Jay Feldman 0:12
Welcome to Episode 59 of the energy balance podcast, where we teach you how to live without constant hunger and cravings, fatigue, brain fog, poor sleep and other low energy symptoms by maximizing your cellular energy. I'm Jay Feldman. I'm a health coach and independent health researcher, and joining me again today is my good friend Mike Fave. Mike and I have been studying health and nutrition together for a long time now, and Mike also draws on his experiences from working within the healthcare industry. Today's episode is part four of our series discussing tissue oxygenation, cellular swelling, pH balance and other related topics. In the first few episodes of this series, we discussed carbon dioxide, lactate, glycolysis and pH balance and their relationship with our metabolism. And then in the last episode, we discussed many situations where you see these symptoms and issues play out, such as in altitude sickness, panic attacks and anxiety, swelling and edema, heart failure and other related health states. And then in today's episode, we'll be talking about how you can increase carbon dioxide and minimize lactate in order to rectify these issues and support your metabolism and improve your health. So this is a pretty physiology heavy series, and so if that's not your cup of tea, you might want to go back and listen through episodes one through seven of the podcast where we took some time to build a foundation as far as the bioenergetic view of health is concerned, although in today's episode, it will not be quite as heavy on the physiology as we'll be talking about a lot of the applications here and what we can actually do to improve our health situation regarding these factors. So in specific, today we'll be talking about the major problem with Wim Hof breathing and an alternative breathing method that supports carbon dioxide production. We'll be talking about why using thyroid caffeine and other metabolic stimulants can either increase or decrease carbon dioxide production, depending on the context. We'll be talking about why burning carbohydrates leads to more than a 50% increase in carbon dioxide production relative to fat burning. We'll be talking about how PUFA consumption decreases carbon dioxide production, and we'll be talking about the best carbohydrate sources that will oppose stress and support carbon dioxide production. To check out these show notes for today's episode, head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/podcast where you can take a look at the studies and articles and any other relevant links or anything else that we referenced throughout today's episode, and if you are struggling with any of these symptoms or conditions that we've been discussing throughout this series, whether that's high blood pressure and edema or if you have experiences with altitude sickness or heart failure, or another one that we hadn't mentioned was migraines and headaches, which can also be related to this set of symptoms that we described, or this set of factors that affect our metabolism. Or if you're dealing with any other low energy symptoms, whether that's chronic cravings and hunger, fatigue or low energy, chronic pain, weight gain, digestive symptoms like bloating or inflammation, brain fog, poor sleep or insomnia, or any hormonal imbalances, low libido, or any other low energy symptoms or chronic health conditions. Then head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/energy, where you can sign up for a free energy balance mini course, where I'll explain how these different symptoms and conditions are really caused by a lack of energy, and I'll also explain the main things that you can do from a diet and lifestyle perspective, to improve your cellular energy, to maximize your cellular energy, and optimize your health And reverse these symptoms and conditions. So to sign up for that free energy balance mini course, head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/energy, and with that, let's pick up where we left off at the end of the last episode, where Mike was discussing the importance of energy and the structuring of water as primary drivers of our health.

Mike 4:21
So the key, the key point here and is to make sure that your their cell energy is is working. You're streaming energy through the cell in order to create that structure, in order to create structure, in general, you need to have cellular energy being produced. And this is where you get I'm going to name drop Pete again, but his hypothesis is essentially, what was it? Energy and structure are interdependent at every level, and because it's essentially the reaction is like a feed forward, like a spiraling up reaction, where it's like, the more energy produced your cells can produce, the more structure you can have, the more structure you. Have, the more you're able to produce energy. So the the it's like cyclically going forward. It's like a never ending process, right? It's it continues upon itself based on whatever the resources there are in the environment. But when that stops working, when you don't have the energy, then the structure starts to degrade, and then when the structure starts to degrade, you can produce less energy, and then when you produce less energy, more structure degrades. So you can either technically be going in either one direction, you're either producing energy and therefore structure, or you're or you're not. You're you're losing production of of energy, and then you're losing structure. And through this lens, you can get a sense of aging, right? So aging, it would essentially be, as opposed to the idea that you're burning the candle too hot and you're going to melt all the wax and be done, or you're running through the machine in biological life. Or at least from this perspective, the idea is that you want to be producing more energy, because then you'd be maintaining and producing more structure. Or where, if you start lowering energy metabolism with all this, whatever this, I don't know, calorie caloric restriction and metformin and sirtuins and whatever else, then you lowering energy production, and then you're starting to basically, over time, you're just slowly degrading structure. The The reason these things don't, I think wipe things out right away, is because the biological systems have multiple checks and balances built around making sure that you can still produce energy even in sub optimal conditions. Because if you don't, it's essentially death, like without when you don't have that energy streaming through, then you just have basically a puddle of solutes and proteins. What makes, what brings the solutes? And the solutes being the ions and the proteins to life is the energy streaming through them and producing the structure with water. Without that, you just it's like you could just have it's like, if you took me and you put me in a bucket, I could just be a whole bunch of sodium, potassium, carbon and whatever else. But when you add energy to that system, then it starts to arrange, and you start to get life and life forms and whatever else.

Jay Feldman 7:06
Yeah, and those analogies that you were talking about, like the candle burning or the machine, the reason why those are so problematic is because a better way to look at it would be a situation where burning the candle faster actually increases the size of the candle, like, it builds the candle, which is obviously, like, not something that would actually happen. It just doesn't make sense. But that's why those are that's such a problem. Yeah, that's

Mike 7:28
why, that's why the analogy is the problem. It's the wrong analogy. Yeah.

Jay Feldman 7:31
Same thing with the machine. Like, yeah, yeah. Car machine, whatever, like, the more you run it, once it hits 100,000 miles of it's a car 200,000 or whatever you start to it starts to break down, and you have to replace parts. But that's not how our bodies work. Our bodies replace their own parts. They're like Transformers. They just need an energy source, and they, you know, they can keep building.

Mike 7:51
So well, that's the beauty, right? It's like with a car, you have to actually get the whole part and put it together with a human. You can take other parts that aren't necessarily like the holistic piece, like, you know, if you break your arm, you don't need to, like, put a new arm on, on a human, if you break, if human, if we break our arm, or an animal in general, you just need to make sure that there's enough energy available, and then there's enough resources available, and the body will take those components, break them down into their basic units and then rebuild them using the energy where they need to go. It's like that system is way more complex than an Audi. Like your Audi may be able to tell you if a car is coming on the left or the right, and it may be able to help you park. But it doesn't take components. It doesn't take components, break them down into their into basic blocks and then use some for energy and then intelligently replace those other pieces where they need to go. Like, that's, that's the beauty and the intelligence of the living system versus these non living systems that we have. You know, that's, and that's what the other thing is. Like, it does these things autonomously. It doesn't need to be programmed new like, you don't need to take a new program and and put it in to do it. You just need to put the pieces in there. And it just does it. It's, it's, it's kind of amazing. And it does it with all different types of tissues and all different areas of the body. It's like, how does it prioritize going to that arm that's broken versus somewhere else? It just, it just knows. And the systems have been built and developed around it. So it's kind of crazy when you actually think about it.

Jay Feldman 9:27
Yeah, no, absolutely. And, and the thing that you touched on, like a broken arm or any sort of injury, ideally, should heal perfectly if, if energy is good, and this, the organism is perfectly healthy. And that's why repeat talks about that being able to happen in the fetus, for example, like it's in an absolute perfect environment, high CO two, high glucose, there's no like, stress or injury on it, assuming everything's fine. And that's why I can basically heal injury without a scar. But once we're in the real world with all the insults that we have in our modern environment, um. When we get an injury, it doesn't tend to heal perfectly. It heals pretty well. But then the older and older you get, the more basically scarring you get. And that's kind of the aging process is basically the aging is like a sign of is, or basically all it is is an inability to properly heal and repair in response to stress, to the point where the machine does get kind of degraded. But that doesn't mean that that's what it's stuck with. It's something you can reverse the other way to some degree, yeah, well, I mean, there should be no limit to it. The only limit is what's around us, right? So you just have to go up to altitude and not have any stress and have the absolute perfect diet and not be exposed to any, you know, non native EMFs and no chemicals, and no, you know, like harmful chemicals and pesticides and things, and you have to, well, that's my point, right? And just have to live a couple 100,000 years ago where CO two is even higher. What other things perfect, like amount of sunlight, no previous stress, and all the generations leading up to you?

Mike 10:57
Yeah. I mean, there's a degree. The thing is, is, I think it's, there's kind of a important, like, spectrum here. It's like, at certain levels of degradation, right? Like, it's going to be hard to recover from some of that, like, but the the one thing is, is, they are showing, they are showing, by adjusting certain things, they can actually make that happen. Like, there's some interesting research playing with morphogenic fields and like using progesterone as a bioreactor and high CO two concentrations to regenerate limbs in animals that like, they're not salamanders, right? This is like bunny rabbits and things like that that normally could not regenerate those limbs. And so what they're showing is essentially, by manipulating the environment in the correct way you can actually create, like, massive amounts of regeneration the now, they're not doing that on humans yet. But the point being is that if we can manipulate our environment with the resources that we have now, and the limiting, the limiting aspect is, what are the resources that we currently have now that that's kind of the limiter, right? It's not like you can crawl back in your mom's womb and be like, All right, heal me. You know, it's more like you got to use what you got in our current environment, and that's what it really comes to, is that, and that's what everything that we talk about, and the strategy that we talk about is, what is the what are, what can we use in our current environment, at least that you and I know of to basically heal, to to optimize these energetic processes and provide the resources that they need and the amounts that they need, in the ratios that they need, etc. And that's that's and when we work with people, that's what we're doing. We're basically fixing those processes. And for a lot of for some people, you know, it's geared around different situations. You know, some people have a gut issue. Other people are dealing with high blood pressure. A lot of times they all go hand in hand and but you just have to, like the nuances is where you're going to focus first, and how much energy you're going to put into each place, which buttons are you going to push and how hard you're going to push them. I mean, that's what it comes to. But the whole point here is and what we're what we're going to get to, what and what we've been trying to get to. And like with all our strategies, is, is essentially fixing the energy metabolism the best we can with what we have. And that's, I think, a lot of Ray's recommendations, or Georgie, or whoever else is, is coming to this, this perspective, or and even the researchers who talk about these things like this is essentially what they're getting at.

Jay Feldman 13:25
Yeah, exactly. And I was obviously being semi facetious with some of the things I was saying. But the idea is is legitimate, which is that the more that we improve our environment to support energy production and increase our energy availability, the more we'll move towards regeneration, and the more we'll slow aging, and the more we'll recover from stress and injury better. And as you're saying, that's what we're trying to do with people who aren't you know have gotten to a point where they're experiencing various symptoms and issues because they haven't been in an environment like that. And so we're adjusting our environment in whatever way we can to best support that. So obviously there are certain limitations that we experience in the real world, but there's still a lot that we can do to to support that energy availability. So that's what we're what we're moving towards.

Mike 14:15
Before you move on. I want to add one piece, but okay, I just wanted to point out here when you when you mentioned that Ray talks about the importance of, or like, the ability of the fetus to completely heal injuries in in in utero, in the womb, what I want to point out here that like is a very, I think, important point in the context of energy and structure are in are interdependent at every level, is that making sure that the mother and the father take care of themselves prior to pregnancy and have the necessary building blocks to produce a healthy baby, and that the mother has like a relatively stress free and well supported, or like optimal environment for her pregnancy allows for her. Mother and the baby to have increased energy available to increase structure. So optimizing that environment for the mother during pregnancy gives, essentially, the way I see it is, gives that baby increased reserves for life, because they're a lab, they they develop more structure. And then when the baby comes out, eliminating stresses and making sure that the baby has a solid environment while they're growing, so that they can have optimal amounts of energy, allows that baby's body, and when they're a child, whatever else, as they go through puberty, to create optimal structure because they have the amount of energy they need. So these are all critical periods for the the baby, for this, this developing human, and it's it's extremely important that these critical periods are from from like puberty, or like the whole growth phase, all the way back down to like conception and prior concept, prior to consumption, the parents health are important to optimize, if you want to, like, optimize society and everything going forward is to make these the best periods possible, not derange them with some of the things that we do now with formula feeding and all that other that that is going on. And it like it's when you start thinking about things in these terms, like, some of these things are just kind of like, kind of, like, disgusting that it's going on that way, or, like, causing, like, massive amounts of immune response when the baby's really young, and that, like, in creating inflammatory reactions like those aren't good things like, and I'm just gonna leave it there, but I just, I wanted to point that out, that those periods, like, where the baby's creating their structure, like that sets the tone for the rest of their lives and sets their capabilities. And I think, like, there's a lot of like, IQ and race and all this stuff and whatever else, but I think, I think what's and like, even, like the idea of genetics and nature versus nurture. But what I think it really comes down to, and this is where all the epigenetics comes from. Is like optimizing the environment, optimize the individuals. And it's a continual process from individual to the to the individual, the baby and the children that that individual create, and then their children, and then their children. It's like all of this is an accumulation of the environments that they were able to create for themselves and the amount of energy and structure they were able to build over time. And so it can either feed forward. It can be going in a great direction and positive direction, or it can be going in a negative direction and degrading over time. And it's just kind of like which way do you want it to go?

Jay Feldman 17:35
Yeah, yeah. And as we're getting at too, I mean, these things get passed down in a way that really affects the whole evolutionary path of a species, where these the amount of energy available can dictate whether increased complexity is a possibility for that species, and whether they're going to, you know, they're going to drive towards increased complexity or reduced complexity, and whether they're going to increase their brain size and be able, you know, and you kind of see that throughout all the different species, and when they might have split, and what could have been going on in the environment to allow for that, yeah? And yeah, we'll have to have that, that conversation on that, yeah, and evolution in genetics and, well, yeah, epigenetics and all of that in the future. But yeah, the the environment and energy availability is what drives that and and that's when you also get people talking about potentially previous civilizations or previous subspecies or other like human type species, potentially being more intelligent, or potentially living for much longer, and possibly being, you know, having lived up in the mountains, or having been in a particular time in history when there was much more CO two circulating in the atmosphere. So just interesting things to think about that we'll dive into. You know, dive in more in the future, but definitely helpful to keep those, all those things in context, as far as the way that they affect our health and the generations beyond us, and, yeah, and aging, and it's all it's all very intertwined, very intertwined conversation. But circling back, there's a couple other things I wanted to touch on, just situations where you see the same hypoxia and lack of CO two and basically respiratory alkalosis, and you had talked about diabetes and the edema scene there, and that's also responsible, at least in part, for the neuropathy scene in that state and diabetes, which is basically like nerve damage due to compression, which can happen due to swelling in the area. So that's just another, you know, another situation there that's worth mentioning.

Mike 19:36
And energetic failure at by with the cells at that nerve area. Like, I think it goes directly to that as well. It's like the whole system is, is deranged.

Jay Feldman 19:46
yeah, yeah. And then the other thing too, and I know I mentioned this earlier, is all those situations where, where set is all mine is used, like various forms of edema and glaucoma, epilepsy, altitude sickness, heart failure. That. It. And again, the status of all mine is working by increasing CO two. So that's basically showing the involvement of this whole situation, this whole pathway in that, you know, in these different states, and how much increasing CO two can help with that. Yeah. So as far as increasing carbon dioxide goes, you already talked about this before. I mean, you talked about, like, the most important piece here, which is, and we talked about this whole the whole time, is just increasing mitochondrial respiration, increasing the amount of energy producing we're producing, and increasing the amount of CO two we're producing. And complete glucose oxidation is going to be the best way to do that. And that's because, as we mentioned earlier, when comparing glucose to fat oxidation, you produce less CO two with fat oxidation, 50% less. And that's because the pyruvate to acetyl CoA conversion in that basically connects Glycolysis in the Krebs cycle increases carbon dioxide production. And that's why, when you convert the pyruvate to lactate, you miss out on that as well, and that's why you can Yeah, so, so that's a huge part of why we want to be encouraging glucose oxidation, especially in the places that need in the in the areas that need to be respiring at a high level and producing a lot of energy. And then the other factor as well between comparing glucose and fat oxidation has to do with the NAD to NADH ratio, which allows glucose oxidation to run faster and produce more ATP and more CO two in the same amount of time. And so that also helps to increase carbon dioxide production and oxygenation. So overall, big picture, the best way to support your metabolism do all the things that we said that are on the beneficial side, and push everything in that feed forward reaction is to increase glucose oxidation. And then, as you mentioned as well, there are certain things that can block that process. And that's always the place we want to address first, because you don't want to try to stimulate that process and increase it with something like caffeine or thyroid, if there are certain things blocking it. So you mentioned endotoxin as being one of those main things that blocks it, which is definitely the case, and other gut toxins can Can, can have the same effect. So that's one thing to consider, is improving gut health and reducing endotoxin production. We've had several episodes talking about gut health, so I'll link back to those. Nutrient deficiencies can prevent efficient glucose oxidation. So addressing those will be particularly helpful, and we'll talk about that in detail. But B vitamins and magnesium are going to be incredibly important there. But really, any nutrient deficiency, I mean copper as well, or zinc, really anything is going to all of the, all of the vitamins and minerals have a role in glucose oxidation, in mitochondrial respiration, and so if we're low on any of them, that's going to, that's going to be a bottleneck. And then some other things that can inhibit that process. I mean, excess stress, emotionally or or physiologically, that's driving the increase in stress hormones is going to block that process. And that could be over exercising, that could be just living in, you know, a stressful life, that could be not getting enough sleep, those things are all going to drive you towards that lactate producing state, you know. And others I know, I mentioned nutrient deficiencies, having excessive amounts of certain nutrients, like excess iron can be an issue there, any sort of heavy metal can be an issue there, and can kind of disrupt these processes. And yeah, PUFA, definitely. So polyunsaturated fats are really good at inhibiting the efficiency of mitochondrial respiration, and basically inhibiting the effectiveness of the Mito of the electron transport chain, which is then going to cause all those problems we talked about before. And so decreasing PUFA consumption is huge. In that regard.

Mike 23:36
They do it by impairing structure, by being incorporated into the mitochondria and being more easily damaged the mitochondrial membrane, and being more easily damaged and whatnot. So they're just, they're just generally not ideal.

Jay Feldman 23:49
Yeah, becoming more easily damaged, which causes all those issues, and then also basically being more permeable, kind of like how we talked about a cell that's lacking energy, is more permeable to sodium, and, you know, sodium and calcium coming in, and that causes it to swell and everything. Basically the same thing happens in the mitochondria when you have a lot of PUFA, where the we talked about, like the protein gradient being important for producing energy at the electron transport chain, and the PUFA causes basically a leakage there, so you don't have as much of that gradient, which is like the, you know, if you think of it as, like, like, a hydro electric generator or something, where you need the pressure of the water on one side to drive it, you're like, decreasing that pressure. I don't remember what analogy we had before, but I don't know it's like, I don't know we had some, we had some analogy talking about the gradient before I remember what it was.

Mike 24:37
Yeah, because at, at pace is like, the, like the hydroelectric dam, like with the protons going through, and so it's like, if the, if the dam is leaky, then in the water is leaking out, like from the cracks, then it's not able to run across the turbine and basically create energy. And PUFA is essentially putting cracks in the system. Yeah. Yeah, and it's like, there's whether or not you believe in a requirement for PUFA, like the requirement is so low, and it's like, completely unavoidable in the diet that you like it, you'd be hard pressed to miss the requirement if you were eating like, a generally healthy, whole foods diet, at least in with the principles that we've previously described. So it's like the idea is still to keep it as low as as you can on a normal diet. You know, none of those, no lab diets, right? No sucrose and corn starch and whatever else. Diets that they give these rats to induce the deficiencies, right? Like super hydrogenated coconut oil, whatever else.

Jay Feldman 25:39
Yeah, none of the that's the problem. I mean, definitely the anyway.

Mike 25:42
yeah. It's not that those are the problems, just like, like, extremely, yeah, extremely, like, refined things that you couldn't nutrient less, whatever else, yeah, yeah.

Jay Feldman 25:51
And another thing with the PUFA, too, talking about this mineral balance, is that in addition to leaking, you know, causing the leaking of that proton gradient. They also, they've been shown, to cause that same leaking of the sodium into the cell. And we would say that that's due to the lack of energy. But, you know, they say that basically it's the same thing where it's kind of becoming, the cell becomes permeable to the sodium, more fluid, right, right? And then they say that that increases the energy demand, because it has increased the pumping of the sodium, the sodium potassium ATP pump, which basically is saying that it requires energy to force the sodium out. So it's just another area that PUFA, even when it's not damaged and oxidized and destroying your DNA and protein structure and all of that, it's still having these effects by increasing the permeability, basically in the parallel way that a lack of energy does, and then it also happens to decrease energy production too. So it also directly causes the lack of energy. So it's that's a huge one when it comes to wanting to, you know, if you want to keep CO two high and produce a lot of energy, you don't want to have a lot of PUFA.

Mike 26:55
And that also doesn't like, if you take that in context of, like, a structured water point of view, as the main determinant of cell structure, rather than a membrane. Anything that's making it more fluid isn't necessarily good, like you want to be maintaining the gel state. So if like PUFA is making it more fluid, then that's like an increasing the increasing the influx of sodium, and then also impairing energy metabolism, like, those are basically three nails in the coffin right there for it, for having a high amounts of PUFA in the diet, and like, it being super beneficial, or anything like that. Yeah,

Jay Feldman 27:30
Yeah, definitely, yeah. And so then some other things, when it comes to improving carbon dioxide production, obviously, as we said, like getting enough carbohydrates is going to be important, having them spaced out so you're keeping the stress hormones down there are, you know, and then when you have removed some of those blocks that we've talked about, whether it's PUFA or, you know, a lack of various nutrients or endotoxin, and then then doing things to help kind of stimulate that process can help increase the production of carbon dioxide. So that would be using something like thyroid or caffeine. B vitamins are another one that help to drive this process. And as we talked about before, b1 is, is, is vital in increasing the conversion from pyruvate to acetyl CoA through pyruvate dehydrogenase. And that's that step that connects glycolysis to the Krebs cycle. And basically, basically, that is the step that is the main regulation step determining whether the glucose is getting turned into lactate or if it's going to be moving on, obviously, things still have to function right at the electron transport chain, but that's kind of that switch right there, so that's extremely important. So having enough b1 is important there, but which is thiamine? Yes, thank you, yeah. But virtually all the B vitamins have roles in various aspects of energy production, so getting enough of those, or having extra amounts of those can help drive it a little further and increase carbon dioxide production.

Mike 28:46
Yep, and each one of those, well, what you can actually take pretty large amounts of b1 without causing necessarily deficiencies of the other B vitamins. And like, it's being relatively safe. But with B vitamins in general, you have to think like, if I'm going to push the gas pedal and basically connect glycolysis to cell respiration, then I'm probably going to need more NAD plus to carry electrons, which means you're going to need more b3 and you're probably going to need more riboflavin for fad. So what it really comes down to is you can't just take you if you're going to use B vitamins, you're probably going to want to use, like the whole consortium of B vitamins, rather than just one, and that's why they usually have B complexes, um, but just something to keep in mind with anybody thinking about experimenting with taking this B vitamin or that B vitamin. And even though we're talking about b1 specifically here, or even b3 for energy production. They're important. They also, they like, they require the other vitamins, and some like taking these three can cause issues with the methylating B vitamins and whatnot. So just something to keep in mind as far as applicable information.

Jay Feldman 29:54
Yep, absolutely, yeah. And then a couple of things that are more specific to increasing carbon dioxide production one is kind of parallel to the bag breathing that we talked about. And you know, if someone's hyperventilating, if they're having a panic attack, bag breathing can help to increase the amount of carbon dioxide you're inspiring, just kind of like, you know what all those studies looking at increasing carbon dioxide in the air that you're breathing? So that can be helpful. But in general, if you there's a breathing practice called Buteyko, which can also be really helpful here, basically by training yourself to breathe in less and breathe out less, so you're breathing off less carbon dioxide and in general. And that can be helpful for also raising carbon dioxide levels, kind of in the in a parallel way to altitude, where it's kind of the equivalent of of not breathing in as much oxygen and in a parallel way to bag breathing, or just in a parallel way to having really effective oxygenation, and it can help increase that by increasing the carbon dioxide availability. And some of the things they talk about, in particular breathing, is that you tend to see hyperventilation, not only in like a panic disorder, stress state. But also, you know, we were talking about symptoms of somebody's aging. Generally, if you see someone who's really not doing well, they're old. In their age, they have trouble breathing like they have to breathe a lot. It's heavy. They can't breathe through their nose, and that tends to be a sign that they're not respiring well, and they're not getting enough carbon dioxide. And so utaco Breathing is kind of built on the opposite idea there, which is also important to mention, is the opposite of a lot of breathing techniques or a lot of breathing techniques, whether it's like, Wim Hof or hell, Wim Hof. Yeah, you're doing the exact opposite. You're basically forcing, like, it's very stressful. You're increasing adrenaline and stress hormones, which, again, can always feel good in the short term, but you're doing that by decreasing carbon dioxide and causing that whole uh, HPA activation, that whole stress activation that we talked about earlier, that happens in the those quotes from those studies. And so that's what you're doing with something like Wim Hof. And the opposite new take is kind of like the opposite of that.

Mike 31:53
They actually proved that they actually they their studies on Wim Hof breathing, and basically, like they injected the volunteers with endotoxin after they had them do Wim HOFs breathing, or like they either they had them do Wim Hof breathing and then injected them with endotoxin, or injected them with endotoxin, like, not a dose to obviously hurt them, but like a dose to stimulate an immune response. And this was like human volunteers and then had them do Wim Hof breathing, and they didn't necessarily respond to the endotoxin. So we're like, Oh, that's great. And it's like the reason they didn't respond necessarily to the endotoxin is because after they did Wim HOFs breathing, the adrenaline levels in their blood were ridiculously high. And so essentially, my thought process behind this, and this is something that we talked about, is like they the adrenaline, basically they just started seriously raising, I would guess, fatty acids in the blood and through adrenaline's mechanism. And then the fatty acids basically helped to mitigate the response to endotoxin. And then maybe even the adrenaline itself helped. But in the study, they they basically showed that, like doing breathing like that, like blowing off all your CO two, like strongly elevated adrenaline, which was, which is kind of antithetical to what we want to do here. It's hermetic, yeah. But the thing is, adrenaline has a whole, whole, whole host of especially in, like chronic, chronically being raised, negative effects on energy metabolism and shifting towards, like fatty acid metabolism and things along those lines. So it's not necessarily, like, it's not ideal, it's not ideal to be doing things in that way, per se, um, and this is why I laugh when I when I see it, especially when you, like, if you're a clinician, and you look at things like, who's small breathing, which is where you're basically trying to blow off CO two and, like, really pathologic states, or if you understand what we're talking about with the boar and the Haldane effect, like going out and actively do as a meditation technique, blowing off all your CO two is not a good idea.

Jay Feldman 33:50
Yeah, yeah. And another explanation, maybe the increases in free fatty acids is protective there too. But also adrenaline is there for backup energy production. Like there's a reason why it increases when you're doing intense exercise, and there's value there. It helps you deal with whatever the demand is at the moment, term, yeah, it just comes at a cost. You're You're accruing debt in that way, and so that's why increasing adrenaline can help you deal with anything. Normally, your body is making that evaluation. It's experiencing endotoxin, and it's kind of like I'd rather deal with a little bit of inflammation now, rather than accruing all this debt with adrenaline, and I'll just kind of deal with it, and instead, you're saying, no, let's let's accrue the debt, let's take out a loan with this adrenaline, so that way we don't feel the effects of endotoxin, like it's not a net benefit. It's just a benefit in the short term at the cost of a long term. And another example of that is an EpiPen. Like, that's why an EpiPen is used when someone's having an extreme allergic reaction. It alleviates the reaction by driving immediate energy production, which is great, and obviously it's better than dying, and that's kind of what we talked about this whole time. Like these acute adaptive responses are much better than dying, but they're just coming at a cost. And so I wouldn't you know you don't want to use an EpiPen all the time to like, feel good during the day, or to like, get enough energy. When you wake up in the morning, with which I'm saying is the equivalent of Exactly, yeah, yeah.

Mike 35:07
I mean. And the thing is, our body is adapted to. Our bodies are adapted to have short bursts of these situations, right? Working out if you if you had a fight, or if you're going, if you had to run from something, whatever it was, but chronically hammering these pathways is definitely not a good idea. And like, even in ICUs, like long term use of some of the adrenergic agents are not necessarily good or like the vasopressin agents, whatever they are. And then the other thing is, if you see, like the other stress hormones from the adrenal gland, the your glucocorticoids, like cortisol and whatnot. When you see like synthetic use them, like prednisone, prednisolone, dexamethasone, whatever it is, the long term effects and the side effect profiles of all these are essentially the same as chronic diseases, right? It's like high cholesterol, high blood sugar, thinning, skin wrinkles, stretch marks, abdominal obesity, like and that's, that's your those are the extreme examples of what these hormones do either in Super physiological with super physiological effects, because a lot of the synthetic glucocorticoids have groups added to them to make them way more potent and, like, less metabolizable, which is, I mean, it's helpful for lowering inflammation acutely, but again, it for acute situations. They can be life saving. But in long term situations, or like chronic exposure, is is absolutely terrible for the physiology. It completely degrades it, and that's what you see with with long term use of these drugs and cancer, or in in any type of autoimmune disease, or in certain like acute events like strokes or brain tumors or whatever it is. And people that go on these like a long time, you can see, like I've seen patients in the hospital, they get, they, they they, they have cancer, they get their diagnosis. They do whatever surgery, whatever they're going to do, and then they put them on they put them on the steroids, and then they blow up their blood sugar goes insane, like they, especially if you're diabetics, don't give a diabetic a steroid. They're they

Jay Feldman 37:09
already have a steroid, exactly. Yeah, they're already really high in glucocorticoids, exactly.

Mike 37:15
And then it's like the you'll see blood sugars like skyrocket of people, people who weren't diabetic, and start getting high blood sugars, they'll start getting high high blood lipids, high cholesterol. They'll start, they literally will make them fat. Like, in a matter of like a month, you start seeing like, abdominal obesity, loss of muscle mass. Some women get like, stretch marks. You start to see wrinkles, like the face gets fat, like, just all the consequences of disease, like that degradation of structure and from the loss of energy production with these hormones is just it's really not good. So, yeah, these adaptive processes are there for the short term to help us drive increased resources and energy production when we need it. But long term, they come at that cost, that debt, and that debt is the structure of your body.

Jay Feldman 38:04
Yeah, yeah. And that that does the cortisol and glucocorticoids and cortisone, like the medications, work in the same way as the adrenaline, as we're talking about, where it helps decrease the inflammation. Immediately it helps, you know, use it on, like a skin rash or whatever people use it for if they're inflamed. But as you're saying, in the long term, it comes at a cost, yeah. And I wanted to clarify also that acute, you know, I know you said, like we're developed to acutely deal with situations through the stress hormones, like running from a tiger, or, you know, exercise or things,

Mike 38:35
it was always the tiger.

Jay Feldman 38:36
Yeah. And it's, it's true, we are adapted to it. It doesn't mean it doesn't come at a cost, like spending a lot of your time running from a tiger is not going to lead to a healthy organism. And so in the same way, like when we're exercising, there is that stress there, and there's benefits to exercise that outweigh that stress. And this comes back to that whole hormesis argument. So there's still benefits those things, but that's why doing it too much, is it comes at a cost. So we just want to be aware that we don't want to be driving that we don't want to be driving that stress, and we definitely don't want to be doing it all the time with something like Wim Hof breathing. Instead, we want to be doing the opposite with something like mutico breathing, where, again, the main idea here is that you're reducing your breathing. You're breathing gently through your nose. And because of that, it's the opposite of hyperventilation. It's hypo ventilation, and it basically is mimicking the same effect as altitude. So the goal would be to kind of be in a state where you're basically doing that. So that way, I mean, it's, it's just a good way to, you know, keep your CO two up at the same time. It should be something that kind of happens naturally, if you're producing a lot of CO two, you know, and effectively oxygenating and everything. But it's just something you you know, that can help externally. And you know, in addition to saying that, it mimics the effects of altitude, another thing that increases CO two, if you adapt well, is altitude. Obviously, it's just a little bit prohibitive, because a lot of people can't up and move. But if you were to be able to that would help increase CO two as well, yeah.

Mike 39:57
Instead of, like, if you're going to get exposed to endo two. Toxin, right? Instead of doing Wim Hof breathing, and this goes directly with what we're talking about, you can just have a glass of juice, because the glass of juice will supply you with the nutrients to help deal with that, with that stressor, or if you're stressed out, like you can back breathe. And you can also have some juice, and basically that sugar and the minerals that come with it, and all the plant compounds can help drive energy metabolism to produce CO two and so one of the basic anti stress measures that you can have is making sure that you're eating enough carbohydrate every day and you have enough micronutrients to be able to oxidize that carbohydrate. And you know enough is, you know, that doesn't mean that you need to eat 1000 grams of sugar a day. Enough is the amount that you you need to for whatever your functioning is, right? That's a minimize stress. Yeah, exactly, to minimize stress. And there's some studies on, you can look at different studies, but, um, essentially, yeah, that's, that's like, a very key anti stress measure, as well as eating enough protein, eating enough fats and then eating enough micronutrients, that's your B vitamin, and we already covered that. But, yeah, the another basic way to increase CO two is to be eating enough sugar and oxidizing it through cell respiration. And it's not just, you know, it's not just taking teaspoons of sugar, because we both tried that it's more, you know, getting adequate carbs from whole fruits, fruit juices, frozen fruits, tubers that you that you digest well, if you digest starch as well, any anything along those lines, that's really where you want to be getting your carbs from. And that's those are direct anti stress measures. And there's studies basically showing this, that in the higher carbohydrate diets, you can see lower especially in relation to protein. You can see lower cortisol levels, and you can see higher androgens and things like that. And you also low carb diets are are like a key. How do I want to put this like have been shown, specifically to lower thyroid hormone function and to raise cholesterol, which are both signs of their effect on cell energy metabolism, because that when that high cholesterol is a sign, especially in low carb diets, that thyroid hormone is lowered, and then that cell metabolism or cell respiration and glucose oxidation isn't being isn't being prioritized and used effectively to take that cholesterol and the thyroid hormone and turn it into your steroid hormones. And then you also see a lot of low carbers come back with low hormones, like, like testosterone. And so those are, those are, like, key indicators of our examples to look at the benefits of carbohydrates and that. And again, the it's the ones that I necessarily listed. There's problems with certain carbohydrate groups, like the grain based carbohydrates and soup, like super refined carbohydrates, like granulated sugar, making up the bulk of your carbs every day. And just again, that there's, that's the nuance to this stuff. It's not just sugar.

Jay Feldman 43:05
yeah. And, of course, like, some table sugar is fine, but as you said, making up the bulk of your carbohydrates Not, not a good idea.

Mike 43:12
yeah? And I tried that. Just, I definitely tried that, yeah.

Jay Feldman 43:16
And as we talked about, the vitamins and minerals are incredibly important for producing energy. So that's definitely part of the problem. We've also talked about the gut effects, potentially with the granulated sugar. I mean, most people should be absorbing it without it getting fermented in the colon or in the small intestine. But if, especially if somebody already has a digestive issue, it can cause problems, and it doesn't have the benefits of the fruit polyphenols, or the polyphenols from the roots and tubers and their their fibers too. So that would be just some things to consider, as far as the sugar thing, but as far as sugar goes. But another thing I wanted to mention, along the lines of Buteyko too, was just that it anytime that somebody tends toward hyperventilation, whether it's because they're exercising or they're getting stressed and they noticing that they start to breathe through their mouth, or if they do when they're sleeping, those are all times that you would want to try as much as you can to reduce that ventilation, reduce your breathing and help decrease the stress. So breathing through your nose when you're exercising would be ideal. When you notice that you're hyperventilating or you're breathing through your mouth. Trying to shift towards breathing through your nose would be helpful. And then when it comes to sleeping, some people will also tape their mouths, which can also help encourage you to breathe through your noses instead of through your mouth when you're asleep, which, over time, should help you retain more CO two and help improve your breathing too. So you don't have to keep doing that forever, necessarily. But a lot of people find that that helps to improve their sleep, especially if they run out of glycogen and they wake up in the middle of the night. That can be because you're, you're not oxygenating well, and yeah, and you're breathing through your mouth, and you're, you're letting off CO two, and it leads to inefficient glucose usage, and you're running out of your glucose fast, kind of like if you were using Metformin. So that would be a reason why you want to maybe try mouth taping too. I've definitely seen it provide benefits for a lot of. People, they say they sleep deeper and all of that. So those would all be things to consider when it comes to increasing carbon dioxide. I did want to mention also that we're like, just to clarify, anything that can stimulate you metabolically, whether that's thyroid or caffeine or exercise or any energy demand, can help to increase carbon dioxide and oxygenation and increase energy, or it can drive lactate production and cause all these problems. It depends on that underlying state, whether you've taken those blocks away, and when the whether you have the not only the substrate, meaning like the carbohydrate, but the other materials necessary, like the vitamins and minerals and the low stress situation to help optimize the energy production. So you just want to be aware that you don't want to always be hitting that gas pedal, especially if you're not doing well. You want to make sure that you're fixing the ability to produce energy first before, before doing anything like that. And that's why I think a lot of people run into issues when they use thyroid too early, or pro metabolic hormones too early, or too much, yeah, or too much, yeah.

Mike 45:59
You see people come to you like, taking, like, they're not feeling well, so they're like, taking progesterone, pregnenolone, a gram of aspirin, niacinamide, like, this, whole boatload of supplements. Like, whoa, whoa. Did you try it? Like, let's take it easy. Like, you're not even eating 2500 calories a day, and you're like, strongly pushing the gas pedal, like, let's, let's go back to the foundation. Like, let's get the diet set first and like then we can start in incorporating this toolbox of of supplements and things that you can use.

Jay Feldman 46:29
All right, that's going to wrap up this series, discussing tissue oxygenation, cellular swelling, pH balance and various related topics. Although in the next episode of the podcast, we will still be discussing carbon dioxide, although in a bit of a different context, where we'll be talking about the effects on the environment and whether we should be concerned about increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And you may be surprised by some of the information that we share in that episode, so make sure to tune in for that one. And if you have enjoyed today's episode and the rest of the series, then please leave a like or comment. If you're watching on YouTube and if you're listening elsewhere, please leave a five star rating on iTunes or a review. All of those things really do a lot to help support the podcast, and are very much appreciated. To check out these show notes for today's episode and take a look at the studies and articles and anything else that we referenced throughout today's episode. You can head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/podcast and if you are dealing with any of the low energy symptoms that we've discussed throughout this series, whether that's related to high blood pressure and heart failure or edema and swelling, or any other low energy symptoms, whether that's chronic cravings and hunger, low energy or fatigue, chronic pain, weight gain, digestive symptoms like bloating or inflammation or water retention as well, or if you're dealing with brain fog, poor sleep or insomnia or mono imbalances of any sort, or any other low energy symptoms or chronic health conditions. Then head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/energy where you can sign up for a free energy balance mini course, where I'll explain how these different symptoms and conditions are really caused by a lack of energy, and I'll also walk you through the main things that you can do from a diet and lifestyle perspective to maximize your cellular energy and resolve these symptoms and conditions. So to sign up for that free energy balance mini course, head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/energy, and with that, I'll see you in the next episode.