Cold-showers / Cold Exposure, Hormesis, and the Discipline of Adaptation
cold exposure is often sold through spectacle: colder water, longer holds, harder moments. The more useful question is quieter. What dose helps the body adapt without overwhelming it.
Cold-showers / Cold Exposure, Hormesis, and the Discipline of Adaptation Transcript
Good morning, Dr. Seager, and thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Uh I remember first learning about Morozko on Ben Greenfield's podcast a few years back and have been fascinated with the brand ever since. I know a lot of our audience is likely familiar with you or at least Morozko. But for those of us or not us, or those who in our audience who maybe aren't, would you mind just sort of running through your story, how you got interested in cold thermogenesis, and yeah, we can take it from there. I'd be glad to, Robert. You probably know I'm a professor of engineering at Arizona State University. So, it is a bit of a question as to how would I go from environmental engineering and studying civil infrastructure and disaster response and get into cold therapy. Well, my own personal story and the COVID lockdowns intersected in such a way that I said, "I got to change my whole career." I had started doing cold showers cuz I thought it would toughen me up. I'd never tried an ice bath until a former student of mine said, "Hey, why don't you come over? We're getting a Wim Hof style thing going." Now, I hated every cold shower I've ever taken, but the ice bath, totally different experience. I felt both the calm when I was in the ice up to my neck, and then I felt the euphoria afterwards. It comes with the dopamine and the noradrenaline. So, I thought this was fun. But I needed to take it really serious when I
needed to take it really serious when I got a lab report back that showed I had an elevated prostate specific antigen. So, this is classic, you know, I was in my early 50s and I'm overweight and I'm a sedentary college professor. Who what man in that position wouldn't have an inflamed prostate? But when I was googling around, I thought I'm going to die of prostate cancer. A PSA is not a a death sentence. That is an elevated PSA is associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer, but it's not a diagnosis of prostate cancer. It's just that my mind works in this catastrophic way where you spend 20 minutes on, you know, Mayo Clinic or something and you're like, that's it. It turns you into a hypochondriac. But the good thing for me was it got me into the cold every day. And I wasn't doing it because I was trying to be some extreme marathon triple triathlon athlete kind of guy. I was doing it because I was scared I was going to die and I didn't want to go to the urologist. I didn't want to have a biopsy. I didn't want to get a prostatectomy that would leave me with a lifetime of impotence. Instead, I said I'm going to do a little keto, I'm going to do cold, I'm going to get this inflammation down and it worked. Well, we started selling ice baths, Jason and I, in January 2019 and we thought it would be sort of a a fun side business, you know, on the weekends in the backyard. But Ben Greenfield put us in his first edition of the Boundless
in his first edition of the Boundless book. And the next thing you know, people started calling. They wanted to buy ice baths because there was nothing like this in the market anywhere. As you know, it was about a year later that the Western world shut down. They locked me out of my classroom. You know, the students went away to spring break and I had to teach them on Zoom afterwards and I had questions because I was not in favor of the lockdowns. I thought the whole two weeks to flatten the curve was a bunch of crap and I published an article saying so that medium censored and pulled down. It was AJK writer who convinced me that the data out of the CDC showed that COVID had been in community spread since the fall of 2019 and the lockdowns were pointless. What I didn't realize is people started to come after me. People said he should be canceled. The US News and World Report and NPR and Newsweek and the San Francisco Chronicle all did articles on me and for 15 seconds I was like the world's most notorious COVID denying professor. And I knew that my career had to change because I was up against something much larger. I was so naive, Robert. I didn't know the way our institutions of public health work. I didn't know how all of the policies were organized around keeping people sick and extracting from
keeping people sick and extracting from them as much money as possible. So I started doing more research on lockdowns, on COVID, and then on ice baths. How can people take charge of their own health? How can they, regardless of who's in the White House, regardless who's running HHS, regardless of who's director of the NIH or the FDA or the CDC here in the United States, how can people take charge of their own health? Turns out cold plunge therapy is one of the best ways because every single leading cause of death from chronic illness in the United States originates in metabolic disorder and cold plunge therapy will fix it. Now, my career is all about the science and experience of cold plunge. What can cold plunge do for type 2 diabetes? What can cold plunge do for opioid addiction? These are new proposals that I'm writing as a faculty member and I will submit to Jay Bhattacharya's new NIH and perhaps his emphasis on chronic illness will intersect and support my whatever this last 20 years of my career is going to be and we can turn the downward trajectory on US life expectancy back up. Yeah, that's a fascinating uh story and one I've heard before but it Yeah, it never ceases to amaze me sort of quite the sort of the turnaround you personally had with cold. Um I wasn't aware of the research
Um I wasn't aware of the research regarding sort of cold's effect on uh uh on opioid addiction and addiction in general and maybe I know that's something that's potentially all strip and maybe we could touch on later as well. Um beyond that though you being an engineer, it's something comes up again and again. It's something that generally amazes me. Um that there are just so many of you engineers in the wellness space. We've just had Tristan Scott on from Daylight Computers. I don't know if you're familiar with Tristan. He's doing a lot of very interesting work in the the EMF realm at the moment and uh sort of educating people on the the potential uh dangers of just excess non-native EMF exposure. Anyway, he's uh by by education an electrical engineer. And it's sort of Yeah, it's something I I sort of noted over the last couple of years. Again, there're just a lot of engineers sort of migrating over into the health field. Um obviously a lot of them uh a lot of you I should say uh as with most people I suppose sort of make their way into the sort of the health sciences broadly speaking because you go through your own health challenges and it sort of opens up that whole rabbit hole, doesn't it? But specifically engineers just seem to make the transition so seamless seamlessly. And yeah, I'd love it if you could maybe elaborate on as to why you think that might be the case because yeah, I think that engineers bring a really fresh
that engineers bring a really fresh perspective to uh what we're doing. Uh sort of and by we I mean sort of traditionally trained chemists, pharmacologists, physiologists, etc. Um yeah. There are um there's a contrast between the way engineering works and the way medicine works. So, I'm going to talk about the origins and the evolution of my profession, environmental engineering, and then I'm going to contrast that with medicine. Environmental engineering, there's a great book called The Ghost Map because environmental engineering began with a map that Dr. John Snow put up on the wall of his office during the cholera epidemic in London. He put a pin in the map every single household that had experienced a cholera death. And he noticed that these pins clustered around one well in the city. So, he ordered people to go out the workers got to go out and remove the pump handle from that well so that nobody could draw water because he hypothesized that the water was contaminated. Sure enough, once the pump handle was removed, the cholera epidemic subsided. It was the polluted water that was killing people. Now, even though John Snow was a physician, this is an engineering approach. And now we need to mobilize the civil and environmental engineers to create clean and sanitary water and deliver it to every household so that it doesn't make people sick. Engineering has always been, at least civil engineering, in the service of the
civil engineering, in the service of the public. And public health has always been at the core of environmental engineering. But the way the engineer works is in the environment outside the body. Now, we're going to contrast that with medicine. The development of medicine, particularly in the United States during the 20th century, as as it was supported by John Rockefeller, didn't look outside the body for solutions. It looked inside the body. So, the engineers about clean air and clean water and the environment that the body is exposed to, but the physician became all about, "What do you put in the body?"as if you could heal from the inside out. This is the big debate between sanitation and vaccines that we just heard played out by the author of Dissolving Illusions on the Joe Rogan podcast. She points out that 90% It's more than that, but I forget the exact number. 90% of the measles fatalities had already subsided by the time the vaccine came along. And that was from basic sanitation. Engineers saved millions of lives at a time by creating a cleaner environment, whereas physicians save one patient's life at a time. We are at a point where what is happening outside the body is way more important to chronic illness than what is happening inside the body. You cannot vaccinate somebody against poor light hygiene or poor sleep habits or poor lifestyle choices. There is no medicine for a bad diet that is filled with seed
for a bad diet that is filled with seed oils and junk food. And so, the medical doctors are way past the point of diminishing returns. Antibiotics were a wonderful thing, you know, when they were first discovered and they present prevented uh death from infection. But, they do not promote health. In As a matter of fact, they come at the expense of health. And so, the engineering approach, let's control the light environment. Let's control the lifestyle and the uh stimulus that allows the body to heal itself, is diametrically opposed to the medical approach. Thank goodness I don't have the handicap of a medical degree now that I'm in this health and wellness space. The other wonderful thing about being a PhD, rather that is a doctor philosophy rather than a doctor of medicine, is that we learn research. In medical school, you learn what drugs to prescribe when. But in a doctoral program, because it's a research-based degree, we learn how to create new knowledge that is driven by data. Too many physicians get locked into misconceptions that they were taught in medical school. They don't have time to read scientific journal articles. They don't have time to do research. And so they spend their entire careers. This could be 30 or 40 years based upon knowledge that is out of date. One of the classic examples of this is the misconception that elevated
this is the misconception that elevated testosterone will increase your risk of prostate cancer. The theory is because testosterone is anabolic, it promotes cell growth. Anything that's anabolic could promote the growth of tumor cells. But it the data says exactly the opposite. Dr. Abraham Morgentaler is really good on this. He says, "No, high testosterone promotes systemic health and it protects against prostate cancer. So every physician that has been prescribing testosterone suppression to his male patients who are concerned about the risk of prostate cancer has been doing them harm instead of good because they don't keep up on the production of new knowledge." The future is probably not going to be going back to living in caves. I live, you know, in a high-rise apartment building in the hottest city in North America, downtown Phoenix, Arizona. I'm not grounded. I'm so far from the electrons in the earth, you know. I I don't have the ocean to go swimming with the cold water and the salt. I'm 2 hours away from the forest. Where am I going to find the natural environment? And I'm not about to move. I love my job. I love teaching in Tempe. I love, you know, my career as a professor. This is where it is. What I need to do is bring the light, bring the cold, bring the forest, bring nature to me, to my apartment. So, I have my red lights. I have my green lights. I have my Morozko. You can sort of see it over
my Morozko. You can sort of see it over my shoulder. It's out on my balcony. The best thing that you can do is go swim in the Pacific Ocean. But, the next best thing you can do is get into your Morozko. This is the role of the engineer is to build the technologies in the machines that empower people to deal with the dysfunction of our highly techno technological sort of Western society that's full of blue light and full of thermal pane windows and full of heated leather SUV seats, all designed to keep us comfortable and to contribute to chronic illness. Yeah. Now, it's you raise a number of good points here. And I suppose fundamentally it comes down to engineers being able to apply first principles thinking to what is otherwise sort of viewed as a sort of a very reductionist set of issues by sort of physicians, I think. And as you pointed out, they're essentially Maybe that's a bit of a blanket statement, but they physicians are obviously trained fundamentally as pharmacologists. You identify you associate drug with a certain condition, but you don't look past that. And yeah, it's you you also spoke to sort of this idea of terrain theory, i. e. solving the problems that create illness. We recently hosted Dr. Jenny Goodman on on the podcast who's really uh at least in the UK along with another gentleman called Adam Parker. Um they really are sort of raising
Um they really are sort of raising awareness of the fact that environment um and environmental issues are driving um the development of so many of the chronic diseases that we sort of face as a society today. Um your high levels of PFASs your favorite chemicals that sort of uh sort of saturate cells and create all sorts of endocrine dysfunction all the way through to Yeah, uh everything you mentioned light and air pollution that then drives uh mitochondrial dysfunction. Um People online say that Rockefeller industrialized medicine in the United States because he wanted to sell more petrochemicals, uh you know, in the form of drugs. That never made any sense to me because the amount of material in the pills is so much smaller than the amount of material in the jet fuel or the gasoline or the whatever. Never made any sense said he was looking for a market for petrochemicals, but here's what does make sense. The Industrial Revolution relied on a certain model, a certain philosophy or an ethic. And the ethic goes like this, we're going to build a factory. That factory is going to poison the workers. That factory is going to poison the community. It's going to poison the neighborhood. How do we get away with this? We're going to blame the workers for being sick. We're going to blame the people in the neighborhood and we're going to treat instead of at the smoke stack or at the outfall, instead of fixing the factory and the pollution that it is creating that makes people sick, we're going to build this entire medical establishment and say, "Well,
medical establishment and say, "Well, what kind of drug can we give people that would allow their bodies to withstand the poisoned environment that my refinery created." I Now, I've never met Rockefeller. I don't know what was on his mind, but the history of of justice and environmental engineering is replete with these examples of where industry for the sake of turning a larger profit is poisoning its own workers and its own customers in this blind way of thinking we must reverse the burden of proof and make it somebody else's fault that they're sick. I'm tired of it. COVID was the epitome of this. If you don't get vaccinated, if you don't social distance, if you don't wear a mask, all these pseudo-religious superstitions that are refuted by data, that are at odds with reality, were um propagated as myths to try and shame people into political conformance. And I'm still kind of angry about it. Yeah, I know. I I don't blame you. It's something I I can't really speak to. Um at least not from my perspective. It's something I never got that involved in. But yeah, it it does. It makes sense and I fundamentally agree with you. Um I think we've really gone a bit on tangent. So which is one of my sort of party tricks. That's my specialty. Yeah. Well, there's two of us. We're properly screwed now. Um so before we
properly screwed now. Um so before we sort of go Yeah, before we can sort of head down that rabbit hole, maybe we could sort of come back to Morozko. Um Yeah, I'd love to sort of explore a bit more about Morozko specifically uh sort of the brand and sort of and the name and as well as the logo. Um I looked up Morozko it it's it is a unique name. It's it's not something that sort of you would just think of off the top of your tongue maybe. As I So I looked it up and from what I gather it means Father Frost in Russian there's a fairy tale associated with it. Um but would could you sort of just maybe help us sort of understand your thinking there? Um just how you came up with the name Morozko and then yeah. At first it seemed like a really stupid thing to do, Robert. You know, we're going to found a company. And what we should have called the company was besticebathforyou. com or something totally Chinese and literal and Google would have found it and you know, people would have like SEO'd their way to our page. Yeah. We didn't want that. We wanted a metaphor. We wanted to the the name of the company to be attached to meaning so that when you get in the ice bath and you experience that sympathetic nervous system activation, you feel that fight or flight response, you know, you remind yourself, why are you there? Then the parasympathetic kicks in. It only takes about 30 45 seconds for the dive reflex to overcome the gasp reflex. You take
to overcome the gasp reflex. You take control of your breathing and you find a sense of calm. And when you come out, of course, you feel like you have superpowers. So we stumbled across this Russian folktale. This is Morozko. Morozko is the winter warlock. And the folktale is a way of kind of trying to convince Russian children to do their chores, you know, if you're not a good boy or girl, then Morozko from the winter warlock will freeze you to death and punish you. But the way the folktale goes is there's the evil stepmother and she sends the stepdaughter out to gather firewood in the middle of winter thinking well, she's going to freeze to death and never come back. Morozko finds her and sure enough, he's about to freeze her. This is his forest and she doesn't belong in it. But he pauses for a second and he says, "Aren't you scared, child?" And she says, "No.""But don't you know who I am, child?" And she says, "I know you very well, Morozko." And he says, "But aren't you cold, child?" And she says, "I'm warm enough." And she continues to root out through the snow looking for sticks that maybe her family could burn to stay warm. And Marozko thinks, "What a brave child. You know, what an obedient child. I will take her to my castle. I will make her a princess." He bestows upon her all of these gifts. She returns home as a princess. And the stepmother says, "Well, I'm going to send my own daughters, my biological daughters out there in the woods." She sends her two out there and they got to go, you know, find meet Marozko. And he says, "What the heck all
Marozko. And he says, "What the heck all these little girls running through with my forest? Aren't you scared?" And they say, "No, we're not scared." He goes, "But don't you know who I am?""Yes, we know who you are, Marozko." He says, "But aren't you cold?" And they say, "Dang right I'm cold. Where are my gifts? Make me a princess." Freezes them to death. The moral is when you get into the cold water and you do it with grace and you you sort of stay in control of yourself, you do it without complaint, you remember why you're there, the cold then will bestow upon you these superpowers. You will emerge from the ice bath feeling like royalty. So, we did that. And for, you know, 18 months, Google entirely ignored us because Google doesn't do metaphor. You know? Yeah. And then we're now, I think, the number one search term result for four different misspellings of Marozko. And it was the article, The Curve Is Already Flat, that really put us on the map. The irony of COVID was that AJ K wrote this article. Uh it was a critique of lockdowns. It went viral. 2 million views in 24 hours. Medium put it down. We put it right up on our article. And so, it brought people to our website in a way that Google said, "Oh, there must be something interesting going on here." And then domain authority and what and all the whole the business can build out. Since then, a A
a of other cold plunge companies have emerged. And the typical business model here is for someone in the United States to go on Alibaba, find a cheap Chinese product, create a website where they say it's the ultimate new revolutionary technology and the benefits of the cold plunge, markup what they're buying off Alibaba, you know, by eight, nine, 10 times, buy a bunch of Google ads, and then sell millions to the public that doesn't really understand what's going on. It seems like that was a really successful business model for a couple of years, and probably it's over. Now the market is sort of sorting itself out. The shady competitors, the charlatans, and the criminals are having a harder go of it. And so there's a few brands that really care about quality and what they're doing that hopefully will come out of this, you know, industry shakedown intact. I hope Morozko's one of them. No, I mean it definitely will be. I mean, I've always thought from the beginning that the and I've obviously been in the UK. I've not had the opportunity to see one of your forges, but you can just tell that they are a quality piece of kit and that they are well designed. And when you look at the competition, they do. They seem flimsy and uh it doesn't take much research. I mean, just in the research I've done to note that more often than not, pumps fail. Um
more often than not, pumps fail. Um and but but parts leak and yeah, so I mean, I and and fundamentally you sort of you've made a name for yourself by sort of, as you said, having this medium article and being on on Ben Greenfield and and being mentioned on Rogan and yeah, and I I think you're you've built a brand that will definitely with with withstand the ages. And uh what you know what they say, there's there's no such thing as bad publicity. So, obviously uh I'm not sure about that. But, you asked about the logo. Um this was another sort of marketing misstep. I drew this logo. And now we're mixing our metaphors, because Morozko is Father Frost. And so, you might come up with a logo that looks frosty and a man, kind of like a mean Santa Claus or something. I didn't do that at all. Instead, I drew the Greek Hydra monster. So, this goes back to the 12 trials of Hercules. And one of them is he must slay the Hydra. The problem with the Hydra is when you cut one head off, two grow back. And this is symbolic of hormetic stress or resilience. This is the adaptive capacity in the individual that becomes stronger under stress. The Hydra, of course, comes out of the cold water. It lives in the swamp. And then it terrorizes the villagers until uh Hercules figures out how to defeat it. I wanted our venture to be like the Hydra.
wanted our venture to be like the Hydra. I wanted every bad and difficult thing that would happen to us along the way, and I knew it was going to be rough, to make us stronger, because we're adaptive. So, I built these mathematical metaphors and this Greek mythological metaphor into that. And I loved it so much. I didn't mind that it had nothing to do with Morozko. So, what happened was another company in Australia uh and and there's a good backstory to this founder uh Odin Ice Baths. It's a good job that they're doing making quality ice baths. They called it Odin, which, of course, Norse mythology, rather than, you know, Russian mythology. And they created a little logo. And the logo has these little serpents all over it. Somehow, Robert, we set the tone, the precedent. We established a template for the ice bath industry that didn't exist until Jason and I invented it. And then people started imitating our own marketing mistakes to the point where it's become normal in this business to do it this way. Yeah, you really have sort of created the industry in that sense. Okay, thank you. You satisfied my uh Mhm. Look up Brass Monkey. They're a bunch of fun. You know, cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey is a whole different metaphorical story. And they have a fun little monkey logo, too. Yeah, no I Yeah, I've seen Brass Monkey over here, too. They They're They're also another stand-up brand. Um yeah, uh
Um yeah, uh thank you for that. You satisfied my my inner entrepreneur. Um right. So, uh We we might as well get get into the topic of today's conversation, which is cold. And to start off with, I'd love to sort of start talking about some of the science behind cold. I think most who are listening to this pod podcast probably familiar with broadly speaking with what the benefits are of cold therapy, cold thermogenesis, uh etc. But um and yeah, that it can sort of help to to lower systemic inflammation, support hormonal health, which are topics I'd like to come back to later on. Before that though, I'd love it if you could sort of just give us a high overview. Um And what is happening from a a sort of physiological point of view when someone gets cold? What is happening, yeah, to sort of broadly speaking elicit the benefits that cold uh has on the body. There are two ways to categorize the body's response to cold. One is physiological, and this is principally through the metabolism. And then the second is psychological. So, let's talk the physiological first. What cold exposure does is maintain or recruit brown fat. There are two types of adipose tissue in the body. This is somewhat oversimplified, but for our purposes, it'll be fine. There's white fat, which serves the function of energy storage. There's some other functions,
storage. There's some other functions, too, but the white fat holds lipids, holds the free fatty acids for when you might need them to fuel your metabolism. Brown fat has a different function. Brown fat is full of thousands of mitochondria, which is what makes it a different color, and it is there principally for thermogenesis. Now, I say principally because it has some other roles, too, that I'm going to get to. It used to be that medical doctors thought there's no such thing as an adult human being with brown fat. Infants have it. Children have it. Because an infant doesn't have the muscle development to shiver to keep itself warm. It needs another mechanism of thermogenesis, and that's brown fat. But then medical doctors used to think, "Well, we all grow out of it, you know?" And as grown-ups don't have it anymore. Until a Swedish team of cancer researchers noticed symmetrical patterns on some of the PET scans. A PET scan is used to identify tumors. You um take in a radioactive glucose tracer, and because tumors uh preferentially up take glucose to metabolize via the Warburg effect, that radioactive tracer concentrates in the tumor, you run the PET scan, and now you can image a patient's tumor. But tumors are not symmetrical. They saw these other images, you know, around the base of the neck, a little bit around the heart, between the shoulder blades, and they're like, "We think this is brown fat." And someone at the Sloan Kettering
And someone at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York said, "No way. We've got 10, 000 of these PET scans. We're going to go through every single one of them. That can't possibly be brown fat." Sure enough, 95% of American adults scanned at the Sloan Kettering Institute had zero detectable brown fat. But 5% did. If you work an outdoor job in a cold climate, I don't know, maybe you're a lumberjack or a fisherman or a garbage man or something like that. If you get exposed to cold, your body will maintain that brown fat into adulthood because you need it to defend your core body temperature in the cold. You might say, "Well, uh Professor Zigger, you live in Phoenix, Arizona. You know, it never really gets below freezing here. So, what would you need brown fat for?" It is not just for thermogenesis. It is also an essential secretory organ that regulates metabolism. The brown fat is in constant communication with the thyroid. Without brown fat, the thyroid is prone to dysregulation. So, that could be Graves or that could be Hashimoto's. And there are now an accumulation of case studies of people who suffered from what their physician said was a chronic, degenerative, lifelong disease like Hashimoto's and reversed it with ketogenesis and ice baths. Because you re-recruit, you can even if you've lost all your brown fat, you can recreate, your body will beige white fat
recreate, your body will beige white fat by adding mitochondria and then turn it into brown fat if you keep up with your cold exposure. You can remodulate your thyroid function by restoring your brown fat. And that's not all. Brown fat's also associated with better brain health. There are neuroprotective factors like FGF, fibroblast growth factor 21, and brain-derived neuroprotective factor that are associated with increased levels of brown fat. So, what happens when you get into the ice bath is at first, your muscles are shivering because most people are not cold trained. Most adults don't have the brown fat, but you keep this up every day for 2 weeks. I've got some good before after PET scans from cancer patients who have sent them to me and said, "Look, I've been doing cold plunge therapy. My tumors are shrinking and I have brown fat on my PET scan." You keep this up every day for 2 weeks, you will recruit brown fat into your body, you will stabilize your thyroid function, you will protect your brain, you will improve your insulin sensitivity, and you will reduce your risk of chronic illness. So, that's the physiological. The other one is the psychological. Brown fat is highly innervated, which is to say that it's connected to the nervous system. And that's kind of unusual. Like, why would the brown fat need to be so responsive to the nervous system? It's the nervous system that activates the brown fat. When you first get into the cold plunge,
When you first get into the cold plunge, the sympathetic division of the s - autonomic nervous system is activated. This is the fight or flight response that I mentioned earlier. And it's puts you into panic mode. It is characterized by the gasp reflex. So, you get in and you're like, "What am I doing?" Give yourself 30 That being the You see it on the videos. Yep. The mammalian dive reflex, is that correct? That The mammalian dive reflex is different than the gasp reflex. The dive reflex is the parasympathetic division. Okay. It slows everything down. So, the gasp reflex revs everything up. It prepares you for battle or for flight. But the gasp Oh, sorry, the dive reflex slows everything down because at this point, I guess your body is convinced that you've got to go spear fishing or maybe you got to, you know, dive down into the bottom and get the lobsters or the I don't know, the muscles or whatever it was that our ancestors needed to do in the water during the ice ages when they needed the fish and the shellfish and they needed to forage in the cold water to survive. Our bodies, like all other mammals, are wired to slow down the heart rate, to slow down the brain waves, to prepare for that dive into the cold. These two reactions, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic,
the parasympathetic, have a way of building psychological resilience, of building adaptive capacity inside the human psychology to improve your response to stress. And we know, because we've measured heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is probably the best physiological measure of psychological stress. Heart rate variability is the heart's capacity to make these little microsecond adaptations in the pulse rate, that is the time between beats. And And this allows the heart to respond to stimulus other from the environment or challenge, uh, but even at a scale that could be your thoughts. And so you have an idea and it changes your pulse. You have a thought, a fear, an anxiety and it changes the way your heart works. So, we've got data on people wearing Whoop straps or or Biostraps or Oura rings that measure heart rate variability that show they have improved their heart rate variability sometimes three, four, five times because they were in a really bad spot to begin with by doing ice baths. Yeah, they're an amazing tool. Um, just one question there. You mentioned, um, going back to the dive reflex and talking, uh, do you think that cold potentially has an oxygen-sparing effect with regards to, um being able to sort of potentially utilize oxygen more efficiently when sort of in in a
efficiently when sort of in in a diving scenario. Yeah, this is a somewhat paradoxical phenomena. Um When you get into the cold, your brown fat becomes active to produce heat. And it will either use glucose or free fatty acids in the bloodstream as the energy source to make that heat. Because the it is oxidation of those metabolic substrates that produce the heat. This is a redox reaction. You think, "Well, oxygen consumption must be going way up." And that sort of makes sense. But paradoxically, oxygen consumption goes down, even though the brown fat is revving up. And you can use a continuous ketone monitor to show how fat metabolism begins almost immediately after you get into the cold plunge. Total oxygen consumption starts going down. And that is to conserve these resources while you're doing your dive. There's a big danger, though. Free divers will sometimes hyperventilate and so that they can break some record or they can compete more effectively in free diving. The hyperventilation will purge their bloodstream of carbon dioxide. The problem here is that your urge to breathe does not come from depleted oxygen levels. It comes from elevated carbon dioxide levels. So, if you do sort of a Wim Hof style hyperventilation or or you do the hyperventilation that free divers do before you get into the
free divers do before you get into the cold, you might suffer a blackout from oxygen deprivation long before your carbon dioxide returns to levels that give you the urge to breathe. This is a very dangerous. There are dozens of documented fatalities from people who have combined hyperventilation with cold plunge. And it could be a bath, it could be a pool, like even it's called shallow water blackout because once you lose consciousness, it hardly matters how deep the water is. If you pass out and your nasal cavity and your mouth is covered with just a couple inches of water, you drown and die. Never combine hyperventilation with cold water immersion. Yeah, I think that's very important for the listeners too. I think a lot of people will also sort of naturally try and reproduce a lot of what figures like Wim Hof try practice which is obviously a lot of well, yeah, practice hyperventilation and then doing that in in cold obviously just carries that extra risk. Wim Hof is very good on this. Like he he would say, you separate your breath from the cold. You don't get into the cold and do your hyperventilation. But in some of the videos that people see online, they're like, "Oh, I I must do it like this."because they're emulating others or they've seen Wim breathe while he's in the water and it gives people the wrong impression. So this is why I'm emphasizing, structure your breathing. Always breathe when you're in the water, but use box breathing or use some other structured
breathing or use some other structured breathing approach. Do not hyperventilate in the water. Yeah. No, it's definitely something to note. I'm going to refrain from talking about exogenous ketones cuz I'm sure you have other stuff to do it today, but maybe that's something we can talk about another time. Um cool. Okay. Brilliant. Well, maybe we can get to ketones later on. Um I sort of like to sort of chat maybe more about the sort of the mitochondrial aspect and thank you for that by the way. It's great to sort of get that physiological breakdown as to what's happening. It just really I think provides the the listener with an idea of why these benefits can occur and do occur when you have a sort of a an a basic understanding, as I mentioned, of the underlying physiology at play. But quickly going back to the mitochondria, um obviously there's a mechanism there uh called PGC1-alpha, which I'm sure you're familiar with, which is Okay. I'm outside the body. Sounds like you're talking about something inside the body, where my knowledge is more limited. So, tell me about the PDQ1-alpha. PGC1-alpha. Uh it's a metabolic pathway in the body. Technically, it's mediated by uh hormesis. It's another hormetic stressor within the body uh that then drives a whole set of downstream metabolites to sort of start driving the biogenesis of mitochondria.
driving the biogenesis of mitochondria. Uh now upstream of that, there are there is other molecules. Um these so-called longevity genes and pathways, which these I'm almost completely sure you've heard of. Your your sirtuin and your AMPK, etc. Now, again, I I just I am a shamefully chemist, so I sort of look at everything through this sort of molecular reductionism. Um and sort of try and sort of equate clinical outcomes with with mechanistic inputs. But the way I see it, if you can sort of increase the production of mitochondria by sort of activating the these pathways that these things like AMPK and sirtuin, um it to me suggests very loosely anyway that there could be um some potential sort of links between um cold therapy, cold thermogenesis and and an increase in lifespan. And I know this is sort of definitely something you would have to speculate on. Um but lifespan and longevity are definitely trendy topics at the moment. Do you think that Yeah, and like I said, feel free to speculate cuz I suppose that's the best you can do. That there is anything Yeah, plausible to suggest that uh regular cold exposure could um improve uh lifespan in mammals? it does. This is not speculation.
it does. This is not speculation. Um Okay. And it is a hot topic because there are a number of celebrity physicians that are now making a living selling longevity supplements or longevity whatever the heck it is. It's like longevity has become its own brand. Yeah. Peter Attia was recently on the Thomas DeLauer podcast and it was really difficult to watch. Not because Peter is wrong about everything, but when he says, "Oh, you know, we did a white paper and we looked at it and there's no benefit between ice bath and longevity." He has not made the white paper available to me. I haven't reviewed it and he fails to explain to the audience that longevity studies in human beings are really hard to do. You know why? Because human beings live a long time compared to rats or, you know, fathead minnows or whatever the heck else we experiment on. And so typically, the people in the longevity space, remember I haven't read Peter's white paper, but typically what people in the longevity space do is they look at material biomarkers that they hope are associated with longevity. So we'll say, "Will ice baths uh extend telomere length?" You know, I'll give one question." Will ice baths modify DNA methylation?" There's another question. These are answerable questions. They are the wrong questions and sometimes there's nothing worse than the right answer to the wrong question. We know that every single leading cause
We know that every single leading cause of death in the western industrialized world originates in metabolic dysfunction. We know that ice baths fix it. So, how the hell is an ice bath practice that fixes your metabolic dysfunction not going to move the needle on longevity? Of course it will. Resolve your type 2 diabetes, that will improve your longevity just as one example. However, a Tiyana might say, "We're talking about people who are otherwise metabolically healthy. We're not talking about insulin resistant even though insulin resistance is present in something like 86% of the American adult population. We're really only talking Peter Attia might say about the other 14% who are metabolically healthy." And you could say, "Well, ice baths do nothing for their longevity." And I say that's a crock-a - hooy because people misunderstand longevity. You and I are both trained as physical scientists. Whether that's chemistry or physics. And the problem with this classic training is that it has a material fetish. Every discipline in physical sciences of course preoccupied with the physical world. What can I see through the microscope? What can I measure on the scale? This is the history of our professions. The challenge to that was thermodynamics because thermodynamics is not observable. There's no such thing as an entropy meter. You can only derive a a measure like a state variable like entropy by measuring other things. So,
entropy by measuring other things. So, thermodynamics, which is mysterious for most people even though Jack Kruse talks about it, thermodynamics takes you out of the sensory world that is this physical science fetish and it brings you into another level of abstraction. The original definition of entropy, and there are 27 different definitions of entropy in the scholarly literature, but the original definition was postulated by Clausius, who said it is heat flow over temperature. Entropy is best understood as a verb, as the difference between two states. It does not exist as a state property without a reference state. So, entropy is the change between two states. And this is a level of abstraction that I can barely even talk about in a podcast. I'm sure that your viewer retention just plummeted because if I go into my classroom and say entropy, all of my students close their notebooks and shut their eyes. Nevertheless, this is the key to well-being. Erwin Schr dinger wrote a book in 1943 called What Is Life? And essentially, life is a flow of what we're going to call negative entropy. It is a struggle against entropy. It requires a constant flow of the capacity for work. Life is a thermodynamic activity, and it is the metabolism that modulates that flow of negative entropy. It is the metabolism that organizes all the materials and the channels the energy through our body that keeps us alive. Looking at the material
alive. Looking at the material biomarkers of longevity is looking in the wrong place. You must look at the energy flows to understand life and to understand longevity. So, nobody is doing this. Mark Hyman is not doing this. Peter Attia is not doing this. David Sinclair is not doing Even Ben Greenfield is not doing this. What we really need is an energetic portrait of the body. It can be done. We can measure, we can observe with our instruments, but it sounds like, you know, some Sedona magnetic vortex woo-hoo. It sounds like astrology. When you say, "Well, I want to measure the energetic aura that is produced by the body." But it can be done. And it is associate There are patterns of energy release because we are electromagnetic creatures that are associated with good health and longevity. And there are those patterns that are associated with disease or ill health. This is where we should be looking for longevity, in the energetic patterns and not in the material patterns. I've looked at these biomarkers. There's just a scatter plot of data. There is no improvement on chronological age that comes from any of the expensive tests that you can get. I'm not saying that the tests are useless. I'm saying that at the population scale, there is no improvement on predicted mortality that come out of any of these expensive biomarker tests. So, they are toys at this point. What I'm really waiting for
this point. What I'm really waiting for is the person who's going to get your energetic signature so that they can assess your mitochondrial health. Yeah, I think there are a few tests on the market now that are looking into mitochondrial health uh directly or indirectly. I'm not sure just yet on the uh on how they function. And I know that there's also a lot of research being done into mitochondrial transplants and and other uh What's the word? therapeutic interventions on that side. Um I do think that it's You brought up a lot there, especially around entropy. And and I think that there's just so much missing again from the mainstream uh sort of medical model. And I think if I was to go back, I would definitely sort of I'd love to study what I did, but from the viewpoint of biophysics because I think physics sort of underpins everything that biology and chemistry fundamentally is. And unless you understand physics and what Jack Kruse goes on about, which I will be honest, 85% of which goes straight over my head cuz I think the last time I took physics was probably get no more than 1 / 3 of what that man says. Yeah, no, I sort of I try and I I never take anything that anybody says for granted. So, I listen and I fact-check, but I just don't have enough of the fundamental of a fundamental understanding of physics to really sort of go and sort of actually say be able to prove or disprove what he says. So, I think it's
disprove what he says. So, I think it's definitely something that we've got to sort of really as a society sort of take more of a hold of if we if we're going to and try and understand this issue regarding regarding health, we've sort of got to view it through the lens of physics and and understand it through the lens of physics almost before we understand it through the biological lens. Um Again, I think that would be a conversation for another day. Um Cool. Well, that was No, I I'd I'd love to pick your brain over it in the Yeah, if I ever sort of if I ever end up in Arizona, I'll definitely be taking one of your classes. Um that's all I can say. Please do. Come. Yeah, that would be amazing. Thank you. But, uh yeah, just sort of try and sort of get us back on track again, which is fully my fault, I'll admit. Um I sort of love to sort of I was going to talk about sauna, but we'll not do that. Um No, we're going to do that for a second, Robert. Um this is really irritating me. People in the United States, not just the United States, New Zealand, Australia, people in the English-speaking world talk about sauna as if it were only the heat. Now, if you go to Finland, they understand sauna is a Finnish word, and it means hot and cold. And yet, it's probably the only world word from the Finnish language that has been adopted in English, and we've adopted it wrong.
English, and we've adopted it wrong. Because now, especially in the United States, we talk about sauna as if it were only heat. And so, you've got people like I don't know, Stacy Sims is one and other people who are Huberman is even vulnerable to this misconception. If you just get hot for 45 minutes, you can expect this kind of improvement in more all-cause mortality. Because why? Because this Finnish study. When you go and you read the papers that come out of Finland, they all say sauna is hot and cold. They go roll in the snow. They go jump in the lake. And the cold gets subtracted. You cannot count on the data in some Finnish study that was doing thermal contrast therapy if you are only doing the heat. Now, the heat is probably beneficial. The heat is really good for your circulation and vasodilation. So, I don't want to knock the benefits of what Americans understand as sauna. What I want to point out is there's no research on it. Because the research coming out of Finland is all on thermal contrast. And in Phoenix, there's no snow for me to go roll in. So, I got to have a Morozko. Yeah, that's there's nothing wrong with that. Yes, um I think so. I definitely sauna has its place. I think what most people miss about sauna is that um it's going to upregulate heat shock proteins. It's going to upregulate the production of things like histamine, which for people who are already metabolically
people who are already metabolically unwell, um can potentially be an issue. Um the last thing you want is to have uh high levels of histamine circulating in a body where there is already sort of there are already issues like mast cell activation syndrome or um other inflammatory conditions present. Um obviously, it's great from the perspective of helping to sort of improve uh cardiovascular function. Um and you're going to get that that great cardiovascular benefit um as you know sitting in a sauna can really at least to a low extent replicate uh sort of a zone two cardio workout especially if you're not sort of aerobically conditioned. So I do think it has its place but I think it's like everything else it's just got to be viewed carefully. I mean I'm working through a few health issues of my own and some old issues and I I know from first hand experience that if I spend too much time in a sauna there is definitely it taxes my central nervous system and I tend tend to break out in hives and get a lot of histamine like reactions. So yeah I think it definitely has to be a balance there. There is a tragic misunderstanding even within the medical research community of the hormetic stress curve. The classic dose response curve is an upside-down U. If you don't get enough of something
If you don't get enough of something your health suffers. If you get just enough your health is great but if you get too much your health suffers again. So one of the things that people often ask me is what's the optimal temperature? What's the optimal time for an ice bath? And it's the wrong question. I kind of get why they're asking because the pharmaceutical industry has trained us that you take one pill for one condition in one dose that applies to everybody and that's a fallacy. But they do understand with something like weight training. No one's going to ask you what's the optimal weight for the bench press and what's the optimal number of reps that everybody should do. It's a ridiculous question because we all have the experience to understand it depends upon your level of previous training. The same thing is true of cold. The right temperature the right duration for you depends upon your level of training. When I got into the testosterone research because me fixing my prostate with ice bath also sent my testosterone up through the roof and I needed to know what's going on. I started looking at herbs and supplements and minerals that people could take and I was flabbergasted by how bad the testosterone research is. There's something called D-aspartic acid and in some one study when they administered D-aspartic acid to young men, oh look, they got a little testosterone boost. You can take a mitochondrial toxin like metformin and in low doses your
metformin and in low doses your mitochondria can respond to that toxin in a hormetic way that it might you know stimulate production of reactive oxygen species that then induce mitophagy and mitochondrial biogenesis and rejuvenate your mitochondria because you're in the right part of that dose-response curve. But in the D-aspartic acid literature, all the follow-up papers like, oh that's a really interesting paper on testosterone. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to double the dose and we're going to lengthen the trial period to see if we can get a stronger signal. Well, of course testosterone levels went down because just because a little bit is good does not mean that more is better. The same thing is true of cold. The same thing is true of exercise. The same thing is true of sunshine. The same thing is true of sleep and all of the essential things how much you need oh sorry, whether you need more or less depends upon where you are on your inverted U dose-response curve. This is something that I wish more people would sort of take to heart. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more Dr. Ziegel and I think what uh the idea of sort of toxicology 101 comes to mind that the let me see if I can get this uh that the poison is in the dose uh and by extension the benefits of a hormetic stressor are also in the dose. So, yeah, I I think you can't really apply that sort of one-size - fits-all um
one-size - fits-all um model to it in in any way, shape, or form, which actually throws out one of my rapid-fire questions that I was going to answer later, but we'll bypass that one we'll get to that one we when we get to it. Um we danced around the topic for a while on testosterone and it's something I'd love to get into. Obviously, testos - uh cold therapy has greatly helped you um with regards to improving your test - uh excuse me, your testosterone production. Can you sort of help the listeners understand as to why that's happening, though? Um why do you think physiologically um the body is responding so well to cold and how is that helping to produce uh additional levels of testosterone or physiolo - physiologically normal levels of testosterone? Your physician will tell you that you should expect your total testosterone levels to decline with age. That's not true. Testosterone doesn't decline with age. Testosterone declines with an accumulation of mitochondrial injury. And mitochondrial injury is associated with age. So, let's understand why. The testosterone is synthesized from cholesterol. So, cholesterol is sort of the the precursor to all the sex hormones in steroids in your body. And that synthesis begins at the inner membrane of the mitochondria. You have
membrane of the mitochondria. You have to get a cholesterol molecule and you have to get a specific enzyme. They meet on a site in at the inner membrane of the mitochondria, cleave off a hydrocarbon chain and create a steroid called pregnenolone. And all the other sex hormones are downstream of pregnenolone, including testosterone. If the transport processes to get the cholesterol to that site, through the cell membrane, through the outer membrane of the mitochondria, and then attached to the inner membrane, if those membranes aren't right and the transport isn't right, then that slows down the synthesis of the steroids, of the sex hormones. If the mitochondria are too few or they are too dysfunctional, that slows down the synthesis. And you cannot take body composition or cardiovascular health as a reliable proxy of hormone levels. There are too many people, young men who are fit, who are strong, and yet have total testosterone in the United States where we'd measure it in nanograms per deciliter, and they'd be down in the 200s. They would be at levels so low even physicians would say, "You are below normal, hypogonadal." Because mitochondria are critical in the synthesis of testosterone, anything that benefits mitochondrial function is going to support healthier testosterone levels. So, let's take a look at this uh and the cold plunge. You get into the cold plunge
You get into the cold plunge and you stimulate the action in your brown fat. That produces reactive oxygen species. Those ROS induce both mitophagy, the removal of damaged mitochondria, and mitochondrial biogenesis, their replacement by healthier mitochondria. Mitochondria have their own DNA, remember, and there can be thousands of them in any given cell inside your body, depending on how energetically active that cell is. An ice bath is one of the best things you can do for mitochondrial health. Is it then any wonder why testosterone levels would go up as people adopt a practice that supports their mitochondrial function given that testosterone synthesis begins in the mitochondria? Of course, it's no mystery. But men and women are a little different in this regard. What people don't understand is that testosterone is the dominant sex hormone in women. It's because when a woman gets her lab report back, the estradiol and the testosterone are reported in different units. You have to convert the units to be able to really compare them. In a classic lab report in the United States, woman will look at her estradiol and say, "Oh, look at all this estradiol. Of course, I'm female." But when you do the conversion, a healthy woman will have three or four times the amount of testosterone in her body. Where does it come from? About 1 / 4 from the ovaries. And that's it. The rest of the testosterone comes from the adrenal glands, fat cells, and the skin.
glands, fat cells, and the skin. Now, what stimulates activity in the adrenals, the fat cells, and the skin? A cold plunge. Women get an instant testosterone boost from cold stimulation. But men are different. To maintain the much higher levels of testosterone in their bloodstream that men that healthy men have, and it could be 10x what women have. To maintain that high level, yes, men get a little bit of testosterone from their fat tissues and their skin cells and their adrenals, but they need their testes. They need the Leydig cells in their testes to function really well. And this is of course mitochondrial or modulated by the function of the mitochondria. And of course, men get a boost in their mitochondrial function that will support their long-term testosterone. But immediately, if a man does not exercise after the cold plunge, his testosterone levels will go down. So, the classic order of things has been to go for a run or work out and then soak your knees in the cold or get into the cold bath to reduce inflammation and recover a little faster. That will stunt your test your muscle growth. That will reduce your testosterone levels. That will suppress your luteinizing hormone. But when you do it the other way, when a man pre-cools his workout, does the ice bath and then does the exercise, you have reordered the the nervous system response. The ordinary way is exercise. That's activation of the sympathetic nervous
activation of the sympathetic nervous system. And then ice bath. That goes sympathetic in the fight or flight response and then parasympathetic. So the ordinary way is sympathetic, parasympathetic. What I'm suggesting is do your ice bath first. That's sympathetic and then dive reflex parasympathetic. Then do your exercise. That's sympathetic again. And this order of things creates a testosterone boost that of course promotes leaner body composition, promotes sex function, promotes muscle building in the men. The pre-cooling is critical to getting the benefits of testosterone from the ice bath, especially in the short term. I again I I couldn't agree more and I especially like the fact that you brought up the importance of testosterone in female health and in women's and women's health. Um I think it's a bit of a travesty that when women start to go through menopause they are often given HRT but they're given estrogen and progesterone, no means of some cookie-cutter approach but never testosterone. And it's often as you just said I love the fact that relatively again women have just as much testosterone as men. Obviously those those ratios between testosterone state that a little bit. Um testosterone performs an essential function in women. Men have like 10 times as much as women. Healthy men have 10 times as much testosterone as healthy women. But there's something else about the women that we must be clear about.
the women that we must be clear about. When a woman is insulin resistant, she becomes vulnerable to something called polycystic ovarian syndrome. So this is PCOS. This is the formation of cysts around the ovaries. They stimulate the ovaries, but in a pathological way. So that now the ovaries are producing too much testosterone. So it goes insulin resistance leads to ovarian cysts, leads to overactivity of the ovaries, too much testosterone. The ironic thing is that using cold plunge therapy to fix the insulin resistance also resolves the PCOS and can bring a woman with PCOS and testosterone levels that are too high, bring those levels down to normal. So there are of course physiological differences between men and women and differences in the way that their bodies respond and the reproductive organs respond to the cold and I don't want to oversimplify the effects of cold plunge therapy for women in a way that makes some poor lady thinks that she's going to grow a beard if she gets into the cold plunge. That's not what happens. Yeah, no, definitely not. And I think it's sort of also important to note that I think that the cold is going to help reduce a lot of that inflammation associated with conditions like PCOS and how it helps to regulate the immune system function as well. Um Yeah, I also have a a few sort of standing hypotheses that I think uh specifically in men that obviously the
specifically in men that obviously the uh the vasoconstriction and then rewarming so the slowing and sort of uh upregulation of blood flow within the testes is getting in and out of cold obviously is going to help support the delivery of nutrients specifically to the testes and help with the that movement of of pregnenolone and and all those steroid cascades as you mentioned mentioned alluded to earlier. I also think that as you will know cold um helps to sort of really increase dopamine which has a direct sort of correlation with with prolactin which I think a lot of men specifically men who are metabolically unwell have have issues with and if your prolactin is high then testosterone is going to be low so I think by increasing dopamine you can then help to mediate some of that prolactin which is going to yeah drive down that testosterone. So yeah there just so many different pathways by which cold does seem to sort of drive up the production of testosterone. Um and the fact that it doesn't seem to initially just be acute. I think that's like people who sort of will talk about that the benefits of of fasting and sort of IGF-1 go on about. You have this very sort of acute rise in IGF-1 from the data I've seen
from the data I've seen testosterone the increase in testosterone production as a result of high of regular exposure to cold does seem to be fairly yeah consistent doesn't just sort of disappear sort of after you sort of dropped out of the the cold tub 3 hours later. Obviously with continued exposure one bath of being in a cold tub isn't going to raise your total testosterone 500 points but regular exposure does seem to have a lasting effect and I believe and I think you you'll probably will as well but that's likely to do with the fact of just having a sort of improved mitochondrial function cuz at the end of the day mitochondria sort of rule the roost and uh uh you've got me thinking actually. I don't know what you how familiar you are with uh this concept of the cell danger response in sort of these conditions of um chronic fatigue and uh other sort of post-viral fatigues. But, I do wonder if um are you familiar with the cell danger response before I carry on? Uh so, the cell danger response is it's been put forward by uh a guy called Dr. Robert Naviaux. He runs his own lab. He is I think he's out of UC Berkeley, but I may be uh incorrect and it's this basically this idea that um s - when a cell is stressed, the mitochondria sort of
mitochondria sort of um go into this metabolically in act - in inactive state to an extent and they stop producing cellular energy ATP to the same extent that they would normally. Um this has got to do with a sort of a three-part cycle sort of CDR one through to three. Um and normally in a when a cell goes through a homeostatic stress or stress state, it's all go through uh CDR one where it sort of down regulates it itself slightly just to preserve energy. But, then it gets into CDR two. It's it essentially understands that the the threat has passed and it starts to then uh the proton gradient uh sort of is reestablished. Electrons move freely in and out of the cell and it is able to sort of re - uh sort of uh get back into a state of uh homeostasis and and energy flow sort of is reestablished. Uh now, when you have these sort of chronic conditions uh where there's an infection present or something similar, Those processes are are completely sort of down regulated to where it becomes pathological and the cells no longer able to produce energy and this is where you see so many people start to develop these issues surrounding poor mitochondrial function and it's sort of proposed that this is actually at the root of almost well, all chronic disease in this at least from a mitochondrial standpoint. And yeah, I
mitochondrial standpoint. And yeah, I I'm just again looking at it from a my sort of molecular reductionist standpoint, but I would be interested to sort of have a look at and see how cold is actually uh affecting the energetics of the mitochondria. I think especially through the lens of this a cell danger response theory. And it's something I don't know, maybe I should Dr. Naviaux another email. I'm sure if I send him more than 50, he might respond, but well. Um but it's yeah, it's uh It's it's just a working theory of mine, but I think it might be quite interesting to sort of to to explore and it's again something that is of a pet interest of mine sort of being fairly well um entrenched in the the CDA CDR data. I do think having said all of that that with regards to test just going back to testosterone that TRT I think is is definitely something that men should view as a bit as something that they potentially need. Obviously, you get different types of hypogonadism. You get primary, you get secondary. And whereas I would never suggest that men jump onto TRT as a first line uh option, they they need to go through yeah, all the lifestyle stuff. It is definitely something worth considering. Um and we recently did a a podcast with Dr. Robert Stevens who's definitely the coat
Robert Stevens who's definitely the coat of of testosterone replacement therapy in the UK. And for anyone listening, if you do want to learn more about uh TRT, I suggest you listen to that podcast. But, going back to your experiences with increasing your testosterone production, um besides cold, uh what else uh did you do to sort of help uh improve your levels? Um I know you mentioned you've mentioned a ketogenic diet both in this podcast and others. Um what other modalities did you sort of stack, for want of a better word, along with your um cold exposure to help sort of improve your endocrine function? Remember that my testosterone was an accident. I was getting into the ice baths uh because I was worried about an inflamed prostate. I wasn't trying to move the needle on my testosterone. But, if you check the box, you know, I want a male health panel, uh then you get lipids and you get PSA and you get testosterone. It's a matter of routine. It wasn't until I had the guts to go back to the lab 4 months after doing ice baths every day and re-measure my PSA in the hope that I would not get bad news. That the testosterone came up too high. I took that lab report to the urologist now that my PSA was like 1. 8. And I'm like, I'm going to get a big pat on the back and I'm going to get a congratulations, you know, I'm going to change medical science and the way that, you know, medicine is practiced.
that, you know, medicine is practiced. My urologist didn't care. He didn't care about my PSA. He only cared about my testosterone. He got this fat college professor coming through with an uh testosterone total testosterone of 1180 nanograms per deciliter and he said, "No way." So, he said, "I want to do one more test." He sent me back to the lab to get my luteinizing hormone measured. I didn't know what luteinizing hormone was. I had to go look this stuff up. Lab report came back 8. 9, you know, whatever the units, in red, out of range, too high. He knew at that point that I was natural, and he never talked to me again. Because I was so naive, Robert. I'm not going to change the way he practices medicine. You know, no doctor can say, "Well, I had this goofy patient with a PhD who wrote an article, and Joe Rogan read about it, and now I got to, you know, change my practice." That's not the way medicine works. What did I know? So, I have now published this book called Uncommon Testosterone. It's available on Amazon in hardcover, Kindle. You can get it uh from Mercola Forge in paperback. We will mail it to the UK. I'll sign it if that's your thing. Um and I talked about my experience and then several case studies, other people who have written to me about what they've done. And I published a protocol, uh you know, for me, it's to get up in the morning, 2 to 4 minutes in the ice bath, freezing cold, and then a little bit of exercise. I don't know if that's going to work for everybody. But I also went into the minerals, the supplements, the herbs, uh sunshine,
supplements, the herbs, uh sunshine, vitamin D, tongkat ali. You know, what are the other things that are in the sort of science of testosterone space? What works and what doesn't? And here's the major problem. Medical science does not do good research. A clinical trial is typically something like this. We recruit a bunch of subjects. We give them a thing. And then we measure them a week later and we see if the dependent variable that we're interested in, like total testosterone, has changed. Entirely uninformed by the mechanisms by which that change might come. So, it is a It's like a black box. We don't know how the body works, but when we gave these young men a bunch of fenugreek, some of them got higher testosterone levels. That is a nonsense way to do research. If you want to investigate something, it helps to have a model of what the mechanisms of action are going to be. Magnesium and zinc are wonderful examples. If your magnesium levels aren't right, and your zinc levels aren't right, then your body doesn't have the resources it needs to produce the enzymes that participate in testosterone synthesis and metabolism. So, get your magnesium and your zinc right. This is um not speculation or hypothetical. Now, magnesium is great. If you take too much, it sort of lets you know. Back off when you start to get diarrhea. But, zinc is a little bit different in its hormetic dose-response curve. You can overdo it with zinc and create some
overdo it with zinc and create some adverse effects. So, you got to be careful with some of these minerals and know where you are on that curve. But, if you are deficient, repairing that deficiency, uh supplementing, will boost your testosterone levels. And there's some misconception. Because testosterone is associated with vitamin D, people think, "Oh, I'm going to take vitamin D supplements, and that's going to get my testosterone up." Doesn't work that way. The vitamin D levels and the testosterone levels, they move together in the body, but not because vitamin D is causing testosterone to move. Sunshine is great. UVB is a wonderful thing that you can do for your metabolism, for your vitamin D levels, for your testosterone levels. The vitamin D and the testosterone move together because they have similar origins, not because one participates in the causal chain of the other. So, there are some misconceptions about how some of these herbs and supplements work, whether they work, and how to sort out there's a cacophony of claims about testosterone boosting and supplementation available online. And there's so much nonsense that it it's too hard as a consumer to sort through it all and figure it out. So I did that for you and I published it with like 200 scientific citations and you can download it off of Amazon Kindle for you know 10 US dollars if you're into that
know 10 US dollars if you're into that kind of thing. Perfect. Well, definitely link that in the show notes for anyone interested. But yeah, I'll pick up a copy too. It sounds like a fascinating read. Um Brilliant. Uh Dr. Seager, I think we've covered most things to be honest. I would love to sort of maybe get back to the mental resilience piece a little bit as well. Maybe look at some of those those mechanisms there and then maybe we can end up on a few rapid fire questions. Um So yeah, we we Yeah, let's talk mental resilience. We we've we've touched I think we've we've covered a lot of the basics here of how it increases dopamine and and testosterone, all of which are going to help. But beyond that though, I think what most people miss is the psychological piece here. Can you sort of help and work walk us through how cold rally sort of help someone or an individual to improve their their sense of resilience, their sense of being able to handle a difficult task, a difficult day, that sort of thing. Let's talk about psychology. Chris Palmer, he's a psychiatrist at Harvard University. He wrote a book called Brain Energy. And I did a review on Amazon. It's one of the more, you know, up roaded voted reviews. I like Chris. I don't know him personally, but I like his social media presence. and I like his story. His mother suffered from
story. His mother suffered from schizophrenia when he was a child. He spent parts of his childhood homeless. He's dedicated his career now to understanding schizophrenia and becoming a practicing psychiatrist who also does research. And he discovered that nothing in psychiatry was working until he started putting patients on a ketogenic diet. He wrote an article in Psychology Today probably 10 years ago, and he said, "Look, I have these schizophrenic patients. I put them on a ketogenic diet, they got better." And that has, you know, become this book called Brain Energy that talks about metabolic interventions to mental disorders. The brain needs a lot of energy. It consumes maybe 25% of your total caloric intake is right up here inside your skull. So, there's the physiology of the brain, which is important, but the metabolism of the brain is essential for psychological resilience and for mental health, and this is why. Most of the mental disorders that people suffer from are include this cognitive fallacy of all-or - nothing thinking. That is the catastrophic thinking. Um it doesn't matter what the personality or the mental disorder is, they all include an element of this black-and - white all-or - nothing catastrophizing thinking. And the most effective behavioral therapies, whether that's dialectic behavioral therapy or
that's dialectic behavioral therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy, relies upon cognitive resources to um dissolve the all-or - nothing thinking. That is, you might say, "Well, can two things be true at the same time? Can it be both black and white?" And then it requires a lot of cognitive reframing or to make a new meaning out of an emotional experience that is not catastrophic requires a lot of cognitive energy. Here's what I'm saying. The effective behavioral therapies are energy intensive. Your brain is an energetically demanding organ and for you to use your cognitive resources in order to overcome the the cognitive biases that are characteristic of personality and mental disorders requires a lot of energy. Your brain won't do it if the mitochondria in your brain aren't right. If it doesn't have the right energetic sources and your brain loves ketones. The brain functions so well when you're in a fat metabolism and it can take ketones out of your bloodstream that cross the blood-brain barrier and use the ketones as fuel for this difficult work of cognitive reframing that is associated with the most effective behavioral therapies. If you don't have the right metabolism in your brain, then you can't do this difficult work. You're just going to lapse into the fallacies and the misconceptions and the personality disorders that keep you miserable, wretched, and sad. So, I'm totally bought even though Chris Palmer has never been in a Morosko. As far as I know, he's never done an ice bath. He's
know, he's never done an ice bath. He's doing it with diet. He's supporting the brain through ketosis. And I go in and out of ketosis all the time. What Chris doesn't say is that the fastest way to stimulate endogenous production of ketones is to get in an ice bath because your brown fat will clear glucose from your bloodstream and it doesn't take long. It's like a minute those glucose reserves are exhausted. Your white fat cells will immediately begin to release free fatty acids into the bloodstream so that the brown fat can switch over to fat metabolism for cold thermogenesis and because ketones are an intermediary metabolic product of fat metabolism, your ketone levels will begin to go up right away. You don't have to wait 3 days of zero carb dieting. So, surely there's the Surely though that depends sort of to an extent on the amount of glucose current in your blood and the sort of the diet you follow. I mean, if you are on a very high carbohydrate diet, you're not going to uh sort of clear that What is it? Between 1, 800 and 2, 000 calories worth of muscle and liver glycogen in just a few minutes. Um so, I assume that that is on a spectrum and relative to the sort of diet you eat to an extent as well. There is something called metabolic flexibility. When people uh have never fasted and they've never gone low carb, um they lose this metabolic flexibility. There is something called the keto flu,
There is something called the keto flu, which has a really bad reputation. And this is people trying to get into ketosis when they lack that metabolic flexibility. So, you you make a good point. When you are already metabolically flexible, this phenomena of ketones going up right away as a result of the diet ice bath, it comes so much easier. I tested this on myself. Thanksgiving in the United States, people often indulge, right? They're going to throw your diet out the window, eat the turkey, eat the cranberry sauce, whatever. For me, my weakness is pumpkin pie. Day after Thanksgiving, I ate a whole half of pumpkin pie cuz I'm going in the fridge and I'm like, "Oh, look at this. That's my favorite." And then I thought, "You know, I might have overdid it." I get in my ice bath, 4 minutes. Then I pee on my keto stick. I had the before ice bath, after ice bath. And you can see the jump in ketones in my urine. Just to demonstrate, now I have a high metabolic flexibility, but just to demonstrate that this phenomena can overcome a high carbohydrate diet. However, you are correct. There are um researchers in Sweden. This is a paper written by Seki et al. in which they showed that activation of brown fat in rats, or maybe it was mice, would clear glucose from the bloodstream, but they could overcome the effect if they fed a super high carbohydrate diet to these mice. They were doing it because they wanted to understand the effect of deliberate cold
understand the effect of deliberate cold exposure. For them, it was cold air on the growth of tumor cells. They discovered that cold exposure will inhibit tumor growth. And they did some really clever experiments to demonstrate that it was the uptake of glucose from the bloodstream into the brown fat in the mice that would starve the tumor cells of the glucose that it needed to grow. And that effect was reversed when they put the mice on a super high carb diet. So, you have a point about the limits of cold exposure to clear out all that glucose. Nevertheless, type 2 diabetics, I've got some good CGM data. People going into the ice bath had like 220 blood glucose, which is way too high, and coming down to 120 and staying there for hours after the 4 or 5 minutes at at about 1 ° C. Yeah, no, it is fascinating. Um I was going to ask if you'd uh ever looked at the the gluco the glucose ketone index and then uh overlaid that on top of cold and find to see if that cold exposure helps to improve that index, that ratio that My readers are helping me with this. I haven't run this experiment on myself or any subjects directly, but now that there are continuous ketone monitors, I'm very fortunate. My readers will send me screenshots, you know? And they'll say, "Hey, look at what's happening to my ketones. They jump when I get into the ice bath."
the ice bath." Yeah, no, it's definitely something that's again, that I'm finding fascinating and and an area of research that I've sort of I got to sort of dive into a bit more. Dr. Seager, thank you very much for that. Um I think what we I'd like to do is maybe jump into the rapid fire questions now, if that's okay with you. Um so assuming someone is is new to cold therapy, um I know we sort of uh already discussed this, but what's the where's the best place to start? Is something like a cold shower uh a good starting point or is it sort of a bit sort of reduction? Coldest shower I ever took was probably January in London. It was miserable, wretched, and I hated it. I hate all cold showers. So, for me to say no, don't start with a cold shower, um you know, I sell ice baths for a living, so don't take my word for it. A cold shower is a fine way to get started, but you're going to hate it. There's a good study out of Finland that compares partial body cold water immersion to whole body cold water immersion, and they're different. With partial body, you get the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, you get that fight or flight response, but you do not necessarily get the dive reflex. So, you don't get that calm, peaceful effect. What I would rather do, if you have a bathtub in your flat in London or something like that, not everybody does, but if you have a bathtub, just fill that with cold water. Instead of taking a cold shower, try to get that whole body. So, you will get the dive reflex,
body. So, you will get the dive reflex, you will experience that calm, that sense of peace, that present moment that I feel. Whereas when I get in a cold shower when I'm traveling, and I just wind up cussing up a storm and hating the world for a minute. I do it anyway, because you can get the metabolic benefits, but the psychological benefits are not the same. If you're going to start and you have a tub, start with your tub. In a northern climate like the United Kingdom, your water's going to be pretty cold. However, that's the second best way. The best way You're on an island nation. Will you get yourself to the beach? Go jump in the North Sea or the English Channel or the Irish Sea or something like this, you know? Because now you're outdoors. And even if it's cloudy, like it often is in the United Kingdom, at least you're getting some sunshine. Go with friends. You'll have an oxytocin bonding experience. You'll become better friends. The best way to get cold is in nature. The second best way is in a morosco. And after that, there's a lot of things you can do to sort of get yourself started. The good rule of thumb is go cold enough to gasp, go long enough to shiver. If you experience the gasp reflex, you know the temperature of the water is cold enough for you to get that nervous system benefit. And if you are naive to cold training, that is if you if you're not well cold trained, then you don't have any brown fat and your muscles are going to shiver. You know you've activated thermogenesis and your body
activated thermogenesis and your body will begin to bathe some of your white fat. After a couple of weeks, you don't have to shiver anymore. Your non-shivering thermogenesis that's taking place in your brown fat, that's taken over and you don't have to worry about shivering. Just do a couple of 3 minutes. Perfect answer. Thank you for that. Next one, do you still follow a ketogenic diet? I go in and out. I've never followed a ketogenic diet. Um I do what are sometimes called carb confusion days. So, I might be in ketosis and then I'll eat a bunch of carbs. And I want them always to be high-quality carbs. Um especially during the summer, this is fun. So, if I can get a real sourdough bread, man, I'll cut some toast, I'll put some butter and honey on that thing with some cinnamon. That's a great carb confusion day. But uh yesterday, I was out with my daughter and I said, "Hey, let's have an early dinner." We went to this vegan restaurant. I'm not recommending vegan restaurants, but it's in the neighborhood and they do a really good job. I had chia pudding. You know, and there's fruit and granola on it. This is a dessert. Let's not kid ourselves that this is like healthy or something. It is laden with carbs. And I ate it because it's delicious. And it's not bad for me to do this every once in a while. What I do is I go for this metabolic flexibility. I'm not Shawn Baker, you know, on an exclusive carnivore diet or something like this. I like if there
something like this. I like if there were a donut that were fried in duck fat or something. I would eat that thing. So, I go in and out. I'm intermittent keto and I'm constant ice bath. Yeah, I think you again, perfect answer and this won't be replicated, but you raise a good points and it ketosis is another subject something incidentally fairly uh familiar with and interested in. But, yeah, I think it's important to note that for the majority of people a certain amount of carbohydrate is is required in the body. It helps to present that peripheral insulin resistance happening whereby the muscle becomes uh resistant to the effects of insulin with sort of prolonged exposure to ketogenic diets. Um now, that's not to say that uh that's going to happen to everybody. Obviously, you as you mentioned alluded to you you have your Shawn Bakers who are probably on one side of the bell curve who who can really function well in in a prolonged state of ketosis, but I think um when you sort of lower blood glucose levels uh chronically, you you can create additional problems at at the level of the thyroid and and those sorts of things. So, yeah, that's suppose that's a really good approach. Robert. I I think about it like this. Would my grandmother have turned down blueberries? Of course not. You know, if it's in the summer, eat the fruit. You're getting the vitamin C that helps you process the carbohydrates all together in one whole
carbohydrates all together in one whole food. Eat the apple in the fall. This is the way that I think of it. However, stay away from bread in the United States. You know, There are carbs because they can be preserved and because they are subsidized by the federal government in the United States. They are uh present in highly processed and poisonous foods. So, it isn't uh carbs in an apple or in berries. Berries are wonderful uh when they're in season. It's the carbs that come in Doritos and in flour and in other highly processed foods in the United States that I won't eat. And you know, maybe other people have other approaches because I'm not very scientific about this. Um I'm trying to stay in touch with my ancestors when I eat. For me, food is about how I feel. And if I don't feel good about what I'm eating, when I'm eating it, the way I'm eating it, I would rather fast. Fair enough. Okay. Next one. What's the most persistent myth about cold and cold therapy that you'd like to dispel? What's happening right now is Stacy Sims is got a PhD and uh she's a wonderful exercise physiologist. She wrote a book called Roar about extreme exercise for women and she's making the rounds on these podcasts saying stuff that she doesn't know anything about and it's really frustrating. Women are more sensitive to cold. Well, that's true,
sensitive to cold. Well, that's true, but it's not because of inherent biological differences between men and women. There are inherent biological differences and yet what she says is that extreme cold is not healthy for women is false. Women don't work the same outdoor jobs that men do. When men get some exposure to the cold, they are better cold trained as a population. And so when you look at the the clinical data, which there is, and you see well women are more sensitive to cold, it's because they are more likely to be less cold trained, that is have less cold exposure in the previous experience. They also respond faster to cold training than men do, which suggests that this is purely environmental, no inherent physiological difference. And Stacy Sims glosses over. She allows her listeners to believe that cold therapy is a bad thing for women. And there's good reasons why, you know, women want to believe that. If you look at the comments under the like Mel Robbins Stacy Sims post, they're like, "Oh, thank goodness. I'm so glad to hear this. I hate the cold and I never do it." You didn't need Stacy Sims to tell you this. You didn't need an excuse from Stacy Sims to say you don't want to do cold. If you don't want to do it, don't do it. But there are also comments from women who says, "I've been doing it every day. It saved me from depression. It resolved my PCOS. I use it for endometriosis. Uh it helps me with menopause." Like and there's all good clinical data on every single one of these benefits. It will promote
these benefits. It will promote fertility. It's a wonderful thing for a pregnant woman to do because it's associated with better birth outcomes. These this persistent myth is popular for clicks. If a cucumber facial and a spa day was going to cure cancer, I would be writing articles about, you know, a a mimosa brunch or whatever it is that women love to to be sold. That's not the way it works. If you want the metabolic benefits, if you want the psychological benefits, you got to do the hard dang thing, which is get yourself into the cold. So this persistent myth, even though there are differences between men and women, This persistent myth that somehow ice baths are bad for women is really frustrating for me. There are a lot of wonderful benefits, metabolic and psychological, for women who do ice baths. And you only need to take their word for it online when they, you know, they write in and they say, "I feel like this saved my life." Cuz it probably did. Dr. Seager, thank you so much for your time. I think that's a perfect place to wrap up. Um before we go, where can people find you online and Morozko, obviously? morozkoforge. com. Um you know, it's hard to spell and the domain name is too long, but you search for Morozko, uh you'll see us there. Go to the science tab. Everything that I have ever written is available for free at the science tab. But if you need it, you know, all compiled in one If you like to write in your books like I do, then you need a hard copy, and you
I do, then you need a hard copy, and you can get that at morozkoforge. com from our shop. That's the Uncommon Cold Book is the largest and most comprehensive. If you're only interested in the testosterone, then go to Amazon and get the Uncommon Testosterone Book. Perfect. We'll be sure to link to all of those books, your websites, and your socials in the show notes. Thank you so much No, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This has been truly an insightful conversation. So, thank you. It's my pleasure.
Transcript auto-generated by YouTube. Verbatim — duplicates intentionally preserved.
In this conversation, Dr. Thomas Seager frames ice baths as a hormetic stressor. Cold asks the body to respond. Done well, that response may support mitochondrial signaling, metabolic flexibility, focus, and stress resilience. Done carelessly, it becomes another strain.
Hormesis describes a beneficial response to a manageable stress. Too little stimulus does very little. Too much can exceed capacity. Cold therapy lives on that curve.
The goal is not suffering. The goal is adaptation. A session should be challenging enough to require composure and brief enough that you can recover well afterward.
When the body gets cold, it must defend temperature. That process changes circulation, nervous system tone, and energy use. Seager connects this to mitochondrial signaling and metabolic regulation, while also making broader claims that deserve careful interpretation.
The practical lesson remains strong: cold is a metabolic event. Respect it as one.
The first seconds of cold create a reflexive urge to escape. Slowing the breath and staying composed teaches the nervous system a different response.
This is where the ritual becomes more than temperature. You rehearse steadiness under stress, then carry that steadiness back into the day.
"The cold is useful when it teaches adaptation, not when it becomes performance."
"Cold therapy works through dose, recovery, and consistency."
"Hormesis means enough stress to adapt, not so much stress that the body pays for it."
"The breath is the bridge between discomfort and composure."
Start with a dose you can repeat calmly, such as brief cold showers or short plunges.
End sessions while your breathing and awareness remain controlled.
Avoid treating testosterone or disease claims as guaranteed outcomes. Cold is a practice, not a prescription.
