Ben Greenfield's 5 Daily Supplements & the Spiritual Practice He Regrets Missing | Dr. Josh Axe

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Dr. Josh Axe Show

Episode: Ben Greenfield on The EXACT Process to Transform Your Body
Date: May 7, 2026
Host: Dr. Josh Axe
Guest: Ben Greenfield

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Main Theme and Purpose

This wide-ranging episode features health and biohacking expert Ben Greenfield discussing his personal and professional journey in health optimization. Together with Dr. Axe, they dive into practical strategies for transforming physical health—specifically gut health, hormones, and testosterone—while integrating spiritual growth, emotional resilience, and the importance of family rituals. The conversation blends high-level science with intimate stories about values, rites of passage, and faith, offering listeners a holistic blueprint to elevate health and live a purpose-driven life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Lessons from Experimentation: What Works and What Doesn’t

Timestamps: [03:25]–[11:50]

• Biohacking's Efficacy and Caution
  • Ben shares that most interventions he’s tried work if you do due diligence and understand the mechanism of action.
  • Disfavored “publicity stunts” or treatments lacking solid science.
  • Example: Sexual health treatments like peptides show promise for clinical needs but are overhyped in healthy populations.
  • Peptides such as BPC-157, KPV, thymosin alpha 1, and GHK copper have made a “night and day” difference, especially for gut health and immunity while traveling ([05:47]).
  • GLP-1 agonists work for appetite suppression but are easily misused; purity and dosing are major concerns ([09:13]). Ben stresses “start at minimal doses” to prevent muscle loss and side effects.

"There's not a lot that didn't work, because I try to do pretty good due diligence."
—Ben Greenfield ([04:05])

• Tracking Progress and Deciphering Results
  • Overlapping therapies make it hard to isolate results ([11:50]).
  • Ben’s approach: Understand mechanisms, wash out redundancies, make single changes, and avoid ‘stacking’ too many new things at once.

"There's not a perfect answer...it still gets messy to just try and track everything at once."
—Ben Greenfield ([13:40])

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2. Insights on Peptides, Personalized Supplementation, and Sleep

Timestamps: [07:09]–[21:14]

• Peptides for Gut and Recovery
  • Peptides like BPC-157 and KPV are cited as “top surprises” for healing gut lining and post-infection recovery.
  • Other peptides and compounds: Lorazotide, LL-37 for antimicrobial support.
  • GLP-1 agonists help with appetite but are best in microdoses.
• NAC & GlyNAC for Detox Pathways and Sleep
  • Dr. Axe recounts how genetic testing revealed his glutathione pathway weakness; supplementing with NAC and glycine yielded major improvements ([15:28]).
  • Glycine is an “underrated” sleep aid, lowers body temperature, and mitigates damage from seed oils ([17:58], [19:15]).
• Optimizing Sleep
  • Overheating is the number one reason for waking up at night ([19:15]).
  • Other top disruptors: Hypoxia (sleep apnea), nighttime hypoglycemia, and poor meal timing.

"If you read the Bible, Jesus says that the two greatest commandments is to love God and to love other people."
—Ben Greenfield ([01:35], restated at [32:25])

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3. Bloodwork, Testing, and the Limits of Conventional Medicine

Timestamps: [21:14]–[30:28]

• Functional vs. Standard Labs
  • Many patients with unexplained symptoms have 'normal' labs by standard ranges, but suboptimal for functional health ([21:14]).
  • Importance of assessing nutrient levels inside cells (e.g., RBC or WBC analysis), not just in serum ([27:06]).
  • Athlete caveat: Good blood lipids don’t always mean no arterial plaque—get imaging if family history or risk factors ([28:48]).

"Going beyond the reference ranges that would indicate presence of disease...venturing into the realm of actual health optimization or prevention."
—Ben Greenfield ([22:47])

• Pitfalls of Food Sensitivity and Autoimmune Testing
  • Dr. Axe warns of food sensitivity tests producing "false positives"—they often flag foods you simply eat a lot, not true triggers ([24:49]).
  • Modern panels are more nuanced, looking at multiple immune markers.

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4. The Process and Power of Spiritual Growth

Timestamps: [31:42]–[51:15]

• Ben Greenfield’s Shift to Faith-Based Living
  • Ben describes his own climb up the “wrong mountain”—career, fame, wealth—while neglecting his family and spiritual life. He returned to prioritizing God and close relationships in his thirties ([32:25]).
  • Quotes ancient thinkers and the Bible: Loving God and others is foundational for lasting fulfillment.

"You grow distant from God and you grow distant from people...there is this eternal hole in our soul...longing for something infinite."
—Ben Greenfield ([32:25])

• Rite of Passage for Boys
  • Ben outlines the structured “rites of passage” for his twin sons: wilderness solo at 13, three months living on their own at 16, and a final vision quest at 18 ([39:19]).
  • Intent: Ensure boys become responsible, wise adults not chasing external validation.

"You educate your children about the consequences...then let them make an educated choice."
—Ben Greenfield ([46:46])

• Establishing Family Values & Constitution
  • The Greenfields developed a family constitution including a crest, mission statement, traditions, and even end-of-life wishes ([49:26]).
  • Annual review turns it into a living document guiding culture, decision-making, and legacy.

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5. Integrating Daily Spiritual Practices

Timestamps: [51:17]–[56:20]

• Greenfield Family Spiritual Routine
  • Each morning: Listen to (not just read) the Bible, pray, and do family scripture study ([51:40]).
  • Weekly: Worship music dance party.
  • Evening: Shared scripture memorization.
  • These routines “train the brain” and build spiritual resilience for kids in the digital age.

"God’s Word...that's the very first thing that goes on...I lead them through the scripture and we just read chronologically through the entire Bible."
—Ben Greenfield ([51:40])

"If I take the first 20, 30 minutes of my day with God, my entire day goes differently than if I don't."
—Dr. Josh Axe ([54:10])

• Advice: Write down rituals/routines for consistency ("It's all scheduled in...should feel weird not to do them" — [55:01]).

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6. Foundational Supplements and Hormone Optimization

Timestamps: [56:36]–[61:36]

• Top Five Supplements (per Ben):

  1. Minerals (esp. magnesium, zinc)
  2. Omega-3s (fish or algal oil)
  3. Creatine
  4. Essential Amino Acids
  5. NAD (NMN/NR or IV/injectable forms) ([57:24]–[59:44])

  Personalized supplements are critical—test, don’t guess.

• Raising Testosterone Naturally

  • Lower stress and overtraining.
  • Ensure nutritional foundation (magnesium, zinc, omega-3s, vitamin D, creatine, boron).
  • Strength train—especially legs; consider cold exposure ([63:05]).

"Testosterone replacement therapy...should definitely be something to table until you’re at least like 35, 40 years old..."
—Ben Greenfield ([64:13])

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7. Rapid Fire Insights

Timestamps: [66:37]–[73:09]

• Best Book: Sahil Bloom’s The Five Types of Wealth ([66:42]).
• Desert Island Food: Salmon ([67:38]).
• Wife’s Health Game-Changer: Natural hormone replacement ([68:07]).
• Must-Do Exercises: Kettlebell swings and pushups for full-body results ([69:33]).
• Travel Health: Maintain morning routine, hydration with minerals, sunlight, HEPA filters, Whole Foods delivery ([69:50]).
• Most Underrated Biohack: PEMF (Pulsed Electromagnetic Field) therapy ([71:36]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On climbing the wrong mountain:

  "You spend a great deal of your life’s energy, often in your teen years, your 20s, sometimes your 30s, pursuing financial wealth... and justifying to myself that the family was good because I was sending home the paycheck."
  —Ben Greenfield ([32:25])

• On modern medicine’s limitations:

  "There’s a difference between normal and optimal. Are you going to drop dead tomorrow, or are you going to feel amazing in 20 years?"
  —Ben Greenfield ([22:47])

• On family legacy:

  "We sit down as a family and discuss what our values are... a mission statement, a crest, daily rituals. The Constitution is basically like a living document."
  —Ben Greenfield ([49:26])

• On daily non-negotiable rituals:

  "It’s all scheduled in... it should feel weird not to read the Bible or listen in the morning."
  —Ben Greenfield ([55:01])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:25] – Ben’s surprising wins & duds from 10+ years of biohacking
• [05:47] – Peptide stack for gut health and personal healing routines
• [09:13] – GLP-1 agonists: microdosing & misuse
• [11:50] – How Ben tracks and isolates what “moves the needle”
• [15:28] – NAC, glutathione, genetic testing: Dr. Axe’s personal insight
• [17:58] – Glycine’s role in sleep and countering oxidized seed oils
• [19:15] – Main reasons for poor sleep & actionable tips
• [21:14] – The functional vs. conventional bloodwork debate
• [32:25] – Ben’s spiritual transformation & ‘wrong mountain’ story
• [39:19] – Greenfield family rites of passage for boys
• [49:26] – How to establish a family constitution and mission
• [51:40] – Greenfield family’s daily spiritual practices
• [56:36] – Top five foundational supplements & rationale
• [63:05] – Testosterone: natural supports and cold exposure
• [66:42] – Rapid fire: best book, superfood, travel hacks, top exercise, underrated biohack

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Closing Thoughts

This episode delivers a unique blend of advanced biohacking, spiritual depth, practical parenting, and health optimization wisdom. Ben Greenfield’s integration of family legacy, faith, and science stands out as a rare, actionable model for those seeking not only peak performance, but meaningful, sustained well-being. Whether you’re interested in peptide stacks, functional labs, rites of passage for teens, or the power of an intentional family life centered around faith, this conversation offers something transformative.

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For more:

• Ben Greenfield’s Website and social platforms
• Ben’s books: Boundless, Fit Soul, and more on Amazon
• Dr. Josh Axe’s clinics, blood tests, and articles at draxe.com

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(Advertisements and non-content sections have been omitted for conciseness.)

Transcript

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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[Ben Greenfield]

out of your car.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

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[Ben Greenfield]

[e-mail] I went through the same process that I think a lot of people go through. You climb the wrong mountain. Pursuing financial wealth, providing for the family, building a business, and justifying to myself that the family was good because I was sending home the paycheck.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Most people think their priorities are one thing, but it's actually something different. I mean, if I take the first 20, 30 minutes of my day with God, my entire day goes differently than if I don't.

[Ben Greenfield]

If you read the Bible, Jesus says that the two greatest commandments is to love God and to love other people. And Jesus knew that everything else in the end would be unfulfilling if those two aspects were not the foundation of your life. Foreign.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

So I am so excited about today's podcast episode. I've got my good friend Ben Greenfield on here. Last time I was with him, we were getting a. We were at a Russian spa, you know, like sweating together, getting beat, cold plunge branches, plunge all of it.

[Ben Greenfield]

Large Russian men.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yes, it was a lot of fun

[Ben Greenfield]

thrown into cold plunges. That's right.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Today we're going to talk about balancing your hormones. We're talking about men for you, how to really radically increase your testosterone. We're going to get into dealing with things from the spiritual aspect of things, because that's one of the things I've loved, Ben, that you've started to dive into is you've dove in so much into how to start to heal spiritually and how that impacts the physical. So we'll get into that today. Please subscribe. It's the number one thing you can do to support the show. Also in the comment section on social media. Let us know your thoughts. We'd love your engagement and love to hear from you. And we've got a rapid fire for Ben today as well. We're going to talk about biohacking. The therapies that have worked for him that haven't worked for him.

[Ben Greenfield]

Ben, welcome to show and buy some honey some Manuka. Dude, I love this stuff.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I know

[Ben Greenfield]

the you've probably told the whole story on the podcast, but ever since I started getting that stuff for lunch, I'm not kidding, like almost every day I have a raw carrot because I feel like that improves digestion and it's a little bit of extra fiber and I just like slather it with Manuka honey.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Nice. Hey, one thing I love, every time I talk to you, you're doing something new. And I think probably you have had more experience than anyone I can think of. I mean, maybe Tim Ferriss is up there, but I think I know you're really high up there in terms of you have tried so many different modalities and supplements and biohacks and all just different things. And you have a great level of body awareness of what impacts you, how it impacts you. When you think about the last 10 years, what are some of the things that you thought, hey, I thought this would work and it just didn't work. And some things you were maybe unsure of and you thought, wow, this really moved the needle for you in terms of some sort of health benefit.

[Ben Greenfield]

Oh man, there's not a lot of didn't work because I try to do pretty good due diligence on. I mean there's certain things that people do. Like I think it's just like shticks that are often used for publicity in many cases. But like treatments for sexual dysfunction. That's a big one. These days in the biohacking industry, people are talking about injections and stem cells and something like that. You look at the data there is known on healthy populations. But then you can find people with Peyronie's disease or erectile dysfunction or something like that and see whether or not it might have a decent proposed mechanism of action. And then there are others, like the peptide industry as a whole. Not a lot of long term human clinical research on it. But if you look into the mechanism of action, the proposed organ systems or receptors that they act on, you can say, okay, well that there's probably some pretty good science behind this. So I can't think of any like, any like crazy protocols I've done that have Just been kind of like meh. I would say on the flip side, the things that have worked surprisingly well. I mean, kind of depends how weird you want to get.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Well, I'd say we've got a lot listen, we've got a combo. People listen.

[Ben Greenfield]

To show how wacky do we want to be?

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I would just say generally what has moved the needle the most when you're like, okay, I did this and I noticed a significant difference in my testosterone, increasing my digestion, improving my sleep, improving, those types of things.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yep. Okay, so we were just talking about them, so we might as well keep talking about them. Peptides would be one. Yes, sourcing matters. I know the regulatory landscape is rapidly evolving right now and seems to be shifting towards you being able to get most peptides from like a compounding pharmacist or a pharmaceutical company and the whole gray market sold for human research only is I think more and more going to be a thing of the past. We'll see. Things change so quickly. But let's say people who have struggled for a long time with leaky gut and they've done everything from an elimination diet to maybe a low histamine diet to glutamine, bone broth, colostrum, all of the things that would be considered baseline foundational principles and they just can't seem to move the dial a stack like BPC157 orally and then injectable KpV, thymosin alpha 1 for modulating the immune system a little bit and then typically something like GHK copper peptide as another anti inflammatory agent that you know, for me personally I would have like a princess gut when I travel. And that's like my travel pack now that I'll inject and take orally and night and day difference as far as gut stability. That's. That's one example.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, yeah. And let me jump in and say I totally agree with you. I think of all the things that have maybe surprised me the most in terms of the benefits, that might be number one. Because you know, I had my spinal infection and then I also had to get on, you know, my gut got torn up. I had to take antibiotics when I had the spinal infection for a short time and the BPC157, even orally, I mean there's tremendous benefits there. And I just wanted to point out a few others. I love that you mentioned kpv. There's so many great studies on that for healing the gut. There's a few that are antimicrobial, there's Lorazatide and LL37. So you've got Candida or Dysbiosis. Those are great.

[Ben Greenfield]

Or even just like your food poisoning home first aid kit. Totally.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

So I'm so glad you called that out. And I do think it was great seeing Robert F. Kennedy sort of take those 14 peptides and. And kind of get those through the finish line of being, you know, generally approved. Right. But there's got to be a lot more that happens. But yeah, that's. I'm so glad you brought this up.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

So that would be one. I think, even though they're controversial, that GLP agonists, especially one the ones that target multiple receptors, they are, of course now pretty difficult to get because most are being turned over to pharmaceutical companies. Obviously you can buy sold for human research, but you never know what you're getting. And even recently there was a big New Yorker article and someone had taken them into a lab and looked at them for purity and having the amount in them that they said they had in them. And a lot of them were pretty wonky as far as actually adhering to claims. Even a certificate of analysis is pretty easy to fabricate. So it's the wild, wild west. But for suppressing appetite, especially in small amounts, just like full disclosure, I have reticerutide at home. And when I have a long flight day or an international trip or just a period of time where I'm not gonna have access to good food, I'm gonna be sedentary. I don't wanna eat, I don't want food noise. Very small dose of that, like 0.25 milligrams and just quiets all food noise.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I think one of the issues with a lot of these GLPs is just

[Ben Greenfield]

the dose is too high, the dose is too high. So then you get nausea in response to just about any bolus of food, which means that it becomes impossible to eat adequate protein for muscle protein synthesis. And then that creates the vicious feedback loop where that combined with lower carbohydrate intake, means you feel flat when you go to the gym. So the weightlifting that you're supposed to be doing when you're on them to maintain muscle mass is very hard to do. And a lot of that is mitigated. I'm not a doctor, I'm not giving this out as medical advice, but a lot of that can be mitigated by taking a much slower dose. I mean, I just said 0.25 milligrams. And if you look at some of the studies on cardiac Muscle loss, loss of lean muscle tissue throughout the entire body. Many of Those studies are using 8/mg of something like retatrutide, which at those doses that's one of the GLPs that's often championed for preserving lean muscle mass. But if you're taking a standard dose, a lot of times that's not the case. You still see lean muscle loss with retatrutide.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

Whereas you know, compare that to 0.25 milligrams. Right. Large bolus, 8 milligrams, let's say on a Monday morning and you're nauseous for the next few days and can't hit the gym versus 0.25 milligrams on like Monday, Wednesday, Friday or just on a select few days of the month where you're busy and you don't want to think about food. Very, very slight, but enough to make a difference metabolically.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, yeah. And I do think that right now, I mean, you know, it's, this is happening a lot. And I think one thing about you is you're very, you are reading studies, you have an understanding, you are listening to your body. And I think a lot of times people are watching influencers online and say, I'm going to try this peptide or I'm going to try this here and here. And I think if people have enough, if they're able to listen their body enough, there can be some benefits there. But I think for most people, I think something that they're missing, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Is this end goal and idea and actually having somebody lay out a really strategic plan for them. You know, it's like if I'm going to, if I'm going to say I want to put on 10 pounds of muscle or I want to lose 20 pounds of body, body fat or weight, you know, there's a sense of, okay, here's the foods I should eat. I'm laying it out, here are the supplements I'm going to take. What happens a lot of times today is people just try so many things they almost don't know what works a lot of the times as well. How have you been able to kind of decipher what works, what doesn't work? Have you ever journaled, have you ever been using tracking? I see you're wearing a band there.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah, I get where you're going. With all the wearables, all the apps now, all the AI driven apps, the ability to self quantify has gotten easier and easier and yet the noise from the information era, in which you've got access to multiple stacks, makes it very difficult to say, okay, so. So I reinvented my life last month and I started doing hyperbaric at a local clinic and I got a red light panel and I started onto a few peptides and increased my protein intake and cut these three different food groups out and shoved laser lights up my nose while I'm checking my emails every morning. What worked? And it is very difficult. There's not an easy answer I don't do. If I have to start some new protocol, I'm not going to wash everything out. Let's say I want to start taking bitters. I don't just like quit everything. No digestive enzymes, no probiotics, like quit consuming any fermented foods. Let's just do a full washout and see what bitters do again. I think that if you go back to mechanism of action and understanding what a compound is actually supposed to do and then looking for redundancy is probably the best thing to do if you're trying to leave out certain things that you might be doing to see if things that you introduced would work better. For example, let's say you're putting collagen in your coffee every morning and you're tracking muscle mass body composition and then you decide that you're going to instead shift to whey protein or branched chain amino acids or essential amino acids or gelatin or anything that's a little bit of a crossover, that's a little bit of redundancy. And that's where you might say, okay, so I'm going to stop taking the collagen and see if one of these other substances works better for me for something like muscle protein synthesis. Another example would be like blood sugar regulation, right? Maybe you're already taking back to like a bitters or a shot of apple cider vinegar before a meal, or you're doing some kind of like a cold thermogenesis protocol for blood glucose management. And then you want to know what your blood glucose does if you start doing a walk before and after a meal. That's a case where you might say, okay, so for three days I'm not going to do any of these other things because they're technically hitting the same target that this new thing that I want to introduce is hitting. And so you can do like baby washouts of certain things that have redundancy as far as mechanisms of action. But. But it still gets messy to just try and track everything at once. There's not a perfect Answer.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, you know what I just try and do is I try and add in one thing at a time was more of kind of the thing. And so I might be. Still be doing quite a few things. You know, I, I recently, I'll tell you something that's really been a game changer for me recently was I started doing some higher doses of N acetylcysteine and I went and did. And I started doing this because I had a, you know, most people are familiar with mthfr, sort of the genetic variant, but I went and did a full genetic panel. You know, they do a. I did a mouse swab and sent that in. I actually was doing it because my daughter was having these dust mite allergies and we were trying to figure out why is she so her nose is stuff up all the time. We came out, she had a really severe allergy to dust and it was the only thing. So we did all these things. So I'm like, okay, well I want to do find out everything I can here on her. So we did, you know, basic blood work on her looking for deficiencies. We did this genetic test and did it for her, did it for me. And I had some other genetic markers that came back of saying my body has a little bit harder time with creating glutathione and glutathione recycling.

[Ben Greenfield]

Right.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

And so I just went and started saying, okay, I'm going to start doing some things for that. And it was like, whoa. Like I started noticing I like I would sometimes get a little bit of almost histamine like, like redness if I would film too long or do certain, like exert myself. I almost like a little bit of that sort of response.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I started taking N acetylcysteine and do things just to support glutathione more. Yeah, 100% went away completely. Yeah. And so I've been a lot more conscious of now of like reducing oxidative stress, boosting my own glutathione. But my point, that was something I added in recently and I was just like, wow. And another thing for sleep is I started doing glycine and a supplement now people are doing a lot of times is that combination of N acetylcysteine with glycine called glynac. And I've just really noticed a superb difference.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah, that's interesting. Those glutathione detox pathways. A lot of genetic testing services are including those in your report and of course, as you've just noted, supporting those pathways with Supplementation, if you tend to be sluggish from a detoxification standpoint, is good. And then you're also, you tend to be that person who's kind of like the canary in the coal mine. Also, like, you're super sensitive to when you're walking onto an airplane, you smell the jet fuel and you feel like crap for 10 minutes and you walk into a hotel room, you're like, man, I need to get a new room or get a HEPA air filter in here. And you're super sensitive to paint. Not everybody's like that. But people who have a poor ability to detox those, it's almost like a survival mechanism.

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[Ben Greenfield]

And that, that also is interesting what you said about glycine. It is underrated, I think, for sleep in particular. Yeah, but, but there's two, there's two interesting fun facts about glycine. A IT and spirulina at anywhere from around 4 to 6 grams can help to mop up some of the oxidation that is specifically related to excess linoleic acid intake, particularly from oxidized. So it's one of those things where, you know, take one for the team and go out for burgers with the boys or whatever. Like you, you can use glycine or spirulina afterwards. And the other kind of like tip with respect to that is a couple of other things that can have similar effects are higher omega 3 fatty acid intake. It's like doubling your fish oil that day. And then cold thermal stress reduces some of the enzymes that tend to cause seed oils to become more inflammatory. Amazing. And then the other thing is that glycine lowers body temperature. It lowers your Core body temp. In higher dosages, a lot of sleep supplements will put like 1, 2 grams. Once you start pushing 4 plus grams, let's say, I don't know, you're like in Florida and checked into an Airbnb and the air conditioner sucks and you're used to sleeping on a, on an eight sleep or cooling mattress or whatever. Glycine can actually lower body temperature and kind of make you a little more comfortable in a hot scenario.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

You know, I did this whole sleep episode and I pulled together a lot of these studies and across the board, the number one reason why people wake up at night from sleep disturbances is they get too hot. It's the number one reason.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yep, I believe it obviously, and I have no clue. I'm just, just throwing random numbers out there or ideas. But the other two would of course be hypoxic episodes during the night, sleep apnea, sleeping position, which can be as simple as a nasal strip, can be as complex as cpap. And then the other one, and I think this is more common now, especially with the surge of GLP agonists. Back to those, is low blood sugar hypoglycemia. Because if you think about it, if you have multiple hypoglycemic episodes during the night, one of the ways that you engage in glycogenolysis or freeing up storage glycogen to raise blood sugar is via a cortisol driven mechanism, right? So you go low blood glucose, your body shifts into cortisol hyperdrive that wakes you up. And typically what you see is like low sleeping hrv, which a lot of these wearables do. If you were wearing CGM low blood glucose throughout the night, not a really good way to track cortisol right now throughout the night. But if you could, you'd probably see multiple surges in that. And then the fix of course is pretty obvious. Like eat more for dinner, get some carbs into the body or even and this is a tip for people who are like using it because they're severely obese and overweight and just can't eat calories, including before bed ketones, like drinking or consuming exogenous ketones as an alternative source of fuel for the brain. So that when you shift into low glucose availability while you're sleeping, your body still has another substrate to draw on so it doesn't have to bump cortisol up. You know, remove glycogen for break down glycogen in the liver and then wake you up.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

You know, it's interesting because when when most of those people, I want to say there's like, there's a, it's around that 3, 2, 3am Wake up time. You know, it's. And it's if, like, if you're that person and you keep waking up at 2 or 3am, that's likely you. That very same thing. And so that's, that's good. You know, I was going to mention this too. What's so interesting. I just opened a clinic here about a month ago, the Longevity Clinic. And so we're now, I'm spending so much time like going through patient blood work, seeing what's going on. And you know, you know the thing, I knew that this was happening, but I'm almost shocked at how much happens. More and more people are getting blood work now. But there are so many people that come in with their prior blood work and their doctor says, hey, your labs are totally normal from the standard care. But then I, when I look at it myself and I look at it from a functional medicine standpoint or even if I would train my AI to do the same thing, it's like, well, no, you know, you know, 32, vitamin D is normal. Yeah, but you should be, you know,

[Ben Greenfield]

testosterone's a 350, bro. You're just fine or whatever. Like, you know, TSH is like hovering a little bit above 4. You'll be okay. But yeah, going beyond the reference ranges that would indicate presence of disease and venturing into the realm of actual health optimization or prevention. They're two entirely different things. And even back to the AI models, that's part of the prompt. Like, you, you literally, if you're using AI to look at your blood work, you need to say, don't just look at reference ranges.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

That's right.

[Ben Greenfield]

Give me clues about whether I'm actually close to what might be considered not fully optimized. Like, don't just look at. Are you going to drop dead tomorrow? But how are you going to feel in 20 years? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, it's huge. You know, I had a person recently and it was like, okay, we have like three or four things that are borderline and they were all related. And it's like the person's energy is absolutely in the tank. And it's like when we're looking at mitochondrial function, it's like, okay, your MMA, which is a form of B12, is off and your carnitine is off and your CoQ10. Like, none of them are ideal. And so I do think I was even surprised with this. I'll give you an example of this we have people bring in there, and there's so many ads for this right now. They're function labs and they're standard.

[Ben Greenfield]

You mean function health.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I thought they were going to be more like optimal ranges, like my nurse.

[Ben Greenfield]

I want to read your mind right now. Are you getting. You do the O's Pearlman thing. Guess your. Your PIN code. Are you seeing on those labs a lot of people who are being told that they have autoimmune issues?

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Oh, yeah. Well, especially. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

Every. Every single person has ever sent me. And I have nothing against function labs. I just think it's an interesting relic. My gosh, like, they're. They're either have. Have a hypersensitivity on the autoimmune panel or something else, because a lot of people get that test and like, I'm autoimmune issue.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely am. And part of me is also like, well, it's. There are more people have it than they think, but also it could also be. It's overly sensitive. I mean, listen, I learned this really on. In doing blood work. So I. Even before I graduated and started my own clinic, this is probably 22 years ago, I worked in a clinic as a nutritionist through school. And we were doing blood work panels of like, fatty acid testing, like, nutrient testing, and all of it. And the thing that I noticed really early on that I knew, I'm like, this is not that accurate was food sensitivity testing. That was one of the things.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah. Because I'm like, this laundry list of false positives.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah. Because I kept testing myself and I'm like, this doesn't make. I'm like, it's just showing high numbers for what I eat a lot of.

[Ben Greenfield]

Right, right. The antibodies that you're already producing, because these things are staples in your diet mixed in with either an IGA or IGG or IGE response to something that you truly are sensitive towards. But it's. It's difficult to dig through what's a true sensitivity versus what's just an antibody response because you're eating whatever scrambled eggs every morning for breakfast.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

There are.

[Ben Greenfield]

There are tests that will look at, you know, like an 88 test with oxidative stress added in. I think Premier does that test or the mediator release test that a guy like. Who's the functional diagnostic nutrition guy, Reed Davis made that one pretty popular, where you're not just looking at the antibody response, you're looking at clues that there is like a histaminergic response or an inflammatory response. Or something that goes beyond just detection of antibodies. Because, like you said, that could just mean you're eating that food a lot.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

And this is what we use now. So there's a friend of mine, and, you know, he's friends with Jordan, Ruben Gezagoli. He's in Atlanta. He's. He's like an OG. I mean, he's been practicing functional medicine for like 30, more than 30 years. And. And so he's got a test where they're testing like five, not just igg, but like five different markers related to the food. So I think it's probably one of the better. Very similar to the test. You're talking about one of the better tests out there. You know, another thing, too, I started realizing as we been looking at blood work is like, I like testing for nutrients. It's like, how many people have ever been tested for their zinc and their selenium and a lot of these nutrients? Most of the time they haven't. And we can do blood work now where you do intracellular nutrients, like what's in the red blood cell or what's in the white blood cell. It's so much more accurate because sometimes people have stuff floating around in their blood, but it's not getting into the cell. And so I'll share this for myself. When I had that spinal infection afterwards, for the next year or two, I was just so exhausted. Like, I mean, just energy in the. And I was doing so many of the right things. And then I went and did this test to look at what my, you know, a more advanced panel. And it said my vitamin B2 was like zero. I mean, it was like. But every. Literally everything else was completely normal, but it was almost zero. And I started taking. Taking just vitamin B2, riboflavin, and then it was like, boom.

[Ben Greenfield]

Blood panel would have shown adequate vitamin B levels, but when you look at intracellular levels, they were low.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, well, and the other thing is, but the most blood tests, again, they're not even testing for B2 or a lot of the nutrients out there today. Right, right.

[Ben Greenfield]

Or just tissue levels in general. Like, here. Here's kind of like the reverse version of that. When you are looking at blood lipids, that doesn't necessarily reflect what's happening on the tissue level. Yeah. So if you're doing, let's say, your standard, like APOB lp, little a LDL particle size hdl, you could theoretically be lit up like a Christmas tree, maybe because you exercise a lot and you're what's called a lean mass, hyper responder and your body is just churning out more triglycerides in general to be shuttled around as fuel and then extra LDL to fight inflammation, or you just happen to be someone with really good genetics and you could go and get something like a CT angiography and be fine. Oh yeah, no plaque, no calcium, looks great. And then you could have a pretty pristine lipid panel from a blood standpoint and go in. Because I've seen this happen before, especially surprisingly in athletes who are just like beating up their hearts a lot, especially endurance athletes. You can have like 6%, 7%, 8% plaque accumulation in different areas of vasculature in heart tissue, but the lipids didn't really tell you that. So I think if you have family history of heart disease or if you're just a male generally in like the 40, 45 year old age range anyways, or a woman who is perimenopause. Plus it's a good idea to do a CT angiography.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

Just, just to see if there's any issues. Because lipids don't tell you the whole picture.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I think we're going to see more, A lot of these tests. They're, they're, they're, we're coming out with more and more types of testing. Like Gezo, who I was telling you about, was showing me this new breast cancer screening that's going to be more accurate than thermography, anything else. And it's, it's, we're going to keep seeing more and more of the stuff. It's going to be less expensive.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

So I, I am really excited about, you know, the other thing I'm excited about. I, I tend to wear a, I like or a ring. I'm wondering if they can get to the point where, or if like a CGM like monitor where you are looking at cortisol, not just insulin, like looking at some of the other. Yeah. And that actually doesn't even look at blood glucose. Exactly. It's something that's related to glucose, but it's. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

There's some companies working on more metrics that are tested. Like there's a newer ring called signal. I think Dr. Matt Cook told me about this one recently and that one's doing like blood pressure now, which is a new metric. But as far as like, just to name a few, it would be really cool to see things like cortisol variation during the day. It would actually be pretty insightful to see what lactate is doing because there's some correlation between that and metabolic dysfunction. You can put glucose into that, and then if you're able to do cortisol theoretically, you could probably do testosterone and a couple other hormones as well. The problem is that using like a photonic measurement or using a light based measurement, which a lot of these tools are doing, is still inadequate for accurate detection of things like hormones.

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[Dr. Josh Axe]

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[Dr. Josh Axe]

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[Dr. Josh Axe]

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[Dr. Josh Axe]

Hey, I want to totally shift gears. I want to talk about spiritual health impacting physical health. And this is something I've really respected about you. I've loved following your kind of journey in this in terms of what you've been teaching and. But I know when I first met you this wasn't necessarily as much of a topic conversation, but I want to say it was probably like seven, eight years ago where I saw you start talking a lot more about your faith and how prayer and meditation on the Bible really have impacted you in a really deepened way. Had you always been like that? Was there something that kind of happened? An experience or something that happened that kind of caused you to have an even greater shift in looking towards your faith and incorporating that even in your health practices.

[Ben Greenfield]

Oh yeah. I went through the same process that I think a lot of people go through. Not that you have to take this journey, it's just something that, that happens to a lot of humans and that is that you climb the wrong mountain. Yeah, you climb the wrong mountain. Meaning that you spend a great deal of your life's energy, often in your teenage years, your 20s, sometimes your 30s, pursuing financial wealth, providing for the family, building a business a lot of times. And I think part of this is related to the absence of a formative ceremonial rite of passage, especially in the upbringing of a young man. You also tend to spend a lot of time conquering things, like doing lots of, like, bodybuilding or triathlons or Spartan races or even from a secular standpoint, just amping up your. Your body count and your sexual prowess to prove to the world that you're a man. Because no one actually ever, like, put that stamp on you, because that's just. It's not baked into Western cultures, baked into our family now, but not in the Western culture. And I. I took that path, right? Like, I. I was working a lot on my business. I was flying all over the world. I was obsessed with, like, you know, people knowing my name and building up my. My podcast numbers and. And justifying to myself that the family was good because I was sending home the paycheck. And there would come a time when I would, you know, once I'd really built that foundation of business, have more time to hang out with my family or to grow the relationship between me and my wife. And, of course, 2020 hindsight, and most everybody knows this deep down inside, it's paradoxical to be working towards supporting the very people in your life who you hold most dear while simultaneously neglecting them emotionally or spiritually or even just from. From the standpoint of a man failing to be a good leader for the home, failing to set the right temperature in the home because you're just not around. In the case of me, I was just like the fun older brother type of figure that, you know, that hung out with my boys, but that really wasn't a true father figure because I was just too obsessed and too busy with other things. And then when it came to my relationship with my wife, that was very similar, right? Just, like, growing distant from her because I was pursuing too many other things that I thought would fulfill climbing the mountain that I thought would be a good mountain to climb. And then anytime that you are pursuing things like money or power or fame or sex or cars or homes, those are all basically, for most people, idols that tend to eventually get put ahead of God, ahead of your relationship with God. And so you grow distant from God and you grow distant from people. And there is this idea that has been championed by ancient philosophers like Pensis or Augustine or authors like C.S. lewis, that we have this eternal hole in our soul, right? This longing for something infinite, this longing for something eternal that I think is hardwired into us because we were created by an infinite creator made in God's image, given God's stamp. And because of that, we have this deep desire to be connected to something eternal. And when you rip that away or take that out of your life, then that gnawing is never full because there's really. If you think of having, like an infinite hole in your soul or this eternal longing, what are the two things that in our daily existence are actually eternal, immortal elements that we interact with on a daily basis or have the opportunity to interact with on a daily basis? I would say it would be God and people. God and people. And you mentioned the Bible. If you read the Bible, Jesus says that the two greatest commandments, if you want to sum up all the law and the prophets, it's to love God and to love other people. And Jesus knew that everything else in the end would be unfulfilling if those two aspects were not the foundation of your life. I took until I was like, 33 years old to come full circle to that realization that if I was not fully present for my family and prioritizing them, and if I was not building my relationship with God through prayer, through scripture, through church attendance, through. Through caring for the soul just as much at the time as I was caring for my body and my business, that I would never be fulfilled. You know, now I'm happier than ever. But it took kind of like. It took a lot of dedication at home to be the father that I knew I should be, be the husband that I should be. And then also took a lot of just reconnecting to God through prayer, through scripture.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

You know, I mean, I think every. Every male could resonate with that. I mean, I think that there's this element of. It's. It's a. I was on a men's. I have this amazing men's group I. I meet with monthly, and we do a trip together once or twice a year. And we were in Park City, and we were all having this discussion around a John Elder book. And the John. John Elder kind of puts it like this. You have these sort of different phases of being a man, but once you go to one phase, you don't necessarily leave the other phase behind, but there's more of a focus on it. And he talks about going from a warrior phase to lover phase to king to more of the sage mentor sort of phase.

[Ben Greenfield]

I think there's probably a jester in there somewhere.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

It's probably earlier on.

[Ben Greenfield]

It's like college.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Exactly. Yes, exactly. And so it's.

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But it was really good.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

And all of us shared, hey, here's where we're at. Or here's what we're struggling with. With that type of. With being the king or the mentor or, you know, or the. Or I'm still trying to be the warrior, you know, I'm still trying to, you know. You know, prove myself even now.

[Ben Greenfield]

Right?

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

Right.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah. And.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

But I want to go back because this is such a big thing. You said something earlier, and I want to hear about how. How you now are doing this with your boys, because I think a lot of men. I know in the. You know, when you're reading the Bible, in the Old Testament, in the Jewish world, when a boy turns 13, there's this sort of, you're a man now, right? And there's a bar mitzvah. There's a ceremony around it. And a lot. There's a lot of other cultures throughout history, and it tends to be the age 13, 14. It tends to be right around there. I am really grateful, though. I definitely had a dad who was an old military guy who, like, challenged me to do things, and my dad kind of just naturally did that in ways. But I can think of most men, they never had anything like that, you

[Ben Greenfield]

know, a rite of passage. A rite of passage. Some. Some kind of a defined crucible that. That. That is a recognized time that you have become a man. You know, you're given more responsibility, recognized as a more contributory member of the household or the community or the. The city or the church or whatever body that you happen to be in. And women have that forced upon them by nature. Women have a distinct biological experience at some point, usually during their teenage years, where they get onset of menses and suddenly they can produce other members of the human race. Right. Men don't really go through that time. We don't just wake up one morning and not to be crass, but our balls have dropped and our voices have lowered, and we're just like, oh, I'm a man today. Women, it's kind of just like happens. And I still think that in many cases, we don't go about recognizing that for women in the right way. You know, I think mom and grandma and a girl at home should actually have some kind of, like a ceremony or a celebration or like, this is important. And this goes beyond just Something annoying that you have to deal with now and, you know, stay home from school a couple of days because, you know, you're, you're cramping or having a hard time or whatever. With men, nature doesn't force a rite of passage upon men in most cases, unless there is an intense period of survival or famine where, you know, that boy has to go off and like, kill an animal to feed the family. Right? Yeah, that doesn't happen most of the time and, you know, whatever. Downtown la, to the random high schooler. So in, in our family, we have programs, specific rites of passages that occur for a Greenfield young man. Specifically what we chose to do. And this wasn't just like, I didn't randomly come up with this. I talked with a lot of legacy builders, a lot of entrepreneurs who had done similar activities with their sons. My sons went to a wilderness school and camp every year with a company called Twin Eagles, where the guy who runs that company, Tim Corcoran, is also very big on rites of passage, especially for young men. So I learned a lot and soaked up a lot along the way. So by the time my sons were, were 12 and my wife had pretty much figured out what we were comfortable with and what would be formative for them. So what we DO is at 12 to 13 years old in that timeframe is a rite of passage into adolescence. And for them, the rite of passage into adolescence was a three day wilderness excursion solo, still supervised by, in this case, the wilderness organization that we were working with, but a time for them to go off, face their fears, you know, start a fire, you know, not have access to food, and face, you know, face the wilderness and come back and be recognized afterwards. You know, we had a party with the family members and grandma and grandpa and the cousins and nieces and nephews and had a, you know, a special fire ceremony. And so that was step one. Hey, like you have become a teenager now, and that's important. And along with that, like, they get more household chores, they're doing a lot more with dad. They started like, shadow me at work in my office. And it's basically baked into or programmed into the calendar of that young individual's timeline at 16 years old. And they knew this for two years leading up to 16 years old, their responsibility was to leave the house for three months and not come back. No money from mom and dad. You can choose your adventure. They originally were going to do like some kind of an international trip to Europe. And then they realized that the price of a plane ticket was going to drain Most of their food budget for three months. So they, they got a used car. I worked out a loan relationship with them where they have twin boys. Yeah, right. Yeah. They're 18 now and they're not in prison yet or dead, should anybody wonder if this stuff actually works. And they left the house for three months in their car with a tent, like a roof tent on the vehicle, a little Honda Pilot. And they drove from Idaho down to Arizona and back, stopping at national parks, you know, grabbing chicken and beans at a Walmart and, you know, sleeping out of their car. And they came back with a much deeper understanding of how it works when mom and dad aren't there to pay for stuff and you got to have your own budget and you know how to make campfire spaghetti for 10 nights in a row and. And they walked in the house, you know, in September of that year with a much deeper sense of responsibility, having left that summer, knowing, hey, like, we can't go back, so we just gotta go out and find an adventure.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Well, how is that on your wife? Because you have. I mean, she has these two twin boys that she's cared for and then they go off for that long.

[Ben Greenfield]

And she did have the Find my iPhone tracking feature. And she would look at that thing freaking like every morning, every night. She called him a couple times. She even. So she did get on a plane and flew to Arizona and surprise them in Arizona when they were down there where they stopped at a friend's house to visit and she hid in the closet and jumped out. And I was pretty jealous. I think that was actually when that would have been right about when you and I were in London. Oh yeah, last year. And then 18 years old or the 17 to 18 year old time frame is the final vision quest, the rite of pastures into adulthood. At which point when they come back from that, they're expected to contribute even more to the household as far as, like if they want to live at home, basically they have a certain number of chores and contribution that they need to make. They're expected to pitch in a lot more from that standpoint. We start to have deep discussions afterwards about marriage, about working towards getting the first home, about what it looks like as far as. Cause we have a whole. This is an entirely different discussion, a whole Greenfield family trust and Greenfield family constitution. And they can technically borrow against the money in the trust for something like starting a business or, or taking a loan out for their first home. So those discussions start to happen after that final rite of passage into adulthood, which for them was a 10 day vision quest. So kind of similar to the 12 to 13 year old rite of passage, but this was longer, more intense and that was kind of like the final icing on the cake as far as hey, here's your stamp of manhood. And even though again they're 18 years old, they're not proven models of success. But the objective here, back to the reason you would do this in the first place, is that they spend a lot less time trying to prove to the world that they're a man through conquests of money, business, power, fame, girls, whatever, and instead are set to start a family, settle down, start a business.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

One of the things that's so powerful about this is there is a plan in place to support them growing and overcoming these obstacles and facing these things, you know, Cause it's like, okay, if you don't do that, it's this saying that we've had before. If you don't tell your kids about sex, the world is going to. If you don't tell your kids about how the world is going to. I would much rather have a godly father and mother teach their kids about this than someone in the world that's going to try and take advantage of them.

[Ben Greenfield]

Absolutely, absolutely. You educate your children about the consequences of any decision that they might make and then let them make an educated decision or choice about what it is that they're going to do. And you're right. Like I'd rather have, I call it lazy parenting. Right. When you just say no to your kid. We don't do that. No, we don't talk about porn. No. We don't eat gluten. No. We don't discuss alcohol. That is for adults. I would much rather like a parent take the non lazy approach and sit down and educate their child about the effects of porn on neurotransmitters and objectification of the opposite sex and the sex slavery industry and talk about alcohol and what it does to the liver and how it's metabolized and what amount is the appropriate amount and what amount is too much and you know, rinse, wash and repeat for health choices, for nutrition choices. But it takes time. And I think a lot of parents, I don't want to throw parents under the bus, but I think a lot of parents just don't take the time to sit down and educate their kids and create a responsible, free thinking individual.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, well, I think there's a couple reasons why a couple challenges. One, they've never had it done for them and so they almost don't Even know. I mean this isn't even on most people's radar. So I think that's one challenge. I think the other one is that they're. We're so busy today and have so many things filling our calendar that actually most people think their priorities are one thing, but it's actually something different.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Right. And so I think there's a lot. It kind of reminds me of that parable of the seeds, right. The sower sowing and then there's weeds coming up around them, choking them off. Some the soil, it doesn't get planted deep enough. So the root. So I. I kind of see that as being one of the reasons why. But I absolutely love that you do this and I encourage everybody. This is something actually I was just talking to my mother in law and Chelsea about recently is we're talking about doing a. Because we had some friends of ours do this. Go through and create our family values in a family crest. Like really go through and kind of plan out all of this stuff. And thinking about this throughout the. Just for our girls, the future of their lives.

[Ben Greenfield]

Oh yeah. Bird's Eye overview is you sit down as a family and you and your spouse and your children, if you have them discuss what your values are the same way as you do. If a business, whether it's love, honor, transparency, honesty, kind of like a word cloud of family values, preferably no more than 10, you can use those to form a mission statement. Wordsmith that into a mission statement that you can hang on the family living room wall or whatever that defines what it is that we do. Elements of ours would be like we are content no matter our circumstances, or we exist to help people find deeper meaning and purpose and fulfillment in life. And these are all just like elements of what it means to be in our case, a greenfield.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

And then you can visualize that mission statement graphically with a logo and. Or a crest which is an actual. Like we have a crest. Like it's a physical big piece of metal like a shield that hangs in our study that that shows all the different things that we hold dear and that we do together and that we stand for. And even has elements of the family history. Like the lasso around the logo that reflects my wife's Montana rancher background. Or the, you know, the big table with the chairs in the upper left corner that reflects our love for entertainment or entertaining and relationships and community building. And then in that same constitution. I mean, use your imagination wherever you want. You can do what we do for Christmas, what we do for Thanksgiving, what we do for Easter, what we do for New Year's, the traditions that are baked into that daily rituals. Like we have a 7am morning family huddle and a 7pm family dinner meeting. We have our end of life and memorial plan wishes in there. Each member of the family. Like, here's what I want my memorial service to look like and you know, the food I want served and the ambiance and the music that I want played, which is a super powerful exercise for a child or a young human being to go through all the way down to. Like, here are the numbers for the family insurance agent, the family banker, if you have one, or the family financial office. And here's a link to a Dropbox or a drive folder with the actual family trust in there if you want to take an even deeper dive into how we manage money and what happens when you're 18 and what happens when you're 21. So the Constitution is basically like a living document and we come back and revisit ours on an annual basis. And then that feeds into the family trust to help define what wealth in the trust might be used for, whether it be a business or, you know, or what it can't be used for. Like a trip to Vegas.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, I love that, man. I love that. I want to switch gears a little bit and ask you continue on with the part of the spiritual conversation here in terms of what are the practices that you have that you felt like allowed you to become more Christlike, you know, really grow in your faith? What are maybe the top three practices you've noticed have been helpful for that?

[Ben Greenfield]

Number one would be God's Word. What that looks like for me and for us as a family is I listen to the Bible every morning. Kind of like our mutual friend Jordan Rubin. I know he does a lot of that as well. That's the very first thing that goes on. It's downloaded the night before. I do the daily audio Bible so the phone doesn't have to go on at all. So no text messages, no distractions. But that's usually about a half hour reading. And then I finish that with my own personal prayer time. And that's literally just like five to 10 minutes of laying things out before God, thanking God for the day, laying out like any anxieties or concerns I have about the day, praying for the family. And then after that I am kind of like diving into some morning self care rituals, foam rolling and stretching. Then at 7am I gather the entire family and I lead them through the scripture and we Just read chronologically through the entire Bible. So, so good. But we're back in second Thessalonians right now. I use a study Bible. I'm like a Bible collector. I've got like the, the Cultural Studies Bible, the Word on Fire, the Founding Fathers Bible, the ESV Study Bible. And so even though we did devotionals for a long time, like, the one that has really stuck for us that we just haven't moved from for three years is just reading the Bible in the morning. And I teach the family out of the Bible. And I'm learning a lot as well because I'm going through footnotes and references and here's what this means, and, you know, here's what this would have meant in the cultural context of that time. And then we pray together. And once a week we switched up and just do a worship music dance party, which is great, like just raising our arms and dancing around the backyard, the patio, or the living room to, you know, some, some epic worship song. And then we all memorize Scripture. Every night, about 9, 9:30pm we all gather in me and Jess's room or mom and Dad's room and we memorize a section of Scripture. Like right now we're memorizing Ephesians 15. And we have done that for five years. So we've memorized a lot of the Bible. And that's important not only to train parts of the brain, that in an era of GPT and Google and AI, we don't use our memory as much. So I'm a big fan of like, you know, language and music and memorizing quotes and memorizing scripture. So more importantly than that, training a specific area of our brain, it's allowing us to place God's Word on our hearts, which I think is important. It's so good to call upon in a time of need or stress.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, I mean, I noticed for me, when I. I mean, if somebody to ask me, hey, what is something that just radically changes your day more than anything? I mean, if I take the first, even if it's five minutes, but five, 20, 30 minutes of my day with God, my entire day goes differently than if I don't. You know, I noticed this in college because in college when I rededicated my life to Christ, and so I woke up every morning, started praying and reading my Bible, just those two things together, and it was like, wow. And if I would not just do that and kind of continue to have the Holy Spirit's presence with me throughout the day, it was like, man, I'm Reacting differently to every single thing. I'm thinking different. I'm walking with this greater sense of like. And you can feel this, right? Like. There's a sense of. Even the brainwaves of like. I would call them probably theta waves, but there's this sense of like, almost more of this meditative state you're carrying with you throughout the day.

[Ben Greenfield]

You've cast your cares upon something that's. That's greater than you, that's outside of you. And for people who have not started their day with God or with spiritual care, the closest approximation would be how you feel during a day when you don't do something like a morning workout or a morning sauna, cold plunge, if that's your thing, versus how you feel when you've done that thing. You manage stress better. And I think the best of both worlds, back to the reasons of eternality that I was talking about earlier, is to do both. I work out, I pray, I read the Bible, I connect with family. I'm ticking all those boxes before I'm jumping into any amount of formal, deep work. So that's really how I manage things. And just like the rite of passage or the Constitution, it's all scheduled in, like, it's got to be part of the routine. It doesn't just randomly happen. And you should get to the point where it feels weird not to read the Bible or listen to the Bible in the morning. It feels like you're missing something. And it feels weird for the family just to have not gathered at the beginning of the day, or weird for there to be no formal family dinner, prayer, or song time. Just like, it would feel weird to not work out or to not eat protein with lunch or, you know, any of those other things that are part of our health routine.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, yeah. And I encourage everybody write it down and then just start doing it. Right? Write it down and then start doing it. And then also, I mean, it's the greatest urge to, you know, run to whatever the emergency is. It's almost like, I mean, there is a. There's always an emergency. Exactly. There's a hormonal thing.

[Ben Greenfield]

Elon Musk, right? He says he turns on his phone in the morning, just looks for an emergency.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, it's so true. It's so true. You know, you're talking about your morning routine as well. I'm curious for you. You know, I take a lot of stuff, you know, and I know you do as well. One thing I think that my patients have appreciated is I kind of lay out what they should do. But in addition, a lot of times I say listen here, these are the most important in ranking order. You know, if you're only going to take one thing, take this. If you're only going to take two things, take this. This is hard for people like you and me, but if I gave you your top five supplements in ranking order, what are your top five in ranking order?

[MyBloodWork Advertiser]

I would let you do bonuses at the end.

[Ben Greenfield]

But I really want to let you know, just like dihydrogen monoxide, like drink, drink 32 ounces of water.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I want to get into the hydrogen. I want to get that next.

[Ben Greenfield]

For sure. Yeah. So I do start every day with, with giant 32 ounces of water. And that water has minerals in it. So minerals would be one I think all the more important considering the fact that we live in an electrical soup that causes a little bit of excess calcium to bleed into the cell. And so you can offset that with magnesium, with minerals. There's other reasons to start off the day with something like that. But I would say minerals would be one. I would say if we look at long term history of good human clinical research for a variety of issues that two others, like if we wanted to say 2 and 3, it would be some kind of omega 3 supplementation, fish oil or algal oil and creatine for the former. For the fish oil. I actually don't take fish oil on any days that I'm eating fish anyways. And there's like a solid like three or four days of the week. You don't have a big cut of salmon, you don't have to double up. But Omega 3 supplementation, and even paying attention to your omega Quant, your Omega 3 index is pretty important, like trying to have that above 8% if you're able to test it. So minerals, omegas, creatine. I'm biased on this one because I have a company that, that sells it. But I think a lot of people just don't get enough protein. And you can fill in the gaps with essential amino acids. And I take like, I've already had 30 grams of essential amino acids per day and getting somewhere in the range of like anywhere from 10 to 40 just to just for maintaining muscle protein synthesis when it's difficult to get quality protein. I do a lot more of it when I travel, particularly because I have more access to quality protein at home. But I would put amino acids in that bucket. And then we discussed some different peptides. And even though it wouldn't technically be classified as a peptide, I'm Increasingly for the effect on cognition, on inflammation, on battling sleep deprivation and overall cellular health. Becoming a bigger and bigger fan of some form of nad, whether it's NMN or NR or nicotinamide. I'm getting an NAD IV today, later on. And so you don't have to do the IV route. There are patches. You can take it orally.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

But I would say minerals, fish oil, creatine, amino acids, and NAD would. Would be pretty big ones.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

That's a solid list. Yeah, that's a solid list. Yeah. And I think for everybody, you know, there's a. Again, there, there, there are. You and I are both into personalized nutrition. I think different things are great for different people. But that's a great list. I do think minerals, of course, we could definitely highlight magnesium on studies. What people are deficient in. That's a. That's a big one.

[Ben Greenfield]

That's a big one there as well. It's a tricky question because it's so personalized. Right. Like if you were coming to me and you just had a digestive enzymes and probiotics and. And bitters, or, you know, if you had immune issues. Right. We'd be focusing more on, you know, maybe I'd be pulling out vitamin D and vitamin K and Thymus and Alpha 1. And so it's tricky, but just like sledgehammer approach. Hey, if, you know, knowing nothing about you, if you took some of these, you'd probably feel pretty good. Those are a few.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Have you tested your testosterone and also have you. What would you say your top things in ranking order you've noticed for supporting testosterone?

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah, yeah. The biggies most people know about. Basically, nature doesn't want a human being to bring babies into the world in a time of stress or famine. Right. So excess carbohydrate restriction, excess calorie restriction, excess chronic aerobic cardio and stress, whether it's lifestyle or business or circadian rhythm stress or relationship stress would be the things that would dent testosterone. The base compounds that are necessary for the Leydig cells to actually make testosterone would be minerals, which you already mentioned, magnesium amongst those, zinc. Also fitting into that category, omega 3 fatty acids, vitamin D, creatine and boron. Right. So addressing any of those micronutrient or nutrient deficiencies would be number two.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Boron is the one that always surprises people that they're like boron. I haven't even heard of boron. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

Decent research on boron and testosterone, and it's not as sexy as tribulus or, you know, fadosia or any of these herbs that are sketchy but might work for some people definitely work for libido and some for blood flow. Testosterone is questionable. It's like, well, do you have more testosterone? Because this herb made you want to have more sex and more sex created a positive feedback loop of more testosterone, or is it actually increasing testosterone?

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

And then more. More sex. Or more weight training, which would lead me to the next one. Lifting weights with your legs, where there's a high concentration of androgen receptors. Even if you don't like leg press and deadlift and squat and lunges, weaving those in is pretty important. So don't be toothpick legs person at the gym. And then excess heat. A lot of people get confused about that potentially dinging testosterone when it's more of the sperm count thing. For my son's 18th birthday recently, I actually got them the ball cooling underwear for those reasons, because I want to have grandkids someday, and we do the sauna a lot. But anecdotally, there's a guy named Dr. Thomas Seager who sold me my cold plunge, and he's pretty bullish on this. The idea of regular cold exposure for the testes causing an increase in testosterone. And he has a lot of anecdotal evidence on that. It's difficult to find anything beyond just old Russian power lifter lore that there's something to that. But I can tell you I feel pretty anabolic. High libido, good energy levels crush a workout if I get cold, and I specifically get my balls cold.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

I've talked to several men who have done cold blunt, and I've had some of them say it's doubled their testosterone. I mean, I've talked to many.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then going beyond the basics, all the things that I just mentioned, let's say actual testosterone replacement therapy aside, which should definitely be something to table until you're at least like 35, 40 years old. And for obvious reasons beyond your childbearing years. There are certain things that can increase LH and FSH production and increase testosterone production. Kisspeptin peptide would be one of those. Enclomiphene, HCG, or gonaderelin. All of those would be something that you normally work through a compounding pharmacist to get. But they can assist with raising testosterone to pretty appreciable levels without you actually diving straight into actual testosterone replacement therapy, which a lot of guys don't need to do. That's getting dropped off at the top of Mount Everest.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, yeah, I agree. For me, for testosterone therapy for men, it's like I want you to just put it off as long as you possibly can and would. I ran into Mark Sisson at the gym and we talked about this a little bit too. And I think even when he was on the show, we talked about, about it in terms of like. Yeah, I think when you get in your 70s, you know, or just later in life, the lowest dose possible. But generally I'm always a, let's do it with food, let's do it with exercise, let's lower cortisol to your point, let's do all those things and then let's try things like peptides, you know, let's, let's not, let's do it absolutely last. I mean I, and I'm seeing more and more guys jump on testosterone therapy in their 30s.

[Ben Greenfield]

I mean it's happening because, because it's easy, it's, it's. Yeah, yeah, it's like back to the spirituality thing. It's the same thing as just like vaping DMT to have a spiritual experience. Yeah, it's going to like it's going to drop you straight off at the top of Mount Everest. But because you didn't have to do a whole lot of work to get there in many cases, like is it going to last and is it going to be as deep and profound as like, as a true spiritual experience, like daily on your knees with God. So with testosterone, what happens is you get on testosterone replacement therapy via pellet or cream or gel or injection or now, you know, an oral or a nasal spray and you feel incredible and you often feel so incredible. You're like, well gosh, like this is where I don't need to like back squat and I don't need to like make sure I'm eating adequate fats and getting sunshine and doing a cold plunge or you know, taking vitamin D. I, you know, this is just my band aid for everything. So you see a lot of people on testosterone with inflammation, oxidation, poor lifestyle practices, poor sleep. So yeah, the testosterone is elevated, but it's kind of like a subpar elevation when it comes to overall health.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Well, if you think about it too, if they go to a doctor and their doctor was like, hey, just get on testosterone and they have an underlying non alcoholic fatty liver disease. You know, they've got, you know, inflammation, you know, just blowing up their arteries all the time. It's like a lot of times it is a band aid that's gonna lead to death. I mean there are side effect. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

And you could Make a case that, okay, once you get on it, you've got enough motivation to do all those other things. And that is true. But I think there's a greater number of people who just use it as a crutch.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I totally agree. All right, we are going to do rapid fire here.

[Ben Greenfield]

Let's go.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Okay.

[Ben Greenfield]

Okay.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

What is the best book you've read in the past year?

[Ben Greenfield]

Sahil Bloom's the Five Types of Wealth. I thought it fit into a similar category as like the Almanac of Naval Ravikan or Charlie Munger with a little bit of like a Tim Ferriss four hour workweek thrown in there. Time.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Well, I think several people bring this book up.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah, I think it's a good book. And we have Father Son book club. So every month me and my sons go through a new book and then we chat for five to ten minutes before dinner about the chapter that we read that day. And that was one of the, I think one of the books that was a highlight last year. That's so great.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

What is? If you could only live off of one food, what would that food be?

[Ben Greenfield]

I'm supposed to think like a scientist here. Are we thinking from like purely epicurean, hedonistic standpoint?

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Well, let me say this. Okay, so how about this? How about you got sent into a wilderness, right. And you know, you got to survive for a month. Yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

So I would probably go with, assuming I had access to fire, I would probably go with salmon.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, I would go salmon too. What is something that maybe your wife is doing health wise that she has said, wow, this is really helping her health.

[Ben Greenfield]

Natural hormone replacement therapy. She's on progesterone, dhea, estradiol and testosterone and it's very well and properly managed. She would be considered like still like pre menopausal, but just as far as like her libido levels, her energy levels, it's, it's like, it's a game changer for her. Like we recently went to Mexico and she's forgot everything and, and didn't have a great, you know, week down there, which is kind of like the catch 22 with hormones. Like when you're, when you're on them and then you don't have them, you don't feel so well. And then you have to accept the fact, well, if you're on them, you're probably going to be on them for your life unless you're doing some pretty intense bodybuilding style cycling. But I would say hormone replacement therapy is something that's pretty well ranked for her. Besides her little. She has a face laser thing she does every day. Yeah, yeah. Beyond my understanding.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

My wife, she loves gua sha so she does a lot of gua sha on her face.

[Ben Greenfield]

She's always got something on her face.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Oh yeah. No, I mean there's no doubt. Like for me, I don't do any, I'm very not, not that conscious there. My wife, I mean she spends more time, I'm sure most, most women do compared to men. So that's probably, probably normal. One exercise. What exercise do you feel? And it could be just a standard exercise that everybody's familiar with or something. Not. But like what is the type of exercise you're saying for your body that you feel like you've seen really good results with?

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah, kettlebell swings and push ups. Yeah, like honestly like if that's all I had was a kettlebell and body weight, I could work out all year long and those would be two of the top exercises.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

How do you stay healthy while traveling? What's something? What are a thing or a few things you always try and do?

[Ben Greenfield]

I carry as many elements of my morning routine at home as I can when I travel, meaning I get up, I listen to the Bible, I don't have red light therapy when I travel typically, but I'm usually out in the sunshine within 30 minutes of waking up. I have my big glass of water. I have most of the supplements that I mentioned that I travel with. I typically like we started this podcast at 10:30am A lot of times have people who want to start a recording at 8 or 9 or 9:30. I typically don't start anything until mid morning so that I can get my workout, my movement, my spiritual time in, take care of emails. So typically like starting the day later when I travel and then I do use a higher dose melatonin but just when I travel typically for the first couple days to realign the circadian rhythm. And I outfit my hotel room or my Airbnb with as many things as possible to make it more natural. Like I typically put a help of air filter in there and either like buying one and giving it to the hotel afterwards or having a company like Jasper ship one out, always have a whole foods order waiting with like glass, bottled water and macadamia nuts and some blueberries and just like healthy food so I don't have to eat at the hotel, restaurant or Starbucks or whatever. And then typically I have like grounding shoes like I'm wearing right now just for when I'm walking. Get in Touch with the planet.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah.

[Ben Greenfield]

And yeah, I would say grounding, earthing, light, fuel, movement, circadian rhythm, timing, and then just like managing stress and not trying to rush too much, especially in the morning, would be some of the biggie's.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

What do you think is the most underrated biohack that's out there today?

[Ben Greenfield]

I have been to a lot of medical clinics lately. I've been like doing a lot of consulting with a lot of medical clinics. Just like they want to chat with me about exercise or about like, you know, the layout of the facility or whatever. And I'm still surprised at how many of them like don't have pemf. I think for like chronic and acute injuries, inflammation. I use PMF every day at home. I have one of those like nice ones.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Like I have one by my centers, one while I'm like in bed. So good.

[Ben Greenfield]

I've got one by my desk and I'll put on like a knee or an elbow from a workout that morning. I think PMF is pretty underrated.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, I agree.

[MyBloodWork Advertiser]

Like eat.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Like if you have like a health

[Ben Greenfield]

clinic and you have an IV lounge, like why not just like make the chairs PMF chairs and have people like kill two birds with one stone?

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, yeah, I agree. Yeah, I've been doing it on my. I did the. One of the dumbest things I've ever done. Well, it wasn't intentional. I was swimming underwater. I'm trying to increase the amount of time I can swim underwater. And the pool was really weird to where it was kind of like it was curved, all the same color. My goggles were fogged up.

[MyBloodWork Advertiser]

Yeah, I thought I had one more stroke.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Yeah, I went right into the wall and I. And I've. I mean I had like stinging pain in both palms. My arms like my, my facets are still jammed. But I got back here and I started doing PEMF a couple times every day. Red light a couple times every day. Started doing, you know, BPC and peptides every day just to kind of get it to where it's needs to be. And then I'll get some, you know, regenerative kind of therapy, you know, in there as well.

[Ben Greenfield]

There's thera wave duos, like the vibrating peanut shaped roller that you can kind of roll up and down behind the net. Yeah, it's another good one. Although ultimately really the, the number one secret to being able to swim for long periods of time underwater. You know what it is?

[Dr. Josh Axe]

What?

[Ben Greenfield]

A snorkel.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Well, you know, that's one of the better jokes I'VE heard in a long time.

[Ben Greenfield]

I don't know if it's a joke, but it's just an observation. It's always worked for me. Wow.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

And you're, and you're funny. Wow, man. Well, hey, thanks so much for coming on the show. This is so fun. I know we're going to be together in London here at the Health.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Sometime this year again. We'll have to do another Russian, you know, Russian beating slash.

[Ben Greenfield]

Yeah.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Cold plunge slash, you know, sauna session. And I want to encourage people to check out more about Ben. Ben has an amazing website. He has a great social page, a great podcast. So if you want to learn more about Ben and follow his work, I want to encourage you. Just search him on all platforms, everywhere out there today. He's also got a couple of great books. One is Boundless and that book is all about upgrading your body and defying aging. And he's also got some great spiritual books. If you just go on Amazon.com and search Ben Greenfield, there are many, many books, things he's written, great products, just a number of things that he has that are out there that I think you'd really enjoy as well. And hey, if you're watching on YouTube, we'd love to hear from you. Are you a fan of Ben? Are you doing any of the biohacking or practices we talked about? And also, what do you think about his family practices with the male rite of passage and what he's done with his boys here? I'd love to hear from you there as well. So, hey guys, thanks so much for watching. Remember, the number one thing you can do here to support the show is subscribe and share. There are millions of people that don't know the truth about how to use food and lifestyle medicine to heal your body physically, mentally, spiritually. So thanks, Ben, for coming on today. Thank you for watching the show. We'll see you on the next episode. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with

[Ben Greenfield]

a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Please, for the love of everything good

[Ben Greenfield]

in this world, stop with Mint. You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

No judgments.

[Ben Greenfield]

But that's weird.

[Dr. Josh Axe]

Okay, one judgment anyway. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment

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