU I brought into the market like 6 years ago with all my athletes, and it just got big over the past year or so. And so we've had that. We actually have someone to synthesize it, get it. There's a whole hassle. But that was years. Same thing with so many compounds. So you were just staying ahead of the curve to work with those people so they don't get in trouble.
Alex Keckel
How quickly can you tell that you're going to really be able to help? Like one of these athletes, you do an assessment with them, find out about their diet, find other stuff like that. Like, how quick is it for you to go like, oh, I'm going to be able to dial this up, dial that up and make a big difference.
Sal Destefano
Like a peak a second, really. I'm honestly not like to sound like, arrogant or cocky. I just, I don't think there's a biological problem we can't fix. And if there is, I would be more motivated to fix it because I'd be the first one to do it. So whether it's the athlete, the cancer patient, like, to me it's all just a problem to fix. And it's so much fun. You dig into the research, you dig into the books, you dig into basic biology even more so you look at all the other. That's where all the case studies really come in. For me, if I can't figure out a problem, like, okay, what Have I seen across the spectrum with this drug, where do we see this problem being fixed or, you know, whatever we're actually talking about there? So to me, like, I honestly don't think there's much that we can't reverse. Unless if you're like on the ground, dead brain's completely like blown off, heads up, blowing off your head, off your shoulders. I mean, I think we could pretty much reverse it all.
Adam Schaefer
Wow. So do you work, you obviously work with athletes and high level executives and individuals. Do you work with people who are dealing with things like chronic illness, autoimmune diseases and those types of things?
Sal Destefano
All the above, yeah. Like, I mean, we all know all the long Covid stuff, you know, like back in the day, whenever Covid really hit and the virus and all that kind of stuff. If you're just taking a low dose nicotine, which we'll talk about later on today, it would modulate how the receptor would bind in the actual neural tissue and then you wouldn't get that long Covid neuroinflammation.
Adam Schaefer
Talk about that for a second.
Alex Keckel
Yeah, no, no.
Adam Schaefer
I remember the data coming out showing that nicotine was protective against Covid and it got buried and everybody said it's conspiracy theory. That's terrible. Talk about that.
Alex Keckel
Cigarette smokers had a better chance with the COVID going on.
Adam Schaefer
Well, it was offset by the smoke.
Sal Destefano
But okay, well, yeah, and it's also, it's also dose dependent, right? So you're smoking like three packs a day. You're getting way more nicotine than you need. All you're trying to do is occupy that nicotinic receptor neural tissue so that that actual Covid can't bind there.
Adam Schaefer
So Covid blocking it.
Sal Destefano
Exactly, yeah. So it just, it just stayed occupied. So literally half milligram, one milligram, you did not need much. You just needed to occupy that receptor. So the smokers, you know, because they were taking 15 milligrams, 20 milligrams, it also then down regular the immune system, and then it probably also hurt them, you know, but then do we have.
Alex Keckel
Cases of like the people that you guys. I got big in the gym just like a few years back where, you know, people are doing the pockets or what's that brand?
Sal Destefano
Patches.
Alex Keckel
Yeah, Zen Pat, they're awesome.
Sal Destefano
They're awesome. To me, it's always a dosage problem. We have seven a day. Probably not the best thing for you from a blood pressure vascular aspect, but you have one or a milligram, you know, that's like the sweet spot is For a lot of things.
Alex Keckel
Oh, wow.
Adam Schaefer
What are the benefits then of, of nicotine? Because this is interesting. You know what's funny about that, by the way? I brought this up five years ago to these guys and I said, you know, I noticed that this is, I've been reading about the nootropic effects of nicotine. Yeah. And, and I think that this is going to eventually become kind of a thing. We actually, you know, at some point working with it, but then we decided not to. What are the effects and let's say benefits of nicotine. And of course the administration is very important. You're not talking about smoking a cigarette typically when you recommend nicotine.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, exactly, yeah. We're generally not smoking anything. So that's the end of lungs causing damage. Like we'll get a voice from away from the smoke. The lozenges, the patch ins, like whenever you travel, put a little nicotine patch on. What's it going to do? Occupy that receptor. That Covid molecule, if it's out there, is not going to bind. It also has potentials to kill the flu virus. So you start looking at the nootropic benefits as well, like you said. And it's that nicotinic base receptor in neural tissue. So we'll start hyper driving neural action. So the problem with that though is it works so well, which is part of the problem. You'll burn through acetylcholine, you'll burn through all of the traditional ketones and neural glucose. Remember, our brain produces its own insulin, so it hyperdrives that process as well. And then your brain just goes. So as long as you're fueling properly, you keep up with that nicotinic reaction pretty much good to go. But you always have to remember about fueling because like this is like a high tier nootropic, it works that well.
Adam Schaefer
What about the addictive properties of. Because it is a classic. It does have classic addictive properties. Where does it rank by itself? Because I know cigarettes have their own additional addictive properties because of the, the action in using them. Yeah, but in comparison to something like caffeine, where would it rank with its addictive properties?
Sal Destefano
If we're looking at use versus abuse, that's what it comes down to.
Adam Schaefer
Okay.
Sal Destefano
So if you're taking it every single day at a higher dose, you become normalized to that. And then if you come off, your day's terrible. You have no energy, no neural input. So it's usually always the dosage or the duration of the frequency. So like the nicotines, the Methylene blues, like they have a place to be a daily therapy. But almost all the time we're taking an infrequent fashion. So you're elevating your baseline. So we're trying to get you on those days hyper driving your neural system. And then when you come off, if you do that long enough, your body's used to actually driving at that high neural input. So you're like, okay, you have to elevate so you can do those rotational strategies to make sure that over time you're elevating your baseline so you don't have to take anything. Like that's the whole point, right? We don't want to take something, replace it. We want to drive up the underlying system with the enzyme system better. Want to drive ribosomes harder. Like we want to make sure we're operating at a higher frequency. That's really what that comes down to. So it's usually the frequency of action.
Alex Keckel
So give me an example where you, if you're training an athlete or competitor, and I don't know how different it would be for the two of them, how are you cycling something like the methylene blue or the nicotine in their programming? It's like, are you trying to peak it? And so you're okay, we're getting ready for prep. And so it's these times of the year or if you're an athlete, they get ready for competition. How are you typically programming the cycle in there?
Sal Destefano
You could do a very simple rotation. If we only look at those two commons and nothing else, where you can pick out your two hardest days of the week, we'd implant methylene blue that morning. We're doing that to drive up cerebral metabolic rate. It's going to again indirectly drive through all the ATP cascades, more fat loss, more nabilism. Pretty much something all athletes need, right? We had on the two hardest days, ideally they're separate. So you're not going to do two crazy workout back to back days. To me that's a Monday, Thursday, then maybe you do like a Tuesday, Friday, on some other workouts, whenever they're just not as high tier. Maybe like you're more of an, a lactic athlete. You're looking at more like the glycolytic days. That's whenever you bring in the nicotine. You don't need as much neural stimulus, you don't need as much ability to flux nutrients. Just need that like background elevation, you know, and then maybe quarantine on other days or you got tons of other options. But usually that Infrequent like one to time per week. Frequency is enough to stimulate and get your baseline up, but not so much to where you can. That's that dependent based effect.
Justin Andrews
Yeah. What have you found in terms of memory recall? And I, I know for me like playing football and having a lot of head impacts and I've, I've been on this quest to, to and kind of help to get bring cognition back. And you know, there's stuff like dihex out there and there's some.
Sal Destefano
My bag, you know, some.
Justin Andrews
Yeah, I saw that and I was like, wow, yeah, I'm on that. But you know, just finding, finding more options for me in terms of like, you know, how you would put that together. And like you mentioned methylene blue, you mentioned, you know, nicotine and so all these things to help kind of with brain function. Like what does that look like to help kind of. Yeah, for, for idiots that, you know, smash their head.
Sal Destefano
It's funny you said that though. So in high school I had a TBI and I couldn't walk, talk or eat for six months. So I was the traditional therapy of go to the dark room and do nothing. Okay. I remember I was shooting a goal for lacrosse and I remember waking up my bed and I'm like, my ribs, my face, like what happened to me? I stumbled to the bathroom and I lost like 50 pounds. I was like, why? Like what happened? Last six months of my life, it took me years to recall those memories, to remember parents feeding me, to remember trying to. You know, I actually scored a goal in that game. I had that, that hit that caused the concussion. And I got up and I just kept moving, but I don't remember any of it. And then eventually I scored a goal. I just collapsed. So I was on the same quest because I was a naturally just unintelligent person. Poor memory. And then the TBI on top of that, I was kind of like, that's not too cool, I gotta fix that. So the list of methylene blue to the nicotines, adding them in that fashion, that low dosed fashion, look at repairing your cerebral system as well. Something like a cerebral lysine would then come in because it has every neurotrophic factor out there. So we're driving neural repair from multiple different levels. Because as you're driving that processing speed, remember everything on our body is plastic, right? So it can be changed. So you can hypertrophy or atrophy anything, any organ, any tissue, it doesn't matter. You can change any cell. So in the brain based World. They used to think that, what, after 40, right. They said you couldn't learn. After that, your brain stopped growing. It's like, no, no, you. You can always progress. And so in the neural world, you're trying to literally hypertrophy your brain. You're trying to actually grow your brain to function better, fire more neurons, recall more memories, speak better everything.
Justin Andrews
Now, you mentioned plastic, though. Have you seen the latest? They're finding the microplastics in the brain and.
Sal Destefano
Oh, yeah, I was like. I was talking like, plasticity, like nerve.
Justin Andrews
Yeah, I know, but I'm shifting.
Sal Destefano
I got you. Yeah, there you go. Sorry.
Justin Andrews
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, do you.
Sal Destefano
I thought it was TBI kicking.
Justin Andrews
No, I'm not making the wrong association. No, I was actually just curious because they're talking about that might be a contributor to dementia. And is there any way to counter that or to clean it out of it? Yeah, clean it out.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, a lot of things. So there's a really cool product out there from Wizard Sciences, and he has a lot of carbon 60 products. Guys. Ever heard carbon 60? So lipofullerines, they're super cool. They do a bunch of different things. Imagine it traversing the mitochondria and kind of acting like a straw to pull off the oxidative load from mitochondria. So it'll wedge itself in there and just pull oxidative load globally. So as an overall, like, repair molecule, like, we had a deer by our house that got hit, actually felt bad. So I actually went through a whole quest to, like, heal it. Healed it in like, six weeks with SLU and carbon 60. I snuck it into some apples, guys, to trust me. And carbon 60 pulls off that oxidative load dramatically. So you. Then you bind it with a fat. If you do, like, linoleic acid, it'll go more. More global, more cell wide. If you do a capric acid, where's it going? They not deliver beta hydroxybutyrate to the brain. So then you use it to drive your own endogenous ketone production. So Wizard Sciences shout out to them. They have awesome products. It's in a fat, so it's bound to that capillary gas.
Adam Schaefer
Coconut oil.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, exactly. Okay, so they'll have that C8, I believe. Right? And then it'll dry that neurological process and it'll start to actually pull the oxidative load out of your brain. So whether that's coming from plastics or anything like that, there's also. There's a couple products like NMN pqq. So Pulling off the fibrin content and really driving that lymphatic system. So if you can look at, like, dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all these neurological diseases, there's always the amyloid plaque conversation. Right. The plaques aren't bad. That's the same fat that's around your stomach. That's the thing that sequesters toxins and make sure it doesn't get global because it just causes more problems.
Adam Schaefer
So it's more of a side effect than a cause.
Sal Destefano
Exactly. Yeah. So the amyloid plaques are more than fine, but what they're holding is bad. So if you were to drive that lymphatic system, which is when you sleep, it bathes your brain in blood, cerebral spinal fluid, all that kind of fun stuff. If you could just hyperdrive that system, you get more recovery at night. That's where the PQQs come in. That's where the carbon 60 comes in. So to remove, like, microplastics, plastics, from neural tissue, those products, and carbon 60 as a whole is just absolutely awesome. And then Z ketones come in, because these are just ketones. Then are these basically the cellular signals? They can drive all those actions. They can even go to the thymic gland, which after 30, roll over 30. Right. So after 30, that thymic basically calcifies. You stop pumping out your own thymic peptides. You can basically reactivate that with, like, metformin and growth hormone. You can regrow it. But exogenous ketones can act as the intracellular aid to basically turn that thymic gland back on and start pumping out more endogenous peptides.
Adam Schaefer
Regardless, if you're. If you're not in ketosis, you could just add the exogenous ketones. It'll do that.
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
Adam Schaefer
Oh, wow, that's. That's. That's really interesting.
Sal Destefano
Oh, they're cool. Yeah. Because then you can also use it as. Like that. Remember back in the day, what was it? The two fuel theory, like, is. Oh, use glucose and ketones.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
Like that was talking about metabolic flexibility back in the day with. Was that perillo. Right. With carnitine. And you can just take your exhaust ketones now. So, like, this morning, I'm sleep deprived. I want to make sure I'm operating good, not sound like an idiot. I had. I destroyed the buffet at my hotel. It's awesome. And then I had some exotic ketones before we started. So in my brain right now, I have all of the glucose and the ketones, so I'll never run out of fuel. And then I have My shake right there. If I need more.
Alex Keckel
I thought it was worthless if you were already running on glucose. I didn't know that.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, no, you can use them both simultaneously.
Adam Schaefer
I heard. Now you mentioned something called.
Alex Keckel
Man, we've been, I've been telling a company that's been coming after us for a long time. The ketone Different. Conversation of a fly kite for a long time.
Adam Schaefer
Cerebral liaison. Is it? What is that? Yeah, I heard you mention that.
Sal Destefano
So amino acids come from pig's brain. The cool thing about it is it has every neurotrophic counterpart in there. So if we look at all those systems, glial cell drive, brain drive, everyone knows bdnf, right? There's these somatropic and these classical ones. So we have these four different families in this neurotrophic system. These neurotrophic compounds drive neural healing. So neural repair from every single aspect. Cerebral lysine really got a big name in the Alzheimer community. In dementia, you use the IV like, you know, 80 milliliters, 100 milliliters, it depends on, you know, the person, the practitioner, all that kind of stuff. But as a low dose therapy, you can use that, like for a lot of my entrepreneurs, for example, you're burning the Kindle, both ends go crazy. Monday through Friday upon waking, Saturday and Sunday, low dose of cerebralysine, literally just to drive the repair process of you crushing your brain throughout the week. It's a really cool player.
Adam Schaefer
All right, you just mentioned, you just mentioned your, your entrepreneurs. All right, let's, let's go through a few avatars and what would be. Obviously it's going to be dependent on the individual, but what would, what are like the, like the, the common stacks for different kind of avatars. And let's start with the entrepreneur who wants kind of high performance, you know, cognitive function, being sharp. They want to build their business. What are the kind of go to peptide supplement stacks that you typically recommend to them?
Sal Destefano
Gotcha. So if we look first Monday through Friday, let's assume in this scenario for that entrepreneur, it's like crazy Monday through Friday, then they work a little Saturday and Sunday. Entrepreneurs are working every single day. But you have to differentiate. Can't take everything every single day. So in this world we would look first of all, generally the bigger workday. So three days per week, ideally for here we'll say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we can drive up that overall release of histamine from lateral hypothalamus and orexone neuropeptides with something called modafinil. So Modafinil is that thing that will drive that cerebral metabolic rate. Actually not even the rate, but the actual firing of your brain, the potential dramatically. So that can change your memory formation, your speech, everything to that next level. So you would actually start in a linear fashion. So you start off low dosing for week one, something like 25 or 50 milligrams, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, following week, work that up by 25 or 50 milligrams. You do that over the weeks until you get to a higher dose of like 150, 200. Once you find your tap out point, you do the reverse and then you just do that pyramid effect throughout the week. Because the whole point is what we're trying to do as we are raising and taking the dose, we're trying to elevate our baseline too. We don't just want to take it to a place and we're also infrequently throughout the week so that again we're elevating the baseline. So that's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, right? Have Modafinil or whatever high tier player you want. Then you come in and say, okay, I have that driver, biggest neuroplastic driver there, right? For this person. Now, Tuesday, Thursday, methylene blue comes in because we're all trying to drive the electron transport chain. We're trying to drive a lot of the health based process of methylene blue. We're trying to clear neuroinflammation because if you're going crazy Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you're have to repair from that, but you still want to drive the performance. So then methylene blue would come in. Usually a lot of individuals in this role, it's like 20, 40 milligrams. That's usually a good spot. And again there's always that biological inter individuality. So I respond different, right? We could work up the dose, but that's a good starting place for Tuesday, Thursday, okay, Then the weekend comes in. Weekend comes in and that's where we start off with about 1-5 ML of cerebralysin intramuscular Saturday and Sunday morning we usually back that up with Uran A because that'll recycle the mitochondria, the damaged mitochondria that we just pushed so hard throughout the weekday. We could also take a step back and say, okay, other mitochondrial peptides Monday through Friday to complement the neurogenic process. So if you push neurogenesis, like literally building your brain, it's energy consumptive, it is hard to do. Like you get certain headaches if you're.
Adam Schaefer
Not taking enough food or somebody's like MOT C SS31.
Sal Destefano
Exactly. So. So MOT C. So it's mitochondrial open reading frame with a 12th S RN if you know the name, you know what it does. So zoom into the mitochondria, they have their own mitochondrial DNA. Zoom into that DNA, it spits out something called short open reading frames. Those spit out MOT C molecules. So that's working from an inner mitochondrial aspect. So MOT C is cool as like a kind of an overall player. Try some cool AMPK cascade. Try some cool recovery cascades.
Adam Schaefer
I loved it. I used it. I loved it.
Sal Destefano
Right dose of that.
Alex Keckel
Yeah.
Adam Schaefer
Oh, I don't remember what the dose was. That's a good question. I can't remember. It's been a while, but I did, I felt really good taking it.
Sal Destefano
Okay, so. Okay, cool. So Matzi, right, so you have experience with that. What about SS31?
Adam Schaefer
I also have used that. I like it, but Motsi was much more profound for me.
Sal Destefano
SS31 is on the mitochondrial side thing. So chemically strong, it's kind of like the preferred for organ healing. But you have to dose it high, like 50 milligrams, 100 milligrams. It gets expensive. Okay, so if you have like an organ failure, SS31 comes into reverse that like 5 CKDs. So chronic kidney disease or liver failure, SS31 comes in for that.
Adam Schaefer
Oh, wow.
Sal Destefano
But again it's, it's a higher tier compound. It just, it's pretty expensive at 50 milligrams.
Adam Schaefer
Okay.
Sal Destefano
You know. Okay, so then backtrack from there. We have all those players. If we're just trying to drive the mitochondria as hard as we possibly can and get some body composition changes. So the athletes or the entrepreneur in this conversation because he wants to look good, right? That's where SLU P332 comes in. That's going to hyperdrive. So it's an estrogen receptor related orphan receptors that alpha 1. It'll stimulate mitochondrial processes extremely hard.
Adam Schaefer
This is the one Jay was raving about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he did, he did.
Sal Destefano
So I started using it like six years ago, before anyone else was. We're having it synthesized, implement to get. So I've had years and years of data and no one like ever thought it was cool. And then someone made a video like a year ago and now it's cool. So I'm like, cool. It's finally out there. It does. I've seen it reverse a lot of ocular dysfunction. So People are losing their sight. I've seen it drive up spermatogenesis, so increasing fertility. You can see it directly driving anabolism, directly driving beta oxidation.
Adam Schaefer
They call it exercise. The exercise peptide. Exercise Mimic peptide is what I read.
Sal Destefano
Articles and it does so much more than that. It does so many cool things from every single aspect. So like SLU is amazing. But remember, it's, it's chemically strong, so the chemical signals it sends is drastic. If you take too many of any of these mitochondrial peptides, what does it do? That mitochondrial ATPase will spin. So if, let's say this is a normal spin rate, right? If you hyperspin it, what happens? You'll throw off some oxidation, you'll throw off some reactive oxygen species. That's normal in ATP production. It has to be like that. But if you too much spin it too hard, you spin off more reactive oxygen species. So the peptides, the mitochondrial push, right? Now in the longevity community, it should be massive because that's how we're going to heal our system. Right? But if you overspend those by taking SS31 and MOT C and SLU and you just fill in the blank with mitochondrial peptide X or whatever, it's going to overspin and cause the negative opposite effect.
Adam Schaefer
And what does that feel like?
Sal Destefano
Yeah, you feel stimulated. It's like when you've had too many cups of coffee too many days in a row. So you're overly stimulated. You are pretty lethargic as an overall rule. You can't think straight.
Adam Schaefer
That's what happened to me with this.
Justin Andrews
I got headaches from it.
Adam Schaefer
I took too much SS31 because. Okay, yeah, no, I just. I don't recommend my listeners ever do what I do, but I tend to, you know, be a little bit of a cosmonaut. And I did take more and more, and then I got bogged down and I felt lethargic. And I'm more sensitive to these mitochondrial supplements, so.
Sal Destefano
Which is good.
Adam Schaefer
Yes.
Sal Destefano
So that tells me your mitochondria are already spinning and functioning properly.
Adam Schaefer
Good.
Sal Destefano
So that's kind of your spectrum of gauge. Like if you want to check your mitochondrial health, take these mitochondrial peptides. If you have to take a lot more than likely your mitochondria need a little bit of help.
Adam Schaefer
Got it.
Sal Destefano
You know, and like with slu, it's actually super interesting. I've had individuals approach me and I'm working with them now. They were taking like 100 milligrams. We take it in micrograms. Usually the dose like 100, like 500 micrograms.
Adam Schaefer
They're taking milligrams.
Sal Destefano
100 milligrams.
Adam Schaefer
Oh, my God, that's. What is that? 100,000 times more than people with deep.
Sal Destefano
Pockets that just want to see what happens. Shuts down testosterone production, atrophy the testicles in like three days, pulled down DHT, estradiol, interleukin 6, pulled down and tanked. And then HSCRP shot up. She had that reverse immune response. You had dermatitis, you had swollen lymph nodes. Like, it's crazy. Yeah, I like, destroy these people overnight. And I'm like, yeah, because you took like 100,000 times a dose. You know, so usually the dosage for SLU, you start off with 100 micrograms. Every other week work up by 100. Everyone has their own response. Most people are like 100, 150 micrograms. Some people be upwards of a milligram. I had some Olympic athletes at like 2 milligrams. But they're also, they're just different species. They do not metabolize these compounds the same.
Adam Schaefer
Got it.
Alex Keckel
How much does what, I mean, what we and I know that you obviously speak to this too, is like, how much does this compare to? Good night's rest, balanced nutrition, like, good programming, exercise wise.
Sal Destefano
Like, everything we're talking about is the compliment. If you don't have the basics down, of course, good water supply, high food quality, the right light, all the blue light. Right. If you don't have those basics down with sleep, stress management, a good life, a good family, love. Like, if you look at all the longevity research, anyone lived to be over 100 years old, had family or had a loved one, could have even been a dog. But that connection and a purpose to live every day, that's why all those people were living to that age. So you have to have all those basics down. To me, those are the basics. Then you bring in supplements, then maybe peptides, then maybe hormones or whatever. But it's the compliment. It, it takes us to this super physiological level, though, so you won't be able to do this stuff without them. But they also work 100 times better if you already have the basics.
Alex Keckel
Now, is that so like you, you're helping somebody and is that what the conversation kind of sounds like is, do they, do your clients almost have to earn the right to get the peptides and the stacks or anything like that? First I need you to do these, Check these boxes, then I'll give you that. How do you do it?
Sal Destefano
So when people work with me I the initial program's like a 25 or 30 page PDF usually. So we'll have initial goals, right of our training. We'll have our aerobic work. In the aerobic we'll say cardiovascular work as a whole. There's not just the traditional list. So I always call it pro elastic cardio because you're using it to increase the elasticity of your heart. Right. You don't want blood hitting against the heart atrial wall, you want to give. So we're increasing cardiac strength. Those parasympathetic beta oxidative walks, which is nasal breathing outside, low heart rate, low arousal, practicing gratitude, just enjoying life and smelling the air. And just a nice walk. Exactly, A nice walk. That's all it is. It's working that parasympathetic beta oxidative system. So we're using stored fat as fuel during that period while driving. All those other health cascades of just being outside, the sun exposure, all that cool stuff. Then the other aerobic work is going to be some kind of a hit work. So blow your lungs out far, far in spectrum glycolysis so you can handle oxygen better, which allows you to handle subatomic particles better, which then allows you to dismantle and cleave all your supplements, peptides and compounds more efficiently. So then there's the nutrition, then there's the over the counter supplementation, then there's like the pharmaceutical section if that person is going to be going that route. And at the bottom it is how you should breathe throughout the day. Nasal breathing, the sun exposure work, some grounding work. It's really trying to hit from every single level and then we'll tweak it based on the person. But to me, I try and include everything in programming. I don't like being the person that just does one thing because if everything else isn't taken care of, things don't always work that well.
Alex Keckel
I'm so glad you said that because I had a feeling that someone who'd be listening right now, we're like 30 minutes in and we're like talking like all the pharmacology stuff. I guarantee this dude didn't get to this level and it doesn't. Check all the other boxes first because I don't care how great we've learned, that stuff still matters.
Adam Schaefer
Broke down the stack for the entrepreneur, which I thought was great because you're cycling, you're alternating your timing with, with workload and you know, and so it just makes sense that you would do it that way. Just like you Would with a workout or with a diet or it's all the same sleep and rest. All right, what about the bodybuilder? Or somebody's like, I want to build, I want to build an incredibly aesthetic physique. What does that look like? What are their priorities when it comes to some of those things?
Sal Destefano
Okay, so in that whole physique based world, there's always gonna be a neurological input. So no matter what, if you're looking at building muscle tissue, right, getting the most out of your workouts, you need to make sure that contractility, that, that ability to get every quality rep out of every single set is as high as possible. So that's where things like alpha GPC come in to just donate more raw acetylcholine so you can fire tissues better. Carnitine can come in. So injectable carnitine paired with the choline, actually to get the choline preparation as well, the carnitine is going to drive up the antoreptor binding affinity in constant. So your androgens endogenously or exhaustly taken, they're now going to be able to find the receptor faster, dock conformationally change the cell geometry, send its signal, undock faster, find another receptor faster.
Adam Schaefer
So let's pause right there for a second. So carnitine I'm familiar with. Yeah. So carnitine increases the either availability or density of androgen receptors. This is where testosterone attaches to. In other words, if you can increase the density of your androgen receptors, your current testosterone is now like more testosterone. And carnitine's been shown to do this in studies. Carnitine L tartrate I think is the one that I've seen in the studies. You're talking about injectable L carnitine?
Sal Destefano
Yes.
Adam Schaefer
Is there a big difference or can you take oral?
Sal Destefano
So all carnitine's awesome. What degree of chemical action do you need? If you're taking the oral preparation, it's only going to work so well because you have to pass through different gastric layers to get that end chemical fate. And then there's also just. If you try and like equate bioavailability, there's still only so much physiological action you can drive. You inject it, it takes the brakes off of that. Your body has to accept it. It's being directly infused into highly perfused muscle tissue. Tons of blood, tons of oxygen, so you can work up that number like crazy. You also don't get the same tmao. So trimethylamine monoxide, the thing in your gut to basically, you know, thrive off of carnitine and choline, which has inflammation. You only get that you take it orally. If you inject it, you don't get that because it's not going to the.
Adam Schaefer
Gut, it's going to working tissue, it's going direct. And then is timing carnitine before a strength training workout a good idea then in that case because you want to maximize the androgen receptor effect.
Sal Destefano
Oh, you're gonna love this. You can do it. You can do it a couple different ways. You can take carnitine before the workout to drive VO2 max. To drive your ability to partition nutrients, drive overall substrate utilization and the just better effects anabolically of the workout. Also anti catabolically if you're in the strength community, not the body, but we'll say a powerlifter when they're training in that a lactic range. What builds up post workout? Acetyl groups. Right. So those acetyl groups will sit there. And you don't start recovering just because you stop training. You only start recovering whenever you get parasympathetic, whenever you pull down ventilation, when you clear a seal groups and generally restore glucose homeostasis. So clearing the aceal groups is massive. You can take currentine post workout to clear those aceal groups. So you can in the strength based community start recovering faster if you move quarantine post workout.
Adam Schaefer
Got it. Now somebody who, who's. If somebody uses injectable L carnitine and they do it pre workout, do they notice anything in that workout?
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
Adam Schaefer
What do they know?
Sal Destefano
The vast majority of people you'll start to notice, first of all increased sweat rates. You start to increase your overall ability to just contract with the muscle. You'll get easier pumps because it's literally putting fuel where it needs to go. Okay, so you're storing more glucose as intramuscular glycogen, storing more amino acids and nitrogen as good by the way, for po.
Adam Schaefer
I was just going to say carnitine is not some strange exotic anything. It's an illegal. It's an amino acid. So it's one of the amino acids that makes up protein. It's been a supplement forever.
Sal Destefano
Yep. Literally. Yeah, Literally forever.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah. We're just. That's one of the first, if I can think back, one of the first supplements you could buy.
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
Adam Schaefer
Because they knew of its importance in fat, fatty acid metabolism. So it was actually a fat loss supplement back in the day, in the 90s it was when I remember it.
Sal Destefano
Works amazingly for that.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
So remember that whole quarantine family, it's that transporter across across the layers to get intra mitochondrially it'll donate and it'll drop off that fat in the mitochondria and then it'll recycle again. It can also go through a different cascade to drive the neurological effects like the acetyl L Carnitine. Like the alcars for their neurological side effects.
Adam Schaefer
Okay, so L Carnitine you mentioned. I think you mentioned something else with that.
Alex Keckel
What else?
Adam Schaefer
Choline. There you go. Alpha GPC in particular.
Sal Destefano
Yeah. Or you could do the injectable preparation with your carnitine if you get that kind of a product.
Alex Keckel
Did you take an alpha gpc? Did you take one?
Adam Schaefer
I've taken alpha and GPC many times. I used to take it with. I love it with caffeine.
Sal Destefano
Are you taking the left handed antimer?
Adam Schaefer
Not sure.
Sal Destefano
So if you look on the back it'll say L Alpha glycerophosphol choline. That's the full actual that. I mean an answer that has the full amount. So if it's that and it says 300 milligrams is 300 milligrams it doesn't say that. And it's the actual racement mixture. It's only half.
Adam Schaefer
Got it.
Sal Destefano
So you generally, most people shop like.
Adam Schaefer
Is that the mirror? Is that because it's like a mirror molecule and only one side is really active and the other one isn't.
Sal Destefano
Yep, that L side, that left.
Adam Schaefer
Got it. Interesting. Okay, so L carnitine alpha gpc. We're talking about the bodybuilder. What else?
Sal Destefano
So we have that driving baseline interjection in the workout. Baseline anabolism, all that kind of fun stuff. If we then kind of look back to one more thing in the workout to improve your ability to contract because again anabolism and your ability to feel the quality of those repetitions is pretty high in my books. Neuropep comes in so N phenyl cetyl procynthyl ester that I'll drive up motor cortex function like crazy. So now all of a sudden you're getting more efficiency out of every single replacement.
Adam Schaefer
Wait, noopept, is that. Is that N O O P T?
Sal Destefano
Yep, I use that all the time. Yep. It's awesome, right?
Adam Schaefer
That's a Russian.
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
Adam Schaefer
Peptide for or nootropic.
Sal Destefano
You do intranasal or oral?
Adam Schaefer
No, no, just a capsule.
Sal Destefano
Intranasal will drive that neurochemistry fast. And your ability to focus. I actually have some in my bag. But I don't want you to use it because you get your nose on it. But if you use the intranasal, it'll drive that focus during the workout more than anything else.
Adam Schaefer
So people who are into nootropics new peptides is like I don't know how many hundreds of times more powerful than like paracetam or the racetam kind of category of peptide of nootropics. Correct.
Sal Destefano
And even cooler than that is it'll ameliorate glutamate toxicity. So if you're taking the traditional coffee and pre workout and you're stressed and you're fighting with your fiance, whatever, it'll start to clear those glutamate levels. So then you start to have what better neurological action, which means better training overall, less stressors and it acts as an anti catabolic aid neurochemically.
Adam Schaefer
And are you recommending this for the bodybuilder pre workout all of this?
Sal Destefano
Definitely, yeah. Again though, if trying to have motor learning. So if you're trying to bring up a lagging body part, only do it on those days.
Alex Keckel
Oh, so we would sick with our focus days. How sick would that be? To prescribe that by the way, for.
Adam Schaefer
People listening, like lagging body parts oftentimes are a result of the fact that.
Alex Keckel
You just poor connection.
Sal Destefano
Exactly.
Adam Schaefer
You can't connect to that muscle very well. And so what you're saying is you're taking compounds to augment the connect, the process of connecting. So now when you squeeze your glutes, you feel them more when you're hitting your lagging body part which might be.
Sal Destefano
Glutes and you can potentiate that. So I'm a big fan of doing something then taking something. Or you have to do an action if you're going to take a supplement. So to me, in this world, if you would even just do like a little journal, it doesn't even matter cursive writing with your non dominant hand, it's going to drive up both left and right hemisphere connectivity and then over time it's going to drive up those neural cascades, drive more neuroplasticity. So what before the workout you take your neuropept, you write a couple sentences, I like to say what I'm grateful for or whatever because it's just cool. It's cool to put it on paper. Love my kids, love my dogs, wife's freaking awesome. Like you know, do that with a non dominant hand in cursive that non stop. So that's why our society is starting the IQs are dropping because they stop teaching cursive in school. Seriously. And that now it's not even just normal writing. What are we doing? We're texting. And now if you get a text from someone, it's 17 different texts all saying one sentence.
Alex Keckel
Yeah, yeah.
Sal Destefano
Because no one thought. Exactly. Yeah. It's like. It is. It's getting worse, and it's driving that neuroatrophy. So now our prefrontal cortex, which was supposed to mature at 25, which is like people. You find yourself. You become an adult. Then now it's 35, 45. I. I did one governmental project back in the day that I don't like that I did it, but I want to bring it up. I thought the goal was to bring that prefrontal cortex maturity down. So I thought we were trying to make humans able to evolve. Exactly. Trying to make sure people are maturing earlier on in life. And then project ended, got paid, and it was basically. We're going the opposite with it. Thanks for your help. So literally pushing 25 to 45 was their goal. When I thought we were trying to push 25 to 20 or 18.
Adam Schaefer
Why? What? Why? Better consumers, Easier to manipulate.
Sal Destefano
Same thing with all the lights.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah. Yeah. Wait, wait. What do you mean with the lights?
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
Adam Schaefer
I know why Jay likes you so much.
Sal Destefano
I'm like, so. I don't. I don't want to. I hate the conspiracy theory stuff, but when things add up, you're kind of.
Alex Keckel
Like, yeah, but wasn't that so. Okay, I saw something. We have to go here then, if you know information about this. Because I. I meant to share this with you guys. So that the original re. The reason why all our. Is blue light. And also was. It was an original government project, and they were trying to train the brain for something I can't remember. And the guy actually spit out the title of the project name. And that's when we figured out that is the reason why all of our phones, all of our lights, all have that blue light base.
Sal Destefano
So they sell it as energy. What do they call it? They call it energy reserve, where you're basically saving energy so you spend less money. Yeah. So they're changing that actual energy that's given off by the bulb. So they're changing the spectrums of light to save energy. That also means the energy is not giving off by the bulb, is not being absorbed by our bodies. So it's incandescent lights, the chicken lights, things like that. They're like. The chicken lights are like, full spectrum pretty much. They cost more money. To run because it's giving off more. But that's energy we need. It's lightly heating the house. Who cares about that as much. But it's driving all those mitochondrial cascades. The reason why tumor growth is so big. So we're gonna, we'll wrap it up. There's so many things go down. Our melatonin production, it's like 5 or 10% in our brain, right. Everyone thinks it's higher. Like it's all in the brain. No, it's in our mitochondria. And it happens by infrared exposure during the day. So our melatonin pool mitochondrial is not being released during the day. What do people do that have tumors? They take a lot of melatonin during the day. Because when melatonin's high, tumor growth gets suppressed.
Adam Schaefer
So as it is authentic cancer, melatonin is very well established.
Sal Destefano
Exactly, very well established. So you start to see, okay, we have people are trying to elongate how long it takes to mature your prefrontal cortex. We now have these lights which are getting less and less diverse and more and more specific. We are then avoiding. So we're in a state of basically near infrared light depletion, if you want to call it that. We're in that debt. What that does is that handles all those mitochondrial actions. If you go outside, for example, like any time of the day, you could be bundled up in a bunch of layers. It's going to traverse all, all those layers. If you go out, it's going to interact with your mitochondria, your bone, all that fun stuff. If you go out in like a lush environment where there's greenery and sunlight, it's going to reflect off the greenery and hyper potentiate into your cells. The reason why you do cold therapy partially is to get your mitochondria to release the light that they're holding on to, which is infrared. So you start to paint this picture of going to control people with lights. A different project I work on, one of the individuals that was also in that group did some of that stuff, the torture based world. And what they would do is they would have people in extreme blue light, completely surrounded exposure for 48 hours. They would then go through a process of only darkness for like a couple minutes at a time. They then hit them with like green light or something like that, then back to blue. But the blue overexposure and the depletion of any near infrared is what they were doing. And if you do that for, you know, weeks on end, what would happen? You'd walk into the room, they had no idea what day it was, who they were. But if you would ask them a question, they'd answer because things aren't firing the way they were supposed to. And that's just like, there's tons of examples like that throughout history. And then you get into conspiracy theory of they're changing the lights to control us. But then you also have all the stuff with technology. It's like, okay, there's a lot of controlling going on.
Adam Schaefer
You know, could it be just a. An accident? In other words, you have this ideology that says, save energy at all costs. And so we're going to produce these light bulbs even though it's costing us more because it's reducing productivity, it's reducing. Our health is getting worse. But they don't look at that. They just look at one part of the equation, which is saves energy, and push it forward. And then it just so happens that this is actually shitty light. So could it be that.
Sal Destefano
I like to think it's that way. I mean, honestly, like, I see the best in everyone. I think everyone's really good at their heart.
Alex Keckel
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
And I'm never the cynical, I'm always the optimist. So to me, I like to think.
Adam Schaefer
That, yeah, it's like the whole fluoride thing. Like, we now know fluoride lowers iq, even though we've been saying it forever and they called us crazy. But it really was just, oh, it might. It can reduce cavities and it's just not harmful. And now we have a great way to dump it so we can get rid of it and not necessarily want to make everybody dumber. Yeah, that just happens to be the side effect. You know what I'm saying?
Sal Destefano
I mean, it's even like water. Like, I think water was unintentional meaning. Right. You find it in nature. Top of the mountain, it's rolling over these rocks. What's it doing? It's following. It's having a left and right spin, what that spin does. So if you like a glass of water, it's not like H2O here, H2O there, H2O here it's big bands of H's and big bands of O. So these hydrogens and oxygens look like a reef as you're going down the mountain, rolling over rocks, picking up minerals and cool stuff like that. It's pulling them apart. They want to be. They want to live together. They create a charge so they start to structure and have living action. And you can prove that because water is reactive Meaning if you jump out of an airplane or a building off a hot. You know how far up into water what happens? It's like hitting concrete. You don't fall into water, you get smashed. If lightning hits it, it tenses up before the lightning hits it. Because water in its natural state is literally living. It's reactive or else it couldn't have that kind of communication system. So in society today though, what do we have? Pressured pipes, straight pipes, no right spin, no left spin, no going for rocks and picking up minerals. It's first desanitized and cleaned, which is cool. We get to our house and we clean it again with ro, which is fine because we're having like in this community, everyone's like remineralizing their food and so that's not as big of a deal. It's still coming out though. Basically dead. Like it's still coming out, not acting like it should. So what we do is you can restructure it. There's a lot of cool like natural action. They have like Jonathan Butts and the guys over there, well, he actually passed. They made some amazing products. There's a lot of other good products out there. But all you're looking to do is restructure your water so it can act like it's supposed to be in nature. But going back to the whole problems of our society today, why does everyone have cancer, diabetes, all these failure problems. Why are athletes so. Athletes are even held back. So could you imagine the athlete that comes to Alex over here and we're changing their training, nutrition supplementation, their water, we're changing their lights, we're changing all these things. You act like you should have been acting this whole time. It's not like just that one peptide. There's all these other little things people are missing.
Adam Schaefer
But Paul Check used to talk about structure.
Alex Keckel
Yeah, I was just. Well, my mother, she has a bottle that's like. And she actually even like says stuff into it. Right. So I don't know if you.
Sal Destefano
Oh no, it's true. It's true though. The affirmation.
Alex Keckel
Yeah, yeah.
Adam Schaefer
So there's weird studies on that.
Alex Keckel
She'll have. She has a bottle of water that's been recharged, has a positive affirmation that's put on it and like I drink out of it every time I go over there. Makes me feel good.
Sal Destefano
It's so real though. It's what like. So in my shoe I actually have a heel capsule from Leela Quantum. I could. Because these, these pants don't have pockets. I don't know why they have them like that. But that heel capsule, it has spheres that are basically infused with quantum energy. All we're looking at in the quantum world is spin. So if we kind of go back in the energetic world in that conversation, right? If I came in today and I was like, grumpy and like making fun of your hair or like that energetic transfer, you're like, I don't like this guy. It's going to dampen the mood, right? Versus me coming in happy, energetic, excited. Everyone's mood's getting better, right? That's just an oscillatory change. So we're not talking about, you know, subatomic particles. We'll get below them. Everything spins at a certain frequency. So that Cheeto is spinning at the wrong frequency. Yeah, there's some other crap in there, but it's not identical to the spin our biology accepts. So we eat that Cheeto, it causes all the upstream inflammation, oxidation, and everything else that clogs your arteries or gives you a heart attack versus having sweet potato chicken breast, like whatever traditional healthy food you want to say there. It's just spinning at a better frequency. That's all it is.
Adam Schaefer
You know what I find interesting about all this? Because I would have a tendency back in the day to hear you listen to. Listen to what you're saying. Cool, peptide, cool. That's cool. Oh, now he's talking about this other stuff. I'm not going to listen to that. But what's interesting is that so many things now that we've now extended, accepted, were regarded as crazy 15 years ago. I remember, look, I owned a Wellness Studio 15 years ago, 20 years ago, and I had a young lady in there that, she was really on the cutting edge. And I remember her talking about leaky gut syndrome, and she would refer to leaky gut syndrome. And I used to train a lot of doctors. These were surgeons, and they would hear her talk in the background, they'd roll their eyes. Oh, my God, what is she talking about? What is this, another crystal thing or what's happening? Whatever. Well, they call it, they now call it intestinal wall hyperpermeability. That's the actual medical term for leaky gut syndrome. I brought up.
Sal Destefano
We have a peptide to fix that, by the way.
Adam Schaefer
Sorry?
Sal Destefano
We have a peptide to fix that.
Adam Schaefer
What do you fix that with?
Sal Destefano
So if you look down that entire cascade, lorazatide acetate will tighten those junctions that get loose and leak out inflammatory proteins.
Adam Schaefer
Oh, interesting.
Sal Destefano
Sorry to interrupt. Very good.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, no problem, no problem.
Sal Destefano
Tool to fix everything.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, but no, my point is a lot of the stuff that we now was all regarded as insane or crazy. And so you can look into structured water, whether you believe or not it's good for you or not. It's true that water can be structured versus not. You can actually see this when you examine it.
Sal Destefano
You can also dark microscope stuff.
Adam Schaefer
You can. So there is a difference is the point. And one of them is how it appears in nature and one of them how it doesn't appear in nature. And so I think it's a fair judgment whether you believe it or not, to say if I had to bet money, it's probably going to be better the way humans evolved. Drinking it is what I would, you know what I would say. All right, back to the bodybuilder. Yeah, sorry, what else are we taking? What else the bodybuilder taking?
Sal Destefano
So we have quarantine colon, we have neuropept. Usually there has to be a good insulinic driver. So maybe it could be the exhaust insulins of the world or something like that. More so than the nutrient partitioning. What it'll do pre workout is first of all it'll drive mtor C1 directly so that pi3k akt cascade downstream will push anabolism.
Adam Schaefer
Okay.
Sal Destefano
It'll also offshoot that foxho cascade and that'll manage anti catabolism. So you're taking something that stops you breaking down too much muscle tissue and builds more.
Adam Schaefer
Now, aside from exogenous insulin, because you're referring to insulin, which by the way, a lot of people know is more anabolic than almost any other hormone. Could they do something that's non hormonal to help that?
Sal Destefano
Oh my gosh. Yeah. Have a huge carbohydrate meal.
Adam Schaefer
Okay.
Sal Destefano
That pancreas working, dump out some insulin.
Adam Schaefer
And then go lift.
Sal Destefano
Exactly. Even gemina Sylvester, I always pronounce that wrong. Yes, that'll release insulin from the actual pancreas. Okay, so you'll start to just be so intra workout. So that shake. Basically if you had that intra workout, you have your glucose intro workout in your amino acids. What are you doing? You're hyperinsulinemic from the carbs and you're hypo amino acidic from the eas driving.
Adam Schaefer
The amino acids into the.
Sal Destefano
Exactly. That environment is the most anabolic environment out there.
Adam Schaefer
Right.
Sal Destefano
When you do that chronically in the bodybuilding world 24 7, it can also lead to some negative inflammatory side effects. But that's where you're looking at, you know.
Adam Schaefer
But you also have more insulin sensitivity from strength training. So it's a good time to time it.
Sal Destefano
Good time to time because also glucose is going up anyway because you're training.
Adam Schaefer
Okay. All right. So any, anything else? What are they doing? What about peptide wise? Growth hormone releasing peptide?
Sal Destefano
Yeah. So everything the growth horn hormone world is amazing. Going back to how much chemical pressure do you need? You could go with the traditional. So in the body how it works is you have up, you have that arcuate nucleus, it'll go downstream, interact with those hypothalamic releasing factors and then it'll drive up that growth hormone releasing hormone and you get that action into the blood and the target tissue. If you take an exogenous growth hormone peptide, it'll stimulate that process harder. If you take the exogenous hormone in a vial, that's a 22 kilo Dalton variety of growth hormone. In our body we have a 22 kilodalton, a 20 kilo Dalton, a 17, a 15. Oligomers, heterodimers, homodimers. So we can take the peptide to release all there's peptides to release enzymatic action of growth hormone or the exogenous growth hormone drives the entire process and overrides it. But it's only a 22 kilodalton variety. So you have tons of options if you go the exogenous growth hormone route has the most amount of chemical pressure because you're not relying on your body to produce its own growth hormone. But also more side effects if you work the dose up.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
So you can do different combinations.
Adam Schaefer
What do you like peptide wise? For growth hormone releasing peptides I've used Tessa Marilyn ipa. Marilyn I've used.
Sal Destefano
It's awesome, isn't it?
Adam Schaefer
Which one?
Sal Destefano
Ipam.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, you know I like it. So I mean I like the feeling of pumps and strength and size. Ibutamoran just crushes that for me.
Sal Destefano
Omk.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, the most.
Sal Destefano
So you're. Oh, you're gonna love it. So MK drives up the enzymatic action of all growth hormone reception.
Adam Schaefer
That's why.
Sal Destefano
So no other peptide out there does it. So they'll label it as a secretagogue or this or that. I don't care about the labels anymore. To me it's what does it do action wise? It's the only product out there that will drive the enzymatic action. So you could literally take exogenous growth hormone Monday through Friday and MK on the weekends to drive the enzymatic system on the weekend and to override the system Monday through Friday. MK is amazing to drive It'll drive REM sleep like crazy. It'll drive that nitrogen retention like, you know what. 10 milligrams.
Alex Keckel
So good on it.
Sal Destefano
Yeah. You're full 247 too. And you get hungry.
Adam Schaefer
I get eight pound different eight pound swing with me for.
Sal Destefano
Did you stay lean? Did you get any fluid?
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, a little bit of fluid. My hunger goes up too, but yeah, partially. Yeah, but it, but the pumps on it are just insane, right?
Sal Destefano
Yeah, you get a pump just like writing.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. All right. Any, any. What about the healing peptides? Any favorite stacks or. I just tore my hamstring and. Yeah, on vacation and bpc, thymus and beta, you know, I'm using those two.
Sal Destefano
And talk about your hamstring now or later?
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, no, let's go to it.
Sal Destefano
Okay, so we'll sidestep from the body. One conversation. So I tore my quad. It was grade three tear almost off the bone.
Adam Schaefer
Oh.
Sal Destefano
Recovered it in four weeks. I actually did it moving and I'm kind of like, I got three kids, another one on the way. I have work, I want to train. Like, I just don't have time for this. So I'll just go with one of my extreme protocols. So first of all, if you look at this healing based world, the sooner you get to it after the injury, the faster recovery happens. So what you do, like technically, practically, if you have to get surgery, pre op determines how you recover faster. Post op, if you're avoiding surgery like I did, you could just move the muscle back to the bone, get it to get it to basically adhese again and regrow. So in this world, you first of all have to upregulate growth hormone receptors and reception. So BPC and TB work amazing by themselves. If you pick up the underlying subsystems, they're going to work that much better. So there's this insulinic, somatropic and androgenic axis. What that means is growth hormone, insulin and androgens have to be balanced out to allow healing to drive as hard as you want it to be driven. So you have to balance out that axis. So that could be a T, R, T, HRT or whatever, or even just, you know, traditional tongue out. All these, like whatever it means for you. Androns have to be covered. Insulin has to be covered. Could be exogenous, could be the gemina, could be just eating more carbohydrates. And the growth horn has to be covered to drive up their sensitivity of these growth hormone receptors, which could be exogenous growth hormone or and like the M case, anything like that. We have all those covered. Now. The BPC and TB can work like they were supposed to. So all these peptides have literally 20 different actions, plus they do so many different things, so many different systems. I look at the primary, the primary reason why I would use TB is because it upregulates something called neonatal gene expression. So the genes that are there, as if you had no damage at this point in time. So if you activate those, it's regressing you back to how you should have been. Once you upregulate the genes, then you take care of the tissue recovery. BBC comes in to do that pretty well. Change the vasculature, drive more blood flow into the area, more oxygen, and it goes from there. Then what could you probably do? Stem cell migration, Pull some more stem cells into the area. You can get donation of red bone marrows that cxcr4sdf1 cascade to really push more stem cells from red bone marrow in the blood circulation. You could also do that. You could do it with a couple different products. But ghkcu, that blue copper peptide, it drives stem cell migration to a crazy degree. So right there, if you have it. So let's say because like what I did, I tore my quad, literally that night. I had a bolus of growth hormone and growth hormone peptides. More than I want to say on air, but dozens of vials, literally. And what I did, I occluded the area first. So extra blood flow, extra oxygen, extra nutrition. It hurt pretty bad, by the way, all these applications. And then I sat in front of red light, near infrared light therapy to activate the mitochondria in that area. I would then rotate that off with test course at the time, because I didn't have lakoffsy cores at the time to alter the millivoltage change of those cells to start to push the muscle back to the bone. And then I would wrap it for an hour and I would do rotating therapies for over those multiple weeks of near infrared for an hour, and then rotate with the different coils to change the voltage.
Adam Schaefer
And in four weeks, it grew back.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, it's perfect. I actually, I tested it in Venice with Mark Bell. We were out there doing something for a different group, and I was like, if I'm gonna, if I'm gonna retear this, I'm not doing in my basement and screaming, lindsay, come help me. You know, like, I want to go out, like, you know, big time. And we tested it, it was perfect. No problems. Four weeks later, that's why squatting a couple plates again, I didn't have, I.
Adam Schaefer
Didn'T have access to all that stuff because I was on vacation. But when I got back, you know, the, the thymus and beta, the BPC and the ibutamoran and I, I mean, I gotta say, man, it was really bad. And I feel like probably in a week or two I'll be able to work out. And I was at grade three, it was grade two, so it wasn't a full tear.
Sal Destefano
Okay.
Adam Schaefer
But I had the bruising and everything, so I could see that there was some damage.
Sal Destefano
Where was it on the hamstring?
Adam Schaefer
Semitendinosis.
Sal Destefano
Okay.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, yeah, 100 where it was so very interesting. All right, let's go back to the bodybuilder.
Sal Destefano
Let's finish that guy off track.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, let's finish that guy off.
Sal Destefano
So we talked about the growth hormone side things, talked about the insulin, talked about carnitine, choline, neuropept. Other than that, once you have that androgenic access stimulated, which could be from the Tonga leaves or the fidosias in the natural community, those work pretty dang well. We're never going to get super physiological. But just to top off those levels, I work with a lot of people that just take like testalutin. So some of the bioregulators just to drive that testicular production have that covered. Or you're in the HRT plus route. Can't really talk about that too much like we talked about. But that's the world that. Then you have that androgenic side covered. That'll drive direct protein translation transcription, just anabolism, straight anabolism. You could choose basically from like traditional testosterone which also pull in some oxygen and overall energetics. Dhts, which are more like will drive insulin sensitivity, they can drive gut motility, they can drive that neurochemical expression so you can motor learn faster. Or 19 ohs, which are really going to be like the retentive compounds. You can push more glycogen, more ions, more nitrogen into one area.
Adam Schaefer
Awesome. That's great. Wow, this is cool. All right, let's. Let's talk about GLP1s for a second because that's all the rage. Everybody's talking about them. They're in my opinion, I think they're cultural shifting medical interventions for obesity. I think at some point we'll look back and will remember before and after GLP1s. Are they, I mean, I know the answer to this, but are they being used in the bodybuilding world? Are they being used Pre contest, obviously people are using for obesity. You lose a lot of weight. Doctors prescribing them, are they being now used for pre contest?
Sal Destefano
They're used in every single industry because they're absolutely awesome. They really, really are. So the problem in the bodybuilding community or anyone who has to eat a high amount of calories is if you slow down that gastric motility and inability to desire food, that can have the reverse effect.
Alex Keckel
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
So a lot of my IFB pros that are 250 on stage type guys or even a lot of the hyper muscular females, if you would take too much and drive down gut motility, it also drives, it'll modulate the cocaine amphibian receptor in the brain, which that's why it actually pulls down your desire for food, it'll pull down your desire for alcohol or different drugs. And like because of that modulation, if it has the reverse effect, it's not good for us. Yeah, but again that's only if you have to eat thousands and thousands of calories to keep dieting. The majority of people, you can still take it low dose to drive up all the insulin genic based actions. So it's improving your own system's ability to handle nutrients. You then can add that, you know, GIP component to drive life polysis beta oxidation directly. You can then add the gcg. So that's the reducotide. Now as you kind of evolve through just glp. Excuse me. There we go. All the way upstream to having the three stage agonist to now hyperstimulate the glucagon receptor. You'll take redatotide and be hungry because it's driving anabolism drastically. So if you're a graduate.
Adam Schaefer
So are they using it to build then build muscle?
Sal Destefano
You can, yeah, you can low dose it, microdose it like 10 micrograms, 100 micrograms a couple times a week, you can use it to drive up a lot of organ based protection. You drive that background dose of beta oxidation and fat loss, you're staying leaner and you're also building muscle tissue because of the anabolic interactions.
Adam Schaefer
Wow. And so are they using them all the time or just pre contest?
Sal Destefano
You can use it all the time pretty much.
Adam Schaefer
Okay.
Sal Destefano
No matter what. I'm a big fan of rotating them because if you look at what they all have to offer, if you hyper stimulate the glucagon receptor with red atide, it's called, I call it rid. So Reddit tried induced dysfunction. It works so well, it tanks Interleukin 6. Interleukin 6 is not bad. If it's extremes in biology, that's where it's bad. If you're right in the middle, you're good. If you take Interleukin 6, you have that reverse immune response and then you have the dermal problems, then you have the lymphatic problems. You have all these issues. So to me, it's not that you need to do it year round, but it's a great therapy for longevity, especially if it's microdosed. Probably like everything else though, unless there's those baseline players, I like to bring things in and out. I don't like making the statement of take this every single day. Because there's a time and a place.
Adam Schaefer
By the way, for people listening. Like the, the whole. All the fears of GLP1s causing muscle loss, which we've covered many times on the podcast, that's just a result of not strength training and just severely cutting your calories. Bodybuilders wouldn't touch the stuff if it caused muscle loss. And the data actually shows their muscle sparing.
Sal Destefano
Exactly. And again, Reddertide drives anabolism directly. So you have that three stage agonist. We talked beforehand. I work with one group where we're being a five stage to the market.
Adam Schaefer
What.
Sal Destefano
Which will modulate the IGF receptor and the antigen receptor. So if you also look and they. Again, I'm not the first person to think about this. There's some old, old, old research. There was one, there was actually two drugs. One of the drugs back in the day was a GLP and they had a storm which failed miserably. It just tanked. HDLS like it was just like a chemical disaster. Right. But the concept was there. They also had a GLP1 and a Melanocort, an agonist. Because what did that do? It drove up more insulin sensitivity and more growth hormone based reception, fixing that IGF problem. So potentiate that. So these things have been done. They just didn't do them right. Or, you know, didn't apply them properly.
Adam Schaefer
What did you say?
Sal Destefano
Melanocortin.
Adam Schaefer
Okay. Now these are the receptors that they do everything. Oh, yeah. Okay. So let's talk about that for a second. Because they're compounds you can take that stimulate those that make your skin darker. Right. These are the receptors that help with melanin, but they do other things. There's a libido enhancing peptide that attaches them as well. That's got some popularity, especially among women. Correct.
Sal Destefano
PT141.
Adam Schaefer
Okay. What else do These receptors do oh.
Sal Destefano
My gosh, so much. So Melanitan one for example, again they do multiple things. That specific compound will actually drive a lot of we'll see energetic changes and that's where people can have their conscious based experience. So people over really high in the energetic based world trying to elevate their own consciousness. And Melan 10:1 comes in pretty massively to open up that side of neurochemistry, neuroplasticity. We sidestep. Go to million 10 2. That's the one that can drive hematology. So if you have, you know, if you're anemic, something like that, if you're trying to jack that up as an endurance athlete, which also is not banned by water, pretty cool, you can drag, you can take that, that it will directly drive insulin sensitivity. It will drive that over libido in desire neurochemically. So there's a difference between driving like an erectile curve and a neurological libido driver. Like an arousal like I want to have intercourse, it'll do that neurologically which then indirectly will drive better erections for males and females. Because remember, if you look at like female genitalia, exact same structure, just internally, right? And those clitoral bulbs go back in for so many, it's just everywhere in there. So females have an erection just like guys and I just obviously can't see because it's more internal, right? So it can drive up all those erectile cascades dramatically and then the PT141s will pretty much only drive those libido cascades. You get some nausea given how they're digested.
Adam Schaefer
Say the dose on that. You got to be careful because you're gonna make you nauseous.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, start off low. The intranasal ones are really, they're pretty popular. They work really good because again you can low dose it and you can usually avoid that, that nauseous based effect.
Adam Schaefer
What are your thoughts on artificial sweeteners? I mean obviously you're as you know, in the bodybuilding world yourself. Artificial sweeteners super popular because there's no calories in them. Are you a fan against pro?
Sal Destefano
I'm honestly a fan of moderation of everything. To me, nothing is good or bad. I mean, yeah, there's healthier options out there. I don't think having the little artificial sweetener in your intra workout shake or your protein powder, I don't think that's really the deal breaker. I think it's once you get into the heavily processed foods and that's all you're consuming. Consuming because we as a species, like again, everything we talked about today, how are we not dead? Like, it's crazy to me that people are still living to be 60 in our environment. So our body is pretty resilient. Again, it's not that a lot of these are technically good for you, but a lot of them also aren't technically bad for you. So to me it's more about moderation and a lot of things kind of go back to moderation.
Alex Keckel
Okay, I agree with that. I feel like in the, the bodybuilder or the fitness person who's eating, you know, four or five balanced whole food meals that has their right, you know, Diet Coke or their artificial sweetener or their protein bar that has not a big deal. A big deal. But it's the person who never eats whole foods, eats out three, four times a day or eats out of a wrapper. But that's probably the person who's got an issue.
Sal Destefano
Every birthday party that we take our kids to, I have a piece of cake. Not going to be that dad. I want to enjoy it. I want to be part of my kids lives. I'm also not having cake every single day. It's the same thing with the kids. They're still kids. I want them to live and have life. But 95% of their food is basic whole microgen dense food, you know. But that little 5%, if that's the thing that gets you, you're probably doing ten other things wrong.
Adam Schaefer
That's right. You mentioned earlier working with, with the team that works with RFK Jr. I don't remember a time when I was ever hopeful of government policy when it comes to health. The way he talks and the things he mentions, I'm like, okay, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about. For the most part. Definitely in the context of previous administrations in government policy. Are you hopeful with some of what they're doing and what do you think?
Sal Destefano
So I work with a specific individual who's a party to that whole group. I've never actually worked with him directly or anything. What I'm helping that individual do is basically word things right, so legislation can be passed properly.
Adam Schaefer
Okay.
Sal Destefano
Because right now things aren't really determined in the peptide space. Like everyone knows, hey, these are good things. Here's the research. But also what's going on that's probably not going to be shown in the research for 10 decades because the funding's not there. So I'm helping more so on the terminology and breaking down how this can kind of be sold to the government, to the world, for it to be accepted. And I am, I'm so hopeful. I honestly, I feel like our world is in a renaissance right now. And over the next, it's gonna be five years. And over the next five years there's gonna be a drastic shift in pretty much everything.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
And the sad part about that is the healthy, it's not going to be like, you know, lower, middle, upper class anymore in five years. It's going to be the healthy that are living and essentially the sick that are dying in their 40s or 50s, whether that be lower caste because they can't afford peptide therapies or our world is evolving. Like, why do you think this last strain of the flu is so strong? Because as a species we're elevating. Like, look at all the technology we have now, all the medicines, all the peptides, as we're evolving. These, these pathogens, these bacteria, they don't want to die out. They're trying to live too. So they're getting stronger. So you have again, the people that are avoiding a lot of the heavy dyes, avoiding a lot of the bad light exposure, like living a generally healthy lifestyle that will thrive, and then that other subset is sadly going to die off. At least that's what I, I kind of see happening.
Alex Keckel
Where does, where does your. Because it's interesting to talk to you. You have this incredible wealth of knowledge with like pharmacology, but then you also have this almost woo woo side of you where I've heard you say grounding. We talked about charging water.
Sal Destefano
I tinfoil hats in my bag.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, yeah.
Alex Keckel
So where does that come from? And it's rare. I mean, I remember when we first started this podcast that was like one of the missions for us because we've been in the over 20 something years training people and seen western eastern medicine. And unfortunately in our country, I feel like we're so heavy western in that, where we've just kind of dismissed a lot of this, like eastern medicine or the, the types of terminology they use to explain things. Where does that come, like, how did you come to that conclusion that, you know, there's something to this grounding and charging water and maybe what someone else would call woo woo. Where did that, where did that happen for you?
Sal Destefano
I was running into problems with people that no one else was fixing. Whether it was the sprinter that just can't take that extra second off or again, the heart failure or cancer patient that no one else was fixing. And so you start just looking at the baseline of why there's a problem in the first place. You break that down and look at energetics, for example, you start to realize, oh, my God, grounding. What does it do? It donates electrons to your body. That's all it does. There's also pores at the bottom of your feet that pull toxins out through it. That's why when you take your shoes off and you've got sweaty socks, it stinks so bad because of those pores. They're so drastic. So just by grounding, you can pull out a lot of just those. Those damaging particulates and donate electrons. Why? To eat fruit. Fruit donates electrons. That's all they do. So if you understand the energetics of it, then you can just see, okay, how can I donate electrons? I can only eat so much fruit. Chemical signaling. Wise fruit's awesome for you, but you almost can't eat so much fruit to kill cancer, for example. That would actually also fuel the cancer because they thrive on glucose. But it started there. It was just literally trying to find problems, and you find different ideas. And today I am open to everything. If something works for someone, I want to know why. I want to know how you're doing it. It because there's validity there. Someone could disagree with me, and I love that because to me, through their lens, they found some way to find success with something that I didn't find success. So how did you do that? Was it context specific? Specific. Did I do it wrong? Or what's really the lens they're looking through? Well, yeah.
Alex Keckel
What was the last thing that maybe you were skeptical about or that you had attempted, you know, western medicine, pharmacology at. And then you ended up realizing, oh, it was a missing grounding. What was the last thing that was like that where maybe you were trying to figure out, and then it was something that you maybe wouldn't have thought of or pharmacology couldn't answer.
Sal Destefano
It was probably about two, two and a half years ago. It was with dry fasting, because all the research on fasting is there. Even dry fasting. There's some scattered research.
Adam Schaefer
So dry fasting is no food, no water.
Sal Destefano
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And to me, it was not that I was against it, but I just didn't really see the. How I could implement it in certain scenarios. So if you look at your fat cells that'll dump out, you know, triglycerides and hydrogen, you're just literally, you can make your own water via fat cell manipulation. So you'll donate that hydrogen Combined with oxygen, you create your own water. You can't do that forever, but you can get your own endogenous water. I started looking at this for the parasite world. Parasites thrive on their own glucose and our water parasites can't make their own water. So if you make just enough internal water, you can starve off those parasites. So the, the. Oh, what was it? I think this is back again. The, the, the Russians are one of those cool places where they were having people dry fast for like two days on, one day off. But they did for days at a time. They were reversing cancers, killing parasites. They did it crazy because they, they would do a hard dry fast, not just a soft. So a hard dry fast means no washing your hands, no showers. Then you realize, oh, showering you, you know, get some water transverse into your skin. It dries lymphatic drainage. So that actually kind of worked against them. Whereas the soft dry fast, you wash your hands, you shower, but, but you know, you just don't drink water. So it started, it was probably that in the parasite based world. Wow.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah. You must be a fan of the, of all the Soviet era studies.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, they did some crazy stuff but I mean I'm glad we get to read it now.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Well cool. This was a lot of fun, my man. I'm glad, I'm glad you came on the show. I can see why Jay likes you so much.
Sal Destefano
I feel like we're just getting started.
Alex Keckel
We are. Our personal thread with all of each other is going to really go. I already know it. I already know everyone's gonna be hitting you up with like personal stack and things they're going to want to do. We could probably sit on this and talk for hours. Of all the different.
Adam Schaefer
No, it's great man. Is there, is there, is there anything that's really interesting you or exciting you at the moment?
Sal Destefano
I think so. I, I finally started by paired up with Jay actually he has bio longevity labs. So I'm the head researcher formula and all that stuff. And right now that's been like the latest development that I'm super excited about because I've been waiting because I've had people in the background synthesized compounds and stuff like that for years but no one actually wanted to get into business with that I would like really trust. And we have a couple things coming out to the market that will, I mean pretty much like reverse obesity. I had one. I don't think they're gonna do it, but I had eye drops. We could see in the dark again. I don't think I was gonna buy that. They turned me down on that.
Adam Schaefer
Eye drops. You can see in the dark.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you just use chlorine, insulin, and dmso, and you can deliver it and you don't use it all the time, but you can see in the dark for, like, four to six hours. Oh, my God.
Justin Andrews
Do you see demons as well?
Sal Destefano
Like, I don't know.
Adam Schaefer
This is. Why is it the military? Dude, that's crazy. Did you try it?
Sal Destefano
Yeah, that's actually where I got all that from.
Adam Schaefer
Okay.
Sal Destefano
I did a couple different projects.
Adam Schaefer
Oh, okay. From the military?
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, bro, that's crazy.
Alex Keckel
That makes sense that they would be the ones messing with that.
Adam Schaefer
I'd buy that. You're not gonna.
Sal Destefano
I mean, I hope so. I said it in the group thread. No one replied to me. So usually. So we have that group.
Adam Schaefer
I'll send a message to J. I.
Sal Destefano
Want these eye drops in the dark. There's so many things, like, to potentiate NAD therapies. Right. So we're coming out with a product for that. Because NAD could shoot to the right and drive all these longevity cascades. It can shoot to the left. You have high CD38, high NNMT enzyme levels and fuel cancer cell growth or fuel senescent cell growth. So you can take some basic things to modulate that and then potentiate that. So that whole NAD sirtuin system gets upregulated. Crazy. So things like that. That's like the latest thing that I'm super pumped up about.
Alex Keckel
Are you following what's his. Is it Brian Johnson who's the longevity guy right now?
Adam Schaefer
Oh, the dude that spends all the money.
Alex Keckel
I was curious.
Adam Schaefer
He looks like a robot.
Alex Keckel
I think it's Brian Johnson, right? Is that what it is?
Justin Andrews
I believe so.
Alex Keckel
Yeah. Okay.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, Okay, I remember. Yeah.
Alex Keckel
He just had a Netflix series. I was just curious if you knew.
Sal Destefano
What'S he doing now.
Alex Keckel
I. That's what I want to know. If you knew, like, what exactly he's doing and what. I mean, he's just. He's what we would consider the perfect example of somebody who's chasing longevity. Like, he's doing. He's checking all the boxes. So I thought maybe you knew of what he was doing, and I wanted to hear from you what you think are the big things that he's doing that's probably making the difference. But he's.
Sal Destefano
There's a. He did, like, Clothos therapy, if I remember correctly. He's done. Yeah, he's done a lot of things.
Alex Keckel
That is Brian Johnson. That's who.
Sal Destefano
Oh, yeah. Okay.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, yeah.
Sal Destefano
Again, I'm so bad at following people and keeping up with people, but I remember who that was. I could be wrong, but was he also against going outdoors and getting sun exposure?
Adam Schaefer
I mean, right.
Sal Destefano
If that was him. I remember there was the whole, like, UV conversation. I think that was him. Which I don't agree with, but, you know, I don't. I don't know if that's him.
Alex Keckel
Yeah, I don't think I agree with that either. I think we know how. Just how amazing the sun is for you. I think that's.
Adam Schaefer
Oh, yeah. He says he avoids the sun.
Alex Keckel
Oh, wow.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
Adam Schaefer
Okay, well, that doesn't. Yeah. Weird. Yeah.
Sal Destefano
So right out of the gate, mitochondrial action, neurological development, prefrontal cortex hypertrophy. Like things are getting down regularly when you're not in the sun.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah.
Alex Keckel
Now, I imagine he's probably supplementing with things like red light therapy and other things like that to probably counter what the negative effects.
Sal Destefano
But still, the problem with that, though, is it's full spectrum. So, like, red light's awesome, but still narrow. Near infrared is still awesome, but still narrow. So best case scenario, like, you're simulating what would have happened naturally.
Adam Schaefer
I know you're trying to simulate something that's natural with. By piecing together a bunch of different.
Alex Keckel
Things when you just go out, get the real thing.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, exactly. So you do sunlight, you know, during the days if you can, as much as you can, pretty much. And then at night, you would do, like, something like it. Because it also depends on where it's at. So again, back in the day, when we were cavemen, it would have been fire in front of us. You'd have a low exposure of that light, like the chicken lights or something like that. Because it's pretty much full spectrum as well.
Alex Keckel
But again, not that you care or anything like that, but, I mean, I think you would be a really cool person to actually break down what he's. Because he's going so viral. Everybody's paying attention.
Sal Destefano
Text him, tell him to hit me up.
Adam Schaefer
All right.
Alex Keckel
All right. Because I think you would be a really cool person to go through his protocol. And the things that you're like, okay, that makes. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that's smart. And then the things are like.
Adam Schaefer
Do you think chemical based sunscreens or were just a total grift? Like. Like, hey, these. These help protect you from cancer?
Sal Destefano
Yeah, yeah, because it'll just generate more reactive oxygen damage on top of the skin. So you're basically blunting the beneficial and you are allowing the negatives. So you're literally driving the whole, the whole process of skin cancer and RS overproduction, like sunscreen actually potentiates that. So. Yeah, like. So again though, case in point for error, my wife and my children are very pale skinned. They're very pale. So we have to slowly build up that solar callus by letting them get exposed to the sun. And then over time, they don't have to use that sunscreen as much anymore. So sunscreen isn't inherently good or bad, but when you overuse it to me, no one should really be using the mineral based ones.
Adam Schaefer
Then the zinc oxide and titanium for.
Sal Destefano
Them or I'm still not that big of a fan. I mean, yeah, that's what we use. But no matter what, ideally we want just basic, basic sun exposure on skin.
Adam Schaefer
And build it up.
Sal Destefano
Exactly.
Alex Keckel
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
You build up that solar callus no matter who you are.
Alex Keckel
So what. Okay, what does that look. This is, this is actually a good conversation because this is one of the challenges I have with my wife. She's like, she's like overly protective of him getting burnt in the sun. That, that's like. And I'm like, dude, let's just cover them up or let him have a little bit and then pull them out. So what would that protocol look like? Or what has that protocol look like for you right now? Because I know that I also can't just allow to be in the sun for three, four hours with. And he's never been in the sun like that because he will burn. So. And it's hard to probably get your kid who's playing in the pool for an hour to come out when he's in the middle of doing that. So do you give him a little bit of the sunscreen or. I mean, what does that look like?
Sal Destefano
You're gonna love this. So in the training world, what is it? Progressive overload.
Alex Keckel
Right?
Sal Destefano
It's the same thing in the sun exposure world. Go out for 10 minutes and kick a ball around, come back in.
Alex Keckel
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
The next to go for 15 minutes, whatever arbitrary number. It's that slow exposure over time. So on the weekends, you can't go to the pool for an hour and then come back in or just do the first hour, you know, exposed, and then put on the sunscreen or the clothes or something like that. You just, it's, it's progressive. It's just.
Adam Schaefer
That's what I did with my kids.
Alex Keckel
That makes sense because then it's like, because I'm like, well, how do I deal with the time where, like, I didn't have, like, we just find, like, I find out tomorrow. Oh, we're going with tomorrow's. We're in the winter still. But let's say we're going to the pool tomorrow for three hours. I didn't have time to build that up, so that would make sense is at least allow the first hour regular exposure, then put it on, and then the next time I do it.
Adam Schaefer
That's what we did with ours because we were in Hawaii, and. And now we're.
Sal Destefano
We're.
Adam Schaefer
My wife and I, both olive complex. But still, our kids are, you know, if they're not in the sun, it's winter here.
Sal Destefano
Yeah.
Adam Schaefer
So when we were there, it was, like, out in the sun a little bit. All right, come in, add some sunscreen. And each day we prolong how long they were out for. And they got nice, nice tans from it.
Sal Destefano
Yeah, that's all you need. You can even do, like, the. The red light therapy boxes because at least it's more that dermal. Like, so that's not as deep as near infrared.
Alex Keckel
Yeah.
Sal Destefano
So that topical level. So you can at least slowly get this.
Alex Keckel
Oh, that's a great. Because I have the infrared lights in my house, so that's a great idea.
Adam Schaefer
But then it'll.
Sal Destefano
It'll offset blue too.
Adam Schaefer
But then Justin and Doug are screwed, basically. Right. So they can't just live in a cage.
Sal Destefano
What's wrong with you guys?
Alex Keckel
Translucent.
Sal Destefano
Yeah. Just slowly build it up. See what you can do. You know, you can also do. Like, we talk about MT2, though. Melanin 2 can build up that process.
Adam Schaefer
Oh, there you go.
Sal Destefano
Stimulate it. So if you take MT2 and don't get sun exposure, you get, like, orange looks really ugly. So instead you just do that and get slow sun exposure, and it helps.
Adam Schaefer
Increase the melanin production. Yeah. So there you go, bro.
Justin Andrews
All right. I don't want to be an orange man.
Sal Destefano
Take a little bit.
Justin Andrews
Try it out.
Adam Schaefer
Well, great, man. This is a lot of fun, dude.
Alex Keckel
Alex, thanks for coming on. This won't be the last time.
Adam Schaefer
Probably have you on.
Alex Keckel
Yeah, we will absolutely have you on again.
Adam Schaefer
Yeah, for sure.
Sal Destefano
Appreciate you guys having me on.
Alex Keckel
It's fun. Good time, bro.
Mind Pump Outro
Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically, improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle@mindpumpmedia.com. the RGB Super Bundle includes maps and Maps Performance and Maps aesthetic Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal, Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos. The RGB Super Bundle is like having Sal, Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Super Bundle has a full 30 day money back guarantee and you can get it now. Plus other valuable free resources@mindpumpmedia.com if you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five star rating and review on itunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mind Pump.
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Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth — Episode 2550: Cutting Edge Peptides for Fat Loss & Muscle Building with Alex Keckel
Release Date: March 10, 2025
In Episode 2550 of Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth, hosts Sal Di Stefano, Adam Schafer, and Justin Andrews delve deep into the world of advanced peptides and supplements for fat loss and muscle building. Joined by esteemed prep coach Alex Keckel, the discussion uncovers cutting-edge, gray market substances that promise unparalleled advancements in fitness and health. This comprehensive summary captures the essence of their conversation, highlighting key topics, insights, and expert opinions.
The episode kicks off with Sal introducing Alex Keckel, emphasizing his expertise in peptides and supplements. Adam highlights the uniqueness of the episode, stating, “This is like you won't hear this anywhere” (00:14). The focus is set on exploring substances that are not mainstream but hold significant potential for fitness enthusiasts and professionals.
Methylene Blue becomes the cornerstone of the discussion. Sal elucidates its diverse applications:
Definition & History: Originally a dye, methylene blue has been repurposed for various health benefits. Sal mentions, “It started off again as that dye, and then they started seeing some different interactions” (03:33).
Benefits:
Dosing & Side Effects: Sal shares his personal experience of taking 50 grams of creatine alongside methylene blue to reduce neuroinflammation (04:54). He warns about dosing variances, stating, “Most people are about 1 milligram to 40” (07:39). Potential side effects include hyperstimulation, renal issues in rare genetic cases, and interactions with MAOI inhibitors.
Notable Quote:
"We're in this renaissance right now, in our age where we can basically fix any problem that talking about." — Sal Di Stefano (03:28)
The conversation transitions to creatine dosing, with Sal advocating for higher doses beyond the traditional 5-10 grams:
Personal Usage: Sal mentions taking 20-30 grams daily during workouts to maximize benefits without hitting GI issues (05:30).
Alex’s Inquiry: Alex probes, “How are you, how are you measuring the return on that?” (05:39), to which Sal responds by monitoring metabolic changes, muscle gain, and fat loss.
Notable Quote:
"It's the cheapest molecule out there that does everything." — Sal Di Stefano (05:07)
The hosts explore the lesser-known benefits of nicotine beyond its association with smoking:
Protective Against COVID-19: Nicotine occupies nicotinic receptors, preventing viral binding. Sal explains, “You just needed to occupy that receptor. So the smokers, you know, because they were taking 15 milligrams, 20 milligrams...” (14:03).
Dosing Considerations: Sal advises using nicotine in low doses (0.5-1 mg) via patches or lozenges to avoid overstimulation (16:35).
Benefits: Enhances cognitive function, reduces neuroinflammation, and may aid in preventing long COVID symptoms.
Notable Quote:
“If you're taking anything that's going to affect your brain will also affect that.” — Sal Di Stefano (09:09)
Alex and Sal delve into various peptides that bolster athletic performance and muscle growth:
SLU P332: Enhances mitochondrial processes, supports spermatogenesis, and drives beta-oxidation.
MOT C & SS31:
Growth Hormone Releasing Peptides (GHRPs):
Notable Quote:
“There is no direct like cocaine and fit me receptor regulation.” — Sal Di Stefano (07:47)
The discussion shifts to neuropeptides and their role in cognitive function:
Nootropics for Memory and Focus: Compounds like Noopept and Alpha GPC are recommended for enhanced memory recall and motor cortex function (36:03).
Cerebral Lysine: Supports neurotrophic factors, aiding in neural repair and cognitive enhancement.
Notable Quote:
"Alpha GPC... it donates more raw acetylcholine so you can fire tissues better." — Sal Di Stefano (36:43)
Sal introduces grounding and structured water as integral components of overall health:
Grounding: Connects the body to the Earth’s electrons, reducing inflammation and oxidative stress. Sal states, “It donates electrons to your body. That's all it does.” (71:26).
Structured Water: Emphasizes the importance of water's molecular structure for optimal health, advocating for methods to restructure water to resemble its natural state.
Notable Quote:
"Everything spins at a certain frequency. So that Cheeto is spinning at the wrong frequency... it causes all the upstream inflammation." — Sal Di Stefano (81:36)
The panel explores the applications of GLP-1 agonists in bodybuilding:
Muscle Sparing: Contrary to fears, GLP-1s may aid in muscle preservation when combined with strength training.
Microdosing for Anabolism: Low doses can promote an anabolic environment without the adverse effects on gut motility.
Notable Quote:
“The data actually shows their muscle sparing.” — Adam Schafer (64:43)
The hosts discuss the integration of Western pharmacology with Eastern holistic practices:
Open-Mindedness: Sal emphasizes the importance of being receptive to all effective treatments, regardless of origin.
Practical Applications: Combining peptides with practices like grounding and progressive sun exposure to maximize health benefits.
Notable Quote:
“Everything we're talking about today... if everything else isn't taken care of, things don't always work that well.” — Sal Di Stefano (35:24)
In the concluding segments, Sal shares his vision for the future of health and longevity:
Legislation and Acceptance: Efforts to standardize peptide usage and integrate them into mainstream health practices.
Technological Advancements: Innovations like NAD therapies and eye drops for enhanced vision in low light are on the horizon.
Notable Quote:
“I am so hopeful. I honestly, I feel like our world is in a renaissance right now.” — Sal Di Stefano (69:31)
Episode 2550 of Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth offers a deep dive into the realm of advanced peptides and supplements, uncovering substances that hold transformative potential for fat loss, muscle building, and overall health. Through expert insights from Alex Keckel and the seasoned hosts, listeners gain a nuanced understanding of how these cutting-edge compounds can be integrated into optimized health and fitness protocols. Whether you're an athlete, fitness enthusiast, or someone keen on biohacking, this episode serves as a treasure trove of knowledge on navigating the complex landscape of modern supplements.
Disclaimer: The information presented in this summary is based on the podcast transcript provided and reflects the views of the speakers. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before starting any new supplement or treatment regimen.