Building Resilience Through Cold: The Science of Adaptation: Full Transcript

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your body is evolutionarily expecting you to exercise and you might not like it and so if you don't do it your body goes into a state of disease or decay in the same way that your body expects sunshine and exercise and healthy foods your body is evolutionarily adapted to expect deliberate cold exposure you got to give it to your body in order to maintain the

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this morning and I just emerged from like the you know the black hole of inbox and I was like oh wait a second I'm supposed to talk to Ben right now you're in the UK I'm just waking up and thank goodness that you know this is over Riverside so I can put on a halfway decent shirt look like a scientist and no one needs to know that I'm still in my pajama bottoms well it takes one no one me too all good it's the top half of

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variability can make us stronger and so I'd worked some intermittent fasting into my diet and I'd lost a lot of weight but this's one book that I read uh before Mike cernovich became a controversial political journalist journalist and a little bit of an idiot he wrote a book called gorilla mindset and in this book he said you should take cold showers so I'm like okay you know I'm going to try anything I have a rule

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about whole body cold water imer than the fins at the University of U or I can't even say it right you know but they're up at the Arctic Circle and they have the best scientists on cold water therapy and they compared partial body to whole body cold water immersion partial body UPS your heart rate it stimulates the central nervous system so everything up regulates but whole body down regulates once you get in you

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that's a really good segue because how many people have actually the discomfort that our ancestors had in their everyday life maybe your your friend who does the windows does yourself you do with your sort of voluntary ice exposure but or cold exposure to say but how important is fostering some discomfort into the human existence great question um I think about my grandfather sometimes you might have WR uh read some of the

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pre-prepared meals that they never had doesn't mean that our bodies respond well to the Comforts that we're sort of wired to desire we expect cold exposure that is our bodies are evolutionarily adapted to the cold in a way where we don't get it then we get sick it's very much like exercise your body is evolutionarily expecting you to exercise and you might not like it and so if you

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without brown fat you typically become metabolically disregulated insulin resistance type 2 diabetes Alzheimers these are all slow moving but eventual consequences of failing to get cold failing to activate your brown fat of allowing your metabolism to disregulated how do you know when you've activate you're activating Brown fat and is is there a conversion of can you

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no longer applies in the same way you might you know for me it's about six or seven degrees C so maybe 40 degrees Fahrenheit in uh the us anything above that is like bathwater it's just boring I don't get the same kind of you know activation because my body is acclimated in several ways that allows me to stay comfortable in the cold once you become acclimated you don't need to go long enough to shiver you might but just your

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and was held in ranomi in December so only sort of the bravest of scientists are going to go fly to Helsinki then I get one of those little planes it takes me up to Roan neami it's the closest I've ever been to the Arctic Circle they've got all the displays in the airport about Santa's Workshop just to remind you how close you are to the North Pole and I'm checking into the hotel and all I have is a scarf a

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into heat and it's the mitochondria that do that so white fat cells with their principal purpose is to store energy and they don't have a lot of mitochondria at all but Brown fat have thousands of mitochondria and each mitochondria organel contains multiple copies of its own DNA and this is something that you know they never taught me in high school microbiology or whatever the heck I took you know back in the early 80s they

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they go up that is Alzheimer's is one uh heart disease is another um these are diseases that are related or associated with metabolic disregulation fixing your mitochondria will help fix the or reduce the risk of these a so-called age related diseases so you get into the cold water therapy you stimulate your mitobiogenesis and it's like aging yourself in Reverse at least biologically speaking the

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fertility is a great thing to optimize for how can um cold exposure and um how can cold exposure affect the male endocrine system I think uh is is the tangent I'd love you to go down if it's okay let's talk about men first then um for me this was an accident um I mean take let me take you back to I'm in my early 50s I've lost a lot of weight I used to be 250 pounds I don't even know how many Stone is or you know whatever

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the allopathic Medical Institution would create a Cascade of diagnosis that would result in overtreatment I said I'm not doing it I'm going to talk to other men first and the stories they told of biopsies gone bad biopsies that led to sepsis infections of of prostate ectomies that resulted in incontinence and erectile dysfunction they scared the crap out of me I was determined to do whatever I could to reduce my prostate

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bike for like 20 minutes and then did some cold water stimulation testosterone went down lutenizing hormone went down and then for some reason that they don't really explain they reversed it they said okay we're going to do the cold water stem first and then we're going to do the exercise testosterone went up luteinizing hormone went up it's luteinizing hormone that signals the gonads to produce the testosterone so

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then for years no one read my stuff I you know I'm just putting it up at morasco forge. com and there's like 300 people who read it until December 2022 when Joe Rogan had David Goggins on and David Goggins used to be a Navy SEAL and they tra in the Pacific Ocean out of Coronada Island and they know a lot about cold water and Rogan said well there's this guy and he goes to my Instagram and he puts that up on the

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the UK 300 n per deciliter is low upwards of maybe 800 is high but I mean I've heard you say before that the reference you disagree with the reference range is it my correct say yeah um you know my lab reports come back now and they say I'm abnormal well I don't want to be normal Ben I want to be better than normal because the reference range is C cated to the results that they're getting from

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it to some friends like you're taking something I like well no look at my lutenizing hormone is through the roof and for the listener if you were to take something exogenous something like trt or steroids or something like this your lutenizing hormone would drop down to basically zero um so it's it's a remarkably easy protocol for The Listener how much exerise need is is a walk enough do they

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if you're going a little warmer maybe um maybe the rule of thumb changes the point that I'm trying to emphasize is a brisk walk jumping rope kettle bells it doesn't take a lot of exercise some men will say well I don't want to do my weights after my cold I'm afraid that my muscles will be so tight that um I'll injure myself I don't have any reports of this but it sounds like it's a worthwhile risk to be careful about go

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can't prove but if you have a daunting to-do list and you conquer that daunting to-do list if you look at it and scares you a little bit and you conquer it I'm convinced that there's a psychological testosterone benefit and boost to it there's a nice line I like from Joseph Campbell says the cave you fear to ends to holds the treasure you seek and every time I look at the Ice Bar and every time I don't want to go in there the

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the benefits of the cold water therapy what is the what have you learned from the cold I mean I think when you when you're in the cold for that long and at such extreme temperatures it's really hard to not know not be confronted with your true self here's what I've learned my fears are [__] all the things that I'm afraid of that uh I think I can't do all the catastrophes that are rattling around in my mind all the

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equivalent of what I just learned in the ice bath elanar Roosevelt said I know elanar Roosevelt I'm going in a different direction here you know she wasn't known for her Fitness advice and her bodybuilding and that kind of thing elanar Roosevelt says do something that scares you every day because that's the key to personal growth that's the key to facing these challenges without letting your catastrophic mind take over

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now she finds that she's incapable of having kids some women in that situation feel cheated feel lied to because their fertility has been declining at this accelerated rate that is analogous to the decline in testosterone levels among young men what can they do the most metabolically demanding thing that any human has probably ever done is pregnancy pregnancy is a physiological state of insulin resistance not

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and that the ovaries will no longer ovulate and that there can be low tea in women and there are no FDA approved testosterone therapies for women in the United States and that means a clinician who wants to treat a woman for low tea has to adapt a male protocol which to me makes no sense they're they're really they're making it up as they go along and I'm not saying it can't help but it has to be done under the careful

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women with testosterone therapy is low libido when the woman feels that testosterone boost she's going to feel a boost in her sex drive and so a lot of things happen when a woman starts practicing cold water therapy she's fixing her metabolism which will improve her fertility she's uh likely but we don't know for sure stimulating testosterone production which will improve her sex

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shoot she used to be a runway model this is perfect right we're going to promote the ice bath and it's going to be good for morasco and S is such a beautiful backdrop and we had such an argument like the day before that we're supposed to drive up there and my daughter is supposed to be the videographer and my daughter doesn't even ride with me right because I'm all full of resentments and I'm angry and stuff but we're going to

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your partner will also increase vasopressin and oxytocin these are bonding hormones so Helen Fischer writes about the three brain systems of love lust romance like having a crush on someone and familial attachment that oxytocin bonding that that we can experience with a pet or with a baby or with a sibling so she says you know human beings are capable these three different systems of love the word love

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especially shared physiological States is what you want to try and experience with a with the partner different experiences outside the house but again like it's pretty hard to not share the sh same physiological state in in an ice bar Thomas I want to be respectful your time I know coming up to the hour what what would you say to someone who hasn't tried cold water exposure um I know it was a big sort of catalyst for your own

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know saying breath [__] like there is no coercion in our method there is no bullying in our method you get in and out of your own valtion and so she developed her own method and she developed the catchphrase this is what cold feels like her approach was take all the emotion down calm yourself don't let anybody push you into it or talk you into it when you get in like you are a king or a queen of your own

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Baseline of what seems to be stressful and things that previously would have stress me out a bit less so feel calmer feel I'm enjoying life a bit more but I always enjoy life as well but just uh amplifying it even further um Thomas one last question for you which is uh inspired by a CH it's not my question but I feel I should probably credit him Patrick shus he asks what's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you we're

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cried like a baby and I didn't even know why except I had to process it later and realize that there was some deficit in my childhood now in that moment she could have judged me she could have said well he's crazy or she could have said well he's weak well he's vulnerable like a lot of fears going through my mind about how this display is sure to kill like her attraction to me and none of that happened instead um she appreciated

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you were just then so massive uh yeah very uh very much admire that I think was a beautiful answer I'm pleased I ask the question the um I want to be respectful for your time and know we come out to the hour um is there any partying thoughts you'd like to give to our listeners or any words of advice or anything you'd like to end on where can people find you as well well let me tell you what I'm uh working on

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once in a while I follow him on Twitter and I don't understand 80% of what that man says but the 20% is so helpful in guiding my own research that I can't stop trying to figure him out and he's been talking about light and cold for a lot longer than I have and the way that they interact so I'm going to leave you with this thought that I'm working on vitamin D is essential to your metabolic health and to your immune