CM#3 Nicotine Unfiltered: Exploring the Surprising Science

Welcome to the architect of Resilience podcast, where we explore the secrets of overcoming life's challenges and unlocking unstoppable strength through deep personal conversations and expert insights. You know, Anthony, I really need to take this little square here and pop it. I've had a few miss starts here. Need to pump up my, my little mental clarity and cognition this morning, I think so. I see you're chewing on one already.

Yep. Yeah. Welcome to our audience again to another in our series on cellular medicine. This time we're going to do a deep dive on a compound that is a bit controversial because it's got a lot of media around addiction, and it does have addiction issues as well as. Concerns with health, as well as tons. Of potential positive sides. But I think it's important that as we kick this off, we're going to be diving into some,

some really cool stuff around the benefits of nicotine. Let me go ahead and get mine going, but I don't want it to come across like me and Anthony are huge, you know, nicotine junkies or anything like that. It's important to note everything I think needs to understand it comes in seasons. It's, if there's any substance that you overuse, you know, the body's going to seek homeostasis and start quit having those effects.

And so we'll talk about application, but it's honestly something I don't use that often, unless I do have something that I really need to step up my game, you know, so a few times a month, sometimes years without it, but then also phases where I use it quite significantly for periods of time, longer periods of time, quite consistently to stimulate fat loss, things of those nature. So with that, welcome my co host, Anthony Castore, fellow with the Seeds Institute, and my good friend.

So, yeah, do you want to talk a little bit about. Give it an intro, Anthony? Sure. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be here and always honored to be in your presence, Chris. Not only a friend, but a mentor. So nicotine is really interesting. I thought it'd be kind of fun to start with history. I always like to hear the story behind things. And when we think about nicotine, it was actually first isolated all the way back in the 16th century in France, in tobacco by

two german chemists. In 1828, it was Wilhelm Heinrich Posselt and Carl Ludwig Reinman. And when they isolated the nicotine, it was initially regarded with curiosity, soon became one of the most studied alkaloids due to its powerful effect on human nervous system. And when we think about nicotine and how it works in the body. It's what's called an alkaloid, which means

it's just a naturally occurring compound. It contains nitrogen, just like substances like, give you some other examples, like caffeine or morphine, would both be considered alkaloids because they contain nitrogen. And when nicotine enters the body, primarily what it does is it affects the central nervous system. And the way that it does this is it binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Those are a really specific type of receptor.

It's found on the surface of a nerve cell. And these receptors are normally going to be activated by, like, acetylcholine. And when we think about acetylcholine, probably one of the things that's going to come to mind with a lot of us having a training background is acetylcholine is the first thing released from the prefrontal cortex into the neuromuscular junction to initiate that contraction. When we think about these receptors, I prefer to think of them just like a lock with a

key. And the molecules that bind to them, in this case, like nicotine, that would be the key, receptors like the lock. So kind of makes it easy when you think about it in those terms. Nicotine kind of fits into this lock and then it activates these receptors in a way that sort of mimics acetylcholine. But it's got a greater magnitude of stimulus than like regular acetylcholine. And it also has longer lasting effects. And this is where things get really kind of interesting.

And this is where we see nicotine just has so many applications. Some of the cellular pathways involved are going to be the dopaminergic pathway. And when we think about this, you know, dopamine, and we've all heard, like, that's our motivation. Neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. This is why nicotine is often considered addictive, because it stimulates that dopaminergic pathway. Also pleasure and addiction. Right. That's

very highly linked. You know, before you continue with the cellular pathways, I think not super important, but on the history side, noting, like, so the german scientists in 1828 isolated nicotine and that's where the research started. But the name came from Jean Niquette. He was the french diplomat who

introduced tobacco to France in the 15 hundreds. And it was additionally initially used for medicinal purposes and spread all around Europe from there, then having a significant part of social, economic, political roles that it's played. Yeah, really incredible history around it, but it is not that far back in our european ancestry. As it relates to that history. I actually didn't know that. That's really cool. So, yeah, let's jump back into the cellular pathways.

Dopagenetic, collagen and glutamogenic, right? Yeah, absolutely. So the

cholinergic pathway is going to be the one that nicotine is going to mimic, the acetylcholine. When you think about acetylcholine, it's got that word choline in there and cholinergic, so easy to remember it that way. And that's going to lead to increased activity in parts of the brain that are generally controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system, like your heart rate, muscle

movement and attention. So when we think about that as we chew our nicotine gum, it makes sense if we're stimulating that cholinergic pathway, we're going to have better attention. We might have an accelerated heart rate, and like we talked about, that acetylcholine is the first thing released from the prefrontal cortex into the neuromuscular junction, so we can have that muscle contraction. Then with regards to the glutamergic pathway, a lot like how it sounds, glutamate.

Glutamatergic. Nicotine is going to promote the release of glutamate, and that's crucial for learning and memory. And one of the reasons nicotine is sometimes linked to enhanced cognitive function. In fact, there's several people I know who are many times smarter than I am, that whenever they have an intense bout of studying to do, and I kind of pick this up from them, pop a piece of nicotine gum, chew on it, and it's going to improve your rate of learning and your retention.

So really kind of some cool stuff around that. Yeah. And it was. You don't need that much to enhance those. So even half of. And that's typically what a Reddick, man. It's to unlock those pathways, to really speed up, you know, those pathways through the brain, amplifying the signals as it relates to intensifying cognition and physiological responses. It takes like 1 nicotine, like, not an amount that you're even going to feel. So half of. I mean, your first time

ever having nicotine, you're probably going to get some. Some sensations from that, but that's probably it. Therefore, we're using half of a piece of. Of gum. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's one of those things, you know, if you can open a door with a key, don't use a stick of dynamite. It little bit goes a long way when it comes to nicotine. And that

also keeps it safer. Yes. Like, I'm thinking about. I love to mention his name because apparently it upsets a lot of my followers when I say David Weck, but he got into nicotine recently, and he quit doing the gum because it was raising his heart rate. Well, it does do that, but he was also taking, like, 20 to 60 pieces of gum per day,

again, just completely overdoing the effects of that. And that's where, like, if I'm in a fat loss phase, you know, I'm using half a stick, you know, once in the morning, once in the afternoon, timing away from carbs. We'll get into all that sort of components later. But, yeah, it will raise your heart rate and will raise your resting heart rate if you are using too much. Yeah, definitely. And then it also has effects on norepinephrine. Um, it boosts. Let's. Let's dive into those, uh,

neurotransmitter effects. So, you know, we talked about the cellular pathways with the dopingenic, uh, cholerinogenic, and glutamogenic. So obviously, it's affecting neurotransmitters of dopamine, acetylcholine, but it also affects norepinephrine, serotonin, and glutamate, correct? Yeah. And it's really cool. Like, I always kind of. I like to associate these neurotransmitters with different things, so it's a little easier to remember. So dopamine, we kind of covered.

Dopamine is one that can get you into trouble because of addictive behavior, but it also helps in terms of creating, like, memory in the brain as well as pleasure. So it's definitely important. Interestingly, side note, when people have add, one of the things you're going to see is, like, really, really low levels of dopamine for dopamine one and two receptors.

So it's like they don't have enough. So. And we'll get into this a little bit later, but one of the kind of off label uses of nicotine is in cases of attention deficit disorder, the acetylcholine we covered. You know, I do have to read. Your add article, but I haven't quite bounced to that one yet. I wrote that and two others at the same time. I've got add as well. The self diagnosed. I'm like, no, no. My therapist actually laughed at me when I said

what I suggested that we do the test. He's like, oh, yeah, we could do that. And just literally laughed at me. That'll be entertaining. It was. You're like, I passed. Yeah, me too. Flying colors, maybe. Yeah, that's that one. That is one test I didn't have to study for with the norepineprine. What's really kind of cool about that, when we think about, like, thermogenics and the conversion of white fat to brown fat and the shivering that takes place,

that's a norepinephrine driven response. So you can start to kind of see as we're talking about these neurotransmitters and how nicotine works. Like, man, you know, there's really a lot of application for this. It does also affect serotonin, which is kind of your, I call it the comfort neurotransmitter, and it's got a lot to do with regulation of mood. And we talked about the glutamate. Glutamate. One of the problems is if glutamate gets too high, it can lead to excitotoxicity

and kind of burn out those receptors. So that's kind of one of the things where, like, a little bit's good, but get too much, and that's where you start to kind of get into trouble. Yeah.

So it's those effects. Like, that's why I really, the times that I use it, I'm very limited to use it. I did it today just as a kickoff for the meeting, but, or the podcast is, for me, like, a challenging business meeting, getting up in front of an audience and doing a presentation. Now, the raised heart rate can also be counterproductive. So this is like getting

the learn to feel those things. But again, a small amount isn't really going to raise your heart rate, but that feeling of comfort, euphoria, pleasure, along with, like, the enhanced alertness in focus, it makes a really great combo for, like I said, like, a very challenging, like, you know, business meeting, presentation, things of those nature to get your mood and mental clarity set just the way you want and then perform at a higher level. Yeah,

absolutely. Similarly to you. Anytime I'm going to a conference, I'll use nicotine gum or a nicotine patch, and we'll get into the reason I do a patch versus gum. I'd never thought about that from a conference standpoint of the learning aspect. Like, that's really like, you're leveling up on me, Anthony. This is why you absorb more knowledge than me. Maybe. When you think about, like, a patch versus a gum, the gum is kind of

that immediate shot of nicotine. The patch is going to be more gradual, and on a patch, I'll use, like, a seven milligram patch. And reason for that. Also, if I'm going to a conference, there's going to be travel involved. And this kind of brings us to some of the other benefits. Immune system, right? So. Absolutely, yeah, yep. Yeah. Immune system. You know, you're, you're in an airport.

I mean, you're in a petri dish. And the, one of the cool things with nicotine is by binding to those nicotinic receptors on immune cells like the macrophages, it's going to inhibit the release of inflammatory molecules and cytokines, and that should kind of trigger in a lot of people's brains, cytokine storm, Covid. So no coincidence it's got some benefit in terms of navigating travel and boosting your immune. We talked about the cognitive benefits. Wouldn't that also play a role in

autoimmune conditions as well? 100%, yeah, it's got a lot of benefit anytime you can reduce inflammation, because autoimmune is basically inflammation driven response. And they're even looking at it in things like Crohn's disease because it appears to reduce some of the intestinal inflammation that you'd see with like a Crohn's. Crohn's is a little bit more complicated. That'll be when we talk about some immune peptides and gut stuff. I think there's some really cool stuff coming out on that.

But, yeah, it just really speaks to the, how broad the applications of nicotine are. Yeah, yeah. So other potential benefits beside the immune, we talked about the cognitive function, the learning applications for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and then potentially, would that that make sense? 100%, because in both of those situations, you need to have higher acetylcholine and dopamine. And as we mentioned previously, nicotine is something that's going to raise

the dopamine levels. And for Parkinson's in particular, it's kind of called death of dopamine producing neurons. So there's some studies out there that actually have shown that there's a lower risk of Parkinson's for smokers. Now, I'm not telling anybody to go take. We're going to get into health implications later. Do not become a smoker. Let's be very clear on this. But yeah, there are studies that are showing lower risk of Parkinson's being observed in

some of them. Uh, really interesting. I think that that has gotten. There was like some popular, you know, health guru that basically said that nicotine wasn't as bad, you know, smoking was better than, you know, having sugars in your diet or something? Something fucking crazy. Uh, maybe better than diet soda or something like that. No, no. The. The positive effects of nicotine do not outweigh in any way smoking. You know, cigarettes, cigars, things like that.

Yeah. And the other thing to think about with smoking and this one kind of flies under the radar. People forget that one of the primary sources of glyphosate is going to be when you smoke tobacco, because it's such a heavily sprayed crop. So when you think about, like, intestinal permeability and a lot of the health complications that come with accumulating glyphosate, you can see why smoking is 100% not

a great idea. I mean, in addition to everything else. So on those other potential benefits, we've talked about fat loss a bit, and the shivering response. So clearly that's going to stimulate thermogenesis. And with that, typically, I don't employ that for general fat loss myself. I employed the nicotine at the very, very far reaches end of a diet, when you're just trying to strip off that ever so last hard piece that you can't normally get to.

Uh, that's my personal approach. The other side of that is it does act as a appetite suppressant as well, uh, which is. Can be invariably invaluable, uh, at times too, particularly in kind of those phases. So anytime someone's seen me, like in a photo shoot prep condition, I say probably half those times, you know, the final few weeks, I. That's when I'm doing the nicotine twice, twice a day, which also works well because of. We'll get into the

downsides. But the blood glucose level, insulin resistance is affected to some level by this as well. So having it with a high carb diet is not necessarily a great idea or around carb sources. What about other off label, non traditional applications? We've talked about Parkinson's. I don't know if you want to dive more into the ADHD or autoimmune conditions, but we've covered that a bit. Ulcerative colitis.

Yeah, yeah. I think anything where there's going to be inflammation, and that's just such a broad spectrum of things. Nicotine is going to have an application in terms of, like, some of the research they're currently doing, as mentioned, they're kind of looking at ADD Parkinson's. They're actually even looking at it for schizophrenia. It's kind of interesting. Schizophrenia patients have shown altered nicotinic receptor function, and I was not aware of

that one. I actually just learned that myself two weeks ago when I was doing some research for our podcast and had heard about some of the other things they were studying it for. But schizophrenia was a new one to me. And

then it's really gaining a lot of popularity in terms of populations where people are really already healthy, but they need to perform optimally in terms of their cognitive function.

And I think a little bit later, we'll kind of discuss some really cool combinations you can do to sort of offset some of the negative effects you'd have on, like heart rate or added stress to the heart, accelerate the fat burning, and turn it into something that you can use with a little bit more regularity without having to really worry too much about, like, the addictive side of it and, you know, maybe have a big impact on something like

ADHD or that kind of thing. When you think about what's traditionally prescribed for ADHD and, you know, a lot of the stimulants that they use, there's kind of, kind of a different mechanism of action. And if you want, I can kind of unpack that, or we can save that for another time.

Yeah, let's drop that down. I'd like to cover. I think it's time to dive into the, the downsides, the risks associated with, with nicotine before we jump into a few of those others, because, yeah, it's not all, nothing is all pretty, right? So clearly, we've talked about the addiction. I mean, nicotine's activation of the dopagenetic pathways rewires the brain's reward system, leading to dependence. Now, myself, I've used nicotine on and off for 20 years

and never once felt that. But again, we're talking about levels that are very similar. I just want to note that because, yeah, I want to raise my hand and go, oh, look, I, I was using it long before it got popular, but, yeah, but I was turned on to it by other people in the fitness realm because it's in the, you know, the hardcore bodybuilding realm. And, you know, the, the original biohackers. Like this stuff has been around for a

long time. You know, popping nicotine and doing some fasted cardio, you know, those type of things have been and used in that realm. And now I think it's funny getting popular, like people going, oh, look, we just discovered this, and it's so amazing that we came up and this has been around for decades, well, actually hundreds of years, you know, as it relates. Right. Yeah, but what about anything that you would want to add on addiction?

The addiction, really, like when you think about the reason. It really kind of comes down to dopamine and kind of the easiest way to help people understand, like the addiction thing we have in the nucleus of compass, we have our sort of our reward center and that dopamine pathway. And it's one of those things like, you know, when you get a little hit of dopamine, it's like bing, the lights go on and there's an imprint in your brain. Like, I want to

do that again. And, you know, that light goes off for a couple times and then pretty soon it requires more of a response to get that same thing. And if you don't get it, there's almost kind of like this down. So then of course, you know, the logical thing to do, you're going to

have more nicotine. And the cycle repeats. And I with the addiction because a lot of people probably right now are thinking, well, you know, if the only thing is I'm going to be addicted to nicotine and it's going to improve my fat loss, my cognition, decreased, chances of Parkinson's. Like, I guess I'll just be paying for a lot of nicotine, but I won't smoke it. So really, what's the problem? And the problem is eventually what happens is these

receptors kind of get burnt out. It's almost like to draw analogy when you think about like the boy that cried wolf, you know, after a while people just stop listening. And that's kind of what your receptors do when there's just dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. And no matter how much more, there's going to be a point where you're not going to have enough receptors available and the ones you have are going to be burnt out or not have. It's called an action potential. So the same response to stimulus

and that's kind of where the problem comes in. And then of course, you know, accelerated heart rate and that kind of thing can be problematic as well. Well, particularly if it leads

to heightened blood pressure. Heightened blood pressure is a, you know, that is a significant contributor to heart disease and something I think particularly in the fitness realm with supplements and pharmacology and stuff that's used that people really, really need to be aware of, um, as a, as a driver and make sure that they're mitigating, uh, so if it's causing heightened blood pressure for you, like, you need to figure out how to, how to

address those things. Um, yeah, you know, myself, I run, you know, 110 over 55 pretty much all the time. Um, but, you know, I use a lot of other products like the one I mentioned every episode, if a. So blitz, see your night. Uh, your nitrates, uh, uh, your, um, you know, vasodilation, explain, uh, you know, making those, those pliable, making sure we've got blood flow to all the tissue turnover and, uh, really improving tissue quality through proper cellular hydration

and nutrients. So, anyway, there's my, my plug. But, yeah, it's absolutely profound for things like heart rate. Like, this is one, like anybody that is a user of, you know, pharma for, you know, improving anabolism. Like, I'm like, you have to use that one. You're going to get better results. You can lower your dosage, but it's also going to take care of some major issues, relates to, uh, health risks. So is there any narrow toxicity with long term use of nicotine, or does it

really. No, I'm sure it's dose dependent. Uh, plays a role in that. Let's dive into the world of optimizing your overall health. With pushing my physical limits, I encountered significant reductions in my health, and I reached out to Merrick Health as the premier telehealth service. I loved their personalized health coaching. From the comfort of my home, they empower you with the choice of

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Yeah, it would be dose dependent. And I think the neurotoxicity is going to come from, like, excessively high glutamate levels. That's just gonna. That would be where the neurotoxicity component would come in.

It's kind of like when people's glutamate, you know, being an excitatory neurotransmitter, if you could imagine being, like, too wound up and you were a car, like, if we were, let's say we were a Ferrari and we're driving ourselves 220 miles an hour, like, every day, all day, as much gas as we can put in the car, the car's just going to burn out pretty soon. And that's kind of what happens with when those glutamate levels are elevated too frequently and too high.

So that would be a concern as well, I think, kind of to build on what you said, like, the product that you have, the vaso blitz is just so incredible because blood pressure really is kind of the silent killer. And when you have something that's going to increase nitric oxide in the endothelial as well as brain, you're going to improve cognitive function, you're going to improve your ability to keep your blood pressure down,

circulation, all that stuff. And, yeah, I mean, you got a pump, you got a good brain, you got health. And it makes using something like nicotine potentially a little bit safer. I think that it's a no brainer. What about blood glucose? That's something I've mentioned a few times. I have not done any current research on nicotine as you have done. Are those concerns still valid as far as timing of nicotine around carbohydrates and impact on insulin sensitivity, or am I just fear

mongering and it's a non concern? Honestly, that's new to me. Admittedly, I'm not educated on that particular thing. Anecdotally speaking, I can say I frequently use a CGM just to kind of see how different compounds work and stuff. And I haven't noticed a spike in blood sugar. Okay. When, like, if I do, that's going off my, you know, 15 years ago advice from some, some, you know, well researched

bodybuilders as it relates to diet. But it might have just been more diet specific potentially, because that's really, you know, me prepping for, you know, prepping for getting very lean. So it might have been more. I'll have to. I'll have to do a follow up on this. Maybe we can handle this in our q and a's on these. It'd be a great topic

if I'm kind of thinking it through. Like, I think when kind of na one here when I, when I look at my blood sugar and I've got nicotine in there, I'm really big on, like, I do a lot of supplementation with different types of fats, and fats are going to change the glucose response as would amount of protein, the amount of carbs, the type of carbs, and the amount of fiber. And outside of those nights where I've, and there's quite a few of them indulging in some pizza, like, I

generally pretty healthy. So I think if you look at something like contest prep or like where you're getting ready for a photo shoot, so just for that acute phase, you're dropping things like fats and even fiber so you don't get the bloat that that's going to change how those carbohydrates react. In general. And then with the stimulation that could come from nicotine, I could see how that could potentially spike glucose. I just admittedly that I just did a kind

of. I just did a query on my research database and where I've got all my books and research loaded, and it is saying that, yeah, because of the release of hormones like adrenaline and epinephrine and cortisol, that in turn can influence production by the liver and reduce effectiveness of insulin. Oh, yeah. Makes perfect sense to cortisol. Yeah. It's probably more related to people that have glucose dysregulation issues to begin with because I did not see any. When I was. The year I used a

CGM while I was doing some product testing for buildfast formula. I didn't see, I only used nicotine a few times during the course of that, but I didn't see anything myself as it relates to that. But, yeah, obviously cortisol, adrenaline, it makes sense, right? Yeah, yeah. And kind of a cool hack. Not to diverge too much, but a lot of times, too, when you look at people prepping for a show or that kind of thing, they're going to be in a sympathetic dominant state.

And one of the things you can do that just knocks that right out, puts that balance back in the nervous system. It's called neural therapy. Best person I know in the country for that is going to be Doctor Suzanne Ferri over in Atlanta. And basically with the neurotherapy, what you do, it's called a stellate ganglion block. It's an injection that's done in the neck, and it generally use like a procaine or something, and essentially it almost instantaneously returns vagal tone.

So again, not to get too off the subject, but it's a really cool hack. Like, if you're sympathetic dominant, if you're in a situation where you have to use nicotine for a longer amount of time or even post Covid, there's dysregulation to the vagal tone. So it's a great way to almost instantly restore that vagal tone. Doctor Adeel Khan with Aterna has a really incredible injection on the vagus nerve that they're doing

a lot of. It's like post military PTSD exposure to chemicals, as well as massive stress where they're recovering people that have overuse of adrenal, adrenal fatigue. Actually saw one. It's kind of scary, you know, because they're going right into the. Through the. Through the. Through the trap into the neck, I believe. I'm trying to remember. It's one I would love to have done myself in the future. I couldn't get that done just to see the impact of it. Yeah. Does he use the

brocaine as well? I'm not familiar with it in front of me right now. I just remember it was like a, when I went down to see him last January and it was when I really wanted to get done. I just couldn't afford in the budget at the time, so. But I plan to go back. Yeah, that, yeah. Anybody that's interested, check it out. Eterna health with doctor Adil Khan really does

some innovative stuff. So not to get too far off back behalf, let's jump into delivery methods and health impacts of each of those delivery methods. Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about the delivery methods for nicotine, there's generally, we think about, like, smoking or vaping. And to me, those are just a no go. There's plenty of data backing up the risks of lung cancer. And you're getting all the toxins and metals in with both of those as well. So any benefit

you'd get from nicotine would be far outweighed from. Yeah, I want to do vaping thinking that it's safer. I have some significant concerns around that. There's been a lot more research coming around out on that, but I honestly, that might be worse, right, than smoking. That's tough to say. Yeah. Chemicals on the tobacco. Yeah, the smoking to break it down a little bit more. Like when you think about. We'll just kind of go through each of them smoking. Like when you, you're going to

absorb that nicotine directly. And when you think about pharmakinetics and pharmakinetics is kind of, how does that molecule work once it's inside of you? How far does it have to travel to get to, like, wherever it's trying to go? And you think about where your mouth is in relation to your brain. So that nicotine is going to go almost instantly to the brain in as little as 10 seconds. And because nicotine is absorbed so rapidly through the lungs into the bloodstream, it

causes this quick hit. And that's what the smokers feel. And just like it comes on really fast, it also goes off really quick. And that's one of the reasons that you see people smoke like that exponentially. Their use goes up. And as we talked about, the biggest risks with the smoking, you're getting all those carcinogens, carbon monoxide, the glyphosate that have been sprayed, and now you're heating them up and making them easier to transport into your

system. And then with vaping, it's absorbed through the lungs almost as quickly as smoking. And again, it gets right to the brain. A little bit slower than traditional cigarettes would be. But the risks are going to be really similar. I worry about

the metal toxicity and all the combustion of the byproducts. The safer alternatives would be like patches and gum. That's usually what I stick to, the patches and gums. They're going to be a slower delivery method compared to smoking or vaping through the skin or oral mucosa. They get absorbed really gradual. But what's nice is that allows for kind of a trickle into the bloodstream.

So good analogy would be like, if you drink a cup of coffee, you get that hit of caffeine and then there's kind of a crash. If you drink a cup of coffee and you put like some cream in there, because of how cream is going to affect the metabolism of the caffeine, it's going to be a little bit more gradual. And then if you

put like, you know, Danine or something in there, you can even make it. So it's just, you get enough caffeine and it just kind of levels off and there, there's not that drop off. So when it's absorbed through the skin or chewing the gum, that's what you're going to see. The gums got a little bit faster onset and a little bit higher magnitude of stimulus than the patch. So that's why, like, for an acute studying boutan or podcast,

I would lean towards like a nicotine gum. But then if I'm traveling for the weekend, because I want kind of a nice constant nicotine level that I'm going to have that better concentration increase. Neurotransmitters we talked about, as well as the immune boosting benefits. And I don't want to have any drop off where, you know, virus could find receptor to park on the patch. Makes a lot of sense. There's also, like, the lozenges and inhalers, other methods of delivery. And

lozenges are going to dissolve pretty fast. They also get absorbed through the mucous membranes and it's kind of more of an intermediate absorption rate. So it's going to be faster than a patch and faster than gum, but slower than smoking. And inhaler with the inhaler, do those. Cover the same risk as the vaping and smoking? Because I see a lot of. I'm thinking of, gosh darn it, doctor, that doesn't matter. There's a number of health gurus, we'll say, but they love to, you know, use the

inhaler. And to me, I don't know that just. Yeah. Tell me your thoughts on the inhaler. I. The. I would tend to think like you do it. The gum works well, the patch works well anytime you have an inhaler and essentially you're giving an opportunity for metal to enter your system, I'd be a little bit more concerned about that, even if it was a negligible amount. I think that it's kind of like, why take the risk if you don't have to?

Yeah, agreed. So should we cover the neuroplasticity separate or just leave that as we've covered it with a lot of the cognitive function? Do you want to do a breakdown on that separately? Yeah, I think that might even be fun. Like, if we did sort of a follow up for members and if they wanted to know more about the neuroplasticity, I mean, we can break that down to its smallest level,

but I think in terms of. Yeah, so the information so on that, we do Q and A's on this and additional information for our endless evolution members. So that's a community. You can find a link to that on chrisduffin.com, but it is an absolutely free group to join. But we do have a, you know, a paid tier with incredible level of content on there. Literally thousands of hours and thousands of videos on movement and assessment and articles by Anthony myself,

as well as additional excerpts from. From the podcast. Live. Live calls. And all this for dollar 29 a month. It's really, it's an unbeatable deal, but if you want to get involved with that, do a follow up, join that group, and you can join in on some of that. I can't stress enough how much value there is in there. I mean, I've been training for 30 years, and I go on there to learn about the training stuff that Chris has put up. It's amazing. And I put up at least an article a week.

And when I have time, I try to put up more. We just really, the whole reason we did this was because we want people that are really interested in learning more about this stuff to have the platform to do it. And we don't want it to be cost prohibitive. We really want to get people involved. Yeah. Like my ebook I dropped this month I'm selling. It's a three part ebook that sells for, you know, $20 a piece. It's a 300 plus page, you know, deadlift manual.

So you know, $50 for the bundle. Well, you get all the ebooks if you join and get the others that drop every month, so. But if you want to buy it individually and not become a member, that's always, I'm good with that, too. Love sharing knowledge. Appreciate everybody but the. Yeah, the group's really unbeatable. Thank you, Anthony. Appreciate that. Now, I appreciate you putting the information up there, honestly. So let's talk about how nicotine compares to other stimulants.

Yeah, that's when, when we think about stimulants generally, like, I'll kind of think about, like, I guess we've got caffeine, we've got stimulants, like for adhd, like the methamphetamines, and we've got, those would kind of be the main ones that I would focus on. You got the bodybuilding classic cocaine. I've never touched this stuff, but. We can forget that one. It comes up in discussion. Like I said, I don't have an experience there, but,

yeah, how does it compare to those? I mean, amphetamines, you know, people think of as, yeah, meth, but not realizing that that is essentially a lot of the pharmaceutical derivatives are methamphetamine. Amphetamine based as well. Yeah, yeah. I guess kind of a good place to start. Like, I always like to look at mechanism of action, and the reason I always like to think about things that way is when you understand how something's working, then it's going to

make a lot more sense. You're going to be able to contextualize it, you're going to find application for it. That's really how I break down almost everything I think about. That's my starting point with amphetamines. When you think about how an amphetamine works from mechanistic standpoint, basically what they're going to do is they directly increase the release of dopamine and norepinephrine from neurons. And essentially what's happening is they're

flooding the brain with these neurotransmitters. I mean, it's just like somebody turned on the spigot all the way, and they prevent the reuptake of these chemicals. So by doing that, by preventing that reuptake, they're staying active in the brain longer. And what nicotine does, it's a little different. It indirectly increases the dopamine and norepinephrine by stimulating these nicotinic receptors that we had talked about earlier. And it's done

in a lot more controlled manner. So instead of having, like, this garden hose turned on. Now it's just kind of like you're not wasting water. You just got enough water so that you can get your plants growing and not going to have the problems. Yeah, and then there is a time and place for that too. So, you know, I'm thinking of tbis. I a low dose, a low dose of an amphetamine based, you know, product is going to. Because we just need the firing that's not happening in the, in the brain.

And so, you know, micro dose of, of those during a TBI type situation can be valuable in concert with a number of other interventions, obviously. All right guys, we talk a lot about mental resilience on this podcast, but let's talk about another type of resilience that's movement resilience. We want to move well, recover better and do it for life. And it starts with your feet. And you can start today with Neboso. Neboso is a sensory technology company founded

by a functional podiatrist. And all their products feature a texture to stimulate, strengthen and awaken your feet. I use their splay toe spacers and neuro ball to release my feet at the end of every day. They also have these textured recovery socks that feel like a mini massage when you walk around. If you're looking for an effective way to bulletproof your feet, head to nemoso.com. that's naboso.com. and use code resilience for 20% off. Yeah, that's a great point. That it's almost like

everything's got an application as long as it's used in the right way. And that includes nicotine and peptides and everything we talk about that, it's really about, you know, doing, thinking about what you're trying to address and using something specifically for that purpose in a responsible way. That funnily enough, again, not to get too far off the subject, but with regards to cocaine, they used to have the workers that built the pyramids would actually

chew on coca leaves. And that's what gave them the energy to build those massive structures, you know, in those situations. And with that little dose for what we can figure based on looking at remains, it appears they didn't do too much damage to themselves. But yeah, the dosing is a little different than I think the people using that today. Now caffeine works on the same set of choline receptors and also blocks adenosine receptors which is how it leads to that sensation of alertness and

wakefulness. Because adenosine is going to be the trigger for us to know that we need sleep, we need rest. Yeah,

it's cool. When you think about these adenosine receptors, essentially, our adenosine level should peak around 09:00 p.m. and that's what makes us kind of fall asleep, like, when we get this build up of adenosine. And as Chris pointed out, caffeine has the ability to kind of park in that parking space so the adenosine can't get in there. That's why also, when people take caffeine later in the day that they don't, they have trouble falling asleep because that adenosine doesn't

accumulate. And kind of a cool hack. If you're somebody that uses caffeine later in the day, my advice would, of course, be, I don't like people to use caffeine after 02:00 p.m. but if you're somebody that may be a shift worker or you got a

long drive, you're doing caffeine late in the day and you need to sleep. There's a natural supplement called rutacarpene, and it'll pull the caffeine out of the receptor so the adenosine can go back in and not disrupt that whole building up of adenosine and falling asleep process. I was not familiar with that one. Rutacarpene, you say? Rutocarpine? Yep. Yep, rutocarpine. Cool. I have my limit at 03:00 like, if I hit caffeine after

that. So since I train in the afternoons, although now that I don't have a job, I might change that up and train midday so I can get my. My dose in. But it's always, like, I have to have, like, I have a morning dose, small dose of caffeine, and then my bigger one is in the afternoon, which would be before I podcast or before I train. But 03:00 p.m. is my limit. Like, if I go past that, it

affects my sleep, and 03:00 p.m. pushes it. But, like, I also, you know, I'm trying to push it as far as close to my training as I can, but not affect my sleep. Yeah. Is there any, you know, main topics as it relates to nicotine that I jumped over during the course of this or pieces that we were going to address that I pushed you out on?

No, I think there's definitely room to dig into these a little bit more in the member forum, and I think there's some really cool stuff about it might be fun if you wanted to talk about some different protocols like different applications. Let's talk about applications. Nicotine. I think I've been sharing some of mine, like through this. So I'd love to have you spent some time talking about applications. Absolutely. So I kind of break it into three basic categories,

I guess more like two categories. I think about the benefits for cognitive enhancement and the benefits for like fat loss or body composition. And the, I guess immune would probably be another good one to cover. When we think about if we're using it for fat loss and we think about the shortcomings of nicotine or like what are the things we have to navigate? Obviously, we want to be doing something that's going to support our

heart. We want to be doing something that's going to keep our blood pressure down, and then we want to do some things that are going to have some synergy with it. So one of the things that I like to do would be for improving muscle mass as well as sleep quality and getting the support for your heart. Hexarelin as a peptide is amazing. Hexarelin has all sorts of cool benefits in terms of cardio protection. It improves the elasticity of the blood vessels and it

reduces left ventricular dysfunction. So you can see with something like nicotine where essentially you're going to be putting more demand on the heart. Hexarelin makes sense as a growth hormone releasing peptide. Then I like to put tessamorlin with it because tessamorlin is going to increase lipolysis, which is basically like breaking

down that fat, making it available. So now that youve got essentially an accelerated metabolism from the nicotine and youve protected the heart and youve got something thats breaking down the fat, youre halfway there. And then additionally you can do something like throw carnitine in there to transport the fat. Now that it's been broken down to the mitochondria so it can be metabolized. And absolutely love that. That mixture of acetylene l carnitine with the lipolysis, really, really

tremendous. Yeah, I'm a big fan of that.

And it also gives you kind of that and alpha GPC kind of refill that gas tank so that you're not burning out dopamine available and that sort of stuff. And then the other kind of under the radar one that I really love to throw in with that and this plays into the blood pressure thing is the telomeresartin, and it's actually a PPAR gamma agonist. So it's got benefits for your kidneys. It'll keep your blood pressure down and ppar gammas

accelerate fat loss. When you think about a PPAR, what they do, easiest way to explain them is they kind of tap the cell on the shoulder and they say, hey, I need you to burn fat for energy. Or hey, I want you to use carbohydrates for energy. And PPA or gamma is the one that kind of taps it on the shoulder and says, this is kind of an oversimplification, but hey, let's use a little bit more fat for energy. With that stack, you've got something that, with a low

dose of nicotine you can use for. I wouldn't use it for more than a month, but you're going to be increasing breakdown of fat. You're going to be improving the transport of fat. You've got stuff in there to protect the heart, improve natural release of growth hormone, and stuff to protect you against like high blood pressure and damage to kidneys. And the only other thing maybe I'd throw in there would be something like a

five amino, one mq. And that would just be to kind of put gasoline in the mitochondria so it's got that energy to really rapidly metabolize that fat. Yeah, that's. Man, that is just an incredibly powerful stack he just went through. Um, and I have experience with all those things. They work, work phenomenal. Uh, even not as an entire package, you know, just portions of those put together. But, um, yeah, absolutely tremendous approach for, for fat

loss. The, uh, yes, that's always been one that I kind of tuck in the back pocket and had good success with for the cognitive enhancement. I mean, it, it really works on its own. But if you want to kind of kick it up a notch and, you know, all things are on the table, you can use the nicotine with like modafinil. And modafinil is categorized as a wakefulness promoting agent. Modafinil

increases dopamine and norepinephrine. And kind of a cool funny side story about it is they had actually thought about testing people getting ready to take the MCATs or the LCATs because it can improve short term memory so much. So I do like a low dose of endafinil with like a nicotine gum. And then I would think about doing like alpha GPC. I like the liquid form and that would be like my, my study stack. There's a lot of peptides you can put with it too. I mean, you can

do. So. Modafinil, people think as being similar because it's used in a lot of applications like Adderall but benafenil is actually an antioxidant. And so clearing, clearing the byproducts out of the brain is actually what creates some of that wakefulness that sleep is supposed to do. So it's essentially performing some of the duties of sleep. But it's one that I, as I say that I want to say, it's one that people can abuse because if you're not, they're using as a fix for

sleeping less. Like you get your sleep dialed number one. Right. Like that is important. Don't try to use a product to replace sleep. But if there's sleep quality issues or things like that that affect, like modafinil is really powerful for that, but it's using, it does not work. It acts like a stimulant, but its mechanisms of action are not that of a stimulant. Yeah,

its really a fascinating compound. And the other two that I think pair really well with nicotine, you know, how we kind of talked about there could be some potential issues with excitotoxicity in the brain. So I like to use like synapse and rg three, which is going to repair damaged synapses. Nupept and Nupept is going to increase acetylcholine signaling and it also increases the availability of BDNF brain drive neurotrophic factor and then like to put dihexa with that too.

Dihexa is something that promotes neurogenesis and so it creates new neurons and it creates new synapses. So now you've got essentially more neurons, more synapses, and you're giving them that supercharge that's coming from the nicotine and even the stack that I previously mentioned, acetylcholine and melanin. And you're going to have a

expert memory here pretty soon. Yeah, absolutely. So one thing it should be important to note is if anybody is wanting to explore some of that and some of those are needing to be prescribed as well. But you could reach out to me or Anthony for coaching services. Mine are on the christuffin.com website. You can see where those are where I do health coaching, Anthony does as well. And like I

said, he's absolutely phenomenal. And my go to resource these days on the peptide front, but we also work in concert with Merrick Health. So if we need blood work done or prescriptions, things of that nature, that is an option as well. And it's really nice

too. Not to completely let the cat out of the bag, but we've even got one of the country's best positions that can supply like a telemed platform. So, you know, you can, for all your health needs, optimization, that's something we can address. And you've got an awesome team behind you. I mean, Chris, as I said, is somebody that I've learned from and continue to learn from. So just being able to do stuff with them is incredible.

And the whole platform really, like, if you're, if you're looking for that, what's going to put me ahead of everybody else and, you know, get the most out of my years? It's something we can, we can do for you. Yeah, yeah, there'll be more. So our subscribers, you know, you'll hear more about that as we develop that concierge platform, but that'll also be join up for a group and you'll get more information as early, early information as

that becomes available as well. But feel free to reach out to. And something to look forward to. The. Oh, sorry, go ahead. I was just going to work towards closing, so if you got anything else, let drop it. The. No, I think really we covered a lot of great stuff. The immune protocol, I think could be fun to cover in the members group because there's a lot of different components to it and

thinking behind each component. So, yeah, we didn't really cover the, you know, how you would, you know, stacks and, you know, dosing as it relates to reducing inflammation. So we cover cognitive function, weight loss, but we've got, you know, the inflammation and immune side of it. So that'd be really great to cover in a members group. Doctor Justin absolutely. Yeah, I think it'd be a lot of fun. Well, thank you for our listeners for sitting with us for an hour while we dove

deep on nicotine. You know, its potential benefits, which are very significant, as well as some of the risks associated with it, how you mitigate those. I feel really great with this episode and I hope you enjoyed it as well. So make sure to do all that stuff with reviews and liking and whatever, and please support our sponsors as well.