46. Thomas P. Seager: Using Cold Therapy to Optimise Health & Reverse Metabolic Disease

Thomas P. Seager, PhD is an engineer and Associate Professor in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. He is the expert in cold water therapy and the founder of the company Morozko Forge, which manufactures high quality ice baths.

Thomas & I discuss the principles of cold therapy, how cold influences our physiology, using cold therapy to reverse diabetes and metabolic diseases, and fascinating anecdotes of the effective use of cold therapy in individuals with cancer. We also detour down the topic of mitochondria and discuss the work of Dr Jack Kruse as it relates to these topics.

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Thomas Seyfried PhD 'Cancer as a metabolic Disease' https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118310311

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 4:21

In today's episode I speak with Thomas P Seeger, who is an engineer and associate professor of the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University. He is an expert in cold water therapy and the effects on the human body. He is also the founder of the company Morosco Forge, which manufactures high-quality ice baths. This episode is an exploration of the principles of cold therapy, how cold influences our physiology, using cold therapy to reverse diabetes and metabolic disease, as well as some fascinating anecdotes of the effective adjunctive use of cold therapy in certain individuals with cancer. We also detour down the topic of mitochondria and discuss the work of Dr Jack Cruz as it relates to these topics.

Speaker 1: 5:07

I remind you that this is not medical advice and to always consult your treating condition before making medication changes or commencing cold therapy if you have pre-existing medical conditions. Enjoy the show and thank you for your support. Okay, thomas, thank you for joining me on the Regenerative Health podcast. It's a pleasure. So we are arriving at this idea of cold therapy and how we can integrate it into our life as one of the tools of improving our lifestyle. So, if you can explain to us your professional background and your journey to basically becoming someone who is well-versed and practicing cold therapy, I'm glad you asked, max, because you're a medical doctor and I'm a PhD.

Speaker 2: 5:53

So when I'm on campus at Arizona State and people call me Dr Seager, there's no confusion. But when we do podcasts, if you were to call me doctor, people might think I'm in medicine and I'm an engineer. I was educated in civil and environmental engineering and I'm currently a faculty member in the School of Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State. So it's a legit question to say how did I come to cold therapy and metabolism? For me, the journey is several decades long. It was 2001, when I was a doctoral student, that my six-year-old son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. I didn't know what was wrong with him. I thought he had the flu. I was giving him orange juice because that's what my mother did for me when I was sick, and it turned out to be totally the wrong thing. He slipped into ketoacidosis and our pediatrician was also our neighbor. My wife called him up John was his name and described the symptoms, and John said well, you know, there's flu going around. This is around Christmas time. And then when my wife said and he's peeing the bed all the time John said your son has diabetes. Meet me at the hospital, your life is going to change. I carried him into the emergency room. John handed me an insulin syringe and an orange. He said nobody leaves this hospital until you figure these things out.

Speaker 2: 7:24

This was before continuous glucose monitoring, before insulin pumps. Everything was done by hand, and my son was six. So I spent the night practicing drawing up his H and his NPH, blending the insulin, injecting them into this piece of fruit while the IV-dripped insulin into his bloodstream. Because I'm a scientist, I took a very scientific approach to his care. We got journals. We wrote down everything he ate, we wrote down all of the insulin that we injected him with, we wrote down all of his exercise, and so I was tracking this in kind of a model of how to manage his blood sugars. Well, of course, we met with the endocrinologists and we met with the dietitians and the nutritionists, and they were all full of bunk Max. They were telling me things like protein cannot increase blood sugar, and I would get the journals out and I would say well, here's where he had a cheeseburger, no bun, no carbs, and I have to give him extra NPH because several hours later he will experience an increase in blood sugar. I had to teach myself about neoblucogenesis. I had to teach myself everything about metabolism and I knew nothing about cold. Until he grew up and I'm not in charge of his blood sugars anymore. You know he's quite capable, he's got much better technology and he's doing great.

Speaker 2: 8:49

But I was neglecting my own health. As a dad with young kids and trying to start this faculty career, I'd gained 40 or 50 pounds. I wasn't taking care of myself with the same attention that I was paying towards my son and I got a lab report back. You know the standard male health panel and on it it said my PSA was 7.8. You know, whatever the units are nanograms per deciliter or something like that. The lab report said that for a man my age I think I was 52 at the time a normal or a healthy PSA would be below four. And here I was sitting at 7.8 and it scared the hell out of me.

Speaker 2: 9:33

So I started reading online. Now I know that the prostate specific antigen is a measure of inflammation, but it's associated it's not that reliable, but it's associated with prostate cancer. So everything that I read said that if I go to a urologist they're going to want to do a biopsy and if they do a biopsy they might find cancer, and if they find cancer, they're going to want to remove my prostate. So this was a cascade of catastrophic thinking that was going on in my mind. I started talking to other men and men don't talk anywhere near enough about these issues, but I talked to men who are older than me, men that were younger than me. I called up my old graduate school advisor and I said hey, you know you. You probably had your prostate check, right. I heard a series of disastrous stories of biopsies gone bad, of prostate ectomies that led to incontinence and erectile dysfunction, and I became so frightened that I refused to go see my urologist at all.

Speaker 2: 10:39

Fortunately, I had a former student, who is a friend, who had kind of talked me into doing these ice baths, which I thought was great. Cold showers make me angry and miserable, but ice baths I find relaxing and invigorating. So I'd been doing them and we had invented the world's first ice bath so we could do them on a regular basis. I live in Phoenix, arizona. It's hot, we can buy ice from the store, but you know, it might be 40 degrees Celsius in the backyard, 115 Fahrenheit, anyways, typical during the summer in Phoenix and 200 pounds of ice melts in 15 minutes. So we invented our own ice bath and I said I'm not going to visit the urologist, I'm going to do more of these ice baths. I'm going to get myself into keto, I'm going to do the ice baths.

Speaker 2: 11:29

I did it religiously every day, three, four, five minutes in freezing cold water and I get out and I'd be cold. So I'd exercise my steel mace and my pull ups and my push ups and I'd go for a walk into campus and sure enough, max, I brought my PSA down from 7.8 to 0.8. I got my labs again. I was like relieved to no longer have an inflamed prostate and I don't know if I ever had cancer, but I mean, probably not at such an unreliable test. But I felt healthy and I felt more confident and I went back to my urologist with my lab reports because I felt like now you know he's not going to try biopsies. I mean, look, I'm great, I kind of want that clean bill. And he looked at that and he didn't care about my prostate anymore. All he saw was my testosterone, because part of the male health panel is, you know, you got to get your T levels checked and my total testosterone had jumped to 1180 nanograms per deciliter. It had a big red exclamation mark next to it saying too high out of range.

Speaker 2: 12:41

My urologist thought I must be juicin Because a lot of guys, you know, in their mid 50s and they're not feeling vigorous and so they'll go to testosterone replacement therapy or not necessarily prescribed, you know they'll try and find something to regain that youth. And he was about my age. He said you know, I just want to do one more test. And what did I know? I'm an engineer. He wants luteinizing hormone. Now I found out later luteinizing hormone is what stimulates testosterone production in the gonads. So he must have been thinking if I'm natural right, then my luteinizing hormone would be high too, but if I'm juicin, then luteinizing hormone would be low, t levels high. And then he's going to scold me. Luteinizing hormone came back 8.9 off the charts, big red exclamation mark. And I sent that tomorrow my urologist, and he said oh, okay, then he never asked me about my prostate. He never asked me Well, how did you get your T levels up so high? He wasn't curious in the least.

Speaker 2: 13:46

But it was this regimen of ice baths followed by exercise, and by that time the ice bath company was starting to grow and I was starting to get curious about how cold therapy impacts metabolism, impacts the immune system, impacts our this is all before COVID but impacts our overall health. Sure enough, I found a study in 1991. There was a team of Japanese researchers, and who knows what motivated them. But they put a bunch of young men on an exercise bike. Then they just did cold stimulation, not even whole body immersion, but non dominant hand immersed in ice water up to the elbow. And sure enough, when you use cold to recover from exercise, in men testosterone goes down, luteinizing hormone goes down. But then they flipped it around. They said Well, what if we did the cold stim and then we did the exercise bike? So it's just 20 minutes on the exercise bike. Testosterone went way up, luteinizing hormone went way up.

Speaker 2: 14:52

So I published this article. A few people read it. My partner, jason, read it. You know he's impressed. He gets his testosterone checked. He moves from 600 up to like 990. And he's maybe 13, 14 years younger than me, so you would expect him to be higher. Other men started reading it and trying. It was sort of replicated. This is like n equals one four different times. But it didn't really take off until liver King, if you know, liver King on Instagram. He got caught and he'd lied about taking testosterone supplements and Joe Rogan had called him out and said Look, everybody knew that he was on the juice anyway. Like you can't get a physique like that. It's just ridiculous. So, but Joe got pretty curious about testosterone. He found my articles and I remember it very well December 2022.

Speaker 2: 15:51

I was vacationing in Iceland at the time and I started to get text messages. Hey, dr Segar, I saw you on Joe Rogan's podcast. What are you talking about? I haven't been on Joe Rogan's podcast. I wasn't. David Goggins was the guest. But Joe Rogan pulled up my Instagram post and he read out the text of my story to his audience.

Speaker 2: 16:12

And I started getting messages from all over the world for men saying Well, do you think this can work for me? Now this goes back to me being an engineer. I'm a problem solver, not a prescriber. And so I said I don't know what's going to work for you. I can know what worked for me and I know what the science says, but the only thing you can do is try it, max.

Speaker 2: 16:36

People have been trying it all over the world. There's a 62 year old guy in Massachusetts. He said I was on testosterone replacement therapy, I decided to try your protocol instead. So now I go down to the lake, I jump in in the morning and then I power walk home. That's all he does. He doesn't like weight lift or, you know, take supplements or anything. He sent me his lab reports he was over 1200. There is no reason any longer that our testosterone has to decline with age. The way that most doctors are telling us is normal. I don't want to be normal. I'm not satisfied to be normal because in our western countries, normal is diseased and so, without the qualifications or the license to use drugs or prescribe them, what am I going to do? I'm going to use coal. I'm going to use sunshine vitamin D diet the things that I've learned about my body, both from managing my son's diabetes and from the experimentation that I've done in the last five or six years, to find out what works for me without drugs.

Speaker 1: 17:51

That is a very, very interesting story, thomas. Thank you for sharing that journey. I have reflected, or I've seen prostate PSA levels and, as you mentioned, it's not the best reliable marker for screening of prostate cancer and it is fraught with a whole bunch of basically cascade of interventions, so there's a lot of nuance around the topic. But essentially, psa is expected to go up year on year. That is what clinically is expected from a conventional medicine point of view. So to be able to take your PSA from over seven down below one using lifestyle intervention that is not something that is recognized by urology in general and then to see a level, a testosterone level, that high and without exogenous supplementation, it is again incredibly, incredibly impressive.

Speaker 1: 18:49

And I guess it's another whole rabbit hole to go down, which is the testosterone levels of men in society today, and I think a big contributing factor is metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance as well as things like endocrine disrupting compounds. But what you showed is how powerful that protocol of cold exposure followed by exercise is. Maybe to really lay a solid foundation for people who are really wanting to get into this, maybe we could define the terms, because there's things called liquefied therapy, there's cold thermogenesis, there's the cold exposure Maybe explain to us the differences and nuances around the terms.

Speaker 2: 19:33

There's a phenomenon in science, you know, I've published hundreds of journal articles and they've been cited thousands of times and there's the phenomenon when you invent a term and people cite it and it sort of catches on, it raises your reputation, your prestige among your colleagues, and so there's always pressure to come up with the new catch phrase. And what I've learned is that this happens in marketing too. So someone might say, oh, biohacking. And then you know, dave Ashbury say, well, I invented that. You know, if you say biohacking then you've got to cite me.

Speaker 2: 20:11

Everyone at this point has a little bit different way of phrasing it. So Andrew Huberman, as far as I know, coined this phrase deliberate cold exposure, and what I really like about it is it emphasized the deliberate part. Accidental cold exposure, chronic cold exposure, these are not good for you. But deliberate with intention. And it could be cold air or it could be cold water. So it's encompassing and it emphasizes the deliberate component. So I've quoted, andrew, you know, copiously in my writing I use this term deliberate cold exposure.

Speaker 2: 20:48

But cryotherapy, which could be cold water or could be cold air, has become associated with the cryo chambers that use liquid nitrogen or supercooled air. It can go down to like 100, negative 140 Fahrenheit. I'm trying to do the translation. I mean the two scales had negative 40 Fahrenheit and negative 40 Celsius. They sort of cross and then I've lost track of how you would measure it. But it is bitter cold and there's a risk of frostbite. So when people say cryotherapy, it's almost always associated with this frigid, cold air.

Speaker 2: 21:26

Cold water therapy is the term that I'm using more and more because I favor the cold water compared to the frigid air.

Speaker 2: 21:35

I think it's safer. I think it comes with other benefits like grounding, and I would rather narrow down when I'm communicating my protocols and my expertise that I'm really talking about cold water. Cold thermogenesis is a term that Ben Greenfield uses and he's really talking about the body's reaction to the cold activation of muscle shivering, which can clear glucose from the blood stream. Activation of the brown fat, which is going to improve your insulin sensitivity. So we do have a myriad of terms, whether it's deliberate cold exposure from Huberman emphasizing the intention, no matter how you're getting cold, or cryotherapy, which is more of a medical term but become associated with those cryo chambers, cold water therapy, which I'm increasingly going to reference when I write, and Ben Greenfield's cold thermogenesis, which says this is the state in which you want to put your body. On some level they're interchangeable, but at the level that I'm trying to work, I want to be specific about these details so that people don't get the wrong idea.

Speaker 1: 22:49

Yeah, it's important to be specific and thanks for that breakdown. That is very helpful when we're understanding these concepts. So maybe let's talk about what the effects are physiologically on the body when we essentially lower the core temperature, because that, essentially, is what the goal is and for the listeners, obviously our bodies, we're so-called endothermic mammals we're regulating our body temperature at a very defined set point. What is the effect when we deliberately lower that body temperature?

Speaker 2: 23:21

The first thing that happens is the thermal receptors on your skin activate your brain, so it's the hypothalamus in particular. They send the signals up to your brain that says, hey, wait a second, what are you doing? The thermal receptors, they can't distinguish between hot and cold. All they do is signal the brain that temperature of your environment is out of whack and our language reflects it. It's why we have terms like icy hot or burning cold, because our nervous system is activated in the same way whether it's cold or hot, and this is to alert our body and our brain that we got to get the heck out of here. So the first thing that happens is you enter a fight or flight like emergency response state. Your central nervous system, in particular the sympathetic division of your central nervous system, becomes activated to prepare you for whether it's battle or running or whatever the emergency is. Your liver typically will dump glycogen into your bloodstream, because glycogen is stored in energy and there isn't a lot of it in your body, but it's the fastest way to get your muscles moving and every cell inside is trying to. You know your body is trying to communicate to your brain get us out of here. So right away your heart rate might go up. You experience the gas reflex when you get in the bath because you're a mammal and this huge sympathetic activation creates, for most people, an anxiety response. If you can get through the first 15 seconds and structure your breathing, a whole bunch of counterintuitive things begin to happen. Your heart rate goes back down. Typically, your oxygen demand goes back down. This is called the dive reflex. If you don't just jump out of the ice bath right away, your body will, without you ordering it to prepare yourself for a dive. It will conserve the metabolic energy. Your brain waves will go and descend into a deeper meditative state because some part of your brain thinks you must be going to I don't know collect the shellfish from the bottom of the ocean. Or maybe you're going to go spearfishing or whatever it is that our ancient ancestors used to do in the cold water. Your body is still prepared to do it.

Speaker 2: 25:51

The blood glucose spike. It is cleared by either muscle shivering or brown fat and it's almost immediately. We measure this with continuous glucose monitoring. It's using the energy in the glucose for thermogenesis, that is, to generate heat and defend your core body temperature. Basal constriction will cut off the circulation. By shrinking your micro-brut vessels. It cuts off the circulation to your limbs. It moves the blood into your core and into your head, because if your head is above water then it's not cold, and that's to defend your core body temperature. It's actually a very healthy thing to exercise the smooth muscle tissues that control vasoconstriction. And so, both by insulating the body to reduce the heat extraction or to reduce the heat loss, and by generating more heat, your body is attempting homeostasis.

Speaker 2: 26:49

The glucose doesn't last very long. So almost right away, your white fat cells that is to distinguish them from brown. These are the cells that store lipids. They release these lipids into your bloodstream, which travel to your brown fat and are metabolized, converted by your mitochondria into heat again to keep your body temperature warm. You don't actually have to bring your core body temperature down. Your skin temperature and below the skin, your muscle temperature, can come down and activate all of these nervous system and metabolic benefits without your core temperature dropping very far at all.

Speaker 2: 27:29

Hypothermia even in like a one-degree sea where there are chunks of ice floating in the water, hypothermia actually takes a long time because if we define it as a drop in core body temperature of something like two degrees Celsius, that's actually a really big drop, given that your body has all of these mechanisms to defend core temperature. But there is a phenomenon when you get out called after drop, in after drop, vasoconstriction relaxes, the circulation returns to your fingers and to your limbs. But because your skin is cold and because the outer layers of your muscles are cold, as the blood reenters those tissues, of course the blood gets cold. When it comes back into the core it cools down all the organs in your body that were previously being defended. So the core body temperature can keep going down, even after you're done with six or seven or however many minutes of cold exposure. It is, and so, if you're.

Speaker 2: 28:34

I've never used a rectal thermometer. I don't have the guts for it, but if you're monitoring a patient's core body temperature, it isn't necessary to leave them in the cold bath or the ice bath long enough to drop them down a degree, a degree and a half Celsius. They will continue to drop. If you have got a gas reflex in a patient, you know you're cold enough to activate the nervous system. If you've got shivering response in a patient, you know that their brown fat is activated. Their thermogenesis has been activated and they are getting metabolic benefits.

Speaker 1: 29:11

Yeah, thanks, thomas, for that physiology lesson and thanks for correcting me, because, as you mentioned, these physiological adaptions or responses that the body has, that we've evolved over a very, very long time, defend that set point of body temperature and they keeping our body temperature at that 37 degrees, despite the frigid temperature of the water and the environment that we're in. It's interesting how the body has developed all these different kind of mechanisms. And let's talk about this distinction between shivering and non shivering thermogenesis because, as you alluded to with regard to the brown fat, that could be a key tool in helping us make progress on the metabolic health epidemic that we're dealing with. So what's the distinction between those two forms of thermogenesis?

Speaker 2: 30:05

To understand the distinction between muscle shivering thermogenesis and non shivering thermogenesis, we should probably go back to birth, because babies human babies are born without the muscle development necessary to generate enough heat to defend their core body temperature in the cold.

Speaker 2: 30:26

Instead, they have brown fat. It is the brown fat that keeps the baby warm and I remember when my children were born my son particularly in late October. I was worried about him being warm enough. We swaddle our babies up and his parents were sort of paranoid about it because we can no longer relate to what it was like for us as children. If you think about it, I mean my kids. When they were little, they would play in the snow like they were at the beach, you know. And me and my wife would be like, oh, put on your mittens and put on your hat and wear a scarf, you'll catch the death of cold. No, they've got so much brown fat. Their bodies know what to do. You know they'll come inside and say, mom, my fingers are freezing, will you make me some hot chocolate or something like kids know, and they are better equipped with brown fat to be exposed in the cold than that you and I are adults are. So we kind of forget. The reason we forget is because we lose that brown fat as the muscles develop, particularly during puberty, they become larger, more dense and they can handle more of the thermogenesis. But what also happens is we lose the brown fat because we're not using it, because we don't get regular cold exposure. The brown fat in our bodies, it shrinks up and eventually it can disappear.

Speaker 2: 31:50

There was a study of PET scans at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York and they went back and looked at all of these scans to see if they could find brown fat. And by the age of 45, fewer than 5% of the patient's scan had any detectable brown fat at all. That's because in our Western industrialized world we're always comfortable. We're either air conditioned in the summer or we've got our heated leather seats in our SUVs so that we never have to feel the discomfort that our grandparents probably put up with. But as a consequence our bodies enter a state of disease. Cold is a lot like exercise If you don't get enough of it, then your body atrophies. It's a lot like sunshine If you don't get too much, not good. But if you don't get enough, then your metabolism and your vitamin D and your immune system drops.

Speaker 2: 32:45

Cold is an essential environmental exposure because brown fat is an essential organ. It's not just for thermogenesis, it's also a secretory organ. It produces more thyroid hormone than the thyroid gland does. It produces brain-derived neuroprotective factor. It produces hormones that will protect the brain both against metabolic injury and against cold exposure. So when you don't have brown fat, it's no wonder that you lapse into a state of disease. The principal distinction between the muscle shivering and the non-shivering thermogenesis is the presence of brown fat. Without it, then the only thing you've got is muscle shivering. We've probably all experienced this. It takes about seven to 10 days of regular cold exposure to recruit new brown fat to restore these adaptive mechanisms inside your body that will defend your core body temperature during cold exposure. When you're going to see insulin sensitivity go way up, you're going to see the risk of type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance and other metabolic disorders go way down when you restore cold exposure to your regime.

Speaker 1: 34:10

Yeah, and the way I think about a brown fat and I'll quickly lay it out for my listeners, because I've talked about visceral fat a lot in the past with Dr Sean Omara and a quick recap is that our white fat is the fat that is the physiological energy storage and that is living mostly under our skin and is an endocrine organ as well. So it's secreting beneficial factors and storing energy and what Thomas is talking about. With regard to brown fat, I think about it as incredibly active. It's almost like a furnace. It is a furnace that is burning energy, so it's not storing that. As for storage, it's burning it for heat. So you had a furnace in your body that you're shoving different types of fuel in, whether that's glucose or fat, or you're using it to generate heat.

Speaker 1: 35:01

And the point that you made about the role of brown fat throughout life is really interesting, because babies, as you mentioned, use this mechanism to maintain their body temperature after they've come out of the womb.

Speaker 1: 35:14

But it's lost and it was thought to be lost until those PET scans were done, and I read a couple of the original papers with regard to those PET scans. So PET is a form of nuclear imaging which uses a radioactive isotope to look at the uptake of radioactive glucose throughout the body and it's used to diagnose and stage various types of cancers, lymphomas and these types of things. And the original papers Thomas showed that they essentially said we have shown uptake of radio tracer, so the PET tracer in the clavicle area of these healthy men. This is a warning to radiologists this is not pathological, this is physiological brown adipose tissue that is playing a role in body temperature homeostasis. So fascinating how we had to basically rediscover that even recently. From a bottom medical point of view, maybe talk a bit about this idea of the mitochondrial effects of brown fat, because mitochondria is something that I've delved in deeply and I think that it helps us understand maybe the different types of people, different mitochondrial haplotypes, so different propensities to burning fat in brown adipose tissue.

Speaker 2: 36:32

This is controversial but unconvinced that there is a broad misconception about gene therapy, whether it's CRISPR and the role of DNA in our health. Everyone's looking in the nucleus, where you have one copy of your nucleic DNA and we all understand. You know high school biology. Your father donates one strand, your mother donates another strand. It comes to make a new version of a human being and this is the DNA that defines you. We are taught. But there is another set of DNA inside your cells on which your body depends.

Speaker 2: 37:13

Mitochondria have their own DNA and nobody in my freshman biology class bothered to mention it at all. It's inherited exclusively from your mother. So in theory, you and I as human beings have the same mitochondrial DNA as Eve, you know, in the Garden of Eden, whomever the first Homo sapien mother is. Now this isn't exactly true, because there are mutations, there are irregularities that cause, as you say, these different haplotypes referring to mitochondrial DNA. But that's not the important thing. The important thing is the realization that the DNA in your nucleus, compared to how active your mitochondrial DNA, we might as well think about it as inert. Now I'm exaggerating, but it is the mitochondrial DNA that are doing the hard work of metabolism. They are converting the food that you eat into the energy that you need for wound repair, for growth, for everything for exercise, for maintaining your ordinary bodily functions and the mitochondrial DNA have been overlooked as far as their role in health. Brown fat is packed with mitochondria. The brown fat need the mitochondria because one of their principal jobs is thermogenesis, to convert glucose and fatty acids into the heat that your body needs when you're cold. The fastest way to stimulate what's called mitobiogenesis, that is, to grow new mitochondria, is cold exposure. What happens is your body learns to select to the mitochondria that are defective and eliminate them, and then use sorry, the mitochondrial DNA that is defective your body doesn't need and it has mechanisms to select that which is more perfect I'm struggling for the right term but the copies of mitochondrial DNA that have greater integrity, because mitochondria don't just have one copy. They have a gazillion copies of DNA even inside a single mitochondrial cell, and so when your body makes new mitochondria, it uses the best of the mitochondrial DNA available to replicate. When you get cold and you stimulate this mitobiogenesis, it's like doing a mitochondrial therapy, upgrading the quality and quantity of mitochondria in yourselves. Well, that sounds nice, but why is that important?

Speaker 2: 39:49

When we look at theories of aging and there's some people out there who have gotten a lot of attention on social media for spending a lot of money trying to reverse their biological age, reduce their mortality, kind of turn back the clock on aging when we look at these theories, most people are looking at things like DNA methylation and they're talking about nucleic DNA. They're looking at telomere length, they're looking at everything in the nucleus and I think that's a krakahooie. I think that's a garbage theory. I think they should be looking at mitochondrial DNA, because life is energy. This is something that Jack Cruz talks about. That's very difficult to understand.

Speaker 2: 40:29

I did my PhD in environmental thermodynamics and I used to wake up in the middle of the night with these nightmares about entropy until I got this worked out. Life is a struggle against entropy. Life is a thermodynamic process and the mitochondria are the key to you maintaining yourself, your life, as a thermodynamic flowing organism. When the mitochondria decay, that is when their DNA accumulate defects that impair their function. That is aging. Compared to telomere length or DNA methylation, which are important for other reasons, mitochondria dominate aging. When your mitochondria are healthy, then your body has the energy that it needs to create new cells to repair whatever the defects in the nucleic DNA might be detected. There is no reason that we should age in the way that we have come to accept as ordinary, because we can extend the life and the quality of our mitochondria for several more decades than most people think is normal.

Speaker 1: 41:39

Yeah, and thank you for bringing that up and I'm really glad you have, because what you describe is this concept of mitochondrial heteroplasmid. Again, go back to listen to my audience, listen to my Jack Cruise series where we talk more about it. But essentially, when your cells and the mitochondria in your cells accumulate enough mutations, their ability to make the proteins of the electron transport chain become defective, Then slowly, bio-energetically, the cell fails because some proportion of its mitochondria aren't working. Therefore the cells roll, whether that's a neuron or a cardiomyocyte or a heart cell that stops working. Then eventually you develop a disease in that organ, whether that's heart failure, whether that's Alzheimer's disease. That's a really key distinction and thanks for bringing that up.

Speaker 1: 42:28

The fascinating thing that I've thought about when it comes to mitochondria and cold exposure is this evidence that mutations, but beneficial mutations in mitochondrial DNA were basically the thing that allowed us to move out of Africa into Europe, into Siberia, across the Bering land bridge. It allowed us to colonize the planet was because we developed these mitochondrial adaptations that, as you've described, thomas, allow us to burn energy in these furnaces of our mitochondria in the brown adipose tissue. The other point I'll make and we talked briefly about Dr Cruz before we came online is that the benefits of mitochondria, or getting cold, and extend to that electron transport level, so much so that I believe the chief mechanism is that it actually brings those respiratory proteins closer together on that electron transport chain, which makes the tunneling more efficient. It's incredible, I mean you can tell me and I can say, having done cold exposure, is that when you get out you feel like a million bucks, you feel like you could rip the head of, you could kill a lion with your bare hands. That to me, speaking about the efficiency of the energy production in mitochondria and essentially the whole organism, is humming and the thermodynamic efficiency which you've just talked about is optimized by the practice.

Speaker 1: 43:54

The last point I'll make and I'm really glad that you brought up this idea of improving mitochondrial function with cold, because it's just coming into the mainstream lifestyle medicine narrative of using mitochondrial-based lifestyle therapies to help things like neurodegenerative disease. Dr Matthew Phillips is doing exciting work in this area, but as far as he's using, it's mainly restricted to fasting and ketogenic diets which, as we both know, are very effective. I feel like, unless we're using all the tools in our toolbox, we're missing the whole picture here. One of the tools is sunlight and infrared light, and that's another topic. But one of the tools is cold.

Speaker 2: 44:41

You've touched on a number of things. I'm going to try and go through them as I remember them. The first one is the evolutionary biology or the anthropology of metabolism. This is something that I think is misunderstood, because we find human beings all over the world, all different kinds of climates. We say, well, we're mammalian, we're warm-blooded, we're adaptive. We forget that there was a time during the Ice Age when Homo sapiens, when humans, were down to maybe fewer than 10,000 total population. We're now at billions, but there was a time when Homo sapiens were confined to this narrow strip between the glaciers of East Africa and the ocean.

Speaker 2: 45:30

We think of East Africa, and I think these are where the oldest Homo sapien fossils have been found. We think of East Africa because it's equatorial. Oh, it must be hot. Why would we have to have cold? The fact is, wim Hof takes his trainees up Mount Kilimanjaro, and that's a glacier. There are four active glaciers in the mountains of East Africa.

Speaker 2: 45:51

During the Ice Age, the habitat for our ancient ancestors was in these strips of land next to the water. They needed the water. They needed it for fishing, they needed it for forage, they needed it for shelter. It is the DHA and other omega-3 fatty acids that feed our brain and allow us to be so intelligent, and that water was cold because it was coming down from the mountains during the Ice Age. We are evolutionarily adapted. All of us I don't care if you're Caribbean or whether you're Scandinavian. All of us have in our mitochondrial roots this adaptation for cold exposure.

Speaker 2: 46:39

How did those mitochondria work? It was Lynn Margolis, who was married to Carl Sagan at the time, who put forth this preposterous theory that mitochondria were at one point, their own organisms that had become subsumed by the eukaryotic, more complex organisms, the organisms that had DNA in their nucleus and the prokaryotes don't. They entered this mutualistic relationship in which what used to be a separate cell now lived inside a more complex cell. I think this was the early 70s, in which she was ridiculed for such a preposterous evolutionary idea and is now accepted as fact. The mitochondria exist within us to do a job that our own eukaryotic cells would never be able to do by themselves. It is their energy production that allows us to be these complex and intelligent organisms that we are. When they do that job, they create what are called reactive oxygen species, that is, they're converting one form of chemical energy into another, because this is a redox reaction. Electrons are flying all over the place. Some of those electrons where they wind up where they don't belong, they create reactive oxygen species.

Speaker 2: 48:02

And those ROS, because they're so active, can damage other tissues inside the mitochondria. One of the tissues that they damage is DNA. The mitochondria can accumulate this damage from their own function. That degrades their ability, their longevity, to continue to produce this energy. They have developed defense mechanisms against reactive oxygen species. When ROS gets too high, it stimulates myobiotensis. Either mitochondrial DNA can be repaired or replaced, but when the defense mechanisms are exceeded, then your mitochondria become overwhelmed and they need time. They need time to recover.

Speaker 2: 48:48

This is a conversation I had with Joe Merkola. Joe doesn't care about cold water therapy, he's skeptical. He lives in Florida, he walks on the beach and he has these phone calls and he'll go to a biohacking conference and say that cold tub stuff is all overblown. He didn't want to talk to me about ice baths. He said Tom, do you know that mitochondria make their own melatonin? Well, joe, I did not. He sent me a paper it said will scavenge reactive oxygen species to protect mitochondrial DNA. And I had no idea until this guy who doesn't even get into ice baths told me about it. And so what is this telling us?

Speaker 2: 49:34

There are three principal routes to mitochondrial injury. One of them is your light hygiene isn't right because the melatonin that is produced inside your brain it's insufficient for your mitochondria. I mean, we all know about this, but the mitochondria produce their own melatonin, and if your light hygiene isn't right, then your mitochondria are more vulnerable. So that's one. The one that everybody does know is too many carbs, not enough exercise, so this carbohydrate overload. Your mitochondria are then called upon to convert the glucose in your bloodstream into fats that can be stored in your white fat. And when you give your mitochondria too many carbohydrates without them having a time to recover, then mitochondrial damage ensues. When you fast or when you go keto, that gives your mitochondria the time to repair the DNA and recover.

Speaker 2: 50:32

The third one, which isn't well-known at all, are an excess of seed oils, that is, too much omega-6 fatty acids Fatty acids we think of as energy. You know you eat the oil, you have the butter or the animal fat, and of course, we know that it has a high caloric density. But what most people don't understand, it is also an important building block. It is a material in your body and we use these fats to make cell membranes, including mitochondrial membranes. When the omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid ratio is out of whack, then your body has no choice but to construct these membranes out of I'm gonna say this is an exaggeration but of the wrong type of fat molecule. This impairs the function of the cell membrane for transport of nutrients across the cell wall and that can impair the function of the mitochondria. So these three things get you a light right. Get you carbohydrates right, spend some time in ketosis and get your fatty acid intake. Get your diet right. So what is the quickest way to stimulate endogenous ketone production inside your body?

Speaker 2: 51:50

well, that's cold exposure so it's a way of sort of accelerating your fasting.

Speaker 1: 51:56

Yeah, and let's talk about that and I'll quickly put a couple of bookmarks for the listeners. So what you talked about in terms of melatonin being made inside the mitochondria, and that was such a great explanation. So I talked to Scott Zimmerman, who was the optics engineer who wrote the paper that you are, I believe, you're referring to, which is called melatonin and the optics of the human body and, as you mentioned, essentially the exposure to infrared light. So what we're getting in the morning, what we're getting later in the day, is penetrating up to 10 centimeters through our body and even through clothing and stimulating those mitochondria to make melatonin. And melatonin is such an old, ancient, efficient antioxidant that it essentially has antioxidant capability and then its metabolites have antioxidant capability. So it's an incredible, elegantly designed system that makes us very.

Speaker 1: 52:52

It makes it important to be to be getting outside during the day and getting that infrared light. And I also like your description of the excess linoleic acid and seed oils in the diet, because Taco Goodrich and I would invite listeners to go back and listen to that my second episode with Taco Goodrich because he describes how excess linoleic acid from corn oil, soy oil, vegetable oil, sunflower canola can lead to oxidation of some key mitochondrial enzymes called cardiolipin. So maybe the only other point that I would make on that and I'm not sure, have you looked into deuterium and how it's affecting mitochondrial function? And we don't have to go deeply into that topic because I want to keep going on about the metabolic stuff but are you up to or have you looked into deuterium?

Speaker 2: 53:38

This is part of what Jack Cruz knows that I don't understand, and he would probably chastise me vehemently for failing to pour over the literature and, you know, get some approximation of his understanding. And yet there's only so much I can do, jack, and so I follow him on Twitter and I'm trying to pick up what he's trying to teach, and, as a first approximation, I know nothing about deuterium.

Speaker 1: 54:06

Yeah, and we won't make it the topic of this, of this conversation, and there's some very exciting work being done by Dr Lazuli Boros, who has got some really good presentations on deuterium that I'm gonna get talk to him hopefully get him on the podcast soon. But let's talk about metabolic disease and what you've previewed for us, thomas, is all these mechanisms by which we can use cold to essentially reverse metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, obesity, fatty liver disease and, at its basically core of what is going on. So talk to us about the evidence and kind of what you know about the mechanisms of how and this is having such an amazing effect in in metabolic disease.

Speaker 2: 54:49

Some people have been looking at cold exposure as a way to lose weight and I think they're wrong. There are no you know miraculous before after pictures of someone who is obese and the only thing they changed was cold exposure. And then look at how ripped they are. And I'm a case study. I'm in my ice bath every day and I'm still a fat guy in my 50s. You know it is not.

Speaker 2: 55:15

Cold is not, despite its caloric requirements of thermogenesis. It's not how you're gonna lose weight, it is how you're gonna fix your metabolism and the distinction is really difficult for people to understand because the association between metabolic disorder and obesity in our modern sort of Western industrialized countries is so strong that people think they're synonymous. Cold will remodel the distribution of fat in your body. So Sean O'Mara is great. I've never had one of the scans. You know that he puts on the difference between subcutaneous and visceral fat and how dangerous visceral fat is. And then there's another type of fat, liver fat, which is deadly, and what you notice in the cold is that visceral fat goes down and subcutaneous fat goes up, which is part of your body's adaptations to the cold. The health outcomes are wonderful insulin resistance goes down because you're repairing mitochondrial injury and this is what I'm gonna go way out on a limb. I got to share this with Ben Bickman, who's taught me several things, but a conversation with him about this next topic might either reinforce my conviction or tell me that I'm full of who we which comes first, the mitochondrial injury or the insulin resistance? The way that we understand it in the literature, the convention, is that the two are associated with one another and that the mitochondrial injury comes after. And I'm saying I think that's wrong. I think insulin resistance is the ways that the body defends the mitochondria against that injury, that the injury to the mitochondria happens first and insulin resistance is an adaptation intended to protect the mitochondria from further injury. So when you stimulate mytobiogenesis, when you do this mitochondrial therapy that upgrades the quantity and the quality the body, let's go of that insulin resistance, because the mitochondria no longer need to be protected against the overload of the blood glucose spike. Now here I'm highly speculative. I should probably put my own journal article together and wait for that to get rejected by every, you know, respectable medical journal. But perhaps you know, if Ben thinks this is promising, he'll run with it. This order of operations in my mind, is based upon mitochondrial injury first, insulin resistance second.

Speaker 2: 57:52

And so there was a study it wasn't for weight loss, but there was a study in Germany where they took type 2 diabetic. So this is insulin resistant middle-aged men and they said we're gonna keep them cold for 10 days. And they kind of worked up to it. Not cold water, just cold air. First it was an hour, then it was two hours, then they worked up to four hours and it wasn't even that cold. I forget high teens Celsius, maybe 60 degrees Fahrenheit, just chilly. You know, they did not allow these men to exercise because they didn't want to mess up their study and they didn't want them to change their eating habits. So you got to imagine you're only allowed to wear a t-shirt and shorts and it's, let's say, 16 degrees C, you're hanging out with your buddies eating your snacks and not extra. You know, in America we call that a tailgate party, like they're just watching me shivering in the fall weather.

Speaker 2: 58:49

Dang, if they didn't notice a 60% increase in insulin sensitivity, such that some of the subjects no longer met the diagnostic criteria of type 2 diabetes after 10 days max. Well, what would happen if I got them in the cold water? I mean, they didn't even report being uncomfortable, just their subjective report. They said well, occasionally maybe I felt a little shiver, but it wasn't that bad. This is how powerful a little bit of cold is for your metabolism, because when you fix your mitochondria, everything else in your metabolism gets better. As your fat begins to redistribute fat, liver fat goes down, visceral fat goes down, but subcutaneous fat, the kind of fat that you know jiggles underneath you, I've got plenty of it. I'm not going to take my shirt off and show you, but you can sort of take my word for it. This fat is is less unhealthy than the, the belly fat or the liver fat that your body will accumulate when you're metabolically dysregulated.

Speaker 1: 1:00:01

Yeah, and I'll really echo those and what you said, thomas. And this is a really key distinction, because the point at which we start spilling out of our white adipose tissue storage into places where we shouldn't have fat, that is the threshold upon which we start developing metabolic dysfunction and insulin resistance. So I think about it, as we have these storage mechanisms and they exist in our white adipose, under our skin, and, for whatever reason whether that's circadian disruption and I've talked about that before whether that's stress, whether that's ingesting seed oils and processed carbs, we essentially either exceed or start bypassing that physiological white adipose storage of fat and we start getting fat in the wrong place. And that can include, as you've mentioned, in organs like within the muscle, which is called myosteatosis, within the liver, which is called herpataesthetosis, or even in white adipose depose that shouldn't be there, and I've talked to Dr Amar about this. And there's fat in, obviously, in the visceral cavity around the organs, which is the visceral fat. There's fat even in the retro bulb area, there's fat in the tongue and fat in the upper airway that can be contributing to obstructive sleep apnea.

Speaker 1: 1:01:23

So identifying metabolic dysfunction is key because, as you said, this is the problem that we need to address and I agree with you, thomas, that I think the mitochondrial dysfunction happens first and then, when you get enough mitochondrial dysfunction perhaps in addition to this energy overload that we've talked about then the insulin resistance manifests and then the ectopic fat starts depositing. And if you go far along down the road then you start getting an organ specific manifestation, whether that's type 2 diabetes or fatty liver, etc. So that's a really good point that you've made and I think we've really put a good case for people to consider adding cold if they have metabolic disease, and it sounds like this can reverse pretty quickly with a regular cold protocol.

Speaker 2: 1:02:17

The work that Susanna Soberg has done on her PET scans show that winter swimmers who get like 11 minutes a day and she just surveyed them On average they said, yeah, I'm in 11 minutes. Sorry, a week, not a day, but 11 minutes a week was sufficient for them to maintain active brown fat. So sometimes we have it in our heads, you know no pain, no gain that if the benefits are this extraordinary, they must be very difficult to achieve. No, they're not. It takes a few minutes. I do it.

Speaker 2: 1:02:51

You know, two to three minutes a day and for 15 seconds it's miserable, because I'll look down at my morose cone, I'll see the ice floating and you know, all these things start coming out of my head like, um, I could probably skip today. You know, I'm not going to put it on Instagram, Nobody would ever know I can. You know, I'll just pick it up tomorrow. That's all crap. I just get in 15 seconds of misery and then I'm like, oh, what was I afraid of? You know, I relax my breathing, I calm down and I remember why I do this and how good it feels.

Speaker 2: 1:03:27

The cold will create the same neurotransmitters that are associated with love. I get a big testosterone boost. I get a dopamine boost, I get norepinephrine. It will also stimulate production of vasopressin and oxytocin, and it will modulate cortisol. There's a lot of misconceptions here about whether it increases cortisol or decreases cortisol, but when you decode the papers it looks like if your cortisol is too high, it'll bring it down, and if your cortisol is too low, it'll bring it up, and so your cortisol levels will be moderated by the cold rather than elevated or depressed. I've never had a nice bath. That I regretted, max.

Speaker 1: 1:04:12

That I have a personal rule, thomas, and when I go camping, if there's a body of water, I have to get in it. And exactly what you describe. There's every narrative and every internal voice that is like oh no, just don't go in. Next time You'll do it, tomorrow you'll do it. It's this little voice in your head that is making you, giving you an excuse, but without fail. Every time when you push past that voice, you ignore that voice and you hop in that cold water you're like, oh, this is, I'm so glad I did it. So I really echo that call and I encourage people to do it.

Speaker 1: 1:04:47

The interesting point that you're making about the synthesis of these neurotransmitters and the mood and hormonal stabilizing effect of cold water again reminds me of something that Dr Cruz said, which is when we migrated to these northern latitudes and the UV light yield lessened because we were further away from the equator, we evolved these mechanisms to get the same benefits that we would have got from UV light from cold.

Speaker 1: 1:05:14

And he talks about that is related to internal UV light production from the mitochondria and that gets very technical and from a biophysics point of view, but it's amazing how elegant that is if we can basically mimic those mood beneficial effects which you get from warning sunlight and to mimic the appetite regulating effect and everything. It's a very, very elegant kind of system. I want to really get your thoughts next now on a topic that I haven't talked about on my podcast at all, really, which is cancer, and I know that you have used cold therapy and with in the setting of cancer and malignancies with some benefit. Can you give us an overview of what the context was and what were the improvements were and yeah go from there.

Speaker 2: 1:06:04

When I was catastrophizing my PSA, I got really curious about cancer and there's a man in Oregon who reached out to me because he was looking for some ice bath therapy, cold water therapy, with a remarkable story. This is Dean Hall. Dean Hall was diagnosed with two forms of inoperable, incurable cancer. One of them was leukemia and one of them was lymphoma, and he decided that he wanted to do something to inspire other cancer patients. He'd already lost his wife to brain cancer and he was scared and he knew that it was eventually going to kill him and he wanted to sort of go out with a bank, make a difference for his daughter and for the people in general. He decided he was going to swim the entire length of the Willamette River, which is 188 miles long in Oregon, and his doctor told him Dean, you couldn't so much as step in the public pool with your immune system. The way it is. It's going to kill you. And Dean told his doctor and I guess I don't have anything to lose so he gets in the river. It takes him three weeks and it wasn't like he just plunged in the next day. He trains up for this. It takes him three weeks to swim the Willamette and, as you can imagine, it's cold. He goes in and out of hypothermia. His doctor flies out on day 14 to monitor him See check upon how is he doing and he estimated that Dean was down to 3% body fat. He implored Dean to take a weekend off before he's going to do the last week, which Dean did, and I think he gave his mitochondria the break that they needed to recover so he could go back in the river, finish the swim, max. He went into that river with leukemia and he came out of that river without it. He flew down to a specialist in San Diego you know to do like all right, how am I doing, doc? That specialist said if I had not done your initial diagnosis myself, I would swear that you were misdiagnosed because there is no trace of leukemia left in your body. The lymphoma did not get resolved right away. He had to do a process of porous bathing to allow the lymphoma to resolve itself, but the leukemia completely reversed. So this got me curious, because I'm not going to deny a man's experience. This is what happened. But you know I'm a skeptic and I'm like. You know, come on, sounds like what an incredible coincidence. So I started reading.

Speaker 2: 1:08:51

I was reading Thomas Seyfried's work I think he's at Boston College and he's written about metabolic approaches to cancer. In Seyfried's mind, the damage to the nucleic DNA that's not the source of cancer, that's a consequence of cancer that the real damage happens in the mitochondria. He says cancer is a metabolic disorder and it is true that 80% of these tumor cells can metabolize only glucose and so and they don't do it through the mitochondria, they do it through a different metabolic pathway, because the mitochondria are already so dysfunctional that they can't produce the energy necessary for proliferation of the tumor cells. So Seyfried's really good on this and he has administered exogenous ketones to mice and to rats in which he's implanted cancer cells, and he's observed that ketones they don't even have to be produced endogenously, but ketones will inhibit the growth of tumor cells. That's interesting, so I started to think that Dean Hall is really on to something.

Speaker 2: 1:10:01

Then a paper came out from Sweden and I think this is 2022, secchi et al and they used cold exposure not cold water, but cold exposure to starve cancer cells. Because when you activate the brown fat, it will preferentially clear glucose, take up glucose out of the bloodstream so that it's no longer available for the tumor cells and in mice in which they had implanted tumors. They noticed greater longevity, slower tumor growth in these mice that were bred that were designed to die of cancer. So they said, well, that's really fascinating, can we do this in a human being? They took a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma patient, been through like three or four rounds of chemo, still had active tumor tissue, and they used cold to do the same thing and they noticed the same preferential uptake of glucose.

Speaker 2: 1:10:59

Then the University of Rochester did another study completely unrelated to Seafreed and Secchi. They were interested in the question of the longevity of the bowhead whale. According to genetic theories of cancer, a bowhead whale would be riddled with tumors by the time they were 70 years old. They lived to 200 and they're cancer free Because the genetic theory says that mutations accumulate in the nucleus that result in these sort of defective cells that then proliferate. And a bowhead whale has so many cells and it lives so long that the genetic theory says cancer is inevitable. So the University of Rochester said, well, what mechanisms prevent this sort of emergence of cancer in the bowhead? And they decided it was cold shock proteins, because the expression of cold shock proteins repair defects in the DNA in the experiments that they ramped. So these are now three mechanisms by which cold water therapy will inhibit tumor growth Production of ketones within the bloodstream, starvation of those tumor cells that depend upon glucose as their substrate, and production of cold shock proteins that can repair defects in DNA. That is some pretty powerful science behind the mechanism. They sort of explains the mechanisms.

Speaker 2: 1:12:26

That might be what happened to Dean Hall, but I had another experience that was more personal and more moving. This was a woman that I was dating, who called me when I was in Texas and she said I'm in acute abdominal pain. I don't know, maybe I've got an ovarian cyst or something. I said will you get yourself to the hospital? You should not be suffering through this. She's in the emergency room. I fly back to Phoenix. She's got four daughters. She's a single mother and they're all teenagers, are under and the doctors won't say what's wrong with her. Blood work scans everything.

Speaker 2: 1:13:06

So the next day, after they've evaluated all of these tests, they say you've got a tumor on your liver. It's four centimeters across. We cannot remove it because the liver is full of blood vessels. You have a history of a bleeding disorder and just the operate, just a biopsy, could cause you to bleed out on the operating bullet and kill you. We cannot treat it with chemotherapy and we cannot get it with radiation.

Speaker 2: 1:13:35

And she said well, what can you do?

Speaker 2: 1:13:37

They said watchful waiting.

Speaker 2: 1:13:40

Watchful waiting is this medical term, for you're going to die, because one thing that spontaneous liver tumors don't do is just go away by themselves.

Speaker 2: 1:13:51

And so she thought that she was going to be leaving her children motherless. She said, tom, what am I going to do? I said are you going to do the same thing I did? You're going to do the same thing Dean Hall did. You're going to go on a ketogenic diet, you're going to take your carbs down as close to zero as you can get them and you're going to get in the ice bath. She said okay, six months later, this is what you do with watchful waiting. You have to have another scan and I'll be damn max. That tumor shrunk a centimeter. She has not gone back to soda or fruit juice or refined carbohydrates and all the things that you know. All the. She'll eat some processed foods, she'll have some carbs, but she will not have those concentrated liquid carbs. She won't eat the bread, she won't have the rice, she won't have the things that she's convinced, fed that tumor and she's not going back to the hospital either, because yeah incredible.

Speaker 2: 1:14:45

Yeah, because she says I know what works for me. I don't need a medical study, I don't need a medical doctor to tell me that the thing happening to me is really happening to me. I'm going to keep going with what is keeping me alive.

Speaker 1: 1:15:03

It's such an amazing discovery and protocol because the beauty is that we don't need it doesn't need to be this or that, and the beauty of what those three interventions that you talked about, the fasting, low carbohydrate, ketogenic diet and cold exposure these all can be done at the same time as conventional oncological treatment. So it's amazing how we don't need to forego one. And people are very when they get a diagnosis of cancer. One question they ask is why? But another question they ask is what can I do? And it's so empowering to be able to offer something to them that can potentially make a massive difference.

Speaker 1: 1:15:44

And I followed the work of Dr Seafreed and, yes, I think he provides such strong evidence that cancer is this mitochondrial metabolic problem and what he's shown with his experiments, as you mentioned, and he's put mitochondria into disease cells and vice versa and shown that it was the broken mitochondria that made the difference. And for those who follow my podcast, they know that, to go back to the person, the pope of this was Dr Doug Wallace, because he was doing the original research that showed how critical mitochondria are and the whole mitochondrial bio-energetic etiology of disease. I think that's a great transition to talking about the protocols, of how we can implement cold therapy and how maybe we can talk about who would benefit from a protocol, who has metabolic disease versus cancer, versus just health optimization. So if you could let us know what you think about that, thomas.

Speaker 2: 1:16:49

If you're just starting out and you're not cold acclimated, this is the only protocol that you need to know Go cold enough to gas and long enough to shiver. Your observation of your own physiological response to the cold is the best indication of sort of whether it's working. There is no standardized scientific instrument for measuring cold dose, and it's not because the army hasn't tried. I mean, the armies of the world are very interested in how does the human body respond to cold, because in the Arctic, in these areas that could be militarily contested, these military organizations need to know. But the thing is that we have different levels of cold adaptation and because of the vasoconstriction, because of the thermogenesis, there's no standard instrument that says this is how much cold you're getting. Go cold enough to gas, long enough to shiver. After you become acclimated to the cold metabolically, those rules of thumb, they're not quite so important anymore. The Soberg study that says well, do 11 minutes a day. These are sorry. A week, 11 minutes a week is sufficient. Those are all in cold acclimated people and so they don't really apply to beginners.

Speaker 2: 1:18:10

I was going back and forth with a woman on Instagram. She said that she's gone through four rounds of chemotherapy for the ovarian cancer she's 63 years old that she's suffering from. She said do you think cold water therapy would help me? And I said I can't tell you that. You know, I'm not a medical doctor. I can only tell you what happened to Dean Hall and what happened to the woman I was dating, these other people. I can tell you what Seafreed says, but I can't tell you what's going to work for you. She said well, how would I find out? I said you don't have to buy a $15,000 morasco. Just go down to the Atlantic Ocean, get yourself in the water. She said how long should I stay? I said you don't. 15 seconds, you know. Just allow yourself to feel it to see if this is something, a kind of a stimulation, that works for you. I got a text a few days later. I did 15 seconds at the beach. It felt wonderful.

Speaker 2: 1:19:09

She texts me every day because she did buy a moroscope. She says I'm at 45 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm doing two minutes in the morning and I'm doing two minutes in the evening. She says I am not going back to chemo. If I'm going to die, I'm going to die in this ice bath, not in that hospital. So she asks me do I have to go colder. I will if you tell me. Look, geez, max, I'm an engineer Like you, probably have conversations like this all the time. But this is ripping my heart out. And I say 45 is fine because she's getting the metabolic benefits. You can get these even at 50 degrees. When you're starting out you know you're going to feel the. So 45 is fine.

Speaker 2: 1:19:57

But then you listen to Joe Rogan. Gary Brecca was on the Joe Rogan podcast and they get around to talking about cold water and Brecca goes. You know, I don't see a lot of evidence that there's any benefits to go in colder. So why do you bother, joe? And Joe says because it sucks more. And Gary says well, there's a lot of evidence that it sucks more. You know, joe says because it's hard. It's the psychological benefits that really kick in under 40 degrees.

Speaker 2: 1:20:30

Scott Carney, you know he wrote the Wim Hof book. He's got a moroseco and we talk about this sometimes at 39. It feels like bathwater to us, but at 34, it still scares the crap out of us. So if what you're going for is metabolism stay in the 40s, it's really not a problem. But after you become cold, acclimated to the 40s, the 40s isn't going to scare you. If what you're really looking for is heart rate variability and psychological resilience, then go down into the 30s, because that's what's going to give you that anticipatory anxiety. Oh, you know that voice in your head that says you know, I really have to do that. It's overcoming that fear response that in me builds this feeling that nothing bad can happen to me.

Speaker 2: 1:21:19

Today. I just did two minutes in my moroseco. My day is only going to get better. For me it's 34 degrees, two to four minutes every day, unless I'm shooting a video, in which case it'll wind up like seven or eight minutes because I got to do three takes or something. And then I'm fricking, freezing and it takes me an hour to rewarm. And we should mention that it's possible to cold overdose and generally it's okay. But do not operate heavy machinery. Don't try and drive your car while you're shivering. Allow yourself sufficient time to rewarm after you've done your cold exposure. The rule of thumb for me is twice as long as however long I was in there. So if I did a 22 minute lecture on mitochondria with Brian, call one time and Brian can talk like he just won't shut up about mitochondria and I'm freezing 22 minutes. The rule of thumb is it's going to take 45 minutes of light exercise for me to rewarm, but if I'm only doing two or three minutes, then I can do five or six minutes of light exercise, whether it's squats or my steel mace or something like that, and generally I'm fine Couple of other precautionary protocols Never hyperventilate in or near the water.

Speaker 2: 1:22:44

This is something that Vim Hof has been too careless about, because he teaches the breath work and then he teaches the cold, and it's very natural for people to combine these things. But there's a phenomenon called shallow water blackout. The hyperventilation will clear your bloodstream of CO2 and is the CO2 that gives you the urge to breathe. So if your CO2 levels are low and you don't feel that urge to breathe, you could run out of oxygen long before the CO2 says hey, get yourself out of here. People have passed out while they're in the water and drowned because they combine the breath work with the cold. So let's not do that. Always breathe when you're in the cold water.

Speaker 2: 1:23:26

Other than that, I like to go in feet first, never face first. I've seen some people do it, and then Dave Ashbury has this video where he says ah, you don't need an ice bath, just stick your face in a bucket of ice water and I don't know what the hell he's talking about. I always start from the presumption that Jack Cruz is correct and I don't understand him, and that doesn't apply to Dave Ashbury. I think he's just wrong. Go in feet first, because you're going to experience the gas reflex first, then allow the dive reflex to come second. If you go in face first, both the gasp and the dive may be coincident. And there's a guy, mike Tipton, in the United Kingdom. He has a whole lab outfitted where he can study cold water therapy in human beings. He says it's great for treating depression. If you've got a major depression that is resistant to talk therapy and drugs, he's reversed that by using cold water therapy. He always puts his people in feet first because he's afraid of the gasp and the dive reflex happening coincidentally and creating something called autonomic conflict.

Speaker 2: 1:24:33

Another precautionary, a contraindication is hypertension. Cold will induce the vasoconstriction that will put more pressure on your blood by reducing the volume for blood in your limbs. So you're going to get a blood pressure spike and that can be a hormetic stress because cold exposure is great for your circulation. But if your blood pressure is already high. You got to be careful. It's a contraindication for cold exposure. Start warmer. If you're on blood pressure medication, you got to make sure that's up to date. The hypertension is one of the most important contraindications. And then the last precautionary protocol is ice bath sober, and it's amazing that I have to say this, but people drown in tubs and I don't want that on my conscience. And they drown because they lose consciousness, they have face slips under the water and there's no one there to rescue them. So I guess that's a summary. My protocols are emphasizing safety and the potential dangers, because the benefits come so easy and I don't want anybody to slip into a condition that might harm them.

Speaker 1: 1:25:52

Yeah, that's very wise advice that you've offered there. I like the idea that for people who are not yet ready to invest in an actual ice bath or a cold plunge pool, they can use natural bodies of water, and that's something I advocate for strongly. And when I'm in Aubrey, I swim in the local Murray River and it's amazing because you're also getting the benefit of grounding, as you mentioned. You're getting all those free electrons that are having similar beneficial effects in a range of ways, and it's so elegant when we combine these modalities. And we keep talking about Dr Jack Cruz, but his basic, simple recipe is get sunlight in the cold and get grounded at the same time.

Speaker 1: 1:26:43

So you can imagine that when you're stacking all these interventions, you're in a cold temperature, you're getting a degree of UV light, maybe you're at higher latitude, then this is just. It's turbocharging, mitochondrial function and healing, and it's no surprise to me why all these diseases seem to the modern diseases seem to disappear when we're putting us back into this natural environment. The only question I had about the facial plunge I've heard some people recommended in terms of acclimatizing or getting called acclimatized. So you're doing either wrist plungers or facial plungers in a bowl of water, maybe particularly for women. Do you have any thoughts on that specifically?

Speaker 2: 1:27:28

There's something called the cold presser test, which is a standardized psychological instrument to measure your body's resilience. It says to measure your response to stress, and they plunge your non-dominant hand into a bowl of ice water. It used to be that the standardized length of time was five minutes, and then the psychologist decided that was too long. People couldn't stand it. They were torturing their patients. They cut it down to like two to three minutes and then they measure your blood pressure, they measure your breathing rate, they measure perspiration on your dry hand, just to see how your body responds to stress. The cold presser test has been used by Hans Seely, who is deceased but practically invented this modern concept of stress Because he recognized that we have a generalized physiological response, no matter what it is.

Speaker 2: 1:28:25

Inflammation is one. You have an infection, you have an injury, you have too much exercise. The inflammation is this generalized response, and so this concept of stress was meant to describe that generalized response. I don't know whether it helps with cold acclimation from the standpoint of metabolism, but I do know that it helps from the standpoint of psychology, because it's exposure therapy. You become desensitized to an experience that you have more confidence in. As you gain experience, nothing bad has happened to you, then your confidence increases and you learn to take control of the parasympathetic nervous system. You can improve your vagal tone with hermetic stress, so just plunging a hand or the feet into the water is a really good way to activate the nervous system. Practice the structured breathing, whether it's box breathing or something else that you're doing. Calm yourself down into that meditative state.

Speaker 2: 1:29:32

There is however a difference between partial body and whole body. And this is coming out of Finland. There's a university up near the Arctic Circle that I can't pronounce. It's like ooo-loo I forget how they say it, I'm not Finnish and there are vowel sounds that my tongue can no longer make, but O-U-L-O or something like this. And they do great work on cold science. They compared partial body to whole body. They noticed that partial body activates the whole system and it doesn't come down. So blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up, but whole body will activate and then calm.

Speaker 2: 1:30:14

And this explains why I hate cold showers, because cold showers make me angry and I don't want to do them anymore. So I mean, I started out that way, but it's kind of like Joe Rogan said, it's just like a stream of curse words coming out of my mouth when I was in the cold shower and that was the way I managed all those feelings. Ice bath totally different. So I would love to sell you an ice bath, max, and it would cost you a fortune to ship it down to Australia. But you don't need that.

Speaker 2: 1:30:45

I really like what you said about getting into the natural bodies of water. It's only until you decide I want this every day and I want it at my house where I can do it, you know, as part of my routine. For me it's first thing in the morning, I get the dawn, like Huberman says, I'm supposed to get into my eyes and I get in the ice water, and I guess Jack Cruz would approve. Once you want to do it every day, the investment. It doesn't seem so extraordinary anymore. You're reversing your type two diabetes, you're taking care of your brain. Even Alzheimer's has been reversed through metabolic therapies. When you consider the benefits to longevity and health, the $15,000 doesn't seem so bad.

Speaker 1: 1:31:34

Yeah, a couple points on the box breathing. I think, just for the listener, that's a practice of essentially inhaling for four seconds or whatever, however many seconds, holding for four and exhaling for four, holding for four, and that's a. I think it was developed, or I mean who knows who developed it, but it was popularized by Navy, seals and other forms of special forces, military to help them with extreme environments, and it's one I use whenever I'm getting into cold water and for me I've found that regulating breathing and not hyperventilating, as you mentioned, but regulating breathing and focusing on breath is a really effective way of allowing myself and regulating the body. I'll just make a quick point about women and I talked to Sarah Kleiner, who has used cold therapy to optimize fertility and obviously through its mitochondrial optimizing effect, and she made a couple of nuanced points in the interview that I did with her, which is that the first part of the menstrual cycle is a better time to expose ourselves to these hormetic stresses, whether that's exercise or time restriction or fasting or cold exposure. So the first part of the cycle rather than that second part. And she uses the wrist plunges and the facial plunges in some, so it's probably worth. I mean it costs nothing. So it could be a good thing to try for people, maybe before they want to do full body immersion and before I'll get your final thoughts, thomas.

Speaker 1: 1:33:05

But I just had a thought that I wanted to make, and that is to someone who is using cold therapy to reverse their metabolic disease. And it speaks to the point that you made, which is we get a remodeling or a redistribution of our fat tissue and it's going to be nuking or vaporizing ectopic fat, visceral fat, fat in the liver, in the muscle, fat in the wrong places and redistributing it to subcutaneous fat. And this makes so much sense because you're obviously going to need physiological fat stores. So don't be disinherent if you don't see changes in your body composition but your HBA1C diabetic markers gone down, your fasting insulin's gone down, all the other markers are improved. Just keep that in mind.

Speaker 1: 1:33:52

And when I talked to Jack Cruz, he made the point that the study of super centenarians by a researcher called Niels Baselai in New York and essentially these guys that are living beyond 100, all of them had subcutaneous but not visceral fat. So they didn't necessarily look like a Donus or Arnold Schwarzenegger. They had what you've described yourself, thomas. They've got subcutaneous stores. So that hints to the idea that there is a protective effect of having subcutaneous fat into the advancing age. But the distinction here is that most people don't know what type of fat they've got unless they do an abdominal MRI and get a look at those fat compartments or they've measured things like a fasting insulin level and they're known to be insulin sensitive. So I'll just add that nuance. But wrap this up for us, thomas, and thank you so much for your time and for exploring so many of these fascinating topics with me. Do you have any final comments and maybe where people can find you and your business?

Speaker 2: 1:35:00

morosecoforgecom M-O-R-O-Z-K-O-F-O-R-G-Ecom. This is where we make the ice baths, but I publish a lot of articles. I've got like 130,000 words of science and experience published in these articles in Moroseco Forge. A number of people have said you should really put that together in a book. So I am. It's not going to come out until 2024 because I had no idea how much work it is to put together a book. But we're in the editing stage and I got like one more chapter to write. It's going to be called Uncommon Cold and then the idea here is to blend science and experience. It will be the definitive work on cold water therapy. But without the personal stories it just doesn't resonate, and so you'll hear my story of testosterone in there. You'll hear stories on couples' cold plunging and all these neurotransmitters. You know experience together, the way that it bonds the couple together. You're going to hear Dean Hall's story on cancer.

Speaker 2: 1:36:11

There's a chapter on autoimmune diseases and you alluded to this earlier when you were citing cruise. This is one of those things a few people appreciate on which he is absolutely right. There is an interaction between UV light exposure, cold and the immune system, and you think about it in the northern latitudes, when there's no UVB light to be had. Cold can compensate for the lack of UVB exposure and this makes so much sense evolutionarily and it can restore the strength to the immune system that would ordinarily be drawn from higher levels of vitamin D. And so there's a chapter on the origins of all these different autoimmune disorders, whether it's Parkinson's or rheumatoid arthritis, or my son's type 1 diabetes or multiple sclerosis or fibromyalgia that all relate to the immune system in surprising ways and how they originate in disorders of either light exposure vitamin D specifically or cold. You can read all about this when the book comes out, and I'll send you a copy, max, except I feel so damn guilty about not having finished it yet.

Speaker 1: 1:37:28

No worries, that sounds very exciting and we're really bringing together what I believe is a decentralized approach to solving these modern health problems. And if centralized science and medicine is good at diagnosis, when it comes to autoimmune disease, metabolic disease, cancer, neurodegeneration, it has no real answers for reversal or for treatment. And that is where these decentralized strategies, which focus on mitochondrial health and mitochondrial function, are kind of giving us relief and giving patients and our clients and our patients hope. So, on that note, thank you so much, thomas, for your time. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I'm very much going to look forward to pushing it out to my audience. So thank you and have a great day.

Speaker 2: 1:38:20

It's been a delight you too.