Cold Plunge Science | Thomas P Seager Explains Cold Exposure Benefits and vitamin D production! Ice Bath for Metabolic Flexibility, Brown Fat Activation - Mitochondrial Health, Testosterone, Fertility

0:03 This is the fitness wisdom. Podcast Hello and welcome back to another exciting episode of the Fitness Wisdom Podcast. Today we have a very special guest, Professor Thomas Seeger. He's the founder of Morosco Forge, probably some of the best ice baths in the world. They're grounded and also self cleaning. He's also the author of Uncommon Cold and also Uncommon Testosterone. Welcome to the show, Doctor Thomas. Thank you for being here. It's a pleasure to be here Andreas. Thank you for having me on.

0:34 I feel like why it's so important for us to have this discussion is because cold is such an underrated tool when it comes to overall health and well-being because it's simply just seen as this just temperature, right? Temperature change. And a lot of people the way they view at it is just that, oh, I just do it mainly for the mental health benefits or just for being tough, right? And there is a lot of misunderstanding and misconception as well on the Internet and also, you know, floating around on social media about ice spots and how they actually can be counterproductive for our health.

1:07 So we are going to dispel dispel all of these myths today. I hope so. But before we dive into all of that, I would love to hear your own personal journey, how you actually go into, you know, inventing an ice bath, you know, company yourself, like what was your interests? What was the trigger? I started with cold showers because I'd read a book that said cold showers is going to toughen you up. And I said, OK, I want to be tougher, but I hated every single minute of every cold shower that I'd ever taken.

1:38 In Phoenix, AZ, where I live, the water doesn't even get that cold in the summertime. It can be coming out of my shower at 80° so. A. Former student of mine, I'm a professor at Arizona State University and a former student of mine said, well have you ever tried an ice bath? No, I'd never heard of it. He said, have you ever heard of Vim Hoff? I didn't know who Vim Hoff was. So he invited me to one of these things where you buy, you know, 200 lbs of ice and you throw it in the horse through and you do the breath work.

2:05 Thought it was great. Completely different experience than a cold shower for me. It wasn't until later I found this paper. It was done by these researchers in Finland. They compared partial body cold immersion to whole body cold immersion and they found two different effects on the nervous system. When you do partial body, you get the activation of the sympathetic nervous system. You get the activation. Of the brown. Fat. It can be very good for your metabolism. But what you don't get is the dive reflex.

2:37 You don't get that sense of calm that the whole body ice bath will give you. So your heart rate never comes down, your parasympathetic division. Never takes over the ice. Bath. Has this paradoxical calming experience and then after say the 1st 30 seconds you wonder. What the heck? Was I even worried about? Why was I anxious? After that dive reflex kicks in, your brain enters an involuntary meditative state when you get out, and the dopamine and the noradrenaline is now coursing through all the neurotransmitters that were produced in response to the activation from the cold.

3:20 When you get out now you feel euphoric. So the ice bath experience was entirely different than the cold shower experience for me. We got tired. Of buying ice, you know, in Phoenix, AZ, it's 45° C, say, in the backyard, and you buy all this ice, but it melts in 15 minutes. We said, well, we should really be able to build a machine. We're engineers. We ought to be able to, you know, construct something that makes its own ice. So we did. But I didn't get. Serious about it until I got a lab report back and the lab report measured my PSA which is prostate specific antigen.

4:00 I was 52 years old at the time and it's something that you know they say you should do. You know men should get their PSA checked as they get older. My PSA came back 7 which is too high. I went straight onto the Internet to figure out why they were flagging that on my lab report in read and telling me it was a danger sign. And it took maybe 20 minutes of Googling around to convince myself I was going to die of prostate cancer. Now, the PSA is not a prostate cancer test. It just says you have an inflamed prostate.

4:33 However, the the thing you're supposed to do is go to your urologist, have a prostate exam, get a biopsy. And I started talking to other guys who had done this. The biopsy was incredibly painful. It was, in conclusion, inclusive in many cases. And so as a precautionary measure, they had the surgery to have their prostate removed. And one of the things that that does is leave you with a lifetime of erectile dysfunction. So I had all these catastrophic thoughts going through my head. I thought I was either going to die of prostate cancer or I was going to have a prostatectomy and have a lifetime of erectile dysfunction.

5:12 And neither one of those sounded good to me, Andreas. So instead of going to the urologist, instead of doing what WebMD told me I was supposed to do, I got straight into the ice bath. I started doing it every single day. I thought the ice bath is good for inflammation, the ice bath is good for metabolism. I'm going to use a keto diet, which I went in and out of, and the ice bath to see if I can get this PSA down. And it worked. Four months later I had dropped my PSA from 7 down to 1.8. It went a little lower later on.

5:48 But IA. Funny thing happened in my labs, you know when you go in to the lab, at least in Arizona, and you check, Yep, I want the male health panel. They don't just. Check your PSA they also check your total testosterone and my testosterone jumped. I was in the mid 7 hundreds and I went up to 1180 nanograms per deciliter which came back flagged red too high on the lab report. For a overweight sedentary. 52 year old guy to have 1180 nanograms per decalitre. Testosterone cries out for an explanation.

6:25 So I went, you know, I'm a scientist. I went back into the library and I started looking for any evidence of cold exposure and testosterone. I found some in 1991. These Japanese researchers, they looked at young men and they did cold after exercise. Which was what? Everybody was doing use cold for recovery. Testosterone and luteinizing hormone both went down. But then for some reason they reversed. It they did the cold and then they did the exercise. Testosterone and luteinizing hormone went up.

6:57 Well, Andreas, I wasn't doing the ice baths to recover from kind of some strenuous workout. I wasn't running 3 miles a day, you know, I was doing the ice bath because I was afraid I was going to die of prostate cancer. So when I got out, of course I would exercise. I would do some push ups or pull ups or I'd go for a walk. Not a lot of exercise, but just enough to get my. My blood flowing back into my limbs. It was exactly. The protocol that the Japanese study said would boost my testosterone, and it did.

7:27 So I wrote an article about it. I put it up, you know, on the Internet where everybody could read, you know, these brilliant findings of mine. And nobody cared. You know, Google ignored it. Nobody was looking at marazkoforge.com, you know, for advice on testosterone until Joe Rogan found it and he put it up on his podcast and he explained to David Goggins, this is December 2022, that. He'd. Started this protocol of doing his ice bath in the morning and then doing some exercise and David Goggins just like well that's crazy you know, how's that working for you and Joe said it's working then people all over the.

8:09 World found the article. They started reading it. They started doing it because they wanted to see what happened. They started sending me their labs and that's really. What happened with my book Uncommon Testosterone? It explains what happened to me, what happened to my prostate, what happened to my testosterone? It's got the case studies of men and women, by the way, from all over the world. It says this is. Why your testosterone goes up It turns out that every sex hormone in the body originates as pregnenolone, synthesized in the mitochondria.

8:44 It is the mitochondria that are responsible for producing your sex hormones. So when you do things that support your mitochondria, exercise is good, magnesium is good, zinc is good, sleep is good. Get all the seed oils out of your diet. It's good for your mitochondria. And one of the best things you can do. Is cold plunge therapy because it stimulates MiTo Biogen genesis? Now you have more mitochondria. They are of a higher quality because of what you've been doing in the cold. It's no wonder your testosterone levels go up.

9:19 So that's the genesis of Marasco Forge. Some people come after me and they say, you know this guy, he's fabricating the science so he can sell more ice baths, and they get the order wrong after I figured out how. Incredible. The science was. Backed up by my own experience, I had to start fabricating ice baths. So that the world could. Have. Access to what they needed to keep their metabolism healthy, their testosterone levels up, their energy level up, etcetera. Oh yeah, if there was 1 substance that could increase your energy levels, optimize mitochondrial function, boost ATP production, help to optimize your hormones, re mineralize the body with ionic minerals whose cognitive function assist detoxification and support your gut health via the microbiome.

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10:32 They have an extremely high quality shilajit product that has been rigorously tested for heavy metals and impurities. Grab yourself some Shilajit, the destroyer of weakness today and head over to Mountain Drop. Com Use the promo code MOBILITY. Fitness at checkout for a nice discount as well. That was such a fantastic breakdown. Thank you so much for sharing your personal journey and it's super inspiring because it makes you understand that, OK, that is, it's working on a foundational level. It's not just something that you feel on the outside.

10:58 It's working all the way on a cellular level, on the mitochondrial level, because we know that the mitochondria are the foundation of health. And when mitochondrial health is suffering, that's when everything else begins to decline because obviously the mitochondria, they produce the energy for the cells. And obviously, if the cells have the energy that they need, then they can carry out all of the necessary processes that they need to be able to thrive and to and to to survive really. And when things are, you know, our modern living really, which is making us so comfortable.

11:28 You know what the temperature, for example, the, the lack of sunlight, staying indoors and being under, under artificial blue light. This is so damaging to our mitochondria. And I feel like too cold can be such an incredible tool for people who can't get much time in nature, for example, who can get such an incredible hack into their lives because it's actually going to change their body from the inside out, right? So maybe now you can take us down the journey of what actually happens step by step, by the time frame, from the moment that we enter the ice bath by time, and what's actually happening under the hood on a biological level.

12:09 You get it, Andreas. It's so ironic. Our industrialized modern world that makes us so comfortable is also killing us. So everything that my grandfather, you know, used to consider a hardship, we now consider therapy. My grandfather used to chop wood so he could, you know, run the wood stove in Maine the whole winter. And so he's getting his exercise and he'd be so sore at the end of the day. Now we go to the gym because what he. Used to think was a hardship we consider a therapy. Well, cold is part of that.

12:43 It takes about two weeks. For your body to recruit brown fat in response to daily cold stimulation. My people come from the North Sea. I come from seasonal latitudes. I'm supposed to have summer and I'm supposed to have winter. The problem is I live in a high rise apartment building in the hottest city in North America in the middle of the desert in Phoenix, AZ. I don't get any winter. I need an. Ice bath to maintain healthy. Levels of brown. Fat. Now some people might say, what's the point of brown fat?

13:18 You know, 20 years ago, medical doctors thought there was no such thing as brown fat. In human adults. They thought it was only something that babies. Had and then. Everybody grew out of it, but it was in Sweden when they were doing PET scans with cancer patients and they said we think we found brown fat in grown-ups and they published a couple of papers. I think this was 2007. And so other cancer researchers started started looking at their scans, looking for brown fat. And sure enough, about 5% of the cancer patients scanned showed visible brown fat on the scans.

13:54 What that meant was 90. 5. Percent of these patients had 0 detectable brown fat. If you do not get. Cold on a regular basis, you lose your brown fat. And maybe some people are saying I'm OK with no brown fat, I'm just going to keep the thermostat up and I'll stay warm. But brown fat is not just about thermal genesis brown. Fat is an essential secretory organ, so it makes. For example, neuroprotective factors FGF 21 and brain derived neuroprotective factor three are associated with higher levels of brown fat.

14:31 Your brown fat takes care of your brain. Your brown fat also communicates with your thyroid to regulate your metabolism. When you have no brown fat, there is nothing to modulate your thyroid function and so many people who are separated from the cold. Will wind up with a thyroid. Disorder, either hypo or hyper. That can be. Corrected by two weeks of regular ice bath therapy. Now their body recruits new brown fat that communicates with the thyroid, modulates its function and brings it back into the normal range.

15:10 It's brown fat that will convert inactive thyroid hormone. Into the. Active form of thyroid hormone, so the brown fat. Supports. The thyroid and the thyroid, how it signals the brown fat. When you don't get cold, you lose your brown fat. You lose an essential metabolic and neuroprotective organ. It is no wonder you get sick. Wow, that's so powerful. Yeah. It just makes you realize that it's a biological necessity to get cold. It's not just something that's nice to do. You know how Uncle Doctor Jack Cruz, he he talks about the three leg stool of life, right?

15:48 He talks about light, water, magnetism, and how those three things are essential for supporting life on this planet. Well, I would actually want to add into that stool if it, if it would be possible, melanin, DHA and cold. Because I feel like those, if you Add all of those things together, my God, you would have such a, such a thriving Organism. Because as you're mentioning, it's not just something nice to do, it's a biological necessity, especially if you're designed, your biology is designed to actually be exposed to the cold.

16:19 Because a lot of people don't understand that if they are from a northern latitude and they are living closer to the equator, they think that it's OK to not do the cold. But I personally, because my mother is from the UK, but my father is from Cyprus, so I'm half and half, but I, I really, really crave the cold. Like the entire summertime, I really, really crave the cold. So that's just telling me that, you know, my body really needs it. Whereas they said there are some individuals who don't really crave the cold at all.

16:46 And I can imagine that people who are born on the equator, do they, do they actually need to do the cold as well? Do they also benefit from the cold for example? Yes. So here's two things to keep in mind, Andreas. First, your mitochondria have their own DNA. Mitochondria do not participate in sexual reproduction like the DNA in the nucleus does. You've inherited your mitochondria from your mother. So as far as your mitochondria concerned, they don't care that your father is from Cyprus because? All of your.

17:21 Mitochondria are inherited from the mother. Because the mitochondria do not participate in sexual reproduction, the although the mutation rate will modify mitochondria and result in different haplotypes. The. Inheritance of mitochondria that goes along this maternal line means that there's less variation in each generation. That is, when you inherit one set of chromosomes from your mother and one from a father, there's all kinds of recombinations. When you inherit them only from your mother, they change more slowly.

17:53 So, as a first approximation, we have the same mitochondria as our ancient grandmothers who survived the Ice Age of 70,000 years ago. Where did they live? The oldest human fossils have been found in. East Africa during this Ice Age, the anthropologists estimate what was called a population bottleneck, estimate that there were only 5000 human beings living between the edge of the glacier and the ocean. We lived at the water's edge. We fished and we foraged in the water so we could stay alive. And that water was cold.

18:37 So where does Vim Hof take his trainees? You know, after they finished their breathwork training and they finished their ice bath and they finished their sauna, what do they do? They climb up Mount Kilimanjaro. Well, Mount Kilimanjaro is on the equator. There are four modern glaciers in East Africa, and they were all. Iced over to 70,000 years ago during this Ice Age so. We have this sort of modern misconception. That the world today was the world that it always. Was. And that's not true. Our ancient ancestors were stressed by the cold, and in particular the cold water, in a way that favored those.

19:18 Who? Had the mitochondrial and the metabolism, the metabolic fortitude to thrive in the cold rather than suffer from it. So there's something ancestral about this expectation of cold. Now the challenge to that is, well, you know, what about these hunter gatherer societies that live in the Kalahari Desert? Human beings are very adaptable and I don't know this for a fact. So I'm going to give you. A hypothesis when your light exposure is on point. So you don't. Have fluorescent bulbs, you don't have LED devices at night.

19:52 You have good circadian rhythm, lots of natural sunlight. When your diet is on point, we're not talking seed oils, you're getting a lot of animal fats. And during the right season you're getting good fruits, maybe some tubers. So your light is on point, your diet is on point, and your exercise is on point. Lots of. Steps. Probably you do. OK. Metabolically, even if your brown fat is miniscule because you don't have regular cold water exposure. I think there's nothing. About the health of the hunter gatherer societies that contradicts this idea that the human body is designed to expect cold exposure.

20:34 However, when your light is not on point because maybe you're a college professor who stares at computer screens all day and all night when your sleep is. Is not on point because you happen to live in an industrialized society where light is practically free and people stay up all hours of the night. When your diet is not on point because people are subsidizing ultra processed foods to put canola oil in there, to put soybean oil and corn oil in there, and wreck the function of your mitochondrial membranes, You're darn right you need cold brown fat and cold plunge therapy.

21:12 Will help you overcome many of the other insults to which your mitochondria are subjected, and that can be poor light hygiene, too many seed oils, constant snacking of carbohydrates, in other words. The standard American diet and the typical Western modern lifestyle. Now I'm not about. To go, you know, live in a cabin in the woods or, or go become a hunter gatherer in the Kalahari desert. I like my job. I like being a professor. I like. Living in a modern, you know, city in the United States. But because I'm so disconnected from nature, I need to do things that are going to bring the nature back to me.

21:57 I need the Morosco ice bath because I need cold, because I need the grounding. I need the electrons from the. Earth that come up through the wires that we've built into the Morosco. So I get instant electrical balancing with the Earth. When I get in there, I need the Epsom salt and the magnesium and some of the other sulfate salts that we put in there so I can get transdermal magnesium museum absorption to keep my metabolism healthy. If you don't get the good sunshine, for example, well then you need the red light panel.

22:29 If you can't get out into the forest, then you need, you know the green light device because your. Eyes are. Relying upon. What your? Ancestors used to get for free. This is why we say Morosco. Is the next best thing to nature. I'd rather that you went and jumped in the Mediterranean. You know that. That's wonderful, and here's the salt water and the cold temperatures. When you can't do that, that's when you need moral. Light influences every single system of your body from mood, skin health, cognition, energy levels, gut health, sexual function, training, performance, recovery, wound healing, body composition, and so much more.

23:11 This is why I make sure to block the harmful artificial blue light and expose myself to the beneficial wavelengths of light. Optimized my biology? Upgrade your biology today by upgrading your light environment. Head over to emrtech.com/mobility Fitness and use the promo code Mobility FITNESS for a massive 20% discounted. Check out for the best red light therapy panels on the market and the best blue light blocking glasses. Oh yeah, oh, it's so important to have these biohacks and tools in our modern living and lifestyle because as you mentioned, that there are so many people who can't get in connection with nature on a daily basis.

23:44 And you need to do these practices on a daily basis, honestly to stay healthy because our biology has been designed that way that we're supposed to be in connection with nature on a daily basis, right? So if you don't have some biohack or something to replace that in order to even keep your biology at a baseline, you know, health level, then obviously it's going to deteriorate and decline. I always like to look at the body like a battery, right? So the mitochondria are what are fueling that battery.

24:14 And when those are not working well, then obviously our battery is going to start to become depleted, right? And there are many lifestyle factors, especially modern living, the blue lights, the Emfs, the seed oils like you mentioned are all depleting our cellular battery. They are just constantly draining it. So it's so important to be aware of those things and to not have them them in our life in the 1st place or minimize those. But then at the same time, do the things that are boosting the mitochondrial function, which is basically the ice path, right?

24:43 So maybe you can talk a little bit about how the ice path is beneficial for insulin sensitivity. How does it actually do that? And yeah, like what's actually happening when we are exposed to the cold? Where is the glucose going? Insulin resistance is at the. Origin of every single leading cause of death from chronic illness in the United States. So you could say, well, what about cancer? Strongly associated with insulin resistance, cancer is a metabolic disorder that originates in dysfunction of the mitochondria, you could say.

25:18 Well, what about heart disease? The association between insulin resistance and death from heart disease is very strong. Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is now called type 3 diabetes. It is a. Cytochondrial disorder in the metabolism of the brain. Every single leading cause of death from chronic illness in the United States originates in mitochondrial dysfunction that can be characterized or expressed as insulin resistance. So people think insulin resistance is the problem. We got to get your insulin levels down without raising your hypoglycemic that without raising your blood sugar.

25:57 Until you become hypoglycemic. That's. Sort of an OK thought, but it is misguided. One of the things that a type 2 diabetic in the United States is likely to experience is a recommendation or prescription for metformin. You take the metformin and laboratory studies, especially in animal models like rats and mice, will show that metformin decreases blood glucose levels and say, oh, we should give this to the type 2. Diabetics. The problem is that metformin is a mitochondrial toxin. You can temporarily stimulate mitochondrial function by giving a body metformin, and that increased mitochondrial function will reduce blood sugar levels.

26:41 But you do it at the. Expense of the mitochondria and not in support of the mitochondria, which is why. People find themselves taking larger doses and larger doses over time. They say you know it's not working anymore, perhaps I should take more, but they wind up ruining their mitochondria chondria. Insulin resistance is not the problem. Insulin resistance is your body searching for a solution to mitochondrial dysfunction. When the mitochondria are overwhelmed with carbohydrates, the cell becomes resistant to the action of insulin.

27:20 It says. I'm going to keep that glucose in the bloodstream for a little while. I'm going to slow down the rate at which you're processing it, because the processing of glucose into ATP will produce reactive oxygen species inside the cell, right at the mitochondria. And those Ros can be a good thing. They can stimulate new mitochondria. They can stimulate MiTo Biogenesis, but only when the. Mitochondria get a break. That is stress and recovery. That's what the mitochondria needs, like anything else.

27:52 When they are subjected to a constant stream of carbohydrates and a constant production of Ros, they never get the recovery. They become dysfunctional and the cell responds by resisting the action of insulin. The way to fix insulin resistance. Is not to overwhelm the mitochondria, but to support the mitochondria magnesium. Red light, cold therapy, sleep, all of these things will give the mitochondria the support they need rather than reducing blood glucose levels at their expense. They When the mitochondria have that necessary support, they're better prepared to process the carbohydrates.

28:34 Ketosis is another one. Intermittent fasting is another one. Giving your body a break from those carbs will help your body restore the mitochondrial function. Going back to the animal models, researchers took mice and they said, OK, let's see what happens when we give them periodic, that is, intermittent acute cold exposure, not chronic cold exposure. Many of the studies on mice have been mice housed at a cold temperature without any break, but just for a. Few hours a day. Let's give these mice some cold and then allow them to recover.

29:10 What they discover is that it stimulates mitophagi. Which is removed removal of broken mitochondria and MiTo Biogenesis their replacement by new mitochondria exercise will support mitochondrial function, but the. Best way to improve the function of your mitochondria is to give it cold. This is like a workout for the sorry cold is like a workout for the mitochondria in particular in your brown fat. Brown fat are packed with mitochondria, so when you recruit new brown fat, you do it by Beijing white fat cells, that is adding mitochondria to the white fat cells.

29:53 Where are those mitochondria coming from? Reproduction, proliferation. Your body knows how to select the highest quality mitochondria and make new ones from them. And so in this way, cold therapy is like reversing your biological clock. Many of the phenomena that are associated ordinarily with aging, testosterone is one of them. Your doctor might say a man's testosterone, inevitably. Declines with age. Well, that's a bunch of crap to the extent that a man accumulates mitochondrial injury or the man's mitochondria.

30:28 Deteriorate over time because he's not taking. Care of them. Yes, testosterone will come down, but that kind of aging is optional. When you take good care of your mitochondria, they take good care of you. Your body responds ordinarily to the cold with muscle. Shivering. We're all familiar with this, but that's only because you don't have the brown fat when your body recruits. The brown fat you. Will no longer shiver to the same extent in the cold. So we tell people who are just starting a cold go cold enough to gasp.

31:00 So you feel. That gasp reflex and then go long enough to shiver. But after about two weeks, you don't need to. Shiver anymore, your body has recruited the brown fat. Just getting into the. Cold and feeling the gasp reflex will activate. Your brown fat that it will stimulate MiTo Biogenesis. Don't stay in too long, go very cold. As cold as you can stand it and still get that gas reflex. And just stay in for a couple or 4 minutes. That's all I do. That's how to keep your metabolism healthy. Wow, that's amazing.

31:31 Yeah, that I've actually noticed that myself as well, that because here I always get in the sea. I live by the sea, like super close, like 50 meters, and I get in every single day, right. And I do this all year round on purpose because I want to keep that brown fat active. And I know that cold is so beneficial for me. And, and is there any like benefits to doing longer times, especially when the temperature of the water is not that cold? Because the lowest it gets here in Cyprus in the winter time is like 55°F, which is honestly not that cold.

32:02 You know, it's not freezing, right? So. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it's, it's basically it's just enough to stimulate something, anything. Warmer than about 40° I get bored and so I'm trying to think of what that is in Celsius. I don't know, maybe 7 or 8°C is boring for me. You must go cold enough to get that gasp reflex or you're not activating the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system. Brown. Fat. Unlike white fat, it's highly enervated. Well, what are all those nerve endings doing in your brown fat?

32:37 They're not there to feel pain or something. They are there to. Communicate with the brown fat the the body. Can't wait for the brown fat to sense that you're in the cold environment those. Thermal receptors are in the skin, whereas the brown fat is inside the body where it's going to keep your vital organs warm. The body can't wait. As soon as your skin senses the cold, it will send a signal through the nervous system to turn the brown fat on. And that's going to keep your vital organs, especially your brain and your heart, warm even when you're in the cold.

33:13 But if you don't feel, feel that gasp. Reflex. If you're wading into the Mediterranean, you're like. Oh no, this is. Great, then you are not signaling your nervous system. Your brown fat is sitting around going hey Andreas, when are you going to find some real? Cold. And it's not getting that stimulation. Yeah. So what I was actually going to say was that for. Long enough. Sorry, stay. In there for long enough and you and if you stay in there for long enough and you do find yourself shivering, then you know you have activated your brown fat, even if you didn't get the gas reflex and it might take a long time.

33:48 Yeah, I did find that actually at the beginning when I started doing that, because I was living in Costa Rica at some point. And then we came back to Cyprus in the winter time and then I started doing the cold. And then I noticed that, OK, I was really shivering at the beginning when I was doing it, even though I was, you know, I just wasn't conditioned to doing it. And then afterwards, so it's after a while because I'd been doing it the whole year round. When the next winter came around, I wasn't shivering at all.

34:14 I had no shivers and I could stay 20-30 minutes and I was like, I don't feel anything, but it was cold. It did feel kind of comfortable. I put. I didn't get the shivering feeling though. If you, I don't know if you had this experience when you were a child, but if you watch children, they don't care how cold it is. They just want to go on the beach. They want to play in the water and their teeth might even be shivering, but they don't want to come out of the water, water because they're having such a great time.

34:39 And then the parents are like, no, no, it's too cold for you. The parents don't have the brown fat, but the children do. And so they can be much more comfortable in the cold weather than the parents who aren't getting cold anymore ever could be. And I remember this when. I was a. Kid and it was at the very beginning of the summer, you know, the first day mom would take us to the beach and we would go run into the water and we would play in there for hours. We didn't care how. Cold it was. Unfortunately, we also got sunburned because my mother was one of those people that that margarine was healthier for us than, you know, butter fat was.

35:17 My mother had some really weird ideas that she mostly got from Harvard University propaganda about what to feed her children. I was raised on white toast and Lucky Charms, and no wonder I wound up fat. The the nutritional misconceptions that my mother, which was all propaganda, was told were not good for me. But taking me to and my sisters to the beach to let me run around in the cold repaired my metabolism, repaired a lot of the. Damage that had been done by a winter's worth of eating, you know, marshmallows for breakfast.

35:54 So by being exposed to the cold, then we're actually improving the insulin sensitivity by increasing the amount of mitochondria that we have and increasing the brown fat, which is higher in mitochondria. So basically we have more factories to process more of that floating substrate that is available in the bloodstream, you know, so it's getting processed more efficiently. Is it also going indirectly like insulin independent into the muscle as well via the glute 4 receptor? Is is anything like that happening as well there?

36:28 Are mechanisms by which glucose can enter the cell. Without insulin, those mechanisms are insufficient to maintain normal glucose levels, and so I'm not an. Expert on the Glute 4. We should talk to. Ben Bickman about this. You know, how does the cell metabolize when insulin levels are very low? But one of the mechanisms that I am familiar with is ketosis. Ketones are an intermediary metabolic product of fat. Metabolism. Ketones do not need insulin to enter the cell, and so the classic mechanism that your body has to metabolize in a low carbohydrate environment is to burn fat.

37:16 And ketones will fuel the brain. They cross the blood brain barrier and keep your brain fired up while you're on a fat metabolism and you maintain through gluconeogenesis a minimum level. Of blood glucose. Which could just be 50 or 60. We've discovered that people. In ketosis, do not experience the symptoms of hypoglycemia or low blood sugar at the same levels that people. Who are not metabolically flexible will begin to experience brain fog. Or a loss of. Proprioception or or other characteristics of hypo glycemia.

37:59 When you're in ketosis, you can tolerate very low insulin levels and very low blood sugar levels and still maintain good brain and muscle function. So rather than think about how could blood glucose enter the cell without insulin, I've thought a lot about what do we do in a low insulin and low carbohydrate environment. That's called ketosis. The fastest way to stimulate production of ketones in your own body is to get into the ice pack, because you get that parasympathetic activation and your liver will release glycogen into the bloodstream.

38:36 There will be an immediate blood sugar spike as a result of that fight or flight response to the cold, but it only lasts 20 or 30 seconds. Your brown fat burns through glucose almost immediately. And so the white fat cells will open up and they will release free fatty acids, triglycerides, they release lipids into your bloodstream so that they can travel to your mitochondria and your mitochondria will begin burning fat almost right away to fuel the non shivering thermogenesis that will elevate your ketone levels.

39:10 So one of the. Advantages of having a regular ice bath practice is increased metabolic flexibility. Now you don't need 3 days of, you know, 20 carbohydrates a day to get yourself into ketosis. You can do it in a matter of hours because you've got an ice bath to burn through all the excess glucose to burn through the glycogen stores in your liver and move you to ketosis almost immediately. Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, because metabolic flexibility is so important, right? Because your ability to be able to utilize both substrates is absolutely, absolutely essential.

39:45 And we know that it's not only governed by diet as you're explaining environmental factors such as temperature is a huge, huge factor, but also the light environment we're exposed to as well. Because we know the artificial blue light can spike our insulin levels and can make us release glucose as well because it's actually activating that sympathetic fight in flight state. And so we know that basically our metabolic health is governed by the light environment, the the presence or the absent. Sense of oxygen, so the type of metabolism we're using aerobic versus anaerobic and also temperature.

40:20 That's basically what I'm understanding here. There are these three factors at play. And when we are able to manipulate those to our advantage, we're able to stay more metabolically healthy and and more flexible and be able to switch between those different substrates more efficiently. Whereas modern living, because of the comfort that we are experiencing and because we like, we like to be comfortable, we're also becoming metabolically inflexible while at the same time over consuming glycogen rich foods, which are maybe not even grown at our, you know, latitude or even season.

40:53 And then that's overwhelming the mitochondria causing mitochondrial damage and therefore not even able to process that energy, you know, even even more. So it's actually becoming even more of a problem because we have damaged mitochondria. We don't have new mitochondria forming. And This is why it's so important to have tools like the ice to be able to restore the balance basically in the system. So you mentioned a little bit about the reactive oxygen species. And this is a very interesting topic because we know that the Ros is like a signaling molecule because it's not only, yes, it can be damaging in excess, but as you said, it can be as a signaling molecule, right, for the mitochondrial Biogenesis.

41:33 So maybe we can talk a bit about the bio photons, if you know about that topic, you know, and how that actually contributes to the formation of vitamin D and actually how cold can be a supplement for vitamin D in the winter when we have an absence of UV light from our environment. You are correct, the mitochondria make light inside the cell. They can't help it the. Electron transport chain is a series of what are called redox reactions. So you're moving electrons from one molecule to another molecule, from one state to another state, and the.

42:10 Physics. Of electrons. Requires the release of light as the electrons are moving between different states. Some of that light made inside the cell where the mitochondria are housed. Is in the UVB. Wavelength. And so you might say, well, it's very faint, you know, and our sensors have a very difficult time detecting it. And that's true because we don't have sensors inside the cell. When the light is produced right there inside the body, you can't think of the same intensity expectations because that photon, which might not be the right word, that light at about the 312 nanometer wavelength made inside the mitochondria will intersect cholesterol.

42:56 It cannot help it. And when that happens, this is not enzymatically governed. This is a purely physical reaction, the UVB. Wavelength of light produced by the mitochondria, which is called a bio photon, will convert the cholesterol. To pre vitamin D it is later metabolized into the myriad there's something like 25 different forms of vitamin D, which isn't really even a vitamin it is a hormone it has a profound effect on everything happening in your body, including the regulation of the immune system, the development of the immune system in children.

43:30 Of course your bone metabolism. Everything in your body relies upon your hormone levels of vitamin D and to take supplements will help if you are in a an acute vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency. But here I agree with Jack Cruz, if your body can make it, you don't need to take it. The big question is how do people at the extreme latitudes maintain healthy vitamin D levels that their body needs when there's no sunshine? At least there's no UVB in radiation during the winter. This was an enormous mystery and people thought that is because, well, they're living on seal fat or they're eating, you know, cod liver or something.

44:17 The dietary contribution to vitamin D is inadequate to maintain healthy levels, but the biophotons produced by the mitochondria can make up for it. When you get cold and you activate your brown fat, you initiate this electron transport chain that produces light inside your brown fat cells. That light in the UVB range intersects cholesterol. It produces pre vitamin D and it produces it right where it needs to be, not in the skin where it has to be transported into the fat cells where it can be stored and further metabolized.

44:57 It produces it right in the fat cell. And so I wrote this article and I hypothesized that the vitamin D produced by. Cold. Would never show up as calciferol. In a. Classic vitamin D blood serum test because people, you know, on Twitter were coming at me and they saying, hey, where's your data, Professor Seeger? You know, if the cold will produce vitamin D, why aren't we measuring it in the bloodstream? And I said it is not measured in the bloodstream because it does not ever have to be transported through the bloodstream.

45:31 Andreas, I was wrong. I found this paper. This is from Poland. It came out in April 2025. And it is the first study of whole body cryotherapy and blood serum levels of vitamin D. And guess what it finds Whole body cryotherapy will increase vitamin D levels measured in the blood, at least in the dozens of women who are all. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. That participated in this study. So they had the experimental group, they had the control group, they subjected the experimental group to whole body cryotherapy and they got a boost in these Polish.

46:15 Women's with Multiple sclerosis Vitamin D levels Now you might know that multiple sclerosis is associated with deficiencies in vitamin D metabolism. All the autoimmune disorders, whether it's diabetes or Parkinson's or fibromyalgia or rheumatoid arthritis, they all originate in vitamin D insufficiency during the first year of life when the immune system is developing by Healthy levels of vitamin D then are essential to the healthy development of the immune system. Later on, the vitamin D status of the person with an autoimmune disorder can be corrected, but the immune system is already developed, so it is still susceptible and in multiple.

47:01 Sclerosis. Patients when their vitamin D levels get lower, they are subjected to what are called flare ups. The symptoms of multiple sclerosis can get worse. So this is a population with a vitamin D disorder and in that population, sure enough, the vitamin D that is being made in the brown fat during whole body cryotherapy is traveling through the bloodstream to reach other places in the body where the multiple sclerosis patient needs it. This is an incredible finding that although it contradicts my hypothesis that it would, that that vitamin D would stay in the fat cell and never be found in the bloodstream, it confirms that the vitamin D is being made in the fat cell.

47:49 This is something that I'm pretty sure Jack Cruz is aware of, but he doesn't quite talk enough about. He talks about using ice baths for leptin sensitivity so you can better regulate your appetite, and it's very smart. But then he tells everybody, you got to move to El Salvador, you know, buy Bitcoin, move to El Salvador, get more sunshine. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm saying he could emphasize more that if you live in these northern latitudes, you can maintain healthy vitamin D levels by getting regular cold during the winter.

48:23 And don't worry about what your blood labs say. If you're not symptomatic, you shouldn't be treating a lab report. Treat instead those indications that feel like ill health and maintenance of healthy vitamin D levels is. Possible without eating a ton of cod liver during the winter, as long as you're willing to experience some cold. Wow, this is so mind blowing information. Really because I'm sure many people were not aware about this. I mean, the more I actually go into studying biophotons and having many other incredible guests on the show, I, I got more and more deeper into this topic of the biophotons and their roles.

49:05 And it just seems that there are certain they are very intelligent, right? Like they are doing different things. So, so for example, some that you mentioned are they're making that vitamin D production. Some can be doing something else. They're they're serving as this quantum communication throughout the body, which is traveling throughout the facial system at the speed of light. And it's just, it's just absolutely wild. And it would even support your hypothesis, you know, like the fact that the facial system when the nanotubules, the fact that we can quantum communicate and tunnel energy throughout the body.

49:38 You know, you could even possibly tunnel vitamin D molecules, who knows, right? Because everything in the body, once it gets to a certain level, it becomes so small and so quantum, it's almost instantaneous. It doesn't even take time to travel from one place to another because the more coherence there is within a system, the better the communication between the cells and the and the and the yeah and basically all the organs of the body. So we mentioned about the bio photons, we mentioned about the brown fat, we mentioned about the testosterone.

50:11 How about fertility for women? How does called improved fertility? One of the most metabolically demanding things that a woman can do is pregnancy, and this should make sense to everybody because she must nourish the growth of the fetus for nine months, and this is metabolically A stressful thing. Her body becomes full of growth hormone and growth hormone will interfere with the action of insulin. So it is a state pregnancy. That is, pregnancy is a state of physiological insulin resistance. And I mean physiological, not pathological.

50:47 Some insulin resistance during pregnancy is a healthy condition. The problem is that this metabolically demanding state requires healthy mitochondria. And so you look at the statistics that come out of Europe and the United States and say, oh, the poor women are going to lose their fertility after they turn 35. That fertility just falls off a Cliff. It's not fertility. It is the mitochondria. It is mitochondrial health that decline with age, and as a consequence of the accumulation of mitochondrial injury, then fertility declines.

51:24 So for a woman to maintain her fertility up until menopause and then including the early 40s, she must maintain healthy mitochondria. There are a number of things that she can do. I mentioned magnesium and zinc. Coq 10 get enough choline. L Carnitine PQQ is another supplement you can take so there's some nutritional. Things that you can do. You must also take care of your gut health. Get the glyphosate out of your gut. Make sure that your gut microbiome is in good shape because it is the gut microbiome that produces free fatty acids that travel to the mitochondria.

52:01 You get the. Wrong gut microbiome. And that's really where metabolism starts. Then you get the wrong feedstocks. For the mitochondria, cold is one of the best things for a woman's fertility because cold stimulates MiTo Biogenesis and rejuvenates the mitochondria that have otherwise been injured. By all of the other things that that we do in Western society, poor light, poor sleep, too many seed oils, too much snacking, too many carbs, no ketosis, all of these things accumulate injury inside the mitoch.

52:36 Chondria that can be corrected by cold plunge. Heat very bad, you know, if you're seeking either a man or a woman, if you're seeking to conceive, men cut out, don't do the sauna Women stay out of the sauna if you're pregnant or seeking to conceive. I've got an accumulation of anecdotes from women in their late 30s or early 40s who said, well, I started doing ketosis and ice baths and surprise, I got pregnant. You didn't warn me. And I they'll say, well, hang on a second. I think I did. But you know, you weren't thinking about that.

53:12 I do not recommend hormonal birth control. I recommend you take care of your metabolism. And I think it's wonderful. Like every message that I get, I'm saying, congratulations. It doesn't matter to me whether the pregnancy was a planned event or the accident of fixing the metabolism. What a blessed thing for a woman to have, even as she's into her early 40s. Then of course they'll message me and say, but maybe I shouldn't do cold anymore while I'm pregnant. And no, you should, because pregnancy is a physiological state of insulin resistance.

53:49 If you're not doing things to maintain insulin sensitivity, insulin resistance can go too far. It can show up as preeclampsia. It can show up with gestational diabetes or, heaven forbid, eclampsia. It can show up as placental insufficiency. And all of these things are are going to happen in the third trimester. Cold is associated with better birth outcomes. So if you want to take a break from the cold because you think that you've conceived or it's right around ovulation and you say you know what, I don't want to activate my immune system when I'm trying to conceive when that zygote might be implanting in the uterine wall, it's OK, take a break for.

54:32 A few days. Take a break for your first trimester and then come back with the cold in the second trimester. In the third trimester, your baby is fine. All of the thermal regulatory mechanisms are going to protect that fetal core temperature. And the benefit you get from the mitochondrial boost, from the reduced swelling, from the improved sleep. Is going to lead to better birth outcomes. So that's the latest met. The. Biggest difficulty that that. Let me rephrase that. The first clinical indication of metabolic dysfunction in a young man is erectile dysfunction.

55:12 The function of the penis that is, an erection requires healthy mitochondria to produce the nitric oxide that stimulate vasodilation so that blood can reach the penis. If you are experiencing as a young man erectile dysfunction, it could be related to low testosterone and the failure of the endothelial cells that are responsible for. Signaling vasodilation to produce enough nitric oxide. Both of those things are mitochondrial in their origin, and both of those things can be fixed with cold plunge therapy.

55:46 Do not do the sauna because that interferes with sperm production. But cold is a wonderful thing for the male metabolism as well and for the male sex function in women. The number one cause of infertility among otherwise you know women of childbearing age is called PCOS, polycystic ovarian syndrome that is metabolic in its origin. So both men and women can. Improve their fertility by. A regular practice of cold plunge therapy. After the baby is born, it's OK to start sauna again. It maybe it will help bring in your milk.

56:23 Maybe it will help improve your circulation. Don't bring your baby into the sauna, but it's OK for the mother to do sauna again. That's awesome. Yeah. So basically in the body, we have like 3 of the most energy demanding systems, right? Is the is the brain, the heart and the reproductive system as you just mentioned. So that is where we have the highest concentration of mitochondria. And there is there must be a reason for that, right, Because they must be kind of important for our, our survival and our basically our survival as a species on the planet reproduction right, to be able to give birth to to new human beings.

56:56 And so how does it actually this cold benefit heart health, since it's, you know, since the heart is so abundant in mitochondria, what does it actually do to the heart? Like how does it benefit the heart? The cardiovascular system? The mechanisms I'm not an expert in the association between insulin resistance and heart disease is very strong. When you improve your insulin sensitivity, you reduce your risk of any sort of cardiovascular event, whether that's heart disease or a stroke or deep vein thrombosis or even chronic venous insufficiency, which we just found out present.

57:33 President Trump, who gives no outward indication of metabolic health whatsoever, suffers from chronic venous insufficiency. The mechanisms by which the cold might target improvement in the heart, mitochondria, those remain mysterious to me. It is true that you can stimulate one part of the body and find benefits in another part of the body. And there's a medical term for this that I find very confused confusing because I'm not an expert in the Latin medical terminology. But what we know is that you can exercise 1 aspect and strengthen other aspects of the body.

58:14 The body is a complex system in constant communication with one another, and this is imperfect. But you cannot change just one thing. As an example, you get your 10,000 steps, you get smart. Was it your brain? That was doing the steps. It's not like you, you know, sitting there doing crossword puzzles is also very good. For your brain. But just visualizing exercise will. Improve your muscle tone. How? Is it that you can give your brain exercises that improve the quality of your muscles? How is it that you can give your muscles exercises that will improve the quality of your brain?

58:49 Because there's no such thing as changing just one thing. This is one of my objections to the pharmaceutical local industry. They want you to believe that you can take 1 pill to correct 1 symptom and everything else is in side effects. There's no such thing as a side effect, Andreas. There are only effects because everything in the body is connected to everything else. When you change one thing for the better, you change everything for the better. And the opposite is also true. When you change one thing for the worse, you change everything.

59:21 For the worse. So I wish I could answer with greater expertise about what change changes in the mitochondria and the function of the heart, but the mechanisms aren't my area. Did you know that muscle weighs more than body fat in terms of volume? This is why someone can look like this or like this and be the exact same weight on the scale, making weight tracking not the most reliable metric when it comes to measuring progress. So building muscle while losing body fat can massively influence the number on the scale, leaving you feeling frustrated and discouraged.

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1:00:18 But could we hypothesize for example, that when we are in the cold environment, we do we cause vasoconstriction at first? So all of the blood from the surface is going to the internal environment close to our organs, right, to keep us warm as well, in addition to the brown fat. So basically that oxygen now is getting, I mean, the blood is getting more oxygenated because it's closer to the, to the organs, right? And so I can imagine that it's going to have more systemic benefits once our body starts heating back up and the the temperature is starting to come back to our extremities, that blood is going to be more oxygenated.

1:00:55 Am I correct? But you make a great point, I'm glad you brought it up because it allows me to correct. Another misconception in the United States. Thermal contrast therapy is one of the best things you can do for cardiovascular function. The cold restricts the blood vessels. This. Smooth muscle tissue that controls the diameter of your blood vessel contracts, and it shuts down blood flow to the extremities to increase perfusion in the core and in the brain to protect all of these elements against the cold.

1:01:25 That's wonderful. And then when you get into the Sona, the Sona causes vasodilation, the relaxation of the smooth muscle tissue. So thermal contrast therapy is like a workout for your smooth muscle tissue, and it improves cardiovascular function so your heart doesn't have to work as hard. And that might be one of the mechanisms of heart benefit. But the misconception in the United States is people think Sona just means sweating in the hot box. Sona is the only word in the Finnish language that has been incorporated into English, at least as far as I know.

1:02:01 And we misunderstand it because Sona in Finland means hot and cold. And then we say, oh, I'm going to do Sona. And we think it's only heat. Well, in Finland, you jump in the lake, you know, even in the summertime, the lake water there is cold. Or you roll in the snow in the winter, they're always doing cold. It is not possible to do an epidemiological study in Finland of sauna without the cold exposure too. And they will say right in the research papers, by sauna we mean hot and cold. But then Rhonda Patrick or you know, Andrew Huberman or somebody, they do a podcast and they say if you sauna 3 * a week, you know, you get a reduction in mortality according to this finished study that also did cold.

1:02:42 But I'm not going to tell you about the cold. And so people get the wrong idea. Thermal contrast therapy is hot and cold. If you're only doing the heat, you're probably getting some benefits. But you cannot rely upon the work done in Finland that Rhonda Patrick and Andrew Huberman and other people cite. You cannot rely upon that research if you're not doing the traditional Finnish sauna with the cold back and forth. If you're you're in an infrared sauna, that research doesn't apply to you. If you're in a traditional finished sauna but you're not incorporating cold, that research does not apply to you.

1:03:19 So enjoy yourself. Just don't fool yourself into thinking that the statistics are the benefits. So that's important. And there's another caveat. People misunderstand hot tubs. Hot tubs feel great, and at first hot tubs will make you sweat a little bit, but your skin understands when it is saturated with water. When you get into the hot tub, you only sweat through the parts of your skin that are not in the water. It is the evaporation of the sweat, not just the release of the sweat into the water.

1:03:56 And so there's this phenomena called hydromiosis. Your skin knows that sweating into the water will not cool the body. So how does it defend the core body temperature against getting too high? It's also vasoconstriction. So when you get into the hot tub in the, you know, water, there is, I don't know, 104° or you know, 40 something cells or whatever it is, it's too hot for the body. The body will respond. All those parts that are in the hot water will experience vasoconstriction. So if you go from the ice bath vasoconstriction into the Sony vasodilation.

1:04:34 You're getting a good workout, but if you go from the ice. Bath into the hot tub. That's vasoconstriction and vasoconstriction. And I love hot tubs. They feel great. But they do. Not. Give you. The heat that will cause vasodilation which really looking for in thermal contrast therapy for cardiovascular benefits. That's wild and such an important distinction for people to understand if people want to do this contrast therapy. And so how does cold benefit our brain, especially dopamine? What's actually happening there?

1:05:09 Was it? What is it doing for our mental health the most? Widely cited study was out of Poland and it's widely studied because it's the one that Huberman talks about. 2.5 X increase in dopamine. This is wonderful, in particular for Parkinson's patients. I have a friend who has Parkinson's. He's in his 60s and he's started doing cold plunge therapy because he knows he could take L dopa. He could take exogenous dopamine and it would improve all of his symptoms of Parkinson's and would also burn out his dopamine receptors.

1:05:42 So instead of taking L dopa, he's hypothesizing that if his body is making its own dopamine, which is stimulated by the cold, then he will not burn out his dopamine receptors and he'll get the benefits of the dopamine without the downside. This seems to be working out pretty well for him. He's been doing this for a couple of years. I've seen his posture improve, his gait improve, the cadence of his words improves. He's doing some other things, some methylene blue. He hasn't gone into ketosis, but he's doing some nutritional support.

1:06:14 So how does cold support the brain? Cold is neuro protective. Hyperthermia is very dangerous. Hyperthermia is when the body temperature gets too hot and it begins to kill the body. The brain is in particular susceptible to temperatures that are too great. But hypothermia, low body temperature is brain protective. I spoke to an an emergency room physician in Baltimore. She told me that when they get a cold water drowning case, they cannot declare that person dead until they re warm the body. She has brought people back to life as much as 24 hours after they've drowned and that's without a pulse.

1:07:02 That's without brain activity because of the body when it's cold enters, it's not even right to call it a coma, but enters this state in which it is not active. It's not thermodynamically giving any signs of being alive, but it can then be resuscitated because it is not damaged either. And when this happens, she rewarms the body, resuscitates them, and they come back to life. These people are lucid. They're like, what am I doing here? I was just, I was diving in the lake with my buddies. How did I get here?

1:07:38 They do not suffer the kinds of brain injury that you can when your body temperature gets too high. Now, we talked a little bit about the neuroprotective factors that are produced by brown fat when it's activated. And I think that's important, particularly if you have traumatic brain injury and you're trying to heal the brain. Brown fat and cold are super important. The cold increasing perfusion in the brain, for example, can increase healing and the neuroprotective factors can help rebuild those neurons that have been damaged and traumatic brain injury but the relationship between brain activity and temperature itself, the cold is inherently protective of the brain, whereas.

1:08:18 The heat is not. Wow, it makes you think that, you know, we can preserve human beings in ice, you know, probably for thousands of years. And and they they, they would still be, you know, if you reheat them back up or to a regular temperature that come back to life. That would be absolutely why I disagree. Which part? And for an important reason, the ice, the cold is protective of the brain. But once you begin to create ice inside the cells of the body, that's. Frost like the expansion of the. Water into the crystalline ice structure can destroy the integrity of the cells.

1:08:56 Now there's this. You know what is it? A tree frog. You can freeze it solid, and then you can thaw it out and I'll start hopping around again. There are like some instances of, you know, of complex biology that can be frozen solid. Human beings are not one of them. Yeah, it makes sense because when you put a fruit in the in the freezer, right, it usually expands or loses its structure. And that's probably what happens because like ice, you know, water normally expands, whereas our system is probably not.

1:09:26 And if you kept us in water, our body would probably start to disintegrate, right? Or something like that, if it was kept in the water long enough? Probably right? So let's talk a little bit about your light, that green light, because that's very interesting. I don't know much about it. Why would someone want to shine this light into their eyes or their face? To relieve pain and anxiety. It turns out that this is narrow band LED green. It turns out that that green light. We don't know the mechanisms.

1:09:57 But that green light will relieve migraine pain and reduce anxiety, so. Why would that be? The dominant wavelengths of light in the shady forest are near infrared and green. This makes sense. When have we ever, you know, as human beings, failed to feel calm, failed to get that sense of relaxation from being in nature, being surrounded by the trees. Now I'm I'm not talking scientifically, but I'm talking experientially, of course, the green. Shady forest, you know. Fills us with a sense of confidence and serenity.

1:10:38 In Japan, there's a practice called forest bathing, and they send people out out into the forest just for a few hours a week. It speeds wound healing. It improves mood and metabolism. It makes them, in general, healthier in all aspects. And they used to think it was because the leaves in the coniferous forest, you know, release something into the air and it gives you that pine smell. I think there's some truth to that. It does not mean that you want an air freshener in your kitchen to try and recreate that pine smell with these artificial Forget that, right?

1:11:12 I think that the air in the forest is good, but what we've been overlooking is the light. In the forest. So there was a study at Harvard University with migrainers. One of the things about having a migraine is you become photophobic. Any amount of light can increase the pain. And so migrainers will lock themselves in a dark bedroom or in a closet or something for hours until the migraine pain passes. And so at Harvard, they wanted to study this and they tested each wavelength into individually and every single wavelength, including the white, which is all the wavelengths together made the migraine worse, except green where they got a reduction in migraine paint.

1:11:52 University of Arizona does a follow up study and they're using narrow band green LED light. And they saw among chronic migrainers, I forget the exact statistics, but it's something like a 60% or an 80% reduction in the frequency and the severity. Of the migraines. So these papers, they showed up, you know, in inbox somehow. I was working on a vitamin D lamp and phototherapy and probably Google thought I'd be interested in some papers on green phototherapy. Turns out that I was dating a woman who experienced regular and debilitating migraines.

1:12:24 So I said, hey, you know, let's try some of this green light. I bought one of these commercial devices that were based upon the Harvard study, and she had a headache and I asked her to try it. She said, if I hold my eyes in just the right way and I relax my face in just the right way, I can feel a little bit of benefit in headache reduction. Said, OK, that's interesting. I called up a friend who's in the red light business, and I asked him to make a portable red light device but put green in it instead.

1:12:52 He did. He called me up, said, Tom, this is garbage. It's too right, You know, it's going to give you a headache if you didn't have one. And sure enough, the Harvard study showed the green was only beneficial at low intensities. So my girlfriend and I, we went out to take a look at the prototype and she's already got a headache. She's about a six on a out of 10 on headache. And I'm like, well, come on, honey, you know, we're going to check this out. I'm like, oh, yes, he's right. Oh, this is terrible.

1:13:20 We could never sell this. She says, let me see that. She takes it out of my hand. She closes her eyes. She puts it right up against her face and she says this feels really good. What? Happened, Andreas was closing the eyes, blocked out all the painful wavelengths. When you close the eyes and you wait about 70% of the light intensity with the eyes closed, it's high intensity green was an advantage, not a disadvantage because it meant it was the only wavelength of light penetrating to the retina. It took her headache from a six down to A2 right away.

1:13:57 So I started testing these with other migrainers. When she had a full on like visual distortion migraine, I begged her to try the green light. She said no, no, I know my sequence. You know, I'm going to have this and the pains going to hit here and then take some meds there and I'll be out for about four hours. I said please try it. She experienced all of the normal symptoms, that is the visual distortion, the brain fog, the loss of cognition, no pain, 0 pain and she didn't take any meds. So now I'm getting these reports.

1:14:31 Sinus headache pain gone. Post concussion headache pain gone. High altitude headache pain gone. Certainly migraine headache headache pain gone. The only headache that the green light can't seem to touch is what I call a high estrogen headache that some women get at a certain part of their cycle. Every other headache Male, male adults, children without medication. 10 minutes of this high intensity, narrow band, green wavelength takes the pain away. This is a remarkable finding that I wish more people would know because migraine is a billion dollar a day problem just in the United States.

1:15:12 But Andreas, nobody believes me. You know, I go on, you know, Instagram or something and I say, yeah, yeah, close your eyes at 10 minutes, no migraine pain. And they think I'm alive. They have to apply. It for themselves. And then they write me and they say this is unbelievable, this is incredible, this must be a miracle because my headache pain is gone. Well, what you're doing is a great service to the world for sure, because it's and it's amazing that you are sharing this information because first of all, you brought it to my awareness.

1:15:43 I wasn't aware about it. So it's so cool to learn new things. And also the fact that light touches every single aspect of your body, every single aspect of your biology. So anybody who thinks that light cannot possibly influence clearly just does not understand quantum biology, circadian biology. It's it is the foundation of our health. You know, our circadian rhythms are basically the way that our body supposed to respond to light. You know, it just tells you that your body is wired and you can manipulate the way that your body responds based on different light frequencies.

1:16:20 We know that, for example, when we're when we're exposed to artificial blue light in isolation, we get negative like, you know, symptoms when we are exposed to blue light from the sun in combination with all the other colors of the spectrum, the red there in near infrared, the UV, we actually have a massive benefit because that's actually in training the circadian mechanism. It's actually accelerating are metabolism, right? And the same thing, for example, just studying even as well, red and infrared light in isolation is incredible for the body and the mitochondria and the exclusion zone water.

1:16:54 So again, your panel that this green panel that you have made is another incredible addition biohack that people can have in their, you know, in their homes in case they actually need it. And why take a pill when you can use light as your medicine? Because actually it I can imagine it has very little side effects, right? I'm. Tired of the term biohacking. It makes it seem like there's some technological software code shortcut to health. Yeah, and I don't think of it that way. I think about returning to nature.

1:17:26 I think about, you know, there are no trees, there's no shady forest in Phoenix, AZ. So how am I going to get the benefit of the green light? I need to build a machine that is going to bring the forest to me. There is no beachfront in Arizona, so how am I going to get the benefit of the salt water? I must build a machine that brings the ocean to me. Now some people will say that's bio, but I don't think so. I think it's like bio halving if there are things absent from my environment because technology, you know, I can use technology to create the environment that my body needs.

1:18:02 And it doesn't have to be all the time. It can be a few minutes a day, it can be 10 minutes a day of green, it could be 4 minutes a day of ice bath and these things will repair. It's enough to repair a lot of the damage that has been done by being disconnected from our environment. I would much rather take that approach then start doing, you know, speed running nad drips or if you have a serious ailment and peptide therapy is going to fix it. Do it. There are. Occasions for bio hacks but just as you have regular lifestyle more of a bio have kind of guy.

1:18:39 I love that. Fantastic. Is there anything that we didn't cover today that you would like to talk about? Because I feel like we touched on so much, but I there's also so much that I'm not aware of and that I don't know. So is there something that was important that we didn't mention today? There is one thing and it is relationships. You're talking about the heart. It is not a metaphor. You know, we use the heart as the metaphor for love and attachment and connectivity. And I don't think it is just a metaphor.

1:19:10 I think there's so much wisdom in the folk tales and the metaphor that we use when we relate our emotions to the body. And so the question that I've been asking at Morosco is how do we build an ice bath that will help bring people closer together? You get in the sauna, and it can be you and four or five other people, and you're doing it together, and you feel a stronger sense of attachment. Part of the neurological and health benefits of the sauna is the fact that you're doing it with other people.

1:19:44 And no one has done this study to say, is sauna with friends more beneficial than sauna alone. But your intuition in mine is telling. Well, of course it is. You know, right now all cold plunges on the market are focused to doing it individually. You know they have some temporary. Like pop ups? But I've been thinking, how do we build the ice bath experience that you share with other people? Because some of the data that we've got shows that it is a bonding experience, it is a relationship building experience and that is probably the mechanism, one of the mechanisms by which you keep your heart and your other vital organs healthy.

1:20:29 That's amazing. And do you feel like, do you, do you feel that like it increases oxytocin as well when you're in the cold? I know it does. Yep. There's good data on that. It increases oxytocin, it increases vasopressin. So in addition to the dopamine and the noradrenaline and the adrenaline, you get these other hormonal benefits that cause you to feel closer or more attached to your partners. Wow, yeah, and I guess that also plays such an important role with the hormone optimization, like the fertility and the testosterone as well, right?

1:21:01 Because that drive and that feeling that you want to be close to your partner, for example, it kind of all goes together like hand in hand. It's not like as you mentioned, it's all a system. So you have to have all the pieces of the puzzle. You can't just have the testosterone, you know, just, you know, just floating around. You have the all the all those other beneficial things that are going on that are that are accommodate this feeling of love, right? You're when you get into. The cold plunge with your partner.

1:21:29 It is like a love potion. All of those hormones and neurotransmitters associated with every dimension of love, whether that's lust or. Romance or the feeling of familial attachment, they are all augmented by the experience you have with your partner in the ice bath, and I've experienced this for myself. This is the same woman who has migraine headaches. We're in such an enormous argument, but we'd agreed to do a photo shoot. You know, relationships show like that sometimes where I was full of. Resentment for her?

1:22:02 And she was full of resentment for me and you. We have a video of this and it's not very good because we'd procrastinated until the the light was crappy and the capture was not very. But we said, OK, you know, this is what we're here for. We got to do it. And we went in and we held hands and we looked at one another, and she broke a smile. I thought, OK, that's good. Then she started to giggle. And then she started to crack jokes, you know, with the camera crew. And I'm like, well, this is all right.

1:22:32 You know, my resentment melted away. Men need to exercise after the ice bath to get the testosterone boost, but women do not. Women get an immediate testosterone booth. So not only was her resentment melting away, but her testosterone was going up. And as you know, testosterone is the. Lust. Hormone. So after about 2 minutes, maybe 2 minutes, 15 seconds, she reaches in, she leans in, we're holding hands, we're making eye contact and we're breathing together. And I pull her a little closer and she kisses me on the lips.

1:23:04 We start making out in the ice bath. All of our arguments were forgotten. My daughter is the videographer and she's like, OK, cut. You know, that's we got it. We have everything we need. You 2 get A room. We had the best weekend. We fell back in love. And it wasn't because of talk therapy. It wasn't because of compromise or understanding. It was because we created the neurochemical conditions of attachment. Andreas, I wish we could have kept that feeling our whole lives. How many times have we done an ice bath together since?

1:23:39 Then zero and. Really going out anymore? I recommend Coldplay plunge with your partner anytime you're beginning to feel those relationship doubts. You want to reconnect, you want to give the relationship the boost that it needs in that moment. Getting in the ice bath together, hold hands, make the eye contact, breathe together, spend 2 minutes and when you come out re warm together. You. Will feel closer. That's fantastic. Yeah, wonderful breakdown and thank you for adding the relationships in there as well because that is a very under talked about discussion in terms of health in general because we tend to forget you know that our emotions and the way that we feel about each other massively influences our health.

1:24:24 I mean we can see that so many things in physics like biophysics as altering our biochemistry, right. So obviously brain waves and thought is frequency and that is all obviously going to impact our our biophysical, our quantum system really that is is just constantly scanning its environment trying to pick up this vital information. So last question would be for you to explain to the audience why your ice baths are the top on the market. And I also believe that they are as well. They are also the first ice bath really which I ever heard of, which you know is was self cleaning, grounding and all the materials.

1:25:06 Everything about it looks like super premium. And I think the first time which I ever heard about your ice bath actually was on Luke's Stories podcast. And it it wasn't it wasn't one of his recent episodes. It was a really, really long time ago. It was two people who were representing Morosco Forge. I don't remember their names, but anyway, it sounded so convincing and and since then I've been wanting 1. So now why don't you tell the audience about former? Student. Yep, really. Wow, that's amazing.

1:25:37 His name is Jason. Stalpert And that was his wife, Adrian. Adrian reversed. Her Hashimoto's thyroiditis with ice baths because she. Grew up in. Florida and then she lived in Phoenix. She had no brown fat. She became dysregulated in her thyroid and when she started getting into the Morosco, she recruited brown fat. The Hashimoto's gone and so yes, they make a very compelling case and we founded Morosco together, although they don't have a day-to-day role in the company anymore. I don't really talk about the technical features, but you've asked there are four, we make ice, we're electrically grounded.

1:26:13 We're warrantied for Epsom salt. You can put as much Epsom salt in there as you want and it's important. The number one, most important thing is that you feel comfortable with the people from whom you are buying. So I don't talk about all the technical features that much. And Oh yes, we're chlorine free. We use ozone exclusively. And it's not true to say that it's self cleaning. You have to vacuum the lint and the sediment out. Every once in a. While but you don't have to buy chemicals right? All those things are wonderful.

1:26:46 That's not the point. The point is if you want to know what ice bath to buy, go on Facebook marketplace. You will find a lot of used cold plunges. Some of them the owners are like hardly ever used it or a lot of them are like, well, all you have to do is fix the chiller and then re Plumb the thing and then you know, repair the filter housing and then it's all going to be good. Morosco is a no. Regret purchase you get a 30 day ecstatic guarantee if you. Aren't experiencing ecstasy, you know, because that's what the ice bath does.

1:27:18 That's fine. You can return it. No, we'll refund the product price. Not the shipping, but the product price. And we will find a home for that ice bath somewhere else. The customer service and the quality at Morosco is unparalleled. And we're competing in an industry in which people are buying ads like crazy. Everybody seems to have the next revolutionary, ultimate cold plunge technological breakthrough. If what you really want to do is save money, go to alibaba.com where all of our competitors are buying their ice baths and save yourself, you know, several €1000 and just buy it directly from the Chinese where everybody else gets it anyway.

1:28:00 We are made in America. That might not be an advantage for someone who's in the EU. We will ship. To the EU of. Course expensive. Every single one of them is handcrafted in Phoenix, AZ, and when we have had to do a service call in the European Union, we have technicians in the EU or we fly somebody over. Because amazing you. Pay prices. It's because you aren't sensitive to price, you are sensitive to quality. And so Miles Co isn't for everybody. I wish that we could make it cheaper, but I don't know how to do that and employ people who are Craftsman in the United States, paying them living wages with good materials that we're sourcing from local areas in Phoenix.

1:28:52 I don't know how. When I figure out how to make it cheaper, the price will come down. In the meantime, I I shudder to think about the people buying the inflatable tubs with all the like, plasticizers and brominated flame retardants. And when you take it out of the bag and it smells funny, that's because it's not good for you. And so to think that you're going to get into one of those plastic inflatable tubs for your health is sort of ironic. But if that's what you need to do to get started so you can kind of get some of the experience, so OK, fine.

1:29:25 Fantastic. And for everything that you just mentioned today in the show, I will be linking the link to Morosco for bathtubs as well. And for the audience, we have a special listener discount. So the discount code is mobility fitness. So if you add that the check out, you'll be able to get a massive discount on your order as well. So definitely check those out. How about the the links and everything to your green light? What's the website for that? Mygreenlamp.com So MYGREN lamp.com. You know, I don't know if it's the best donate name, but it sounds like migraine.

1:30:01 So my greenlamp.com. Oh, that's clever. You can buy direct from there. We ship all over the world. Awesome. And you want to hold up your two books again? Do you have them both there? I got the. Uncommon testosterone book. Which you can purchase on Amazon. There's an audio book, there's a Kindle version. Amazon has the hard copy. You can get the paperback from marazzoforge.com. The other one is Uncommon Colt, Which is bigger, more comprehensive and I didn't bring a copy to show you and you can only get it from roscoforge.com.

1:30:34 Awesome, fantastic. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Professor Thomas, it was an absolutely pleasure to talk with you today. I learned so, so much. And then I feel that the audience is going to absolutely devour this episode because my audience is very quantum biology and circadian biology based. Everyone is really interested into this kind of frequency and you know, all the stuff that actually matters in mitochondrial health. So it was an absolute pleasure to talk with you. I would love to do it again in the future.

1:31:02 If you have any new revelations or if you come up with any new devices or any new books, I'd. Be happy to. Thank you, Andreas. You guys enjoy the topics and guests I bring on the show. I would really appreciate it if you left me a five star review on Spotify and also subscribe to Fitness Wisdom podcast on YouTube as well as this helps to spread the knowledge and wisdom with the world. Until next time, this is the Fitness Wisdom Podcast.