76: From Ice Baths to Ancestral Nutrition with Thomas Seager, PhD!

From Ice Baths to Ancestral Nutrition with Thomas Seager, PhD!

Thomas: posted or talked with Joe Rogan about testosterone, and the science behind it really blew up. 

Thomas: Before exercise, you know, like I want to find out how it is to do it before I go CrossFit. Food, sunshine, cold, exercise. These things are not money. They're biological. When you pre cool or per cool your workout, your mitochondria Well, we don't have a heat problem anymore.

You know, we can keep putting out the ATP. We can fuel this exercise. You get more endurance. You get a bigger peak. They say if you're in there for more than four minutes, you're just showing off. But I like showing off. They make it so easy. Why would you raise a chicken when you have DoorDash on your phone?

Michael Kummer: for the same reason I jumped into the cold because it's not convenient, you know, it's uncomfortable. It takes work. It takes dedication. So from this point forward, whatever someone, first of all, I don't go to regular doctors anymore because unless it's, you know, I break my leg and they need to patch me up.

But anything that's got to do with chronic disease, there is nothing that can tell me that I feel like would help me because they don't understand or don't want to understand the root cause. They want to pre discern them. What 

Thomas: possesses an Austrian guy to move to Georgia in the United States and become a farmer?

So now I'm trying to get back to more seasonal eating. Nobody says, um, when they go to McDonald's, Oh, are the quarter pounders in season today? You know, cause it doesn't make any sense. But if you eat spinach every day. 

Michael Kummer: Problematic. You know, what are you doing? Yeah. But the one thing you can eat, you can find, and 

Thomas: you can eat every day is animals.

We're so disconnected from our environment that we need a television to tell us whether it's raining. 

Michael Kummer: I consider myself incredibly lucky that I get to try those things, make money doing so, and get healthier at the same time. You know, I get, I get, I get paid. To be healthy, you know, and it's awesome.

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Michael Kummer: All right. Um, well, welcome back to the Primal Shift Podcast. Today we have a very special guest, Thomas Seager. And, um, I'd like to give him your wise attention to cold exposure.

So terrible for our health. 

Thomas: Because it doesn't feel good. And then we, uh, thank you fellas. Shoot. You're asking me a trick question. I feel like Marissa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny, you know, it's a bullshit question. And I know why you're asking me because there's so many people on Instagram or YouTube and they're saying, Cold exposure is the worst thing that you can do for your health.

You're gonna burn out your adrenals. You know what else will kill you? Exercise. Yeah, I would like to go fast. Stress. Of course, stress feels bad. Of course, stress isn't meant to be fun. And how else are you supposed to get stronger? You need a little bit of cold, and then you need recovery from that old You need a little bit of exercise and a lot less than people actually make it seem.

Maybe 60, 70 minutes a week of weightlifting or strenuous exercise is enough to move all the markers in your favor, but you also need rest. You need light, you need dark, you need fasting, you need feasting. You even need periods where you're thirsty and I don't care what the army says about drinking eight gallons of water a day.

A little bit of thirst is good for you and cold. is one of those things that our ancestors could take for granted, and we can't. If you think about, um, just a hot shower, I assume you have indoor plumbing, right? I think that's what we do. I got a hot shower. Why are there no more water keepers in Venti? You know, when you think back, like, how far back do you have to go to, before you couldn't really take a hot shower for granted?

Is it a hundred hoops? Probably. Indoor plumbing is a pretty new thing. It used to be, if you were taking a shower, it was cold. If you were taking a bath, you either had to heat it all up, you know, on your stove with wood, or you were doing it cold. The ancestors could take cold for granted. You and I, we have heated leather seats, you know.

We're so comfortable, and the comfort is killing us. But when you want to sell something, you don't sell it by saying how bad it feels. I mean, unless you're Joe Rogan and you go on there and you go, Oh, I got colder because it sucked worse. The reason we get cold is because we want that hormetic stress that makes her stronger.

But if I'm going to sell you vacation or a spa. or a luxury product. I'm going to say, Oh, it feels so good to spend this money. And the next thing you know, I'm making money and you're more poor is the opposite way. You need the cold. Your body is adapted to expect some cold. It doesn't take a lot. Just like your body is adapted to expect some exercise, expect some sunshine.

Cold is an essential part of our health. But that doesn't mean it's any fun. Right. 

Michael Kummer: And before we maybe get into some of the, you know, details, like specific benefits and, you know, how long, you know, you said, you know, a little bit of code, what does it mean, you know, uh, maybe just, you know, introduce yourself, who are you and why do you have anything to say, you know, I love that topic.

Thomas: That's an even tougher question. Yes. My, my name is Thomas Seeger. I'm a professor of engineering in the school of sustainable engineering at Arizona state university. So you've got a totally legit question. Like, what do you know about the cold? I teach engineering business practices and my research focus used to be in infrastructure and the environment.

Resilience of infrastructure, disaster recovery, and I didn't know anything about the cold until say five or six years ago when a former student of mine, Jason Stauffer, he said, Hey, have you ever tried ice baths? Nope. Have you ever heard of Wim Hof? Nope. But he invited me into this ice bath group. I've been doing cold showers, which make me angry, but I thought they would toughen me up, you know, so I got to stick with them.

And, uh, once I found the ice bath, I was like, this is great, totally different response than the cold shower. The first 15 to 30 seconds of the ice bath, terrible. But after that, you get a sense of calm, meditative relaxation. I'm like, oh, this is great. We wanted to keep it up. So, you know, we started buying a lot of ice.

Uh, we live in Phoenix. We're doing it in his backyard. We're And a hundred and fifty pounds of ice lasts about five minutes, you know, in the Phoenix summer. And we thought that's kind of nuts. Uh, we're engineers. We should build a machine. So we did. Uh, it makes its own ice. It's a refrigerator wrapped around a stock tank at the time.

We still have some pictures. It's incredibly ugly. Um, but then a friend wanted to buy one and so we're like, Oh, okay, this is kind of a thing. And, um, we said, we should start a company. We might sell one or two of these a week. You know, this was 2019. So long before it became, uh, kind of crazy and it was just a hobby really.

But then I got, um, my blood work back and You know, I'm trying to take care of myself. I've lost a lot of weight. I'm trying to stay healthy. So I said I should get my blood panel. Cholesterol's done. The whole male panel. Testosterone is in there. That's good. But my PSA, my prostate specific antigen, elevated.

I didn't really know what that meant, but I go online and I start Googling around and if you have an elevated PSA, the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, WebMD, they're all going to convince you that you're going to die of prostate cancer. Like this is what happened to me. The internet will play with your fears, you know?

And so it says you should go get a prostate exam, you should have a biopsy. And I didn't want that. I didn't want anybody to cut me open. So I said, first I'm going to talk to other guys and the stories I heard from other men about their prostate were scary as hell. So I was determined I wasn't going to go see a urologist.

I was, if I had to, I was going to die of prostate cancer. I told myself, you know, I didn't even have cancer. I just had an inflamed prostate, but I started getting in that ice bath. Every single day, I said, I'm going to handle this inflammation with keto and with ice baths and it worked. So I brought my PSA all the way down and so I got really serious about, um, health and about ice baths.

I knew I had to get to the library because I'm a scientist and find out how is this, uh, working. Ice baths are great for inflammation, but when I got my panel done again, my testosterone had gone through the roof. So I was in like 700, which your doctor will tell, you know, maybe I was in my early fifties, like 52, uh, say, well, that's very healthy.

You're doing great. Professor's eager. I'd gone up to 11 to eight. And so what would explain that? Turns out that there was a study done in Japan in 1991. If you do your exercise and then you're cold, your testosterone goes down. But if you do your cold. And then your exercise, just reverse the order, testosterone goes up.

So I wrote this article. I said, wow, there's really some science behind this. I put it up on the Morosco Forge website. Nobody cared because Google's not paying attention to Morosco, but Joe Rogan found it. And so 2022, and by this time, you know, Joe had been talking about ice baths. He's a Morosco customer.

Hugh Rimmond's talking about ice baths and the interest is growing and growing. Jason quit his job. Marasco is going full time for him. Um, and Joe read my post and he's like, there's this guy and he's doing ice baths and then exercise and his testosterone goes up. And, uh, guys started messaging me all that.

I'd written a ton of articles by this point, type two diabetes, Alzheimer's, all of these. insulin related chronic illnesses. But it wasn't until Joe posted or talk with David Goggins about testosterone that, uh, the science behind it really blew up. Now guys are messaging me from all over the world and they're saying, look at what happened to my testosterone numbers.

I'm getting this big boost. Do you think I can get higher? And that kind of thing. So it's just like the circuitous route. This is a very personal journey that brought me from. I mean, engineering is about making these machines, right? But they brought me more towards what's the science of ice baths because we really need that.

Right. It culminated in my book. So I have this little book, uh, and by little, I mean, there are 600 scientific citations in this thing. I'm like 13 chapters and it goes on and on forever. Cause I, that's the way I write. Uh, and you know, so like 300 copies or something. But I had to get it straight in my head.

I had to go through all of the literature. I had to organize it by what is the ailment? What is the condition? What are the dangers and the contraindications and get all of this in one place for the people who needed it? Because there's so many stories online that just don't make any sense. So that's my introduction, Michael.

Yeah. Uh, you get to know me a little bit. 

Michael Kummer: Yes. And I appreciate it. Um, you mentioned in the beginning, you know, a little bit of cold is good. What does that mean? I mean, how long do you have to stay in the ice? You know, 30 seconds to, or in the water, 30 seconds, two minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes is longer. Or is there like a, a cutoff where you, you know, you don't get 

Thomas: any more benefits?

We have this idea that if a little bit is good, then more must be better. You know, that's the American way. And you know, it's not true. Like you could have your favorite food. I don't know what it is. Let's say it's a tomahawk steak. Cause you're so animal based. And you eat one and you're like, Oh, that was delicious.

You say, I'll have another one. But it's not as good. You say, I'll have a third one. And by now you're making yourself sick just because look, if you have a little bit of money, that's good. And more money is better, but food, sunshine, cold exercise, these things are not money. They're biological. And everything in biology has a curve where not enough is no good.

A little bit might be just right. And too much turns out to be no good again. So the cold is like that. Susanna Soberg did this study on brown fat and she surveyed Danish winter swimmers. So these are the guys who will go into the fjord, you know, and it's a Scandinavian tradition. She invited them to come into the University of Copenhagen and do these PET scans to look at their brown fat.

And sure enough, they have brown fat. It was a long time that medical doctors didn't think that adults had any brown fat at all. That turned out to be wrong. In people who get enough cold, they will keep their brown fat. Children have a lot of brown fat, but then you gradually lose it if you don't stay cold.

So she found that these Danish winter swimmers, they've got the brown fat. And she said, okay, how long do you swim? And people have different answers. You know, she's just surveying them. She averaged them out. Turns out it's 11 minutes a week at about four degrees Celsius. Does that sound like a lot? It's not a lot of cold.

So it's, and she said, it doesn't matter if it's 11 minutes all at once, or if it's spread out into like three different sessions. But remember, this is just a survey and an average. We don't really know what the minimum dose is. We don't know what the dose response curve even looks like. Now they say, if you're in there for more than four minutes, you're just showing off.

But I like showing off, you know, sometimes I'm going to show off. And I think it's a pretty good rule of thumb. If you're just starting out, you go cold enough to gasp. So you get in your, and that might be 50 degrees. Or if you're European listeners, it could be, um, like just in the low teens, Celsius. It's fine.

You're going to feel that gas reflex. Then you go, if you're just starting out, go cold enough to shiver. Listen to your body. The analogy that I make is with weight training. You could say, well, uh, what weight should I do and how many reps? I have no idea. It depends upon your current state of training. And so you might say, um, do an amount of weight that will lead to failure in eight to 10 reps.

You know, just as a rule, I'm not recommending this. There'll be a rule of thumb that when you're in touch with your body is right for you. Same thing with cold. Go cold enough to gasp, long enough to shiver. Once you've recruited some brown fat and it takes 10 to 14 days of daily cold exposure to acclimate to the cold, you're probably not going to feel the same shiver.

You don't need to go all the way to shiver because the brown fat is creating enough heat without shivering to keep you warm for those 2 to 4 minutes. So what I do is, super cold, 33, 34 degrees, 1 degree C. There's ice floating in the water and I do 2 to 4 minutes and that's it. Then I get out. Now I'm a, I'm a little impatient, you know, uh, sometimes I'm like, okay, this cold is great and everything, but I gotta go do some work.

And I have difficulty meditating even in the ice bath. So if you're more patient and you don't want to go every day. You could go a little longer. I'm not, I'm not going to tell you that there's a cookbook or a recipe or a formula beyond the rules of thumb that I've just mentioned. Right. That makes a lot of sense.

Michael Kummer: Um, you mentioned before ice bathing. Before exercise. I did this a while ago just because I thought let's do something completely crazy. I had no idea about that study or your article. I just thought, let's do things different because everyone jumps in after the workout. I have to do whatever. And I'm like, I want to find out how it is to do it before and then I go CrossFit.

And I actually noticed that I performed quite well. I never, you know, kept exact metrics or, you know, see if I would, you know, would lift more or whatever, but I just felt good. Um, and it's interesting, but I never, you know, continued doing that. But now knowing that, I will, I think I'm going to switch it around 

Thomas: and go in.

Do it that way. Pre cooling it's called. I didn't know this. Um, I, my experience was, I was getting into the ice bath because I was worried about inflammation. Then I would get out and I would be cold. And so I'm like, you know, I got to warm up and some jumping jacks or some squats or some pushups. I got a pull up bar.

And then I would go walk into class. Cause at the time I was living maybe a mile away from campus. And even a brisk walk is enough exercise. So I was just sort of naturally doing the cold and then the exercise that turned out to be the right protocol for testosterone. Well, when we installed an ice bath at ARX Fitness in Austin, Texas, they have these super sophisticated machines.

It's a constant displacement machine. rather than constant resistance. And so it's all, you know, tricked out with the sensors and the computers and it gives the people using it a like maximum power output curve over time. It's wonderful. Right. Well, I got a text message from ARX saying, Hey Tom, the people who do the ice bath Before they do the machine, because they were waiting for the machine, like, okay, well, I might as well get in the Morse code, you know, they get a 25 to 30 percent measured performance boost from their ARX.

What's going on? Got to go to the library again. Turns out Craig Heller at Stanford University, he's been on the Huberman podcast. He has studied what's called per cooling. This is heat extraction. Between your sets and he gets this enormous boost. The mitochondria in your muscles generate two things as a consequence of all the ATP that they're producing.

One of them is heat and the other is stray reactive oxygen species. Your body has the capacity to handle this excess heat and these excess ROS. The melatonin in the mitochondria will donate electrons and scavenge the ROS, for example, and your body will sweat and thermoregulate to help shed the heat.

But there are limits. The mitochondria will begin to to slow down to protect themselves from the damage of excess heat or excess ROS. And we call this fatigue. So fatigue is not a problem. It's your body's answer. It's like trying to solve this problem of overexertion, which can be dangerous. When you pre cool or per cool your workout, Your mitochondria are like, Oh, this is great.

We don't, we don't have a heat problem anymore. You know, we can keep putting out the ATP. We can fuel this exercise. You get more endurance. You get a bigger peak and you get the testosterone boost. So you get the anabolic gains and the muscle gains and the change in body composition. It's enough for me to say, why would you not?

Interesting. Yeah. And so you're experiencing what Craig Heller had to go into the laboratory and measure, but your experience is more important than any study. If it works for you, then keep doing it. Correct. Very clear. All right, very nice. Um, 

Michael Kummer: do you want to now kind of switch over and ask me questions?

Thomas: Yeah, so I've read that you're a homesteader. What's 

Michael Kummer: homesteading? It means a lot of different things for different people, I guess. But for us, it means, you know, being in control of our food supply, at least to a certain degree, and being self sufficient and healthier, you know, after all, because Food in the store is crap, regardless of how much you pay for it, or how good it's, you know, what the label says.

Um, that's just based on, you know, unfortunately, our farming system is set up, our regulations and compliance regulations are set up, you know, it's the USDA has to put a stamp on it. It means automatically it's crap food, unfortunately. And, uh, and so, you know, we decided that we need to break out of this cycle and also, you know, going back to some of those, you know, ancestor concepts of being cold, being uncomfortable, you know, going back to some of the ways of how humans have been doing things before everything got crazy.

And I'm not talking about the last five years, but, you know, the past couple of decades where, you know, we discovered lead paint and, you know, all of those, you know, beautiful things that make life more convenient, but are sicker, you know, in the process. And so, 

Thomas: That's why we decided to, yeah, but you're still an enigma, Michael, what possesses a German guy to become a Georgian, Austrian, I need to, I need to make that distinction.

Um, what possesses an Austrian guy, you and Schwarzenegger are both Austrian, that's all I know. What possesses an Austrian guy to move to Georgia in the United States and become a farmer? Uh, good question. 

Michael Kummer: Um, I actually, um, Was in sales, uh, it says, uh, enterprise security roles and authorizations is what I did for most of my life, you know, and, uh, and so I worked for a Swiss company, actually moved from Australia, Switzerland, uh, worked for them.

And, uh, and then they asked me if they want to help, you know, expand in the U S and so I came over here and, uh, did my sales for, for a couple of years. And then I realized that, you know, this is not really my, my passion. I like it, but it's not my passion. And then more and more, we got into, uh, You know, healthier, a healthier way of living, the more I realize that technology is really the one thing I want to reduce in my life.

And not the other way around, right? And so that really, you know, made me kind of mentally disconnect from, from software and technology. It's still useful in certain areas, but it's, I think it's, we've, we've gotten way out of hand. Um, depending 

Thomas: on the swung, you know, way too far to one side. Yeah. But not everybody who's sick of Microsoft Office learns how to slaughter a chicken.

Like, this is kind of a big transition, you know? 

Michael Kummer: Yeah, yes, but it's been, you know, in the works for I think the past decade or so, it really started with my wife and I figuring out that, um, added sugars are maybe not that great, you know, and every single food that we eat and from there we went into, you know, paleo and keto and carnivore animal based and, and, you know, then we realized, well, it's not only nutrition.

And so, You know, as we went along and tried to take control of more and more aspects of our lives, we realized that you can only take control of your health if you take control of your food supply. Um, and so that's when, uh, my, actually my grandma, she's still alive. She's now 92, I think, and she's like, it's so, you know, it's hilarious because she grew up, you know, raising cattle and, and all, um, and now I'm, I guess the, probably the only one in the, in the extended family who went back to kind of, you know, farming.

Thomas: It does seem like, um. People just want to go to the Piggly Wiggly and pick it up. Like, I don't really know where you shop down in Georgia, but they make it so easy. Why would you raise a chicken when you have DoorDash on your phone? 

Michael Kummer: Ah, for the same reason I jump into the cold because it's not convenient.

You know, it's uncomfortable. It takes work. It takes dedication. It takes a lot of the things that, Yeah, most people don't care about and pay for the consequences, 

Thomas: you know, health wise. One of the ways that I paid was my son was six years old when he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. And, um, I had to learn everything about metabolism.

I had to learn everything about insulin. I kept scrupulous records about what he ate, all his exercise, all of his insulin injections because this is over 20 years ago. This is before insulin pumps and CGMs. And so we would go meet with the dieticians and endocrinologists and they would tell us a bunch of things just weren't true.

And so this was the beginning of me kind of waking up to, well, I'm going to call them nutritional lies. They would say, Oh, he can eat anything you want, you know, just give him enough insulin. And I know that's not true because there is no amount of insulin that you can give a six year old boy that will prevent a glucose spike from an Oreo cookie, one Oreo cookie.

And I could measure it in my son's blood sugar. And then I would look, you know, at my daughter and I said, well, What's it doing to her? And what's it doing to me? There's Uh, a certain experience that once you have, create, it created in me a distrust of the entire, like the American Diabetes Association, all the institutions that were presumably organized to help me and my son manage his blood sugars, realized we were on our own.

And then I read an article, you know, I was in a dentist's office or something. This was back when Reader's Digest was a thing, you know, you're waiting. And so you flip through the magazines cause we didn't have smartphones. And there was an article about a study in Finland. This was a 20 year longitudinal study.

And it said type one diabetes, not the type two, but this is the autoimmune disorder that is irreversible. It is associated with an insufficiency of vitamin D in the last trimester of pregnancy and the first year of life. I had no idea. And it clicked. Like, He was born in October. October is a cold month in Northern New York.

Uh, you know, my wife wasn't getting enough vitamin D. He wasn't getting enough vitamin D. And that's not a, uh, like a certainty, but it just means increased risk. And it made me think, what else don't I know? Like, what more do I need to learn? So by the time I got my elevated PSA, you can understand why I didn't want to go to the doctor.

Because. That's just, once you enter the allopathic medicine, like, establishment, there's a cascade of events. There's always three more tests that they want to run until they find something wrong with you and keep running up the bills. And they tell you not to worry about it because your insurance company is going to pay for it all anyway.

That is the moment where you have lost control over your own health. So now, I own an ice bath company, and the idea here is to allow people to take charge of their own metabolic health. You don't have to make any changes to exercise, you don't have to make any changes to diet, if you're willing to get into the ice bath for a couple of minutes a day.

You will improve your insulin sensitivity, you will build brown fat, you will stimulate mitobiogenesis, you will correct metabolic disorders. And, it only takes a couple of minutes of discomfort a day. That's the first lifestyle change that people can do to reduce the risk of every single risk of death from chronic illness in the United States.

They all have their origins in insulin resistance. Ben Vickman wrote a great book called Why We Get Sick. And, uh, You can sort of condense it down and say, we get sick because of metabolic dysfunction, right? Yeah, 

Michael Kummer: that's exactly right. And funny enough that you said, you know, the loss in trust in the medical community, because I kind of, well, we have the same similar experience.

Our, our second, our second kids, our son was born prematurely and, you know, my, there was already, you know, issues during the pregnancy and my wife was admitted to the hospital a couple of times. And then at some point they said, um, we need to, you know, get him out. And it was a 30, uh, weeks and six days. So significantly earlier than what we would have hoped for.

Um, and they're like, yeah, because you can see, you know, they had, you know, they had Explanations, but I couldn't really say, is there anything truly wrong? It was just, oh, that's just in case let's take him out. You know, unfortunately he's completely fine. And, you know, he's growing and everything is good, but I'm like.

At that point, I'm like, I'm going to question every single thing a medical profession tells me because it, some of it just does not make any sense. It, it, it, it almost appears as if, you know, we can treat that symptom. We don't really understand and want to understand what the underlying reason is. I mean, what is the reason why, even if there was something wrong, why it got to that point?

You know, what was, what did my wife and I maybe do leading up to the pregnancy and during pregnancy that, you know, might have caused a complication? If there was one, because we still don't know for sure, um, considering that he is completely healthy, you know, uh, and other kids that were born at, you know, most of them have some sort of kind of, you know, long term issues where it can turn over to preemie, you know, um, and so, and I'm like, So from this point forward, whatever someone, first of all, I don't go to regular doctors anymore because unless it's, you know, I break my leg and they need to patch me up, they can do it very well.

But anything that's got to do with chronic disease, um, you know, There is nothing that can tell me that I feel like would help me because they don't understand or don't want to understand the root cause. They want to treat the symptom. They're drug dealers and that's okay. You know, if you need drugs, but anything else, you really have to do your own research, which is at the end of the day, ridiculous, because why do we have a You know, medicate 

Thomas: professionals.

You, what you say about your son, um, it brings up a lot of difficult emotions. Like, as a father, I felt ashamed that I didn't understand what was going on with my son. I, I couldn't diagnose him. Like, I just thought he had the flu. I was giving him orange juice because that's what my mother did for me. She thought orange juice, oh, vitamin C, and this is a healthy thing.

Worst thing. I was just making it worse for him when I wanted to be making it better. Now I know, orange juice is poison. I don't care whether you're diabetic or at what age you are, orange juice is not good for you. A whole orange is a different story, but once you've juiced it Then it just becomes like a, uh, a diabetes delivery mechanism.

Great. And that contradicted my expectation of myself as the protector, as the father. Of course, I felt shame and guilt, like the diabetes was my fault. And I took those negative emotions and I channeled them into trying to learn everything I could about it. Manage it better, uh, do a better job caretaking for him and really come to understand it.

But I don't think that those, the shame has never really gone away and maybe as a motivator, it's good. And maybe I'm overreacting, but when a dad has a child who's suffering, I think a lot of things go through his mind. Like, what did I do wrong? What could I have done better? Where did I mess this up? And I think that's especially true when your pregnant wife is in the hospital, she's not capable of, you know, she's already debilitated.

This is all on you. You have to be the brains and the decision maker. And when they come to you and say, we want to get your son out, darn right, you're going to have questions because whatever happens, they move on in their career. You have to live with the consequences for the rest of your life. 

Michael Kummer: And the other noodles, so that is, you know.

If you feel okay, no, we got to do something different. This doesn't feel right. You know, then there is still, you know, that, that remaining doubt. My wife told me so often, you know, when we changed from the standard American diet to paleo and later keto, like, what if we are wrong? You know, what if it turns out that everyone else is right?

You know, that keto is terrible for your health. And unless you're really convinced of, you know, of your truth, that can also be incredibly difficult for, I think, for many parents that want to maybe do better. But. You know, the, the pediatrician says, no, you know, the kid needs to eat whole grains, you know, uh, and drink orange juice and, you know, let him at the ice cream because, you know, otherwise it's going to be, you know, I don't know, psychological issues because all the friends are eating it, you know, whatever, you know?

And so I think that's a very, very, difficult aspect as well. And what has helped me is to think back, okay, what have humans been doing for a very, very long time? However much time you think humans have been on this planet, because some people don't believe it's been very long. Uh, but however long it is, you know, might be a few thousand years or a few million years, but it's different to what we do now, you know, and whatever is right, it's not what we're 

Thomas: doing now.

So, let's say that you think it's a few thousand years and you think, and your best understanding comes from the oldest texts, you know, that we have at our disposal. You're like, I'm going back to the Old Testament. You know what they didn't have in the Old Testament was protein bars. And I'm not even, there's probably worse things, but you know what they didn't have?

They didn't have Reese's peanut butter cups. So, there used to be these traditional rules about eating that Um, and people followed them. They didn't necessarily understand why, but they worked. So let's take a look at this so called Mediterranean diet. There's no such thing as the Mediterranean diet. I mean, there's the Mediterranean sea and there's all these different cultures around the Mediterranean sea, but people have a concept of what this means.

What they, it's not what you eat. It's when you're not eating. One of the things about all of the cultures around the Mediterranean is that they have strict religious rules around fasting. That could be lent, or it could be Ramadan, or it could be anything, right? And they tell you when not to eat. It's not the olive oil.

It's not the fish. I mean, those are fine things, but it's the fasting that goes into this diet. Then when they bring it over to the United States and they market it as the Mediterranean diet, cause they want to sell you olive oil. There's like 70 percent canola with a blob failing or something like that and tell you that it's healthy.

They forget to tell you that you're not supposed to eat during these, there's like 180 days worth of fasting. And you know, the Orthodox Christian calendar, don't quote me on that because it's not my area of expertise. This idea of what you're not eating is probably more important than what you are eating.

Right. The scientists from Harvard in the fifties and the sixties that were paid off by the sugar lobby to, you know, at the, as the cold war is accelerating and we're like, no, no, no, we don't want to import sugar from Cuba or whatever. They tried to convince us that it was fat that was making us sick. and margarine would be healthier.

They tried to convince us that, uh, sugar doesn't really have a lot of calories, so you don't really need to worry about it. And it was all a bunch of lies that enriched the corporations that paid them to produce this so called science. Now, who do you trust? Well, you trust your own experiences. I started with keto.

Maybe four years after my son was diagnosed, when he was in the pediatric of intensive care ward, our pediatrician was our next door neighbor. I trusted him with everything, right? He said, someone's probably a couple hours away from a coma. He's in a condition called ketoacidosis. As your body switches to fat metabolism, it produces ketones.

It can change in a type 1 diabetic. It can change the pH of the blood. And when the pH drops too low, it's a very dangerous condition. And so maybe this is why ketosis has such a bad reputation. Cause it's extremely dangerous for type 1 diabetics. For the rest of us. It's like the normal metabolic state.

If you associate it with ketoacidosis, then you're making the wrong association. It was only true for my son because his body no longer made insulin. Since then, they trained us. Like if he ever goes into ketosis, you got to get him to the hospital. Well, My son never wanted to go back to the hospital. He's six, which means he was old enough to understand what happened to him, why it happened.

He would go to the birthday party and they would say, Oh, here's the cake and ice cream. He would say, no, thank you. And not because, um, he doesn't want to offend anybody, but in his mind, he's like, that's how I want it from the hospital. I don't want to go to that hospital again. So sometimes you get sick and you have a fever.

And you don't have an appetite and he would go positive on ketones and he would say, Dad, I don't want to go to the hospital. We learned how to manage his insulin injections so that we could bring him out of ketosis, which, you know, the endocrinologist was telling me was a very dangerous thing to do.

He's never been back to the hospital for type 1 diabetes because he set that goal and it required us to understand metabolism at a different level. So Michael, what am I going to do? Not go into ketosis myself. Like I have to understand this. If my son is going to be in and out of keto, I have to know what's going on.

And at first, like the first three days, maybe you feel like crap because you have no metabolic flexibility. Your body is not accustomed because it hasn't been in keto for so long. It's like, what the heck's going on? Now I have what's called metabolic flexibility It doesn't take me three days of zero carbs to get into ketones.

Um, I can pop that urine stick like after four minutes in the ice bath because I'm pretty low carb. But I go in and out of keto, which seems to me like a healthy way to do it. Same here. Yeah. And, um, 

Michael Kummer: the, I think the other nuance to, um, to trusting or not trusting doctors is that very many of those experiments, especially in the nutritional world, are very easy to do.

And if you don't know, is this guy right? Or someone else, right? Just try it out. There was no harm. We're not eating anything, but meat for two weeks is not going to kill you, you know, or eating only rice for two weeks. I'm going to kill you either. I might not let you feel great, but you know, you're not going to die.

And, but that's one of the things I hear a lot. You know, I had IBS irritable bowel syndrome for three, well, yeah, three decades. possibly even a little bit longer. And it all went away when I stopped eating most plant foods, right? I'm like, huh, this is interesting. And then the more and more I discovered, you know, that all foods have, or all plant foods at least have defense chemicals, right?

Because nobody wants to be eaten. Not, not an animal or a human or a plant. And I'm like, how does it make a lot of sense? And of course, you know, everyone reacts differently to those individual defense chemicals, you know, what, you know, tomato might work for one guy, not for the other. Yeah. And. When I, you know, published a video and say, Hey, this is how I fixed my IBS by just cutting out plants for a while.

And then just selectively, you know, putting stuff back in to see what triggers me, what doesn't. Um, and now I know what I can and cannot eat and I'm completely fine. And I'm like, Oh, this is crazy. You know, every dietician, you know, Tends to the exact opposite. I'm like, well, here's the thing. Just try it out.

Just need only plants for a while and see how you feel. Then you'd only meet for a while and see how you feel. And you realize probably if you eat only meat, you'll feel way better than eating only plants, you know? Uh, and it's a very simple experiment. I don't know why people are so reluctant to self experiment a little and just listen to their body and see how they feel.

I think most people don't even want to feel. Anything, you know, or at least not being in tune with their own body. I don't want to know, you know, they just want to do whatever they do without much thinking, without much feeling. And that's just a shame because most of most of everything you can figure out relatively quickly yourself.

If you cold plunge for a couple of days, you're like, how do I feel after getting out? I feel really good after getting out. How do you sleep? Yeah, how do you 

Thomas: sleep? What's your energy levels like? He's like, well, actually, it feels pretty good. But then I saw someone on Twitter who said, there's no double blind, placebo randomized trial that says the thing that happened to you actually happened to you.

Healing and thinking together. are two different things. We, in the United States, we are products of the enlightenment. I just finished reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin. He's like the original American scientist and inventor. Wonderful story. And he epitomized the American view of the enlightenment.

In France, um, maybe it was Descartes or Voltaire or one of these other guys, it was Descartes who said, I think, therefore I am. He could have said, I feel, therefore I am. He could have said, I act, therefore I am, right? But the enlightenment privileged the mind and the thoughts to the point where now, at least in the U.

S., we've lost track of what feelings even are. We don't even know. What's the difference between a thought and a feeling and that we're so out of touch with our body like I'm a professor and on campus, the faculty think like the whole rest of the body is just something you have to bring your brain around to meetings or, you know, they're so out of touch with everything happening below the neck.

And I think that's emblematic of something that happens in the American society. So we are in our school system, in our culture, we are taught to be. Disconnected from our own feedback mechanisms, as if we could only learn out of books or in a lecture, and I'm a teacher for goodness sakes, nothing matters more than your N equals 1 experience.

I don't care what the Lancet, or the BMJ study, or the clinical trial, or what the p value is, if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. Yeah. Michael Pollan wrote this great book called The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's very, you know, it's great reading. And then he sort of sums it up as if, you know, it's just this irreconcilable issue of what should the omnivore eat?

And I thought, wow, that's fascinating. And now I look back at that book and I'm going, nope. You see, this is wrong. You should be eating meat. You should be eating fish. You should be eating animal products. Think of plants as medicine and flavor. Right. But they're, that's not food. Right. Not for us. And so, you know, people are going to get angry at me sometimes.

Um, but I'm finding out what works for me. Because my ancestors. are from the North Sea. I've been giving this some thought. Do you think like my great great great, whatever it was, grandmother would pass up blueberries in the summertime? 

Michael Kummer: No 

Thomas: way. She's like, this is fantastic. Let's get all these blueberries, you know?

So eat the blueberries in the summertime. But there is nowhere in my evolutionary history that, um, you know, it was getting blueberries made in Chile flown up to the Kroger's in Arizona for the winter. It doesn't make any sense. So now I'm trying to get back to more seasonal eating. If you're on the farm and you're raising your own food, you can't help it.

The weird thing about America is we think we're supposed to go to the restaurant and order whatever we want, you know, uh, nobody says, um, when they go to McDonald's, are the quarter pounders in season today? You know, it doesn't make any sense when the food comes out of the factory, it transcends all space and time.

But if you're on the farm, Maybe you just don't have that. That's not what we're cooking with. So I favor the seasonal approach because food is about the way it makes you feel. And sometimes that's the story that comes with it. And sometimes it's all, like you say, in your gastrointestinal tract, in your energy.

And I 

Michael Kummer: actually proposed an experiment a couple of episodes ago. I said, you know what, if you don't know what to eat, and you know, you'll be sick of hearing a million different opinions. Just eat wherever you live right now. You know, especially if you've been living in this place for generations, you know, just eat what's available.

What do you could potentially theoretically hunt or gather, you know, whatever's in season, you know, that's what you need. You know, you're not going to be, you're likely not going to be overloaded with, uh, overloaded with oxalates because spinach is only growing for two weeks in a year or whatever the case might be.

And also, but if you eat spinach every day, problematic, you know, what are you doing? Yeah. But the one thing you can eat, you can find, and you can eat every day. 

Thomas: is animals, right? Fish, they don't care whether it's winter or summer, like they're swimming around and they're ready for you to catch up, you know?

And so I favor your approach because you're more connected to the land and the sun and the season and the weather and all of our human evolution. is in an environment or was in an environment that is connected. It's only now that we have central air conditioning, that we have, you know, high emissivity windows to reduce our electric bill or something.

We are not, Arizona is a great example. We call it the Valley of the Sun and, you know, sometimes it's 45 degrees C, so it could be like 120 at the absolute peak at the airport, you know, that's dang hot. You'd think that with this much sunshine, people would have plenty of vitamin D. No, they don't. Because they don't go outside in the sun.

They stay in their car, in their air conditioner. We're so disconnected from our environment that we need a television to tell us whether it's raining. And that's the most preposterous thing. You know, the weather report in Arizona. That's a different level of existence. And it requires some conscious effort to reconnect us with our environment.

That's incredibly, 

Michael Kummer: I think, difficult for many to, at the end of the day, to think differently than we do. everyone else is doing. And, you know, both, uh, more so my wife, you know, has kind of had her struggles over the years to, to be just different, you know, when someone says, Hey, you know, let's go out at night.

I'm like, what do you mean go out at night? You know, it's, you know, eight 30 lights out, you know, or whenever the sun is gone, you know, that's when I'm gone. And so, but it's, it's like, it's literally like a switch. But once you make that switch, once you feel Being uncomfortable because you're different.

Then everything else that's uncomfortable, you know, it's so much easier because if you can be uncomfortable in society, you can get comfortable in the cold, you know, or in the heat or whatever. 

Thomas: Well, that raises the question, how did you go from this like food independent minded, I'm not going to do software anymore to I'm going to get an A.

Every single cold plunge, I can finally start writing articles about it. 

Michael Kummer: Uh, that's a very good question. I think it started when, when, when my content resonated really well. And people ask, Hey, have you tried this? Have you tried that? And then I coincidentally, you know, the very first cold plunge I took in a morose before that's great.

You know, and, and we spoiled you right from the beginning. I mean, that was one of those, one of those things I'm like, I got out. I'm like, I feel so different and it's good. You know, I had these like. Or, uh, almost, you know, around me for the rest of the day, I was energetic and slept while I'm like, I got to do co plunging, you know?

Um, and so, you know, I started like, you know, talking to brands and then figuring stuff out. And then, you know, I got a co plunge home and I'm like, well, this is awesome. The content resonates really well. People are liking it. People are, you know, buying the product because I tell them that that's the one I use and I like it.

And I'm like, well, you know, if, if, if this is so great, you know, there's so many co founders out there. Everyone has their pros and cons, you know, I want to be able to try them all and write about them. So, you know, whatever your budget is, whatever your requirements are, you find one that works for you. You know, not everyone can afford, you know, a 10, 000 plus unit.

Some people have to use a 150, 000 inflatable, you know, but if that's what it takes to get right. She started. Yeah, that's what you should do, you know, and so, and that's kind of what's the, the beginning and, and, uh, and, and still to this point, I mean, I'm still, you know, right, right now, you know, working on new cold exposure and heat exposure.

Those two things have really taken over a lot of my. My writing and recording time because they are so, uh, foundational to my daily life. You know, we have two saunas, infrared and the regular one. We have, I don't know, I think right now seven cold plungers, you know, you know, a backyard. Well, my wife is like, you know, you know, this is not a, you know, kind of commercial spa setup.

This is the backyard. I already have to share with the chickens and the rabbits and the bees and the geese and the turkeys. Um, you know. But it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's fun. You know, it's, I, I consider myself incredibly lucky that I, I get to try those things, make money doing so, and get healthier at the same time.

You know, I get, I get, I get paid. To be healthy, you know, and, and it's awesome. 

Thomas: There's something really interesting about the Sona, um, it's taken off, which is great. And there's some really good science. When you go read the papers that are done in Finland and some of these colder countries where the Sona is a tradition.

Sona, Sona. Means hot and cold. Right. Right. And it's a weird, and it says right in the scientific study, you know, that we're studying this and when they do the epidemiological studies in Finland, and I know there's like three and a half million sauna in Finland and there's only 5 million people or something like that.

Right. . 'cause they're totally into it. They take. The cold for granted when they're citing the research in the United States and maybe because in Finland they take the cold for granted. Of course, you go out in the snow, you don't need a morosco if you live in Finland, but the two are always going together.

It's not just the hot box without the cold experience. None of the data means a dang thing. If you're not doing the thermal contrast therapy. Well, uh, talk to Pete Nelson at Sisu Sauna about this. He was on Cam Haines podcast and he says, look, you know, when you read the studies, it's really the traditional finish.

There's really no studies on the infrared. And it's a wonderful story about how it heats you from the inside out. And I'm like, that's really interesting, Pete. We have an infrared sauna here and it doesn't do me a damn bit of good because once I get out of the mirage coat and I get in the infrared sauna, it only goes up to like 145 degrees Fahrenheit.

It takes me 45 minutes to break a sweat. Like my phone will conk out and I'm just sitting there, you know, like I should have brought a newspaper or something waiting to get a sweat on. To pair the mirage coat, you really need. The super hot dry finish sauna. So like 180 degrees and up. 

Michael Kummer: But I'll tell you what, I actually did an experiment because I've had this question a lot and I, you know, I own both types of saunas.

And you know, I, I use both and kind of, and I'm like, I want to find out what's the, the metabolic stresses. On, you know, we're going to fill a full spectrum in for rent. So it heats up to 169 or so. Okay. Um, so a little bit higher than the 145. And then we have the, the efficient barrel solid that you can use either dry or you, you know, it's pouring water to make it really humid.

Right. And then I also have a, a steam box. That's on a box. They call it. And I've tested those different ways, uh, using, I have this Frontier X, uh, chest strap that measures, you know, my respiratory rate, my, um, HRV, um, heart rate, obviously, um, I wore a glucose monitor to see my, my glucose response, um, and at the different experiments, and I noticed that My highest stress response was with the traditional sauna and extreme humidity.

Yeah, I think that wiped me out. That's surprising, yeah. The second one was the infrared. And the third one was the dry sauna at the highest 220 degrees Fahrenheit. It was higher than when I had the moist train. I don't know why, maybe I let it preheat for a little bit longer or whatever, but it was hotter on the thermometer, but it had less of a, of a response.

And I felt subjectively less stressed than in the infrared. Um, and the, the solar box was kind of in between. And the worst experience I had was doing, do you know, the Carobike, That's reduced. Yeah. It was at the same conference. I tried the Roscoe. Yeah. I have that bike at home too. And yeah. And one, I'm like, you know what, I'm going to do the bike because I didn't get to work out today.

And then I'm going to do my sauna experiment. And I did the bike and that bike wipes. It kills me, you know? Um, and so after that, I went into the sauna, the traditional sauna with the high humidity and I had 15 minutes I had to get out. My, my respiratory rate was like at 54 breaths a minute. I was panting.

I was close to. Wiping completely out. Yeah. And that was my worst response. But the interesting part really was that our, the infrared. was I had more of a response than the high, high heat 

Thomas: dry sauna. That surprised me. That surprises me too. Um, but gathering this kind of data that empowers you to say, uh, if you're getting off the carol bike and you're already stressed, maybe you don't want to go for the max stress sauna, right?

Maybe you're going to use the heat to recover. You would go for a less stressful experience. I mean, but if you're not doing the carol bike and you're saying, Look, I got 20 minutes. What am I going to do with my 20 minutes to really put myself through this hormetic stress experience? Now you know which sauna to select to spike those measures.

Have you ever done the same experiment but gone back and forth with the culture? No, not 

Michael Kummer: measuring 

Thomas: anything. I've 

Michael Kummer: done the contrast. So 

Thomas: obviously, but not measure. I have 

Michael Kummer: not measured. Now 

Thomas: I want to know. 

Michael Kummer: Biomod. Yeah, yeah. 

Thomas: I don't know if your monitor can get that wet. Um, I think 

Michael Kummer: it's waterproof. Uh, it's just, I ended up, this one actually records on the device.

So I don't have to be, you know, screaming Bluetooth data, whatever. With the first chest drip I had, where I did like, you know, my HRV and the cold plunge. Uh, it capped out once the sensor was underwater, but this one actually 

Thomas: records. Well, it's wonderful. You know, when you get home, you know what I want you to do?

Will you gather these deer? I think that's terrific. Yeah. There is something about the pairing. When you get into the ice bath, you experience basal constriction. So this is reducing all the blood flow into your limbs and that's to keep the blood in your core and help you thermoregulate, protect yourself from hypothermia.

then you get into the sauna and you're going to sweat. It's a different type of thermal regulation there. It's typically vasodilation. So when you go back and forth, you get vasoconstriction in the cold, vasodilation in the sauna, but some people will use a hot tub for their heat instead of the sauna. And this Ironically, it's more vasoconstriction, and they don't realize that they're not getting the same vasodilation.

They feel warm, but because the hot water is so hot, your body, to defend your core temperature will constrict the blood vessels in your limbs, or it would take in too much heat. So it's the same defense mechanism, even though the temperature is different. You'll sweat through your head or whatever's not in the hot tub.

So when you're going to go thermal contrast. Pair your wet cold with your dry heat and see how the data looks. There's a phenomenon called hydromeiosis. Your skin knows when it's already wet and you will not sweat through wet skin. Because what good will it doesn't evaporate, it doesn't remove any heat.

Uh, so hydro miosis will prevent you from getting the sweat benefit in the hot tub that you would if you were in the sun. Mm. Interesting. I also think if you had too much water, like in a, a steam room mm-hmm. And you feel the, um, steam condensing on your skin, it may also be enough to activate theosis.

Yeah, that's good. Well, let me know what you 

Michael Kummer: measure. . Yeah. Lot of experiments. Alright, I guess we right? We can wrap it up. Was a great conversation. I appreciate it so much. And, uh, and, uh, we'll get cold people.

Extra: in the next Primal Shift podcast episode. We're cutting through the noise surrounding beef. Is it really a heart killer? Does it cause cancer harm the environment or lead to weight gain? We're tackling these myths head on and uncovering the truth about one of the most ancient, nutrient dense foods on the planet.

Tune in as we explore the science, the myths, and the facts you need to know. Don't miss it.