Rhonda Patrick

If you're like supplementing with creatine, you got to tell your physician-

Yeah, I am still a huge proponent of using deliberate heat exposure to improve your health, both cardiovascular and brain.

I do think that the physiological mechanisms are somewhat in some ways mimicking some aspects of moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise.

And that is how it is improving cardiovascular health and also exercise.

an aspect of that brain health, cardiorespiratory fitness that's been shown.

There's been not only like observational data, but there's been intervention studies looking at endurance, getting someone on a stationary cycle and then adding the sauna on top of that.

And VO2 max improvements were greater in individuals that are also doing the sauna right after their training.

So anything that improves cardiovascular health is going to improve brain health.

But there's another aspect to the story here.

And this kind of dates back to like the origins of one of my first biology experiments I did when I was actually a technician at the Salk Institute before I went to graduate school.

And that has to do with...

the heat shock protein response.

And so we do know that heat stress in the form of either hot baths or going into a hot sauna, infrared sauna, a little different, you'd have to stand there a long time to get a real heat shock response.

But if you're in like 163 degree Fahrenheit sauna for 30 minutes, we know that heat shock proteins increase about 50% over baseline.

In the water, it's about 104 degrees for 20 minutes, shoulders down.

Yeah, about 20 minutes.

Presumably.

We don't have that data.

I'm just quoting the empirical data that we have.

Not that.