Health Benefits of Paleo Environmental Stressors

Intro:

Welcome to Dr. Ruscio radio providing practical and science-based solutions to feeling your best. To stay up-to-date on the latest topics as well as all of our prior episodes, please make sure to subscribe in your podcast player. For weekly updates, DrRuscio.com. The following discussion is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease. Please do not apply any of this information without first speaking to your doctor. Now let’s head to the show.

DrMichaelRuscio:

Hi everyone. Today I speak with Scott Carney, an investigative journalist who has written two fantastic books, That Which Doesn’t Kill Us and The Wedge. One of which I found quite helpful in my own life. The main premise is there could be some missing, as he terms them, “Paleolithic stressors” that if incorporated into our lifestyles could lead to a myriad of benefits, including mood, energy, inflammation reduction, and improvements in auto-immune conditions. Some of this is reminiscent of Wim Hof breathing and cold exposure therapy, but it goes a bit deeper and a bit broader. So I really hope that you will listen to this episode and look for these certain lifestyle practices that again, expose us to these missing stressors, just like exercise is a stressor, and that could unlock quite a bit of health benefits. This is something that should plug into the protocol in Healthy Gut, Healthy You.

DrMR:

So if you haven’t yet read Healthy Gut, Healthy You, and you’re looking for kind of a foundational approach to your diet, lifestyle and gut health, I would definitely steer you there. Then compliment that with Carney’s book, The Wedge to unlock any missing potential paleolithic lifestyle stressors. That really compliments the foundational approach that I advocate for in Healthy Gut, Healthy You. With that, we will now go to what was a fantastic conversation with Scott Carney.

DrMR:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Dr. Ruscio radio. This is Dr. Ruscio and I am here with someone I’ve been listening to non-stop for the past couple of weeks, Scott Carney, who was an investigative journalist . He’s got a few pretty fantastic books out there, one of which I’ve recently gone through, What Doesn’t Kill Us. Scott, I feel like I know you because I’ve been listening to you over the past three weeks nonstop.

ScottCarney:

Well, that’s great because that means you and I were stuck in my office closet together for eight hours as I recorded that whole thing.

How the Human Body Interacts with Its Environment

DrMR:

I can feel your pain as someone who attempted to record an audio version of my book and grossly failed, I can totally feel your pain there. I am really excited to have you on the show. One of the things that I am always trying to bring to our audience is the simple foundational diet and lifestyle interventions they can use to improve their health. You really hit on kind of an array of these breathing techniques, exposure to cold, and a few others that seem to, if I can try to kind of encapsulate your thesis here, provide some of the evolutionary pressures that we may have evolved with that are now absent. By revisiting those, we may be able to have a health promoting effect on the human physiology, similar to how we’re discovering how fasting is helpful and Circadian rhythms are helpful. Is that kind of a fair way of capitulating that? Or would you modify that at all?

SC:

My work goes pretty deep. At the most basic level, I’m looking at how the human body interacts with its environment, both actively and passively. If you think about the most broad generalizations of what goes into making a healthy human, we generally think of two pillars of human health. Diet which is what you put into your body, and exercise which is how you move your body. If you just get those two things right, you would be a picture of human health. Now that’s a very broad sort of generalization of where our understanding of health is. What I’m positing in my book, What Doesn’t Kill Us and in my more recent book, The Wedge is that there is actually a third pillar that human health also rests on, which is the environment. The place that we inhabit and all of those passive signals that come in from the outside world, that tell your body to do stuff. Then how you interact with that environment. Mostly what your mental attitude towards the environmental stressors is. That can have a profound impact on how your body operates.

DrMR:

This is something that we had discussed on the podcast a few years ago with Katie Bowman. She remarked that she felt that exposure to extremes of heat and cold were actually necessary for your circulatory system to adapt to the temperatures, which makes a lot of sense. You know, it does seem that these are things that are really missing from a lot of people’s lives. Sometimes trendy things kind of come onto the scene and then they fall off of the scene. I try to be careful not to get pulled into trends. This is one of the things that I really resonated with in terms of your approach, which was, you were initially trying to disprove some of the gurus in this space, like Wim Hof. You were going into an open-minded, but also not being swept into the guru-dom that was associated with some of the fanfare around Wim Hof as one icon.

The Evolution of Human Ability

SC:

Right. Well, it’s interesting, when I first met Wim, this was back in 2010, 2011. Either late 2010, early 2011. He was not that well known at that time. Wim Hof is now known as the Iceman and you’ll see him all over vice videos and Joe Rogan’s podcast and stuff like that. He was sort of an unknown person. I was the first journalist, first investigative, real serious journalist to write about him. The book that I’d written just before meeting him was called The Enlightenment Trap, which was about essentially how intensive meditation can have really negative side effects. It can even leading to death. I followed many cases of people who had gone insane on their spiritual journeys. One person dehydrated to death while on a three-year meditation retreat.

SC:

There’s this sort of guru worship that goes on out there, especially when people are offering things that almost sound supernatural, like telepathy, levitation, walking through walls, thinking your way to grow super rich. Um, These were things that I was very, very skeptical about. When I heard about Wim Hof, his schtick is climbing up mountains in his underwear and sitting on glaciers and saying, I can control my body heat in any condition. I was really sure he was going to get people killed, like the people I’ve written about had been killed following similar gurus. So I flew out to meet him in the winter in Poland. I like to say that this is the winter that stopped the Nazi army. Spent a week at his training center. This was actually the first training that he ever held publicly.

SC:

There were only three of us on it. In the course of a week after learning his very simple breathing method and deliberate cold exposure, I was doing the same things that he claimed that he could do with really not all that much effort. It opened my eyes to this whole world of interactions with the human physiology by using environmental stimulus. I define that broadly. I think that’s both like immersion and cold, but also things internal, like breathwork, and changing your internal environment. This can really can alter the way you feel in the environment and also your resilience and let you do really crazy things. Like, at the end of a week, I climbed up a mountain in Poland. It was about two degrees Fahrenheit. I was in my underwear basically up the whole mountain. I was on there for eight hours. As I continued my journey, I ended up climbing up Mount Kilimanjaro in a bathing suit. I’m doing things that I never thought were possible. When you immerse yourself in this environment, you realize that these are just human abilities. These are things that we evolved.

DrMR:

You’re not like a mountaineer, just for our audience. You don’t have a background doing this crazy stuff. You walked in kind of like a standard person off the street and were able to have all these results.

SC:

Yes. I think that’s really important. There are a lot of people in these spaces who have got the six-pack, they’ve got those jacked muscles and the veins popping out of their neck and stuff. You see them as super athletes. You know, Laird Hamilton, for instance. These guys who were just amazing. That is not me. I fine. I’m reasonably fit, but I’m not over the top. I think that what was, has been really amazing about this journey is that this type of intervention, this type of work is really open to anyone’s physiology. You can do really amazing looking things without necessarily being the Lamborghini of the human body.

The Wedge

DrMR:

Now, you, you mentioned The Wedge. Do you want to maybe define that a little bit more robustly for people who may not understand exactly what that means?

SC:

Sure. It’s a little hard to describe just on its own, because you really need to think about the human interaction and the body. Let me explain what the Wim Hof method is first and then I’ll describe what the wedge is. So in the Wim Hof protocols, what you do is you jump into ice water. Water that’s 33, 34 degrees, pretty bracing stuff. You get into that environment. Then your natural bodily response in ice water is to clench up, right? It’s like, it’s like every single muscle fiber in your body first clenches. Then it will eventually start to shiver. What’s happening in that environment, when you go from like nice warm room, temperature air into that very physically extreme, very primal environment is that you’re triggering all these sympathetic pathways.

SC:

For those who aren’t familiar, the sympathetic nervous system is your fight or flight responses. The alternative to that is the parasympathetic, that’s your rest and digest responses. Just going into that ice water, into that sort of extreme environment, automatically triggers fight or flight. What you do in the Wim Hof method is once you jump into that ice water, instead of just gritting your way through it and fighting those sensations that are just screaming in through your nerves, you instead say, I am going to relax. That sensation that’s coming in, although it’s very loud and bracing, it is not immediately going to kill me, even though the signal is saying you’re going to die right now. When you relax and you really just sort of let yourself fall into an automatic meditation, what happens is your body automatically switches to a different way of heating itself instead of that muscle clenching action that was there initially.

SC:

What happens is you relax and you turn on these sort of passive metabolic pathways that let you survive in that environment, but you’re doing this in the relaxed parasympathetic state. The science behind that is fascinating and we’ll probably get into that in this call. When you’re in that ice water for the first time, it’s like putting your mind and your intentions in between the stimulus of the environment, the ice water and your body’s automatic reactions. So when I first thought of this concept of the wedge, I was really just thinking of creating that space in between stimulus and response. There’s some cognates to Victor Frankel’s work here as well. You’re just giving yourself an opportunity for your body to work in a different way.

SC:

Then when you do that, the fascinating thing is, your body does change. We can think about this at a really sort of profound level. This is the mind body connection. By changing my intentions to relax in ice water I’ve literally changed the way my adrenal gland is functioning in that moment. I can’t usually affect my adrenal gland, right? I can’t usually say adrenal gland fire, give me some adrenaline, but what I’m doing by saying relax is that gland also relaxes. So I’m changing parts of my physiology that I don’t usually have conscious control over by setting these sort of environmental intentions.

DrMR:

Yeah. What’s interesting here is one way we could look at this would be well aren’t people under enough stress and don’t we want to de-stress people? What perhaps is happening here, and I’m curious if you would disagree with this or modify this, is maybe these are other types of stressors, like exercise. You could look at exercise and say, well, you cause muscle microtraumas literally tiny tears in the muscles. People sometimes get injured. Is it really worth all the stress on your body and the wear and tear? We know the answer to that question is, within reason, yes. The right exercise load without going too crazy is beneficial for the human organism. They become stronger in light of that. So is it fair to say that these are other healthy stressors that we’re just not getting enough of at current day?

SC:

Well, I think we need to redefine what stress is in the first place, because when we say stress, like “I’m really stressed out, you’re not saying “Hey, I’m running from lions”. There’s a lot of lions in front of me and they’re going to eat me alive. So I’m really stressed out about that. I gotta have the most adrenaline possible to run from those lions. What we’re usually are saying is, “Oh, man taxes are going to be due pretty soon. I’m looking at these spreadsheets and they make me feel bad”. We have these sort of existential problems, but we still have these paleolithic bodies. So our stress hormone system, the stuff that’s connected to the sympathetic nervous system is really designed to deal with physical threats.

SC:

So if you think about, you know, on the prototypical African Savanna, where we first emerged, we didn’t have to deal with spreadsheets. We had to look into the distance and there was a lion just charging at us. Your response to that lion was to fight it or flee from it. Your system is designed to give you that energy boost, that pain reduction, releasing cortisol, you’re releasing all these things in order to survive that imperiled, existential threat that’s going to happen. Now when we fast forward into the modern era, we don’t have like a new endocrine system that deals with spreadsheets. We only have those rest and digest things, and we have the fight or flight things and your body doesn’t have another pathway with which to deal with threats.

SC:

When we look at our spreadsheet that says our taxes are due or whatever we are triggering, oftentimes, those same stress hormones that we had on the savannah. However, unlike on the savannah, we don’t have a physical output. When you’re on the savannah and you’re running from that lion, there’s the physical response. You’re literally moving your muscles. Adrenaline is actually doing something that is useful in that moment. In the modern world, what happens is you release these stress hormones, and then there’s zero physical output. There’s just nothing that you’re doing. When you do that, that creates all sorts of problems. One, you feel bad. But the other thing is it triggers your immune system in weird ways and can sort of make your immune system turn on itself. It wrecks your body.

SC:

So what’s happening with things like the Wim Hof method and the things that I write about in The Wedge is that now we’re giving your stress hormones something to do. If you’re under stress, you’re looking at your spreadsheets and you have released all these hormones, maybe what you should do is some intense breathwork, or maybe you should go take a cold shower. Maybe you should go on a run or exercise. I mean, there’s already all these studies about how exercise makes you deal with stress better. What you’re doing is giving a physical output to the more remote stresses of the modern world.

How Does Breathwork Fit In

DrMR:

The temperature piece makes a lot of sense in terms of, I guess we could term it loosely, a paleolithic type stressor. We didn’t always have temperature controlled cars and offices and coats and gloves and everything else. How does the breathwork fit into this? Just to slip in a little bit of my personal experience, certainly it seems that when you’re doing a prolonged breath hold after a full exhalation, and you’re fighting back against this deep visceral urge to breathe, there are definitely some stress hormones released there, at least seemingly. So how does that fit in with kind of the paleo framework?

SC:

So how does this work from a paleolithic standpoint? I can’t transport myself back 3 million years ago when our species was first emerging. But what I can say is that every mystical tradition that has emerged, that I’m aware of in the last say 5,000 years has either fasting as a component to it or some type of breathwork. Now, when the Buddha first taught meditation, the second meditation he ever taught was focus on your breath, focus on the way that you inhale and exhale. In that moment, you’re really bridging that mind, body divide that Descartes goes into much later.

SC:

You’re really linking what your conscious nervous system can do. It can literally command the flesh of your body. But if you’re not paying attention to breath, that continues automatically. So the breath becomes one of these essential tools for extending control over who you are as a person. What we also find is that as you do different types of breathwork, you can have very, very different physiological changes. There’s certain breathwork that is more ideal for sprinting. Then there is great breathwork can give you sort of like hallucinogenic effects. There’s great breathwork that can make you feel tingley and good. With the Wim Hof stuff, there’s breathwork that can make you feel warm. We just find that there’s just many, many ways to intervene in the body by using this. It is sort of like the ultimate wedge. That ultimate tool that we all have to take control of our automatic and somatic processes.

DrMR:

Certainly, the invigoration that I feel is so profound when doing the breathwork, it’s way more than I’ll even get from a cup of coffee. There’s definitely something there that, that for me, gets me to a euphoric feeling that I guess I only hit maybe during really, really intense cardiovascular exercise when you’re pushing yourself and you get that jolt of catecholamines. Maybe that’s part of the tie in where this is another way of getting that catecholamine release that’s exercise associated. Maybe some of this really almost turns the way some of us healthcare providers think about stress on its head. Perhaps your body needs more stress. I mean, the right kind, not you just sitting there and festering on how much you hate your boss because of a deadline just got slapped on your desk. But maybe we need these other forces to stress our body to make us more resilient, just like exercise.

SC:

We need physical stress. The main theme in What Doesn’t Kill Us is that our technology has progressed to such a point right now, in the last hundred years with temperature control and our lighting systems, our internet, we don’t even ever need to leave our house. Our bodies don’t ever have to do any work if they don’t want to. If you’re feeling a little chilly, you turn up the thermostat or turn it down if you’re feeling too hot. We live in an eternal summer. We have electric lighting, allowing us to work longer hours. We’ve totally manicured our environment so that the things that were evolutionarily normal for us over eons, are no longer present because we’ve essentially become jellyfish in our environments.

Reconnecting with Feeling

SC:

If we go back to that savannah example. Humans emerged in Namibia. If you’re thinking about the days in Namibia, it’s pretty hot, but at night it might get down to 30-40 degrees when it’s dark. If we didn’t have technology, which we didn’t really back then, we might have had some furs and some fire, but your body had to deal with those changes. The changes were constant over that evolutionary history. Now, in the present days, our bodies don’t change. We don’t have any of those stresses that cause that change. So we’ve actually taken out the constants by insulating ourselves. By giving into our temptations of comfort. What many people in this sort of movement are saying, is that we’ve got to get out there.

SC:

We got to start feeling things again. We’ve got to leave the numbness behind and actually put ourselves in situations that make us feel things and feeling those things prompts physiological changes. I like to think of it this way, your whole sensory system, we often discount that. The most Western doctor out there, and maybe this person doesn’t exist, but the most Western medicine person out there looks at the body as an object. They want to put a drug into it and they want to fiddle with it from a distance. The person’s expression of symptoms aren’t really relevant. They just want to work with them from the outside. I believe, and I think you probably believe this as well, and probably many of our listeners believe that sensory information that comes into our bodies is critical to our survival.

SC:

It’s giving us information that we have the option to respond to. If you’re feeling something, the reason you feel it from an evolutionary perspective is because your consciousness is involved and it gives you a choice to make a reaction to that sensory input that’s coming there. Some of those changes can be something like “hey, I see a lion” so you run away from it. Other things might be more subtle. Like, hey, I’m feeling cold now. I don’t have access to a fire right now. Maybe there’s a way I can deal with this cold internally to change the way my body works. Maybe that is stress I’m feeling, because I’m in an argument with my wife. Maybe there’s actually a choice there, not just some automatic reaction. That goes on for really everything that a human can experience.

DrMR:

In a way it’s just really kind of reframing discomfort, which I think we’re accustomed to doing. Again, using the example of exercise. When you’re feeling your muscles burn, it’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re trying to get faster or stronger or whatever it is. Now we can reframe cold in a similar way. I have to say again, as a user, it’s quite empowering. I’m in Massachusetts right now. It’s December 28th and yesterday I went to took my niece and nephew to this kind of six flags, outdoor, Christmas themed thing. You walk through the park outside, and it’s about 45 minutes and I did it with a t-shirt on and it felt really empowering. People were looking at me like I had two heads, but I was starting to look back at people with the thought that we all have this ability to withstand cold and we’ve all forgotten about it. I wish I could give some of the empowerment back to people that you can go outside. And in this case, I think it was about 22 degrees. You can go outside for a while on t-shirt and you won’t die and you’ll be okay. It actually is really invigorating and feels almost like exercise in that sense where you’re just man, I feel great.

SC:

You’re actually exercising a part of your body that you can’t exercise in a gym. If you think about what’s in your extremities, if you think about your circulatory system and your fingers and your, and your toes and your legs, right. We have all this smooth muscle along our arteries and what it does is it constricts the flow of blood from your extremities and your core if you get too cold. It is the only way that smooth muscle works. There’s some other valuable things it does as well, modulates blood pressure. If you get your arm cut off, it will clench so you won’t bleed out. This circulatory system does not get exercise by conscious thought, like you can’t get on a bike and exercise really hard and clench the muscles in the arteries in your fingers.

SC:

It just doesn’t work. The only way to do it is to actually go out into the cold. So you can see these people with these like fantastic gym bodies. But if all they’ve worked out in is a scientifically prepared gym, they will have never actually worked on their circulatory system. They will never work on these muscles that line a tremendous length of our arterial system. So when you go out in the cold, you say it’s “like exercise”. I think that’s incorrect. I think it was exercise.

DrMR:

Right. Yeah. Well said.

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A Period of Adjustment

DrMR:

I’m wondering if we should maybe provide the listeners with what the experience is like. It’s a little bit unpleasant at first. I found that the first 5, 10, maybe 15 minutes, depending on how warm a house I was coming from to how cold the outdoor environment is, at least for me, it takes a little bit to adjust. At first it’s like, oh this feels really cold. But then I hit this point and you actually used this term in your book where you feel like you have a suit of armor on and you’re impervious to the cold, but there is a little bit of discomfort kind of in the lead up.

SC:

Of course. That is because your body is doing what your body does, it’s going from a comfortable area to an uncomfortable area. It says, Hey, watch out, remember how uncomfortable this could be. Put on a coat. Your body will always reset to comfort. It wants to preserve. It doesn’t want to work. That sensation that says, Hey, this is uncomfortable is saying the body doesn’t want to work. Now, the body also doesn’t want to get out and go on that run in the morning, even in the summer. The body’s like, forget you, I’m fine over here. You have to override that with your brain. Walking in the cold can be very meditative and can be very valuable.

SC:

What I did when I was writing What Doesn’t Kill Us, I would do these three or four mile runs around a Lake around my house. I’m in Colorado throughout the whole winter and I do a shirtless. I think I put a hat on and shoes of course and I would go for this run around the Lake. Of course people would look at me like I was an alien, cause it was like zero degrees out or whatever. But for five miles, especially when you’re moving, you’re generating heat when you’re moving. So it really wasn’t uncomfortable after the first five minutes, but those first five minutes do suck. That’s just the way it is. But once you start doing it, you know, because you’ve done it in the past and you have some trust in yourself, you know, you’re going to get to that warm place.

SC:

Then once you’re doing that and you’re actually running while it’s cold, it actually feels euphoric. It actually feels really good because now your skin is out to the cold and you get so much sensory information that way. Like I actually think that there’s a link between the square centimeter of skin exposed directly to the environment and your ability to adapt to more stressful situations and more stressful environments. I think that there’s a direct correlation. If we want to talk about something called brown adipose tissue, which is a heat generating fat tissue that all humans are born with, but we mostly lose by the time we’re in our twenties. It’s a passive metabolic tissue that works something like a fireplace. It pulls white fat from your body and directly burns it for heat energy. This is unlike muscles, which have kinetic energy and they just steal. They might be burning carbohydrates, they could be burning fat, they could be doing a lot of different things. This is a direct fat burning thing. So getting cold is actually a reasonably fast way to lose fat by building up brown fat. I think that by running nearly naked outside, you actually generate a lot more brown fat just because of the surface area that is exposed to the cold environment. This is a theory. This isn’t like hard science. This is my guess.

DrMR:

We had an exercise physiologist on the podcast I think that episode will release before this one airs, but we were discussing a few of the mechanisms that underlie the Wim Hof method and brown adipose issue came up. One of the things she wasn’t clear on and perhaps there’s not enough literature to adequately answer this question is, you know, what amplitude of weight loss might people expect? I wouldn’t disagree that the exposure is healthy, but have we mapped out, is this something that in a somewhat overweight individual can lead the two pounds of weight loss, six pounds of weight loss on average? Is there any indication there that. you’ve seen?

SC:

Yes, there is. I don’t want to be thought of as the weight loss guy. I don’t really want to enter the diet sector but I will say that there are people out there who have ice diets where you lose a lot of weight doing ice baths and there’s protocols that they have. I have lost a lot of weight in the various cold things I’ve done and just like a normal person, I gained it back when I stopped doing the cold stuff. I don’t really want to go down the route of, of giving that sort of diet advice.

DrMR:

Yeah. I mean that’s fair enough. I think it’s important to maybe not position fat loss as the primary impetus behind doing this, because it may be like saying, well, is the only reason you exercise for fat loss. I mean, it’s one of the potential litany of positive impacts that may occur for the body, but it wouldn’t be the sole motivation for doing so. So I’m right there with you.

Cold Exposure and Diabetes

SC:

I’ll say there is a study though. For diabetes, there are some really great studies with cold exposure. You know, a guy named, I want to think it’s van Marken Lichtenbelt out of Holland. What he did was he put a bunch of diabetic people into a 50 degree room. Not even super cold, but a 50 degree room. They were just wearing shorts and a t-shirt and he put them there. I’m going to paraphrase and I’m probably gonna get a little off, but it’s something like five hours a day for a week. At the end of that week, what he found is that the people who are diabetic and pre-diabetic had radically better insulin levels at the end of that exposure because their body had started burning fat directly. I think he also measured their brown fat content after being in that cold exposure. So it really changed their health profiles just by cold exposure. They weren’t even doing the Wim Hof stuff. They were just doing cold exposure and it really changed their bodies.

Cold Exposure and Inflammatory/Autoimmune Disease

DrMR:

The other health-related area that really peaked my curiosity and I think our audience will be most squarely interested in is the inflammatory and autoimmune component of this. I don’t think there have been any randomized controlled trials, but certainly there are some pretty compelling anecdotes. I know you wrote about Crohn’s case and an RA case. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that?

SC:

Yes. I think this is probably the most important finding in anything having to do with Wim Hof that’s out there. There was this study called the Endotoxin study where Wim, the crazy guy that he is, went to an immunologist in Holland named Peter Pickers and Mathias Cox. They are at Radboud University in Nijmegan. Pickers’ job was to design cyclosporin, immunosuppressant drugs. Wim said he could suppress his immune consciously with his breathwork and his cold protocols. At that point this was considered totally impossible. You can’t consciously control, turn on, turn off your immune system. But Cox was in this great position that he knows how to test whether or not a drug can turn off the immune system.

SC:

He has this study called the endotoxin study where you inject a patient with a heat killed e-coli bacteria. So it has the cytokines on the wall that say, this is a bacterial infection. When you inject somebody with endotoxin, what happens about 99% of the time is you get a fever, you get the achy joints, you get all of the symptoms of a flu as your body’s primary, also known as your innate immune system fires up to respond to that intruder. Then your body’s like, Oh, this stuff is already dead and sort of relaxes afterwards. This is the normal human response. What, Wim claimed is that you could inject him with endotoxin and he would have no reaction, which was very unusual. Most people do not do that.

SC:

So the doctors injected them with endotoxin and low and behold he had really no reaction. I mean, some very minor things that happened, but all he complained of was like a minor headache and the doctors were wowed. They thought this was super cool. Then the criticism came in that maybe he’s just a freak because if you’ve ever heard Wim Hof speak, he’s definitely a freak. So what they did then, this happened actually the week after I first met Wim in 2011. He took 12 college students through the same training program that he took me through, which was like breathing and jumping in ice water and climbing a mountain in your shorts. At the end of that Pickers and Cox injected all of those people, as well as a control group with endotoxin and all of the people that Wim trained had the same response that Wim had the first time, which was no immune response to the endotoxin, which is groundbreaking.

SC:

It’s still the most amazing study on the Wim Hof method, because what this shows is that Wim Hof’s method consciously turns off the immune response. If someone’s listening to this is thinking, well, why would I want to do that? Why do I want to turn off my immune system? For people with auto-immune illnesses, which would be Crohn’s disease, lupus, to some degree you could say Lyme disease, arthritis, tons and tons and tons of auto-immune illnesses can be treated with the Wim Hof method. I know from my personal experience, when I first met Wim, I had been plagued by canker sores, which are these mouth ulcers. For me they were particularly bad because I’d been getting them since I was about two years old.

SC:

They’re about the size of a dime in my mouth. I would get them once or twice a month and they’d last for three or four days. So my life was like full of canker sores. I hated them. When I started doing the Wim Hof method, not thinking about the canker sores. I realized that I didn’t get them anymore. For 10 years now, I have gotten maybe two canker sores in 10 years. When they start, sometimes you can sort of feel these prodromal things. When that happens I double down on my Wim Hof method and they don’t mature. It’s amazing. I’ve seen a direct change personally. Canker sores the most minor of auto immune illnesses. The people I’ve met who’ve had Crohn’s disease, or Lyme disease, this has absolutely changed their life.

DrMR:

Now, has anyone followed up on the endotoxins study and done anything with patients with inflammatory bowel disease of any subtype? Is there anything else, I don’t want to ask so much of the scientific community, cause I know some of these studies are fairly new and these findings are fairly new, but has there been any followup research in the autoimmune realm?

Achieving Gold Standard Evidence

SC:

So Wim is the subject of many, many different studies, but the problem with the studies that he’s been involved with is that they’re never large sample sizes. They’re always 20 people or something like that. It’s always like a university researcher who has a little bit of extra funds who flies Wim out or flies a couple of people out. And they do these really promising studies that say, Hey, we need to do far more research because this could be huge. But then we don’t see these large trials on the Wim Hof method. I think there’s two reasons for this. The first reason is Wim has a generalized claim. He says, this is good for health. This is good for, you know, not only diabetes, it’s also good for Crohn’s disease, which really, if you think from a researcher’s perspective, those are two very different things to study.

SC:

Those are very different conditions. Wim’s stance is that it improves overall health. So that makes it a little tricky. Now, the other thing that goes on is if you really want to talk about the gold standard medical treatments out there, if you want to talk about getting the new Viagra, to go from chemical idea to animal trials, human trials, safety trials, small population to large populations trials, you’re really talking about like a billion dollars of investment. I think the lowest I’ve seen lately is about $600 million to get a drug all the way through the gold standard, FDA approval, everything.There’s just no money in that for a lot of these alternative therapies. So when you look at something like the Wim Hof method, and you say, yeah, but what’s the real evidence.

SC:

When, when are we going to get the gold standard study? We don’t have a pharmaceutical medical infrastructure out there to answer these sorts of questions. It’s a failing of the medical community. It’s a failing of the way we invest and consider alternative therapies. For better or worse, this is why I don’t think the Wim Hof method or any alternative method will ever truly achieve gold standard medical evidence. It’s a problem. I don’t know if it’s the problem with the method or the way we approach evidence.

DrMR:

Lack of evidence doesn’t mean disproof. I think it’s important for us as the scientific community and healthcare providers to remain open and look at this in terms of pros and cons and risks and rewards. The downside risks and the cost to the Wim Hof method when done responsibly are minimal. I mean, you don’t want to go off by yourself and do this. I know there were two gentlemen who died, I think because they jumped in an icy river somewhere.

SC:

I think something like seven people have died now.

DrMR:

Don’t overdo it and don’t put yourself in a harmful situation. But when done responsibly, it seems like the cost is fairly minimal. Any risks are close to zero again with the caveat, if done responsibly. Are there any other risk factors people should be aware.

SC:

So to my knowledge, I think there have been about seven deaths and all of the deaths that I am aware of have been due to shallow water blackout. When you see Wim and when you see what his advertising messages about the Wim Hof method, one of the things they talk about is his ability to hold his breath a really long period of time, because that’s one of the things you’re able to do with the Wim Hof method. They show him swimming somewhere in the Arctic. So there’s like ice frozen above him and he’s swimming under. He often talks about his Guinness Book of World Records for swimming the longest distance under ice. The problem with that is that the Wim Hof method, the way that you actually do the breath protocols to hold your breath, makes it very difficult for you to know physiologically when you’re going to pass out.

SC:

Because what you’re doing is you’re blowing off all your CO2. You know, you’re hyperventilating, you exhale, you hyperventilate, you exhale, and then you hold your breath. Your body cannot detect oxygen, it only detects CO2. When you’ve artificially lowered your CO2 levels, you don’t really know when you’ve used up all your oxygen. This is one of the reasons why you’re able to hold your breath for so long. But if you do that in a situation where you’re underwater and you pass out, you know, that’s super dangerous, that’s where people die. This is why I think actually Wim’s advertising is a little irresponsible because I think it has directly led to deaths. I don’t think the method is irresponsible, if you don’t do it underwater. If you do the breath protocols on your bed or on your yoga mat. Other than that, I’ve heard of no examples of people actually having serious side effects. There are some people who think that because you’re hyperventilating a lot and holding your breath, that it could put stress on your cardiovascular system. So if you’re very, very fragile cardiovascularly, you might be in danger, but I’ve never heard of an incident where that has happened. I’ve never heard of a stroke occurring from the Wim Hof method, but I think those are more like theoretical.

DrMR:

Okay. So, yeah. So if it’s done responsibly, the risk is fairly minimal. The cost is fairly minimal. For people with autoimmune conditions who I think are, to a fair degree, underserved by conventional medicine, certainly there’s a time and a place. And if people have exhausted all of the therapeutics and let’s say a Crohn’s patient needs to be on Humira, they have my full support, but oftentimes I don’t think they’re being offered up all the other therapeutics that could potentially help them. So this is one more that we could put on the list that could reduce the need for either surgery or immunosuppressive drug use that does carry side effects. Can you tell us one of the anecdotes that you’ve seen through your writings and you’re traveling, and speaking with people for what kind of results you’re seeing with autoimmune conditions?

SC:

I climbed up Mount Kilimanjaro with a guy who had lupus and who was treating this with Wim Hof method. He had all the symptoms and yet by doing the Wim Hof method, he said they were completely manageable. We climbed up Mount Kilimanjaro in our bathing suits, which pretty good showing that he could do cool stuff. I’ve met people, who’ve had Crohn’s disease who had talked about basically bleeding out their anus for years, shedding intestinal lining. They started doing the Wim Hof method within three weeks, the symptoms abated and hadn’t come back. At that point, he had been doing it for three years I believe. I’ve met people who had a progressive type of Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s is super interesting. It’s not really an auto-immune illness, but one of the things that happens is that you’re not sending out the dopamine you need to activate your muscles.

SC:

So it sort of starts in the brain and then your body sort of doesn’t work real well on the outside. You get slowly locked into essentially just your brain, because you’re not sending out those potentials. Now, what this guy was doing is he says by stimulating his body externally, by jumping into ice water, by doing these breath protocols, he’s actually getting the stimulation coming from outside his body inside. He says that after doing the breathwork and doing the cold every day, he went from having, let me see you’ll have to look in the book to get the exact numbers, but it’s somewhere around 12 hours of active daily use of his body. If he wasn’t doing the Wim Hof method, he said he had about four hours of active use of his body, which is amazing. I know that Parkinson’s presents in a lot of different ways, but for him it was life changing. You know, he got 40% extra life by doing the Wim Hof protocols.

Quality of Life Impact

DrMR:

Yeah. I mean, that’s definitely something that I think many would be thrilled to gain. Coming back to you for a moment you lost weight, you had less canker sores. I’m assuming there’s probably just a general mood and energy you’ll benefit from this also.

SC:

Yeah. I’ve been doing it now for 10 years, pretty much every day. Sometimes I slack off because I’m human. I’ve noticed very clearly that when I do the breathwork in the morning, my day is like 10 or 20% better just because I feel better. I’m more activated. I just am a lot less anxious in the day because of this. The times when I don’t do the Wim Hof method, it’s a little like going through fog for me. I see a nice benefit from doing it and that keeps me back coming back to it. It keeps me saying, look, I don’t feel as good today, but I didn’t do the breathing. The next day when I do it, I feel a little bit better. That’s really my qualitative assessment. It’s just purely subjective, sensational. Even if it’s just a placebo effect, it doesn’t matter because I feel better.

DrMR:

In terms of the time commitment, you’re probably doing the breathing for about 15 minutes and then you’re following it with a couple of minutes of cold? I think you said in your book, you start with warm water, but then you end with a couple minutes on cold and maybe 20 minutes total time in the morning.

SC:

Yeah, totally. It’s really not much of a time commitment. I will say, and this is a total bummer about the Wim Hof method, is that when I started doing it and when you start doing this breathing, you’re going to feel euphoric. You’re going to have tingles in your body, you’re going to see colors while you’re doing the breath meditation, and you’re going to have this like really heightening experience. That lasts for the first couple of years. After that those awesome euphoric sensations fade, and I don’t get them anymore. I am bummed by that. I think it’s because you are acclimatized to that sort of environment. So if I need to get into the same things that you’re probably feeling right now, if you’re sort of newer to the method, I probably need to breathe for 45 – 50 minutes before I get to where you are. It’s just the natural human acclimation process.

DrMR:

Yeah. Well, it’s a little bit of a bummer for me to look forward to, I guess, but I’ll enjoy the bomb and now I can still ride it. Coming back to mechanism for a moment, we talked about brown adipose tissue. We’ve talked about kind of this sympathetic activation and hormones. What I’m assuming is happening is the bolstering of the stress hormones that you get during the breathwork and the cold exposure that’s going to lead to a degree of immunosuppression. Are there any other novel mechanisms that you think are worth discussing?

SC:

Oh my God….

DrMR:

Are there a lot of them? Well just give me a few.

SC:

At this point I’m beyond the Wim Hof method. I did the Wim Hof for awhile. I still do it regularly, but I’m really looking at all of the ways that our body interacts with the external world. What I’m most interested in is not the mechanics, what happens under the hood. I don’t care what cytokines you have going on on your cell walls. I don’t care what your endocrine system is pumping out. I don’t really care about any of that stuff because that data to me is meaningless. Like if you told me that my insulin levels were 40% off of where you think they should be, but my life was actually totally fine and I felt great. I wouldn’t care about my insulin levels. I don’t care about the diagnostic criteria. I don’t want to measure everything. I want to think about how my sensations changed my quality of life. I mean, don’t kill me for that.

DrMR:

I actually fully agree with you. I am much more keen to look at outcome measures like longevity, performance, mood, sleep, than I am at mechanisms. So I actually really appreciate it. I’m sure our audience also really appreciates it. So yeah, if you want to talk about more of the environmental inputs or some of these end points, rather than the mechanisms, please.

Environmental Inputs

SC:

What Doesn’t Kill Us, was this New York times bestselling book, all about the Wim Hof method and specifically cold and temperature variation. In The Wedge, I’ve gone on to how to put your body in stressful situations and then change the way you think about that stress coming into your body. This works with heat. You can put yourself in a really hot room, a sauna, sweat, lodge, whatever. Then as certain sensations arise in your body, you realize those sensations are offering you a certain opportunity to re-imagine what that sensation means. Now you don’t necessarily want to heat yourself until you die. But you do want to sort of say, okay, I can be comfortable in this stressful environment. When you put a mental attitude to that, you’re really changing some underlying physiology.

SC:

I look at things where you put yourself in situations that could, that trigger your fear responses. Where you’re like, Oh my God, I could get injured here. I could get hurt. But then when you realize you’re doing this thing that is potentially dangerous, that you can actually take control of it. Your body changes in those environments. It’s a little hard to talk about it in the abstract. So I’ll tell you the specific exercise I’m doing. You get two people and you each have a kettlebell in your hand, like a 20 -25 pound kettlebell. And then you literally throw it back and forth to each other. Don’t just listen to this podcast and go do this, look at how I do it on videos or whatever.

SC:

You throw this kettlebell to the other person. The first reaction you have when somebody is throwing a weight is you think to yourself, Oh my God, this is going to hit me in the foot. Or your listener thinking this guy’s crazy. He’s going to smash his foot. When you throw it, you go from this total focus on that kettlebell, like this dangerous thing to realizing that the movement, if you’re doing it correctly is actually very easy to do and very easy to catch a flying kettlebell. Then you throw it back to the person and you’re worried that you might hurt them and then they catch it. It goes from this fear response to essentially a flow state, almost instantaneously, like within 30 seconds, I can put you into a flow state where your actions are coordinating automatically, and you feel euphoric in this somewhat dangerous environment, but it’s actually a controlled environment.

SC:

What happens is this sort of like what looks like sort of a macho fear, Instagram made exercise. It actually turns into an exercise building trust between two people. It works on empathy. It works on these very positive, really, not even all that physical things. My wife and I will throw it when we’re having relationship problems. Because one of the things that happens in bad relationships is that you lose trust with each other. There’s no better way to build trust than to put each other’s feet in each other’s hands. It’s a really cool, sort of kookie exercise. Also in that book, I do ecstasy or MDMA with two board certified therapists, somewhere in the Colorado area. We sort of use ecstasy, not as a party drug, but as in a therapeutic setting, which was amazing.

SC:

I look at saunas. I look at diets. I do a fast where you just eat potatoes. Usually one of the challenges of fast is that you get very hungry because that’s one of the things that happens when you fast. If you eat just potatoes, you don’t get hungry because potatoes are very filling, but you do get the advantages of having a very, very, very bland diet. You turn down that taste knob because we’re always inundated with taste in the world. You realize that your other senses all get heightened.

DrMR:

These are plain potatoes? Not like Lays potatoes?

SC:

Yeah. It’s boring. It’s just potatoes, boiled potatoes. Nothing but salt. I’ll let you put some salt on it. Gotcha. And that’s it. And, uh, and you know, I’m finding, or what I found in the year of writing that book is that we have instances of putting ourselves under artificial stress in thousands of ways. The book is not do these 10 things and you’ll be super awesome. But there are wedges we have in all sorts of environments, and you just change one little attitude you have to the environment and you watch how your experience of the world changes. It doesn’t only change your perception, from cognition, it also changes the way your body responds to the world. It’s fascinating.

DrMR:

Yeah. I have this growing hypothesis that I’ve kinda been ruminating on. I think about individuals that we’ll see at the clinic who are what a clinician would term a more challenging case. In some cases, I think there’s been some emotional hardship that needs some support with limbic or similar EMDR work to kind of rewire some of that. But I also wonder if there’s a subgroup of people who don’t have enough of these stressors and because they don’t have enough baseline exercise stressors, and maybe they played sports when they were younger. They had some of that fear that you may feel when you’re playing sports, they haven’t built up enough of baseline physiological resiliency. So it’s more easy for them to slip into this challenging emotional position because they haven’t built up that resilience. I’m wondering and hoping that for that cohort of people who I think medicine and alternative medicine actually underserved that this will be a really important kind of game changer for them. Do you have any, any insights in that regard? I know it’s a really specific question.

SC:

No, I think you’re exactly right. We like to think of someone coming in to an office, right. Let’s say they’re coming into your therapist office and they’re saying, Oh, I’m feeling really down right now and the therapist says, well, why are you feeling down? They think to when it all started and they remember they had a fight with their mother. I’m stealing this example from a doctor who was talking to me earlier and we can go to the book eventually. Oh, you had a fight with your mother and the patient is like yeah, my mother has been yammering about whatever, and they has this whole conversation about his mother. The doctor’s like, okay, that’s terrible. This sort of framing makes you think the cause of the problem is that fight with the mother or maybe his relationship with his mother since his childhood.

SC:

You can go down this sort of Freudian talk therapy, and maybe you can fix the problem, maybe you can’t. But what also could be happening is maybe this person’s just not breathing. Maybe this person is also not realizing that they’re a mouth breather. So they’re always sort of like just a little bit hyperventilating, not a lot, just a little bit of hyperventilation. That little bit of hyperventilation blows off just a little bit more CO2 than they should. They didn’t realize that they were say holding their breath while they were thinking about their mother and that somehow stoked the anxiety because anyone who does CBT will know that you can stoke a panic attack in a patient by giving them a dose of carbon dioxide. Cause we’re just wired to panic when we have too much CO2 and that can be therapeutically useful for somebody who has a lot of panic attacks by essentially exposure therapy.

SC:

You give them a panic attack in the controlled environment of your therapeutic setting and they realize that panic attacks aren’t such a horrible thing and they can get over it. So this person could just been breathing poorly and they miss attributed their anxiety to their mother. So you went down this talk therapy route, but you didn’t even realize that there was an underlying physiological thing that you could very easily change. What I think is one of the great outputs of this book is that it gives us another heuristic to think about while you’re doing interventions. I’m not saying invalidate all other types of medicine for better breathwork or something, but I’m saying, look, maybe this is another tool you can get to before you try another tool or in addition to another tool.

SC:

Maybe it will help people. I think that you’ll find it’s not just breathwork. It could be, as you said, sports, it could be, this person feels depressed if I’m so depressed and they tell you why they lost their job and their girlfriend, and all of these other things and that you think that the way they talk about the causal things is that the relationship is breaking down. But it actually could be that their depression started because they’re not sleeping well. If you treat the sleeping, then they’re in a better mood and then they didn’t lose their girlfriend or they get the new girlfriend. It’s these chains, where we sometimes miss attribute some causes.

DrMR:

Yeah. I mean, I guess it comes back to this underlying concept of people not being under enough stress. Therefore their resiliency just starts to go down. I see that as being really empowering because I think, you and I, and our audience, we’re all on the same page that these kind of foundational layer items of diet and lifestyle tend to move the needle the most with someone’s health. If we’re discovering another facet of benefit underneath the lifestyle umbrella, then that could really be a huge thing for people. I hope for people in the audience who may resonate with some of this, you grab The Wedge and you go through. I guess maybe it’s a good transition to tell us a little bit more about The Wedge. Is there an array of kind of self-help things that people can do? Or what does that part look like?

SC:

So the book is essentially 10 experiments that I did on myself. I’m doing some sort of physical intervention and I’m watching how that changes for me. The book is not really, these are the 10 techniques you need to use. While I lay out the techniques and I tell you how you can repeat some of the stuff that I do, the goal of the book is actually a little different than that. It’s not a techniques book. It’s really is a book about thinking about your body and your interactions with your body in different ways. Because I don’t believe that there’s just 10 techniques to change the way you interact with the environment. I think every moment you’re alive, you’re feeling, and you’re making choices about your environment and those choices have, impacts on your health.

SC:

So I want people to read The Wedge, and say look, this was Scott’s experience and your experience may be different than my experience. If I jump in an ice bath, I may have one reaction. You may have a different reaction. Those two subjective reactions, not one is not better than the other, but they are useful. They tell us something about the human condition. I think that somebody who reads the book, ideally will be like, well, three things that Scott said were cool and eight were terrible, but I have this idea of how I can implement this in my own life. That’s really the goal of that book.

DrRuscioResources:

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Response Time

DrMR:

One question there, I forgot to ask this earlier. Is there a certain, I know you can’t maybe give a super specific answer, but a general time to response people should be looking for? I think that’s one of the things that when people are afforded a foray into something that’s new, they’re often saying, well, you know, when should I say to myself, this is working or when should I maybe re-evaluate I’m doing it wrong or maybe bring in professional counsel. So is there a rough-ish kind of time to response that you’d noticed with these things?

SC:

So all of the things that I do in that book, you should be able to tell almost immediately. There’s not really a lag time. If you’re in the sauna, you’re in the sauna. When you get out of the sauna, you should feel different immediately. I think that there’s a lot of stuff where if you allowed more lag time, there’s a lot more types of interventions that you can do. I think that one of the real advantages of the Wim Hof method, when I first did it, is that you notice the difference immediately. First time you do the breathwork, you feel different. There’s that surprise factor, which is actually very valuable. That novelty of Oh my God, I can do this. That’s sort of what I’m trying to pursue in a lot of the interventions that I’m looking at in The Wedge.

SC:

Now there’s often a downside with novelty is that you’re only new once. So things do wear off. I think that ultimately it’s not just a single set of techniques that people need to use. You need to actually be looking for these opportunities for novelty in lots of different ways. I don’t mean that in the sense you should be in like an adrenaline junkie, right? I’ve got to go jump out of airplane. I’m saying that you should always be looking at life with the opportunities that are being presented to you and remain curious and keep looking for ways to try new things.

DrMR:

I love that perspective. I’ve been recently reminded about how childlike that makes you.Just to share a quick example. I took my nephew, who is six to the gym just to kinda let him mess around a little bit because he likes to hang out with his uncle and do what his uncle is doing. When we left the gym, it was snowing. So I decided to leave my car there. We took our shirts off and we ran home in the snow and he didn’t even bat an eye. Now, if I was trying to convince one of my friends who was my age to do that, I’m sure that there would have been a ton of cajoling, but with kids, it seems, they’re always looking for that new and novel way to have fun. So I think for adults embodying some of that childlike exploration and play ties in with this and, and really has some pretty remarkable health benefits.

Episode Wrap-Up

SC:

Yeah. I imagine if we could stay as curious and active and have the learning potential we had when we were children, wouldn’t that be amazing. Even if we can get a fraction of that, that’s still a pretty good life. I remember there was an internet meme that I saw a few years ago that I think should be my life motto, which is the goal of being alive is to die young as late as possible. I love that.

DrMR:

Well, Scott, it’s been a great conversation. The Wedge is your most recent book. Is there anywhere else you’d want to point people to?

SC:

Yeah. You can go to my website, ScottCarney.com and I’m in all the places, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all of those places. I have a mailing list too. So I think if you sign up for my mailing list, there’s some deal that comes in. Maybe I give you something cheap or free. I don’t remember. Hopefully. Give me, give me an email. I’ll give you something.

DrMR:

Well, I want to really commend you. I know the, the guru-dom is something that really draws kind of fads. I think, and as you’ve written about can mislead people. I appreciate the measured approach that you’re taking, where you’re trying to bring people to responsible information and help them really hone in on this maybe unappreciated facet of lifestyle that could really yield some pretty substantial health benefits. So I just really want to say, thank you for the work you do.

SC:

Well, I’m glad that I was able to talk to you and I hope that at least one person your audience took something from it.

DrMR:

Yeah. I think, I think we have about an audience of three, so one of the three might be too bad. Excellent. Thanks again.

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