How to Replace Sauna, Fasting, and Cold Plunge With a Pill (WARNING: Proceed at Your Own Risk!) With Dr. Sandra Kaufmann

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast. You said something like, there's a drug for just about everything that people do to optimize health with those type of methods these days.

**Sandra Kaufmann** (0:12)
I think that's exactly what I said.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:13)
Are you saying that there is a substitute for hard work, or that there is a time and a place when you could use something to simulate what you might be getting through the hard work, blood, sweat and tears?

**Sandra Kaufmann** (0:25)
I think they're just very complimentary. There has to be a way to sort of replicate things. I love exercise. I'm a junkie, just like probably most of your followers, but I travel a ton. I'm certainly not going to pull a sauna out of my suitcase in a hotel room.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:39)
Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.
In this episode of the Boundless Life podcast, I'm going to revisit an interview that I did with Dr. Sandra Kaufmann, one of my favorite doctors because she's just fascinating, kind of weird, which is cool. The reason I wanted to re-air this conversation now is that a lot of what we talk about in this episode has become extremely relevant due to recent developments in the longevity drug space. Dr. Kaufmann is technically an anesthesiologist, she spends her time asking a question that I love in this show. If a sauna or a fast or a cold plunge works by hitting a specific cellular target, is there a clean, well-studied drug that hits the same target? Her answer is often yes, and this episode dishes out the full list. Now, since we initially recorded this episode, Harvard researchers published a paper in Nature showing that lithium, which we talk about in this show, as you'll hear, is a naturally-occurring nutrient in your brain, and losing it may be one of the earliest steps towards Alzheimer's. The dose that worked to address this was a tiny fraction of a psychiatric dose. That's exactly the range that Dr. Kaufmann talks about in this show, years ahead of these headlines. So this is relevant. The show notes are going to be at bengreenfieldlife.com/pharma. That's bengreenfieldlife.com/p-h-a-r-m-a.
Let's go talk with Sandra. Sandy, welcome to the show.

**Sandra Kaufmann** (2:23)
Great to be here. This is going to be fun.

**Ben Greenfield** (2:25)
I know. Remember we were at that conference in the mountains, nosebleed country somewhere.

**Sandra Kaufmann** (2:30)
Where were we?

**Ben Greenfield** (2:31)
I forget. Sundance. Sundance. We were at this private longevity conference, and we were talking about exercise and sauna and cold and red light therapy and all these things that people do.
You said, well, I travel a lot and I've got a hack for a lot of that stuff, and it saves me a lot of time. You basically think the way you phrase it was you said something like, there's a drug for just about everything that people do to optimize health with those types of methods these days.

**Sandra Kaufmann** (3:01)
I think that's exactly what I said. Yeah.

**Ben Greenfield** (3:04)
Then I think what I said, not to rehash our entire conversation, was we should do a podcast about that.

**Sandra Kaufmann** (3:11)
And here we are.

**Ben Greenfield** (3:12)
Yeah, here we are. Okay, so what actually got you thinking about this in the first place? Was it just, hey, I'm busy. I don't have time to sit for 40 minutes in a sauna, or go to the gym for an hour, or I hate cold plunges, or what actually got you down this path of pharmaceutical alternatives to popular biohacks?

**Sandra Kaufmann** (3:27)
Well, as you said in the intro, I'm a physician. I'm an anesthesiologist. So what I do mostly all day is deal with pharmaceuticals. And pharmaceuticals are very clean molecules. We know who made them. We know exactly what they do. And so when you start studying these molecules, you figure out what they actually do for yourselves. So if you trace everything back to cellular optimization, you'll find that the behaviors of these molecules trigger the exact same things that a lot of these very popular activities do. So whereas I'm not against sitting in a sauna, it feels great.
When you boil it down, it's the same mechanism. So if you're busy, it's just easier.

**Ben Greenfield** (4:09)
Yeah. And I know you have kind of a whole list of things that you do, but before we even dive into that, I just know a lot of people right off the bat are thinking, well, wait, there's a difference between climbing Mount Everest and getting dropped off by a helicopter on the top of Mount Everest. And if you're going to tell me some drug simulates me, you know, focusing and meditating and breathing my way and counting my way through a sauna session, surely I'm going to miss out on some of the character development.