Doctors thought adults had no brown fat until 2007, when PET scans found it in 5% of people scanned

What if doing something uncomfortable, like sitting in ice cold water, could make your mind sharper, your body healthier, and increase libido? In this episode of the Nick Stanley Show, Professor Thomas Seger, co-founder of Morosco Forge, breaks down the science and philosophy of cold exposure, from improving mood to surprising links with improving meditation and mitigating anxiety, Seger shares both data and deeply personal stories. Whether you're cold curious or a seasoned plunger, this episode offers fresh insight into how discomfort can be a gateway to resilience, disclaimer. While many of the claims discussed are supported by emerging research, others remain anecdotal or understudied.

Cold exposure may offer real benefits, but it is not a substitute for medical treatment. Individuals with chronic health conditions should consult a health care professional before starting any extreme cold therapy. The views expressed are those of the guests and do not constitute medical advice. I was just reading Atomic Habits, which is a great book, and I was reminded of one of the chapters in there where he talked about the cue for dopamine to be released is when your brain already knows that there's a reward on the other side of the action. It's not the action that causes the dopamine release.

Just standing there outside of it and just thinking, you know what, it's going to be worth it. It's going to be two minutes of your life that's uncomfortable, and then you're going to feel great. Sure enough, within 30 seconds there, I was like, yeah, this is going to be awesome. It's going to suck, but then it's going to be awesome. You got a lot of good company. You're telling the story that a lot of my readers tell me, but my morning was a little bit different. I was procrastinating. There are those times, it's winter, it's dark, the sun comes up late, and there's times when I'm like, so I knew I had this podcast.

I'm like, Tom, you got to get into that ice bath. There's the same kind of thing, like the hesitancy, and I get in there, and 15 seconds later, it's usually for me. What was I even worried about? This is great, but this morning was different. This morning, it took about 30 seconds, and I started shivering like you wouldn't believe. Violent trembling. It's not that my brown fat isn't active. It's not that really that I've gone so deep into cold thermogenesis after 30 seconds that I'm shivering to keep my body warm. This was all about stress release. This is all about the anxieties and the stress of running a business and all the things that can happen in there, like trembling them out into the water.

So even though I knew that I might be a little late for a podcast, I stayed in there an extra minute and I brought that shivering on. I'm like, just keep shivering it out, Tom, because we hold our anxieties in our central nervous system. And if they do not have the release, which ordinarily in the wild, it would be sprinting or fighting or whatever we need to do physically, that our body is prepared to do by that stress. I don't have that in downtown Phoenix. There's no will to beast for me to go slay. But the trembling is that physiological release of the stress in the nervous system that lets the anxieties go, that lets the stress resolve before it turns into a complex trauma.

And that was one hell of an experience this morning for me, Nick. Well, good, good. I find meditation is most difficult, even though I know there are mirrored benefits to it, it is most difficult when I need it the most, when I'm feeling anxious and stressed. And the cold plunge is a hack for that because I go in there, there is this release, just like you described, right, this stress release because it's such a shock to the system. And then I get out and I go into the sauna and everything just quiets down. And it's so easy to just slip into a little meditation in the sauna after the cold. And then everything is right in the world.

You know, I mean, your, your legacy is secure. The kids are going to be fine. Everything's going to work out at work like you're filled with a gentle quiet optimism. You have, well, for me anyway, that feeling from, oh my God, I can't believe this. What's happening goes to, I got this. I'll figure this out. Yeah. Yeah, there's some good data on this. I did a, we'll call it a mini study. I took two subjects, one of them experienced meditator. He's been doing this for years. He's Buddhist and I mean, he studied with the Buddhist monks to learn this stuff. And another totally naive naive to cold exposure, naive to meditation.

And I used to choose muse headset. So it goes, it's got like electrodes and it measures your brain waves. And I said, okay, you know, you're warm and dry. We're going to get a baseline. Do your meditation. Great. I said, now we're going to put you in the cold plunge. And it didn't matter whether they were experienced or naive. The cold plunge dipped their brain deep into a meditative state and kept them there for several minutes. Whereas when they were meditating warm and dry on their mat, you know, they sort of bounce in and out a little bit. But this is involuntary and it is unconscious. When you get up to your neck in cold water, your brain cannot help respond.

It slows everything in the body down. There's a sort of ambiguous term called vagal tone. It refers to the strength of the parasympathetic division of the central nervous system. So we're talking the rest and digest reflex. And we've observed people who have improved their vagal tone, at least as it's measured by their heart rate variability, by doing a regular practice of ice baths. When you first get in, it is true you have this sympathetic nervous system response is the fight or flight response. But again, about 30 seconds later, that parasympathetic division takes over. That's called the dive reflex, where your body is adjusting to this new environment.

It's slowing down your rate of oxygen consumption. It's slowing down your heart rate. And it's bringing your brain into that meditative state. So when you say the cold plunge is like a meditation hack, we've got the data that supports exactly what you're experiencing. Because I suck at meditation. And I know there's going to be a dozen people on Instagram who are going to write to me and say, Oh, professor Seeger, you don't just need to do this and they're all right. But I'm still where I am in my life. So the cold plunge is my meditation. Yeah, and it's all about whatever works for the individual.

I mean, correct. There are no right and wrong answers. I think when it comes to meditation, it's really what is functional in your life. And if the cold is what gets you there. And for me, that is sounds like for you, that is then that works. There's no need to change anything. When we're talking about public health, we must be talking about metabolic health, because every single leading cause of death in the United States from chronic illness has its origins in metabolic dysfunction. So you can go down and you can list, you know, all the leading causes of illness. And it sucks. But suicide is up there for men.

Medical errors is another one that's up there. And the link to metabolic health there is somewhat tenuous, but all the rest, heart disease, cancer, type two diabetes, obesity. These all have their origins in metabolic dysfunction. And that dysfunction comes because you don't have the light, right, light environment. You don't have the right diet, too many seed oils, too many carbohydrates, and you don't get cold. The cold regulates the metabolism by activating your brown fat, or if you don't have any brown fat recruiting new brown fat, aging the white fat. Well, tell me about the brown fat because I don't understand what it is, what that mechanism is, why it's good, why it's not bad.

Break down the brown fat form. I'd have a chance to explain it. Because over the course of my career as a scientist, there have been a number of things that in medicine, the medical doctors, they thought, all thought this was true. And then we find out that's not true. And brown fat is one of them. Up until about 2007, medical doctors thought there was no such thing as brown fat in adult human beings. Babies have it, children have it, rodents have it, but adult human beings, they sort of outgrow the brown fat. And then this Swedish team, they were treating cancer patients, and they were using something called positron emission tomography.

So what happens is you inject the patient with a radioactive tracer of glucose. You allow that to go throughout their body, and then you use the positron emission tomography, the PET scan, to find out where did the glucose go? Cancer cells will uptake glucose because their metabolism is fermentation, not mitochondrial ATP production. And so they are so hungry for the glucose that all the radioactive glucose winds up in the tumor. Great. You get a good image of the tumor. But what the Swedish team found was that through these symmetrical deposits of fat, they didn't know that, but sewing up on their scan were these spots and their cancer is not symmetrical.

They're like it can't be cancer. We're seeing this consistent pattern among a few people. Well, these PET machines, they use a lot of power, a lot of electricity. And you have to keep the instrument room cool enough so that the machine doesn't overheat. By the time you strip a cancer patient down to their pajamas or whatever, and you put them in this cool instrument room, a few people were activating their brown fat. And the Swedish team published this paper said we think we found brown fat in adult human beings. So one of the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York, you know, they've got 10,000 of these PET scans are like that can't be.

We're going to go back, we're going to find, we're going to look at all of our scans, right? 95% of the people that they scanned had no detectable brown fat, and 5% did. And you know why those 5% have brown fat? Because they get cold. So the researchers started looking at people who do outdoor jobs in these northern countries. So they'd be Sweden and Finland. You know, do the lumberjacks have brown fat? Yes, they do. Do the garbage men have brown fat? Why? Yes, they do. And it's because they get this periodic cold exposure that activates the thermogenesis, that is the thermoregulatory systems inside your body include the production of heat when you're in a cold environment.

There's two ways to do it. Muscle shivering and brown fat. Brown fat is different from white fat. Brown fat is packed with mitochondria and it's positioned in the body so that the heat it generates will keep the blood warm before it reaches the brain. So if you get cold on a regular basis, your body will put mitochondria into these specific fat cells so that when it becomes active, all it does is burn up glucose and lipids or fat, white fat cells, so that you know, to keep your body warm in the cold. And some people would say, well, what do I need that for? I got heated leather seats in my SUV.

I don't need any brown fat. You can now get a doctorate just in brown fat. So you think about this, you know, 2007 and medical doctors think there's no such thing. By, you know, 2019 or whatever it was, Susanna Solberg is at the University of Copenhagen. She's doing PET scans on these Danish winter swimmers and she's getting an entire dissertation on just brown fat. And one of the most important things about it is it is not just for cold thermogenesis. It is an essential secretory organ. That means it makes neuroprotective factors, neurotransmitters. It's in constant communication with the thyroid.

If you do not have brown fat, your thyroid can become dysregulated. Whether that's Hashimoto's or Graves' disease, when you restore the brown fat, the brown fat now modulates the thyroid function. So brown fat is this essential control mechanism for your metabolism. And the neuroprotective factors that it makes keep your brain intact. That is, when you're undergoing environmental stress, your brain, which is the most important metabolic organ in your body, experiences that stress. So the increased levels of brown fat are associated with increased levels of brain derived neuroprotective factor or FGF21, which is a different one, fibroblast growth factor 21, that either repair brain damage, prevent dementia, prevent Alzheimer's, or enhance your long-term cognitive function.

Brown fat is an essential organ the same way that you liver or your kidneys. It's just that if you don't have any, it kills you slow. We don't recognize aging and chronic illness. We don't recognize type 2 diabetes as a brown fat deficiency. We think, well, you just get an old and people say, well, you're going to have this for the rest of your life. You got to be on metformin. You got to be taken insulin instead of the medical doctors telling their type 2 diabetic patients. Two weeks, you can turn that around. You're going to go ketogenic diet. You're going to do some cold plump therapy. We're going to get brown fat back in your body.

That's going to regulate your thyroid, improve your insulin sensitivity, and you're going to be metabolically okay. Instead of telling them that, they say, here's a prescription. Metformin is a megadrug, billions of dollars. Here's insulin and the insulin prices have gone up like crazy because I don't know exactly why, but it is one of the most prescribed drugs because something like 80% of America is at some degree insulin resistant. And these things are going to keep you as a profitable patient. You could say, well, Marosco is pretty expensive and it is. But you give me two weeks and I will improve your insulin sensitive.

I won't do it. Your body will do it. My machine will improve your insulin sensitivity because you get into it every day. Activate the brown fat. Take some of that glucose out of your bloodstream. Take some of that white fat, especially the subcutaneous and the visceral fat. Take that out of your body, burn that up and restore yourself to metabolic health. I hope this is what we would call a Hormetic Response. I'm obsessed with this idea of Hormesis. So glad you used that term. Yeah. Well, I feel like it applies to so much more. I mean, it's a scientific term, but this idea that small stressors, the body will respond to it in positive ways.

Clearly, there's a connection with the ice bath there and what you're talking about how the body responds to these stresses and it has positive benefits in the long run. But I think it's such a great metaphor for whatever you're trying to accomplish for life in that when we take on uncomfortable things, our mind and our body respond to that stress and become stronger as a result. And to have all of that big concept wrapped up in one word is very exciting to me because I love language. Exercise is a Hormetic Stressor. Yeah. I mean, maybe it feels good for a little while, and then you don't just get tired, boy.

I did that VO2 Max test on the treadmill. I thought I was going to throw up into my mask and then flat out on the floor for like 25 or 30 minutes. Now somebody looking at me might say, Hey, that treadmill is not healthy, but we have a better understanding. We know that after we exercise, we might be in pain or we might be sore, we might be exhausted, but the next couple of days, our body will come back stronger because we are adaptive. That's a great example of Hormetic stress. Cold is the exact same way. If having a glass of champagne and a spa day, you know, was good for you, then I would be prescribing that as a doctor of philosophy.

And we know it's not good for you. It's relaxing and it's comforting. And that's wonderful. If you pair the relaxation and recovery with the stress, this is what's healthy for you. We need sleep is a good example, but we don't need to be sitting around on, you know, all day napping. We need light, but we don't need light in the middle of the night. So we need cold and heat, light and dark exercise and rest. We need feast and fasting. It is this kind of variability that our bodies are expecting from from this experience we call life. The unfortunate thing, because of my profession, the civil engineers, you know, we live in climate controlled environments.

What do you want your light environment to be this? What do you want your temperature environment to be that? And we can keep all of this at a constant straight line with our machines. And that makes us sick. The, you know, if I think about my grandfather, he would probably have scoffed at the idea of deliberately going into an ice bath. My grandfather, you know, was born in Maine at the beginning of the 20th century. He had plenty of cold in his life and he might even make fun of me. But all of the things that were invented during his lifetime to provide him the comfort that was rare are now making me sick.

Because our lives are too comfortable. I have to go seek out and I call it a workout or I call it therapy. What my grandfather, you know, was doing and he called it work. Yeah. Yeah. I really liked the story along these lines because you made your company made the ice bath that Joe Rogan uses. Is that correct? Yeah. We can talk about that. Yeah. When he had a line on his show and he said, I really like this ice bath because it goes down so low in temperature. And I think it was a guest who said, why would you want it to go down to 34 or 33 degrees? Because it increases the suck. It's not that was such a lovely response.

But that is what you're going for with something like this. And obviously I want to be clear. If you've never done an ice bath, don't start that low. You want to absolutely work up to it. It's like lifting weights. You don't want to start with 315 on the bench press. Let's start with 135 and we'll work up to the three. So right. That guest was Gary Brecka. And I don't know Gary personally. He's got his ultimate human brand. But I know Dana White credits Gary Brecka with helping Dana recover from serious illness. And that's a lot of times people will ask me about Gary. And I'll say, I think there's some really interesting things.

Gary is probably 80% right. The problem is figuring out what the other 20% is sometimes. So Gary has some clever ideas. And he goes on the Rogan show and he says, I haven't seen any evidence that there's any benefit to go in colder. Gary has his own brand. It's a cold plunge brand. It doesn't get as cold as Marosco. Marosco makes ice. And all the other brands that use chillers made in China, they go out on maybe 37, 38 degrees. And there's thermodynamic reasons for it. So he sort of challenges Joe with this. I haven't seen any evidence. And Joe says, I do it because it sucks worse. And I'm like, what a great marketing line that would be Gary says, yeah, there's a lot of evidence that it sucks worse.

And he's right. Part of the reason to go that cold is because it sucks worse. If I get into something that's 39 for me now, it's boring because my body is so cold trained. So I'm in Scotland. I'm at the St. Andrews Club. There's the Global Wellness Institute Conference or something like that. A friend told me I should go. So I show up and I got to take a cab back to Edinburgh or however they pronounce it so I can fly home. And the cabbie finds out who I am and starts asking me about ice baths. And I'm like, Nick, this is probably the indication that this is going like a little out of control when cab drivers in Scotland are saying, aren't you that guy on Instagram?

I should ask you about ice baths, you know, what's the optimal time and temperature he asks? And I go depends upon how well cold trained you are. You know, if it's just like what you said, if you go into the gym and you've never done a deadlift, what's the optimal weight or number of reps for you? Well, it's going to be different than, you know, the strongest man in the world who I met at this conference. If you're highly cold trained, then you're ready for more challenge. And that's where I am. Joe didn't start there. First time Joe got into a morosco was exactly what you just said not to do. There was ice floating across the top.

It was like 34 degrees. He spent like a minute and a half. He put it out on Instagram. He got, you know, millions of views. And then Jocko Wilnut called him up and said, what are you some kind of a wimp? You know, my son, he gets in there for 20 minutes or something kind of shame to Joe into doing another post. Next day Joe gets in there. 20 straight minutes of him shivering. And this became a meme. You know, there were people who made Joe Rogan ice bath action figure dolls that you could buy online. That's how crazy the whole thing was. And Joe was doing it wrong. He would have been better off.

Hey, let's start at 45. Let's go down a degree a day. But he's such a sensational and entertaining guy. I mean, doing it wrong in a way is good for the clicks and the attention. Since then, he's had a lot of people on his show. Yeah, you know, Breca is one. Huberman is another who are talking about the real benefits that they experience. And what temperature is a big deal? Last time Huberman was on the Rogan show, Huberman admitted that kind of like Jocko was given Joe Rogan crap about how long Joe was given Huberman crap about how warm. And so Huberman said, you know, out of respect for you, I've gone down to 44 degrees or something like that.

Well, Andrew, if that works for you, keep doing that. If what 34 and the ice in there works for me and for Joe, we're going to keep doing again, n equals one. What is the challenge that I want in my life? And what am I trying to accomplish when I get in there? It's not the metabolic health. It's not the testosterone boost. For me, it's that mental challenge of doing something really difficult and making the rest of my day seem like it's easy. So if somebody's just starting out, let's say they've never done it, they don't want to do it, but they're curious about trying it would 50 be a good place to start and then work down from there.

Here's a rule of thumb. 50 is a fine place to start. There's even some good clinical trials on people metabolic benefits, people in the 50s high 40s, you know, they measure it in Celsius over in Europe. So if I say 14 degrees C, it might not mean a dank thing to most of your listeners, but 50 is a great place to start from metabolic benefits. But here's the rule of thumb. If you're just starting, go cold enough to gasp and long enough to shiver. When you first get into the water, you're probably going to feel that urge to catch your breath. Your body knows what's going on. Your body is like, get out of here.

We're going to die. And so it's like inhale, just in case you're going to wind up submerged or something. If you feel that gas reflex, you have activated your sympathetic nervous system, you are starting the process of cold thermogenesis. You go in there long enough to shiver. If you've done that, and it might be two or three minutes, like everybody is a little bit different, then you know you're getting vasoconstriction in your limbs, which I'll explain in a second. You know that your muscles are shivering for thermogenesis because whatever little amount of brown fat you have left isn't sufficient to do the job.

You know that you are signaling your body to recruit new brown fat, to rejuvenate your mitochondria. That is, to take out the bad mitochondria, this is a process called mitophagy, where it identifies the damaged mitochondria and says, we're going to eliminate those. We're going to recycle some of those components. We're going to identify the best mitochondria. We're going to replicate them. They have their own DNA. And so they replicate as if they were single cell organisms, right? They split into two mitochondria from one, and this is happening all the time. So that's called mitobiogenesis. If you're shivering, you know your body has signaled mitophagy and mitobiogenesis to rejuvenate your mitochondria, recruit new brown fat, you can get out and then get a little exercise to do the rewarming because all of your thermal regulatory responses have been active in their exercising.

I said I would get back to the vasoconstriction. One of those thermal regulatory responses is to shut down circulation to the limbs. You know you have a lot of surface area in the fingers and the toes and the extremity, and it's to keep the blood in the core. So all of the vital organs stay warm. To do that, you have to constrict the blood vessels to make sure the blood stays in the core. Your blood pressure can go up. So chronic hypertension is one of the contraindications. One of the things to that would cause you to avoid cold plunge therapy. But with that exception, if you don't suffer from chronic hypertension, then this vasoconstriction is a workout for the smooth muscle tissues that control your blood flow.

When you do this for long enough, you will improve your circulation mostly through improved action, improved flow of the blood through your blood vessels. But you can even remodel the micro blood vessels in your toes and in your fingers. You can change the flow of blood through your body and especially your extremities because your body is responding to the cold. This is a wonderful thing because especially when you combine it with sona, the health benefits of the thermal contrast therapy that they're talking about in Finland, which is reduction of all cause mortality. They're coming from improved blood flow, improved circulation, and the reduced risk of heart disease and stroke and all of the other things that can be fatal that are associated with poor circulation.

So where should you start out? Go cold enough to gasp, go long enough to shiver. And then after a couple of weeks, you might not shiver anymore, at least not at the same temperature. You're not going to feel that shiver response unless you continue to reduce the temperature. Now me, I'm freezing. So if it takes four or five minutes, usually, it's for me to have that shiver response. Unless I'm in a fight with my director at ASU or I just had an argument with my girlfriend or some customer calls me up and wants a refund or something is going on in my stress life, then I can start shivering after 30 seconds like I did this morning.

Are you looking to get into shape or stay in shape? If so, you're going to want to add a low calorie, high protein drink to your daily regimen. This episode is brought to you by Hewell, makers of this delicious protein drink. They've also got energy drinks, protein bars, and my favorite, their daily greens mix, packed with 91 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source nutrients. Let's go to receive a $15 off code. Click the link to Hewell in the show notes. Hewell, it's fuel for humans. Hewell, see what they did there. So I have one plunge at my home and keep it in the 40s so that my wife and my kids will still use it because I have experimented.

And if we get too low, there's no way they're staying in there for more than five seconds. And so to compensate for that, I usually just stay in longer. If I'm doing it regularly and it's getting easier and easier, I will just stay in for a longer period of time. And from what I'm hearing from you, as long as you get the shiver eventually, you're still going to get the benefits. I had a run of maybe like two months where I was going every day and I was like, I got to turn this thing down. It's just not doing anything for me. Now it's more, let's say, twice a week is probably the average on like non workout days.

I'll just go in there. It's quick. I can get on with the day and feel good. And then every time I do a podcast, I make sure to go in there in the morning just to be alert and awake. But that system will work. Is that correct? Yeah. Your instincts here are really good. You're kind of tuning up your brown fat twice a week. And out of deference to the preferences of your family, you're like, okay, I'll stay in here a little longer at a warmer temperature. It makes total sense. It reminds me of a story. One of our customers is the proper hotel in Austin, Texas. And I was in Austin chain of hotels. Yeah, it's magnificent.

They do everything so well. And so that's why they, when they're saying, well, we're going to do these spas. Well, we want a moronco makes total sense. But the proper hotel in Austin, it's kind of got a feminine feel that is a lot of my audience on Instagram, you might think of them as Jim bros or something like, you know, they're, we're going to be tough. Joe Rogan talks about it. He's like, you got to kill your inner bitch. You know, David Goggins actually has a lot of fans in female fans, right? So we're doing the heart. Austin proper is not really like that. It's beautiful and it's comfortable.

And they have a spa that they know the ladies would enjoy. So I'm, I've got this Society of Risk Analysis conference. I'm going to as a professor, I'm like, Oh, I'm going to stay at the proper hotel. I'm going to mystery shop, you know, the moronco. Nick, they keep it at 45 degrees. So I booked their thermal contrast room for 45 minutes, which is, you know, the time that they let it out. And I went through with AJK and we're in there together and I'm like, okay, I'm going to do the cold plunge. You do the sauna and then we'll switch. 25 minutes I spent in that cold plunge. And it got to be where I'm like, is this thing ever going to kick in?

And she said, you know, we only have 20 minutes of the room left. And I was like, Oh, I'm not even going to break a sweat if I get into the sauna because my skin temperature is already so cold. I got to, I got to get out and see if I can get it. Well, the sauna only went up to 190, which meant I didn't sweat in the least. Where is this story going? Yes, it's the total heat extraction that constitutes a dose. You can do 44 and stay in there longer. But there is a certain level when you're highly cold trained where you could do that temperature indefinitely. And for me, 45 degrees felt like indefinitely.

It's just like in the gym, you were talking about the bench press. If you've got someone who's highly trained and they bench 300, you say, okay, but here's 120. You only have to do more reps. They do 500 reps. They get bought and they're like, this isn't a challenge for me. And I felt like that with the cold. When you do thermal contrast, if you're going to do morose code like 34, you got to have a sauna that goes up to like 200, 210, because otherwise this is going to take all day for you to start feeling that ormetic stress going back and forth. Speaking of weightlifting, is it correct? You should plunge before the workout instead of after because the plunging after can slow down your hypertrophy or or stop it all together.

It is so correct. It's ridiculous. And it's frustrating me that people haven't really caught on. I should be more patient. There have been dozens of studies using cold plunge for recovery from exercise because this is everything, whether you had a high school track coach or something, everybody said, oh, use the cold. And the reason they said that is because it reduced delayed onset muscle soreness. You could go back to exercising again in a state of comfort. But when people do the studies, there is no improvement in performance after the next day if you've done the cold plunge after your exercise.

And people have been really looking. Huberman has this good rule of thumb. He's like, wait four hours. And he says that because he's read the same studies. You will blunt the anabolic response. You will kind of negate the hormetic stress of the exercise if you do the cold after. But here's what I discovered accidentally. If you do the cold before, you will increase the anabolic response. And I say this came to me accidentally because I was not like an everyday ice bath guy until I got a blood test back. And that blood test said that my PSA, my prostate specific antigen was elevated. I was like seven nanograms per deck leader or whatever the units are.

Now, this was maybe five or six years ago. And you get a report like that. And it's got the red exclamation mark. And it says too high. What do you do? You go right to WebMD. You go right to Mayo Clinic or Cleveland. Because this is what I do. I'm going online. I spent 20 minutes online. I was convinced I was going to die of prostate cancer. Because that's what you start reading about these things. Your catastrophic thoughts take over. I started talking to other men. I'm like, have you ever had your PSA and blah, blah, blah. Turns out everybody my age has had some kind of experience like this. And they are all terrible, whether it's the pain of the biopsy or the sepsis infection after the biopsy or the erectile dysfunction after the prostate act to me.

So here I am in a bit of a pickle. I'm convinced I'm going to die of prostate cancer. At least in my nightmare. I'm not going to go do a biopsy. I'm going to stay the hell away from allopathic medicine. Because I don't trust any of it. I've got to find another path. And I said, I'm going to treat this inflammation with ketogenic diet and ice baths. And that's when I started getting in every day. Because I was scared out of my mind in that moment. I had the guts to retest like four months later. I'm like, I know I got to keep an eye on this thing. But if it goes up, I didn't want those nudes. So I'm like, am I going to go?

I got the test back PSA drop to less than two. And a weird thing happened. Because if you check the male health panel, they will measure all this stuff, your PSA, and your testosterone. And my testosterone went from like 700 to 1180 nanograms per decoliter. So the PSA, it said was normal. But the testosterone import had the red exclamation mark. And it said too high. And I'm like, I didn't know how that happened. So I got to go back to the library. And there was a study from 1991 in Japan, where they'd compared cold after exercise, reduces testosterone, reduces luteinizing hormone. And then they said, but just for, you know, giggles, we're going to do cold before exercise.

Testosterone went up, luteinizing hormone went up. I didn't know what luteinizing hormone was at the time. But I took my test report to my urologist. I'm like, now I'm going to get a gold star and a clean bill of health, right? Look at my PSA. He didn't care about my PSA. He looked at my testosterone and he said, there's no way this fat college professor, 50 something years old, has 1180 nanograms per decoliter. He's like, you're not in any creams or supplements or like, what are you taking? And I go, oh, I'm just doing ice baths. He goes, I got one more test. This is the luteinizing hormone. So I go get my blood drawn again.

Luteinizing hormone is what signals a man's gonads to make testosterone. And I figured out later that urologist was like, if his luteinizing hormone is low and his testosterone is high, then the professor's secret is a liar and he's taken some kind of supplement testosterone replacement, whatever the heck we're going to call it. And I'm not going to treat him anymore. Well, my luteinizing hormone came back, red exclamation mark too high. It was 8.9. I sent that to my urologist. Guess what? He's not going to treat me anymore because there's nothing wrong with me, Nick. There's nothing left for him to treat.

So I wrote this article. I said, hey, this is a weird thing. Do your cold before you do your exercise. Huberman had Craig Heller, who's a Stanford professor on his show. And Craig Heller has been taking highly trained athletes, like professional athletes and untrained like graduate students and saying, what happens if I extract heat? He does it through the palms, extract heat from their body during, you know, in between sets. Turns out their performance goes way up. Their peak muscle power goes way up. Their endurance goes way up. And they probably get a testosterone boost. So I wrote this article.

Nobody reads my stuff because who goes to moroscoforged.com, you know, to read health advice or something. But remember, getting off the plane in December, 2022, when I'm going to see the Northern Lights. Yay. And so I land in Iceland and it's dark and it's cold. And you know how you turn your phone back on? It's all lit up. People are like, Tom, you're on the Joe Rogan show because Joe read the article and Joe was reading it out to David Goggins and saying, now I only prequel. I do my ice bath and then I do my exercise. And I started getting messages from, you know, next year, 18 months from all over the world.

Guy Sand, I found the article Joe Rogan was talking about, I started doing pre-quilling. My testosterone is going through the roof. Now I have, you know, three more articles and they include a number of case studies. These are documented lab report before, after I interviewed every single one of these people. And they say, this is what I did. And this is the impact that I had. And I was bothered by two cases that didn't get any testosterone boost at all. By the way, I have two women in these case studies. They get a testosterone boost. Let me talk about that. So these two cases and it was AJK again.

She said, well, are they taking any other meds? So I asked them, yes. They were both taking medications for other conditions that interfere with testosterone production. And I'm like, okay, that explains it. I didn't have a mechanism until I think it was a post that I saw from Dr. Courtney Hunt. She's in Scottsdale. She's a customer. She's an MD. And she said, hey, do you know where testosterone comes from? The mitochondria. The mitochondria take cholesterol and they recombine it into a steroid. And that steroid is the precursor to testosterone. If your mitochondria are damaged, then the last thing that they're going to do is start producing steroids.

Like they're just trying to keep up with the essential functions of your body. If you have healthy mitochondria, then the healthy mitochondria will convert cholesterol to steroids, which is then converted to other sex hormones in your body. And I'm like, that's a mechanism, Nick. So low T should be an indication for cold plunge therapy. The story isn't quite over. Mark Bell invites me to come out on the podcast. And if you don't know, Mark, he's famous for taking massive doses of testosterone that they wouldn't even dare to give a racehorse. And he goes, look at me, doing pretty good. He says, hey, come on the show, we'll talk about testosterone and we'll talk about ice baths and stuff.

And Mark Bell is a smart guy with a great sense of humor. I'm like, sure, I'm going on the show. But he's also a clever entertainer. He played a clip of a medical doctor. And he says, you know, Professor Seeker, this medical doctor says he would never prescribe cold plunge therapy under any circumstances for any of his patients. What do you say? Because one of the best ways, to entertain the audience is that game like, let's you and him fight. And I watch this clip. And I'm like, hang on a second. There is no class in medical school that teaches doctors when to prescribe cold plunge therapy. So they can't do it.

And I'll allow like, they've never been trained on this stuff. Now I got to write the clinical guide to cold plunge therapy, say, what are the indications? What are the contraindications? And forward thinking medical doctors like Courtney Hunt or Dr. Kirk Parsley or other people that I'm working with who are medical professionals, I'm a PhD. They will know when to prescribe cold plunge therapy and what the contraindications and safety protocols are. So this is changing. You asked me this question, you know, should you do it before or you do it after? And in my mind, I'm like, okay, this is all settled.

I've got all the case studies, all the data. But you still get people on, you know, Instagram saying cold plunge doesn't do anything, because they're doing it after exercise. You should 100% be pre cooling your exercise. Will plunging increase your free testosterone? I don't know. And I don't know because I don't care. I don't care enough to ask, right? I think total is the important one. And I'm trying to remember who convinced me of this because I went to a seminar at Parker University in Texas, Dallas, Texas. Andy Galton was given this seminar. And it was with a friend of his, I wish I could remember his name because now I'm embarrassed.

And they got the exact same question, what's more important free or total? They said it's total because your total testosterone is the reservoir that allows your body to partition into free when you need it. We know free is more active, right? But if you have that reservoir of total, your body knows when to release it into the active form. And I'm like, well, okay, that makes sense to me. Now it's convenient that I was only paying attention to my total. That's what my lab report came back. But the explanation I got there made sense to me. The question I have for you is, is free something that is important to you.

The reason I ask is there was a doctor on a previous episode. And I asked him about testosterone supplementation because it's gone gangbusters across the country because suddenly it became legal, whereas it was highly restricted before. And I have never done it. And so I don't know a lot about it. And so I was curious. And he said, and he knew a lot about testosterone supplementation. And he said, well, the thing you need to check if you want to find out if you're deficient, if you need testosterone supplementation is the free testosterone. And often that's not included in the initial testing of testosterone.

If you just go in and ask your medical provider, it's a more time consuming and expensive test to measure the free testosterone. We said, we need that number to determine if you need TRT supplementation. Because basically said, if your free testosterone is low, given your age and metabolic health, then testosterone supplementation will be a good thing. We're just trying to get you back to the normal levels for your age. If they're already normal and you start taking it, well, yeah, you're going to get some short term benefits like getting jacked and having more energy. And suddenly your libido is going to be on fire.

He's like, but you're paying with some long term consequences. The reason I'm asking about the free testosterone is just linking those two conversations. And I was just wondering if cold plunging was a way to move that number up a little bit in a way that doesn't involve having to go out and get the supplement. As a medical doctor, he's asking a specific question, is this patient a good candidate for hormone replacement therapy? And he says, the criteria that I use to identify people who are testosterone deficient to the extent that I would prescribe hormone replacement therapy is the free test.

I'm not going to argue with this in the least. Those are his medical criteria. They sound right to me. The argument that I have with the medical doctors and testosterone is that let's say 25 or 26 year old guy will go and get their total testosterone will come back, let's say 450. And the doctor will say, oh, you're fine. You're normal. Nick, normal sucks. I don't want to be normal. I want to be healthy. I want to be energetic. Now, at my age, when the first time I got my testosterone check was when my PSA came back high. And I was like 750, you know, which is pretty good. I've been doing some ice bath.

I'd lost a lot of weight. And that's great. Any medical doctor would have said, oh, Professor Seager, you're fine. Look at you. You're so healthy. The difference between 750 and 1180 is palpable. And you want it. I don't know about the long term consequences of hormone replacement therapy. And just my intuition says, we're better off if we're making our own supply. But the men I've talked to who are really down there, total testosterone below 300, these men are depressed. There are mental health consequences of being low T. They are in such a funk that when you put them, I shouldn't say you when a doctor puts them on TRT or HRT, and they get up to something like 800 that would be considered healthy.

They don't ever want to go back because the malaise of low T, what it does to your relationship, you know, if you're married is horrible. So a lot of the guys that I talked to, regardless of what ice baths are going to do, they're like, nope, I'm going to take this as, you know, I don't want to take a chance that I'll ever go back. And those guys are getting up to like 1300, 1500, because when you stack the HRT on top of a cold plunge practice, you get these super elevated levels of testosterone. I have yet to meet a man or a woman for that matter, who was not happy about it. Yeah, and I'm all for it.

If you need it, it just it's a question I'm interested in, just based on this new landscape that we live in where there are these clinics and obviously they're incentivized to give you whatever you ask for, whether you need it or not. And so I'm just curious about that. But it's a bit off topic. Let's turn to the women's health piece, because you talked about raising testosterone levels. And I know the last time I did a medical episode, there were several questions from women saying, hey, could you ask some more specific questions as it relates to women's health? Because oftentimes it's different.

And so here we go. No surprise, there are differences between men and women. There are metabolic differences. There are sex hormone differences. Let's start from that supposition. In a man, most of the testosterone, for example, is made in the gonads. And you might think, oh, well, women, they have way less testosterone than men, but it would be made in the ovaries. And that's true. Turns out that a healthy woman has three to four times as much testosterone as she has estrogen. Testosterone is the dominant sex hormone in women as well as men. It's just that the levels are much lower in women. And only about a quarter of it comes from the ovaries.

So where's the rest? The adrenal glands, the skin cells and fat cells. Guess what happens when you get into the ice path? You stimulate the adrenal glands, the fat cells and the skin cells. There's only a little bit of data. And what it shows is that women get an immediate testosterone boost from cold stimulation. Men don't, men need to exercise afterwards, but women get this immediate boost. And it has some of the same effects, not all, but some of the same effects in women. For example, it drives libido. This is a wonderful thing, Nick. If you can keep your wife getting into that regular practice of cold plunging, it might, I don't know what your marriage is like.

I'm not going to pry. But in my experience, woman that I'm with do a little cold plunge has been a good thing for our relationship. Women often get overlooked when it comes to testosterone. They find themselves, especially after menopause. They might be in a low T situation and they experience some of the same malaise. But the number one diagnostic criteria for putting a woman on hormone replacement or testosterone supplement therapy is low libido. And there are no FDA approved protocols for treating women with testosterone. So a clinician who has this woman, she's complaining about the quality of her life or whatever.

I shouldn't say complaining. She's describing this and it's not satisfactory to her. That clinician has to adapt a male protocol and then try and fit it into the woman's life, which is a little easier after menopause than when she still has her cycle. I just passed to it naturally. Now, because I'm not a woman, I don't have personal experience. I'm relying upon two readers in particular. One of them is Pamela Butler and I can use her name because you know, we're on Instagram and she's given me permission. We did an interview. She had her ovaries surgically removed. She had a hysterectary and I forget the word and overrectomy.

So that portion of her testosterone production, it's just gone. She was low T and her doctor put her on hormone replacement therapy. Then she started doing ice baths. She got a 10x increase in her testosterone and her doctor was like, wait a second, we got to get you. What are you doing? We got to discontinue the hormones immediately and whatever it is, keep that up. She was doing ice baths. And then it seems to me, anyway, you could do it naturally is going to be a better way. Intuitively, it makes sense. I think it's better for everyone except Pfizer. It's better for everyone except Moderna. But your doctor would probably agree.

So I put out that post and then I got a message from a reader, a young woman, 32 years old, very healthy. She's a biohacker. And she said, I'm going to put this to the test. And she's measuring her testosterone. And I think it was day three of her cycle. She's very fastidious about this. She starts doing the ice baths. She wrote to me and she said, Professor Ziger, I don't know. I only got a 0.5 increase. And that's not a very big increase. I don't know what's going on with your other readers, but I didn't see a big one. So will you send me your test results? Nick, she's in the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, they measure testosterone in molar units instead of grams instead of mass units.

So you got to do the unit conversion. She got a 0.5 increase. She went from 0.6 to 1.1, whatever it is, millimoles. She almost doubled her testosterone by doing these ice baths. I had to write her back and have the interview and she goes, oh, well, that does explain some things. Because she felt the energy. She felt the libido. She felt the life changes, the characteristic sensations of that higher level of testosterone. It was a remarkable case. Yeah. And anything that is going to give you that libido bump is going to make life a little bit more enjoyable. It's a good proxy. Yeah. This has been tested, believe it or not, by the Czech army.

So this is in the Republic of Chetchia. I don't even know how to pronounce it, Nick, because I'm a child of the 70s. But the Czech army, they took these soldiers, men and women, and they started doing winter swimming. So they're going into the river. And they did this eight-week study, and it was quality of life type questionnaire things. They didn't actually, I don't think they measured testosterone. The soldiers all reported an increase in overall quality of life. And what really stood out was an increase in sexual satisfaction. So this gets to be a little racy result here. But it directly corresponds to what we're talking about.

When the study was over, the soldiers were like, well, hang on a second. Can't we keep doing this? You know, I can't re-keep going. And 80% of them continued the practice even after the conclusion of the study. So we're starting to get some good data on this. Yeah. How important is the heat with the cold to make for all of these physical health benefits? I'm so glad you're asking, because right now, there is sort of a social media wave that is promoting sona use. And I think sona's great. I live in Phoenix, Arizona. If I want a sona, I park my car in the sun. You know, and by the time I get in there, it's like 180 degrees.

I've always taken the heat for granted, because it's so I'm going to walk to class on campus, and it's 110 degrees out. I feel like I'm getting some heat exposure. But the social media movement about the health benefits of sona in the US is a little bit misguided. They will cite these Finnish studies. So guys like a laukenen, you know, they're fun names to say, but I can't even pronounce them right. But they're the University of Oolu, or something like this. And they do these epidemiological studies of the Finnish population. And they say, those who sona twice a week have, I'm going to make this up, but you know, 45% reduced all cause mortality.

And it comes to the US. And people say, I should sona. What they forget is that in Finland, they take the cold for granted. There is no such thing as a Finnish population that is doing sona without also getting cold exposure. And when you read, you know, laukenen's papers, he says, and by sona, we mean hot and cold going, they mean thermal contrast therapy. Sona is probably the only Finnish word that we use in English, you know, and we're using it wrong. Because on Twitter, people think it's the hot box. They forget that, you know, you also got to go roll in the snow or jump in the lake like you live in Finland, if you really want to count on those benefits.

Now, I happen to think if you're just doing heat, it's probably beneficial. You're probably getting some good circulatory benefits is probably good, hermetic stress. But you can't count on the data coming out of Finland if you're just doing the heat. So you're asking how important is the heat? There's a really important distinction to make when you're going to do thermal contrast therapy, and you're doing, I'm going to do the ice bath here, and then I want to do some heat. Don't use a hot tub. Hot tubs are great. But there is a phenomenon called hydromiosis. Your skin knows when it's wet. You will not activate your sweat response.

Open up your pores and start sweating when your skin is wet, because that sweat cannot evaporate into the hot water. So if you Google hydromiosis, Google's going to think it's a spelling error or something. It's an obscure term, but there's some good papers on it. In the cold bath, you do vasoconstriction as a mechanism of thermal regulation. If you go into the hot tub, you will sweat from your head or your shoulders or whatever's not in the water. But everything that is in the water will also be vasoconstriction. And that is to defend yourself against the warm water, the hot water, without sweating.

If you go into the dry sauna, totally different, because your body will sweat, your pores will open up, your veins, your blood vessels will dilate. So ice bath, vasoconstriction. You don't want the veins to open up. Right. The dry sauna, the traditional finished sauna, vasodilation. And this is how you get the workout for your smooth muscle tissue, where first they constrict, then they dilate. Mark Cohen, PhD MD from Australia, he says, doing thermal contrast therapy is like bicep curls for your blood vessels. It's a good analogy. This is how you're going to exercise the smooth muscle tissue. I think it's wicked important.

But again, I live in Phoenix, where I take the heat for granted. We finally got a sauna at Marasco, at our production studio. So now, even in the winter, I can get a little heat and our employees can get a little heat. It feels great. You know something is happening. And now that we're going back and forth with thermal contrast, I feel like we can count on all those benefits that laucanine or I forget their names in Finland have documented. Gotcha. And what about the infrared sauna? I don't have infrared, but I bring up the hot cold contrast a lot on the show. And inevitably, there's a question about infrared sauna.

And I don't know much about it. So any thoughts on that? It's not my area of expertise. And partly, the reason it's not my area of expertise is I have yet to see the paper that came out of Finland that said they were using infrared sauna. There just isn't anywhere near as much data. Now, there's a lot of things though that are true about it. We do, we sort of have an infrared deficit in the industrial world. And you might say, it doesn't make any sense. Phoenix is the hottest. It's the valley of the sun. It's the hottest city in North America. How could people who live in Phoenix, Arizona, possibly be light deficient?

And the fact is, it's so dang hot that they all stay inside during the summer. They don't get any UV. They don't get any infrared. Our super efficient, you know, thermal glazed pains reject the light that is in the infrared spectrum for energy efficiency inside your building. Your body needs infrared, whether that's the fireplace or the wood stove or the lamp or the sun, your body is expecting infrared spectrum light. It feeds your mitochondria, which is not, it sounds like a metaphor. And it is, but not exactly. You have chromophores all through your mitochondria that will absorb the energy of light and give the mitochondria a boost that isn't coming from lipids.

It isn't coming from glucose. It's coming from the energy of the light. You need infrared. And if the sona can supply some, that's terrific. But I have sat in an infrared sona for 45 frickin' minutes trying to break a sweat at 145 degrees Fahrenheit when I've tried thermal and it just doesn't work. I get bored, I pick up my phone, you know, I'm going to scroll through Twitter and say some kind of inflammatory thing that's going to get me in trouble again. And then my phone says, I'm overheated and it shuts down. Long before the sweat starts dripping off my skin, infrared is just not hot enough to do thermal contrast with the cold.

So it's probably lots of benefits. And I don't want to discourage anybody. It just doesn't work for me. Okay, that makes sense. And your company, let's make sure to get all the info. If somebody wants to check out your cold plunges, where do they go to get that? Where do they find you on the socials? All that good information. They go to moroscoforged.com. If you want to see what a $14,000 ice bath looks like, you go to moroscoforged.com. If you want to see what a $250 inflatable tub looks like, go to Home Depot or go to Costco or go to Amazon. We don't sell that. And we get a lot of crap for being so expensive.

Right now, I don't know another way to do it. I will never put my customers in some soft plastic inflatable piece of crap that leeches phthalates into the water. We have stainless steel tubs. We will never use chlorine. Well, let me rephrase. We use ozone so that you don't have to use chlorine. The tub is grounded, which means it puts you in electrical contact with the earth. And I know not everybody can afford it. I wish I could make it less expensive. But for those people who are committed to a cold plunge practice, moroscoforged is the right value proposition because you're getting tub that's warranted for Epsom salt.

You're getting all of the you're getting the five year warranty that comes with our pro model. You're getting all the customer service. You can also get the science. So if you're not in the market for a $14,000 ice bath, you can still go to moroscoforged.com. Click on the science tab and you can read everything that I've been talking about. I've written up and it's available for free on our website. If free doesn't work for you, maybe you need a hard copy. You can buy it like it's not on Amazon, but it's on the moroscoforged website. It's called uncommon cold. And there's five 600 scientific footnotes in there that tie back to the literature because that's what I do.

I gave Jay Bhattachara a copy because we became friends during these COVID lockdowns and he's in Phoenix and he's looking at my book, which he's never going to read. He's going to go be you know, NIH director and he's going to forget all about cold plunge therapy. But he was working on a book. So we were comparing notes and he thumbs through and he's like, Tom, there are way too many footnotes in here. You know, I'm like, Jay, what are you expecting? It's not a popular book. It's a work of science. And so I would send you a copy if you have any insomnia problems, Nick, it would probably put you straight to sleep.

But you can find me on moroscoforged.com. You can find me on Instagram, S-E-A-G-E-R-T-P. You can find me on Twitter. It's the same handle. If you want to, you know, read this stuff that gets me in trouble, that's where it's going to be. Excellent. And closing thoughts for anybody that wants to try this, but maybe they're not quite ready to drop even for a mid priced one, which is still $4,000 or $5,000. How do they get going to see if this is something for them? Very first ice bath I ever took was in a stock tank. So one of these galvanized, it's a zinc galvanized metal tank that they, you know, put out on the fields for the cows to drink out of.

And sometimes it's called a stock tank. Fill that up with ice and water from the hose. And I had been doing cold showers and they suck. They make me angry. They activate the fight or flight sympathetic, but then you never get the dive reflection. Never get that meditative thing in a cold shower. And so a former student of mine said, well, you ever tried an ice bath? I'm like, well, okay, I'm game. Got in there completely different. So I had a great experience. And me and my former student, we started going down, you know, to the quickie mark or whatever, and buying 200 pounds of ice. And we bought a stock tank and we started in his backyard.

The problem is that during the summer and Phoenix, you know, it's 114 degrees. And you just spent $75 on ice and it's melted 15 minutes later. And it's, we said we have to invent a machine to do this for us because we wanted to be able to do it more often. But it is a great way to start if you don't live in an area where you can get into the cold ocean or you can get into the cold lake or you can get into the cold stream. Those are the best ways to do. There's some drowning things, but they're the best ways to really get that hormetic cold stress response. Marasco is the next best thing to nature.

Because I don't have that mountain stream, I live on the 32nd floor in Phoenix. I got to make a machine, put it up on my balcony, and now I can get a little bit of cold every day. We are probably the brand for the most committed of people. The people who are like, I want to be able to do it without thinking about it, without having to drive, without having to prepare. I want to just be able to get in. If all I want to do is a minute, then fine, I'll do a minute. If I want to do 10 minutes, I want to be able to do that too. So in a way, Nick, we sell convenience, not really steel and wood and things like that.

Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure, educational. I've learned a lot today. And it was really interesting to meet you. Thanks for letting me talk as much as I do. You can probably tell the semester is over. I haven't had a class in a week, and I'm like, got all these things that I got to say, and you've been a great host. Okay, everybody. Until next time, ask questions. Don't accept the status quo and be curious.