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

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
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.

**Rhonda Patrick** (0:21)
I am so excited to be here having a conversation with you.

**Andrew Huberman** (0:24)
Thank you. I have so many questions, but I want to start off with a kind of 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?

**Rhonda Patrick** (1:19)
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 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 challenge. You know, we didn't always have a prey that we caught, or maybe temperatures were such that 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 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 is 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 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 anti-inflammatory response or whatever the response is. It could be the production of more stem cells or something like autophagy. These stress response pathways are activated by a variety of stressors. So for example, one pathway is called heat shock proteins. And as their name would apply, one would go, 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 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 going to more robustly activate heat shock proteins from heat versus cold, but there is some overlap.

**Andrew Huberman** (3:45)
You mentioned plants as a route to creating intermittent challenge. There's a lot of debate, mostly online, about whether or not plants are our friends or plants are trying to kill us. The extreme version from the carnivore types, pure carnivore diet types, is that plants are trying to kill us.

**Rhonda Patrick** (4:03)
These generalizations are kind of, they're just not useful. And I think that a lot of people online in the blogosphere, they gravitate towards them because it's easier and it's a lot more sensational. But I do think with respect to plants, there's just evidence that sulforaphane is a very powerful activator of the NRF2 pathway. And this is a pathway that regulates a lot of genes and a lot of genes that are related to like glutathione production. Genes that are involved in detoxifying compounds that we're exposed to from our food like heterocyclic amines. In fact, there have been GWAS studies. So these are genetically, these are studies that are genome-wide associated studies for people listening that aren't familiar. People have a variety of versions of genes. And we have a gene that's able to make heterocyclic amines to basically detoxify it so it's not as harmful. And people that don't have a certain version of that that's doing it well are very prone to like colon cancer and increased cancer risk.