Last updated: April 9, 2026
March 13, 2025Timestamps:
00:00:05 – Introduction
00:01:24 – The Benefits of Sunlight
00:34:50 – Bingeing Reflections & Caloric Restriction
01:06:33 – The Unaging Face
Transcript:
Mike: Hey everyone, today’s guest is channel regular and channel favorite, Crissman Loomis. If you don’t know, and just keeping the intro short, Criss is the owner and operator of the website unaging.com, and I’ll link to it in the video’s description. So with that, we’ve got a few topics to cover. So, what do we have first, Criss?
Crissman: Right, great. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on, Mike. So for topics today…
First thing, heavily inspired by the videos that you’ve shared over the years, we’ll be talking about the benefits of sunlight and what it can do for you. Then after that, I wanted to hear more from you yourself about your recent binge and any reflections, lessons, or advice that you might have from that. How fun is it to eat 6,000 calories in a day after years of fasting or calorie restriction?
And then I’ll talk about the unaging face and how to maintain your face, including some of the lessons from the sunlight. So those are our topics for today. Sound good?
Great. So I’ll jump right into sunlight benefits. And as I mentioned, this is something that was inspired basically by a video that you shared two years ago.
Mike: Yeah, cool. Let’s jump in.
Crissman: Great. So I’ll jump right into sunlight benefits. And as I mentioned, this is something that was inspired basically by a video that you shared two years ago.
Not sure if you remember this one, but the question was, is it a particular time of day that is best to do moderate or vigorous physical activity? And the study is based off of the Biobank study, and the answer was very clear, is that the best time to do MVPA is the middle of the day, between 11 o’clock and 5 o’clock. And doing it during that time gives you a reduction in all-cause mortality of about 10%.
And this confused me greatly. So I spent about two years going, okay, but we’ve been telling people that exercise is important, exercise is most important thing, they need to make sure that they get the exercise. But I had really nothing to answer why it would make a difference to be doing it around noontime as opposed to early in morning and early at night. And the study goes into it says, well, maybe it’s because you have better response in the morning or so.
Okay, but that doesn’t explain why people who would do it, before 11 don’t get a good result from it. That said, well, maybe it’s that early birds are doing it in the evening, so it’s not matching with their natural circadian rhythm or vice versa. But again, that doesn’t explain why both early birds and evening larks both do better in the middle of the day. So this, when I find out a study like this, it bothers me until I can explain it.
And then eventually I came across another study.
Well, actually this is some more detail in this study. It also showed that the benefit out of doing exercise in the middle of the day, the vigorous and moderate activity, was primarily focused on all-cause mortality, but it really focused on CVD mortality. And you can see there’s quite a significant benefit there, especially for people over 65.
And it also reduces other things, but cancer mortality is largely unaffected, which I thought was sort of an interesting dynamic that basically you were getting some benefit in cruising your cardiovascular system, but not reducing cancer. And we’ll come back to that in a minute.
But then later I found another study that was called the MIST study for melanoma in southern Sweden cohort. And this is a study that was done by Dr. Lindqvist.
Probably pronouncing that wrong, but I hope he’ll forgive me. He’s been working for a long time to show that the people who live in Sweden who have been advised by the government that they should be avoiding sunlight are doing the wrong thing. He believes that sunlight is very helpful for you and healthy in living a long life. So he’s been doing a number of research studies that show that basically the people in Sweden who get the most sunlight or sun-like exposure, this includes going to tanning salons.
It includes going on vacation to go to the beach and laying out on the beach. And it also includes a Swedish custom of going up into the mountains during winter and then sunbathing in the reflective mountains where the altitude is higher so the atmosphere is thinner and surrounded by snow so you have a natural reflection of light onto you. And this is one of the ways that people who live in Sweden are able to get more sunlight during their year.
And he found that the people who get the most exposure to sunlight have a 38 % reduction in all-cause mortality compared to people who don’t try to get that extra exposure to sunlight. It’s a massive swing. This would put it on well into an S-tier kind of intervention of being one the most powerful things. For comparison, that’s as powerful as, say, lifting weights or not lifting weights or doing a Roebeck Hecatechis or not. So the idea that sunlight could have this kind of a benefit.
For me, again, this is sort of a thing that I put on hold and sort of think about for while because I really couldn’t explain it. But then I went on and looked at some other studies, and I noticed the conclusion to that one, the Swedish study basically has the same pattern.
It reduces cardiovascular disease, but it doesn’t affect cancer deaths. But it also affects non-cancer, non-cardiovascular disease, so respiratory illness or other things.
And so once I started to put that together, I’m like, okay, so the people who were doing the exercise in the middle of day had the same benefits as Swedish people who got more sunlight, so it seemed to make a good fit.
So from there, I started to look at, okay, well, but I thought that sun causes skin cancer. And this is quite interesting, because this is a study that was done actually in Australia, and the Swedish study also replicated the same study.
But both of them took a look at people who get the most sunlight. In the Swedish case, it’s people who go sunbathing and also who would go up to the mountains to sunbathe and go on sun vacations to get more sun during the winter. And the Australian ones are just looking at Australian people who actually had skin damage from the sun. So they had been out so much that they could see the signature of how much sun they had gotten. And then they looked to see how many of them eventually ended up dying of skin cancer.
And the results were quite surprising because they found that one thing that people, and this is from a different study, but actually from a WHO study, a World Health Organization, people who have exposure to the sun from working.
They are in the sun all day, as you expect, they have more non-melanoma skin cancer, which is NMSC, which is the kind of skin cancer you most often get from sunlight. And so they would have about 60 % more of this.
But from both the Australian study and the Swedish study, they found that the people who had the most sun exposure still had about one-fourth of the death from skin cancer. So putting those two together, it’s about if you have a lot of sun exposure, you have about one-eighth the chance of dying even if you have skin cancer from sun. So it’s quite a surprising finding that actually in some way the sun is protecting against the skin cancer that you can get from the sun. I know that skin cancer is not that uncommon. My father’s already had it two or three times. We’re not quite sure. Everybody’s still alive and well, so it’s not often that fatal. It’s one of the lower risk cancers, and it’s even lower risk apparently if you’re getting lots of exposure to sunlight.
So putting these things together was interesting, but one of the other things that I think that is useful to note is also is that for the vitamin D and for the UVB, basically, this is the transmission spectrum for glass when it’s called soda lime glass, which is the basic kind of glass that all of us, unless we have specialized glass have in our house, is completely blocked by any glass. So if you’re inside, you cannot get a sunburn, unless you really, try, because it’s the UVB that causes the sunburn. And so it’s entirely protected from this. And also UVB is the most high energy transmission of spectrum in the in the sunlight spectrum. So it can be blocked by things, by, for instance, glass, so none of it comes inside.
So putting these together now, we can take a look at the very first part of the spectrum as we go across, and we can see what the traits are of UVB.
So the wavelength is the shortest wavelength, around 290 to 330, 320 nanometers, and the bad effects of UVB is that it causes sunburn.
And the way that you mitigate this is you, first of all, avoid the high summer sun. So UVB, because it has such a strong energy profile, it can be quickly blocked with heavy atmosphere or other things. As I mentioned about the Swedes going up into the higher altitudes, because the atmosphere will block UVB. So it’s only in the middle of the day in the summer seasons usually when you can get enough UVB to give yourself a sunburn.
And the other part of it is just using sunblock. All the sunblock that you get will be UVB-protectant. But the good effects of UVB is that if you do get some of it, and you want to get some, is that you can get vitamin D. And this has become sort of a mistake then that was made because vitamin D was the first vitamin they found, the first positive effect they found from sunlight. And so for many researchers, it became sunlight equals vitamin D. Kind of the same way they discovered that plants and other plant foods have fiber in them. So for many years it’s become sort of an abbreviation just to say, well, what’s good about this plant food? Why are legumes good for you? Why are vegetables good for you? Why is fruit good for you? Because, well, it has fiber. But in that case as well, it’s a simplification. If you just give people the benefit of supplementing fiber, they don’t get the benefits of those foods. In the same way, if you give someone a vitamin D supplement, they don’t get the benefit of actually having gotten the full spectrum of sunlight.
And so for the last row here, UVB can be blocked by pretty much any glass whatsoever will block UVB and also of course clothing and other things will block it. So when you’re trying to get vitamin D, don’t go out when the sun is too strong, but when there’s some sun and then have some exposed skin so that you can absorb and get the vitamin D.
So then we move on to this and I find this paper to be kind of amusing because this was written in 2023.
So just about a year ago and says, sunlight, time for a rethink. And I find this amusing because he basically went from UVB and he said, okay, well UVB is great but it makes vitamin D but we supplement vitamin D, it doesn’t fix people but we do find benefits from being out in the sun. And so he said, alright, let’s include UVA, which is between UVB and visible light and UVA is a little bit less energy, it’s a little bit more prevalent throughout the day. And he said, okay, there must be benefits from this.
And so the first thing that they found is that when you look at UVA, it has a very strong effect on upregulating nitric oxide, NO. And nitric oxide is basically a chemical that makes your veins much more flexible. Getting exposure to UVA can reduce your blood pressure by about five points or so on the systolic.
It has very good benefits as far as reducing the cardiovascular disease that we saw that both the daytime exercisers and also the Swedes who get more sunlight had.
It’s quite interesting because actually the effect of it is something they call the dark reaction. That’s basically the scientist’s way of saying, don’t know how this happens. There’s an immediate effect on the first hour after getting UVA exposure where you’re nitric oxide within your veins will grow by about 14 % over control. And then the next day it goes down. But then as you can see from this chart, on the third day, the fourth day, and the fifth day, again, your nitric oxide levels in your veins go up. So it’s continuing to give you benefit up to five days after you get exposure to the sun. So they don’t really know how this works, which is why they call it the dark reaction. But it’s quite significant and it makes a very big difference in the overall cardiovascular disease since blood pressure is one of the prime drivers of cardiovascular issues.
So now we take one step up the spectrum and now we’ve gone from UVB to UVA and we have a little bit longer wavelength, but the primary issue with UVA is that it causes the aging of the face.
So I’ll be talking about this a little bit later and how to deal with this. But the primary thing is, is that you should use sunblock. Because UVA has less energy, it’s more able to penetrate through the atmosphere, and it goes through glass that’s in most houses. It’s around in a much higher ratio all year round, and also in the morning and the evening. So it’s much more important to wear sunscreen all days that the sun, all hours that the sun is out, as composed to wearing it just to prevent sunburn.
But the benefit that I talked about is the reduced blood pressure and improved reduced cardiovascular issues. And the other thing you might know if you’ve looked into the jet lag, which I’ve written about on my blog, is that it’s the UVA that is responsible for the circadian rhythm. And so when you’re trying to adjust your sleeping patterns or other things, or just help yourself get enough sleep at night, one of the most important things is to make sure that you’re getting some UVA radiation, sunlight, uh… in your eyes to help reset your circadian rhythms so can sleep well at night. But UVA will go through most glass, unless it’s specially treated glass, but it’s also blocked like clothes. So now I have at least two helpful components, or components that are important out of the light spectrum.
And now we get to the next presentation that helped put another block into my understanding of the effects of sunlight.
You had Dr. Seheult come in. Seheult, I’m probably pronouncing his name wrong too.
Mike: Seheult. Seheult. Yeah.
Crissman: What? Seheult. Seheult, thank you. I had, you had Dr. Seheult come on and he talked very convincingly about the benefits of infrared and red light. And I found this to be fascinating because now we’re going all the way to the other side of the visible spectrum to the red lights. And the first thing that Dr. Seheult talked about was ATP in the mitochondria.
So this is the mitochondria which are the cellular part, the parts of your cells that create the energy basically throughout your body and that energy is created in a form of a molecule called ATP. But what they found is that as time goes on the mitochondria can become blocked by both copper and also nitric oxide again can bind up some of the molecules that should be transferring electrons to make ATP for your energy.
But when those molecules inside your mitochondria are hit by red or infrared light, it can knock off the nitric oxide or the copper and then greatly improve the efficiency of your mitochondria, creating energy, which gives benefits throughout the body. So this is showing that basically the light that you’re getting can increase the amount of ATP, almost doubling the amount of energy that your mitochondria is able to produce, which is a massive benefit.
The other thing Dr. Seheult talked about was that it was very beneficial, especially for COVID and other inflammation. So one of the things that happens when the red light hits the body is that it actually causes a very short-term increase in the reactive oxygen species. This is one of the things that’s talked about as one of the oxidants, not antioxidants, but oxidants that can cause damage to the blood cells and DNA damage.
But if you’re getting the near infrared light, that’s the NIR, or red light, that then will greatly reduce the amount of inflammation. In this test, what they did is they used a liposaccharin, a liposaccharide, basically cause… Lipopoly. A lipoly? Lipopolysaccharide. Lipopolysaccharide. Thank you, Dr. Lustgarten. They used a lipopolysaccharide to cause inflammation.
Mike: Lipopolysaccharide. Yes.
Crissman: But then they found that if they applied the lipopolysaccharide along with infrared light, that it was basically able to reduce that inflammation up to three days later compared to the inflammation the person would have if they hadn’t gotten the infrared light. So these are two major mechanisms that are very useful throughout the body, reducing inflammation and also increasing the efficiency of our mitochondria.
So then we come at last to the other side of the spectrum that I’m talking about.
Now we’re talking about the visible red light, which can improve interview production through the mitochondria, reduce the inflammation. And the other thing is by helping the mitochondria, it also helps your skin and your hair. I’ll be talking more about the skin in a little bit. One of the interesting things is that although infrared light can come through most windows, and also it can actually go through clothes, as you’ve noticed. If you’re out on a sunny day, even if you’re wearing a coat or other things, you can feel the heat of the sun on your skin. And that’s the infrared or red light actually delivering heat directly to your skin. But one of the things that blocks infrared light or red light also is actually water. And while that’s usually on an issue on a cloudy day, you’ll notice you don’t feel that heat on your back if it’s a cloudy day. And so red light and infrared light are both blocked pretty effectively by clouds.
So when trying to get these kinds of light, it’s important to see the forecast and not just the season of the time of day. So then adding onto this the infrared, the basic difference between the infrared and the red is again, as we get a longer wavelength, it’s a lower energy radiation, which means it’s less blocked by things.
So red light generally stops at the skin level. Whereas infrared will have a deeper penetration into your body. So when they’re trying to do things like use infrared to reduce inflammation, say in your lungs, as you might have noticed in Dr. Seheult’s slides, he talks about using it to treat the lungs. And so for that, they’re definitely going to be using infrared as opposed to red light because it will have a better penetration down to lung level.
Crissman: So this completes our survey of the basic kinds of light and goes across the spectrum to show the benefits of it. It’s a bit tricky in some places because as we’ve talked about for UVB, we don’t want to avoid the sunburn. For UVA, we want to avoid the skin aging, both of which can be handled by either going out at the right time of day or wearing sunscreen. But there’s benefit across the spectrum. And so it’s been a revolution in my thinking to realize this is another top tier intervention that can increase overall longevity.
So with that, I’ve seen you taking some notes. What questions do you have?
Mike: Yeah, that was great. Thanks, Chris. So first I should say, it seems like you are unfamiliar or less familiar with the sunlight and red light and all of that. But your review on all of that was fantastic. I mean, if there were weaknesses in your explanation, I would have that. I mean, you’ve done a deep dive, so you’ve thoroughly demonstrated understanding, which is great. I mean, it’s fantastic.
So the questions that I have, or just comment, some comments too, I always have some comments, is with the epidemiological studies, it’s just important to note association versus causation. So like the Swedish study, that’s associated with reduced all-cause mortality risk. We’ve got to be careful not to assume causation. We would need to see randomized controlled trials, right? But it is suggestive that the sunlight could be a factor in those cases.
And the other thing to consider too is healthy user bias. Taking it all the way back to your first slide with the exercise at midday being associated with lowest all-cause mortality risk, I wonder if, and especially in people older than 65, I wonder if they’re just able to exercise, it’s just that age group is more able to exercise, they don’t have the constraints potentially of nine to five job and that may be some factor of it. Or are people who are just more healthy in general more likely to exercise at that time? I don’t know that that study looked at all of the aspects of health user bias.
That’s a big flag on my radar now, that every epidemiological study is, they properly controlled for all the aspects of health user bias and the other side, comorbidities, right? We can adjust for CVD and cancer, but what about liver and kidney, you know, disease and Alzheimer’s disease?
If those factors aren’t involved, then many factors that can impact a given association could be messed with. All right, so those are comments.
Wait, so then also skin cancer, should say, I too have had skin cancer. don’t know if everybody can see. You can see the line. So I had a wart, I made it like this, like a cone head size wart, but I had a wart, what looked like a wart growing on my head, and I was shaving my head, this was probably 15 to 20 years ago, and went to the dermatologist, and they were like, yeah, let’s take a biopsy. So they cut off the wart, which was pretty big, and I was shaving around it. So was like, imagine, shaved head, and now I’ve got hair growing around this wart right in the middle of my head, really ridiculous.
So they biopsy every level of what they, they look at the pathology, they look at the sections under the microscope to see if there’s any pathology. And for every section of that wart that they removed, it was squamous cell cancer. So, SCC. So then they had to go in and dig a section of my scalp out to see how far down it had gone. And fortunately it hadn’t gone deep into my skin.
But at that time, what could have caused it? So I was regularly sun tanning. I was also going to the tanning booth. Did I overdo it? Do I have some genetic susceptibility to, you know, there’s an optimal dose for me and if I go beyond that, I’ve triggered now skin cancer, probably. And then with that in mind too, so at least up here in the summer, you know, nine months out of the year, I can’t get regular sunlight. It’s just too cold in Boston. you can’t lay out anywhere.
So whenever it was summertime, I would work up to about an hour a day of getting full body sun exposure. Obviously for the vitamin D benefits too, right? But it feels good. It wasn’t difficult about anything else. And I started to see those characteristic spots, the white bleached spots, which are basically sun damage. So I started to cut back to 30 minutes a day over the past few years. But then that raises the issue of what’s the optimal dose that our skin should be exposed to sunlight without sunscreen?
And I think in the rethink paper that you posted, or maybe late in their references, they posted to other papers that, I mean, it’s a very low exposure dose. It’s something like two to three minutes of the most peak sunlight midday and then you’re good. But I mean, that’s unreasonable. Who’s gonna just sit there for three minutes and be like, all right, I’m done being cooked like a chicken. Dr. Seheult, talking about, and hate to say so-and-so as an authority, making the argument to authority, but Dr. Seheult has done the deep dive into this. He recommends at least 15 minutes. But then I’ve heard him say sometimes up to 30 minutes. So I think for me, there’s that balance between, what’s the minimal dose where you’re getting sunlight’s benefit or potentially getting sunlight’s benefits, not just the D, but the red and near infrared light at what time of the day because that can matter too.
And then, you know, if you’re getting that dose already, then do you go sunscreen for the rest of the day, you get out of the sun and just hang out in the green spaces, which is also associated with reduced alcohol mortality risk in part probably because of the red light reflecting off the leaves. So all right, with that long diatribe, knowing that you’re deep in the skincare and skin creams and sunscreen, how, if or how has that changed your, do you now go no sunscreen for a certain portion of the day and then add sunscreen after? How have you altered your approach or have you in response to the new information?
Crissman: This has been huge. So I’ve now become a sun worshiper, yay, soul bra.
Nowadays I I always like the the sunscreen of the face is fundamental. So I put that on before and I’ll talk about that more in a minute But I put that on before breakfast and wear that all day long and always. I’m still I’ll have more updates on how I adapt to summer later if we get into summer But at least for winter, the sun is so weak here. I’m about a 35 latitude in Tokyo and above 35 latitude once you get to 40 latitude. Basically, you cannot get vitamin D in the winter, the sun. It doesn’t matter when you go out, there’s just none, the UVB is entirely blocked.
But at 35 you can, so between like around 1 o’clock or so. So I go out when the UV index is about between 3 and 4, and I stay out for a half hour, because I’m not actually there for the UVB and the vitamin D, I already get enough of that. I consider that to be a marker for the other things. And I try to get about a total of about two hours or so of near noon sunlight during the week. Because we’re on a cloudy day, I consider that not to be as helpful or useful as a clear day because I’m not going to get any of the infrared or the red. So I’ve changed drastically. I’m not sure how it’s going to change over the summer. think I probably will start still continue to avoid UV index of above four. So around five or so, then you can get a sunburn from that.
And while it would give you vitamin D faster, you just say two or three minutes, I would rather be out for a longer period of time and be getting the higher spectrum than just getting two or three minutes of that and then getting out and not getting as much of the other wavelengths.
Mike: Yeah, definitely. All right. Great. Great plan. what, what this also opens up is, know, so when you think so, sunlight is evolutionary. We evolved with the sun, right? And then when you think of the other side of it, I hate to be in the conspiracy, you know, the type I hate to be in that boat, but unfortunately, you know, it’s like, we’re basically bombarded with marketing of stay out of the sun.
The sun is bad for you, but we evolved with the sun for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. Right. So, that’s what started me on that journey too, of, know, what’s the optimal dose, avoiding it completely doesn’t seem right. And then there is that epidemiological data that supports it that you showed, right? So, you know, it just becomes a matter of dose and frequency, you know, but then also looking at biomarkers, right? Is your vitamin D just using just 30 as a cutoff? that, you know, what is it nanograms per deciliter? I always get, know, 75 nanomolar.
Is your vitamin D at least higher than that? How high should you about that? That’s a different story. And that’s what I’m planning on exploring by doing biomarker versus biomarker analyses at some point. But I need to have enough data to do that but using biomarkers. So if regular sunlight exposure through the red light can impact blood pressure, if you’re tracking your blood pressure, do you see changes based on some regular sunlight exposure? So I think there are biomarkers that we can look at in addition to the obvious of, you know, hey, your skin is brown now and leathery, you’re probably spending too much time in sun, is bad for skin aging. So figuring out that dose is essential.
But there are a couple other windows that this opens up. One is, windows, right? Literally. Indoor lighting, right? So, you know, we evolved when the sun is up, we’ve got light, and when the sun goes down, we’ve got no light after that, right? But yet in our modern environments, we’ve got these artificial lights with a non sunlight mostly a non sunlight spectrum and I don’t know if you’ve seen, you know med cram, which is Dr. Seheult’s YouTube channel, but his latest video, he’s talking about the FDA, at least in the States, how they’re banning, sequentially banning certain types of light bulbs and their frequency, you know, which frequencies that they emit.
Such that in 2028, it’ll be even harder, I think, to get red light bulbs or bulbs that have a red light or near infrared light component to them. Because anything that gives off heat, which is what the red and infrared does is inefficient in terms of energy usage. So in terms of light, the other side of that is, you know, take that out and just have things that are actually light. So, so that opened up my mind to that too. What’s the optimal indoor lighting approach, you know, and, you know, I’ve seen, seen Simland talk about this. People ask him, Simland, what’s your worst health related thing? And he’s like, probably these things, right? Making videos and shining this artificial whatever spectrum, LED spectrum this is, because they can vary, it’s completely artificial. It’s not anything we evolved or have been exposed to for hundreds of thousands of years. So that got me started too.
So now when, you know, sun goes down at night, I’m in darkness. I basically have the computer screen. I’ve got, you know, some blue light blocking glasses, are like magic. And then my daughter will turn some lights on and I’m like, close the light. It really, it’s like, it just doesn’t feel like, it’s so real, like a vampire, right? So that opened my mind to that. But then taking that even a step further. So light is a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we perceive with eyes, right?
But why does it have to only be, and these are frequencies from short to long, yeah, from short, high energy to long and lower energy, right? But also got frequency detection in our ears, right? Which then raises the question of which get worse during aging. And that’s important because, you know, so there’s epidemiological data that people who use hearing aids have a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s related dementia.
So there’s something about the brain getting stimulation, frequency stimulation, sensing frequency through the ears that may be good for the brain, which then raises the question, what’s the optimal frequency that we can expose our ears to to not only slow that decline and potentially slow AD related dementia, but then also there’s published data that there are some labs and I’m looking into inviting them on the channel, that’s easier said than done. You’ve got to find the scientists that agree to present this stuff. Otherwise I’m forced making YouTube videos as a non-expert on what they’re doing. There are some labs that are using ultrasound frequencies which the human hearing range, the average human hearing range, I’ve said this before in other places, but then they’re like, people can hear more than 20,000 hertz or less than 20 hertz. Okay, the average hearing range is 20 20,000, right?
So ultrasound frequencies that are higher than 20,000 that have also shown positive effects on related outcomes in Alzheimer’s patients. So there could be something about sound and specifically targeting sound much like light, whether it’s the red, near infrared, some amount of UVB, UVA. And then, I mean, you can even take it further, right? Our nose is basically perceiving metabolites. You can reduce down into, you know, vibrating strings if we’re getting into string theory, you know, if you take it all the way down to the quantum level. But that’s the story for, you know, sometime in the future. But the sound frequency is on high radar too and potential rejuvenation.
Crissman: Yeah, it’s interesting. mean, I didn’t make the cut as far as the evidence behind it for this presentation. But then as I was reading through this about the cardiovascular benefits, then I found another paper that was just like, OK, Dr. Seheult talks about near-infrared. And they had additional findings, often the far-infrared, where they had found that that light as well seemed to have some specific benefits for your overall cardiovascular system that would then be helping these things to improve and I was sort of like, okay, there could be more here, which is why I prefer just natural sunlight. But yeah, there’s still lots to be determined there.
Mike: But then, as you mentioned, you can’t get strong enough UV in the wintertime, right? So then it becomes a question of if you don’t do anything, are you deficient in these exposing your eyes and full body to these wavelengths that we evolved to get, right?And then it becomes, do you buy a panel in your house where you can expose yourself? And then at what frequency, at what duration, at what intensity, how far away?
So I look at it, it’s like the supplement. You’re using portions of the light spectrum as a supplement where the whole food, as you mentioned, sunlight, getting the sunlight is the best. But completely ignoring it. It’s a portion of the optimal health spectrum, obviously getting regular sunlight every day without paying attention to diet, exercise, sleep, that isn’t good either, right? So it’s a component of the approach.
Mike: All right, so next up.
Crissman: Right, so continuing on then, have Bingeing Reflections. So I’d like you to tell the story. I don’t want to steal your thunder here, so I’ve seen a bit of it on Patreon and I’m interested.
Mike: Yeah, so for those who don’t know, I post the diet composition after each blood test, right? So at least eight times per year, people are seeing what my average diet composition is, and then I go into full detail all the foods that I consumed, and then were there any cheat days, right? So what works for me, and in cheat days where I’m eating some amount of junk because if I don’t, then I can set up a binge, historically, and for me at least, as someone who’s, prior to the past four years, someone who struggled with being able to be as lean as possible and, you know, trying to be calorie restricted.
So I struggled with that until about four years ago, when I finally put it all together and how much, you know, what volume of food, how much fiber, how much exercise, and then that almost completely eliminated, well, I should say completely eliminated these basically weekly binges where I’d have like a Friday or Saturday where I would just eat like, you know, a few thousand calories over my maintenance and then fast Saturday, Sunday, you know, or eat very little food over the next few days. But that’s basically a binge purge cycle. It wasn’t healthy for me mentally or physically. I hated that I was stuck in that lifestyle. So anyway, four years ago, I was able to break out of that and I don’t ever want to go back to that. knowing that if I completely avoided junk food on that journey, that would eventually lead to a quote unquote binge where I’m just eating everything. Can’t stop, don’t wanna stop, feels good, but then obviously feels bad afterwards.
So if I completely eliminate junk food, that’s a bad thing. So after every blood test, immediately after, the first thing I’m eating is whatever I’ve been thinking about for the 50 days in between tests. And it’s usually peanut butter mixed with chocolate or it can be pizza, whatever it is. And then I generally don’t pay any attention to macros and micros, which I try to hit those targets every day based on their correlations with biomarkers. So that lasts two to four days, including a little bit of cheat, not paying much attention to the overall rigid structure, which I enjoy. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy it. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t.
So that’s worked for four years where exactly sticking to calorie intake, the calorie intake goals that I’ve targeted, within a very small range, nothing like, you know, thousand calories over 2000, 3000, none of that.
So, uh, for the first time I cracked, I cracked in four years that was immediately following this last blood test, which on, which was on February 4th. And this story will be in the, after the March, you know, March 18th blood test, you know, when I do the diet composition video. So this is for anyone watching for anyone who’s made it to this portion of the video, you’re getting early access to my struggles where you know not always quote unquote perfect on my approach.
So yeah, so on the day, don’t know, maybe I can share, I can share screen so we can see.
Mike: All right, so this is February 4th. So that’s the day of blood testing. And this day was normal, I say normal, know, it’s immediately after blood testing, you know, I pre-made the day before chocolate with some grape jelly, peanut butter, homemade Reese’s peanut butter cup with some grape jelly, just to see how that tastes. Wasn’t bad.
So if you scroll down, can see calories on that day, 2300. That’s essentially around what I normally do on a workout day. So on workout day, I’m usually 22, 2300. On a non-workout day, it’s, 2050 is the target, 2100, or somewhere in that ballpark. A little bit more calories on the workout day. So after blood testing, did the workout, had a little bit of jump, and then if you look at my macros and micros, I mean, even just focusing on fiber, this is pretty much half of what my usual fiber intake would be. But I’m not paying any attention to it because it’s quote unquote, cheat day.
So then where the problem happened is usually I’ll make my junk and then get rid of it, throw it away immediately. I don’t want to it in the house. And that’s just most for me. I can’t keep any of it in the house. It’s just bad news. I’ll start thinking about it and then it, right? So the next day came and February 5th, and this is where the proverbial hit the fan. Right.
So just going down to calories, 5,700. And just to put that in perspective, my body weight maintenance is 21 to 2,200 calories. So that’s 3,500 calories in excess. I basically ate almost three days of food in one day. it was, no, had cookie dough. I was going to make some, made some, you know, some cookies, but then after I ate the cookies that were on my list, for whatever reason, I was just like, I feel like eating more. And I went off, like, know, eating more chocolate chips, eating the cookie dough raw. And I know people are gonna be like, I, salmonella and all the other things, I ate it raw, it’s still here. I ate the grape jelly and peanut butter, I was just scooping everything, eating everything basically inside. So then, okay, it’s done.
You know, I can’t fix, can’t undo what was done. All I can do is learn from it. I don’t intend on doing this going forward, where I’m just going to make my stuff, get rid of it. And then, you know, I can basically only eat the junk that I pre-plan. And trigger maybe the cookie, cookie dough, where I can’t keep that, any of that around, where that may have also pushed me over the edge, knowing that I had extra cookie dough to include for like a third cheat day, on a third cheat day. And my brain was like, no, just eat it. And that stuff. Yeah. So, so, so with that in mind, what did I do afterwards? Right?
Now, this is where it can get tricky, right? Because knowing that I have a history of binge purge, and I don’t mean binge purge when I’m puking, the purge is basically extreme fasting. Yeah. Extreme binge fast. So, on the next day, on the sixth, I mean, you can see this is my diet the next day. It’s almost no calories. 600 calories, okay? So that’s pretty much good news, because now I was 3,500 calories in excess. I consumed 600. That’s about 1,500 under what I would usually eat. So we can subtract 1,500 from 3,500. Now I’m 2,000 calories over what I did. Not too bad, that’s half a pound of fat. Okay, but then I didn’t just do that for one day. I did that also for a second day. You can see the list is very short.
I mean, just to fast forward that to a week, a week later, if you look at my list, it’s much longer for all the foods that I generally include. So to see very little food on that day, and this was 1,000 calories. So now I’m 1,100 under what I would usually eat. So subtract the 1,100 from 2,000. Now I’m about 900, 1,000 over what I would normally eat over that four day period.
So, could I have pushed that another day and then had another thousand calorie day and basically my binge has been negated by course correcting with calories? I could and I’ve done that in the past and I’ve really pushed it out, but historically that’s binge purge for me and I can’t get out of that cycle and I didn’t want to do that. So the following day it was essentially pretty close to my usual diet. You can see calories are about 2000. I generally am not below 2000. So that’s maybe 100 calories under, but it was pretty close to a normal diet of all the things that I eat.
Am I worried about now being plus 800 or plus 1000? Not really. I was planning on having my calorie intake for the, around 50 day period in between blood tests being a little higher anyway. So my average calorie intake for the 49 day period before the February 4th test was 2120 per day. Right now it’s currently 2176. I’m planning on aiming for 2150, so I’m not too far away from that, even with the 5700 calorie binge.
So that was the experience. I’m not happy about it, but I did it. I take full responsibility. I am planning on it never happening again. It’s just not good for long-term health. I don’t think it’ll impact the biomarkers being 45 days away from a blood test, but yeah, so that was my experience.
Crissman: Well, first of all, I have to applaud you for doing that. You still there?
Mike: Sorry, Criss. pressed the wrong button. was trying to stop share. Wait, did you press record?
Crissman: We’re still recording. Yeah, so first of all I have to really I’m odd that you not only I mean even in the midst of the binge that you still recorded every gram is stunning like I’m impressed. I have the same kind of habits. Many years ago I was doing something that was called the zone diet or so. I’d be eating a restricted amount of calories and stuff. The way I would do it, one of the things I would do is I’d have these zone bars which are pretty tasty. They’re 30 % protein, 30 % fat, 40 % carbohydrates. I have all my favorite flavors and I have them in boxes behind my desk. I was not as smart as you. I didn’t get them out of the house.
I don’t know, like once every other week or so, would just like get ravenous at the end of the day and like eat five or 10 or 15 of these zone bars and put an extra, you know, a thousand, two thousand calories on top of my very tight diet. So I really can relate. But one of the things that you didn’t mention though that we’ve talked a bit about is the sleep challenges.
And you mentioned that you have trouble sleeping, but you eat 6,000 calories in a day and you sleep like a baby, right? So it’s one of the things, so I have been doing the 5-2 fasting as we’ve talked about for 10 years and have given it up now. And one of the things that I found is a benefit of it is that my sleep is improved overall. I’m able to sleep better because those kind of days when I was doing the fasting were always the days where I wouldn’t sleep as well.
And with calorie restriction, you’re kind of on a constant calorie restriction. And so I feel like it’s sort of a cycle where, okay, you use your willpower to eat less calories than maybe you really want. And then eventually your sleep gets impinged upon. And so you’re not sleeping as well as you would like to. And now you’re tired and hungry. And so your willpower reserves have gone down. And all of a sudden…
Okay, read the cookies. It feels like it’s a longer term cycle, obviously, and you’re much better than having a weekly kind of a thing, but it feels like that’s kind of a checkpoint to not eating enough calories. What do you think?
Mike: Yeah, so a few thoughts. So there is published data that sleep deprivation can lead to overeating, next day overeating. that’s one. So sleep is huge, a huge variable in this equation. The other is that, so my current BMI is 22. I’m not on quote unquote extreme CR. So that’s point number two. Point number three is without even thinking about sleep for now. The majority of my biomarkers, nothing is more strongly correlated with more biomarkers going in the right direction than wrong. the reduction in calories, from 2,800 to where it was at my highest since 2015 to the current around 2,100, with that one exception of lymphocytes, right?
So, but I’m still trying to work out that recipe to resist that age-related change, but it’s like 10 or 11 biomarkers with a p-value less than 0.05 going in the right direction versus wrong. Then getting into the sleep issue and optimizing sleep.
Just to clarify in terms of what my issues around that are, it’s, don’t have problems generally falling asleep. I do that great, you know, or pretty great, you know, 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes at most. And historically that’s been a problem where I could just lay there for hours, you know, so that I can get to bed pretty quickly and it’s generally not an issue. That’s not the major problem. The major problem is then, you know, I wake up four or five hours later, you know, I’ll wake up at two, then I’m up three.
What’s going on there? I’m clearly, I have four more hours or so that I need, because if I don’t, basically a cognitive zombie until I actually do catch up on that. So why am I not staying asleep?
And then sometimes it can be up at two, then three, then four. And okay, one of those may be to use the bathroom, but there’s no reason I should be having to get up to use the bathroom, which I don’t, generally don’t. Three, four, and then finally at five.
So there are other variables at play besides the calories that could be involved. It could be a calorie issue, but I’m not convinced that that’s a part of it. For example, morning sunlight. I can’t get that nine months out of the year. If, will, or how will that change when I can literally wake up and go outside when the sun is up and just literally lay in my backyard? I mean, I can do that after the move. I can’t do that here. Or even just getting regular sun exposure for nine or 10 months out of the year. I’ll be able to do that now, whereas I can’t do that here in Boston. And then even last summer in Boston, they closed the park that’s near my house. I couldn’t get regular sun exposure basically anyway.
That may be a factor. Whether that is a factor yet, I don’t know. Another factor that could be involved in that nighttime awakening is hypothyroidism. If you’ve seen my free T3 and free T4 levels, they’re basically the average levels found in a 90 year old.
And so I’ve been taking, you know, levothyroxine, I was diagnosed as hypothyroid in my early twenties. So I was on T3, I moved to Boston, the endocrinologist basically forced me to take T4, levothyroxine. That’s the inactive version, which needs to be converted into free T3. And that conversion gets worse during aging. So clearly it’s not just a total thyroid hormone thing in my case, because I’m within the range. But if you look at the ratio, the conversion is bad. So now I have to have the uphill battle of talking to my PCP here in Boston and the endocrinologist of switching back to T3, which it’s an uphill battle. I may not quote unquote win that battle until I go to Texas and then have to pay for an endocrinologist out of pocket.
So that could be a factor in the story too, where these nighttime winkles because of basically suboptimal systemic metabolism because of some amount of hypothyroidism. Even just looking at T3 levels on their own, they’re always on the very low side of the range, and that doesn’t even factor into what’s called optimal based on aging and all-cause mortality risk. So even with that in mind too, linking that to bed temperature, if I can’t thermoregulate properly during sleep, that can affect how often that I wake up.
So I’m also planning on experimenting with eight sleep to see if the bed temperature can help my, you know, wake up less and wake up feeling more refreshed, which granted, it’s not a terrible system. Like if you look at my data, slow wave sleep and total sleep, I’m able to still like get in a meditative zone and basically mind over matter into, okay, I’m up at two, relax. You can do this, you do this every night. And I can still get to sleep most nights, but that doesn’t work all the time. And then sometimes I’m up at two in the morning and I’m up for the day. And literally it’s like a zombie. I’m just going through the motions until I can get to bed that night. Those are factors too.
And then the other factor too is the nighttime room temperature. So here in Boston, I have a manual thermostat. So in the non-summer months, and I have a portable AC. I don’t have an AC in the bedroom. It’s an apartment. It’s an apartment, a whole apartment building. So the AC cool down the room to at best 75F, which affects in the summer, in the hot summer, in the hot summer. And then the humidity is super high too. So that affects my sleep quality. Whereas in Texas, I bought a brand new HVAC system. I mean, it’s already there, it’s already been installed. That should be much better. We’ve got the digital thermostat, I can change it immediately. Should be much, I should be able to control factors that could optimize my sleep in terms of wake up frequency. Whether it will, I don’t know, we’ll see. But getting that sleep equation right is a huge part of the approach.
Crissman That makes a huge number of things that could be moving very positively for you as far as getting better sun exposure, better climate control, other things. In that case, carry on. It’s only a few months away and I guess we’ll be getting an update on that.
Mike: Yeah. The fourth variable that I left out, sorry to keep pushing that story is I’m across the street from the fire department. The ambulances on this street are going crazy all hours of the night. It’s a busy Boston street. I don’t know how I did it for 15 years. Like there are, there are, there’s a homeless community that’s about a mile or two away that for some reason likes this neighborhood and will just be yelling like maniacs sometimes at two in the morning. There’ve been dogs barking in the middle of the night. So the neighborhood I’m moving to, can’t be that.
Crissman: Can’t it though? You’ve been checked?
Mike: I mean, at the very least, the fire department and the ambulances and police cars on this street, I’m going to be in the suburbs. I’m not going to be in the city. So those variables should be minimized. Every night it’s, I mean, literally almost every night, the fire department, mean, three in the morning. Like I’ve PTSD every time I hear fire truck now.
Crissman: That’s not that much of a mystery. Yeah, it seems like that should be factor number one if you’re wondering why you’re waking up. okay.
Mike: That’s a part of the story, yeah, for sure. But is some of that related to thermoregulation and not being able to get and stay in deep sleep for longer? I don’t know, but chiseling away at all the factors that could optimize it. But I’m not sold on going higher for calories yet. If I do increase the exercise frequency and duration, which is in my mind, but I’m not still sold about, so part of plan two is to change the two workouts 90 minutes per week into a more split routine so that I can incorporate more HIIT in some biking, which I miss. But we’ll see. We’ll see if I need to do that because there may be a way where, so for example, on my quote unquote staycation, 90 minute workout, next day, full rest day. Didn’t do anything. Basically relaxed, very light mobility work, worked on like knee mobility and lower back flexibility. Nothing crazy. Woke up the day after that with like fantastic recovery. I could do a full 90 minute workout again.
Mike: And this almost never happens when I’m working around the in-person hybrid work schedule. So if that’s the case, and I 90 minute workouts every literally two to three days, I may not need to, anyway, so splitting the workout is a potential option there too.
Crissman That’s, mean, my total time exercising is about half of yours, as we’ve talked about. So, but in some ways it’s more intense. I mean, I know that you’re doing sort of some stretching and some other things and some balancing in there, whereas mine, weight lifting is straight bench squats, dead lifts, other things. But the hip, I mean, actually, the HIIT, that, that’s something that I do find, like I do tend to sleep better after those exercise days. So I have three days of about 30 minutes exercise. So I think that’s kind of what you’re talking about is if you were to take those two 90 minute blocks and kind of spread them out a bit, maybe you would get more benefit of the hitting the bed and just being tired.
Mike: Yeah. And the interesting part about that is, so on the 90 minute workout days, I don’t get better sleep quality. More of it is light sleep and less of it is the restorative sleep. So that says that 90 minutes may not be optimal and that’s a consistent effect. mean, almost every, every workout. Yeah. So then that raises the question, what is that optimal dose? it splitting the workouts? But the reason I raised the exercise and potentially splitting the workouts is the calorie factor. Right? So if I’m 180 minutes of vigorous exercise, it’s basically moderate to vigorous, right? I mean, which is debatable how you classify it, but if I increase that now to 10 or 250, I should increase my calories by a small amount. And, you know, then we would see, right? Is it the calories that are impacting or is it the reduced exercise duration, you know, that could impact sleep? I’m working on, I want to work on optimizing all of that. So getting the dose right.
Crissman: Wow. Okay. Well, I’ll be looking forward to additional updates on that.
Mike: Cool. All right, next up, I think we had some stuff on X.Dezanthan.
Crissman: Yes, I think you added that in. You wanted to say some things about that. So, let me share this for a second here. Here we go. Okay, let’s see here, I need to get that onto.
Mike: I mean, I can share it on my side and maybe easier.
Crissman: Can share it on my side. Okay, go ahead. Is that good? No, it doesn’t look like it, does it? Let me try again. Here we go.
Mike: Wait, wait, I got, hang on, there we go. All right. Here we go. So yeah, just since we’re on the topic of skin, you know, and sun and what’s optimal for skin health. So I haven’t covered this, covered this in a video. I may though at some point, but so astaxanthin, that’s another aspect of my diet where I’ve been lacking.
And so for people who know or don’t already know, I eat fish every day, and this comes almost exclusively from wild caught sardines, mostly for the omega-3, but obviously also for protein, right? So there’s no almost, there has historically been no astaxanthin, which can come from things like salmon, which also has the omega-3N protein. So why is astaxanthin important? Well, astaxanthin may have positive benefits on skin, an emphasis on me because there are only a few clinical trials. I’m finding these days a lot of the interwebs is people will take one clinical study and you know, very few people. This spreads like wildfire into this is gonna be great. This works, right? I mean, I see that for like just things like hydrogen water and, you know, methylene blue. There’s like a little bit of published data in randomized controlled trials, not in vitro or cells.
Anyway, emphasis on May with astaxanthin. So these are two clinical trials. And what I highlighted is in this study, and you know, we’ll link to the papers in the video description and comment, in the first study they looked at on the left, in which I highlighted, they did a study in women where it was six milligrams per day of astaxanthin oral supplementation and two, what is that, two milliliters topically of astaxanthin. So now which is optimal? Is it get it from oral, food supplement or getting it topically? mean, I don’t know which is optimal. Probably topical, probably be best if astaxanthin really can make a dent on skin health and skin aging. To put the dose in perspective, I think average astaxanthin, I mean, I got this off the internet yesterday for, you know, to get four milligrams, I think that’s per 100 grams of salmon. So you need a pretty decent sized salmon, wild caught salmon, I wouldn’t go with the farm stuff.
So you need about 200 grams per day to get eight milligrams of oral acesanthin per day. Nonetheless, they saw positive effects on skin health related measures, So skin wrinkles, age spot size, skin texture, moisture content, which declines during aging. So potentially beneficial. And this is a randomized controlled trial. isn’t association.
And then in the second study that they did, it was in men. And here too, without going through the data, showing the data, just going with the abstract. Usually I show data, but for now, just going through the abstract. In men, crow’s feet wrinkle and elasticity, and then transepidermal water loss, which water, skin hydration declines during aging. So, acid xanthan was able to improve wrinkles and elasticity and reduce the transepidermal water loss.
Now, the reason I haven’t focused so much on skin is because it can be very tricky because if you’re visually inspecting someone’s skin and then looking under the microscope and then you’re trying to quantify what you see under the microscope, that can be very tricky. And, you know, and that’s someone who’s worked in a research lab and done microscope-related studies and now you’ve got to look at visual differences between a few samples, it’s a challenge.
So with that in mind, we can see that basically in the second study, again, randomized controlled trial. This was looking at astaxanthin supplementation in response to UV induced skin deterioration in healthy people. So what they gave was a more physiological dose of astaxanthin, which four milligrams per day, as I mentioned, is in a crazy amount of salmon, in 10 weeks. And just going into that idea of tricky to quantify visually, right?
So this is the skin swelling. The rectangles are the skin swelling in response to the UV induced, exposure. So they made the skin, you know, swelling. It’s, called a reef, a reef mob, probably mispronouncing it, which is basically just skin, you know, redness and swelling. So this was before treatment, right? Placebo and the astaxanthin. And then placebo, you know, post treatment, post placebo treatment, and then astaxanthin post placebo treatment.
So if you’re going to quantify, if you just look at it visually, you could say, all right, well, dark red, light red, know, darker red, lighter red. But, you know, then is the magnitude in the astaxanthin group better than the what happened versus placebo? Because if you look at it, it looks like there is some improvement in less swelling in the placebo group too.
So this is the emphasis on may improve skin health. I’m not necessarily convinced yet. I’d probably place my biggest bet on topical, as I mentioned, but I’d like to see more studies for acizanthin on skin health going forward. But then where it may get more interesting is that there’s a recently published study coming from the ITP, which is a gold standard of lifespan related studies, at least in mice. And that’s because they look at supplementation in a few different test sites and use a very large sample size to evaluate potential lifespan-related effects. So it’s not a sample size of 10 mice versus 10 mice, placebo versus supplement. It’s like, 200 plus mice per group across a few test sites.
So when pooling the data, and this is data in males, it didn’t work in female mice. On the same diets for the same duration, when looking at median survival, this is 0.5 survival, that’s the time when half the mice have died and half are still alive. When compared with the controls, which are in red, the astaxanthotretid male mice, you can see that there’s a significant shift to the right, so a significant increase in median lifespan.
If you look at maximal lifespan, so you can look at 20 % survival here, there looks like there’s a significant lengthening there too, where it’s pushed out a little bit. I didn’t look into if maximal lifespan was impacted. I like to look at 10 % survival, so 10 % of the mice are still alive. And if we do that, it looks like there’s basically overlap curves, at least in terms of median survival, and in mice, seems to be promising.
So with that in mind, I’ve cut down on my sardine intake and I’ve started to add wild caught salmon to about a 50-50 approach.
So now I’m cooking it about once a week, once every two weeks, and then prepackaging it and then eating that over for a few days. Maybe it’s more 40, 60 still sardines. So I don’t know what’s optimal, but some probably better than none, whether that could impact median lifespan or could impact skin aging and health. I don’t know, but some probably better than none.
Crissman: So you’re eating the wild caught salmon because you think that has more astaxanthin or because you think it’s healthier?
Mike: So sardines have no astaxanthin. Salmon does. And it’s in other foods. mean, shrimp, shrimp shells, you know, have astaxanthin. But I get no astaxanthin in my diet otherwise, if it’s not coming from wild caught salmon and the diet almost never has salmon in the approach. So including it now, I’m getting some rather than none, whether that makes a dent. You know, I haven’t done the experiment for long enough. It’s only one blood test, the last blood test, which is pretty good actually.
Crissman: Wow, okay, interesting. I get a lot of salmon so that’s not gonna be one that I would probably notice. One of my favorite fish.
Mike: Nice, nice. Cool, yeah, it’s not bad. mean, it’s okay.
Crissman: Okay, so let me go ahead and continue on.
Mike: On aging update?
Crissman: Yeah, actually unaging face.
So continuing on to the skincare stuff. So I think we’ve talked about this once before, but my approach has become quite a bit more in depth since we talked about it. I it would have been maybe half a year or a year or so.
So I wanted to just put together sort of what I see as the critical components of taking care of your face and how to prevent aging. I mean some people say that the age is, that the face is one of the skin is one of your largest organs and other things will make you live longer. Honestly I think a lot of this is just about vanity. You not only want to be young, you want to look young and so I pay a fair amount of attention to it. But all of my interventions are quite natural and I think quite reasonable, so let me jump into it.
Basically, the first thing is, what we talked about already with the sun, is just to stop the UV aging.
So the ultraviolet A radiation will reduce the collagen in your face by about 1 to 1.5 % per year. So by the time you’re 40 or so, you already have about 30 % less collagen in your face. And collagen is kind of the protein structure, if you will, of your face. And that’s something that very much you want to protect. And they have lots of examples of this just to show the detrimental effects of UVA radiation on your face.
Here’s a pair of twins who are just over 60 years old.
One of them loved getting sun and the other avoided sun at all times. And neither of them were big fans of suntan lotion. I don’t think it’s a hard guess to figure out that the woman on the right is the one who had about 10 more hours of sun a week than on the left.
So even at the same age, the sun, they call it photo aging. It have a very negative effect. So the first thing is put on suntan lotion on your face always before breakfast to make sure that you’re protecting yourself.
And in case you needed a study to show that, here’s a study from Australia where they gave people sunscreen daily for about 4.5 years and they found they were 24 % less aged and they basically did not age during those four and half years if they were wearing sunscreen every day all day.
So the sunscreen that I use is Cerave. These are all non-affiliate links. I’m just giving the solutions that I found to what I think works.
This is Cerave AM, which has about SPF 30.That’s going to block both ultraviolet A and B. So you should have some places on your body where you’re exposed and it will still get your vitamin D. But anywhere that you’re concerned about wrinkling and aging, which for me is my face and my hands, I wear this all the time.
So the second component of making sure that you stay young is just moisturizing. So it’s a very quick response, very gratifying. So just using moisturizer.
This doesn’t need to be super fancy or expensive or anything else, something that will help keep the moisture in your face. We’ll definitely give you a quick response as far as the fullness and softness and just having you look better.
Then there’s two kinds of hyaluronic acid. And acid sounds a bit scary here, but basically hyaluronic acid is very hydrophilic, is the technical term, but it attracts water to a great degree.
They say the ratio is about 10 to 50 times. One gram of hyaluronic acid will attract then 50 to 10 to 50 grams of water. So it’s very highly absorptive and helps to keep water within your face. So there’s two ways that I apply that. One is with an acid cream actually, hyaluronic acid cream. And that has about a 40 % wrinkle reduction. And the other is by actually taking hyaluronic acid supplements. It’s about 120 micrograms per day. It’s a very small amount. Take that daily. Another 26 % reduction in wrinkles.
So this is another Cerave product. It looks similar to the other one. This is the PM product.
So this one you use at night when you don’t need the SPF, but then this includes in the hyaluronic acid. For both of these hyaluronic acids, you want to go for a low molecular weight so that it can be absorbed as directly as possible.
If you eat larger, it’s more easy for it then to be absorbed through the lining of your digestive system whole and then brought to where it needs to be in your body. So then once you’ve got your face moisturized, now we really want to turn back the dial on time and we want to start on something else.
Here’s another, here’s the hyaluronic acid that I used, Jorrow’s formula. Again, this is going to be a low molecular weight.
So then, to go back into time, now we want to actually rebuild back the collagen that you lost to the sound effects.
So there’s about four different ways that I’ve found that can be major ways that can help rebuild the collagen within your face. The first one is just literally taking collagen. So when I first heard about this, I didn’t believe it because I thought, look, you eat protein all the time. Just because I eat a steak doesn’t mean I’m going to get bigger muscles. The body absorbs the proteins and then breaks them down into the basic amino acids and then reconstructs them on the inside. But when I’ve read the detailed research and studies on collagen, it can be a very simple protein. Again, you want to go for low molecular weight. And there are transporters within the gut that will take whole collagen proteins, assuming it’s small enough, and then move it directly into the bloodstream, as opposed to breaking it into the glycine and the other component amino acids.
So about five grams of collagen supplement, something that I make a point to take daily, gives about a 20 % reduction in wrinkle depth. The second thing then is tretinoin. The more popular name is Retin-A or Retinol. And these also then are going to help to rebuild facial structure.
So here’s the picture of the collagen that I use, vital protein. It’s a peptide, which basically means it’s a low molecular weight.
I was taking beef collagen before, but somebody pointed out that beef protein has bad effects with BSE, bovaline, and cephaly, spongiform cephalitis or something. You can correct me on that one, but mad cow disease basically. So I’m happy with the marine. It’s supposed to have good effects anyway. So then for the tretinoin, tretinoin is retin-A, is a prescription drug.
I do have a way to import it into Japan, so I use tretinoin. But retinol, which this is another CeraVe product, is lower strength, but both of them seem to get you to the same point.
They both have about a 35 % reduction in wrinkle depth. The difference is just the higher dosage of tretinoin will get that improvement more swiftly.
And then the next thing, now we’re coming back around to the red lights. And you ask me, how am I getting red light? Well, here’s one other way other than going out into mid-portion getting red light.
This is basically, it’s a lux renew or something, and it’s a red light and infrared light. I consider them to fill the same role, but as I talked about previously, the penetration depth is different. I’m getting infrared, I probably don’t need it, it’s mostly for the red, but the application period is fairly sharp, about
10 minutes every three days or so. So I’m willing to do this. This is supposed to have about a 40 % reduction in wrinkle depth, if I remember correctly. And I’m giving it a try. But one of the things that’s important about the collagen rebuilders is that I should bring up that all of them are very slow to act.
So this is a picture of the collagen before treatment and two weeks after treatment.
And this was a fairly strong treatment, as opposed to spreading out the red light over three months, they basically gave them three times as much in one month. So they gave them nearly 100 joules per centimeter squared of red light. And then within two weeks after that, they could see the collagen is already visibly different.
But the interesting thing, though, is that if you look at the improvement over time, the before treatment here we have over on the left is that two weeks post-treatment, they have some benefit.
But that benefit continues to increase then over the next 10 weeks. So even though the collagen seems to have already been built up, it takes a while for that change to be reflected in the skin structure and for the wrinkles then to start to fill out. So for many of these collagen things, it’s unfortunately something that takes time, but when you’re working on aging, you assume you live long enough to see the benefits, so it should be fine.
So then for the truly dedicated, there’s the last way to rebuild collagen, which I like to call face stabbing. Basically, this is derma stamping.
So there are small titanium needles inside of this. There’s another brands like this. They all look fairly similar and you can rotate the top to go between 0.1 and 1.5 millimeters. And basically, it’s making small holes in your skin that then when the skin heals, it rebuilds the collagen structure.
This is on about a once a week thing. You can put on a topicac anesthetic to reduce the pain from it, but it is a little bit more extreme, so I leave it at last on the list.
So that’s basically it. That’s going through my list of skin interventions. I’ll bring up the list here again. This is kind of the simple straightforward version of what I think you should do to take care of your skin, and it’s what I’m following. So comments or questions?
Mike: Yeah, some million. okay. Starting with pH. I know we mentioned, I’ve talked about this in earlier. So do you know the pH of the, is it CeraVe or is it, CeraVe?
Crissman: CeraVe I think is how I pronounce it but I’m not sure. No I haven’t looked at the pH of it. What should it be?
Mike: Mean, skin pH is around five, and that’s important because even if it’s got hyaluronic, hyaluronic HA in there, if the overall pH is six, which, okay, you’ll say five, six, what’s the difference? Well, that’s a log scale, which means a pH of six is 10 times less acidic versus a pH of five. The skin pH is important for the skin microbiome, right?
So, you know, if something’s got a nutrient that has been shown individually to impact skin aging or skin health, in piecing it in an overall milieu with other ingredients that may not be optimal, that’s part of my skepticism with the current moisturizers and creams.
Crissman: Yeah, it’s a fair question, it’s one that I haven’t looked at, so I really can’t comment on, but yeah, I’m not sure. I know that they definitely consult with skin experts when they’re making the CeraVe products, but I don’t know if they’ve addressed the overall pH of balance of it.
Mike: Yeah, mean, that’s, yeah, it just makes me, you know, so when you think about like, for example, junk food, right? I mean, the purpose there is to sell more junk food, to make it hyper palatable. So if the skin cream smells good or feels good, you know, is it, with the subjective stuff, is it optimal objectively, right? So technically you’d have to, and this, I’m always skeptical with the skin stuff. It’s so, for me, it’s so hard to quantify, like for your face.
Technically, you’d have to do one half of your face, nothing, and the other half, all of your interventions. And then do you start to see an actual change on the side you’re doing the, or even one arm, the other arm, right? That to me would be the strongest evidence versus, you know, just do everything all over and hope, assume, I mean, how would you know that it’s actually slowing the rate of skin aging? It’s a challenge, I think it’s a challenge.
Crissman: Don’t want to be your own counter-proof right like if you found yeah it totally did make a difference now this face side of my face is more aged than the other side.
It’s funny, speaking of the sunscreen stuff, one of the things that I found, which was a fun toy gadget off of Amazon, is an ultraviolet light mirror. So basically it shines an ultraviolet light on your face and then it has an ultraviolet camera that then you can see precisely where you have applied sunscreen and how much.
So I found that to be fantastic and I used it every day for a month or so and now I’ve gotten a bit tired of it. But it really would show you exactly, and you could see that basically your face would become black as you put on the sunscreen. And so I used it a few times and I did exactly that. Sometimes I put it on half my face and say, can I see the difference? Like have I really lost any sunscreen or am I just over applying versus what I had? Yeah, it’s difficult to just say. Like lots of these studies are sort of done by the vendors, which makes me always suspicious. But there seemed to be enough of them that I’m confident and I can understand the logic behind it. So I’m willing to give it a try.
Mike: Yeah, so the imaging, I don’t know, it looks like we’ve got reactions enabled where now thumbs up is popping up for, I don’t know if you saw it on your side, but anyway that’s just something we can turn off for the next time.
So the imaging, the UV imaging is interesting because then it raises the question. Maybe at some point we’ll have imaging where you w I don’t mean necessarily UV, but imaging where we can maybe see the collagen interface, you know, we can see at the microscopic level using some kind of whatever. I’m not an expert in how to image that, but then you could literally see.
Okay, is what I’m applying to my face a net positive for the skin? And you know, maybe you don’t even need to consider your own skin microbiome. Is it optimal for that? Is it optimal for the collagen, which is obviously in the skin, but we don’t want to mess up the external layer of microbes and that balance because if we do now, maybe we’re more prone to skin infection or, know, and that may be a long-term gain, right? So a long-term game.
So that’s one side of imaging, in terms of the other side where you did one side of your face and not the other, if you saw improvement on the one side of your face, just add them to the other to balance it out and you’ll be good. But at least you’ll be able to see, am I seeing a discernible effect on one side versus the other. What I also have for red light, so Glenn Jeffrey, Glenn Jeffrey’s lab, his work in his lab with his published studies on red light therapy and glucose and macular health, eye health, he said when I him on the channel that red light therapy only works even on mitochondria and nitric oxide in the morning. So I don’t know if you factor that in or you just do a red light therapy at any time during the day.
Crissman: Yeah, I couldn’t. I remember looking at that and I couldn’t make any sense of it and decided at the end of it that I was just going to follow the recommendations of the device which had enough such cautions. I thought it was, I can’t remember the specific reason, but I thought it was sort of a specific case that he was talking about, not in general. Like, I mean, there’s a number of factors. There’s the inflammation reduction, then there’s the mitochondrial improvement and other things. But at least at this point, I’m not looking into that. It’s maybe something I should be trying to tune further.
Mike: It could be just his lab’s findings. There may be inter individual variability where maybe for you any time of the day is okay. Whereas in his lab, whether it’s in mice or people that, I remember he said, I can’t improve your mitochondria with red light therapy in the afternoon. But in the morning, and then he said something about, there’s something about red light therapy, basically, you know, activates mitochondria in the morning and then now they’re ready for the day, which I think he rationalized, you know.
So sunlight right you get the red light in the morning when the sun’s coming up. It’s basically prepping you for the higher intensity, you know UV and everything else. But anyway, there may be into into individual variability there, you know. But then also red light therapy has been shown to improve and in others whether it’s true for you, eye health.
You cover, I notice you cover your eyes though, so what do think? Maybe not covering the eyes for red light therapy.
Crissman: Yeah, I I thought it was the infrared or something where there also is some concern that maybe it’s not a good idea to have the lasers that close. When I’m getting my sun outside, then I’m getting straight infrared and natural source. Because of the intensity of this, I thought, maybe I’ll wear the infrared protective goggles.
Mike: So it’s not, it’s a red and near infrared. It’s not just a red light. I thought it was only red. If it was only red, I wouldn’t worry about, I put my eyes right up to my red light that I have. Good reason to be concerned. And then the other thing too is collagen peptides, right? So evolutionarily, we probably got collagen whenever we caught an animal and ate it, right? Because, and then, assuming we eat the whole animal, right? So Native Americans eat the whole animal, not just the muscle, right?
It’s bone marrow, it’s ligaments, tendons, liver. So collagen is found in connective tissue, ligaments, tendons, which most people aren’t eating, right? So then it also raises a question for me. Collagen peptides are peptides, which means they’re short chains of amino acids, which are easily absorbed. They should, you should eat it, should be absorbed by the small intestine. Maybe there’s some degradation to its component amino acids. But peptides are short strings of amino acids, so they should be absorbed into the blood. And now you’ve got collagen peptides and or their component amino acids in the blood. But when considering that we evolved getting some amount of collagen containing foods, ligaments, tendons, even skin, then I wonder if, collagen, ligaments and tendons can actually be fermented by gut bacteria, at least in stripped carnivores to produce short chain fatty acids, which are pretty good systemically, not just for the gut, you know, organs like the brain, muscle, kidney, et cetera.
So I wonder, you know, with the, there are no studies that have looked at this. And I don’t know if there ever would be, but I wonder, you know, taking the peptides versus eating the, you know, the ligaments and tendons, you know, so you have some chicken, you’re chewing on the bone where the ligaments and tendons are, and you get some of that, and now you’re getting some collagen.
And when it makes it to the large intestine, are you getting some fermentation that now has the biggest bang for the buck in terms of collagen, whether it’s on skin health or whatever, you know, other aspects of collagen may provide.
Crissman But here in Japan, it’s more common. You can get basically fried cartilage. It’s one of the things you can get at like a chicken store or something. They’ll just basically take the little cartilage. It’s really crunchy. And I tell you, when the Japanese eat a chicken bone, like a drumstick or something, they eat it right down to the bone as their custom.
Like in the States, I would always be like, ah, no good, that’s done. Whereas they’ll gnaw that thing right down. So there definitely are people who are still eating a large amount of just straight cartilage.
Mike: Yeah, then the question is what’s their skin health? it better? Do they look younger? I don’t know.
Crissman: They also have better complexion. But I haven’t touched my lecture, but for those of you, for people with darker skin, definitely, have less to worry about UVA, but more difficult to get the other benefits of light. it’s a bit of a trade-off.
Crissman: Nice. So I think we covered it all. Anything that we missed?
Crissman: Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak and so great to hear about your recent adventures.
Mike: Thanks for being on Chris and I’m looking forward to the next episode already.
Crissman: All right, thanks.
