A “Hack” For Making Ultraprocessed Foods Less Unhealthy, Eating “Wild Foods,” What Sports Make You Smarter (And Increase Longevity) & More: Solosode #493

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: In this episode of the Boundless Life show, a hack for making ultra processed foods less unhealthy, eating wild foods, what sports make you smarter and a whole lot more. Welcome to today’s show. I’m probably still picking my morning smoothie. Cacao nibs and coconut flakes and bee pollen, all three and shilajit gummies out of my teeth. It’s kind of weird. I actually haven’t been that hungry for my post workout morning smoothie for about the past two weeks. Probably because after hearing so much about the so called pleiotropic effects, meaning system wide effects for cardiovascular health, cognitive performance. That’s ironic that I couldn’t grasp that word.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:50]: Decreased risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia, satiety, lipid management, et cetera. I have been injecting a teeny tiny microdose of something called Retatrutide on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. That’s a triple hormone receptor agonist. It’s a peptide. It targets GLP1, it targets something called GIP, and it targets glucagon. So it has three different ways that it suppresses hunger and helps out with appetite management along with all these other effects. If you were to go get this from your doctor, they would prescribe you one to two milligrams per week. That’s typically a subcutaneous injection.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:28]: I do a microdose, I do about 0.25 milligrams per week, meaning I get a 5 gram bottle. I get it from a company called Peptual, which is like super duper high quality peptides. They’re screened by a doctor. You got to do a teleconsult with a physician to even get your hands on this stuff. So it’s not like fly by night peptide company. So the way that I’ve been doing this is I get a 10 milligram bottle of Retatrutide powder from this company called Peptual. This is like super high quality. You gotta go through a teleconsult with a physician to even get your hands on the stuff.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:59]: They use really good screening methods, only peptides made in USA or Germany, you know, none of this crazy contaminated crap that a lot of you know, sold for human research purposes only companies are getting out of China, for example. But anyways, the company’s called Peptual that I’m getting them from. And so I get a 10 milligram bottle of Retatrutide. I then put 5 milliliters of bacteriostatic water into that. I pull back on to about the 12.5 mark on the syringe. That’s 0.125 milliliters for those of you who like math. And so that 12 and a half units gives me about a microdose of around 0.25 of Retatrutide 0.25 milligrams. So that’s like, you know, easily one tenth the dose or less than what would normally be being used.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:48]: So anyways, side effect though, back to the smoothie thing is I’m still eating, but I’m really, I don’t think about food at all. Like I went to a party last night after playing an hour of pickleball. I hadn’t had dinner, I didn’t care, I didn’t eat any food. I didn’t like the way the food looked. I waited until like 8pm when I got home to make myself some salmon. But stuff like that just becomes far easier. Like I just don’t think about food much, which is nice. And the microdose doesn’t carry a lot of the nausea, diarrhea, depression type of issues you get with a with a mega dose.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:18]: So anyways, check chalk one up for Retatrutide. That’s not what I’m here to talk to you completely about though. Several different things have caught my eye lately and this is my chance to share them with you. Everything that I discuss you can find links and helpful notes for it. BenGreenfieldLife.com/493. That’s BenGreenfieldLife.com/493 first of all, this is interesting. I said I’d have a hack for you for making ultra processed foods less unhealthy. And even though I’m not a fan of ultra processed foods, sometimes you do find yourself at a gas station on a long road trip and you got to take one for the team. That should be pretty few and far between.

Ben Greenfield [00:03:58]: But there was a recent study in which they had young adults eat a diet rich in ultra processed food and the participants ate fewer calories and burned more calories if their diet was high in protein and low in carbohydrates. So this is basically the idea of eating what are called protein enriched ultra processed foods. So what are protein enriched ultra processed foods? These are typically formulations that include added protein, whey protein, soy protein, pea protein or other sources alongside all the other industrial ingredients that you’d find in ultra processed foods. Emulsifier sweeteners, flavors, preservatives, colors and so even though, as you can probably guess, you do want to avoid eating franken foods all the time. If you are going to have them every once in a while, having the higher protein versions are better. In this case they used a specially formulated high protein breakfast porridge. Porridge sounds like something grandma would make you. Not an ultra processed food from a gas station.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:57]: But that’s what they used in this study to find that people basically had a reduction in calorie intake and increased calorie burn, increased metabolic rate when they had these protein enriched ultra processed foods. Of course part of this too is that protein just burns more calories to digest it. This is why also a hack for appetite satiety is if you want to be really full at dinner, grab two chicken breasts, right? Or you know, cut around the outside marbly fat portion of a steak and just eat the interior of the lean steak. You’re gonna get full pretty fast and get bored of eating pretty soon. Or to have a whey protein shake without any toppings or additives to it and you’re full pretty soon. So let’s say you walk into the average, I don’t know, like gas station and you want to have some protein enriched ultra processed foods. What are some things that you could look for? I’m just thinking about like if I’m on a road trip and look like I forgot to pack, maybe I had to jump in the car because the zombies invaded and I don’t have any food. But the gas stations of course are still open.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:00]: Some of the things to look for. You can find Quest protein bars at just about any gas station, convenience store, Walmart, road trip, whatever. Those are around 20 to 21 grams of protein, 190 calories. They’re high fiber, low net carbs, and they do use stevia and erythritol rather than high fructose corn syrup. They still are ultra processed, they still give a lot of people, including me, nasty ass farts. But Quest protein bars, they even have birthday cake flavor, would be one example of a protein enriched ultra processed food. Another one would be the core power protein shakes. You can find these again at most gas stations.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:35]: Not a huge fan of the dairy that they use in some of them or the milk protein isolate in some of them. They also have lactose free versions. They clock in at 170 to 240 calories. They got around 25 to 40 grams of protein depending on the size. They got vanilla chocolate options which have maybe 5 to 10 grams of sugar in them. But that would be an example of quick liquid protein without needing to chew that is going to allow you to consume Fewer calories from ultra processed foods and get that slight bump in metabolic rate. Again, your road trip companions may not thank you later for the amount of gas these type of things produce. But again, we’re just talking about you’re in a pinch and you need something other than a fricking bag of chips and bar chocolate.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:19]: How about the triple zero Greek yogurt from Oikos? I don’t even know if I’m saying that correctly. Lycos, Oikos okos. I don’t speak Greek. Don’t speak Japanese either. Marge, take me to the embassy. Old Saturday Night Live reference for those of you who are scratching your heads. Oikos triple zero Greek yogurt. 15 grams protein per cup, 100 calories, zero added sugar.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:43]: They use stevia now, which is great. They add a little bit of extra fiber. Prebiotics again, you’re still having typically a milk source from a CAFO food lot. These aren’t like organic grass fed grass finished cows. You know, you typically have some emulsifiers in them that can do a number on some people’s guts. But any of these are going to be better than candy and chips. And of course there’s also. I’ll, I’ll throw another couple out there.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:08]: Beef jerky, like say Jack Link’s or Oberto. 12 to 15 grams of protein per ounce serving of that. Look for low sodium if you can, because very high amounts of sodium chloride in these can be an issue. It’s acidic, it can raise blood pressure. So low sodium high protein better than high sodium high protein. Tuna packets also. Starkist has tuna packets. Yeah, there’s metal and microplastics in them. But remember, you’re not doing this every day.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:33]: This is like just in a pinch when you need to eat some processed foods because it’s all that’s available. Go for the high protein, protein enriched ultra processed foods. You can add that to your vernacular. Now. Research shows you will eat less and you will burn more calories if you do. All right, here we go. Here’s another one. Speaking of eating ultra processed foods, this would be the exact opposite of that, I guess.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:55]: This was a recent open access journal publication in scientific reports entitled consumption of only wild foods induces large scale partially persistent alterations to the gut microbiome. All right, let’s dive. This is a fascinating kind of case study asking what happens to your gut bacteria if you ditch modern food, including your beef jerky and yogurt and go full hunter gatherer for in this case, about four weeks, about a month. So we’re talking only eating wild forage stuff like acorns, berries, the occasional piece of the backside of a white tailed deer. So. So this research, which was published again in Scientific Reports, followed one person’s extreme diet experiment and showed some pretty cool changes to the gut microbiome, that community of trillions of bacteria in your intestines that influences your immunity, your mood and your digestion. And so the scene behind this, in terms of setting the scene for you to understand what they were going after is first of all, as I just alluded to, your gut microbiome is like this mini ecosystem inside of you, shaped by what you eat, your lifestyle, your environment. And in modern times, with a diet heavy on processed foods, including Quest bars, dairy and grains, we’ve got less diverse microbiomes compared to our ancestors or people who might be eating a more traditional hunter gatherer society esque diet.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:20]: Those type of people often have more of what are called ancient bacteria that can do a better job fighting inflammation and disease. So the hypothesis of the people looking at this same single participant who was going to go eat wild foods was that switching to a pure wild food diet could boost beneficial bacteria and improve microbial diversity and maybe even bring back some of those lost ancient types of bacteria that seem to be more absent in the modern gut. So for eight weeks they had this guy out, I don’t know if he was in the woods, but they had him out there and they were collecting daily stool samples. So weeks one to two they’re eating a normal diet. Think fruits, veggies, meats, grains, not a horrible diet, but standard western, say healthy diet. Then for weeks three through six they switch to wild foods only. Chestnuts, acorns, nuts, wild greens, berries, mushrooms, little bit like I mentioned, wild caught deer and some fish. No store bought anything, no salt or spices, just nature’s bounty.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:21]: All cooked over open fire or, or ground with stones like a hunter gatherer would do. And then they kept that person’s usual daily routine, exercise, sleep, everything else pretty consistent to just isolate what the diet’s impact on gut was. Then in weeks seven to eight, they went back to normal eating, right? So first two weeks, normal western diet, not too unhealthy, but fruits, veggies, meats and grains. Weeks three through six, the wild diet. Week seven and eight back to the normal diet. And they collected stool samples throughout to track bacteria types and amounts and overall diversities. The changes in a nutshell were pretty massive. During the wild food phase, the gut microbiome shifted pretty dramatically.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:01]: Beneficial bacteria that are these ancient bacteria like one called Blautia. It’s a horrible name, Blautia, that one spiked, that’s linked to reduced inflammation and protecting against conditions like obesity and diabetes. On the flip side, bacteria associated with dairy heavy diets like Bifidobacterium, that one dropped way down. No surprise, because this person wasn’t consuming milk. Believe it or not, they did not milk a wild deer. So overall diversity, the variety of the bacterial species in the gut, jumped up and stayed elevated even after the person switched back to normal food. So I wish I could know who this person was. If somebody knows who this guy was out there eating this wild diet, he’d be interesting to interview on the podcast because I’d like to know how he felt also.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:44]: So some changes persisted, like another kind of ancient bacteria that I’ve talked about before on the podcast called Ackerman, which helps with gut barrier strength and fighting metabolic issues. That one persisted after they kind of stopped the wild type diet. But a lot of the other so called old friend ancient bacteria that are common in older traditional societies, but more absent in modern guts, they barely showed up at all. So the person’s microbiome moved closer to a hunter gatherer profile, but over six weeks, it really didn’t fully go there. So in the paper, the researchers discuss how wild foods, rich in fiber, diverse in nutrients and free from modern additives, can pretty profoundly influence gut health in short time. But if you really want to produce lasting changes to the microbiome and really reinoculate yourself, it’s likely that you need to switch to a diet very low in ultra processed foods, very rich in a lot of these more wild type foods, and do so for longer than, let’s say six weeks. How long remains to be seen. If you look at metabolic adaptations to macronutrients, we know a lot of people need to reduce carbohydrates for up to 12 months to shift back into more of a fat burning scenario.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:03]: So we could be talking about a year or more, especially if you grew up on Cheerios and Gerber baby food and hot dogs. So if you want to know more about what a wild type diet would look like, there’s a great book called Eating on the Wild side by Jo Robinson. I would say both of my cookbooks have a lot of wild foods. Foraging, hunting, game, meat, Boundless Kitchen and Boundless Cookbook. One of my friends, Abel James, he had a whole book he wrote back in the day called the Wild Diet. A lot of paleo type of diets kind of venture into this wild food type of category. I had another I’ll link to all these@bengreenfieldlife.com/ 493. I had another interesting guest, Dr. Terry Cochran, who talks about how wild game meat actually has fewer problematic I believe she calls them amyloid plaques than modern beef, chicken, et cetera.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:52]: You know, so you know, eat duck, geese, deer, you know, those, those type of animals. Get out your bow and arrow folks. So wild food diet, that’s what you need to know and appears that it can be helpful for the gut when you go back to the basics. All right, what else do we have? Speaking of movement and burning calories, taking 4 minute walking breaks every hour after aerobic exercise reduced non HDL cholesterol more than just prolonged sitting after aerobic exercise. Okay, so what happened here? So there are several studies that align with the findings from this recent study, namely that getting up for short periods of activity during what would normally be a long day of sitting tends to be good for your metabolism. But it turns out that that is still the case whether or not you’ve exercised at the beginning of the day or at the end of the day. So what this means is that even if you spend like an hour in the gym before work, you are still going to get benefit from doing 100 jumping jacks once every hour or dropping and doing 40 air squats for every half hour of sedentary time. Like you still get benefits.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:07]: So don’t use the trip to the gym to justify just sitting in a chair the rest of the day. I talked about this quite a bit when I interviewed Katy Bowman as well, a biomechanist, about the cardiovascular benefits of just moving during the day no matter if you exercise in the morning or at the end of the day. So anyways, there are many other studies that back this up. So there was a 2016 meta analysis that caught a lot of attention over a million people. They found that high levels of moderate intensity physical activity about an hour a day can eliminate the increased mortality risk associated with high sitting time of 8 hours per day. Interestingly, once you drop below 60 minutes of exercise, you couldn’t fully offset the impact of sedentary time for eight hours, once again highlighting the need for getting up and moving and not just like sitting and staying sedentary for a solid eight hours. 2024 study showed that reallocating just 10 minutes per day from sedentary time to various types of activity improved mood states. So literally just figuring out where you could grab 10 minutes and that could be like for an 8 hour workday, giving yourself like 75 seconds per hour to get away and do something.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:19]: A 2009 study used accelerometers and they found that the time spent sedentary predicts higher fasting insulin levels, which is a marker for insulin resistance and independent of moderate to vigorous physical activity. Again meaning that no matter how much people were exercising, if they stayed sedentary for eight hours a day, it was still causing issues with their insulin resistance. A 2022 review showed exercise snacks, brief intermittent bouts of activity like stair climbing, let’s say for a couple of minutes, several times per day, or again, doing some jumping jacks or push ups during a day of work can enhance fitness and glucose control beyond what a structured workout at the beginning or the end of the day is capable of doing. They had a 2019 study of older women and they found that sedentary time, independent of that person’s physical activity levels, was linked to increased cardiovascular risk. So what am I getting at here? The answer is not, oh, I’m going to go hit the gym before work, or I’m going to go hit the gym after work. That’s great. But once again, what I’m getting after here is that it doesn’t matter how much you work out at the beginning or the end of the day. If you have your butt planted in a chair and you’re sedentary for eight hours sandwiched in between your workout and the end of the day or the beginning of the day and your workout at the end of the day, meaning you have to move.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:42]: You have to move. Sometimes people visit my house, they’re like, dude, you’re always moving. Like, you know, you’re on a call, you’re walking around, you’re doing a podcast and you’re dropping and doing 50 pushups. And it’s true, I don’t stop moving. And I do eat like a horse despite being on this Retatrutide peptide. Right Now I weigh 203 pounds, I’m 4% body fat, I’m strong as a bull, I feel great and I’m moving all day long and it feels fantastic. Even right now. You can see while I’m talking to you on this video, I’m kind of shuffling back and forth, so probably fitter than I’ve ever been in my life, Feel fantastic.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:13]: And I interrupt prolonged sitting with light intensity activity throughout the entire day. Speaking of which, it’s also been shown, so like there was a 2024 study on this, that this type of strategy reduces inflammation, not just cardiometabolic Risk but inflammation. And another study found that when you have high sedentary time, you get lower cognitive performance. But when you throw in these little exercise breaks, it improves cognitive performance. So for those of you who own a business, this could relate to how you set up your workplace in terms of improved worker performance, cognition and productivity. Like keep people moving throughout the day. This can be standing work desks, this can be kettle balls, this can be suspension straps from the doors, this can be walking workspaces, this can be balance mats at desks. There’s all sorts of ways that you can do this, but if you’re an employer, I would very much encourage you to do just that.

Ben Greenfield [00:20:08]: Okay, let’s move on and look at another study that asks what kind of sports make kids smarter. So what they did here was they looked at what are called open skill sports versus closed skill sports. It turns out that open skill activities when it comes to improving executive function and cognition, especially in kids. But there’s been other studies and meta analysis that look at this in adults too, which I’ll get into shortly. But the type of sports that involve unpredictable dynamic environments that require quick adaptation like say basketball or soccer or tennis or probably even pickleball, that is associated with greater improvements in executive function than close skill predictable sports like let’s say running or swimming or of course no sports at all. I’m telling you this not because if you’re running or swimming or or cycling, you should stop doing that. Cuz the best type of movement is the type of movement that you’re gonna do. But think about novelty, unpredictability and throwing some random, even slightly scary or challenging tasks at your brain and your body simultaneously as a part of your movement and longevity enhancing routine, especially when it comes to your brain.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:28]: I like this idea that I recently came across in Sahil Bloom’s book The 5 Types of Wealth, in which he suggests that having the same day to day activities with the same workout, the same sport, the same type of books, the same people, et cetera can reduce novelty and cause time to go by faster. And you can almost like expand time and get free time and slow down the clock if you focus on doing something novel. Since learning that for about the past three and a half weeks I have been making sure that every day I do something that is one novel thing that I haven’t done on other days or even have never done in my life. This can be playing a new game with the family, shout out to the new game Coyote that Tim Ferriss and the Exploding Kittens did this can be cooking a new type of meal. I’ve been changing up my workout routine and doing this body split workout. It’s a new type of workout. So I’m throwing a new workout up routine it myself, playing pickleball, but playing pickleball with new people. We’ve been also playing pickleball with a foam ball instead of a regular wiffle ball.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:34]: So there’s all sorts of ways you can throw new things. I’m learning coulter walls, sleeping on the blacktop right now on my guitar and having to strum with a different finger style that I’m used to. So every day I ask myself did I go through the entire day? And this comes also down to the importance of self examination at the end of the day. But did I go through the entire day and not have any form of novelty in my routine or did I have something that pushed me outside my comfort zone? So I used to say do one thing at least every quarter of the year that like scares the hell out of you. Sometimes that gets a little masochistic because I was constantly doing like an adventure race or an ironman triathlon or a spartan race or something just cray cray, you know, hella skiing probably would have been next or something like that. But now I just say do something mildly scary every day, mildly challenging, mildly outside of your comfort zone every day. I think it’s easy to wrap your head around and also forces you into a process of self examination. So you ask yourself if you’ve actually been doing that.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:31]: So I did say that there were some other studies that showed similar effects. There was meta analysis that looked at basketball versus running. They found that basketball produced better cognitive flexibility and these benefits were stronger in young adults compared to the elderly. They have done brain imaging studies that show that open skill unpredictable activities improve attention, self regulation and executive function much more than closed skill sports. They have found open skill sports increases acutely brain derived neurotrophic factor IGF1 and IL6 all associated with better neural efficiency and extra brain activation. They’ve also found that open skill athletes, right, athletes who are say let’s say a basketball player versus a marathoner. The basketball player performs better on reaction time, cognitive flexibility, working menu, memory and visual search skills due to higher neural efficiency and what they called connectivity as measured with an EEG and an FMRI. There have also been studies that have shown when you exercise in an unpredictable outdoor setting versus a standard gym or indoor workout, you get better cognition, attention, memory, creativity, reduced stress, a higher state of flow in terms of your psychological state.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:51]: And this again has been backed up by multiple studies. So outdoor activities showed an increase of 25% greater versus indoor exercise on psychological and physical health. Both helped. Outdoor exercise helped way more. They’ve also shown an increase, like I mentioned, in the flow alpha brainwave type of activities. The they looked at indoor versus outdoor running in one study and they found that the outdoor running increased elf activity which is linked to divergent thinking and creativity and flow as well as memory compared to just going for a run on a treadmill indoors. They looked at outdoor versus indoor basketball on cognition. Outdoor basketball, just playing basketball outdoors, right? Taking the unpredictable activity, it’s already unpredictable indoors, doing outdoors, you get even more effects on working memory, attention and reaction time.

Ben Greenfield [00:25:44]: So go outside to work out sometimes, right? And also do a sport, skill or activity every day that is somewhat unpredictable or that takes you outside of your normal day to day environment. Now that all being said, I am often asked, you know, is it true, you know, I came across this study or this paper or heard at a cocktail party that there are certain sports that whether or not they’re open skill versus closed skill, outdoor versus indoor are associated with longer life reduce what we would call all cause mortality. And it is true that this has been looked into. I’ve mentioned it before on the podcast before, but I’ll highlight it again real quick here for you. Because some of these sports are open skill sports, some of them are not. So racket sports had a 47% lower all cause risk of mortality. Swimming 28% lower all cause risk cause risk of mortality. Aerobics 27% lower and cycling 15% lower.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:39]: So racket sports beat the pants. Yay for pickleball. Beat the pants off of everything. You know, pickleball, tennis, probably ping pong would be in there. Paddle, squash, anything like that wins out. Another cohort study that was done that was a little smaller than this one, they also found 16% reduced all cause risk of mortality. With racket sports, they didn’t look at swimming, but running and walking and golf were also pretty low compared to the racket sports. And then most of the studies that have looked at aerobic exercise find that either swimming or cycling runs out for some reason.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:18]: They seem to cause a reduced risk of all cause mortality, even more so than say running. And again, the best type of exercise is the type that you’re going to do. Maybe running beats people up. Um, maybe they, they do it less often because it’s less pleasurable than cycling and swimming. Maybe people who cycle and swim, have higher disposable incomes? I don’t know. There, there are some confounding variables there, but ultimately the big takeaway message is do stuff that’s unpredictable, exercise outdoors and if you can, pick up a racket, sport. And those would be some of the best things that you can do for overall anti aging and cognition. All right, well, that is going to just about wrap up what I have for you today.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:56]: If you enjoy these solo episodes, you may want to check out the Life Network. Join LifeNetwork.com where I’ve got raw, edgy, controversial episodes. My real thoughts on what I was thinking when I interviewed certain podcast guests, certain new things I’ve added to my routine and why, Q & As, et cetera. That’s all inside. Join LifeNetwork.com where you can interact with me and 30 plus other experts in the biohacking, the health and the wellness industry. Shownotes for this episode are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/ 493 where you can access the studies and everything else I’ve mentioned. Also, leave your questions, your comments, your feedback. Hopefully you enjoy these quick, snappy research reviews and Q&As.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:36]: And until next time, I’m Ben Greenfield from BenGreenfieldLife.com/ 493 and the Boundless Life Podcast. Signing up. Do you want free access? Access to comprehensive show notes, my weekly roundup newsletter, cutting edge research and articles, top recommendations from me for everything that you need to hack your life and a whole lot more. Check out BenGreenfieldLife.com it’s all there. BenGreenfieldLife.com See you over there. Most of you who listen don’t subscribe, like or rate this show. If you’re one of those people who do, then huge thank you. But here’s why it’s important to subscribe, like and or rate this show.

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