Cold Thermogenesis, Fasting, and Longevity: Full Transcript

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hello everyone today I'm sitting here with my friend Ray cronies Ray is a former NASA scientist and he is a co-founder of zero gravity Rey is known for popularizing using mild cold stress as a tool for weight loss and he recently did something completely crazy he has just completed a 21-day medically supervised water fast so what's up Ray how's it going well

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a company I had in between there uh for about eight years uh and uh yeah I I was type 2 diabetic basically I had high cholesterol I had issues I lost my weight doing the cold stress and everybody's read my story on that and you know it's in Tim ferriss's four-hour body and and Ted Talk out Ted Med talk out there but even when I lost weight um all those things still didn't fix so

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not only as a medical modality that they were actually getting better things that get better at the facility I'm here people are lowering their blood pressure dramatically uh dealing with diabetes dealing with eczema you know I had a a guy who was a suite mate hunro from South Africa that was with me for a couple you know he was fasting he was there for a couple days he's gone back but you know fix his eczema completely

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day fast you know were there any vitamin mineral supplements like right along with that no and that's a surprising thing I'll show you my nutrient panel even lastly with 14 days uh my vitamin D went up uh didn't go down because I was in sunny California laying in the Sun but it's beautiful uh none I wasn't deficient in anything everything all my bullet panels turned out normal uh on day seven I did a around-the - clock amino

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that are not essential for short-term survival so if you're deficient in it you know it it doesn't matter right now because it's not needed right now it's needed for a long-term survival it's needed to repair damage that's constantly happening right it's needed to prevent things like cancer Alzheimer's disease so the question of deficiency in of itself I think needs to be challenged I think we don't really

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and more mechanistically and now we've spread that to all the blogs and they're peeling the onion but every now and then they you know cut off and forget half of it they just sort of put these technical words out there but how do we bring it back to look at something more comprehensive how do we look at Health span you know before we lengthen life we need to lengthen Health span and I'm saying that

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have a limited if we look at this as a budget budget thing more people may relate to if you're at a budget you'll barely making enough each month every dollar counts but the the value of a hundred dollars to me and a billionaire is still a hundred dollars so the point is is that every dollar counts the closer you get to what you're meeting your needs are so this idea of

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science dietary restriction doesn't doesn't refer to the extreme type of restriction that you just underwear can I make good real quick let me explain how I tell people about this because um before I started doing this research the way I saw it was over nutrition too much normal diet deficient under nutrition that's what was in my head

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don't I don't know that we know where that upper limit is but I know that from a calorie perspective and I hate to use that word too because it's misused a lot and then there's people that even question it and we can talk about that in a minute but um we certainly are overnourished from just a calorie density perspective absolutely you know we do our and that's an and

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and I don't want to then use I don't I won't say carbohydrate again and then from except for nuts and seeds and avocados things like that that have a significant amount of fats uh so but when we look at it we draw this food triangle you know what we put at the top where the leafy greens the cruciferous vegetables stems like celery and and uh and asparagus mushrooms and bulbs we said look the vast majority of what you

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my goal is to have a healthy and extend my health span you mentioned Health span and what that really means is to you're not necessarily going to you know live to be 200 right but when you are 90 years old you're going to be physically active fit you're going to be biologically you know 20 30 years younger 40 50 years younger most people don't guess me at 51. right so the thing is is that there's a chronological age

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nothing it's already designed in our biology that that's possible right and and in some of those populations some of them just are sort of outliers where they just live all some of them are fully functional exactly fully functional Health span yes yes they're fully functional cognitive I mean they're yeah so my point is is that the the only biomarker that was identified to drive the aging process in

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you know it's it's not just because we've seen all the transplant studies we've done in mice it's not just just eating the food but it's also having the right distribution down there and all it takes is a little bit of wrong things and then you get an explosion of something yeah and it so again what's socially extreme may not be biologically

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I've not met I've not measured a single broken metabolism in three years in my lap a hundred people no one has a broken metabolism your metabolism scales with your mass pretty much you know inside whatever size you are is your thin lean self give that then leave self the steel equivalent of what you lost and carry it around all day and that's what happens but what's really interesting is that now on the extreme side so I could say

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combustion of ethanol ethanol plus oxygen and equal CO2 plus water and you do the balance equation like you did you'll see that you know you get a three on one side to another or two on the other one side through any other and you do the you are two and then three and you get the respiratory quotient of 0. 67 so that that's a number so if I'm mainly metabolizing alcohol my respiratory quotient will push down uh

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mainly carbohydrate or am I burning many flat you can run your ass off for hours and if you're only burning carbohydrate you just get on the glycogen treadmill and so then what people do to counter that is they say oh I'm going to remove all the carbohydrate and shift my body into ketosis so I'm burning fat all the time so that when they're running they are burning fat but again it's not necessary because it turns out when we

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precise about the things you want to know this one's really going to mess with you because it's not what we think so this boosting the metabolism we're going to boost some tablet now cold stress we'll come back to it when we talk about cold stress because there's some really specific things on cold stress and some really specific numbers that I can give you or or I can show you some things that I've done with cold

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and and so the one twist what I would say the pause that I think we should do now to think about just a little bit is I think my vision of doing what we're talking about before was about slugging how much stuff that I could get in my body that was helpful and now I'm not so sure that's right now I'm not so sure that in in doing so I might unintentionally be over nourishing things that I really don't

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food triangle um you know I eat on the I own the right side of the food triangle and you know I get nut seeds and avocados often um and I eat lots of fruits I have fruits around all the time I'm not glucophobic you know like all these people think it's sugar sugar well you know I don't eat refined sugars you know but I eat that if I want to sweeten something I use a date but what's really

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blending and I know you're Advocate too I I think um I think well I get tons of fiber in my diet because I eat an enormous Amorous mouth but I think blending certainly ruptures the cells certainly get more access there's some studies I think we need to do more on that where I'm excited is like this summer I did all Hydroponics I grew all my greens and uh and I'll show you some of the pictures but but

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measures sleep too so I have that I have a you know you they have a camera that measures VOC your scale measures CO2 so it's sort of interesting because it Maps your environment what kind of environment you're in but uh I'm now sleeping way better um and we talked a little bit on your your Facebook page about melatonin we can get that in a second too but but so so

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you know anything until the next day and I what I found is that I really felt really good doing that which was the opposite so I started not eating like right before bed you know where whereas that's what I was doing originally so to back that up talk about glucose um if you're uh if you're eating starches in the evening instead of getting those sharp Peaks that you saw today and the sharp people

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based on that alone we know that that's like the time you're not supposed to eat right you're not supposed to get all this like glucose and yeah everything I can't wait to use their paper because we got some other explanations that will go right along with this that will actually it will superimpose well with us and and I completely agree um so let's let's I'd love if you would like to talk a little bit about

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in blood pressures and in a matter of weeks uh you know uh people with eczema and all those things are different so we have these amazing repair processes that are happening in the fastest State and we fast forward can we talk about why that is I mean that's been shown mechanistically in animal models and in monkeys mice monkeys it's been shown that when you fast it is a mild stress on the body you are diluted to the

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was done what was it starting to uh well he lost 276 pounds okay so we had a lot of fat to burn yeah absolutely had the energy right right that's important right yeah no he's not if I were to do 308 I think I don't know there's some probably some brevarians down the street that would disagree with us right no so the point is is that uh so so that is is but when you say it's extreme what's interesting is

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something you've not experienced before it's like when you don't eat yeah and it's almost like you taste it it's whatever but it doesn't send you into any crazy feeling because you're in a perfectly normal State the body shouldn't you know these these symptoms are not a way of starving animal finds food you got to be clear you gotta be Lucid you gotta go find food right right so so okay bidding back to that can I

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postprandial postprandial metabolically we change yeah and and Sir T1 gets activated every time you're making so when you're eating anything you know when you're eating food you're going to make nadh which is my shot officer T1 which is also part of the you know benefits of feeding frequency when we look at feeding versus frequency and that may be a reason and I we we can look at this if you look at the study

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you know you might lose body fat I'm not saying you won't be at a deficit what I'm saying is this idea that you're always slugging every time we slug we activate a whole set of hormones and react and and so we talk about fasting when we talk about and we talk about intermittent fasting the idea that you're really going long periods but even in the popular media because everyone's terrified to say

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before I started the fast um I you know I just started eating three meals a day you know healthy food but just really eating a lot of volume of it and my Ig of us surprisingly no I don't need any meat yeah so why not yeah so um you know zero you know I had uh I had none I mean I had you know it's just all whatever and it was up to 200 and then by the midpoint it was already down to

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both right for the wrong reason which I that will be explained in our paper but that food triangle becomes a road map and then the question is how can we optimize eating frequency because I want to maximize my body's chance to to do this and obviously I could have fasted and supplemented there's no reason why you couldn't do that although at what level of

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so in order to do that what am I going to do I'm going to study sugar versus oil okay what if you just learned nothing because if I add a whole food starch I screw up my protein number if I add legumes I screw up my protein number if I add any of the things that I would actually really eat I screwed it up you know on the fat side okay you add add lots of meat you're screwing up your

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if I don't have the word carbohydrate I can't equate a whole food starch with a refined sugar there's no way to connect I can't equate a carbohydrate just cotton also a carbohydrate I always say refined carbohydrates yeah but even if you say that you're still not same specific I this is a carbohydrate Uh Wood the wood floor is a carbohydrate termites eat wood Mossy Church cotton

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and so that you know again we have 26 27 National Institutes for health but but nutrition is controlled by the USDA do I need to say anymore I left NASA because I knew they weren't getting us into space you know that wasn't going to happen NASA is a great organization a lot of smart people there everybody wants to do stuff but in a mature bureaucracy bureaucracy there's a rule against everything so

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know and I'm trying to get in contact with him and figure that out right because I'd like to know do I need to do incorporate 48 hour fast to to get those autophagy you know benefits that I want and this is my goal post um post book I get my book out there just because I want to get sort of the language changed how we're talking about food to be able to get more people like

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that are 115 years old and are cognizant and are healthy and are you know still active they're not like just crippled and you know and so I want to look at these individuals and understand what is it about their genetics you know because we know that things like intermittent fasting dietary restriction we know that hormesis different plant compounds you know that are present in a variety of plants can activate a variety

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he walked down and you know he wants to like strip down and get in the water cold it's just this way it's just fun we we had a great time so then we were we basically so we're walking back and uh you know he's looking he goes uh-huh and that that exactly look at this the iceman has a coat and you have a short sleeve shirt he said this looks crazy so then like he took his jacket he

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therapy where I was sitting in a very hot sauna um at its peak it was 220 degrees Fahrenheit which is very hot and then transitioning once I mean I was burying the pain I was sitting in this hot sauna you know and and really pushing it like I wanted to get out but I stayed in and then finally got to the point where I'm like okay I'm gonna get out and then I went straight into a ice bath

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go to bed before midnight and so it we were by at 9 30 p. m so we did this in the evening so we started like around 6 p. m I think uh and but by 9 30 p. m we were in bed and asleep by 10 and then we woke up the next morning at 7 30. right and that is not you our typical schedule and certainly not his typical schedule uh and and that was very surprising to me the contrast therapy resetting my circading so one of the things you asked

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developed this literally in his apartment we were talking because we were talking about the benefits and and we were talking about the saunas we were talking about that but you know what could we do in a a concise amount of time that would get us going well as a complete side complete coincidence just like you I was doing something or I don't know we are whatever it was late and I

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there and you can go as cold as you want you you don't ha you have to have a big contrast at first you might not go as far but eventually You're Gonna Go full cold because it's not I mean it's like 50 55 degrees you can handle it everybody has a part their belly their back their face something about them really makes them like uh you know tighten up but you'll figure that out and what's paradoxical about it and I

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contrast therapy and you end on that cold for two minutes again in the morning it gets you alert and at night because of that I think you're where you are in your circadian day it it makes you sleep and I did the same thing in Australia that you did for in terms of reset and I tried it now I didn't get completely over jet lagged so it wasn't really a complete success but I used a combination of melatonin and

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water water okay and it's uh it begins at 60 F in air so so that's about where the that's where you start seeing a change you start seeing a metabolic response you start seeing hormonal hormonalis response um at about those temperatures um water is really easy to deal with all the way down to 60f when you get a little bit below that it's start

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weird to look because the volume of water to leave your muscles when you're fasting it really freaked me out last time I was like I was just sure that I was just atrophying like crazy I was really like I've really screwed this one up but when I got back to the dexa scans as soon as you start eating and getting minerals in your diet again sodium and other stuff the water comes back up okay you know so like for example when you

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became interested I don't want to put two of it much of it up there just because it gets boring but uh but the swimming getting back to swimming I want to take up swimming I I know I've always been able to swim so I've never been afraid of water I scuba dived I was a water skier I love swimming but I never learned to like swim laps you know and and you know I really want that graceful to be able to swim

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that's after what temperature and that was uh that was 70. so for swimming the optimal temperature of comfort and impact is about 75 f with all the stuff I've looked at I'm not studied but stuff I've looked at in my pool right around there it's not too much of a shot now 70 degree water for someone who lives on the west coast they're like what right you know if you

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kicks in Upper regulation happens UCP one now I'm just using you know proton electron leaks through the mitochondria and suddenly I'm not producing ATP I'm just producing 100 heat what's the cell using to do that it's it's grabbing the most energy dense Fuel and is using lipids to do it so that's a real good adaptive strategy because if you were keeping warm using glycogen you'd run out very quickly or if you're

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but it's possible that a lot of these benefits of this excess moving because in nature all organisms are conserved are they they conserve they live a conserved life we want to think of them being all active and they're all on the hunt and they're more active us and we live a sedentary access lifestyle but the opposite of sedentary is an exercise the opposite of sedentary is

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benefits are that we um evolve those sets of cold cold stress responses that happen to mimic the dietary restriction stock as a survival mechanism for winter and we've just extra we've just engineered winter out of our life in the last century we do have temperature controlled environments right right you know and I

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yeah I haven't yeah you just don't have it's pretty wild yeah it's crazy you don't have valves can you please do what you biome like I want to see it damn it I know I I wanted to I know you I just have so much to get I just had so much other I mean that would have been all the blood work I did was so expensive and you know I've I've been I've used really donation on my blog I you know there's plenty of opportunities

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you know cold stress and and dietary restriction to me that's the axi we start with and then the exercise again just like we talked about with starchans and carbohydrate starches and sugars earlier with the studies all the exercise stuff is a lot of it is done on people that are living in a normal world so if it makes you better in a normal normally overfed over nourished

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the effects most of the work that I did on cold stress because where I was in that point in in my life was I was really looking I didn't understand calories and so I was really trying to understand how can we maximize however I really believed the goal at that time was to create more metabolic output and I hadn't quite found that I can control weight and everything perfectly with the dietary input is

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right there you can see it I mean it doesn't burn a significant amount of fat that's the the downside so you're not gonna really the weight losses is minimal it's it is it it does in addition to dietary restriction but you have to have some kind of deficit to start with um but it definitely shifts your RQ and um what I have seen is that you know generally speaking after you know a few

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never happened to me and the reason why is as soon as I come off the slopes I go into the bathroom I do a contrast shower and I'm cold and then I fill the bathtub is already filled up with cold water as cold as it'll come out of this hat just sit up to my waistline uh in cold water and all of that leaves and you feel when you get out you almost feel as if you could

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all no no sometimes yeah at 50 degrees Yeah so I can sleep now right now I can't but because of the fasting but um I conditioned myself this is one of the things I did before um all the stuff that came out for our body I started with you know blankets and I'm like you know we had blankets or we blanketed um to because we never used to heat

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it slowly and there's a really simple test to see if your room is too warm or you're black over blanketing and that is if you stick your feet out from the covers at night or in the morning or you have to stick your hands out if you do those two things that's a sign that you're sleeping with too much covers because that's a way to trick your brain into thinking you're cooler than you really are because we actually have to

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would be producing it let me ask you again so the contrast shower was 10 seconds warm 20 seconds cold um how many times and on colder too ten times and on cold two minutes yeah you know just I I want you to get used to it because that's the conditioning part right because I want to see if it does my circles and then out of then dry off get in bed and then at that point it's I don't do

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at this point you know that's what all the studies say I'm doing it at the Circadian time the time when my brain would be of releasing it probably is releasing it um and I feel like at that point I'm also you know I'm entering a fasted State as well the dietary restriction you know my my meals were earlier in the day so I'm I'm far past I'm in a post-absorptive state at this

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hypothesized this these connections and ran them by David and we actually we touched on it we we had because of editorial limits on that first paper we had to sort of um uh walk away a little bit from the Sleep part and we mainly focused on the other side but you know what it's like you know it's like okay we got we we're too many words well basically but we got you know we got it in there but we had to do we

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why right you know I'd like to understand the mechanism yeah I mean curious I want to know yeah and trying to figure it out I just started looking into it yeah and and it's and I mean I think it's tied to the fact that drop into half a degree that the brain needs to see you know that's at half degree and you know it's really amazing hibernation you know yeah yeah they you go you get the it's when uh in in Winter

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um if people want to learn more about you know the the science you're doing the books you're writing the experiments you're doing anything about Rey cronice where can they find you what uh well Google is easy just Rey cronice it's c-r - o-n - i-s - e I guess you'll slug that um right now for a short period of time um when this is being this one if you're looking later I have a crowdsource hour broken plate is the title it's on