Essentials: Micronutrients for Health & Longevity | Dr. Rhonda Patrick

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Rhonda Patrick. Rhonda, welcome.

I am so excited to be here having a conversation with you, so...

Thank you. Uh, I have so many questions, but I wanna start off with a kind of a, a new but old theme that you're very familiar with. So temperature is a powerful stimulus, as we know, for biology, and you've covered a lot of material related to the utility of cold, but also the utility of heat. And as I learn more and more from your content and from the various papers, it seems that cold can stimulate a number of things like increases in metabolism, brown fat, et cetera, et cetera. But heat seems to be able to do a lot of the same things, and I wonder whether or not the discomfort of cold, deliberate cold exposure, and the discomfort of heat might be anchoring to the same pathway! So would you mind sharing with us a little bit about what happens when we get into a cold environment on purpose, and what happens when we get into a hot environment on purpose?

Let's take a step back, and I think you brought up a really important point here. You know, we evolved to intermittently challenge ourselves, and before we had Instacart where you could basically just get your food delivered to you, we were out hunting, gathering. We were moving, and we had to be physically fit. You couldn't, you know, catch your prey if you were a sedentary slob, right? Physical activity was a part of everyday life, and caloric restriction or intermittent fasting was also a part of it. This is another type of, of, of challenge. You know, we, we didn't always, you know, have a prey that we caught, or maybe temperatures were such that, you know, there was nothing for us to gather, right? So food scarcity was something common, as well as eating plants, so getting these compounds that I mentioned. So this is, these, these are all types of stress, intermittent challenges that activate genetic pathways in our bodies. These are often referred to in science as stress response pathways, because they respond to a little bit of stress. You know, physical activity is strenuous. Fasting's a little bit stressful. Heat, cold, these things are all types of little intermittent challenges. There is a lot of crosstalk between these stressors and the genetic pathways that they activate, and these genetic pathways that are activated help you deal with stress. And they do it in a way that is not only beneficial to help you deal with that little stressor, exercise or heat, it's, it stays active and it helps you deal with the stress of normal metabolism, normal immune function happening, just life, aging, right? So this concept is referred to as hormesis, right? This has a very profound antioxidant, antiinflammatory response, or, you know, whatever the response is. It could be the production of more stem cells or something like autophagy. These stress response pathways are activated, like, by a v- a variety of stressors. So for example, one pathway is called heat shock proteins, and as their name would imply, one would go, "Oh, they're activated by heat." Well, correct. They are activated, very robustly, by heat. But you can eat a plant like broccoli sprouts, which is high in something called sulforaphane, and it activates heat shock proteins, among other things. It also ac- activates a very powerful detoxification pathway called Nrf2, which helps you detoxify things like carcinogens that you're exposed to. Cold also activates heat shock proteins. Now, you're gonna more robustly activate heat shock proteins from heat versus cold, but there is some overlap.