Your Top Health Questions Answered
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science [music] and science-based tools for everyday life. [music] I’m Andrew Huberman and I’m a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today’s episode is a solo episode of the podcast, meaning no guest. However, there will be a large number of outside voices heard on today’s episode, and that’s because I solicited for your questions on social media. that is people had the opportunity to call in and literally record their questions about anything related to science and health.
Well, really anything. But today, we’re going to focus on science and health. And I would answer them in real time, meaning I’m hearing them for the first time today as you hear them for the first time today. And we’re going to cover, I’m told, because I haven’t heard the questions yet, a large number of topics related to signs and health that are relevant to women, to men, to people of all ages, and covering everything from health and fitness to mental health, supplementation, and on and on. I should mention that if you called in with a question for today’s episode, and you don’t hear it on today’s episode, that does not necessarily mean that it won’t be included in a future Q&A episode.
Again, we got many, many more questions than we could possibly include in a single episode. And I also want to say to everyone who called in with a question, thank you. We really appreciate the feedback even if your question isn’t included. It does cue us to what people are interested in and absolutely will shape the future of guest episodes, solo episodes, and again perhaps a future Q&A of this sort. So without further ado, let’s get to your questions.
Okay, so just to remind you, you’re going to hear the question from the audience member played in real time. And again, this is the first time that I’m hearing these questions. Hello, my name’s Anthony Richards and I just want to thank you so much for all the content that you put out. It’s helped me profoundly in so many aspects of my life. My specific question right now is on preworkouts.
I work out late at night because of work and I generally go to bed an hour and a half or so after I complete my workout. I’m curious as to what’s the most effective pre-workout I could take to maximize my strength training without impairing my sleep. Thank you. >> Well, first off, Anthony, thank you for the kind words. I love to learn.
I love to teach and I especially love to teach information that I hope can be of use to people in their health journey. So, in keeping with that, you asked, “What is the best preworkout for someone who’s working out late in the day? ” And in your case, going to sleep about an hour and a half after finishing your workout. And your workouts, as you mentioned, are going to be for strength and presumably for some muscle size as well, which suggests that they’re going to be of moderate to high intensity, which means that they’re going to pretty impressively increase cortisol over its baseline late in the day. And everyone hears that and they think, “Oh my gosh, cortisol stress hormone.
We don’t want to do that. ” Yes and no. It is true that we want our cortisol high in the morning. You all know the ways to do that. You get your morning sunlight, you hydrate, you exercise, you maybe drink some caffeine.
If you like to drink caffeine, you get into your day, maybe even some stress, that’s okay. But if you can’t work out early in the day, what do you do? So, your question about pre-workout is really a question of how do I get energized enough, enough autonomic arousal, enough alertness that I can generate the kind of intensity that’s going to stimulate that cortisol peak, right? We don’t want to avoid that high cortisol level during these workouts. That’s part of the stimulus that’s going to induce the adaptations that we want.
How do we do that? Well, you’ve all heard me say that drinking caffeine in the 8 to 10 hours before sleep is going to disrupt your sleep, even if you can fall asleep after caffeine. So to be quite direct, one thing and perhaps the only thing that I’m aware of that can give you an increase in alertness and that will allow you more focus and intensity for your workout, but that can also help your sleep is something that increases levels of acetylcholine. And the most direct way to do that over the counter and the safest way that I’m aware of to do that is to use the supplement alpha GPC. 600 milligrams to 900 milligrams of alpha GPC taken simply with water will give you a increase in focus and alertness that you can devote to that high intensity or moderate in to high intensity workout.
Alpha GPC is also one of the few supplements that I’m aware of that can increase the amount of rapid eye movement sleep that you get REM sleep. And that REM sleep is critical for a number of things for inducing neuroplasticity. So any learning that you did in the preceding day or days is going to be consolidated during REM sleep. And importantly, REM sleep is critical for removing the emotional load of previous days, not just one day, but days memories. And if we don’t get enough REM sleep, we tend to feel more emotional.
We tend to feel like the emotional load of stressful things in our prior days are not coming off those memories. Okay. So, alphagpc has been shown to modestly increase REM sleep. But the great news here is even if alpha GPC doesn’t increase the amount of REM sleep that you’re getting, alpha GPC is not going to hinder the amount of REM sleep or slowwave deep sleep that you get. So, it makes it a unique sort of quote unquote stimulant.
I’m reluctant to call it a stimulant because it’s not really stimulant in the classic sympathy sense, right? Things like caffeine, um, other forms of stimulants that increase dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, the so-called catakolamines are called sympathy because they actually increase the activity of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, which is just nerdy speak for increased alertness. Alpha GPC is a unique tool in its ability to increase focus and alertness by virtue of increasing the output of the acetylcholine pathway which is involved in focus and to some extent energy. but it’s not a classic sympathy and it either doesn’t seem to hinder REM sleep or it can slightly again slightly increase the fraction of REM sleep that you get. So that makes it a great tool.
Now it’s not a perfect tool and I’ll tell you why. Increasing the amount of choline in your system can after a few biochemical steps increase the amount of TMAO that is circulating in your body. Now TMAO can be increased by any number of things, fish, meat, etc. Anything that increases choline levels can do this, but alpha GPC does it pretty potently. And so the key thing here is you don’t want too much TMAO consistently over time because it does carry some cardiovascular risk.
And there was one paper a few years back that suggested that perhaps people who use alpha GPC regularly at high dosages, so 900 milligrams multiple times throughout the day over long periods of time may have increased risk of stroke and other cardiovascular insults. And so that’s something to pay attention to. There is some literature that suggests that taking 600 milligrams of garlic pretty much any time in the 24-hour period that you take alpha GPC, but probably best to just take them together. Garlic has something called allisonin in it, which can inhibit some of the production of TMAO. We don’t have time to get into the whole TMAO production pathway, but this has to do with your gut, and a lot of these conversions are done in the gut.
And garlic can inhibit that. It’s probably a good idea to be ingesting some garlic regularly anyway. These garlic capsules aren’t um stinky like garlic. Some people like the