 Secrets of a 68-year-old 42-time Ironman triathlete. Imagine if you were well into your 60s approaching 70 and you'd had 42 Ironman triathletes under your belt. You probably feel pretty good, wouldn't you? Probably feel strong, energetic, youthful. Maybe you'd have a few bumps and bruises or a few aches and pains. We're going to find out today. We're going to talk to Dr. David Minkoff, who joins us from Clearwater, Florida in the Tampa Bay area. How are you, sir? Great to have you here. Thank you, James. It's great to talk to you. I'm doing great. Dr. Minkoff, why are you running 42 Ironman triathlons? That seems excessive. It's way excessive. I never thought that this would happen. But the first one I did was in 1982 and it was such a traumatic event for me that I thought that I should do another one just to see if I could beat it. And then I did another one and then I thought I didn't beat that one either. Maybe I should keep going until during the last part of the marathon, I no longer ask myself why I'm doing this and then I'll never do it again. And when I don't get that feeling, then I'll be able to quit. And that was sort of my early motivation. Now it's just pure fun and I know what it's going to be like. And some days are harder than others, but there's a real sense of accomplishment and I love the lifestyle. And I think more than anything, I know a lot of guys my age, they're retired. They don't do a whole lot. They think they're old. And I think I've got more game now going than I have in my whole life. And I think a lot of it has to do with looking forward to being 70 and racing against a new bunch of guys. And seeing life as I'm still young and I can live a lot longer and I can still play and compete. And that's, it gives me a game. And I think life is a game and when you know that, you can have fun. So just for the uninitiated, describe what a triathlon entails. What is it exactly? Because I know you've done eight appearances, I think, in the Iron Man World Championships. But what is a triathlon? So Tri is three and Athalon is some kind of event. And it's a race where you first swim, then ride a bike, and then run. Now the initial event took place in 1978 in Hawaii. And it was a bunch of Navy SEALs sitting around in a bar, probably after too many beers. And they were having an argument as to who's the best athlete? Is it a swimmer? Is it a bicycle rider? Or is it a runner? And they couldn't figure it out and they said, well, they were in Honolulu. I think they were GIs there. And they said, well, in Hawaii every year, there is the Waikiki Rough Water Swim. And that's 2.4 miles. And there's also a race around Oahu, a bike race. And the circumference of Oahu is 112 miles. And then there was an annual Honolulu marathon, which was 26.2 miles. So they said, we're going to do all these in one day. And see, does the swimmer prevail? Does the biker prevail? Or does the runner prevail? And so the first event was, I think, 11 guys with no real support except their families. And they did the route for the Waikiki Rough Water Swim, which was 2.4 miles. They rode around Oahu, which was 112 miles. And then they did the Honolulu marathon course. And they had a good time and they attracted some more people. And a couple of years after the inaugural race, Wide World of Sports heard about it and went there to film it. And that was 1982. And I was sitting at home watching television and I saw the event. And there was probably only a couple hundred people at the most who did it. And at the finish line, the girl who had been leading all the females, when she hit about a hundred yards from the finish collapsed and started to crawl and kind of a weird way like she couldn't even hardly move. And the second place runner crossed the finish line first. And I was sitting on my couch with a good friend and I just started my medical practice. And he was a financial advisor. And we both looked at each other and said, we've got to do this race. This looks like fun. I love how you look at someone collapsing a hundred yards from the end and you're like, yeah, put me in. I'm going to do it. I'm in for that. So he said, I have a great idea. We should do the race, but you give me all your extra money over the next five years. I'll invest it. We'll both become independently wealthy. And then when we're retired, we'll have time we can train and we'll go to Hawaii and do the race. And we shook hands on it. But that night I couldn't sleep. I was like, I can't wait five years and what if he loses all my money? So the next morning I woke up and I went down to the YMCA and I joined the YMCA so I could get at their pool. And I looked in the newspaper and I found they used the Shiki bicycle, racing bicycle. And I bought the bicycle and I looked up online to see if I could get in the Hawaii race. And they had an application and I sent in my application. This was February of 82. And on October 6th or 7th, it's always the full moon in October. I was at the starting line in Kona, Hawaii for my first Ironman triathlon. And then it's, I've just done it since then all over the world. Canada, New Zealand, just raced a lot of places in the United States. And it's great fun. And there's a whole bunch of guys now my age that we've been competing with each other for a long time. And it's great fun. And it keeps you in a healthy lifestyle because you can't go do these things if you're fat and out of shape. Yeah. So it's a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bike ride. And then you got to run a full marathon, a 26.2 mile run. I ran the New York marathon about 10 years ago. And that was, I mean, I know the toll that it took on my body. I only run half marathons now. I run one or two half marathons every year. I like that. That's a good little distance for me. But I can only imagine what it must, you know, I'm sorry. I can't imagine what it must be like to swim and ride a bike and then run a marathon. So what extra training or nutrition or mindset do you need to have in order to, you know, what would I need to do to get out of this mindset of, well, geez, oh man, I ran that marathon. That was tough work to now actually want to go in and go, oh, I'm going to do a swim and a bike ride as well. Right. And so, I mean, you have to, you have to get your body used to that, you know, 112 mile bike ride for a professional will be a, you know, a little over four hours. But for a, for a, you know, for somebody who's not a professional rider, you're looking at anywhere from probably five to eight or nine hours on the bicycle. And then, and then trying to run after that. So it, most of it is just, it's acclimating your body to doing things for a long time. And then acclimating your mind that things come up that will go away. You know, they're usually not things that are going to stop you if you don't mentally get stopped. I did, I did a, my 42nd Iron Man about a month ago. And on the bike ride, the balls of my feet went numb. I could not feel my toes. I was about 80 miles into the ride. And someone who doesn't, you know, who hasn't been there before might think, oh, I got to get off and stop and walk around and maybe I'll be okay. Maybe I won't. And I just know that if I keep going, it's going to go away. And I just keep going and it went away. So some of it is just getting to know your body and what can it do. And then, and your equipment, because there's a, you know, the equipment part of it is, is important, like what running shoes and what are you going to wear. And is your bicycle set up and is it comfortable because it's sitting on a bicycle for six hours is a long time. And if you're not used to it and comfortable with it, you're going to have a, you're going to have a pretty, pretty rough day. We're talking to Dr. David Minkoff, who is a 68 year old, 42 time, full Iron Man triathlete. He's also, he also writes two newsletters published weekly about their health. It's called the optimum health report and the body health fitness newsletter. And he co-founded LifeWorks Wellness Setter, which is one of the largest alternative medical clinics in the U.S. Let's go over a couple of mental tricks that you might bring to the fold when you're in the middle of a race and you're hurting a little bit. Just as a side note, one little trick that I've used a lot of times, when I'm, when I start to get towards the end of a run or a workout and I start to tire, there's only three more to go, like if I'm in the gym lifting, so I've only got three more to go, just push through the three. Sometimes I don't quite make those three, but if I say to myself, I've got five to go, five reps to go. It's amazing how easily I can actually push past the three, which ordinarily would have been, I may have struggled with, just because I make the end or the finish line be a little bit further than what it actually is. And when I'm running, for example, rather than sort of slow down as I cross the finish line, I imagine the finish line being 100 yards in front, and that way I'm sprinting over the finish line. Do you ever use anything like that, or have you got a little tip, a few tips and tricks that you might be able to reveal that help you in your races? I think that's a good technique that you're using. Another one that I use is, I know that from my house to the pier at the beach where I live in back is 10 miles. And so one weighs five miles. So I imagine that I've got to do that two and a half times, and it's a marathon. So if I visualize that segment, so five miles to the beach, I can think with that and it doesn't scare me. And then once I get to the beach, well, I'm just going to run home. And then when I get home, I'm going to do that again, one more time and then back to the beach. I think that helps. The other thing is that helps me is I just try to stay with whatever the sensations are. Like my calf hurts, I got it. My calf hurts, I'm there. I'm there. I know some guys find it better if they space out, if they try to think of other things or they try to visualize other things. For me, it's just like be there and then kind of stay in communication with my body and with the environment and with the people around there. And one of the things that seems to work the best is to just actually put into the environment, just consciously see it as friendly, as supportive. I was at the starting line of this last Ironman and there's 2,500 of us standing on the shore in Panama City Beach. And the wind had kicked up and the ocean looked really angry and you have 2,500 people running in the water at the same time. And an angry ocean, it can be a bit scary and I was like, oh jeez, I'm nervous. And when I just sort of felt that way, I started looking around and thought, you know, every person here is probably feeling exactly the same way. And I could see, you know, like here's humanity, here's another guy just like me, another woman just like me. We are a group and, you know, none of us are professionals. We're not doing this for money. We're doing this as a personal challenge and as, you know, as something that we want to try to overcome or do our best. And I just saw everyone as friendly and I even was sort of looking at the ocean and that looked friendly, even though it was rough and the surf was up. And all of a sudden I felt completely different. My nervousness went away. It was like, oh, this is, I'm going to have a really good day today because this is just, it all has to do with the way I was looking at it. And when I was nervous, it didn't look that way at all. But when I looked at it the other way, it was fine. And that helps me a lot to do that. As we're recording this doctor, I'm in Brisbane Australia and I sent a friend of mine a text message the other day to say happy birthday. He turned 41. I'm 41 years old as we record this. And he responded to me in his text message saying, wow, we're old now, exclamation mark. And I remember thinking, well, actually, no, I don't feel old. I just feel older. And I actually feel like in my 40s that I'm, I feel like I'm stronger than I've ever been. I know that I'm lifting heavier than I've ever lifted. And ultimately I just, I feel, I feel really, really, really good. Let me ask you this. As a 68 year old man, can you look back over the last three or four decades and say, you know what, I was the strongest and fittest in my 30s, or I was the strongest and fittest in my 40s or 50s or 60s. Like, does your strength and your physical prowess increase over time? Does it stay the same? Does it naturally go back? Do you feel old or do you feel younger or just older? Like, can you just talk a little bit about how you feel in relation to that progress through your life? Yeah. I mean, my swimming is pretty close to what it's ever been. My, my cycling is pretty close to what it's ever been. My running is slower. I was a, I was a very fast runner and now I'm, I'm not a very fast runner. But I think that the attitude, I mean, remember in my 40s, I was racing really well. I was on a Nike sponsored team. I was, you know, I was very competitive. And, and I somehow made this decision that I am going to keep this going and I'm going to peak when I'm 65 and then I'm going to keep it going until I'm 85. And we'll see from there what happens after that. And I can tell you now that the, you know, the guys that are racing my age are just as competitive as when they were 40. They're just as into it. They're just as interested. They're just, they're having probably more fun than they did now because it's not nearly as serious as it was then. And that, you know, I still work a 50 hour week week and or sometimes 60 hours. I'm more engaged now than I ever was with my family and my businesses and with triathlon. So I don't have quite as much time as I used to have. And I think that attitude of I'm old now is, is, that's not the right attitude. This is, I'm getting better. And I still feel like I did a, you know, I did a, a hit, I did a strength workout this morning at five o'clock. And then I did, you know, eight times 30 seconds real hard on the bike as a, as a hit workout. And I swam at noon and every workout I am like, I am getting better. I'm going to get stronger. I don't see it as a, I'm going downhill and I have to give up and there's no hope. And look at, I'm going to, you know, I'm at my, you know, I'm going to be dead in 10 years or whatever the, whatever it is. I don't know what it is, but I don't, I don't feel 68. Sometimes I think, God, I'm 68. But then I'm looking around and I'm, you know, the guys that I, that, that I work with and that I, that I, you know, in the patients that I see, most of them are way younger and they have no idea. Somebody said to me today, they asked me, was I, was they my last patient? I said they are, but I'm doing a podcast tonight. And they said, well, what's the topic of it? And I said, you know, 68 year old guy and they said, who's 68? And I said, well, me and they said, oh, no, no, that's not you. You know, I don't, they didn't name an age, but it's, you know, life is all about performance. It's what can you do. And it's what we challenge yourself to do. And I think as long as you keep that in, then it almost doesn't make any difference. Yeah, I can't run a, I once ran a 36 minute 10K. I can't come close to that now, but it doesn't matter. There's still a game and they're still fun. That life is interesting. When you say that you're getting better and you're getting stronger, do you mean that if you, if we looked at, say, what you lifted as a 68 year old man, as opposed to what you may have lifted as a 38 year old man? Does that mean that you're necessarily lifting more than 30 years ago? Or do you just think it just means that you're, you know, relative to your age, you feel stronger than what you did when you were in your 30s? It's the second one. I mean, I can't do as many pull ups now as I could when I was in my 30s. I can't. But, but, but I'm not really trying to compare myself to that. I'm trying to compare myself to, you know, yesterday and how am I doing, you know, and, and so it's doesn't give me a loss to think that when I was younger, I was faster. You know, it doesn't give me sort of a mental loss or a, you know, it doesn't take me down. It's like, you know, I can do, I've got this sort of floor workout that I do where when I first started, it's a, it's a mixture of some, some strength things, you know, where you you do handstand pushups and, and then, you know, there's a bunch of, bunch of different things. There's like six exercises, and you're supposed to do eight reps of each. And I know that a year ago, I was struggling to get through it one time. And now I can go through it and then do a whole bunch more repeats of it. And I'm totally, you know, and I'm stronger, I can feel it. So, you know, it's adjusting your game to, to your, you know, your sort of age and your mental, not your mental, but your, your sort of your genetic age and your, and what you perceive yourself to be, but there's still, you know, there's almost always room to get to improve so that you, you feel like you're getting somewhere. We're going to talk to you a little bit about your, your knowledge of amino acids and how it helps athletes. But just before we get there, give us a day in the life of Dr. David Minkoff for you and not a day where you might be training for an event just like a typical normal average day. What time do you wake up? When do you exercise? What do you eat? When are you in at the office? What do you do at night? So just give us a day in the life, if you would. Okay. I usually get up around 515. I have some personal kind of spiritual work that I do. And I don't usually eat right away. I take a bunch of, I take these amino acids. That's the first thing I do. And I drink a big glass of some special water called cocoon, K-A-Q-U-N. It's a high oxygen water. And I take the amino acids with that. Then I do a workout and depending on the day, I try to do some strength work every day, but it's not always the same thing. So it's mostly body weight, some between 25 and 35 pound barbells. I mean, dumbbells. And then I'm running, try to run three days, ride three days and swim three days. So I don't always make it. I have a 20 ounce cup of decaf coffee with MCT oil and butter blended in. That's breakfast. I get to the office at eight o'clock. I see patients till between 12 and one. If it's a good day like today, I was out at 12 and I ran over to the Y and I swam 1500 yards and I was back at the office at about 130. I see patients still usually about six o'clock. I come home, have dinner. I have some things I'm studying. So I usually do a study cycle for about two hours. And I try to hit the bed by 1115. I have dinner with my wife. She makes a great big gigantic salad and then we have some kind of meter fish, often with like a side vegetable. Lunch is usually, I can run home. I'm only eight minutes from my office. So I usually have like three or four eggs and some broccoli, sometimes a smoothie. And that's generally my food is sort of paleo, mild keto. I have one of those ketonics meters and I try to keep myself in mild ketosis. So I am most of the time. So that's kind of a typical day. My wife is busy. I'm going all day. My energy is great. I take a lot of nutritional supplements. I'm very careful about my food. I mean, I never eat fast food. I don't eat junk food. I go as organic as I can. There's a couple restaurants in this town that have really good food, keto paleo food. So I might, you know, at lunch, if I'm short on time to go home, I might run over there and my wife and I have dinner a couple times a week or maybe once a week out. But it's always, you know, it's not always, but usually it's a good place where we can eat and the food is good. For me, this is something that I've learned over the years. If I stay in mild ketosis and I stay away from grains and anything processed, my level of chronic inflammation pain is very low. If I eat, you know, grains or I go have some pizza or something like that, when I wake up in the morning, I am sore. It's an hour for me to sort of be like, what did I do? I like feeling like my belly's empty and it's flat and my, you know, my body's really aged well. It's, my joints are good. I don't have any chronic injuries or chronic problems. And, you know, I'm in this business. I mean, you know, I'm in the health business. Most of my patients are really sick. But I don't have a typical doctor office. We heal people with, you know, nutrition, detoxification, supplements, IV vitamins, minerals. I probably have some advantage over, you know, people who aren't in this business because I have access to things that are natural products that help build up the body. One of the best things available is ozone. You know, ozone is a definite performance enhancer. Ozone is oxygen, but to the third power instead of the way we breathe it, where it's O2, ozone is O3. And you can do treatments with ozone either in a sauna with ozone, or it can be given intervenously. And it really does, it makes the body work better. So I try to do an ozone treatment once a week, either hop in the ozone sauna or I get an IV ozone treatment. And it really makes a difference. And it's something I encourage my patients to do when they come in, they're sick, but usually within three, four months, they're feeling well. See a fair number of triathletes who are overtrained or injured and they can get better and then they get, you know, they get sort of more tuned into what's going on and smarter. Tell me a little bit about the, I'm interested about the high oxygen water and the amino acids. I know you have your own range of amino acids there, but just tell us a little bit about both of those. Sure. The amino acids are, you know, in the, in the, in the alphabet of amino acid and protein chemistry. There are 22 different amino acids in nature that our body uses and amino in Greek means nitrogen. And an amino acid is a molecule that has a carbon, a hydrogen and an oxygen, plus a nitrogen. The carbon, hydrogen, oxygen by itself is what a carbohydrate is. It's also what a fat is. The thing that distinguishes an amino acid from a, from a carbohydrate or a fat is that the amino acid has nitrogen as part of its structure. And there's 22 different forms of these in nature that our body uses. And when it assembles them in different, different patterns, that is what proteins are made out of. So a very simple protein would be something that probably many people have heard of called glutathione. Glutathione is three amino acids linked together. And those specific three, when they're linked together in the right way, equal glutathione, which is an antioxidant and it's a, it's a natural body detoxifier. So these amino acids together to form, say, skeletal muscle, like bicep or glute. The individual muscle chain is not three amino acids, it's 455 amino acids. So it's a great big complicated long chain, which uses these 22 different things to spell out in the, you know, these things have to be in exactly the right structure in the right configuration. And that's skeletal muscle. If it was hair, it would be a different one. If it's, if it's brain tissue or liver tissue would be different. If it's a neurotransmitter like serotonin, it would be different. If it's a hormone like, like thyroid or growth hormone or insulin, insulin, I think has 69 amino acids in the chain. I think growth hormone is 80 something amino acids. And so the body basically takes this alphabet of 22 amino acids. And then when those get to the cell, it configures them to make the protein. Now, of the 22, there's eight of them which are special and they're called, you know, they're, they're essential, which means you have to get them in your food, or by supplementation, because the body can't make them. If you have the eight, it can make the other 14. So you could, if we're talking about an alphabet, it's almost like vowels, like there's no words in English without vowels. And in proteins, half of every protein are made up of these eight. So they're essential because you can make the rest, but they're also because most of the things are made out of that. So when you look at protein and nutrition, if the body is getting in enough amino acids through the diet, and it's able to digest them and bring them into the blood and then get them to the cell, then the cell can, after that, make the amino acid, make the proteins out of those amino acids that it needs. So if it's a liver cell, it makes an enzyme, or if it's a brain cell, it makes a neurotransmitter. But if the amino acid is lacking in that cell, let's say you had, you had a meal of branched chain amino acids. They're only, they're three of them, not eight. And you can't make protein out of branched chain amino acids, because it's missing five essential amino acids. So you don't make protein with branched chain amino acids. You know this, if you give some, you do a study and you say, okay, we're going to measure how much protein your body made, and we're going to feed you 25 grams of branched chain amino acids. All day long, and we're going to keep track of, we can label those branched chain amino acids with a radioactive label so we can tell when they're in the body, and you wouldn't do this in a human, but if you did it in a mouse or something, where you can tell did those get assimilated into the body as protein, you won't get any protein made out of those because they can't be. So you've got to have a mixture of amino acids in food and or in supplements that the body can utilize to make the proteins that it needs at will so that it's always available. So you can test how good a protein is by how well the amino acids in that protein are utilized. And here would be an example. I want to test how good is whey protein, like if I feed my body, you know, ultra-filtrated, organic, non-heated, whey protein, organic, like the highest quality you could get. And I say, okay, good. And I'm going to take one big scoop, three times during the day at, let's say it's 25 grams per scoop, and I'll get 75 grams during the day. And let's say I weigh 75 kilos, so I'm at a gram per kilo, I'm at it sort of a very sort of usual amount that my body would need of that protein. And the rest of the day I'm not going to eat any protein. I'm going to eat fruits and vegetables. So there's no other meat or fish or eggs or beans or anything like that. And if in, let's make it 100 grams because it's easier to calculate. In 100 grams of amino acids, there's 16 grams of nitrogen. So my in on the nitrogen is 16 grams for that day. Now, if that nitrogen in the form of amino acids gets manufactured into body protein, like it gets made into skin and liver and enzymes and hormones and neurotransmitters and bone, then that nitrogen is not going to come out. So I'm going to keep it. And it won't be eliminated from my body in the urine, which is mostly the reason that we urinate is so that we can get rid of the nitrogen in our body that's not used that we took in when we ate. So urea is urine is nitrogen waste. Urea is a nitrogen compound. So the nitrogen is not used in the amino acid. If that amino acid does not get incorporated into a protein, that nitrogen is locked off and it goes to the liver. It gets made into urea and it gets urinated out. So if I take in 16 grams of nitrogen during the day, and I collect my year in the whole day, and I measure how much nitrogen came out, I can get a percentage of how much nitrogen was actually utilized by my body to build it up or repair it or replace things. Alamea? Yes. Okay, so because when the amino acid comes in, it, if not utilized, gets in a pathway where the nitrogen is taken off and what's left is the carbohydrate and that can be fuel or it can be stored as fat. So we either get amino acids go in and they become incorporated, then they don't come out. The nitrogen doesn't come out. Or if it goes in and it isn't utilized, the nitrogen that gets peed out and the carbohydrate then gets utilized. So if, and so everybody knows that one gram, or that for every gram of protein that you eat, it's four calories. Have you heard this before? I've not heard this, no. Okay, so if you look in a regular dietary, dietitian book, it's a gram of amino acid is four calories, a gram of carbohydrate is four calories and a gram of fat is nine calories. So when you look on the side of the bottle, it says there's 10 grams of protein and in ex food, that would be 40 calories and on the, on the label, it'll say 40 calories. But that calories are things that are burned. They're not things that if, if you eat that 10 grams, and all of it got incorporated into your body protein and none of it was burned as fuel. It would be no calories. Mm hmm. Okay, so in my experiment, when I took 100 grams of rape way protein, which was 16 grams of nitrogen in, and I collect my urine for 24 hours and I measure how much nitrogen that would come out. What you will find is that 84% of the nitrogen that went in came out. Hmm. Only 16% of that nitrogen got incorporated into body protein. Wow. And the reason it, and this is assuming that it was digested and absorbed. So what is, what is the reason for this is that because it, and here's, here's an example. I'm in the business of building cars. And in order to make a car, I need a chassis four wheels, a steering wheel and a motor, like in the simplest form. And so I, I call my supplier and he sends me 400 wheels, 100 chassis, 100 steering wheels and 10 motors. How many cars can I make? You can only make 10. I can only make 10 cars. And what am I going to do with all the rest of stuff? I'm not going to do anything with it. It's going to sit on my lot. What is the answer then for the, for the average person who's listening or watching? How do they ensure that they get 100 cars? If there's 100 chassis and a hundred. That's right. That's what they have to do. So they have to eat enough protein that's diverse enough. And that's got enough of the essential amino acids. Now the best, the foods that are, so there's a, so it's been figured out that the most, the best protein that you can eat is breast milk. Okay. So 49% of the amino acids in breast milk are incorporated into that baby's body. So if we could all drink breast milk, it would be our best protein, but it's hard to get. Right. So under breast milk is, is, is whole chicken eggs, 48%. So the best protein you can eat is eat the eggs with the yolk and question question. Does that, are we specifying that it must be posture raised eggs? Well, I don't know that it makes any difference, but posture raised eggs in terms of the protein, in terms of health are the best. Yes. Okay. So I don't know if the, if the other eggs have less protein. I don't, I don't know, but ideally you need pasture eggs. Okay. Next on the chain. So eggs are 48% utilized. Next on the chain are meat, fish. And it doesn't matter what kind of meat and it doesn't really matter what kind of fish. It's about 33% utilized. So those are the best things. If you drop down to dairy, it's only 16% utilized. So it's about 16 or 17% utilized. Beans are like eight or 9% utilized other than soybeans. So this, so the vegetarians have a hard time because they're not getting enough essential amino acids. Two nurse their bodies and I have seen literally many, many hundreds of vegan vegetarians where I have tested their blood for serum amino acids. And all of them are virtually significantly protein male nurse. It isn't 100% because some people will adapt to anything, but the vast majority are protein male nurse. And I was, I was a vegetarian for 35 years. I was protein male nurse. And to get into the amino acid story is someone gave me, I was, I was racing, I was training a lot training 20 hours a week. I was, I was, I got a, and I, in a race, I tore my hamstring and I for, for two years, I could not get it to heal where I could do hard running workouts. I got massage and chiropractic and I injected it and I electrical stimulated it and I did everything you could possibly do. And I could not get it to be stable enough to really push it because it would hurt again or I was afraid it was going to tear it. And then this mixture of amino acids was being manufactured in Europe. And somebody gave me a bottle, they said, try this in three weeks. I did a hard track workout with no problem. My, my, my maximum heart rate went from 174 to 186 with no, you know, increase in perceived effort. My body was working better. And I gained about either 12 or 14 pounds of lean body mass. But I didn't look any different. My waist didn't change. And when I saw the weight coming on, I called the inventor of this mixture of amino acids and I said something is drastically going on in my body. The scale is going up. I don't look any different. And he said, you're filling in your bones and your, your organ tissue of things that should have been there. If you were properly nourished, that, that is, you are rebuilding your body from the inside. So if, if we're looking at this constant vegetarian versus, you know, meat eating diet debate, based on you being a vegetarian for 35 years, and now obviously incorporating meat into your diet, what do you feel is the, the right balance? I mean, I know you described your nutrition, you know, your daily life. It sounds like you've got a fish and a meat in there, but it seems also there's a lot of plant based foods. Yeah. Oh yeah. And I think, I mean, the good part of vegetarians is that if they're not, if they're not eating a lot of rice and a lot of pasta and a lot of garbage, grains, that they're, that, that from the standpoint of antioxidants and minerals and vitamins, they're doing really well. But in terms of protein, they're not. So one of the solutions. So this mixture, which is called, we call it perfect amino. So we put together these eight essential amino acids, such that the balance, the ratio of each one to each one is such that when you take it orally, 99% of those amino acids stay in the body and get built as body protein. So if you do the balance study and you take 10 grams of perfect amino three times a day as your only protein source and you measure your urine, less than 1% of the nitrogen will come out. It gets incorporated into your body, which is what you want as an athlete, or as a menopausal woman, or as a person with chronic fatigue, is that you want, you want these amino acids to be available so that when you exert yourself, before you just have the whatever the random oxidative stress is that we're all facing all the time where there is breakdown of tissue that the body can immediately have access to these and heal things and repair things and replace things. Okay. Well, I'm going to try it out perfect amino. And I work out I go to the gym is the best time to take these immune is there is there a best time to take these amino acids doctor whether it be morning lunch or dinner time, like do I take it pre work out or post work out does it matter. It doesn't really matter but pre work out you'll you'll probably feel the benefit. These are best taken on an empty stomach with water juice or sports drink, wait about 20 minutes then eat whatever you want. It's okay with vegetable juices and fruit juices it's actually okay even with fruits and vegetables. We want to we don't want to take it where there's going to be a lot of fat or a lot of other protein, because you'll diminish the effect of them. That's why when I get up in the morning I drink this cocoon water which I'll talk to you about in a minute. And I take the amino acids right when I get up I shave I wash up and then by the time I'm ready to go I they're in there and I could basically eat anything I want. Okay, so we're just heading for the finish line here just tell us a little bit about the cocoon water. Will you please doctor. Yes, a lot of waters can claim that there's oxygen in them or their oxy water their oxygenated water but if you open the cap of that water bottle or that water, and you put in a sensor an oxygen sensor which measures the partial pressure of oxygen in the liquid. It won't be there. It will be the same as regular water. It's very low. There is a guy in Hungary, who has a proprietary water that he calls cocoon k a q un. And if you remember the movie with. It's probably 25 years ago called cocoon about the, the guys in Miami who went to this nursing home and yes, yeah. So in Hungarian cocoon C O C O O N is his k a q un. And they developed a special process where, instead of the, the, that the water itself has a very high degree of liquid oxygen in it. So oxygen at 02 and 03 our gases, but oxygen when it's clustered as 08 or 016 or 32 or 64 is a liquid in its state. And it doesn't evaporate. Because the water has high stable oxygen, and it has oxygen in it and when you drink it it raises the level of oxygen in your tissues, and I have seen this, I have proven it to myself if I put an oxygen sensor on my skin. It will record the level of oxygen in my skin. I take a glass of cocoon water. Within seven or eight minutes, the level of oxygen in my skin goes up about 15%. And that, that is sustained about two hours. So there's nothing like this on the planet. It is a performance enhancer. It is legal. I suggest with athletes that they drink a bottle a day, because it really it will detoxify you, it will help you, because it's, it's feeding your body oxygen and that's, you know, high performance requires us. Okay. Dr. David Minkoff. Secrets of a 68 year old 42 time Ironman triathlete. Thank you for the wealth of knowledge that you've given us today doctor. I appreciate that. Thank you. I hope it wasn't I hope I didn't over, over confuse anybody but I think if they go to body health.com you can, there's a bunch of other supplements that really do help people. And I think in today's world with the, you know, with the amount of toxins that are around that supplementation is important and it can really help you keep your game. So you mentioned body health.com is that the best place to reach you is there anywhere else we can reach you doctor. So for our products body health.com is the best. If someone is ill or injured. Our clinic is called life works wellness center. And it's life works wellness center.com. There's a website there with all kinds of information. A lot of the people that we see have, you know, chronic severe illness, and about 85% of the time, we get them better, you know, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and multiple sclerosis and cancer. And these are, these are things that that using natural methods. We're able to get the body to sort of restart and heal and get better Lyme disease there's, there's, you know, chronic fatigue. These are things that we, we specialize in and we can really help people with. So if you're on to this and you're on Twitter, go ahead and send Dr. Minkoff a tweet at Dr. Minkoff. It's D-R-M-I-N-K-O-F-F. And if you're listening to this also, and you know that you don't exercise is enough exercise enough, I should say, then maybe try a little bit of Dr. Minkoff's daily routine, get up a little earlier, run a little further, maybe start swimming. Even if you took up dancing classes and moved around, that would be better than if you're doing nothing at the moment. Dr. Minkoff, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you passing on your knowledge and expertise. James, it was a pleasure and I really enjoyed it. So thank you too.