Tyler LeBaron: Hydrogen Water, Mitochondrial Health, Selective Antioxidants, & Longevity

Alkaline water alone is not going to provide benefits. Even if you subscribe to the benefits that we need to maintain on alkaline body, you can't do with alkaline water. Everyone thinks that it's the pH, it's the alkalinity driving the benefit. So many people are paying so much extra money to get 8.8, 10.4 pH water. Molecular hydrogen is the key to any of the benefits to alkaline ionized water. The mechanism that hydrogen uses to leave the body's production of necessary fruaticals alone reduce the harmful fruaticals that we don't need and allow the cellular homeostasis to return hydrogen acts as a therapeutic selective antioxidant. It doesn't change anything with the water, it's just the water becomes the carrier of those substances. So for somebody that's new to hydrogen water, what's the entry point to start consuming hydrogen water? First I would just consume a daily. When you drink hydrogen water, you'll. If you've ever spent money on alkaline water, I need you to hear this episode. Because Dr. Tyler LeBaron, the world's leading molecular hydrogen scientist, author of over 50 peer-reviewed publications, is about to blow up everything you thought you knew. Here's the truth. Alkaline water's benefits have nothing to do with pH. Nothing. The clinical research shows that when you remove the dissolved hydrogen gas from alkaline water, every single benefit disappears. It was never the alkalinity. It was always the hydrogen. And what Tyler reveals in this conversation is stunning. In a Japanese clinical trial, adding hydrogen gas to standard treatment, improve cardiac arrest survival from 61% to 85%. We're talking about 24 additional lives saved per 100 patients. Tyler explains how hydrogen works as a selective antioxidant, a redox adaptogen, the targets only the harmful free radicals while preserving the beneficial oxidative signals that your mitochondria need. This is the science everyone is sleeping on. Don't skip this episode. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, Human Biologist Gary Brekka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And every time I have a guest on the show, I get excited to talk to them about their subject area of expertise. And today's guest is someone I have been really dying to have on the podcast. He is probably solely responsible for my foray into hydrogen water, hydrogen bathing, hydrogen inhalation, all things hydrogen. I have the deepest level of respect for this guest. He is probably the world's leading molecular hydrogen scientist. I would argue that he has published numerous papers in quality peer-reviewed journals. He holds a PhD in this area of science. And we are absolutely blessed to have Dr. Tyler DeBaron on the podcast today. And I will say he's also become a good friend. And he was teaching me how to arm wrestle this morning, fully random side bar. But we had a great workout this morning. And he was given out, he's a professional arm wrestler, which is, you know, that's banging a 90 degree turn from hydrogen studies. And so he was teaching Zach Efron and my son and I and all the guys how to arm wrestle this morning. So maybe before the podcast is over, we'll throw in some arm wrestling tips. It's only a wrist. That's right. I've just heard that. I don't know if that's true or not. That's all I've just given you all my arm wrestling knowledge and one sentence. But Tyler, I'm so excited to have you on because I think people, when it comes to hydrogen water, hydrogen tablets, bathing in hydrogen, inhaling hydrogen, I think they fall into one of two camps, in my opinion. There are the hardcore skeptics and then there are the people that have actually gotten familiar with the science. And so I would love for you to just give my audience some background. You know, your personal story about how you got into this space because it is kind of random, right? I have a PhD and spend your time researching this smallest, lightest element in the universe and going so deep into that science, but you've done it. And so I'd love to hear the backstory of what got you interested. Well, again, thank you for having me on your show. I really appreciate the opportunity to educate. It is something very passionate about. I'm honored that you think so much in me. I do. I really do, man. I really stand on the heads of shoulders of giants. I mean, there's a lot of other researchers that are much more expert in their fields than I am. I've just been at this for 16 years and I am really grateful for my mentors who, and I go to these conferences in Asia and in Europe and meet with the researchers. And I'm just really grateful for them. I have a lot of interest, like arm wrestling. I'm a one and a professional. I compete competitively, but there's again, a lot who are a lot better than me. And I'm just grateful that I can be on this journey. And with that journey, though, yeah, you know, I came across this whole hydrogen concept back in 2009. And I learned about it because you probably heard of like alkaline ionized water. Yes. That was my- Everybody's drinking alkaline water. Yeah. Yeah. And which is unfortunate. We'll get to that. Yeah. But see, I learned about this. And this is- I was always interested in science and just health, but this would be before I had, you know, any real science training or knowledge. And- but I- but there was some papers on this alkaline ionized water. And I think this is interesting. But I want to understand. I was asking, you know, the different people, like, how does this work? And all the answers were kind of contradicting each other. And then I went to the university and asked my professors, well, how does alkaline water work? You know, why would this help? And they explained to me that it's not going to help. Right. And- and it wasn't just, you know, making fun of me per se, but explaining logically the reasons why it's alkaline water alone is not going to provide benefits. And that raised the question then, how is it possible that this water could have any benefits? Which also raises the question, first, before we tried to figure out how something works, we first need to figure out if it works. Right. And so that was my- my very first forte or for a into into research is just I did a little study, it was a pilot study and I found that drinking alkaline ionized water that was fresh could provide some some exercise benefits. Basically, I had during lactate thresholds, grinding and- the later onset muscle soreness lactate thresholds. Yeah, yeah. That that area that lactate thresholds, and they could exercise a little bit longer. And anyways, this gave me some- I guess some push that I should want to research this more and try to understand why. But it was in this investigations and reading more of the literature that I came across this article published in Nature Medicine on hydrogen gas being therapeutic. Now, I didn't understand the significance of that at the time. But when I was talking to one of my professors about chemistry professor, he had printed that article off. And he had- and I went to his office, I went to his office all the time. We're always talking about different things. And he had printed that off. And he- because he said, and I was really thinking about this whole alkaline ionized water thing and you're right up, you cited this paper, pulled it off and had it to me. And he's like, you know, Tyler, I think there's something here. And when he said that, I just- I felt something inside of me saying, this is really interesting. This is something I want to research. I want to understand this because hydrogen gas is so easy to get. It's all over the place. It's the most prevalent element in the literature, right? It is. It's smallest the lightest, highest on the periodic table. Right. It's 10% of our body weight is hydrogen. Yeah, a different form of hydrogen. That's actually a good point because we want to talk about and separate between hydrogen gas and the different types of hydrogen. Like hydrogen ion versus H2. Yes, or the hydrogen that's in compounds. And- but let me- let me unpack this. Yeah, why don't we impact that first? Then I want to talk about this nature medicine paper so we can understand why this is so significant, right? Yeah. And throughout this podcast, I just want to say through the outset, you know, I am really happy to be here to educate because it's something I'm passionate about with my research. And it's exciting to see this field emerging, but often some of the marketing or excitement outpaces the actual evidence. Yeah. And, you know, but if I- if I don't come and educate, well, then who's going to do the education? They might be talking about things that aren't necessarily true or, you know, the hydrogen is going to alkalize your cells or something. And that's- yeah. That's not how it works, right? So I'm really going to try to do my best to stick to the science and help us understand how it's supposed to work. What does the research actually say? And just people can kind of get grounded a little bit more, right? Yeah. Because I think that the preliminary evidence is interesting enough that it gives- it should give us possibly think about it, right? Yeah. And so this nature article, I don't mean to cut you off. What was the- what was the subject of the nature article? Okay. Yeah, let's- because that is a very serious for those of you that are not familiar with that journal. That is a very significant, highly regarded peer-reviewed journal. Yes. I don't just throw papers into nature. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. So basically, it was with a Schemio-reprofician injury. This was specifically in a stroke model. So they did- they took these rats and they induced a stroke model. It's called the middle cerebral arial occlusion. So they cut the blood supply to the brain and that's going to cause damage. Right. Because you have no oxygenage blood going to the brain. Yeah. And then when you let let the blood go back to the brain. Well now that-- That blood is oxygen rich and that oxygen rich blood goes to the brain and it causes what's known as a reprefusion injury. So you have a Schemia and a profusion and this or an IR injury and this is a major problem with strokes or any time you're cutting the blood supply like that. Well, they used hydrogen gas and they only used 2% hydrogen gas, which is important because above 4% hydrogen gas is explosive. But if you keep it below that, then it's not explosive and it still had these therapeutic effects. Now, you could probably add this in the show notes and you can look at the figure and you can see this white portion of the brain, the rap brain and that the white area is the dead area of the brain and that's when no hydrogen gas was given or helium gas was also administered and there was no effect. But when only 2% hydrogen gas was given, it dramatically prevented the brain damage from this stroke model. I mean, it's just not into you don't have to be a scientist to look at to look and see you can see the difference right there. And then they what they did then is they figured out a mechanism as they dissolved the hydrogen gas into cell culture media. Okay, so remember, just a gas is dissolved in cell culture media and then they add us some like mitochondrial toxins and things that would create a lot of free radicals because that's what happens during the Scheme irrepropucian injury is radical damage. So the addison toxins in there create more free radicals and they found that hydrogen gas also was able to reduce the oxidative stress that was going on. So the article that this paper was a title that hydrogen acts as a therapeutic selective antioxidant and it was and able to help prevent this brain damage from this stroke study. So going back to my story when the professor you had this paper to me and he felt, hey, there's really something here, that was very exciting to me. And seeing how the study basically ignited the interest in hydrogen research, I went and I looked at all the studies and everything I could find at the time and there were only 50 or so publications on hydrogen. Like 1500 now. Yeah, exactly. Around 1500 studies of maybe over 3000 publications in total. I mean, I have authored over 50 publications on hydrogen now compared to back in 2009. But maybe we should just break down again the different forms of hydrogen just so we can make sure everyone's on the same page. Right. But that would be helpful. That would be very helpful. I just think we think about water for example, we already know water is H2O. So water already has hydrogen in it. And that's the biggest blowback that I get when I tell people that you know, I drink hydrogen rich water every day and they're like, that doesn't make any sense. Water's hydrogen is already in water. But those molecules are spoken for. Right. I mean, they're already bound. Yeah. This is like H2O plus H2H2H2H2H2H2H2, right? Yeah. And it doesn't change the chemistry of the water. So if we can actually say there's several different species or forms of hydrogen exists. Now let's just go through them briefly. Okay. If you go to the period table of element, you'll see that hydrogen is number one, right? That's element just called hydrogen number one. That hydrogen has one proton and one electron. And it's all by itself. That's atomic hydrogen. But if it's just a single electron, doesn't want to stay by itself. That hydrogen atom is going to want to react with pretty much anything. If it reacts with nitrogen, you can form things like amino acids or like ammonia, right? And hydrogen nitrogen compounds, it can react with carbon to form hydrocarbons like carbohydrates, gasoline, right? All of these types of these are hydrocarbons. It could react with oxygen to form things like water, H2O. And to like what you talked, you used to mention how these other atoms are spoken for. So look at the water molecule. There's the oxygen and then hydrogen is a, a hydrogen attached to the oxygen. So it looks like Mickey Mouse. It's oxygen. Right. And then to hydrons are attached to that oxygen molecule. So it kind of tied up, right? So again, hydrogen can react with, you know, nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, or it could react with another hydrogen atom. And if it did, it would make a hydrogen atom here, a hydrogen atom here, it would make a molecule of hydrogen. So instead of a water molecule, it would make a molecule of hydrogen. We call that molecular hydrogen. Great. And this is the diatomic gas. This is what we're talking about. It's odorless. It's tasteless. It's filenable, about 4%. This is the gas. And when you take this gas and you dissolve it into water, you don't change the pH. You don't change the structure of the water or anything. So pH, people get confused because when they hear pH, it stands for, in their mind, potential hydrogen. Yeah. But what form of hydrogen? That hydrogen in pH is the hydrogen ion. It's the H plus ion. So if you took, you've got, look at that, the unstable elements again, and you have the hydrogen atom, has a proton electron. If you take away that electron, you just have a proton. Right. That is the hydrogen ion. That's what makes acid base. Okay. And everyone thinks that it's the pH, it's the alkalinity driving the benefit. But it sounds like you're going to make the argument that it's the hydrogen driving the benefit. Yes. It's a hydrogen gas. Yeah. Hydrogen gas is totally different than alkaline pH. There's totally different concepts. There's no similarity other than we're using the word hydrogen. But the hydrogen ion is just a proton. The hydrogen gas we're talking about is two protons, two electrons bound together in a covalent bond. That is a strong covalent bond. So if you dissolve hydrogen gas into water, it's not going to dissociate into protons and electrons. Okay. It stays always hydrogen gas. It also doesn't, you know, structure the water or do any changes to the water. Just the water becomes the carrier of that hydrogen gas. So if you take, I see you have like some supplements here like perfect amino's or, you know, electrolyte powder, let's say. Yeah. If you were to dissolve those as you do into water, it doesn't change anything with the water. It's just the water becomes the carrier of those substances. In the same way you can take the hydrogen gas, you dissolve it into the water, you drink the water, the water becomes the carrier of that hydrogen gas into the body. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So this article initially got you interested. And then you went on this for a overseas and you started looking at different research institutions, reading about different peer-reviewed papers. You eventually decided to affiliate with one of those and start doing some of your own research. And I've read most of what you've published. I've also read other publications, you know, on traumatic brain injuries and post-concussive injuries comparing hydrogen soaking limbs and hydrogen immediately after a traumatic event versus the current protocol, which is like the rice protocol, rest, ice, compress, and elevate. And, you know, some of these were very small trials, some of them were even an end of one. But what seems fascinating to me is the number of applications across the so many different categories, athletic performance, you know, brain health, inflammation, selective antioxidants, PCOS, hormone balance, cardiovascular conditions. I mean, and I want to get into some of those. But so you then affiliate was some of the research institutions overseas. And this is because so I was majoring in biochemistry. And for one of the degree requirements, we had to complete an internship. And so I thought, where do I want to do my internship? I want to do an hydrogen gas. I'd be amazing. There were a couple places in the USA doing things. There was some place in Pittsburgh, also Loma Linda University. But most of the research was out of Japan. And I got some favorable place. Actually NASA was also interested in hydrogen therapy because of radio protective effects. So I actually had some email correspondences, all these groups. And they were all, you know, willing to work something out, but they weren't doing a lot of active research. So I realized I realized I really needed to go to Japan. And I chose at Nagoya University, where a professor, Oh no, how we consider a great mentor in mind, was there. And I researched it at Nagoya University in neurogenetics. And we took hydrogen gas and dissolved it into cell culture media and looked at the effects of hydrogen gas on various cell signaling pathways. And that's when I was able to meet a lot of other researchers. I mean, top experts in the field like Dr. O to for example, is a mitochondrial expert. And that is the foundation of human optimization, human performance, longevity, anti-aging, wellness, whatever you want to call it. I mean, most of the really, I would say sound research that I think is going to move the needle is already inside the mitochondria. 110 trillion of these in our body. Another 10% of our body weight is mitochondria. I think a few people really understand the significance of mitochondrial metabolism. And it's linked to all forms of disease and pathology. At some point, I can't think of a disease-edological pathway that does not operate by either directly or indirectly interrupting mitochondrial metabolism. Yeah, the mitochondria is very important. And we know when we make our energy, for example, we make ATP that didn't seem to try phosphate, right? That's the energy currency of the cell. And the mitochondria make up like 90% of all that ATP. And you need about as much ATP as you weigh per day. So if you're 150 pounds, you need 150 pounds of ATP, you know, turnover cycling. So your mitochondria has to turn this out, just recycling very, very quickly. And so it's a core organile that's not just for energy production but sense in so many different areas. a redox homeostasis and that involves an inflammatory response. And that helps to understand actually a lot of the reasons why molecular hydrogen has any biological effect or therapeutic effects that we're seeing in some of these studies. So you go over to Japan and because I know that you actually authored the paper on looking at alkaline water benefits versus the benefits of hydrogen. That's the one that blew my mind. This one is a very important one because it's not just a study but it's actually a comprehensive review article of all the studies that I published at the time on alkaline ionized water, including a paper that I was involved in. And so many groups demonstrated that when you simply remove the hydrogen gas from alkaline ionized water, the benefits are eliminated. Wow. And that blows a whole and some of the claims that the benefits are alkaline pH. I hope you guys are listening to this. Alkaline water is garbage. And I think so many people are paying so much extra money to get 8.8, 10.4 pH water. If your energy is low during the day, the problem usually started the night before. Sleep effects focus, mood, metabolism, literally everything. And most people never learn how to properly support it. Our free sleep challenges April 29th and 30th and it's designed to teach the basics of better sleep in a way that's realistic and easy to apply. If learning how to sleep, better feels like the right place to start. We'd love to have you join our challenge on April 29th. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Now, now, and there's this correlations, there's no benefit to an alkaline pH itself, but it depends on why it's alkaline. Because if you were to get certain minerals water, for example, a lot of times mineral water is alkaline because it has minerals in them and are balanced with, say, bicarbonate ions. But as it being, those minerals like some more magnesium, some calcium, some, you know, manganese, you know, another trace mineral salts. Yeah, so that's good for you, right? But it's not, again, to your point, it's not because of the pH. And like our body already buffers the pH very well. And in fact, when you. The range is very narrow. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. 7.35, 7.45 is kind of what we say. And you know that when you just hold your breath, for example, that urge to breathe, it actually comes because you start to build a passivity. You start to build hydrogen ions. And so you want to, you want to excel out, because people can try this. Take, take a straw, for example, and blow into water with pH drops. And you can see that the pH starts to go down because CO2 dissolves in the blood to create carbonic acid. And that makes hydrogen ions. So in the same way, like when you exercise, you break down your carbohydrates and fats into CO2. The CO2 dissolves into your blood and lowers the pH. So by you excelling, you remove that CO2 and the pH is able to help to maintain. That's also why, sometimes when you're in shock, for example, people will start to hyperventilate. And you, you excel so much CO2, the blood pH starts to go up a little bit too high. And now people can start actually night tweaking their arms or going on skin torsions. You start to raise the pH so high that you start to ionize various proteins. And now that the cell membrane potential gets, reaches threshold easier, for example, you start to make it muscle contractions, alpha motor neurons, you know, activate your skeletal muscles. So you get these can use contractions, for example. Yeah. And just those small changes in your back. Yeah, exactly. Because you're bringing the back, that's your reabsorbing the CO2. You're keeping that CO2 level so you don't raise that up higher. So point is, even if you subscribe to the benefits that we need to maintain an alkaline body or something, you can't do with alkaline water. Breathing is much more effective, right? Or and even when you look at, like, say, pH of 10, a pH of 10 is, although it's alkaline, it's not really a buffer. That's why just a drop or two of lemon juice brings the pH right down. In contrast to say baking soda, which is a pH of 8.1, that can neutralize thousands of liters of alkaline of acidic water, but it would take thousands of liters of alkaline water to neutralize the same amount of acid, which is because of the buffering effect. Right. Okay. So then you, you, the first paper that you were involved in, was this the paper that was looking at alkaline water? Yeah, that's one of the, you know, well, that's one of the early ones. We actually looked at, it was an animal study in Nafel D. And we found that we first did an experiment where we were using alkaline ionized water. This is a collaboration that I was doing out of a group out of Israel. And there was no benefit. And they were surprised. And I was like, well, what's the hydrogen gas concentration? And they're like, we got to figure out how to do that. So they measured the concentration. And it was pretty low. It was like point three milligram per liter or so. And it's like, well, I think the concentration needs to be higher because the other studies were using higher concentration. So the next, now they can measure hydrogen. It took a long time to do this. This is like several year experiments that we were involved in. Increased the concentration of hydrogen using different methods. And then we're able to do two different groups where we could do a higher and a lower concentration. The low concentration again, no benefits at all. Even though it had like a negative Rp, it was an alkaline pH, all the same properties, no benefits. The higher concentration did have obvious benefits. So that was published back in 2018, 2019 or so. But we worked on it since like 2014, for quite a while. Actually earlier than that. But the main article is this comprehensive review articles. You can look it up. It's called electrolyze reduced water review one. And there's two reviews. There's review one review two. And they just comprehensive review to go through any question or any thought you've ever had about this area goes through the water microclustering claims, alkaline pH, negative Rp aspects. It just systematically goes through every one of them. And it conclusively demonstrates that molecular hydrogen is the key to any of the benefits if there are any to alkaline ionized water. Right. So you also author to paper, I think, which may be, in my opinion, the most impactful paper that you've ever authored or co-authored. And that was understanding the exact mechanism by hydrogen acts inside the mitochondria. And I think it's, I don't think most people absorb what it means to be a selective antioxidant versus an antioxidant. So maybe we could talk about what makes something an antioxidant. What is oxidative stress? And why do you not want to over suppress it? And why could that be dangerous? And what's unique about hydrogen that it restores this redox homeostasis versus just over-suppressing oxidative? So let's do this. Let's go through some history. Okay. We're going to start with that nature medicine publication. And then we're going to talk about the benefits and problems with antioxidants in general. And that'll lead us to this target of hydrogen that we recently published. And did that explains everything. So I can tell you you're so proud of it. You smile when you say it, dude. Well, you're proud of that one. I read it too. It was very, very well authored. Well, and again, it's I'm just I'm just one of the authors. I was happy to be involved with that paper. But really that the harder research belongs to the other authors. And I was just grateful to be part of it. When I was in Japan, back in 2013, is when I proposed this concept. And we stayed in communication, you know, talking about it and working on it for a long time. It was that's why I'm happy because it's over 10 years of work. A lot of effort went into this. But let's talk about some background information. Understand why this is so important. Yeah. If you remember with that nature medicine publication, it talked about how hydrogen acts as selective antioxidant. And that's a key word about that selectivity because we don't want just more antioxidants because antioxidants aren't necessarily a good thing. And the research has shown that over and over again. And that's because it turns out we actually need free radicals. All right. So just break this down. Maybe a step back. We know that if you too much oxidative oxidation is bad. So if you take like an apple and you cut it half, it's going to turn brown right. And avocado turns brown. You have rust and all that is literally oxidation. Right. We are breathing right now. And that oxygen going into our bodies is oxidizing. It's oxidizing ourselves. It's also with driving life. That's how our metabolism works. It's oxygen work as at the complex for the electron transport chain literally consuming the electrons from our foods, making metabolic water. That process oxidation. This is sometimes during that process and electron transport chain, that oxygen gets consumed prematurely by electrons. It gets electrons prematurely. And that creates free radicals. Okay. This is going to be really important. So I just want to set this up a little bit more in the mitochondria. This will we're out. We're going deep into the cell into the mitochondria. And you have what's called the electron transport chain. Right. And there's four main complexes. Complex one, two, three, and four. And basically you get electrons that are passed from complex one. And then that those get passed to coq 10, actually, you bake an oil and then they go to complex three electrons from complex two to go also go there. They go to complex three. So complex two is very important. There's even all these electrons. Okay. We're going to come back to this. It's going to be important. So remember complex two is very important. Yeah. Then the electrons go from complex three, one electron at time, a little bit dangerous, one electron at time, through sardachrom C, go to complex four, a complex four, those electrons typically will combine with oxygen and two hydrogen ions and you make water. Right. Okay. So you make water - I'm gonna try on a 100. - Exactly, right? During this process, you make what's known as the proton gradient, hydrogen ion gradient. So in the inner membrane space in the mitochondria, you put a whole bunch of protons there. Pump it against its concentration gradient, and then those hydrogen ions have to go through the ATP synthase enzymes, some of the called complex five, but it goes through this enzyme and you make ATP. Turns out lots of ATP. Now, as I said, oxygen is a strong oxidizer. So you inhale, the oxygen's gonna bind onto your hemoglobin. It has some iron on your hemoglobin, so it can bind there. And that's important because you wanna kind of sequester oxygen as much as you can in the blood. You don't wanna have a whole bunch of oxygen floating freely all over the place all the time. The hemoglobin goes down, goes into lysidium muscle cells, and the pH is lower, which is actually gonna cause the hemoglobin to slightly shift its confirmation. It's gonna allow oxygen to leave the hemoglobin easier. As soon as that oxygen diffuses out, it's immediately gets sucked up by the mitochondria. And at complex four, it converts to the water. That way there's hardly any oxygen at any time in the cells 'cause that oxygen, if it goes into cell membranes, it's gonna cause oxidation. It's gonna cut in a cytosol, oxidation, free radicals, damage, right? As it goes into mitochondria, there's electrons in the electron transport chain get, right, are being transported. But sometimes that oxygen can actually consume those electrons to say it complex one, or sometimes a complex three, or through the Sim-Wake-Quinone radical that was created of coq10, that enzyme ubiquinol can be a ubiquinone radical, for example. And oxygen can get reduced receiving electron. When oxygen gets one electron reduction, it's called the super oxide anion radical. Now that radical turns out it's beneficial and harmful. - It's beneficial to a certain level, harmful at a certain level. - Yes. - It's a species, hydrogen peroxide. - Yes, it's another one. - Very necessary, but it can also be very damaged. - What happens, 'cause hydrogen peroxide comes next, what happens is it's actually a certain signaling effect that super oxide can do. And then this enzyme, super oxide, this mutate, can convert super oxide to hydro peroxide, let's say, or to water. And then hydro peroxide also has certain signaling effects it can do. And then there's even a specific aquaporn or protein channel for aquaporn to transverse, did you do further signaling? And then say like, Cadillate, so glutathione peroxidase can get rid of that. So these free radicals are literally produced for a specific signaling effects that our bodies literally need in order to have normal mitochondrial function. So the mitochondria regulates our entire, like, redox homeostasis. That's the main area. There's other enzymes like the NADPH oxidase or these knocks enzymes and number of the enzymes that make free radicals. But the mitochondria is very crucial and the place of the largest role in making free radicals. But see, our body has developed in ways to create a small amount of free radicals when needed and to do specific signaling. So when we exercise, we're breathing more oxygen. We're using more oxygen. So what happens to the free radicals? They increase. That increase in free radicals, in turn, signals our body to make more mitochondria to make our muscles work better, to do a whole bunch of signaling effects. - At a whoremedic stress. - It's a whoremedic stress. - Exactly, it's a positive response. So is it fair to say that we actually don't want to over-suppress on oxidation? - That's the point. - That's exactly right. - You've used this term's redox homeostasis and we're gonna pause on that for a second because redox homeostasis is this balance between oxidation and reduction, right? And it's, and ideally we want it to be in balance. We don't want to over-suppress oxidation. We also don't want to over- we don't have too much inflammation or oxidation either. And with antioxidants, you really don't know if you're over-suppressing it or if you maybe you just inadvertently hit the target, but if you're piling a bunch of vitamin C or beta-carotene or something like that into the body, yes, it's an antioxidant, but I think there's a prevailing thought that, well, oxidation's bad. More antioxidants must be good. - Yeah, you hit the nail on the head and the only technicality is technically we don't really want to balance we want homeostasis and the difference is that balance would mean they're equal and that's dead, right? So we can't say that oxidation is just bad in the same way we can't say reduction is just bad. You need to have both of them. And that's why I like the term redox because redox means oxidation and reduction. And you wanna have that homeostasis. So our body, I was going through that whole transport chain because we wanna see that we are designed to make free radicals to do certain signaling effects and then our body naturally gets rid of them through our body's natural antioxidants. Now what happens though with aging, with environmental toxins and whatever you have you or just exercise, yeah? - Yeah, or if you're not actually inactivity, then your natural body's ability to produce antioxidants goes down. Your model conjured become dysfunctional as well. You start to increase more free radicals. You increase free radicals at the point you are now suffering from oxidative stress, right? That's a bad thing. You don't want the stress. You want a hormetic type of effect but not an excessive amount. And so maintaining, again, maintain redox homeostasis is why it's so important. So our body contains our own antioxidants, right? Glutathione, we mentioned these, right? There's a whole bunch of them. And all plants do the same thing. That's why if you have like your apples, for example, if they're on the tree, they're not turning brown because they also have antioxidants in them. And that's why when we eat, say the apples or the carrots or what have you, we get those antioxidants inside of us. Those polyphenols that can scavenge some of these antioxidants, right? Now it turns out though that when you basically isolate these potent antioxidants all in the cells or you have synthetic forums and you just ingest high amounts of them, well, that can be problematic. That's kind of what you pointed out 'cause now we're potentially blunting those frubaticals that our bodies specifically produced so that we could have improved mitochondrial function and mitochondrial biogenesis. So when we look at these studies, we can clearly see that if you're eating a healthy diet of fruits, and vegetables, and so on, then you have your antioxidant homeostasis, your redox homeostasis, everything is good. It's healthy. But when you start to perturb that, either by doing things that are very oxidatively harmful, like say smoking or just environmental toxins, or you have low physical activity because low physical activity will result in lower levels of your body's natural antioxidants, okay? Then you have oxidative stress. Also if you start taking high doses of say synthetic antioxidants, then you start to cause a disequilibrium or you're blunting. Yeah, you blunt those benefits. So you can actually see a number of, especially in animal studies, but clinical studies as well, a number of them have actually shown that antioxidants might actually blunt, exercise training adaptations. Wow. So you don't get mitochondrial biogenesis. You don't get improved, say insulin sensitivity, or if you're bunting the inflammatory response, right? We need these things. We need to maintain the homeostasis. And so that's why we don't want to just take a bunch of antioxidants. And it's why hydrogen is so different than any other antioxidant. And I want to talk about this for just a second. This is just basic chemistry actually. But the reason why it's selective is because hydrogen gas does not react with the beneficial free radicals. It only reacts with the harmful ones. That is so incredible that it's, that word selective means it's reacting with the harmful free radicals, like the hydroxyl free radicals. And not interacting with the beneficial free radicals and allowing the body to just perform that function on its own. Because I mean, there's nothing more intelligent than our own innate system. That electron transport chain was designed for a reason. It innately knows what it's doing. And it's right there in that same nature medicine publication, the chain is such a hand-marked paper. They took, say, nitric oxide, superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, and hydroxyl radical formation through the fentin reaction. And you can, in the adivitamins C or hydrogen gas. And you can see that vitamin C neutralized everything. The good, the bad, everything. Right. So vitamin C is great. It's going to get rid of the bad. But high amounts could also get rid of the good. Right. Okay. Hydrogen gas. When you put that with, say, superoxide or these other free radicals, there was no reaction. It is so awesome. It's thermodynamically possible, but it's kinetically infeasible. Based upon these rate constants, the hydroxyl radical is so reactive that it'll react with anything. Yeah. Anything that's in the vicinity. And that's really the only free radical that I'm aware of that has no known benefit in the body. Pretty much. Right. I mean, maybe by accident. Okay. Because ostensibly, we'd want to take that as close to zero as possible. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. It's just because it reacts so quickly with anything. And that's going to cause, you know, DNA damage and all sorts of problems. All the other ones can kind of be regulated. And your body have a natural detoxification systems for that, like the superoxide is mutated enzyme, right? And all the other ones. So we're going through some of this history. We first see the hydrogen is selected because it can only react with the most oxidative or strongest radicals and most harmful ones, right? And it's small enough. It can actually get into the mitochondria, whereas again, these other vagraniaxidins, maybe like bye bye. which is more, it's larger, but it's also more lipophilic. So maybe it can't easily transfuse into the cytosol and then go into the mitochondria or different areas. Hygien gas can do that where vitamin C is more water soluble. So it's gonna have a harder time going through the cell membrane. That has to go through a transporter protein. Hygien gas, again, there's no problem. It can diffuse very easily into the mitochondria and there it can help with these free radicals and acts like the anti-oxidation. There are three ways that Hygien is helping with this antioxidative process and that's one of them is it's only gonna react with the most toxic hydroxyl radicals. If it reacts with them at all. Yeah, I hope people are picking up on the fact that how profound that is because it is the only selective antioxidant that I've ever been able to find in any kind of research. Anti-oxidants are abundant but selective antioxidants, the mechanism that Hygien uses to leave the body's production of free radicals, necessary free radicals alone, reduce the harmful free radicals that we don't need and allow this cellular homeostasis to return. I mean, you just can't overemphasize how unique Hygien is in that way. And that's actually as cool as that is, that's a minor mechanism by which it exerts these antioxidant effects. The other big one is because it's able to regulate your bodies innate or natural antioxidant defense mechanisms. Wow. So it can even bring redox up. That's right, yeah. So you have like your natural anti-oxidants, right? Glutathione, superoxidine mutates. These are all regulated by this transcription factor to NRF2, pathogen, NRF2 keep one pathway. What happens? This is a protein is in the cytosol. And when you get oxidative stress that's happening, then you get oxidation of this, a keep one factor basically and then the NRF2 can diffuse into the nucleus, they're biased to the DNA, and then you get this basically just transcription of your body's natural antioxidants. So it's starting to protect itself? Exactly. Catalase, glutathione. They all start to increase. NRF2 regulates over 200 different cytoprotective proteins in enzymes. Wow. And this is the other cool thing. So it helps you in just mind-homing. Hydrogen is only going to up-regulate NRF2 when the cell needs it. So if you have a cell, we've published studies on this, demonstrating that hydrogen can regulate and up-regulate NRF2, but only if there was a stress. Wow. So if the cell is, if you take hydrogen gas, you put in the cell culture and you measure NRF2 levels from an healthy cell, you don't see any NRF2 protein changes. You might see some changes in mRNA, but just because you see something mRNA doesn't mean it's actually at the protein level. But in general, you don't see any real changes at the protein level. But if you were to add, say, environmental toxin, some stressor or something that would normally cause oxidative damage in the cell, and then you'd administer hydrogen gas, that's when you see the rescuing effect of hydrogen. Wow. So hydrogen is able to go to the individual cells, knock on the door and say, okay, how are you doing? How is your re-doxalmiostasis? What do you need? Do you need the NRF2 up-regulate or not? It's only going to basically up-regulate the NRF2 pathway in the cells that are suffering from, and not having enough NRF2, where you want to bring those, say, glutathione levels up higher. Yeah. So this is a key mechanism because, again, yes, superoxide, hydrogen peroxide, these are all good, but again, only if you have it at the right concentration in the right location for the right duration. If you start making too many of these because you have a hyperactivated, say, NOx enzyme system or certain complex to the mitochondria, that's when this becomes problematic. Hydrogen is able to regulate our body's natural antioxidants, so our body can naturally detoxify these oxidants before they get too high and help clear them. It's actually using the innate intelligence of the DNA to regulate that system instead of circumventing the DNA and just suppressing it on its own. Yeah, exactly. It's regulating everything. Yeah. And there's a third away. I said that three ways. We've talked about two so far. The third way is that hydrogen, because it's signaling effects, it can actually help to suppress excess oxidation that's occurring. In fact, it's more of a modulator because in some cases, hydrogen is able to. If there's an excess amount of free radical that are being produced, say it complex one of the mitochondria, or any DPH oxidase enzymes, these NOx enzymes, or neuronal nitric oxide synthase, where you're getting too much nitric oxide in the brain, it's causing a lot of stress. It happens in Alzheimer's patients, it happens in autistic patients, ostensibly because it's got dysbiosis, but you see very high levels of a nitric oxide, which most people think is, you know, just has a vasodilation effect, which it does, but it can also be a toxic gas. Yes, it is a free radical. It can be very toxic when you have dysregulation. And that's another key area that hydrogen helps to regulate. See, hydrogen gases are very bad. To black, to black, to hydrogen, what every day. If you're not convinced, like, halfway through this podcast, like I'm going to take some right now. Well, I mean, the mechanisms are very interesting, but we're still looking at the clinical evidence on this. And it's very, the preliminary evidence looks very exciting. But the nitric oxide one is very interesting, because again, nitric oxide hydrogen gas don't react, but hydrogen gas can regulate its production. Yeah. And so these different enzymes, if they get too high, like for some of you have super oxide that's produced from the NOx enzyme, and you have high levels of nitric oxide, if they, if those levels get high, they immediately react. I mean, the only thing that slows the reaction is the rate of diffusion. And when they do react, you form periaxion nitrite, which is a strong oxidative molecule. So hydrogen is essentially preventing that formation, because it's able to decrease the amount of free radicals that are produced in the first place. Yeah. So you have prevention. But it's not more than just prevention, because as I said earlier, our bodies need free radicals. So sometimes the cells need a little boost. And so in a number of studies, including our own that we'll talk about here in just a second, we can see that hydrogen gas can transily increase small levels of free radicals. So it can increase the super oxide production for just a little bit. It's a small transit level. That's kind of a hormetic stressor. My point is, is think about hydrogen's going to do. Go to this cell, and this is not really accurate, but I'm just trying to explain this kind of a layman idea, because we can look at the cell culture studies on this. So hydrogen gas goes to this cell. Oh, you're not producing enough free radicals to have the hormetic stress, right? So we increase your super oxide production. Now that could in turn activate NRF2, and now you can have higher levels of endogenous antioxidant cell defense system. It goes to this-- - It goes to this-- - All these other-- - So that's that cell. The same body. We're talking about the same human. And now we go to the other cell, the other and for different organ, or an adjacent cell, who knows. And this one says, oh, you know what? You are suffering from oxidative stress. I'm going to decrease the amount of oxidation that's occurring. I'm going to help suppress or down-regulate NADPH oxidative system. I'm going to help decrease the amount of free radicals that are being produced. All right. And then it can go to another cell. And it can say, oh, you know, I'm going to modulate your entire free radical production. So you have a better homeostasis, right? Or maybe it's going to go to another cell. And it's just going crazy. Asking me for a profusion, you have hydroxyl radicals being produced just like crazy. And hygiene gases, if it's there, it can react with the hydroxyl radicals in form water. - Yeah. - So you have lately neutralized the worst free radical in the body. - Wow. I mean, I hope mechanistically people are really grasping how incredibly unique that is. It's almost like an intelligent molecule. - Right. - It sort of arrives and then assesses and can shift its impact based on really what that redox homeostatic environment needs, an improvement in redox, a reduction in oxidation. And that's just so fascinating because I think very often we just have to take these blanket approaches. And I did for years too. I just thought, man, more vitamin C IVs, more, you know, more antioxidants, less free radicals, that's a good thing. But really years ago when I started stumbling upon a lot of your research talking to you, getting to know you, really going down the rabbit hole of how unique hydrogen is, it's not only a part of my routine every day. I mean, I take it either immediately before or right after I do every hyperbaric session because I realized that in hyperbarics, that excess oxygen, that oxygen singlet could be creating oxidative stress. - Yeah, and it does. And that's how HBOT tends to work. You literally create a hormetic stress to just like exercise. And you want to get the benefits and negate some of the negative effects. So taking hydrogen therapy, there's some research on this, at least in cell core studies, some very interesting research helping prevent oxygen toxicity. So you're able to get some of these benefits. Oxygen is a much stronger molecule, you know, like ozone therapy that people do or hydrogen peroxide. There's a number of things out there that are really. We're pretty strong and have serious side effects potentially. Like H-Bot, going too high, going for too long, oxygen toxicity is a very well-known thing. Hydrogen seems to help negate, or negate is probably strong word, but help to reduce some of those excess side effects. So you can still get those benefits. Because to your point, you need to have this, I want to say balance, colloquially, but really this homeostasis, oxidation and reduction. So that's really where the researches, I would say, converging in terms of aging and disease conditions and so on, is it's not about oxidist stress or the free radical theory of aging. It's all about redox dysregulation. And as you get older, as you age, as you have environmental toxins and so on, you get a redox dysregulation. And the problem is that redox dysregulation can happen not only in the same individual, but even in the same organ, even in the same cell. So you can have like a one portion of yourself, say the sato-sol that is suffering from an oxidative stress or say in the monocondran, oxidist stress that's going on, there's too many free radicals that are being produced. But yet another area you're actually lacking, reductive potential. Say like in the endopodsic reticulum or something, you're able to fold your proteins correctly. You can't do that, then you can't protein structure dictates function, right? You need to have the correct redox homeostasis. And so you can imagine if the cell itself is suffering from a redox dysregulation, how would it be possible that taking a conventional antioxidant that only is unidirectional, it's just an electron donor basically, is going to help that. Well, there have actually been cancer studies with like beta-carotene, I think, where they showed that it went the opposite direction. Yeah, unfortunately, that's exactly right. And they found people who smoked a lot when they ate carrots, they tended to, there's a correlation, they tended to maybe live longer and be better. And it just makes sense. Well, yeah, smoking causes a lot of free radicals, carrots a lot of beta-carotene, that's an antioxidant, so we're going to neutralize those. But when they decided to do the study, hey, let's really determine this, they found that those taking the beta-carotene started dying faster and getting cancer faster than those on the placebo group. Wow. And maybe, we could talk about the mechanism quite a bit, but maybe it's because again, you're not able to directly address the redox homeostasis or the dysregulation, right? Because you're just providing a bunch of antioxidants, but you could still be suffering from a reductous stress in different areas, whereas hydrogen is totally different. You don't have that same concern. But that study actually, it's another, maybe, critical thing for us to think about just logically as well, because on the surface, it can make total sense mechanistically like, hey, carrots, haritch and beta-carotene, antioxidants, smoking, oxidative stress, we should take it. And that's why we have to be careful when we focus too much on mechanisms, like, oh, the mechanism, this is the mechanism that, because just because we can find a mechanism to support something doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to be the clinical outcome, because the clinical outcome is going to be a summation of a whole bunch of the mechanisms that live in communities. I think some of the worst research we do is when we study things in isolation, we look out something and behaves in a laboratory and we assume when we put it back into the human body, it's going to behave the same way. And very often, nothing could be further from the truth. That's exactly right. And that's also some my skepticism, even with this area of hydrogen research. I'm talking about this because I'm passionate about this area, but, and the mechanisms are, I love biochemistry. I love this area. Clearly, I love biochemistry. I'm going to pull this out of the wheat here in a second, because I want to, I want to get into some of the more practical applications. Yeah, right. I mean, which I know is what people want to hear. Yeah, yeah. And we'll do our best to do that. But it goes to my saying, I also have to be cautious because I don't want to be hit the hypocrite like, oh, this is all the things having in the cell. Yeah. And then what we, what we really want to know, okay, what's the end point? What are the clinical studies actually show? Right. Right. That's really what matters. If you want protein to build lean muscle, but without the caloric impact or need to cut, you need perfect amino. It's pure essential amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in a precise form and ratio that allows for near 100% utilization in building lean muscle and no caloric impact. So we build protein six times as much as way, but without the excess body fat, we normally get during bulking. This is the new era of protein supplementation and it's real. If you want to build lean muscle without having to cut, you need perfect amino. Now, let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Because, you know, anecdotally and observationally, what I have seen from bathing clients of mine and hydrogen gas, by using hydrogen gas myself during intense exercise, look what we did this morning, trying to keep up with my son. His performance in distance racing, you know, he just did a hundred mile race. I truly believe if he wasn't powered by hydrogen water, he wouldn't have completed the seven marathon, seven continents and seven days. Because he had never run a marathon. You know, I've read some of the published research on delayed onset muscle. Muscle soreness on lactate thresholds and again mechanistically it makes sense, but also practically in the host. It's also making sense. So maybe we, eventually I want to get to how should people take it? How much should they take? Is it safe for everybody to take, you know, hydrogen tablets, say, first thing in the morning, maybe another one in the afternoon or take, take additional hydrogen if you're exercising intensely, certainly if you're using hyperbarics. But where are the broad applications, you know, just hydrogen water help with hormones and women's health specifically? And how does hydrogen water impact athletic performance? So I want to, I want to finish the Motoconjus story briefly because I'm going to refer back to that as I just all of these things. And the summation of everything is back to the Motocondria, the mechanism and to that paper that you mentioned. We published a paper in Redox Biology with my collaborators in Japan. Again, their real research behind this, I'm just happy that I was involved since 2013, actually on this project. But this, Redox Biology is a top journal. But what we found was that hydrogen specifically targets a specific protein in complex three of the Motocondria. Remember with electron transport chain? In complex, the specific protein called the RISGate iron sulfur protein or the RISP protein. And it transfers an electron, one electron a time. You bickerel, it comes in, it gives an electron. And then the RISGate one goes to the RISGate iron sulfur protein pathway. When hydrogen gas targets this protein, it actually stops it from working. Basically it causes a change in this protein, this house from working. This is a stress. Because you're not able to transfer the proteins. The Motocondria quickly recognizes this stress and you start to see increases in some superoxide levels. So a slight transit increase in superoxic production. You have an initial drop in ATP levels. That quickly causes the Motocondria to respond to regenerate and rejuvenate. It's the Motocondria function. And then the RISP or the RISGate iron sulfur protein levels, they come back up even higher than they were. ATP levels go back. Follow that with exercise. As soon as you start exercising, what's the first thing that happens? You start producing free radicals. Your ATP levels drop immediately. Just very quickly. As a creating phosphate kicks in very quickly. All these similar things start happening. And then later you start having an increase in everything. So you get the Motocondria biogenesis. So one of the main targets of hydrogen gas seems to be this RISGate iron sulfur protein in complex three of the Motocondria. So Motocondria is a prime target of hydrogen. And based upon that, we can understand why hydrogen is able to regulate redox homeostasis, produce some free radicals we needed, suppress free radicals in other cases, activate the NRF2 pathway, increase Motocondrial regeneration, rejuvenation, ATP production, all the cellular things that are needed right there in the Motocondria. And now we have one of the mechanisms of how hydrogen specifically does this. Wow. So now let's go to these practical applications because I want to refer back to this target. And we can understand how hydrogen gas would be doing some of this based upon understanding of the mechanism. Yeah. So maybe we start with athletic performance. Sure. Right? That's the majority of my audience is exercising on a regular basis and they're either taking hydrogen water or they're not. I take hydrogen for all my exercise. Yeah. So do I. And I absolutely, unequivocally notice a benefit. So does my son. And so does every athlete that I work with. So there's a couple of points. The first one I want to point out is when it comes to athletic performance, we call an ergo genic effect. Okay. We first, whatever we do, we first don't. We don't want to make things worse. Right. And that is a major concern that a lot of new emergent technology supplements, a fat concepts come in where they could potentially. to get some of the exercise benefits. We talked about earlier how, in some studies, show that taking antioxidants can actually blunt exercise performance because you're maybe planting those frubaticals that you need, taking NSA's anti-inflammatories, same thing that could potentially blunt exercise benefits. Cold water immersion in the media, they have to strengthen-- Yeah, that's another good one. Yeah, exactly. So when it comes to hydrogen therapy, we can very confidently say, actually, that hydrogen, at least, does not negate exercise benefits. It doesn't impair exercise performance. So that's number one. If there's a question, maybe you should really be cautioned before you try to do any intervention. Hydrogen doesn't do that. And we can think about the mechanisms. It doesn't react with other frubaticals at all. It can't do it. It's only going to regulate the NR2 pathway when there's a serious problem going on. It actually can increase superoxid production so much to exercise. And then we look at the studies. If we look at the animal studies, for example, with exercise, so combinational studies, we actually see that during the control, of course, there's no increase in mitochondrial biogenesis. We look at a marker, PGC1 alpha. There's a peroxasome proliferator active receptor coactivator, one alpha. It's-- It's a mouthful. It was going to be a test on this later. So I hope that everybody got that. But this is a master target we want to activate. Things like AMPK can activate this, which AMPK gets activated and you break ATP down to get some AMP levels, AMPK, can activate AMPK. Calcium is another one that can activate this. But you want to activate PGC1 alpha. And exercise does that really well. PGC1 alpha in turn can increase things like mitochondrial biogenesis and basculine through a growth factor and a number of other things. So hydrogen. When you do exercise and you combine it with hydrogen, you see PGC1 alpha levels increase. Actually, they increase even more than exercise alone. Wow. When you do the same exercise with vitamin C, you see PGC1 alpha levels decrease. Yeah. It's not so. This is critical to understand. This means that hydrogen is not in parent exercise performance. And if anything, it might act as an exercise mimetic to help to improve exercise performance, especially over the long run, because you see increases in PGC1 alpha. Wow. So this is animal studies. And it makes mechanistic sense based upon the mechanism I just talked about in these Invitro studies, so culture. Now look at the clinical studies. There's a breadth of studies on exercise performance. And I've read them in swimmers, elite swimmers. I want to say another one in elite soccer players. Yeah, that's right. So I've read some of this research. And more discussed, like delayed onset muscle soreness, but it also discussed performance recovery. I don't remember when it's specific mechanisms. But I mean, I don't know that I have read a negative research publication on hydrogen. I'll just put it that way. It depends on definition of negative. There are a number of papers that show there no benefit. We published an article. One of my first articles, actually, when I was doing my masters, is we-- there's a lot of people saying that their VO2 max was increasing when they'd taken hydrogen water. And it was a simple study because we know exactly how to measure VO2 max is a little more complicated. We'll say VO2 peak for those who are exercise physiologists. But what we looked at this, and we found that there was no increase in the VO2 peak following acute supplementation with hydrogen. And mechanistically, that wouldn't be expected. But in that case, it'd be a negative study. However, when we did a subanalysis of some of the-- the exercise looked at the exercise in heart rate, at lower, exercise intensities. We can see that the heart rate was a little bit lower. And there's changes in the respiratory quotient or the respiratory exchange ratio and the number of other changes. And other people have reported on this too, showing that actually, even in acute dose of hydrogen water might be able to help with some of that type of performance, with a hydrogen water or hydrogen-- Well, did they swimmer's and it didn't soccer players? Yes, exactly. And some of the soccer players, they took it for like a week. But they was not at a VO2 max. It was on a max effort. So we're probably not going to see a change if you just take one dose of hydrogen and you go for a peak performance. But you might see even just one dose of hydrogen. And you can see at-- kind of a lactate threshold, a pretty high intensity. You can maybe exercise for a longer period of time, maybe do more balanced of exercise. And probably those benefits are going to be more significant when you do a longer dose in protocol because, again, just like exercise, it takes time to activate mitochondria biogenesis. So when taking hydrogen water, you want to recover quickly. Because that's like the number one thing that comes to athletes is you want to recover fast. Why? So you can train again. It's volume dependent. And the volume is limited by how quickly you can recover. And so by taking hydrogen water, if we can improve the inflammatory response, we actually can see that an acute dose of hydrogen often will increase superoxid production and inflammatory markers like interleukin six, for example. And then it goes back to baseline faster and lowers that chronic low-gate inflammation, lowers that chronic oxygen. Which is why I had a positive effect on the later onset muscle sortness. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of potential mechanisms that could be going on with that. And more research is needed because a lot of the studies are still pretty small, right? But we can see though in the studies that have been done where hydrogen does seem to exert just like an anti-fetiga fetch, right? They're able to exercise-- Say, there was a scale where they rated the-- They're the borbit effect or the RPE. Yeah. Where they rated the actual level of intensity, level of perceived effort. Yeah, the perceived exertion. Proceed exertion, yeah. Level perceived exertion. And in nearly all of those cases, their level perceived exertion for the same bout of exercise was lower. Yes. I mean, that's clearly something that would, in my opinion, improve that flow to performance. Yeah, you could do it again. And but those are also correlated with changes to say lactate levels. Those levels are also lower. Right. Which, you know, the reason you make lactate in the first place is because there's a mismatch between the-- how fast you need ATP and how quickly your model congic can make ATP. So if you need ATP fast enough or fast to the which your model congic can provide, you have to go through glycolysis. You start producing the lactate. They're going to use carbon dioxide instead of using oxygen, right? Yeah. Well, not with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is only produced during the TCA cycle, the citric acid cycle. Glacolosis doesn't use oxygen or anything. It just breaks down your glucose molecule. And in order to continue driving, the end part of glycolysis, the molecule, called pyruvate. And then pyruvate normally enters into the citric acid cycle and then gets converted to acetyl-CoA and then citrate. If you do the whole citric acid cycle, then you make any DH molecules, any other electron, transport chain, COVX-1, 2, there's 3, COVX-3, right? This whole process takes quite a bit. It makes a lot of ATP. One glucose molecule can make 30 or 32 ATP molecules. You even use oxidative phosphorylation. But glycolysis only makes two net ATP. But it's a lot faster. I won't give you numbers, but it's a lot faster. So if you can't oxidize pyruvate fast enough, then you convert pyruvate to lactate. And that's important because lactate production allows glycolysis to continue going. So lactate production actually delays fatigue. It allows you to continue exercising. It prevents or delays acidosis, for example, because the whole purpose of lactate production is you're actually regenerating a molecule that you're familiar with, NAD+. NAD+ drives glycolysis. And if you convert all your NAD+ to NADH, you can't do glycolysis anymore. So by converting pyruvate to lactate, you convert NADH to NAD+ and then NAD+ can drive. And glycolysis has to be phosphate. I can cause that oxidation to 2, 3-bisphosphoglycerate. So you get NAD+ being produced. So in these studies, where lactate levels are lower, there's a couple potential things that are going on. Number one, maybe because you had this exercise intensity, you need X amount of ATP. And so maybe what's happening is the hydrogen helped your mitochondria function better. So you can provide the amount of ATP you need through the oxidative phosphorylation through your mitochondria as opposed to anodobic glycolysis. So in other words, it's just to, again, to pull us out of the weeds. It's allowing you to exercise at the same intensity for longer periods of period of time. Yeah, exactly. Either because that's anecdotally what I noticed. That's right. And my son and every athlete that I put on, I mean, I aid them in hydrogen water. I have them consume hydrogen rich water. And I have hundreds of clients that by bathing and consuming it have both reduced their pain, improved their recovery, and increased the duration that they can exercise at a high level of intensity. And this has been in a number of UFC fighters and a number of professional athletes that most people watching this podcast would know that perform at a very high level. And now they would swear by it. Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. And the research is still ongoing with that. And I think we'll start to see some of the differences in the mechanism because when you drink hydrogen water, actually a lot of hydrogen gas is excelled out. of your lungs. So a lot of that doesn't actually reach the muscles yet. We still see these direct benefits versus say inhalation of hydrogen gas. That's going to have some different, different effects as well. But they both have very, you know, obviously benefits. We see when you look at the clinical studies. So let's go through some, again, I'm going to pull this out of the weed. So now you know the mechanism. I want to pull this out of the weeds. But you know, I want to talk about women's hormones and women's health, PCOS and hydrogen rich water. We touched on athletic performance. There was also a really interesting article published in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology. And in this article, I think it was a six month study. They broke these gerontology patients into two categories, one during hydrogen rich water, one did not. They used tattoo markers from ethylation. They measured, like, sit-stand ratios. They also measured, you know, different cognitive scoring, short term recall, learn memory. There were a different number of different measurements for cognitive function. And it seemed to universally improve the hydrogen rich water side, significantly across all of these markers. That was another one that really piqued my interest in hydrogen water because, you know, a lot of studies are in young athletes, you know, like 22-year-old soccer players, you know, 25-year-old, you know, competitive swimmers. But here you have a population that's deconditioned, you know, they're not out there sprinting. And part of their protocol wasn't to change their exercise regimen, yet they had exercise benefits. Yeah. They actually, I'm calling it sit-stand ratio. There's another term for it. And that was another study that really drew my interest to hydrogen rich water because that was the only intervention that they made for that six month period of time. Yeah. And so, I think that was one of the ones that I participated in, but I know the authors, the researchers. And yeah, it was a very powerful study because to your point, this was number one, it was a longer study. They're using the hydrogen producing tablets. And so you get a pretty high dose of hydrogen, which is important because sometimes some of these studies, they use hydrogen water, but the concentration, you know, it may have found a more effective benefits if there was a higher dose. Yeah. And then, the potential trends we found this in metabolic syndrome study, for example, when we talk about later. But that study showed, you know, some of these potential benefits that you already mentioned. And it was, you know, like six months, it was pretty good duration. Yeah. And that makes sense when you think about the mechanisms, the hydrogen is not a super powerful molecule. And that's what makes it largely safe as well. Yeah. And so it's going to go in and it has these effects in the mitochondria and in the cell. And it's this long-term benefits that we start to see. So that's why going longer, like for six months, you might still see more of these benefits. And also, that's why it gets me excited because, yes, I am very interested on the mechanisms of biochemistry, just because I like to see how things are. Yes, clearly you are. But we want to know that those clinical endpoints. And here we're showing that it's translated. It's being translated, right? It's translatable between the cell culture to animal studies and then finally to the human studies, right? And like I know you mentioned with the women, with the PMS and, you know, PCOS. PCOS, as well. You know, more research needs to be done on this. I was involved, I helped author one of those studies, but it was more of a subjective type thing that we looked at. And it does show favorable effects. So I wouldn't say, you know, hydrogen is like a hormone or a naturally mimics those things. But again, by helping to improve the terrain, the cellular terrain and, you know, how the inflammatory process and oxidist rest, you can start to help maybe regulate things that are really outside of homeostasis. So really think about hydrogen as a homeostatic, adaptogenic regulator. Yeah. Yeah. You also are in the 24 week metabolic syndrome. Yeah, that was the one. And this I find fascinating because the vast majority of Americans with chronic disease have metabolic syndrome. And the vast majority of my deconditioned clients have metabolic syndrome. 41% of children have metabolic syndrome. 52% of adults, I mean, you know, we become the sickest, the most disease in the world, despite the fact that we spend $5 trillion a year on healthcare, largely because of metabolic syndrome and, you know, metabolic syndrome is a combination of things, you know, hypertension, high triglycerides, poor insulin sensitivity or insulin resistance, obesity. And that was another one that was very fascinating to me. Can you talk about what happened to those patients, what changed and what if anything surprised you and what does this mean to hundreds of millions of Americans that are suffering from metabolic syndrome? Yeah. This was, as a six month study, it was conducted in India with some of my colleagues there. And it was a pretty big undertaking. We use the hydroproducing tablets in the study because we could provide a high consistent dose of hydrogen. Which by the way is why I'm not a proponent of the hydrogen bottles any longer. I used to be a big proponent of the hydrogen bottles. I'm not a believer in those anymore. You know, I noticed that the proton exchange membranes would break down over time. The seals would break down over time. A lot of these would, you know, if you didn't clean it regularly, you would get almost like mold in the bottom. And then because there were so many Chinese fakes on the market, you know, I had clients that actually had these things explode on them. And to get a relatively low dose of hydrogen versus getting like 12 parts per million to 13 parts per million from an elemental magnesium tablet. I mean, it's apples and oranges, even cost wise. And I hadn't seen any studies using hydrogen bottles. I'd had them, I'd seen them with hydrogen in relation, hydrogen tablets. Maybe they were some with hydrogen water bottles that I'm unaware of. But I haven't seen them. Yeah. I mean, the bottles can work, but there are a number of caveats. I think you mentioned all of those, right? There's some some bottles that are okay. And but then the longevity of those. The nice thing about the tablets just for research purposes is it's a lot easier to give a client a bottle of tablets and Tessa and exactly how to use it. And we know they're getting a at least a minimum. Exactly. Same. Yeah. Even if it's not exactly the same, that we know they're at least getting a certain amount of hydrogen in order for it to be clinically beneficial. A minimum threshold. Okay. Yeah. Even that threshold. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about the metabolic syndrome? Yeah. So, yeah. So this paper, it was actually, it was both surprising, but also expected because there were a number of other studies already on the metabolic syndrome area. But we were using a higher concentration of hydrogen and a longer duration. And what we found was we found improvements in site glycerides in cholesterol levels in the ratio, for example. We found decreases in some of the inflammatory markers and oxidist stress. Maybe something that was surprising was there was the BMI was lower, which specifically because of weight loss, those seem to be more just fat loss in the hydrogen water group. And you just converted half my on end right now. Really better fat loss. Well, it wasn't a primary endpoint, but it's something that was observed. And this has actually been shown in a number of studies where there seems to just be some modest weight loss, specifically from fat mass and potentially increase in lean body mass. And it's interesting. So, there was a, you'll probably like this. This is really interesting, but there was an animal study. It was published in a journal of obesity, I believe, was a nature publishing group also or it used to be. But this, in this study, they used a leptin deficient mice. So leptin deficient leptins are formed, a hormone that makes you feel full. And so if you don't feel full, you want to keep on eating. And so these mice would overeat and they're fed a high fat diet. But they were blunt leptin so they wouldn't have a satiation as well. Exactly. Well, those given the hydrogen water, they were so much thinner than the other rodents were. It was just, I mean, those pictures in the article, you can just visibly tell the difference. In fact, the drinking of hydrogen in which water, in this case, was equivalent to like a 20% chloric restriction. Wow. And mechanistically, they found that hydrogen increased FGF21 or FB-Blast growth factor FGF21, which increases energy expenditure, which is again something that happens in the mitochondria. So it's metabolism and pros and metabolism. And wasn't there recently a paper, I mean, you might have been involved in it comparing it to GLP ones. Oh, yeah. There was a study on that. I wasn't involved with that paper. But that was interesting because hydrogen seemed to have some benefits in terms of basically helping restore some of the, the, the, the loss that can happen with like obesity or whatever. You can have basically the right levels that you would otherwise, you're supposed to have. And maybe that's helping to regulate your somebody's weight or their satiety or just their perception, their desire. There's a lot of hydrogen is very multifactorial because of what it's doing to the brain, what's doing to the gut and what that in terms of the brain. And then that's going to change. Did you're going to have your dietary habits will change? further going today. change your gut microbiome. And then you might feel like exercise and you have more energy because improving the mitochondria. And now if you start to exercise and we see that some of these studies are people that are taking hydrogen water and like I write down the journal, I feel like exercising when I walked more. Which is kind of a confound, but it's also that's very interesting that people are wanting to just move more and do things more. And that's very important for overall health. You know, there's also a link between the reduction of fiber in our diets over time and the reduction of this production of hydrogen gas. Oh, that's a very interesting correlation. And yes, basically if you have a healthy diet, if you have a healthy microbiome, healthy microbiome, yeah, if you have all these are healthy and good, you naturally produce a lot of hydrogen gas. You actually can produce up to, you know, I don't know, you know, over 10, even 13 liters of hydrogen gas a day, you know, just by having a microbiome with a lot of fiber. Right. Now a lot of that hydrogen gas is not, it is going to be consumed by other bacteria. It's going to be loss in flatulence. So you don't actually get a lot of lost in flatulence. I love the scientific term. And it's explosive. Just bostinous. Yeah, yeah, it's being explosive because it's about 4%. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, it is interesting when you look at some of these studies, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, a lot of neurological conditions, they tend to have lower hydrogen gas in their air, in their exiled air, their breath, hydrogen gas is lower. And when you look at my, my, my collaboration at Nego University, they, they looked at Parkinson's patients and in their, the bacteria in their fecal matter was actually had less hydrogen producing bacteria than those who don't have those disease. So again, a very strong correlation. Again, correlation is not equal to causation, of course. But these are important correlations that you would expect to be exist that would exist if there were a causative factor going on, right? Right. Same thing with the Japanese centenarians, right? Those who are become centenarians, they have higher exiled hydrogen gas levels than, than, you know, younger people who, you know, don't, end up living as long as basically. Listen, there's what I share on this podcast, and then there's what I share with my inner circle. If you've been following me for a while, you know how I hold nothing back here. But my VIP community, that's where the real magic happens. Picture this, you're struggling with energy crashes, brain fog, or just feeling like you're not operating at your peak, and you don't know where to get real answers. But here's what really sets this apart. You're not just getting my insights. When I have incredible guests on the podcast, VIP members get to submit questions for a private podcast segment. So that world renowned expert we just interviewed, you get exclusive access to their knowledge tailored to your specific situation. This section is under the private podcast section in the ultimate human community. And speaking of exclusive, you're getting my personal protocols, the exact tools I use for water fasting, gut optimization, and morning routines that have taken me decades to perfect. This isn't theory, this is what works in the real world. The community launches challenges throughout the year when you get direct access to me and my network of experts. It's like having a personal health advisory board for less than a hundred dollars a month. Your health is your wealth and this investment pays dividends for life. Join the VIP community at the ultimatehuman.com/vip and step into your ultimate potential. So for somebody that's new to hydrogen water, what is their entry point? What's the entry point to start consuming hydrogen water if they're if they've never consumed it before? Well, it's I guess it's pretty simple. One hydrogen tablet a day that started in the morning, take it with food, take it without food, take it before exercise. How would you how would you tell somebody who's compelled maybe after listening to this podcast? Yeah, if they want to ask that's kind of my first thought is first, you know, what does the research say? Like, well, what is your situation and circumstance at? Because you know, hydrogen is not proven. That's kind of anti-science is also like we don't prove anything. We in science, we tried to prove things are false. And if we can't prove their faults, then it increases the probability that they're probably true. But we never really know if it's true. Right. And so I guess first, I'm just saying we don't want to I don't want to misrepresent like the the emergent studies is like, yeah, 200 human studies, but the kind of all over the place from universe is all over the world. Not like just a focused look at this specific primary endpoints we can make this specific claim or whatever, right? So we we there needs to be more research to really categorically say, yes, if you do hydrogen, you will have this benefit. This is what it is. Right. Instead, I think that people should have an informed consent. They should understand, hey, there's an emerging area. The safety is very high. The research looks promising, especially animal research, but the number clinical studies look good. And if you have the the funds, the discretionary means to try, then by all means, you can try it because I believe the safety is high enough that you can do that. Right. And so if you that's you and you do want to try, then I guess if you're going to try the hydrogen tablets, for example, then yeah, you actually only need one. In fact, most of the research, just one tablet will provide you more hydrogen than the majority of all the clinical publications. Wow. Because most most of them do not use hydrogen tablets, but that started to change because the hydrogen tablets have been now used in clinical research. Yeah, I've seen that. Because they're just their convenient and you provide very high dose. And now there's looking at some of these studies that potentially dose dependent effect. And if you also look at the translational effects so ant animals, they drink a lot more water compared to us. I mean, like an ant like we'd have to be drinking like over a gallon of water a day, you know, and to drink the equivalent to what an animal would a rodent. So they're getting a lot more hydrogen. And so maybe one of the reasons that they are more responsive to the benefits of hydrogen is they're also getting a higher dose. There's a lot of other metabolic factors as well. But there's some trending in some case when they hire the higher doses is beneficial, which is why a lot of researchers are choosing to use hydrogen tablets. But there are some studies that there are some studies that show that a high concentration is not more effective than a low concentration in that specific area. But there are other studies showing that a higher concentration is more effective in those specific areas. But there are no studies for hydrogen water. There are no studies where a higher concentration is less effective than a lower concentration. Okay. Now that's not true for inhalation. So if you're going to gas. So if you're going to do it, yeah, that's two to four percent. But so if you're going to do it, you're taking a tablet that's 12 parts per million. And when would you consume it first thing in the morning? Yeah. First, I would just consume it daily. Yeah. We just think about what's the easiest thing, just consume it daily. And then if you want to be okay, figure out some regimen, we don't have enough research to really say this is going to be the most effective. For example, you can take it fasted. There's IADs. If you take it fasted, well, then maybe you don't have any noise in your blood or whatever. And then hydrogen gas can directly cause the signaling. And you can get those benefits, take it before you exercise. But you could also, I take it before I exercise everything. Yes. And that makes total sense. Is that when you take it or in general? I feel like I do hydrogen water before exercise. And I do like inhalation of hydrogen gas like after like a post exercise. But you can do there's arguments both ways. And we just need more clinical research to see if there's really any difference. So you're just saying just take it. Just take it because it's not like caffeine. If you want the benefits of caffeine to help your exercise, you actually take it before you exercise. That's not true with hydrogen. Hydrogen is going to provide a benefit that kind of stacks on top of itself over time. And because we start to change gene expression, we start to change the function of the mitochondria. So we start seeing changes over time and they become more and more consistent. Consistency is the most important. And now if you're really thinking about something important to you, then yeah, take the hydrogen before you exercise. But for that matter, take the hydrogen after you exercise. Also, so you can safely take a number of these tablets. There's no safety concern what comes to hydrogen gas itself. Just pure hydrogen. There's really no safety concerns. They've been using hydrogen gas to prevent decompression Satanist since the 1940s. At orders of magnitude higher than what you would ever talk about, theoretically, you know, dissolving a gas in water than drinking. So they're not concerned there. You just start running up against how much magnesium can one tolerate, for example. So you can probably take-- There is a trace amount of elemental magnesium that's remaining after the everpastas. It's not a therapeutic dose of magnesium either. But it's-- Well, not necessarily because most people see, most people are only getting around 300, 400 milligrams of magnesium. Most people are deficient in magnesium. So simply by taking one or two tablets a day, you're literally no longer being deficient. And that can literally move the needle. Just not being deficient in magnesium. And I would suggest that the research indicates, at least, my interpretation that taking closer to around 700 milligrams of magnesium is probably better for you. So taking several tablets a day, you guess you get the benefits of hydrogen, but I'm just saying you also are getting some of that magnesium as well. And that can help move that needle a little bit more. Because magnesium, we know, is a lot of benefits too. Now, what is really exciting you about the research in the hydrogen? Because as I've poked around the research, I've seen it in concussive injuries. comparing it to the standard protocol for concussive recovery and being magnitudes better than the standard protocol. I've seen it used to soak limbs immediately after injury compared to the rice protocol, rice, rest ice compress and elevate. There seems to be significant indications in cognitive studies that the journal of experimental gerontology. There seems to be significant impact for delayed onset muscle soreness and maybe blunting the lactate threshold for athletic performance. I certainly think that making it a part of your daily routine definitely not going to have any negative side effects. And there's this whole host of selective antioxidant benefits that you're not getting from your regular ingestion of antioxidants. I will say that again anecdotally, I have seen the greatest impacts from people that are bathing in it in terms of immediate benefits. Like my sage, my wife has an L5S1 fusion. And so when her back acts up, it travels right up her spine and she literally just cannot sleep. It locks up when I rub her back. It's like as hard as a rock. But if she gets in a 25 minute hydrogen bath, right before bed, she'll sleep seven hours. And I put Navy Seals in there. I push on Ryan in there. He called me the next day. It was like, "Dude, this is the first time I got eight hours sleeping 15 years. First time I woke up with no pain in 15 years." And maybe lasted 48 hours. I put arthritic patients in these tubs, bathe them in hydrogen, 25, 35 minutes. No one's ever gotten out of there and said, "I feel the same or feel worse." Almost without exception related to inflammatory conditions, knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff, low back. There seems to be an immediate benefit for people and pain, inflammation, like range of motion. And I have seen this so many times and so consistently that I'm absolutely convinced. And so what are your thoughts on that? That's exciting. I mean, it's interesting because. That's exciting. Well, it's interesting though, because what you're talking about is your experience. Yeah, I want to be conscious to say exactly that. Yeah, and these, I guess we could term it anecdotal evidence, which is not something we just throw away, but it's anecdotal, but it's still a form of evidence. It's the way the X-men's arise is too. Yeah, so in front of my eyes, which there are actually some case studies on those areas also, right? So there can be some mechanistic sense to some of these things. It doesn't have as much research as a drinking hydrogen water or inhalation. Yeah, you know, I have to be a little bit more cautious than what I can say, what we see clinically. Mechanistically, I could see how some of these examples make sense. You get in the water and immediately hydrogen gas, the small molecule. I mean, it can penetrate this the skin and it can actually get into those areas. Almost like it's not there, right? It's. Well, it's. Transdermal, yeah. Yeah, it goes to chance-dermal. I mean, it's still. We don't even go into some of the Brownian diffusion aspects, but. No, please don't. I'm just kidding. But it can't get to those areas. And, you know, we can see effects like in our research, we found that hydrogen, if an influence the mitochondria within as little as two minutes, right? So we can see effects immediately. And when you drink hydrogen water, you're influencing the microbiome and you see excelled hydrogen gas within just a couple of minutes also. So, hydrogen gas is going to the body. But again, the concentration is probably not very high, if at all, in say, you know, your knee or something after you drink hydrogen water. So, the benefits of the knee come through other mechanisms, other second messengers, other things that are happening versus if you were to bathe directly there, or if you were to inhale hydrogen gas, okay, now that hydrogen gas is getting feared into the blood and getting into those joints specifically. So those are different mechanisms and they can be supported by mechanisms, actually. But I mean, I've seen it so consistently. Which is why I think you can't necessarily what's better, bathing or drinking or inhalation. Right. You know, really, if you can, you should do all of them. Right. I would say most of the research is on hydrogen water and inhalation. And bathing is starting to emerge. That's becoming maybe more popular. But mechanistically, we understand how hydrogen gas works on the mitochondria level. It's effects on signaling, calcium signaling, for example. So some of these can start to make sense. Probably some of the exercise benefits. So, let's talk about inhalation. Because hydrogen is amazingly effective at very low doses. I mean, concentrations, 2 to 4%. Yes. We don't want to get confused because the concentration in water is very different than inhalation. Because we want to reach at a certain micromole level, a several micromoleurs in the bloodstream. When you drink hydrogen water, you only have, let's say you're going to drink this, you're going to get around three to four milligrams of hydrogen gas, dissolved in the water. You drink that. It's going to be diluted by your body. Right. By the time it gets into those areas in your portal vein and your liver, you're going to be around, you know, five to 30 micromolar concentration. Right. When you inhale hydrogen gas based on Henry's law, between one to four percent, you also get around five to 30 micromolar concentration. Right. And that's what we see in the research in the animal study. So that naturopathic publication, again, that was 2% hydrogen gas. Now, this is some of the most powerful and interesting area of research I'm going to get to, some research going on in Japan right now with hydrogen gas. That naturopathic publication was 2% hydrogen gas. Then they looked at a stroke. So an actual clinical stroke, because that was an animal study of stroke. They used actual hemosteadies in 10 years later in 2017. And they did a safety study and a comparison to see how effective hydrogen gas was. Again, about 2% hydrogen gas. Okay. And in this study, they found that inhalation of hydrogen gas compared to standard treatment, a standard drug, hydrogen gas was more effective at improving the national institutes of radiance scores of the stroke and a number of other parameters. I could go back and look at the study. But it was essentially more effective in all those parameters. Right. So again, this is Scheme Reprefusion Injury. Free radicals, oxidative damage, right? Inflammation. Long term and excellent delivery mechanism directly into the blood too. And that's important clarification too, because hydrogen gas, unlike oxygen, does not bind under the hemoglobin. It doesn't get carried through a specific protein. It just dissolves into the serum of the blood. Yeah. And then as it dissolved, that, you know, 5 to 20 micromolar concentration, it reaches the target organs, has its effect when you stop inhalation or stop administration, then it goes back to baseline within an hour. So like when you drink hydrogen water, all the hydrogen gas is gone after an hour. Right. The benefits remain for like 24 hours, or potentially long rifts you are constantly doing hydrogen water. Right. So same with inhalation. It's gone after an hour. So but those benefits remain. So they also looked at in animal studies in postcardiac caressis syndrome and animal studies. And they found that the 24 hours survival in 24 hours in the control group, about 43% survived. When you do the normal therapy, which is targeted temperature management, so basically cool the body down like a therapeutic hypothermia, then you have 77% survived. Wow. That's why that's a normal treatment. When you did hydrogen gas, 92% survival. Wow. When you combine the two, 100% survival at 24 hours. You're kidding. That's huge. Why isn't everybody talking about that? Well, it's an animal study. Ah, it's an animal study. Okay, but this was enough, that was enough to get the Japanese government to approve hydrogen as a class to be medicine for the study of hydrogen in postcardiac arrest syndrome patients in hospitals. When do you think that study will wait? That's already been done. I'm going to tell you the results. Okay, good. That that that that is exciting. Do we wait at the whole podcast for that? We should talk about this minute one. This is an around with the free radical, you know, stage four of the end, you know, the electron train. We try to cover it. This is the meat. Yeah, this is, but I understand those mechanisms help us understand these observations, right? So in the so the Japanese approve this so they could do a study. And it's not it's not approval like now they're going to use it in the hospitals, whatever, it's just they can actually do a study because you have to make sure this is safe. You're talking about people who are coming in comatose, who are already on the verge of death and then you're going to do some other radical therapy. You've got to get approval for that. Right. All right, so they gave this approval. There's a major study undertaking 15 different hospitals that were involved. But then COVID happened. Oh my gosh. So unfortunately the study got truncated and so it wasn't. They all died because they were vaccinated. Well, they didn't go as long as they wanted to. Right. But but we do have some of those results. Wow. And basically the the the couple of the end points. So they use 2% hydrogen gas. All right. Again, this was not with a nasal cannula. We're like, you know, so many milliliters of flow rate. This was like with a face mask, a tank of exact precise concentration of hydrogen. Because remember 2% it seemed to be more effective than 4%. So you really need to control everything. And you can't have it be vulnerable. Has to be below 4%. Right. Right. You can't do the study. Yeah. Okay. So in the study though, they looked at a couple of things. But I was going to give you two main results. The 90-day survival. Because typically after post cardiac arrest syndrome, you know, you're able to resuscitate the person. But then the survival is not very high because it has so much damage. They end up dying, you know, several days, weeks later. They looked at the 90-day survival. And in the hydrogen, no, in the control group, the control group, I think there were about 77 patients. It was going to be like 380 or something patients. But it got truncated. But there was like, in this study, there was a 61% survival in the standard treatment group. And in the hydrogen group, it was an 85% survival. Wow. So if you had 100 subjects, 61% survived post-Sanitaryment, 85 lived. It's like what, 24, you know, right? I mean, that's a pretty significant. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is people's life. This is an actual study. Yeah. So they are, these people are alive because of hydrogen gas. Wow. And then the primary endpoint was improvements in neurological scores that they were looking at. And in the standard treatment, it was a 39% improved neurological scores. And in the hydrogen treatment, it went up to 56%. So still a pretty big difference. Now, because the sample size is a little bit smaller, this statistically did not reach statistical significance, but still 39% improvement versus 56% improvement was a pretty big. That's a massive. Especially when you consider that there was the survival increase from 61% to 85% was more. So more people who are maybe on the verge who would have died anyways, they also survived. And yet you still saw an increase in the neurological improvements. Wow. So this really has got a lot of people's attention. And so there's a lot more research that's being going on in this area. And then that's these are coma to patients. I mean, they're they're they're inhaling hydrogen gas, right? Wow. Now more research, of course, is going on in this area. And but it's trending because I believe that, you know, there's a lot of corruption and problems with like the FDA and like, oh, that's kind of stuff. Everything, but but that corruption is is everywhere. It's not just with these organizations, right? But I do believe and maybe I'm just too optimistic, but I believe that if we had true, good concrete evidence with clear primary endpoints, then hydrogen therapy could be a standard care. But in order to get that approval, we have to have that evidence. Right. And how do we have that evidence unless we do the clinical studies? Why are the clinical studies going to happen unless we educate people about it? Right. And that's really what I'm here today for. I want to educate people about what's going on. Allow people to have their informed consent. We can raise the awareness about this. This is going to allow for more research to happen. And if hydrogen really can radically revolutionize healthcare, wouldn't you want to know? Would we want to use it again? Something so safe, so simple that's affordable to anybody. And that's precisely why we're working on this education, right? And that's also why, as you know, I'm helped to invent that inhalates to unit. The entire purpose is not because we know this is going to cure every disease known to man, is because we want to do clinical research. We care, like I care about you working on educating this, that everyone about it. What we want to do, clinical research, and now we can do that without tanks of this gas and everything explosive. And we can model the concentration, make sure it's therapeutic. And so that's the whole idea behind you know, inhalates too is initially, it was for clinical research. And then with Alex is like, people actually want the unit. There are people right now today who would want to use this. 100% and so everyone listening to this podcast probably wants to. Yeah, because you get hydrogen water, which we see those benefits and we have inhalation. So really nice combination. But I believe people should understand the limitations and the preliminary evidence that that's how you overcome skepticism because being skeptic is so important. Yeah. That's how you prevent falling, falling victim to a scam. Right. Being skeptic means that you are open-minded, not so open that your brain falls out. Right. I think that's over-addictive or something. Right. But you, but you, but that means specifically that you do not reject the information without first evaluating the evidence and you don't accept the information without first evaluating the evidence. You do both. Yeah. Right. And so I want people to know what the evidence is and we're not claiming that it's going to care for disease. We have all this evidence is proven to do this. That's the antithesis of science. Now we're just saying, hey, this is what's shown in the animal studies, the emerging clinical studies. If it makes sense to you, if you have the desire and the monetary means, well, then you can give it a try. And now you have options available. And I was doing my research and doing a PhD. I remember seeing some of the results. And you were like, damn, I wish I had one of these. No, I don't. I want to get into this study. We had to take a medical grade hydrogen gas with exact percentage. And I'm thinking, why not? Yeah. Yeah. I inhaled that stuff. Yeah. And I want this. I was making hydrogen water. I would make hydrogen water in the laboratory. And so I read these papers. I look at the research. I'm like, we know this is safe. Maybe it can help me. And so I want to try it. And so I would use it. And so now they're like these tablets or this inhalates to machine. People can use it. And they can get clinically relevant doses that we use in the clinical studies if you want to do that. Right? But I would not say that I would not say the evidence is so compelling that you should do hydrogen therapy instead of say go to the gym. Like if you have the choice to go to the gym or just drink hydrogen water. Yeah. Dude, come on. Yeah. So go to the gym. Right? But if you're not able to exercise at all for whatever reason, you're so busy and you have the discretionary funds, why not try hydrogen water, which acts as an exercise mimetic according to some of these animal and early studies, right? If you again, if you have the choice to. Or do you both, if you're going to, that's right. I don't have a single client that I don't recommend take hydrogen water. And that's why I'm so glad that you're here to sort of return the noise to the balance of what are the claims that we could make based on the research today. And then where does the research look like? Yeah. It's heading in a mouth. I think the nicest thing is that the research indicates that it's extraordinarily safe and offers plethora of benefits even though there's additional research. It doesn't impair performance. Yeah. It doesn't make things worse. The emerging evidence in animal studies is very promising. The emerging evidence in clinical studies is very promising. It makes mechanistic sense. But of course, I would not say that hydrogen therapy is more important or there's more evidence than getting your sleep right or exercising or maybe saw a sleep-wolf who died or next choice. Those are the foundations. But if you can do both of them, if you can do all of them and you have the discretionary means to do so, I believe that people should have, should be able to make their own choice to do that. And luckily, there are good products on the market now where people can make that in form of choice. Right. I agree. Tyler, this has been amazing, dude. I know it was very granular for a lot of folks for my super nerds, which is probably half of my audience. They're going to love this for the entry. Heuberman's out there that really want to know the mechanism. They're really enjoyed this. I've been a huge proponent of your research. I've been a huge proponent of hydrogen water. Family drinks it, my parents drink it. After that, the experimental gerontology clinical study, both of my parents on it, they've been on it that entire time since I read that study. I think that was published in 2018. On November 2018. But I'm really deeply appreciative of this because even though we went very granular on the science, I think people understand now why this is such a unique molecule, maybe they understand what the difference is between an antioxidant and a selective antioxidant, which makes hydrogen so unique. It's almost like this miracle molecule with how it reacts in the body. If my audience wants to find you, we're going to find out more about you on Instagram. Yeah, you can find me on Tyler W. LeBaron on all channels. Okay. Tyler W. LeBaron. Yeah. I'll link your research to in the show notes. I'll link your hydrogen and anylation machine in the show notes. But I always wind down all my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. So you probably know that this question's coming. Oh, no, I'm not. I'm worried. No, everybody gets the same question. There's no right or wrong answer to it. Okay. But before you do, I want to end with this. Okay. Hydrogen, think of it as a redox adeptogen that benefits the mitochondria. I want to change the narrative that hydrogen is not just this antioxidant. There's a buttlet of antioxidants out there. Yeah. Think of it as a redox adeptogen that benefits the mitochondria. Yeah. That's a great way to frame it. So what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? That's a great question. I think a lot of that comes from within something divine aspect about that. To be the ultimate human means you are reaching your full potential. Has nothing to do with being better than anybody. It's just, are you making changes? Are you being better today than you were yesterday? And that is an all-ass-special life. How do you treat your neighbors? How do you make them a real, the better place? Are you improving this gift that we have of our body? Are we, you know, we say if knowledge is our power, then learning is our superpower? Are we learning? Are we doing these things? I think to be the ultimate human, we have a balanced life where we're trying to become the ultimate to reach that potential and all those things. And it's not necessarily that we reach our potential, but we're striving for that. We're just making these small changes, just like Kajchen. It's small molecule, but it's constantly there just slowly getting better and better and better. It's not trying to brag or anything. It's just always there. And that's really kind of what we should do. I think, I think, I think about it as sum it up. It's just being incrementally better in all the aspects that we can on a daily basis. Man, phenomenal. We're going to head over into my VIP group now. The VIPs are the only ones I tell who's coming on the podcast before they come on the podcast. And so I let them know you were coming. They were super excited. There's a whole host of questions for you. If you guys are interested in becoming an ultimate human VIP, just go over to theultimatehuman.com forward slash VIP. Would love to see you in their private podcast. One-on-ones with me. Ask Gary anything. There is a 10-month course on becoming the ultimate human version of yourself. It's entirely free. It's all inside of the VIP community. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast. We're going to have Tyler back again for sure. As you continue your journey on Hydrogen, I want to keep people up to date on your research and the emerging research and some of the new findings would love to see if this study in Japan ever gets completed. A bell and it's completed. Yeah, I mean, oh, the one before COVID. Yeah, I know it's done. Yeah, published in Eeklin of Climaticin. A lot of them. I'm going to publish that one. So we like that one. Yeah. And until next time, guys. Special Science.