So the next ones up are: CO2 is more important than oxygen and nitric oxide is an unhealthy
stress chemical. So these concepts are so fundamentally opposite to what we're taught,
especially the first one right. If you ask people what is the most important nutrient and then they
kind of get their head around it they probably go oh it's oxygen right. Number one thing is oxygen
because you only go a few minutes without breathing. Number two is water because you
can only go a few days without water and then all the rest is a lot longer right. So oxygen
seems like the most important nutrient. So the idea of carbon dioxide being more important than
oxygen is kind of saying it's the most important nutrient of all. Some people actually class it as
a hormone. I don't know if Dr Ray Peat does. I think that's you know a valid definition of carbon
dioxide or CO2. CO2 is actually one of the most beneficial things in the body and it's quite
hilarious that you know there's this effort to demonize it as a bad thing in the environment…
Because not only is it one of the most essential things in the human body it's also the most
essential thing arguably well along with sunlight and water for helping plants grow right. And as
carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere plants grow more and more and as CO2 increases in the
human body it has lots of beneficial effects as well which we'll talk about. So how is it beneficial?
Let's start with like my understanding before I came across Dr Peat and then we'll add Dr Peat's
understanding. So I first came across this concept from Dr Buteyko. Dr Buteyko was a Russian
scientist and he observed that the more that people had, the higher. He was a pulmonary
scientist, he would check people's breathing basically in a medical context, and he would
see the two extremes he would work with like astronauts and athletes who were like the very
highest level of pulmonary function. And then he'd also work with people who were dying of
pulmonary disease of various kinds. And struggling to breathe and he observed a very
interesting correlation which is that the more that people breathed the sicker they got up until
and including the point that they stopped breathing altogether and the less that they breathed the
healthier they were. Can you does that mean like in the more breaths during the minute that
they're taking to breathe or what's the distinction the definition of that? Literally filling up a bag
how much of a bag you would fill up with how much you're exhaling, because obviously if you're right
right the volume yeah absolutely volume yeah yeah and so I think in fact I might have
misremembered this I didn't look it up for years but I think it's something like maybe six litres
he'd consider really great and then like 12 was more common when people are unhealthy but the one
thing I do remember is so this is what he observed so therefore he would see that the more that people
were able to hold their breath the healthier that they were and so people who were in the brink of
dying, and it wasn't just a pulmonary disease it could be any disease, they would be unable to hold
their breath for a few seconds without desperately gasping. People who are like peak level of
strength and vitality they could hold their breath for maybe easily 60 seconds without effort. And so
that he ended up calling the control pause basically what the way that you measure your
own control pause is you take a little breath in, you breathe out, but don't push any air out just
let your lungs relax so half a breath out and then you basically just hold your breath and you
get a stopwatch and you see how many seconds you can hold it before you feel any kind of
significant desire to breathe. And so, he had a very simple chart, for he said if you're if the
amount of time you can hold it easily is between 0 and 10 seconds you're probably already sick
if it's between 10 and 20 seconds you're probably on the verge of getting sick like you you probably
get sick frequently or you know it doesn't take much if it's between 20 and 40 seconds then you're
probably you know averagely healthy like okay but can be taken down without too much trouble
if you're between 40 and 60 you're pretty strong and from his perspective you're if you're above
60 seconds if you could genuinely hold your breath with no effort for more than 60 seconds
in a relaxed way then you'd be like superhuman from his point of view. So that was his experience
there's a whole system behind it called the Buteyko method that people still do and teach to
this day it has not caught on massively despite being very effective for a lot of things the
usually the main thing it's used for is asthma it's very effective for that but it's actually
very effective for a whole range of different health issues but his system not Dr Peat's but
his system Dr Buteyko is required like practicing holding your breath for a long time which is
actually very very difficult and so anything that requires an extensive amount of effort
discipline exertion and overcoming resistance tends to not get a lot of mass appeal at least…
Unless there's kind of a status thing right I guess people love to like do intensive exercise
but then often it's a lot of showing off and you know if you say oh I held my breath for 60 seconds
say no one's going to go “oh, well done!” So there's not really any status around it and it's very
difficult so it's never really caught on. But, anyway, what's the science behind it and how is
it related to Dr Peat? So, Krissy you probably know the answer to this as based on context
but like, if you hold your breath, what is the thing that tells you “I need to breathe now”, what is the
mechanism? Oh, I mean I don't really know, for me it's the pressure of the build-up
of the carbon dioxide in the body that tells me I need to breathe
Awesome, yeah! Absolutely, you know the answer. Most people though think that it's the lack of oxygen
right if I hold my breath for too long I need to breathe why because I'm running out of oxygen
so the key thing to understand is this thing called the Bohr effect that was invented
in 1904 and what Dr Bohr discovered is that in order for oxygen to get from the blood red
cells which… So, the oxygen goes into your lungs, from the lungs it goes into the red blood cells
the red blood cells through the whole cardiovascular system transport the oxygen throughout the body
But then to get it from those red blood cells into every other cell it requires carbon dioxide
and so if you have if you do not have sufficient carbon dioxide to go from the red blood cells
into every other cell that means that that cell has to start making do without carbon dioxide
Without oxygen or with less oxygen, and so it can do that, it can do anaerobic respiration it
can do anaerobic energy creation through various different mechanisms, but none of them are as
energy efficient, and none of them are, as you know, involve the fastest strongest highest level of
metabolism, which is why Dr Peat was fundamentally against all of them because optimizing metabolism
was really I would say the centerpiece of his whole philosophy. So, now here's the thing, the higher
stress chemicals the more that you have an intolerance to carbon dioxide, the more that you
feel that the same level of carbon dioxide is intolerable to you and you have to breathe more…
And people get into a kind of loop with this and at the extreme this is called hyperventilating.
So, hyperventilating people right because they're just trying to get out as much CO2 as possible
now when someone is hyperventilating what's the usual advice they give you? Get a paper bag, right?
And blow into that, because then you're not losing the carbon dioxide you keep breathing it.
Back in again because you're breathing into a bag so it's kind of trying to break that cycle
Now, other than this effect of being crucial from to transporting oxygen from the red
blood cells into every other cell, the other thing that's so important about carbon dioxide is the
number one way that your body relaxes the whole cardiovascular system, so it dilates and opens your
arteries your capillaries your blood vessels and all the rest of it. So what you're saying you're
CO2 is what dilates the capillaries and not it's not not because i always thought it
was nitric oxide. So, you're saying it's CO2 it's definitely CO2 uh this is one of the craziest
things about science it's what it's up there to me is it's just as crazy as a lot of the other
things we talked about like almost everyone's starving for thyroid or people poisoning
themselves of estrogen um is believing that CO2 is a bad thing when in fact it is, you know, one of
the number one things that is beneficial for your body. So, that's why i added the other quote about
nitric oxide being bad for you Dr Peat firmly believed that nitric oxide is a stress gas it
is a gas that it is a secondary backup system, from Dr Peat's point of view, which is used in certain
circumstances which i'll talk about in a second. But, generally, you should have sufficient carbon
dioxide to keep all of those arteries and blood vessels and all the rest open, and the nitric oxide,
from his point of view, and i agree with this, is a emergency backup way of opening those blood
vessels to keep you alive. But it's not the primary way that that should be going on. Now what i didn't
learn from Dr Buteyko, but which I learned from Dr Peat is exactly why and how CO2 is so beneficial,
why Dr Buteyko was right that those people who could barely hold their breath for a few seconds
were probably very ill, versus people who could hold it for a long long time were probably
very strong and resilient and not ill is because carbon dioxide is mainly created when your body
is doing when your body is creating energy, when your body is creating ATP in the optimal way.
So, when your body's creating ATP using the Krebs cycle and it's uh going through the
electron transport chain, it's doing the whole thing, that means, you get, i think it's almost
30 units of ATP from two units glucose. So, the abundance of ATP when it's doing it that way
the two byproducts are water and carbon dioxide. Now, from a normal medical perspective, it's a waste
byproduct, but the interesting thing that Dr Peat said, and again this is not a theory, there's
abundance of science behind this, is that the higher that CO2 remains, the more that the body
stays in that high metabolism efficient optimal energy producing state, whereas the more that
you're depleted of CO2, the more it goes into its backup state. And based on what I said earlier
about Dr Buteyko, the reason for this should be obvious if you're joining the dots, because
all of those backup less efficient energy producing systems tend to be anaerobic
or they're less aerobic so meaning less oxygen. So, basically, that CO2 that you're creating is not
a waste product, although you do need to blow off the excess, obviously but it's not a waste product
because you need a certain amount to get the oxygen back into the cells for the next round
of energy production, and if you keep blowing off that CO2 excessively because your stress
chemicals are too high, which means that you're over breathing or hyperventilating, then you don't
have enough CO2 transporting enough oxygen into the cells. Your cells are going to be creating energy
through an inefficient mechanism, they're going to produce less CO2 as a byproduct and you're stuck
in this vicious circle. And when there's less CO2 floating around then you're going to be in a state
of hypertension, or closer to it if, all other things being equal, I mean there are adrenal issues and
stuff that can mean, you got all that bad stuff going on, you still are not having high blood
pressure, but generally at least a high blood pressure and then the body has nitric oxide as
an emergency backup system to deal with that. But nitric oxide has its own issues. So, I think at that
point let's go to what Dr Peat said about CO2 absolutely. He says the basic control of blood
flow in the brain is the result of the relaxation of the wall of blood vessels in the presence of
carbon dioxide which is produced in proportion to the rate at which oxygen and glucose are being
metabolically combined by active cells. In the inability of cells to produce CO2 at a normal rate,
nitric oxide synthesis in blood vessels can cause them to dilate. The mechanism of relaxation
by nitric oxide is very different, however, involving the inhibition of mitochondrial
energy production situations that favor the production and retention of larger amounts
of carbon dioxide in the tissues. These are likely to reduce the basic tone of the parasympathetic
nervous system and there is less need for additional vasodilation. Okay, so, I kind of
already said all that, but he said it in the proper sciencey way… So, let's look at a couple of bits
of that. So, the mechanism of relaxation by nitric oxide is very different involving the inhibition
of mitochondrial energy production - and again he gives a you know scientific reference in that quote -
So meaning if you're using CO2 that helps with mitochondrial energy production, but if you're
using nitric oxide it actually slows down mitochondrial energy production. So, it actually
makes it worse. The other thing he said is that large amounts of carbon dioxide in these tissues
are likely to reduce the basic tone of the parasympathetic nervous system. So, basically,
if you have enough carbon dioxide, you stay relaxed, that's the other part of it, and so
this in my view is one of the reasons that exercise is often, but not always as we'll talk
about next, healthy for people. So, the main way that we produce carbon dioxide
more than usual, well, there's two ways we can kind of build up carbon dioxide in the system, one
is to hold our breath. Most people don't do that, although there is a theory that people are
actually doing that unconsciously, and that that's the real cause of sleep apnea, the body is holding
the breath not because it's trying to kill you, but because it's trying to build on carbon dioxide,
because it's getting so low that it's actually an issue… So, that's a theory, but the other main way
that we build up carbon dioxide is exercise. That's why when you're running or whatever you're doing
you breathe more right, you may be out of breath, you may be puffing and panting, and all the rest of it,
if you're pushing yourself hard that's simply response to the carbon dioxide, right. There's
nothing else that you're doing there, other than just getting rid of what feels like an excess of
carbon dioxide, very good, yeah, that's lots, so he carries on to say nitric oxide is increasingly
seen as an important factor in nerve degeneration. Nitric oxide activates processes that can lead to
cell death. Inhibition of the production of nitric oxide protects against various kinds of dementia.
Brain trauma causes large increase in nitric oxide formation, and blocking its synthesis improves recovery…
And so every statement you made there, obviously we don't want to read it out, but
the studies behind it, right, so, all of these bad things that excess nitric oxide is actually doing…
And so, how have we come to this idea that you just said, Krissy, that nitric oxide is the thing
that dilates the blood vessels? Well, I said, technically it's true it does it's just that
it does it in a bad way, so where's this come from? It came from the discovery of viagra in the 1980s
which has been used, you know, later also for cardiovascular health by a lot of people,
including even some biohackers who really should know better, but they don't understand it's actually
the backup system… So, whereas carbon dioxide has this anti-inflammatory metabolism
boosting energy producing benefit, nitric oxide is the opposite. However, nitric oxide is often
related to being in this excitatory state, right, and so one area where nitric oxide absolutely
is required is for men to get an erection. So, you know, that's I've got, you know, a herbal product
for that, and I stand by that for that very specific purpose… Nitric oxide is necessary
and is effective. However, should men be walking around with one of those 24 hours a day?
Absolutely not! So, this is a thing where a little bit of poison is no big deal, right, a little bit of
nitrogen oxide, whatever it is, an hour a day or however much you're erect, that's absolutely fine…
Your body can deal with that, but having that be the only thing that stops you
hypotonic 24 hours a day that's not a good thing, so that's the
distinction and so you can even make the argument, the viagra there's nothing
wrong with that it lasts for a few hours, use every now and then, that's okay, it's
not the end of the world, but when people are kind of trying to constantly boost
nitrogen oxide to open the blood vessels, to me that seems like a really bad idea
when you look into the actual science behind it. Dr Peat goes on to say
organophosphates increase nitric oxide formation and the productive
anticholinergenic drugs such as atropine reduce it. Stress including
fear and isolation can activate the formation of nitric oxide, and various
mediators of inflammation also activate it. The nitric oxide in a person's
exhaled breath can be used to diagnose some diseases, and it probably reflects
the level of their emotional well-being. So whereas the level of CO2 is a way of
diagnosing health from this perspective, it being higher being good because it
means you must be able to retain most of it rather than blowing out
excessively in a hyperventilating way. So, nitric oxide is actually literally
opposite. So this is the case, why do people favor nitric oxide other than
maybe brainwashing by the pharmaceutical industries? I think it's
actually for the reason that it said, so if I just go back to it, stress including
fear can activate the formation of nitric oxide. So, you've got to remember,
and we talked about this a lot in other episodes on stress, people like the
feeling of stress often when the alternative is a feeling of depression
and deflation and being a low in energy, right? So, just a reminder there's three
kind of basic modalities of the nervous system one is a dorsal vagal mode where
we feel shut down the other is a sympathetic mode where we feel
overstimulated and the third is a ventral vagal mode where we feel
relaxed yet energized. So a lot of people a lot of the time are in a shutdown
state or probably not in a shutdown state but resisting a shutdown state…
Right? Like, you know, I hear this in a lot in people and they're like “oh I can't stop!”
“Because if I do, I'll collapse, you know, I'll fall asleep, like I've got to keep
going, I've got to keep going, I've got to keep going…” So, anyone who has that attitude
“I've got another coffee, I'm gonna do this, go to this, like I can't stop
because if I do, I'll collapse…” Which is a lot of people that is the attitude if
I need to fight that dorsal vagal state off, and so when that's your mode of
being, which is very common, and again I'm not making anyone wrong for this because
often this starts because of the stuff we've talked about, like a thyroid
hormone excess of estrogen, like a progesterone lack of testosterone, excess
of inflammation, excessive seed oils, etc, etc, and many other things all of that
stuff… But once you're in that state, stress feels good because the
alternative is collapse, or, you know, depression, or whatever you want to call
it, which feels bad. So, I think that's why people like nitric oxide, but the thing
that actually will get you out of that vicious circle of going between collapse
and overstimulation, a piece of it actually is carbon dioxide. And, so,
learning to tolerate carbon dioxide is good. Dr Peat, as far as I'm aware, did not
talk about and recommend Buteyko breathing practices… I don't know why I
haven't seen him comment on it, but if I had to guess, I would guess this because
the main mechanism that Buteyko breathing practice is used to help you
to tolerate more CO2, which is a good thing, but the mechanism they use is to
get you to hold your breath for a really really really long time until you
absolutely feel like you can't anymore, which they call the maximum pause as
opposed to the control pause. And often you're holding your breath like several
minutes… Many minutes, I got to the point where I could hold my breath for three
minutes from cold without any preparation, but I'll tell you what that does:
when you hold your breath for such a long time it triggers stress chemicals.
And Dr Peat was not keen on that, so his method of boosting carbon dioxide was
different. He would encourage people not to over breathe certainly but he was not
necessarily encouraging people to hold their breath for a very long time. He
encouraged them to obviously get into this high metabolism state where you are
producing ATP in optimal way because that will naturally raise carbon
dioxide anyway and he also actually experimented with increasing CO2 in the
environment and potentially even bathing in it. So, doing like - I don't actually
know if he did this - but I know one of his biggest followers like has a whole
book on bath bombs and it's basically adding sodium bicarbonate and an acid
like citric acid to a bath and then when you do that it creates there's loads of
CO2 in the atmosphere the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will go up like ten times but
actually there's all the CO2 bubbles in the bath itself and there doesn't have to be a
whole bath. If you don't have a bath you could just do a foot bath, it's still good, and
these little CO2 bubbles, just like if you drink sparkling water, you
collect them on the surface of your skin and then they'll be absorbed transdermally
through your skin straight into circulation. So if you want to do it in a
relaxed way, you know, warm bath, you know, the candles, music, whatever, you can
be super super relaxed, and then still really saturate your body in CO2. And I'm
actually a big fan of that, I really like doing it. I know we still have our list
but I… and maybe this might be for another time because Wim Hof is big out
there in breath and holding breath and things like that is that similar to
Buteyko is it different where does it fall on those lines? Yeah it's a good
question! So Wim Hof is absolutely not similar to Buteyko like any Buteyko
practitioner would say it's not because Wim Hof tells you to do something that
all Buteyko people tell you to never do which is hyperventilate. But I think
there is genius to Wim Hof's breathing because what he's really encouraging you
to do is to go between the extremes of hyperventilating so blowing out all the
CO2 and then holding your breath and building up the CO2 and if you notice
with a Wim Hof breathing pattern it always ends with holding the breath so
it's CO2 right down CO2 right up CO2 right down CO2 right up CO2 right down
CO2 up, that's what's going on. Now, another thing that's going on with that
which he talks about a lot and the scientists who work with him is that is
spiking the hell out of the stress chemicals the cortisol, the adrenaline, the
noradrenaline… Is that a good thing overall? I don't think that that settles
in either direction although of course adherence of either side would say that
it is but I think it ultimately depends on what you want to do with your life.
I think if you want to do the kind of superhuman stuff that you know Wim Hof
has done it proven in the lab priority condition but also you know many other
mystics and monks and all the rest of it, for all the ages, have been reported to
do if you want to do that supernatural stuff you do have to be very very good
at controlling your body's internal processes that are normally automatic
And one of those things would be to manipulate stress chemicals sometimes to
be extremely high, it's not necessarily bad for you to do what he does because
the theory behind it is that you're yes you are skyrocketing the stress
chemicals but then they can go back down again and they can actually you
know find an equilibrium. It depends what you have to do, you know… I would
say the Wim Hof method, I noticed it tends to be more attractive to men than
women although there's plenty of women involved but still most kind of health
groups there's more women than men in the Wim Hof health groups there tends to
be more men than women. And I don't think that's an accident I think it's because
you know one of the things that people say when they do Wim Hof breathing is
something some of the people say when they do fighting, which is like it makes
it everything else seems quite easy to deal with in comparison it's like you're
you're toning that sympathetic response to the point where like you're able to
deal with even highly stressful situations very well so if you're in a
context of I need to climb a mountain like Mount Everest or in the context of
I need to be in battle, I need to risk my life, I think those kind of practices are
very beneficial because they make you very strong and resilient and hardy
because you're the master of your own stress chemicals. However, what if it's
peacetime, what if you don't want to climb up Mount Everest in your shorts…
What if there are no battles what if you just want to live long and be happy and
relaxed and peaceful and joyful and play with your kids and you know not all of
us have that luxury but let's say you are an environment where you have that
luxury then it could be argued that it's not beneficial to do these things
to spike your stress chemicals because they're just going to prematurely age
potentially and if nothing else they're going to stop you from
having that optimal energy production. I've had rumors which I won't repeat
here but I don't know if they're true but that Wim Hof struggled with his own
issues, despite you know being a master in in some ways that, you know, he's
extremely impressive to everyone definitely, including me… So it's a choice
you know do you want to master your stress chemicals or do you want to stop
living in a stress state? Some will say it's a false choice, they would say
by Wim Hof method for you master your stress chemicals which will stop you
being a stress state… But I remember one of the scientists in the documentary
who's on this side, but talking about him, he said, you know, not only was this
cortisol very high and his noradrenaline very high after he did his breathing
practice it was higher even when he just walked into the room even before
all that like it just seemed to be high in general and is that a good thing?
Maybe I think, there was a certain point like when you can control
your own physiology and you can literally you know change your heart
rate it will change your CO2 concentration it will change your
adrenaline it will change a level of lactic acid it will etc etc etc then it's
just a choice what you do with it. So, I wouldn't want to judge Wim Hof or anyone
with that level of self-mastery but I'll say for the average person who doesn't
want to become superhuman it and who doesn't maybe want to harden themselves
and strengthen themselves to you know be able to thrive even in extreme duress it
might be better to just focus on optimizing your body's energy production
rather than like making yourself super super resilient to stress. Because by
making yourself resilient to stress you're also potentially filling your
body stress and prematurely aging yourself. We don't know that for sure
Wim Hof is you know still youngish he's certainly not 80 or something right so…
He's not yet reached the average age that people die so we don't know for
sure maybe he'll live to be under 50 and we're all completely wrong about this… I
guess we'll see. I hope you enjoyed that clip from the rejuvenate podcast if you
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