What Body Fat % Is The Most "Attractive" (& How Low is TOO Low), How To Shorten Your Gym Time, Is Creatine Bad For Your Kidneys & More! Solosode 503

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:05)
In this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, what body fat percentage is the most attractive and how low is too low? Does BPC 157 cause cancer? How to shorten your gym time? Is creatine bad for your kidneys? And more.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:20)
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.

**Ben Greenfield** (0:42)
Welcome to the show. I am tapped. I'm wearing a hat. I don't wear hats too often, but this is the reason why this hair growth project has just gotten out of control. I need to go into the stylist today and figure out how to make a man bun out of all of that messiness right there. Apparently, all of these hair growth, derma-rolling, GHK, copper, peptide, red light helmet things work, at least for me, as an N equals one genetic anomaly. So anyways, there you have it. That's why I look like I'm a, I don't know, like I'm a military personnel with my black hat and my yellow glasses, my tank top.
Welcome to the show. This is a solo soad, just little old moi talking to you about news flashes, research studies and the latest happenings in the whole health, fitness, biohacking, longevity and beyond world.
I want to start with this. I was in the gym this morning. I'm doing a push pull legs routine. Basically, it's very simple. Six days, push pull legs, push pull legs, recovery day. That's it. And this morning was doing triple supersets, right? Back to back to back sets with minimal rest. Chest press, shoulder press, triceps press down, things like that. And I'm listening to a podcast and this, this nutritionist, scientist, researcher, I don't know exactly what she is. She was talking about this peptide, BPC157. You're probably familiar with that one. Many people are. And that is one of the ones a lot of people will use for inflammation. They'll use it for gut issues. They will use it for helping to heal up tissues more quickly. And one of the things that it does do is it's angiogenic. It grows new vasculature to tissues.
And this was the concern of the person on this podcast I was listening to. Basically, that BPC157 promotes angiogenesis. Remember, that's new blood vessel formation. And the way that it does that is it upregulates something called VEGF, Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor. Exercise does that. Sauna does that. Probably just thinking hard does that as well.
But anyways, cancer tumors do indeed depend on this VEGF, VEGF-driven angiogenesis to grow beyond just a few millimeters. And so, the surface level concern is basically if you're consuming or injecting a pro-angiogenic peptide, are you feeding a tumor? Are you growing a cancer?
Well, here's what you need to know. The way that Bbc157 vascularizes works through this axis. I realize this sounds like alphabet letter soup, but the axis is basically the VEGF-A, VEGF-R2 axis. So, in the context of a tissue that has experienced injury or ischemia, you've been working out, you strain something, and the VEGF-A, VEGF-R2 axis goes into work. So, it is responding to local hypoxia, right? Let's say oxygen deprivation from a hard workout, or maybe just like a breathwork session, or a damaged tissue environment, right? Where you've actually, like, let's say rolled an ankle. So, nitric oxide signaling gets disrupted, and then this VEGF pathway goes to work to feed blood vessels to that area. Now, the way that tumor blood vessel formation, or tumor angiogenesis works, is totally different. So, the way that works is cancer actually hijacks angiogenesis through sustained, right, abnormal VEGF overexpression driven by cancer genes, oncogenes. These would be genes like a HIF1 alpha, RAS mutations, et cetera. Again, long names, there won't be a quiz after this, don't worry. And that is combined with a loss of normal anti-angiogenic counterbalancing signals. There's things in your body to help the balance or modulate the growth of new blood vessels that don't occur in a cancer environment. So this tumor micro environment basically creates this chaotic, disorganized vascular architecture that's leaky and that's poorly perfused. And that's because that pro-angiogenic signal never gets turned off in a cancer environment. Whereas with injury or hypoxia, that angiogenic response is normal. So Bpc157's angiogenic effect is in response to an injury or in response to hypoxia, and it's self-limiting in healthy tissue. There's zero evidence that Bpc157 produces the sustained oncogene-driven veg-f overexpression that characterizes what's called tumor vasculogenesis. Okay, so it's all blue sky thinking that Bpc157 is going to cause cancer or is going to grow cancer. It is completely different mechanistically in terms of how the vascularity occurs. So you really have to pay attention to the science and the details here. Now, that all being said, Bpc157 research, all of it basically that I know of, is rodent-based as far as robust, randomized control tiles. There's no human RCTs on Bpc157. Now, in the animal literature, it's never been shown to cause or accelerate tumor growth.