00:26:24 · Andrew Huberman, Daisy Wolf
N acetylcysteine, there's a really nice study showing that N acetylcysteine, six hundred to nine hundred milligrams taken three times per day can reduce the likelihood that you will catch flu. And they did this study by exposing people [00:26:41] S1: I other people with flu only take it if I feel like I'm getting
00:26:43 · Andrew Huberman
[00:26:43] S0: Great. It can make your nose run a little bit. It's a mucolytic. It's actually used in other contexts and dosages for cystic fibrosis, which is the buildup of fluid in the lungs. So, it's a pretty powerful tool. I take it once per day, and if I'm feeling run down, if I'm traveling, or if I'm around somebody who's sick, I'll pick three times a day. It can also perhaps help shorten the course of a cold or flu. But I learned this trick from an ER doc who was working through the pandemic and needed to stay healthy. But the data in that paper, and I can provide you a link if you want, are pretty interesting. The sort of transmission of flu in this case was, I think it was in the mid seventy percentage points of people who took the placebo got the flu by being exposed to clearly flu virus, and I think that number reduced to the high twenties in the group that took N acetylcysteine. You'll have to double check on those numbers. So pretty impressive. I figured safe, increasing glutathione's safe, so why not? No financial relationship to any company that sells it, but they're all pretty much equivalent. And then with lunch, I take a multivitamin. I take two digestive enzymes. I definitely think that can help. If somebody gets itchy after food or thinks they have food allergies before you run off and do some expensive food allergy analysis or something like that, or treatment, recommend there's a there's a enzyme to... That you can take before you eat any histaminergic foods, completely transformed my relationship to food because I can eat pretty much anything now.
00:28:18 · Daisy Wolf, Andrew Huberman
[00:28:18] S1: Cool. [00:28:18] S0: This was a tool that was actually suggested to me by a colleague at Stanford, which doesn't necessarily mean it's a clinical study, but makes sense. If you're not making enough of the enzyme to process histaminergic foods, you can imagine you might get some uncomfortable symptoms. Yeah. [00:28:33] S1: I'm a very allergic person. I feel like I need to know that.
00:28:35 · Andrew Huberman
[00:28:35] S0: This is great. I mean... And it... I used to get sleepy after eating certain foods. I'm like, what is this? It was often dairy foods that would make me... And I thought, it's tryptophan. That turns out to be nonsense. There's not enough tryptophan in dairy or turkey relative to other things. I see it as kinda like itchy around my eyebrows. And people who are kind of prone to autoimmune conditions, like people who have... Like for me, if people have a little bit of psoriasis or something like that, oftentimes they'll find that these foods are kind of irritating to them, so I do that. Also, what I'm describing here, it probably costs less than a penny a day for this enzyme. So it's a trivial a trivial cost. So let's see. And then in that meal is when I take the the Lovaza multivitamin. I do take I do take a desiccated liver. People have to be careful about increasing iron load because it's high in heme iron, but I don't wanna eat liver. I have no interest in eating liver. It it doesn't appeal to me, but I take it for some of the nutrients that are there. And then in the evening, again, not a promotional, but the sleep supplement that's been far and away the best thing for me is just to take AGZ, which is a cocktail of things that I help them create. So it's got magnesium three and eight. Yep. It's got theanine, it's got the tart cherry, it's got all the extracts and things combined. I take that and my sleep's spectacular. It actually allowed me to stop carrying around a bunch of different pills. Experimented with peptides, and I have been open about my experimentation with some other things in the hormone and peptide area, maybe we separate that conversation. Because what I just described, I want to be very clear, is basically what I did between age, gosh, 20, plus or minus, I mean, aging didn't exist and some things like that. But... And 45. At 45, I started to experiment with a few other things, but that's that. I have... I will say, if you wanna have a conversation about some of the tools, especially here in Silicon Valley that people are experimenting with for focus, and some of the stimulant and non stimulant approaches to focus, I spent a lot of time researching that, and I've spent some time experimenting with that too.
00:30:55 · Daisy Wolf, Andrew Huberman
[00:30:55] S1: What's something you recommend to others, but are not that good at following yourself? Or what do you do that you know is bad for you? [00:31:03] S0: I think the social media thing might be the biggest one. I recently moved X and Instagram to a separate phone, so that if people send me things, I can't open it. [00:31:14] S1: Mhmm. [00:31:14] S0: And then I keep that phone in a lockbox, so that I say, okay, for an hour I'm going on there, and then it goes back into... And this is a supermax prison lock spot. [00:31:23] S1: Yeah. So you [00:31:24] S0: can't you can't actually code out of it. That's a little bit embarrassing for me because I can control my behavior, but I did find that time [00:31:31] S1: You're human. You're just like us. [00:31:32] S0: Well, the algorithms have gotten so good. Yeah. They've gotten so good, and it's so entertaining, and it's also a little different because I'm on there, so I'm interacting with it in a in a pretty active way. And I mean, it's also just a weird experience, like, to go online and see, like, people saying stuff about you, and and then you're trying to, like, you know, explain things and trying to figure out if they're in good faith or not, and it can really suck a lot of time. [00:31:58] S1: Totally.
00:31:58 · Daisy Wolf, Andrew Huberman
[00:31:58] S1: Totally. [00:31:59] S0: So I think that I think that that's probably the biggest one, and it's the one that, yeah, carries, like, a a little bit of shame. Right? We should all be able to control our behavior. So why should I need a lockbox for my phone? On the other hand, I feel like when it's in the lockbox, and data support this, that if the phone is out of the room or completely inaccessible, there's cognitive resources that become available to you that are not, if it's even in your bag, turned off under your chair. This was a study that was done. People can focus just as well, but they need to use additional cognitive resources to have that level of focus. This was looked at in a pretty clever way in this study. So I try and keep the phone in another room, and I find that having it in the lockbox is a whole other level of of inaccessibility that I think serves me. [00:32:47] S1: That totally checks out to me. Okay. You distill health research for a living, and it's resulted in a lot of recommendations and protocols. If you had to say... If you had to recommend three things to people ranked no more than three Mhmm. To live a healthier life, what would those three things be?