150. Alex Tarnava: Unlocking Longevity with Hydrogen Water - Anti-Aging, Increased Energy & Reducing Inflammation

Our last universal common ancestor, the single cell organism that spawned all life on this planet, actually consumed hydrogen as its fuel source. When I talk about hydrogen in the water, their reaction is, well, doesn't the gas just float to the top, go out into the atmosphere? How are you able to ingest the hydrogen gas and have it create its therapeutic effect in the body? Hydrogen water gets into the gut a lot better than inhalation.
They elevate different tissues in different capacities. It's better for a lot of these metabolic conditions.
There is a significant improvement in mental alertness, almost replaced caffeine with hydrogen. I feel the difference.
You don't feel stimulated, but you just feel more clean and clear and awake. There are a lot of people that poo-poo the hydrogen tablets as a therapeutic measure for reducing inflammation.
Hydrogen is in fact a weak antioxidant in vitro and it's only driving towards homeostasis and this is actually critically important because Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brekka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between.
And as most of you guys know, I am way down the rabbit hole and a big, big proponent of hydrogen gas, hydrogen water, as a way to reduce inflammation, improve our circulation, as a way to actually just make this a part of our health and wellness journey. And I am so excited for today's guest because we are going to go deep down the rabbit hole of the science behind hydrogen gas and how this gas, this simple gas can change the trajectory of your health journey.
And I've been using hydrogen water for years now. I was a big

proponent of using it for exercise, for improving performance. But now we have the scientifically validated research to really support some of the claims.
And we probably have the world's most renowned expert on the podcast today developed and patented the first clinically valid hydrogen tablet, which I use every day, H2 Tabs. But I really want to go down the rabbit hole of the research into how can hydrogen gas be simply incorporated into your life and make a major improvement on your health journey.
So welcome to the podcast, Alex Tarnova. Tarnova.
Tarnova. You know, there's a common theme, and my viewers hear me talk about this all the time, that runs through most of my podcasts, and that is that I feel like the people that are the most passionate, the most purpose-driven, that are making the biggest change in the world are people that have solved the problem in their life.
And you have a really interesting story about what led you to hyper-focus gas and elemental magnesium i wonder if you might share that story and then let's get into the science yeah absolutely um so i'll be as uh brief as possible so you can focus on the good stuff but as we were talking about earlier i i mean up until this event in my life i would research learn about something for a few months and then get bored and move on. So I was kind of a generalist.
I had an encyclopedia of knowledge on a million different things but wasn't really close to an expert on anything. And fast forward to when I was 29, I was running a successful business in a completely different industry on an innovation I'd had there.
But that business was giving me a lot of free time I was on the road a month like a week out of the month and when I was at home I was working like an hour a day two hours a day so I was basically training as if I was a professional athlete even though I wasn't um I was training four to six hours a day five days a week six days a week and having an active recovery day once or twice a week and this was like Muay Thai jiu-jitsu yeah various martial arts uh CrossFit I did some CrossFit competitions at the time too and I was in by far the best shape of my life right and uh all of a sudden I got really sick and they never were able to figure out what happened but it's most probable I had some sort of virus that caused an autoimmune reaction so basically overnight I developed sudden onset narcolepsy you know if I sit down and wasn't engaged for a minute or two, I'd fall asleep. Wow.
I was sleeping like 16 hours a day. I had crushing fatigue.
Yeah, crushing fatigue. I had also central nervous system fatigue.
So basically, I went from being able to do like 20 bar muscle ups unbroken to I couldn't do a chest bar or a 54 inch plyometric box jump to I couldn't get airtime. I couldn't jump an inch off the ground with both feet.
Wow. And I couldn't sprint, do anything that was explosive and reactive.
But my slower movements like my deadlift, my squat, my bench press were completely unaffected. My strength was normal.
Wow. Right? In addition, I had very high markers of inflammation.
So my C-reactive protein. My C-reactive proteins were about 100 times abnormal.
Wow. They were, you know, 34 milligrams a liter.
Wow. At its peak.
So. By the way, C-reactive protein should be less than three.
It should technically be less than one. Yeah.
If you want to have a really low risk of cardio yeah i mean usually you might spike to yeah one to three when you're sick when you have a cold or the flu or something right most healthy people are below 0.5 right right like if you're metabolically healthy right you know if you have chronic inflammation you start trending up but for 29 year olds in the shape i was in i should have been below5, below 0.3. And for people that are not familiar with C-reactive protein, it's a nonspecific marker of inflammation.
It doesn't tell you exactly what's causing it, but it tells you that something is going on in your body. The liver is reacting, creating this protein that is an indicator of inflammation.
It could be in the brain, could be in the liver, the lungs, the pancreas, the kidneys, and the blood. It could be coming from just about anywhere.
But when it gets really, really high, like what you're explaining, this is cause for investigation. So you have this elevated C-reactive protein, you know, you're crushing fatigue, which is, by the way, classic viral.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And my roommate got really sick at the time too, and it hit him different.
He actually had to go to the hospital a couple of times with pneumonia, right? And this was a guy who was, you know, top three in triathlons and Spartan races. So again, he was a super fit, healthy 29 year old that got taken out by whatever hit us.
It's just he didn't get the autoimmune response like I did. Right.
But this lasted a couple months. And when the dust settled, I was left with polyarthritis.
So I developed osteoarthritis in 11 joints, the worst of which is my left shoulder, which this is as high as it goes now. It's bone on bone.
But also my hip was quite bad, my hands and, you know, basically anywhere I'd had an injury in sports throughout my long life of contact and combat sports. I was told I had to quit working out, right?

Period.

You cannot exercise more.

You can't lift weights.

Just walk, right?

Maybe do like some swimming just like with, you know, breaststroke or something that doesn't

need the shoulder.

And they put me on a thousand milligrams of naproxen a day.

So think like super Aleve, like Aleve is naproxen, but you might get 200 milligrams. So I was on five times that dose and I was taking cortisone injections.
And I just knew that none of this was how I wanted the rest of my life to go. And it wasn't a long-term solution.
It was going to lead to long-term side effects. So the time I'd spent exercising, I just dove into PubMed.
And I just started reading any study I could find on regulating inflammatory response and any sort of therapeutic started a ton of different biohacks from growing going to cryo saunas and normal saunas and, you know, trying to get this out of you, whatever it was. Trying to get it.
And at the time I found some research on hydrogen water and this, the industry was very nascent at the time. There was only, you know, 40, 50 studies, but I found a couple of clinical trials and I bought a machine for like $5,000.
This water hydrogen gas. Purportedly.

Okay.

So I went on my merry way and didn't know if what,

if anything was working

because I was still taking the naproxen

and the cortisone injections

and trying to get back into exercise.

And eight or nine months later,

I fainted a few times in the gym.

So I developed multiple ulcers from the naproxen and I had to abruptly stop right um so basically as I stopped the naproxen I hadn't had a cortisone shot in a while all my joints froze within a few days wow so I realized that nothing I was doing was really helping like going to the sauna and the cryo it would help for a few hours or the rest of the day, but then I'd wake up rough again. And you just...
Stiff as a board. Exactly, right? I couldn't put on socks without sitting down or lying down.
I couldn't put on jackets and some shirts. It was rough.
And I went back to PubMed and I just started reading more and more. And in this nine month period, I found some new research on hydrogen water.
And at first it pissed me off because I had this $5,000 paperweight that wasn't helping. But then it just dawned on me, I took the salesman's word for it, that this made hydrogen water.
How do I know there's hydrogen gas in here and what dose is needed so i started buying the full studies to read the material and methods and i found that not a single one of them at the time were using a machine like what i'd bought they were making the hydrogen water in labs in various ways like bubbling gas or using magnesium under pressure um so then i i found reagent to test for hydrogen gas in water, and I ordered it, and the first test, it detected no hydrogen. I had to over-triple the input to reduce a single drop, putting it at— Is that the methylene blue test? Yeah, yeah.
Putting it at like 0.03 parts per million, which is well below the lowest ever observed you know any kind of therapeutic dose any type of physiological effect on the body like right you know one one thirtieth of the lowest observed minimum threshold to do anything right right um so that gave me a bit of hope and i went about trying to source magnesium which was going to be the easiest way for me to do it. And first I sourced some rods, and then I had some concerns that with magnesium rods, I don't know how much magnesium I'm getting, and I didn't want to get hypermagnesia.
And so then I was sort of thinking I need a powder so I can control the dose. Quickly realized it's hard to get elemental magnesium powder very United States it's controlled by the State Department and DOD you have to go through background checks and everything so I sourced some from Eastern Europe and some from China at first and they arrived saying like silver paint coloring like okay this is a little bit sketchy but i tried anyways um i figured the powder floats so i wasn't able to make the hydrogen water and i'm going to need to compress this so that's where the tablet idea okay i started compressing eventually ended up patenting this um because i mean i take your tabs your h2 tabs uh every day i travel with them now.
They're super easy to use. You know, I either use the hydrogen water bottle or I use these tablets.
And interestingly, you know, a lot of my audience is like, listen, I don't have 250 bucks or 275 bucks for a hydrogen water bottle. But these tablets are inexpensive.
But the elemental magnesium, is this what's effervescing into the hydrogen gas? Yeah. So basically, the magnesium and the organic acids we're using are reacting with the water and it's breaking that bond between the H2 and the oxygen, right? And that's what creates these small nanobubbles that you see in the water.
So you can drink down the hydrogen water. Now, basically the magnesium and a couple of complex reactions goes from the elemental magnesium to just free magnesium ions, MG2+, which is exactly what our body needs.
So it doubles as a highly bioavailable magnesium supplement. Dr.
Justin Marchegiani Wow. And so many of us are so deficient in this like essential metal.
We really are. Dr.
Justin Marchegiani Yeah, no, we are like I think 80 to 90% of the US population 90% of the US population. So many people sleep overnight by adding magnesium.
And you likely know there's big bioavailability concerns with a lot of the magnesium supplements on the market. Someone might go by a magnesium oxide that's on average 4% or 5% bioavailable.
So we're delivering it in the exact form your body needs. Your stomach doesn't have to liberate it off of another compound.
It just freely goes into your system. So it's completely bioavailable because of the way we're delivering it.
But so, yeah, when I started developing these tablets, I quickly started feeling better. Now, were you drinking them? Were you bathing them? I was both? I was drinking.
So I was drinking several liters a day, and I was getting at first to about three parts per million, you know, sealing them under pressure. And my joints loosened.
I felt better. I'm like, wow, there's something here.
But then I had a bit of a sober second thought. I didn't want to win a Darwin Award.
Yeah. You know, like.
Blow yourself up. myself up in my kitchen with hydrogen gas.
And by the way, elemental magnesium is flammable and it burns at a very high temperature. Yeah.
Like 5,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Right.
It's the white and fireworks. Right.
Which is why it's so, so tightly controlled. And I had to go through background checks and everything like that.
But also to like, I wanted to test for heavy metals and the contaminants. And is there any dangerous side reaction that's happening?

Like I understood enough about the basic chemistry, but I'm not a chemist.

Right.

Right.

So I found my, uh, founding partner, um, you know, Dr.

Richard Holland, he's a PhD in organic chemistry.

He works in the pharmaceutical industry.

So he designed small molecules for different therapeutic topic, uh, targets. And um he was doing consulting work offering it and i i told him about my project and he said this is the worst pseudoscience i've ever heard in my life and not what you wanted to hear yeah well he gave me a list of reasons why it wouldn't work why you like hydrogen has no role in the.
And even if it did, you should inhale it and not drink it because of the low saturation point. And if you'd like, we can get into that later.
The pharmacokinetics of inhalation and water are actually completely different. So they hit different organs in different ways.
But because I'd read every study to date on hydrogen as a therapeutic, like at that time, I was able to rebut all of his responses with peer reviewed evidence. And he came back to me and said, like, I'm actually in shock.
Right. I still don't really believe it, but there's enough that I can help you out.
Sure. Right.
So he starts tweaking my formula. I'm sending him a new publication every day just to pique his interest because I'm really excited about the project and he calls me for lunch and serendipitously I sent him this clinical trial on a certain disease state and it was a decent size and it was using a high concentration at the time about five parts per million over a liter a day and it found pretty good results in this group in this population okay and i was not aware but his current job was developing small molecules for this exact disease wow and he said you know with the other studies you've sent i'm not a subject matter expert expert.
Right. So I just have to trust the findings, look at the, you know, methodology and trust the researchers.
But with this, I am. And unless this is fraud, this works.
And it works better than the molecules I'm developing. Right.
Are you interested in commercializing this? Right. So I thought long and hard about it.
I had no expertise in this area. And I was just doing this as a do it yourself project for my own health.
But I figured, why not? What do I have to lose? I can learn as I go. Let's do this.
Right. So I proceeded forward and it only took a few weeks to refine.
There wasn't much changes to my formulation to get to work in a mortar and pestle. But then the hard work started.
We quickly realized that doing this in mass, making millions of tablets at high speed is dramatically different for safety, for getting the reaction right, everything, than making 20 in a mortar and pestle, mixing by hand and then hand pressing. It took us a year, over 2,000 iterative adjustments and 15 failed scale up attempts at manufacturing to get our first production ready tablet.
Wow. Since then, we've stopped counting at version 5,000.
But we're probably at 10,000 iterative adjustments in the R&D process to get to where we are. To where you can take elemental magnesium, compress it, have it sink to the bottom of a glass and ever vest into the water.
And get in this open cup and get these small nanobubbles in the 10 to 30 nanometer in range, which is critically important, so that in, say, half a liter of water, 16.8 ounces, we're getting over 12 parts per million. That's incredible.
I mean, that's really incredible. And I think think a lot of people uh you know when i talk about hydrogen gas in the water their first reaction is well doesn't the gas just float to the top and then you know go out into the atmosphere you know how are you able to ingest the hydrogen gas and have it you know create its therapeutic effect in the body i can tell you that i feel the difference almost replaced caffeine with hydrogen and i know i told you we have a couple clinical trials head to head against caffeine after acute sleep deprivation really in the first study we showed a equivalent improvement in the attention network test to caffeine um but they affected different domains of of attention right caffeine effects alerting and the hydrogen affected orienting right so we did a bigger better controlled study with four groups and it was a you know crossover design also so everyone did all therapies so it was a it was a quadruple crossover so crazy design so there placebo, hydrogen, placebo, caffeine, placebo, and caffeine plus hydrogen.
And it found that the hydrogen groups, with or without caffeine, had a substantially more robust improvement in brain metabolism. So choline to creatine ratios in the brain than the caffeine alone.
So hydrogen was basically, as your brain metabolism slows due to the acute stress of sleep deprivation hydrogen is temporarily restoring it back to proper function i've noticed that truly when i travel and sometimes i do my best to schedule meetings and travel around sleep and exercise but sometimes flights happen when flights happen meetings happen when they happen, or you're just in a different time zone. And there is a significant improvement, I notice in mental alertness, and just my general sense of, I would say cognitive energy, right? You don't feel stimulated, but you just feel more clean and clear and awake and focused.
Interestingly, I read a study, I think it was actually with your tablets, and I'll put the links in the study notes below, was in the Journal of Experimental Gerontology, and it was in November of 2021. And what I found really fascinating, because I've been not down the road of developing hydrogen tablets or hydrogen water bottles, but of researching the hydrogen gas, because I think it's one of those things that in my opinion will be as common as a multivitamin in 10 years, because the evidence is so strong.
I think so, yeah. But what I read in this Journal of Experimental Gerontology was that they were 70 year olds and older.
70 and up. Yes, I think 77 or 78 was the average age.
Yeah,. Yeah.
Okay. So then you're obviously very familiar with it.
And I might paraphrase it wrong, but they, this was a six month study and it was, it was a double blind. It was placebo controlled.
And so one group was drinking hydrogen water. I forget what the parts per million were.
The other group was not, but they measured telomere lengths, which improved. They measured cognitive scoring.
Yeah, they measured cognitive scoring, which improved. They measured sleep.
So they actually were looking at stages of sleep, deep REM sleep. They measured their sit-stand ratio, which I thought was really interesting.
I mean, that there might be some effect on sarcopenia like age age-related muscle wasting um they measured uh different factors in the frontal lobe of the brain uh their reaction times and across the board and all of these metrics improved and they even used a marker tattoo i think tattoo uh to measure the methy, that's linked to young blood. So anyone who's seen the research where they take an aged mouse and they take the blood of a young mouse and, you know, swap it out like an oil change and it revitalizes the old mouse, the skeletal tissue anyways, that's linked to TET2.
So we doubled that in the blood. I saw that.
It... It's also a marker of methylation, which I'm very interested in, because I think that when the body's able to take compounds and convert them into the usable form, you know, you're improving the cellular metabolism and you're making that cell less susceptible to all forms of disease and sickness because it can eliminate waste and it can repair, it can detoxify, it can regenerate.
but i thought it was fascinating that they actually were measuring markers of methylation in 70 plus year olds tattoo was my idea was actually in that study uh so that's uh you can bring it in like research is very important to me when i decided to go down this road um as we all know there's so many snake oil salesmen in the health industry and supplements and i wanted to do something that i could look at myself in the mirror and go to bed happy and feel like i'm having a purpose in life and i'm doing something good not just out there to make money right right so as we were getting ready to launch i did a bunch of research on what regulatory requirements are. So we have grass status and new dietary ingredient status with the FDA.
Actually, now we have 21 validated structure function claims to FTC standards through an expert panel that reviewed all our research. But I wanted to make sure that my hunch that the higher concentration and dose we were delivering was actually going to have an effect and wasn't going to have a harm because that's very important with any molecule every molecule works on a dose dependent and sometimes concentration dependent response and increasing the dose can increase efficacy but there could be side effects and i really wanted to explore this to make sure I was delivering something that was safe and effective for people.
So before we launched as we were doing our first production run I emailed every single first and corresponding author on every single clinical trial on hydrogen and preclinical in mice. Okay.
And I offered free product free placebo and to donate funds no questions asked so i don't believe in uh um silencing science if something if the research came out negative not in favor of what you were doing they still want them to publish it okay exactly love that we cannot understand this world better if we're not publishing negative data wow Wow. As we've talked about before, the big problem there is a law passed in the 1920s called shareholder supremacy.
So corporations have to do what's best for their shareholders. And if they don't, they're breaking the law and can be sued.
Right. So that's why I've kept my company private so that I can make my own decisions and be like, this is what is true and ethical and moral.

Right.

This is how I'm going to do.

And that's why I've resisted all, you know, venture capitalists who have tried to invest in my companies. So I got some bites.
And that's why now just in the last six, seven years since we've been doing research, we actually have more clinical and preclinical research than all other commercial hydrogen water products combined wow right so and and we have way more that that's you know we we have like over 20 human studies now we have i've read a lot of them we have uh ankle injuries c, traumatic brain injuries, inflammatory compounds.

And I actually want to do that.

I want to go down sort of the road of hydrogen gas and its implication in a bunch of different categories.

We can actually even talk about it from the very beginning, why it's important from evolution and why we're not getting it.

So what we're realizing is first we realize that hydrogen is having this impact on the body. Right.
Then the question is, what's the mechanism? How is it having this impact? And we've now been able to identify there's a few different mechanisms that's working. So throughout the whole body, it's acting as something called the mitohormetic

effector so that's hormesis of the mitochondria right so hormesis is anything like a stress that's mild enough that we get stronger from and adapt right so exercise cold exposure sauna sunlight even yeah radiation in certain amounts like sunlight um even ethanol at the right dose right and timing

it's just with hormetic agents they all operate on like a reverse u or a reverse j when you don't get it at all you start here um if you get the right dose and timing you improve your health and then if you go too high it goes either back to baseline or a lot worse like with alcohol it's a very tight reverse chain um which is why we can't really recommend alcohol for anyone at any dose because every person would find a benefit at a different dose and every day so we just don't have the science there to to make advice but um so we're we're acting kind of like exercise for the mitochondria which is improving the health and the number of the mitochondria. In addition, hydrogen is interacting with our microbiome.
It's improving gut health. And in a yet-to-be-fully-understood mechanism, we know we're partially metabolizing it in the liver, and it's driving liver homeostasis.
So there's a few ways that hydrogen's helping. And now, why is hydrogen doing this in our body? What role did it have? We actually have to go back to the very beginning of evolution.
So our last universal common ancestor, the single cell organism that spawned all life on this planet, actually consumed hydrogen as its fuel source, right? And then our first mitochondria came from eukaryaryotes and those eukaryotes was a symbiotic relationship between organelle one of which um expelled hydrogen as a waste product right and now we've actually carried that throughout all of evolution and there's other factors too at times in evolution a couple billion years ago there was a lot more hydrogen in a lot of exposure to hydrogen gas and obviously it's a necessary element but i mean the you know i would say that uh what are we 60 or 67 percent water by weight yeah um so obviously we have a lot of hydrogen molecular hydrogen is the first molecule in the universe too right so it's seems obvious in retrospect that it has a role in our life and our body and actually, we evolved to produce a tremendous amount of hydrogen gas internally, endogenously. We do this by fermenting fiber.
Now, the big problem here is throughout the majority of human evolution, we were consuming 100 to 150 grams of dietary fiber a day. Now, the average person in the Western world consumes 10 to 15 grams of dietary fiber a day, but the average person on a standard American diet is only consuming one to three grams of fiber a day.
So we're not getting the fuel to produce hydrogen. And the bacteria that are breaking down fiber in this process and releasing H2 gas, they're like any living thing.
If you stop feeding them, they die. And that is one of the reasons we're getting this dysbiosis of the microbiome.
You know, these hydrogen-producing bacteria are dying out. They're being replaced by methane-producing bacteria.
So actually when we do studies, we can look at a high percentage of middle-aged and older metabolic-impaired people. we give them a hydrogen breath test after lactulose and they produce more methane than hydrogen or no hydrogen at all wow and this is critically important because we know that methane is strongly correlated with basically every disease outcome it's uh correlated with mortality and we also know that hydrogen is correlated with longevity so a study in uh centenarians so people over a hundred in okinawa found that these centenarians had higher breath hydrogen than the average young person wow so their lifestyle had carried which meant they had the healthy microbiome to produce the hydrogen gas yeah and and as we know with a a lot of the gut dysbiosis, some of the bacteria doesn't come back.
Right. Right.
So for a lot of people that have not lived a perfect lifestyle, which who has, you can maybe only get your hydrogen at the right dose exogenously. Right.
Through hydrogen water or hydrogen inhalation or bathing gas. Yeah..
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It's fascinating to me because I think it has so many implications. You know, it's a part of my daily life, but there are a lot of people that poo-poo the hydrogen water bottles or poo-poo hydrogen tablets or just hydrogen gas as a therapeutic measure for reducing inflammation, for improving circulation.
We now have clinical evidence to support that but i want to kind of break down the different categories because there's several areas where i'm hyper interested in what hydrogen gas can do for sports performance what it can do for cognitive function um i both my parents drinking hydrogen uh gas water you know every every day, I can tell you, I have emphatically noticed the difference in their acuteness, and their memory, their recall, my father says it about my mother all the time. So let's just break down once we get this hydrogen gas into the body.
First of all, how is it getting through the stomach? Once it gets through the stomach and enters the small intestine or perfuses through the blood brain barrier, what is it doing? How is it how is hydrogen gas on an anti inflammatory? You know, we can measure its its ORP. I've got an ORP meter right here.
We can measure its oxidative reduction potential. It's highly negative, which is great.
But explain that mechanism. This is actually where it gets kind of interesting and makes hydrogen a lot more profound than just a standard anti-inflammatory or an antioxidant.
So hydrogen is in fact a weak antioxidant in vitro. So outside of a living body in a test tube or cell culture, which is why we can get a negative ORP from it.
But how it's actually working as an antioxidant in vivo is similar to how exercise works. It's actually acutely an oxidative stress in the mitochondria.
That's what's actually triggering Nrf2 reaction, you know, activation. Nrf2.
Exactly, which we produce more glutathione, catalase,

superoxide dismutase. So we're producing more of our endogenous antioxidants, and it's only driving towards homeostasis.
And this is actually critically important because there are a lot of deleterious effects from taking too high of antioxidants, right, right, you can go into to reductivective stress which is as harmful as being oxidative yes so hydrogen just drives towards redox homeostasis it's getting this harmony back between the yin and yang of our reductive molecules and um because you're behind the body's physiologic process to create homeostasis rather than imposing it upon.

Exactly. And it's doing the same thing with inflammation.

So it can actually acutely spike inflammation just like exercise.

Exercise will release interleukin-6, which is one of the nastiest pro-inflammatory cytokines.

But it's such a low amount from skeletal tissue that it's a myokine role.

And hydrogen does the same thing, which drives this harmonious inflammatory response.

Mm-hmm. tissue that it's a myokine role and hydrogen does the same thing which drives this harmonious inflammatory response and a lot of people just think of inflammation as a bad word yes it's only bad when it's not behaving how it's supposed to inflammation is critically important to our physiology it's part of our healing exactly right and um nothing in the body would heal without the inflammatory response exactly right it's part of our immune system to fight off viruses actually that that was one of the big issues with COVID-19 there's a lot of people a lot of people's bodies weren't recognizing it was a threat so they didn't have sufficient inflammatory response at the beginning and then once the virus started taking over their body would panic and they go into cytokine storm.
Having this healthy, harmonious inflammatory response is incredibly important and hydrogen drives that. And it does that for a lot of other processes too, like autophagy.
It's all the rage in anti-aging with autophagy. And a lot of people think, oh, I want to always be activating autophagy, but no, you want to intermittently activate autophagy.
And in a lot of research, hydrogen has shown to actually activate autophagy. But in some important studies, it's shown to inhibit autophagy.
Like after heart failure and drowning resuscitation, when you absolutely don't want that to happen. So in a way, it's kind of, we'll explain hydrogen, kind of like a supervisor.

Yeah.

In our cell. It's sort of a selective antioxidant, if you will.
And meaning that, you know, it's, if we could get behind our own cellular physiology, our own cellular biology to create homeostasis, reduce the inflammatory response when it's not needed, and not inhibit the inflammatory response where it is. Like I've started taking it before hyperbaric sessions because I know that these oxidative species, high amounts of oxygen under pressure can actually have negative effects, like again, positive effects.
And I can mitigate some of those by taking the hydrogen gas. But actually, it's hence heat distress acutely.
And we've talked about this before. So there's really cool research on hydrogen with other hormetic stresses you know whether it be heat exposure cold exposure or exercise that acutely hydrogen is actually increasing the stress response but then after the stress finishes it's driving back to homeostasis faster wow so like with exercise that's as if you worked out harder and recovered quicker yeah because it's spiking the inflammation and oxidative stress higher and then dropping back down to homeostasis faster.
Yeah. And you know, I noticed in athletes, I've introduced several very dominant athletes like Michael Chandler or john Jones, other athletes that I can't name because they're publicly public about their work with me.
When I introduce hydrogen water, it seems to close that last five yards for them. It reduces the amount of pain that they wake up in in the morning, like knees, hips, shoulders, rotator cuff.
I've seen firsthand what happens to people when I put them in a hydrogen bath. You know, I was getting ready to invest almost $100,000 in this electrolysis unit that made oxygen water.
And I got this hydrogen generating machine and started to use it in my bathtub. And what I've seen get in and out of that bathtub is nothing short of miraculous.
I don't even talk about it online because so many people would say you're a charlatan because you can't put somebody in a hydrogen bath that has crippled with arthritis and then they just walk out of your unit like they won the lottery. But I've seen it.
We have a couple of clinical trials using, you know. Well, I can't wait for those.
H2. Yeah, these H2 tabs, you know, in bathing.
Yeah. And anecdotally, like, as we talked about, I love martial arts.'m a lifetime martial artist and um a buddy of mine uh is a former ufc fighter and during one of his camps he he uh cracked his rip right like um and he was a i gave him a ton of h2 tabs right and he was taking daily baths and he was able to continue training every day and make his fight six weeks later when he cracked his rip wow so really cool anecdotes like that um well i read the study that that you published on uh it was a lateral ankle injury and it was um recovery after um you know acute injury and what i thought was fascinating was it reduced the inflammatory process but didn't reduce the inflammation.
And I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but you know, ice creates this vasoconstriction. And what you were doing was comparing the rice method, you know, rest, rest, ice, compress, elevate to the use of hydrogen.
And then hydrogen wasn't creating this constrictive effect, which was reducing the presence of inflammation. It was actually reducing the inflammatory response, but improving the circulation.
So there's cool research on that, that cold exposure reduces blood plasma flow. So you're not getting healing to where you've injured.
Right, because the plasma has the platelets and the platelets carry the growth factors, which causes the hydrogen is regulating the inflammatory response but it's actually increasing blood plasma flow so this was an acute study and um i wish we'd recruited more people i think it was only like 12 participants right and we were equivalent to rice protocol but in four very important markers we were had strong trends to be better after this single session then rice protocol yeah I think that the professor told me if we record cruted like three more people it would have been significantly better than rice protocol right in lowering information in improving range of motion and decreasing the visual analog score for pain mm-hmm was another, I can't, oh, circumference. Yeah.
I read another one of your studies. I've read a lot of your studies, by the way, you know, that was looking at CTE and traumatic brain injury and immediately post-concussion using H2 tabs in the buccal fold, just putting it there and letting high amounts of hydrogen gas get into the body so that you can reduce the inflammatory response post-concussion.
I don't want to misquote it because it was your study, but I want to say that the way that concussions are evaluated, you use the standard concussion evaluation protocol, And there are a number of categories that qualify you for having a discussion, having a concussion. And he had, I want to say 13 of 24.
The next day that was cut in half. And then the severity score, how they rate the severity of these different measurements

was also cut in half. In fact, it was cut by more than 70%.
I remember reading this. I was so blown away that I was like, why not immediately after concussion? Are we not just giving hydrogen gas? I think in the future we might.
And we have a rat study that came out of the Stony Brook in New York for post stroke recovery that found some synergy between hydrogen and minocycline, right? To improve the post stroke recovery. And Stony Brook actually has a clinical trial underway on post stroke recovery.
Wow. So there's a lot of cool research that's coming down the pipe here.
As I mentioned, we've got over 20 human studies. I think we have five more that are either finishing up peer review or in press that are about to publish and 15, 20 more that are in the planning stages underway.
So the research isn't stopping. And actually because of my devotion to advancing the research on hydrogen therapy, Dr.
lebaron from the molecular hydrogen institute just invited me and i accepted um to be the smartest guy i've ever spoken to about hydrogen i mean that guy will spin your beanie if we're gonna go into say the the biochemistry of hydrogen he is the top in the world yeah he understands you know, the biochemistry of what hydrogen does in the body better than anyone. Where the only thing I'd say that I have an advantage of him on is I have a better memory and I've read more papers than him.
So it's not a contest. Sorry, Tyler.
No, no, no. But I mean, he's exponentially more knowledgeable than me in the biochemistry, like exponentially, right? So I'm taking a sliver here, but he's invited me to be the first chairman of the, the hydrogen research committee under the MHI.
So it's a volunteer position. And basically what I'll be doing is I'll be working with the MHI and working with the public in industry.
So Dr. LeBaron has hired another PhD, Dr.
Grace Russell from the UK, who's published a lot of research on hydrogen, and I know her personally. She's going to be helping research teams fill in NIH grants to get more funding for hydrogen research in the United States.
And I'm going to be working with the public in industry to get more funding, to fund this research, in addition to supplement the NIH grants, and also to do outreach with the universities. Because that was one of the first things I did.
I emailed, like I said, every first and corresponding author on every study that I could find. So we're going to be doing that and hey this is where the evidence is we can help these nih grants we can connect with industry to get future like further funding and then at the end of the day once we we get partners that have all agreed um dr lebaran and i are going to review the protocols to make sure that the targets make sense the methodology makes sense

the dosing makes sense this is amazing i mean um i you know first of all i think it's an it's an

it's an area that's vastly understudied i think it's also because of the trouble that industry has with you know patent protection and copyright protection trademark protection around this you know element which you you've patented, but around this element and its impact

on, on physiology. I want to bring this down to a practical standpoint and like some actionable

steps that people that are watching this podcast might, might take away. Um, how do they incorporate

hydrogen gas into their daily routine and why would they want to do that? And what can they

expect, um, in terms of absorption for their vitamins, minerals, amino acids, nutrients, gut health? I think we should touch on a few areas. We can touch on metabolic, the anti-aging aspect.
You know, they estimate as high as 80% of Americans have some form of metabolic syndrome. And we've reversed metabolic syndrome, you know, in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial with people over six months we were i'm going to link all these studies into the show i think it was 21 of 23 measured outcomes we we had a significant clinical and statistically significant impact just by adding h2 tabs to it was three h2 tabs a day in 12 ounces of water in these people middle-aged and older with that would cost you less than three bucks yeah so we reverse metabolic syndrome we've shown weight loss in weight loss or improved body comp in i think it's six studies now now how would the gas improve body composition or weight loss so it could improve muscle mass by improving exercise recovery and energy output and everything like that.
And we're actually finding some cool research. Some of this is not published yet, but I'm an author on some of it.
I'll touch on it briefly, but we're regulating appetite. So GLP-1.
GLP-1. So we do have a study in mice under peer review right now that we regulated GLP-1.
We had an effect and we have a clinical study study, 12-week, I think it was N of 40, 40 participant double-blind placebo control in obese, metabolically impaired people where we increased GLP-1, right? Wow. In addition, we regulated ghrelin already in a clinical trial on overweight people.
And ghrelin is often called in culture like the the the hunger hormone yeah but it actually has a lot of other roles it regulates our insulin response glucose homeostasis it has a lot of neuroprotective effects and what is poorly understood by the general population and even some physicians is that we actually want a peak and valley of ghrelin so we want ghrelin to be very high when we're on an empty stomach and crash to nothing right and in obese people it becomes impaired so there's no peaks and valleys it's just kind of in the middle all the time which is why they're always snacking they're never really hungry but hungry yeah and and hungry but also they're never really as hungry as a healthy person they're just right kind of hungry and snacky all the time so we actually show to restore that fasting Wow and Valley and we're working on some more research in there and we had another study where we improved modulated the brain chemistry involved in satiety. So there's some interesting stuff there.
We're actually planning several other large, you know, clinical trials on metabolic outcomes with hydrogen. Some of them are currently enrolling.
Others are in the planning stages set to kick off in March. We're doing two of them in Serbia, one in Russia, and one in Australia right now.
It's safe to say that right now molecular hydrogen, hydrogen gas has a positive effect on metabolism. And when we say metabolism, so we throw that word around a lot.
You know, metabolic syndrome is a complex of a bunch of different variables that probably the most impactful would be insulin

resistance. You know, that is the root of a lot of evils, but also, you know, elevated triglycerides,

you know, hypertriglyceridemia, hypertension, abdominal fat, elevated cholesterol,

and restoring homeostasis and restoring the um the gut barrier that that single cell barrier that protects our inside world from our outside world you know if i had a penny for every ailment that was a byproduct of gut dysbiosis i would be a very wealthy man and i have in the last 10 years become very interested and fascinated by ways that we can properly heal and seal and restore function to the gut because it's

the genesis of a lot of autoimmune, if not all autoimmune disease. It's the genesis of a lot of

pro-inflammatory conditions, not the least of which is elevated C-reactive protein. There's

just so many downsides to not having a properly regulated gut. And very

often, it's not just a matter of taking probiotics, or even in some cases, eating, you know, switching

your diet to eat the right foods, because if you wipe these bacteria out, you need to restore the

gas that the bacteria that are now gone would have otherwise produced. That's very important,

because there are certain bacteria that can come back within a few days or a week. There's others

I'm going to go ahead and get started. the gas that the bacteria that are now gone would have otherwise produced.
That's very important because there are certain bacteria that can come back within a few days or a week. There's others that might take months or years.
And there's bacteria strains that we've identified by looking at like tribal peoples that we've discovered in the Amazon or South Asia, where could be generational, right? They might never come back once we've lost them. Now, in that same study where we regulate ghrelin we reduce calprotectin so a marker of inflammation in the stomach and we improved a couple of short chain fatty acids propionic and butyric acid oh wow right so okay there's some definite gut links and actually hydrogen water uniquely gets into the gut a lot better than inhalation, obviously, is going to your lungs.
So that's why I was mentioning hydrogen water and hydrogen inhalation have different pharmacokinetics. They elevate different tissues in different capacities.
So hydrogen water interacts with the gut better. It gets to the liver at a higher concentration and some of the internal organs, which is why it's perhaps better for a lot of these metabolic conditions yeah whereas inhalation it's getting obviously to your lungs better it's getting to your muscles at a higher amount than drinking hydrogen water so

a lot of musculoskeletal issues maybe inhalation will be better for athletes maybe you want to do both and it's getting both are getting to the brain inhalation a little bit higher than hydrogen water but hydrogen water also has the the gut brain connection it's getting, both are getting to the brain, inhalation a little bit higher than hydrogen water.

But hydrogen water also has the gut-brain connection.

It's improving your gut, so it's improving your brain.

So I think in the future, we're going to be doing several modalities of hydrogen therapy.

People are going to be drinking high-concentration hydrogen water, doing inhalation in a proper and safe way, bathing in hydrogen water.

There's hydrogen saline, like IVs, right, for purposes in the hospital. So, you know, I'm interested about how could somebody incorporate these H2 tabs, which is the elemental magnesium that effervesces into hydrogen gas.
How does someone that's watching this podcast that's interested in getting hydrogen gas into their daily routine, maybe doesn't have money for you know a hydrogen bottle you know what's the dosage how do they take it so our studies range from one to well five tablets a day but most of them one to three tablets a day at various volumes of water so you want to five to eight just you know i i take i take five personally but i've got a lot of damage um yeah so first thing on an empty stomach is important. So the right, the perfect volume of water is different for every person because it's the volume that you can chug, drink rapidly.
Right. At a room temperature.
So because hydrogen is this stress, like H2 is this stress, like exercise, you don't want to be sipping on it all day long right that would be like you want to get the dosage you want a high dose intermittently because you want the stress and the recovery so let's say 750 milliliters like a uh you know mountain valley spring water yeah you can drop a couple of tablets in there i i personally drink to effervesce and then you want so exactly exactly i do a liter right but most people can't chug a liter so most of our research on athletes uses half a liter or 16.8 ounces our research on metabolic impaired middle-aged people usually uses about 12 ounces 333 times a day and on the elderly we used a cup so we used 250 milliliters or eight ounces because the point is any amount helps but for somebody to say okay i'm going to put this into my daily routine i'm going to take a room temperature glass bottle of water drop a tablet or two in it um and then chug it as fast as you can and it's really important you want to drink it on an empty stomach right so a lot of companies in hydrogen water don't actually talk about this because they don't understand it very well but one say you are producing a bit of hydrogen from consuming fiber you don't want to be competing with that right right um you want that separately but two one of my uh patents involves i've turned hydrogen water and various fibers into dense foams and gels it stabilizes so if you eat it at a time where you've just had some fiber you might not be getting rapid uptake into your system okay which can affect the therapeutic value so what we're learning right now in the hydrogen research we haven't found a plateau yet okay right for most indications so some indications we need vastly higher amounts of hydrogen than we can reasonably— Tense exercise, severe metabolic syndrome, very inflamed. For instance, liver health, we need 10 times more exercise to start seeing an effect.
So dose and concentration is critically important. You want to get the dosing right to have a better effect on the body.
But for the average person that's listening to this podcast, it says I'm sold one to three times a day. One to three times a day.
One to three times a day. The most water that you can comfortably chug down in one to three gulps within 15 to 30 seconds and on an empty stomach.
So sometimes I like is in the morning or right before you exercise yeah you know that's what i do or middle middle of the afternoon or right before dinner like you can eat five ten minutes after you drink the hydrogen water just don't drink it after you eat yeah and and you know what i find is that if i do the hydrogen first i really don't want caffeine. I'm just, you know, I'm more wide awake, more focused, more clear.
And then I max it with an amino acid product, you know, it's just essential amino acids. And then I just go in and hit the gym.
And I'm always looking for ways that we can kind of bio stack things, take something like, you know, the fluid that's going to hydrate you and make it anti-inflammatory by lowering its ORP, which it clearly does. But then also, there must be some effect on the lactate threshold because I noticed that if I do what I've affectionately called a hydrogen bomb, I'll put five of these in, you know, in about 750 mL and when it effervesces whack it back i can absolutely tell that my workouts can be more intense with less muscle burn a hundred percent and actually there's a systematic review and meta-analysis showing an anti-fatigue effect with hydrogen water and we have a couple really cool studies that i know i briefly told you about that are in press right now on the H2 tabs, showing remarkable benefits.
So in the first, and they were in completely different study populations. So the first one was a shorter term study.
I think it was four weeks. It was in Olympic athletes and it was done in Russia.
And they were taking two tablets in 16.8 ounces or 500 milliliters a day,

you know, before and after training.

And we improved body composition in these Olympic athletes,

which was incredible.

But we also improved their peak torque on leg extension at the end of the trial and more significantly after they'd exercised and warmed up,

showing the anti-fatigue effect.

Wow, so they took it during exercise.

Thank you. their peak torque on leg extension at the end of the trial and more significantly after they'd exercised and warmed up showing the anti-fatigue effect.
So they took it during exercise? Right before and right after. Right before and right after.
And we have another trial in the opposite study population. This was a 50 plus group and I was actually just, I was one of the authors on both of these, but I was just in Milan, Italy at ESPN at a conference presenting this study, you know, with the corresponding author.
And so these 50 plus people who had no adult experience with exercise, they were very out of shape, so much so that they were starting doctor guided exercise protocols to try and turn their lives around. Huge deconditioned population right now.
Exactly and this was off memory I think it was six weeks six or eight weeks I can't I can't quite remember but it was again double blind placebo controlled and in the placebo group we actually saw some very concerning things they were borderline raptomyolisis so the stress from the exercise um dysregulated their cortisol response it increased uh myoglobin by 1100 percent right so 11 times um it increased creatine kinase by like seven times 700 they had serious that's where they get the kidney issues with rhabdo exactly oh and uh with the hydrogen group and we actually we saw this too in the the olympians it didn't raise the creatine kinase at all no no significant rise so we had no significant rise in creatine kinase or myoglobin we regulated the cortisol response we improved dhea and free testosterone Wow and we improved sleep outcomes um specifically in females so we're actually seeing a potential gender response it's gonna love you man there's a few studies now both in press and one published where we had stronger results in females and males yeah so it could be mediated by estrogen we're still this out. Yeah.
But well, Alex, I want to follow this research that you're doing. I'm going to put links to all of the study notes to all of the research you published so far and links to other research on hydrogen gas and the H2 tabs, this elemental magnesium.
I'll even put some information on how people can find the H2 tabs if they're interested in adding these what i like is that now you know under a dollar a day for people to incorporate hydrogen gas into their into their lifestyle instead of you know several hundred dollars and a consistent dose yeah because all machines start breaking down over time but the tablets you're getting this high dose every time yeah right unless you have a lab to test the machine you don't know when it starts to deteriorate. With those tablets, you're getting a safe, consistent dose every time.
In fact, I'd love to even do another podcast on women's health because I've noticed, again, anecdotally, when my wife has really bad menstrual cramps, that it seems to mitigate the intensity of those cramps too. So I'd love to go down the rabbit hole with you on that.
We're diving deeper. Like we actually have a few studies underway that are separating gender to look deeper into these gender-based responses.
And we're starting, I've just signed off on the protocol. We're starting the very first responder study on hydrogen, You you know looking at people's endogenous breath hydrogen production over some time to establish the difference in effect of people with low breath hydrogen versus high breath hydrogen so we can really start narrowing in on the research that's amazing man well i end every podcast by asking all my guests the same question and there's no right or wrong answer to this.
But it is, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I think just constantly the pursuit to improve, right? Not perfection, right? It's just growing and learning. And I think that a philosophy behind maintaining is accepting that you're going to respond to things after it's broken.
That's what it implies. So the only way we can stay satisfied is by always trying to move forward.
So my philosophy in life is always forward, right? You know, and forward in as many ways as you can, you know, trying to improve your health, trying to improve your purpose, your business, your family life, right?

Everything. Just always be trying to make small improvements.
Most people want to say with money, go to bed poor and wake up rich without having to do any work. And, you know, it's an age old saying, but Rome wasn't built in a day.
And the only way we can continue moving forward and achieve what we dream to achieve is by taking one step at a time. That's awesome.
One small improvement. Yeah, one small improvement.
Man, I really appreciate you coming on. Guys, I hope that this has given you the depth that you need to maybe incorporate hydrogen gas into your daily routine.
It's one's one of those I think must have biohacks that's affordable for the for the masses. I'm going to stay very close to the research on hydrogen gas, hydrogen water, hydrogen inhalation, because I'm absolutely fascinated by it.
I will link all of Alex's studies in the study notes below as well as a link to some other studies that are not Alex's, but will give you further background if you really want to go down the hydrogen rabbit hole and as always until next time that's just science