Over the years we have learned people are always looking for ways to slow the progression of aging! In this two-part series, you will begin to uncover the tricks of the trade when it comes to looking and feeling younger. Dr. Bryan Joseph and Dr. Jason Hamed will begin this series by introducing the concept of biohacking tools and the first 5 you can start putting in your toolbox!
Table of Contents
- Introduction to Biohacking Tools
- What is Biohacking?
- Biohacking Tool #1: Drink Your Vegetables
- Biohacking Tool #2: Straight Movement
- Biohacking Tool #3: Binaural Beats
- Biohacking Tool #4: Limit Exposure To Toxins
- Biohacking Tool #5: Get More Sunlight
- Closing Thoughts: Stay Tuned For Part 2!
Introduction to Biohacking Tools
Dr. Bryan: All right. Welcome back everybody. Here we are again at The Wellness Connection Show. As usual, it’s Dr. Bryan Joseph with my cohost, Dr. Jason Hamed.
Dr. Bryan: Thank you all. Let’s start off by just taking a minute of gratitude and thanking everybody for all the great feedback and comments that we continue to receive. It’s been humbling and it’s also been exciting. You’re helping to guide where we are taking this podcast in terms of the messaging that maybe will help more people. So thank you for that.
It’s no longer just anti-aging
Dr. Bryan: On that note, today’s going to be a fun topic because over the years of being involved with healthcare and trying to help people with their health, there are people out there that want to live to be 120 and there’s people that really don’t want to live to be 20. So over the years, the topic of anti-aging has been extremely relevant and prevalent and a lot of people bringing up ways that they can slow down that process of the natural aging. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that terminology’s changed a little bit, right?
Dr. Bryan: It’s no longer just anti-aging, it’s also now a term that you might or might not have heard of called biohacking tools. It’s basically walked onto the playing field right now, and it’s become a popular term that you might hear in the health spectrums of ways that you can biohack your health.
Dr. Bryan: Today, we’re going to talk about some of the top maybe 10 ways or techniques that you can be aware of to biohack your health or to anti-age yourself and slow down the train that we’re all on. This will be fun to share these concepts with you.
What is Biohacking?
Dr. Jason: I think though even before we break these down, I think it’s important that we discuss really, what is biohacking tools?
Dr. Jason: That’s a cool term where people are hearing it. It’s kind of how paleo is now, where before people were like, “What is this paleo thing?” Now everyone kind of goes, “Paleo, that means you eat meat and you eat very limited carbs. Okay. That makes sense.”
Dr. Jason: Biohacking, as you and I have had discussions offline about this, biohacking is basically how can you now literally take external and internal variables and limit them for getting your body to actually function the way it was supposed to be, meaning this: what can you do with the outside level of your health or outside world and your internal health to optimize how well your body is working and how long it can live?
Dr. Bryan: I would say a general statement would be, anybody that really wants to take their health very serious to the point where they want to make sure their body functions for as many years as possible.
Dr. Jason: Again, like you and I have talked about, again, is this comes down to there’s just certain requirements that the human body, the cellular structure of the human body, the brain, the hormones, everything, there’s certain requirements that we just need. Unfortunately nowadays, because of our stress levels, because of how we choose to live and our culture is moving, we’re not getting them. So if we’re not getting them naturally, we have to find “hacks” or ways or tricks to actually get them into our body.
Biohacking is constantly evolving
Dr. Bryan: All right. So here we go. For all the people that want to perform at a great level or to optimize their health experience, we’re going to categorically go around the horn to try to give you some input on ways that you can address keeping and optimizing your health in this new cultural concept called biohacking.
Dr. Jason: Yeah. Here’s the deal, is it’s evolving. I mean it’s constantly evolving. As science continues to learn new things, there’s new tricks. There’s new hacks. I mean we are going to talk about anywhere from eight to 10, but literally there’s probably hundreds out there. I’m not going to be able to speak onto, nor would I speak to our listeners about anything I haven’t personally done myself. So there’s things that I’m still playing with that I’ll continue to bring to all of you as listeners when, honestly, I have a little more experience with them. What we’ll share right now, Dr. Bry, is I’ll share the ones that you and I personally have done and we can speak to.
Dr. Bryan: Before we hit those, what got you into following and studying and researching biohacking tools? Why did you aggressively want to start studying this more frequently?
Dr. Jason: There’s two paths to that. There’s two answers there. The first is my research background in college. I have always been drawn to the research and the science behind how the human body performs, always. I was blessed to have opportunities to be in a top-notch research center in the Northeast. I had amazing instructors, amazing mentors. We had amazing technology. At the time, top of the notch technology that was not being seen at schools up and down the East Coast. So I was really, really spoiled.
Think about Ivan Drago
Dr. Bryan: You know what I think of every time I hear something like that? The movie, Rocky. Ivan Drago on Rocky IV when he’s got all those electrodes on his chest when he’s pumping on the treadmill and he looks like science has taken over. But this guy’s body is he’s ripped and super healthy. That sounds like the type of lab that you’re describing that you spent time in.
Dr. Jason: It totally was. Now that you say that, it’s actually because again, when I watched those scenes in that movie that inspired me as a kid then. So maybe actually it did have something to do with that. But yeah. Much of the stuff that I was doing in my late teens and early 20s literally was that type of high-tech laboratory, scientific study of what the body could do under stress, and that stress being at the time, exercise stress. So that’s what got me in it.
“You gotta do different things”
Dr. Jason: And then openly, I lost my father at a really early age too. When I saw that I was just obsessed with, hey, what could I have done or what could Dad have done differently to allow him and his body to work at a higher level?
Dr. Jason: So when I saw my dad pass away at 53 years old, that just set a fire in me that said, “All right, listen. I want to take this thirst to know from the science. But I want to say, how can I apply it to my life?” Very selfishly, I wanted to apply it to me first so I could be around for my kids and my grandkids. And then as I started to do this I recognized that, you know what? I think this could bless other people and started to teach our patients a lot of the stuff too.
“If you want different results than the people in front of you, you gotta do different things.”
Dr. Bryan: That’s so valuable. It’s like that old analogy that says, “If you want different results than the people in front of you, you gotta do different things.” Lessons learned. If we want to not end up in the exact same position or outcome that maybe our grandparents did or our parents, then we can’t walk in their footsteps in every aspect. We’re going to have to choose some different choices. So that was smart of you. Well done.
Dr. Jason: Thanks.
Dr. Bryan: All right. You want to kick off the list? Where do we start? What’s number one?
A quick reminder on what we’re hacking into
Dr. Jason: Yeah. Real quick before we go through them. Just remember, the foundation behind what our body needs is what we’re hacking into. Here’s what I mean by that, is we need whole food diets. We need a toxin-free life. We need more water in our body, drinking healthy water, direct sunlight, sweating every day, moving our body or standing more than we’re sitting, getting quality sleep. How do we manage our stress? And openly, how do we create good, lasting, emotional bonds with people? When we don’t have those essentials, now we have to go and create them.
Dr. Bryan: Those would some of the principles that have to exist as a foundation no matter what.
Biohacking Tool #1: Drink Your Vegetables
Dr. Jason: 100%. The first biohacking tools that I’ll discuss and the one that I’ve use now and helped teach others on is literally drinking my vegetables.
Dr. Bryan: Okay. Let’s talk about that. What’s that mean because that sounds gross?
Dr. Jason: It doesn’t have to be. It does sound gross, I guess. It can put people off on that. But we’ve gotta recognize we must get veggies. We have to. I think that people get that. Now, people may not always do that. But I would argue that most people walking on the street, if you and I polled 100 people, that at least 80 to 90% would say, “Hey, you know what? Yeah. I know I need to get more vegetables, but I’m just not.”
Dr. Jason: One of the things is instead of making people wrong or even making myself stressed about how am I going to get a bunch of veggies in, I just found a way to get a massive amount of vegetables in as quickly and easily as possible. I drink them in the way of I make a smoothie.
Dr. Jason: I jam it packed with vegetables and I blend up the smoothie in a Vitamixer and I just go. I’ve also tried juicing in the past, with juicing a lot of different types of vegetables or fruit together and then having that concentrated amount of vegetables and fruit juice, which is easy to drink and I can store it through the course of my day in the fridge.
Benefits of vegetables to your body
Dr. Bryan: I remember years ago, we got exposure to somebody that was talking about you say everybody may know that veggies are good for them, which we hear this. But what does it really do? Just to be clear is so many foods and so many different forms of stress in our lives actually create an acidic environment, which basically puts acid in your body and starts to eat away tissue and slows down … actually it doesn’t slow down, it speeds up how fast your body’s going to break down and age.
Dr. Bryan: So when you’re putting in vegetables, which are considered alkaline, then you’re actually doing the opposite of that. You’re slowing down how fast your body is actually going to be breaking down or beating itself up. I love that one.
Dr. Jason: Yeah. It’s one that has stood the test of time. It just is something that once committed to and if you can implement this into your life, it becomes easier and easier and easier, and then all of a sudden, you get to the point where it’s just such a good positive habit that it’s just part of your day. Again, if you make a good-sized amount of the smoothie, then you can sip on it through the course of your day. You’re getting a salad every time you’re drinking your smoothie. You’re literally getting that in.
Use popsicle molds for kids
Dr. Bryan: Or one thing that you can consider, I remember years ago when we used to do this with our kids. But even if you don’t like the idea of drinking a smoothie and it’s too thick for you with veggies in it or juice or that matter, freeze it. Freeze it and turn it into ice cream. A smoothie can be turned into ice cream. So just another biohack for you.
Dr. Jason: Yeah. That’s right. I just remembered that because when the kids were little, we would actually pour it into the ice cube … no, not that. We’d get little frozen-
Dr. Bryan: Popsicles.
Dr. Jason: Yeah, yeah. We’d get the Popsicle molds and we would put a stick in there, and we would pour the smoothie into it. The kids would have it and think it was a treat. That’s right. I forgot about that. That’s another good hack.
Keep drinking veggies simple
Dr. Jason: No. Just really keep it simple. Again, drink your vegetables. Again, find combinations of vegetables and fruit that would actually taste good to you. Again, kale and spinach is my foundation because of the research behind the power of those two. Broccoli’s another one, but honestly, I’ve tried broccoli in my smoothies and it just doesn’t do it for me. Kale and spinach are the foundation, and then I’ll add in other fruits just to make it more palpable so I can drink it through the course of the day and taste good.
Dr. Bryan: Two other veggies that I’ve personally found myself throwing into a smoothie that don’t taste horrible, broccoli might not be a very good option. But cucumber and celery are two easy ones to put in there.
Dr. Jason: Carrot too.
Dr. Bryan: Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Jason: Carrot’s a good one. So as you said, cucumber, celery, carrot, you add that in with the spinach and the kale, that’s salad.
Dr. Bryan: Right. All right. Number one is setting the foundation with drinking your vegetables.
Dr. Jason: Vegetables.
Dr. Bryan: Number two. What do you got?
Biohacking Tool #2: Straight Movement
Dr. Jason: Number two is straight movement. I mean you just gotta move. That’s the key. I’m definitely known for preaching on this, speaking on this, inspiring people to do this. But you gotta move. That’s just a non-negotiable. There’s so much research behind it, from mood states to overall health, to longevity, to immune system. You’ve got to make sure that you literally are moving your body. But not just any type of movement, if somebody really wanted to “biohack” their body for better longevity and better energy, there’s three distinct types of movements that we have to do.
Dr. Jason: The first is what I call steady state cardio, steady state cardio. As that name implies … Why are you laughing?
Dr. Bryan: Because you said it as if it was steady state cardio.
Dr. Jason: Well, it is. Steady state cardio. What I mean by that is you want to engage in movement that gets your heart rate elevated, but is not to the point where you’re out of breath, that your heart’s racing so fast that you’re sweating and you’re exhausted. The key with this is literally just to get the blood pumping to stimulate a part of our body that runs, basically taking oxygen and burning fat and turning it into energy. Now if we go back hundreds of years ago, if you and I were men in our homes, we’d have to go out and we’d go hunt. We would be walking probably for hours just to go find the prey we were killing.
Dr. Jason: Again, we’re going back primally to our body needs some steady state activity.
Dr. Bryan: What’s a version of that right now?
Dr. Jason: Well, go for a jog.
Dr. Bryan: Okay.
Measure your heart rate
Dr. Jason: All right. Go for a jog or a brisk walk. But here’s the key. It’s very imperative that we actually are able to track our heart rate with this, otherwise what will end up happening is people say, “I’m going to go exercise,” and then they go too hard too fast and they actually blow out their nervous system and they overdo it. This is best served first thing in the morning. What we end up doing is if you can get a device, now we have wearables all over the place that you can measure your heart rate.
Dr. Jason: You actually want to be at 180 minus your age. So if you’re 40 years old, you’re 180 minus 40 is 140.
Dr. Bryan: You’re talking about our heart rate?
Dr. Jason: Heart rate, yeah. You want to stay in that heart rate range for anywhere between 15 and 20 minutes. You’ll feel like you’re moving. You will feel energized. Again, this is best served first thing in the morning as far as overall energy and activity.
Circuit training & mobility work
Dr. Jason: Next type of movement, gotta get one day where you are putting some intensity out there, like some circuit training where heart rate is up. Your body is being forced to move. You’re moving some weights or you’re doing something that’s hard for you, CrossFit or a high-level circuit training would be a wonderful use of this.
Dr. Jason: The last type of movement is we want one or two days of mobility work, stretching, yoga, things of that nature. We gotta move, but the movement comes down to three things over a course of a week. Steady state cardio, 180 minus 40, that’s the heart rate you want to stay in. You want to get one or two days of intense heart rate activity where you’re strengthening your muscles, and then one day of some mobility work.
Dr. Bryan: All right. That’s good. Thank you for sharing that. For all the people out there that don’t have any movement in their life right now or are living fairly sedentary, you can go back and listen to episode 10. It was Stay Fit While You Sit. But we actually talked about basically taking yourself from a sedentary lifestyle to beginning some form of movement. So you might find that helpful.
Dr. Bryan: So let’s go on to number three.
Biohacking Tool #3: Binaural Beats
Dr. Jason: Number three is meditation, but not just any type of meditation but understanding something called binaural beats. Binaural beats is all based on brainwave frequency. There was some research done many years ago in regards to studying … again, this goes back to primitive, going back in time literally. What were we doing hundreds of years ago? There was a PhD that did some research and found that literally the beating of certain drums during ancient ceremonies had a certain frequency to it. Well, when they extrapolated this, the neuroscientists looked at it and said, “Wow.”
Dr. Jason: Actually the beating and the repetition of these beats fall within a certain frequency, sound frequency that is, like wavelengths. They found that there is about four to up to eight hertz per second or … I think it’s per second. So what it ends up doing is it’s creating a trance. It’s literally tricking your brain to stop all the “noise” outside the world. It stimulates a part of the brain that literally will get you to focus better.
Dr. Bryan: You know what it makes me think of is babies that get exposure to the white noise, the sound machines. Even I’ve heard a lot of moms say, “Every time I put on the washer or the dryer, I find my child falling asleep.” I would assume that that’s got an element of that same-
Slow down your brainwaves
Dr. Jason: It’s 100%, man. It’s this repetitious cycle. Now, the cycle is important, but what we found is this. In this type of binaural beats type of meditation, what you’ll do is when you put your headphones on, you’ll get say, for instance, 200 hertz on the left ear and 205 on the right ear. It’s done intentionally with the programming of the music. So go ahead.
Dr. Bryan: The purpose of doing this would be to slow down your brainwaves?
Dr. Jason: Yes. In doing that, the name binaural actually means two ears. So when we listen to binaural type of meditation music, which you can find. If you go on iTunes right now and were to search binaural beats, you’ll have playlists, some that will get you ready for sleep. Some will get you ready for studying. Some will get you ready for meditation. But the whole goal is to get your brain activating on a wavelength called theta. Theta is where all of our creativity comes from. Theta’s when we get to be able to learn better. We can actually turn out the noise and just focus.
Dr. Bryan: Biohacking tools tip number three was making sure that we’re going into a state of meditation and slowing down our mind.
Dr. Jason: Slowing down your mind through hack of binaural beats meditation.
Dr. Bryan: Awesome.
Dr. Jason: That’s the actual hack.
Dr. Bryan: Okay.
Biohacking Tool #4: Limit Exposure To Toxins
Dr. Jason: Biohack number four is limit exposure to toxins. I mean you kind of think, “Yeah, duh, Dr. J.” But that’s important these days because we have toxins everywhere, everywhere. I say this to people, but yet you and I, we never want to overwhelm people with this, but you have to be aware. Would you agree?
Dr. Bryan: I remember driving back on the highway and seeing one of those smoke factories coming out. My kids in the back referencing how it looks like Willy Wonka, the chocolate factory. But truth be told, every time you see that, every time I see that, what I start to think is, “Oh my gosh. Where is all that smoke and chemistry going?” Ultimately, that’s a form of toxicity that’s ending up in all of our lungs. We’re seeing it in the smoke there, but when you’re referencing toxicity, our waters are full of different things. We’re also, we’re finding in our environments … We’re finding toxicity in our food. We’re finding toxicity in our skincare.
Dr. Jason: All of it.
Dr. Bryan: Right? There’s so many places which impurities are finding their way to penetrate our bodies. That ultimately is going to break down and speed up how our bodies age.
Dr. Jason: 100%. It’s up to us to start to become more aware of where they are. People like yourself and myself will do everything we can to communicate and educate people, but at the end of the day, you still have to continue to become aware of what you’re putting on, around, or in your body.
Dr. Bryan: Right.
How to limit your toxins?
Dr. Jason: That’s it. That’s the big thing. How do you limit your toxins? Well, first you gotta look at you just mentioned something about skin. What are you putting on your skin? We can talk about this in some specific hacks. But first and foremost, the deodorants you use, are they laced with chemicals? Do they have aluminum in there? Because guess what? If you’re putting on your underarm deodorant or under pit deodorant you’ve got tons of lymph nodes and tons of blood supply right underneath that area. Where do you think that aluminum’s going? It’s not, like you said, disappearing in the fog. It’s going somewhere.
Dr. Bryan: This is why we’ve seen an increase in things like heavy metal toxicity in our society is because a lot of these toxicities are creeping into our skin through absorption of things that we’re putting on our body, like lotions or deodorants or even toothpaste.
Dr. Jason: Yeah. I forgot about that, toothpaste as well.
Be aware with what you put into yourself
Dr. Bryan: You and I were talking about this before, but ultimately, when you’re saying reduce toxins. It’s like you can’t live in a bubble. But what you can do is become more aware of when you’re going to choose which things you’re going to put on or, as you said, in your body. Any opportunity where there’s a chance to buy something that’s all natural or organic, those would be considered forms of hacks. Would you agree?
Dr. Jason: Yeah. I mean you can’t live in a bubble, no. But you can put a filter on your shower head. You can buy toothpaste that’s not laden with coloring and sugaring. You can choose to buy foods that are not genetically modified. This isn’t controversial stuff. We know that these companies are putting basically Roundup in our foods. You can choose to buy fragrances or lotions that are natural, that are not filled with junk. These are choices.
Dr. Bryan: Anything else on that one?
Dr. Jason: No. No. Just you’ve gotta become aware and limit your toxins and your toxic consumption or what you’re putting in and around your body.
Dr. Bryan: Okay. Let’s go onto the next one.
Biohacking Tool #5: Get More Sunlight
Dr. Jason: Biohack number five is get more light. Get more light. Man, I tell you. When you look at how our body was designed to move and some of the requirements, we were supposed to be outside. You agree, right? You love the outdoors.
Dr. Bryan: I would love to live in an environment with no walls.
Dr. Jason: Right. That’s what your cells want too, I promise, right?
Dr. Bryan: I’m drawn to that. I’m sure many people are.
Dr. Jason: I think they are. I really think they are. I think that’s an innate calling because our body needs light on so many levels. I mean we know thermal light therapy is there to decrease pain and it can decrease inflammation. It can increase collagen production, increase blood flow, decrease acne or skin conditions. It can improve your immune system and it can improve the production of something called ATP, which is your cellular energy. It’s how you have energy.
Are all lights equal?
Dr. Bryan: Are all lights created equal? Or is there different forms of light when you say get more light?
Dr. Jason: No. We’ll get that in a second. We’ll get that in a second. But here’s the challenge. Before we get to that type of detail, one of the things we gotta keep in mind though is that we don’t all live outside. We’re not all fishing guides in Colorado or ski guides in Colorado in the winter. We’re working indoors and some of us are in parts of the country where we don’t get a ton of time where we’re outside. I grew up in the Northeast. We had a lot of winter, a lot of winter. But yet, you still have the requirements for light.
Get outside as much as possible
Dr. Jason: So the first thing we can do is this. We’ve got to make sure that we get outside as much as we possibly can. Getting outside for 15, 20 minutes. Get real light. You want to have the light hit your retina, hit your eyes, and hit your skin. That’s the rule of thumb. But again, if you’re in colder environments and it’s harder for you to get 15, 20 minutes of exposure outside, then you gotta start looking at hacks. One of the hacks you can do and one that I’ve used for a number of years is infrared sauna. Infrared saunas now are extremely, extremely doable to actually put into your home. They’re modular.
Dr. Jason: You know me? I don’t have much of a … I’m not a handyman. You can put them together very easy and you can just plug them into a normal outlet. Infrared sauna is huge. If you’re living in an apartment or you’re a city dweller and you don’t have the space to actually have a full infrared sauna, you have infrared lamps that you now can do. You can get an infrared lamp as well. There is therapeutic light devices as well where you can literally plug in a lamp to an outlet and then turn on the light. Like you alluded to, it’ll go through a series of different color or different wavelength of light that will stimulate different things in your body, whether it be blood flow, mitochondrial activity, immune system, cognitive function.
Use a Vielight
Dr. Jason: But you’ve got to get something, whether it be infrared saunas, infrared lamps, or therapeutic light activities. There’s one thing that you and I have seen, I have not yet tried it, but it’s something that I probably will try this year now that I’ve gotten more exposure to it. It’s something called a Vielight, a Vielight. You actually told me about this. A Vielight is actually an intranasal light where you literally through a little … There’s a little light bulb that you put in your nose. The reason you put it into your nose is your nose has a high density of capillaries.
Dr. Jason: So when you stimulate the capillaries with the light, it actually will start to have some of that profound health benefit effects that we would see if we went outside, increased collagen production, increased ADP, increased energy, decreased inflammation. All by stimulating the light within the capillaries in the nose. Again, I haven’t tried that. Some of you are like, “This guy’s nuts.” I get it. But again, if you’re not getting outside, if you’re not getting any movement, if you don’t have a sauna or you don’t have an infrared lamp in your home, you’ve gotta do something to get your body the necessity that it needs with natural wavelengths of light.
Dr. Bryan: That was number five, right?
Dr. Jason: Yeah. That was number five.
Dr. Bryan: Can you list the top five or the first five, just the headline of those one more time?
Closing Thoughts: Stay Tuned For Part 2!
Dr. Jason: Yeah. The first was drink your vegetables. The second was exercise, specifically steady state cardio exercise. Biohacking tools number three is meditation and using binaural beats as the actual hack. Biohacking tools number four is limit your toxins. Limit the toxins you put in, on, or around your body. Biohacking tools number five was get more light.
Dr. Bryan: Awesome. Thank you so much. We have five more coming your way. Since this is a little longer segment, you’re going to have to stay tuned for part two, okay? We’re going to have five more coming at you. We can actually make a longer list than that because there’s so many wonderful things you can do to hack and move your health in a better direction and slow down this aging process.
Dr. Bryan: Hopefully, you’ve liked what you’ve heard so far, stay tuned for part two. This is episode 15. They’ll be a part one and a part two. We’ll see you soon.
Dr. Bryan: Visit us at thewellnessconnection.com/podcast to subscribe to our show and get connected.