Jason: There's short term and long term effects of hyperbaric, and one of the most significant short-term effects is as you drive more oxygen into a cell, you start making more energy. Almost immediately.
Dave: You wake up breathing, you think you're alive. You think it's enough, but your cells are gasping. Your energy is flickering.
You feel too much pressure, but there's one pressure that could save you. For decades, hyperbaric therapy was misunderstood, a safety net for scuba divers. A last resort for burn victims, A tool for survival, not performance. Today, the science is undeniable. Oxygen under pressure isn't just a rescue protocol.
It's a trigger for regeneration, a weapon for resilience, and a gateway to living younger, longer, and stronger. It triggers your stem cells. It rewrites your epigenome. It rebuilds your mitochondria and slows your biological aging at the source. But only if you use it, right?
Jason: It's a systemic therapy. It's not a targeted therapy.
And when you're dealing with systemic therapies, there's so many different avenues to go down to understand the pathways that people see change and improvement.
Dave: Dr. Jason Sons is leading the charge, a pioneer in regenerative medicine, a world authority in hyperbaric therapy, and one of the few pushing hyperbaric from recovery to an engineering tool for performance and longevity because hyperbaric isn't a backup plan.
It's a first move, not after you break, before you do it.
Jason: If you're already doing some fasting, which is gonna maximize your autophagy, and you're doing hyperbaric, which is going to magnify that effect. And the hyperbaric is now stimulating stem cells. You're gonna create an environment that once you go through a certain protocol, you've now cleaned up a lot of the garbage cells.
You've upregulated your own healing response. If you're perfectly healthy
Dave: and you decide you're gonna try hyperbarics for the first time, what's the first thing that you're gonna notice? Pressure breaks most. It builds the few you are listening to The Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.
I definitely feel it when I do, uh, my Oxy Health Chamber app downstairs that you feel it in your brain and if there's an injury or something, I you'll, you'll feel it like a. A change. Do you know what that change is now that you've gotten into the biology more?
Jason: Yeah. I mean, to your point, I mean, I used it for that injury originally, but I still have a chamber in my house.
I use it pretty often. I do a lot of my creating, so a lot of my, you know, brainstorming and a lot of my writing I do inside the chamber because I also, I feel like a, a sense of clarity. Essentially what I would say is there's short-term and long-term effects of hyperbaric and one of the most significant short-term effects is.
As you drive more oxygen into a cell, you start making more energy almost immediately. And so particularly once you've been using it for a while, like I have, or like you have your, your mitochondria, you've already, your mitochondria are already growing in size. You're, you're, you're growing in number. And so as you dump more.
You know, fuel essentially into that cell and you start cranking out more cellular energy and then you direct that energy into an activity, whether that's exercise or you know, let's say brain games or like I said, creating inside the chamber. You immediately start to see the effect of increased productivity or increased performance or whatever that, you know, cell type is or tissue type is.
Dave: What new stuff did you learn over four years of going really deep into a PhD? So what. Is the new set of knowledge about hyperbaric that's come into your mind?
Jason: I, I wouldn't say it's completely earth shattering brand new. In other words, I think you and I would both agree, whether you're looking at chronic illness and you're trying to create solutions for chronic illness, or you're trying to avoid chronic illness, you know, so you're, you're moderately or relatively healthy, but looking for this, you know, optimization as we get older, you know, continue maintaining our quality of life for the long haul.
We've all now known for many years that if we can basically tap into improving mitochondrial function or. Essentially energy production in many ways. Control oxidative stress as best as we can, and ultimately control inflammation, you know, cellular inflammation. Those are really, I'd say two of the biggest keys that anyone could really dive into if they're trying to optimize their health, optimize their biology, or work themselves away from whatever disease or issue they might be having.
What I'd say that I learned is just the deepest level possible of. What does that mean at that mitochondrial level? What does it mean to really, you know, you and I, we, we talk about epigenetics and how lifestyle affects our biology essentially. But now getting into, you know, the actual markers of epigenetics and seeing, you know, what effect does hyperbaric have on these epigenome?
What effect does diet and, you know, gratitude and, you know, I know you're talking, you know a lot about sort of, you know, even mindset and you know, meditation. So like all of these are having a very specific effect, you know, at a cellular level. And part of that is going to be on energy production.
Part of that's gonna be on the immune system's ability to modulate inflammation, but a lot of that is going be on our epigenetics, which genes. Are we suppressing and which genes are we expressing and what influence do we have over that whole process? Which is actually, you know, I knew it was a lot, but now I can actually see which genes are being affected.
It's, it's really an incredible journey to watch and, and see somebody shifting in this way and then knowing really what's happening, you know, at that level inside their body.
Dave: What are the biggest longevity genes that hyperbaric turns on or off?
Jason: The research that I did for. For finishing this PhD was comparing mild hyperbarics, which most people would assume is really like the soft chamber that you would see, let's say at at shows or in people's houses versus, so that's 1.3 atmospheres, just to give it a number.
And then a lot of the research in hyperbarics is done at higher pressure, so about around 2.0. Okay, so 1.3 is about 30% more of the atmospheric pressure than what you and I are getting right now. And two atmospheres would be literally doubling the atmospheric pressure that what, what you and I are getting right now.
And, and we basically looked at, you know, inflammation markers. We looked at cognitive performance, and then we did an a genome wide epigenetic marker test. And so. What was really interesting and we could, I don't know how much you wanna talk about this on, on this particular show. I will be talking a lot about this actually in, um, at your conference in a couple weeks.
Dave: So guys, that's biohacking conference.com, may 28 through 30th in Austin. And Jason is gonna, is gonna give a really deep dive. On Happy Barracks,
Jason: literally. So, and I'm gonna share, um, a lot of my findings comparing these two, you know, 'cause that's kind of the, that that's the question so many people have, you know, is a soft chamber enough?
Can I actually move the needle or not? Does it have to be higher pressure? Like these are, you know, these are the conversations in the industry and have been for many years. The frustrating thing for me has been. People have had opinions about that for the 20 years I've been in the industry, but nobody's been willing to actually take a stance and actually look at it.
And so this study, as far as I know, is the first head-to-head study looking at the exact same markers, the exact same protocol, but head-to-head 1.3 versus 2.0. And what could we find?
Dave: What did they find out? Or is it not done yet?
Jason: Well, I. I, I actually I mean the, the research is done and for the most part, you know, I've already defended the dissertation and and submitted it.
There's still a lot more detail that I'm gonna be pulling from it for publishing purposes. And I, I don't want to tell you all the secrets today 'cause we want, well just tell me a couple secrets, like is it a big difference or is it a little difference? So here's the interesting thing. What most people would've said in the industry is.
Soft chambers probably do very similar things that hard chambers do, but maybe it takes longer to get to that place. So maybe we could use time as a metric to really influence the changes. So, you know, hard chambers would have a, a stronger impact faster, but that sounds wrong. Well, so there, there's.
There's two pieces of it. In some cases that was true. So in certain cases, okay, there was similar impact, but you know, an order of magnitude different. But in most of the cases, what we found was that hard chambers were doing things that soft chambers just couldn't do. Which I think a lot of people would've expected.
But at the same time, the lower pressure, I shouldn't say soft chamber, just the lower pressures also had an impact that the higher pressures did not have. And so at the end of the day, whether we're talking about inflammatory markers, there were some overlap, but soft chamber had a much stronger impact on certain cytokines.
Hard chambers had a different impact. Wow. On different cytokines. That is, is
Dave: groundbreaking. It was pretty, are gonna show some of them at the biohacking conference.
Jason: Essentially during my, my breakout, I'm gonna I'm gonna show most of my
Dave: research findings. That's incredible, guys. Biohacking conference.com.
It's gonna be incredible. Also, Oxy Health will have a bunch of chambers there, so you can go and you can try it. The hard chamber that I have downstairs lets me go from 1.3 up to 2.4, uh, and that's usually more of a clinical grade thing. Well, let me ask you this. If you have a soft sided Oxy health chamber and I had one for like 15 years before I upgraded to the hard one, it's possible to go to Amazon and buy new valves that will go up to 1.5 atmospheres.
It's just, there's a FDA limitation. It says you can only sell one point threes, but the as far as I can tell, any of the soft chambers can handle a little bit more pressure. They have to be able to, so you can. For about a hundred bucks, upgrade a chamber to 1.5. Is there a difference between 1.3 and 1.5?
Jason: So there's two pieces to that. One is there are chamber, all chambers in the US have to be sold at 1.3. That is what you said. There's just rule. Yes, because the
Dave: FDA hates health. I got, I got that right.
Jason: But at the same time, not every cha just wanna, I wanna clarify this. There are some chambers that are overbuilt.
And could very well, even though they're sold one way, could handle that. There are also a lot of chambers that are sold at that and really cannot handle that. So you'd wanna make sure that you know the difference. If somebody was gonna do that, make that decision and try that on their own, because. To over pressure a soft chamber and to have a, a failure in that way wouldn't be you know, it could be dangerous, obviously.
Dave: And so it, it could be, it could be dangerous. It, it could also just hurt if it, especially if it popped versus just sprung a leak. Although most of them I think would spring a leak a more likely than popped. If they're designed
Jason: properly, they would leak before they popped. Yeah, and you
Dave: avoid a warranty and you're taking your own risks and it's not approved and all those sorts of things.
I guess I've stopped seeking government approval for my health decisions, but I like working with technology that's safe,
Jason: totally. Exactly. So, you know, making sure that the chambers are, are built in a way that they're gonna tolerate that that's, you know, that's obviously important now. Good quality chamber.
Is there a difference between, you know, it, it seems like when, when we talk about atmospheres, like 1.3, 1.5, one point, it, it seems like. How much of a difference can there be there? Seems like that's such a, it's 0.3 or 0.5. How much of a real difference is that? Well, if you look at it, it's a big difference.
Yeah. If you look at it in PSI, it usually makes more sense to people. A soft chamber at 1.3 goes to a PSI of about four, a little over four, and a 1.5. In PSI is like seven and a half. So it's not quite, but it's almost double the pressure. And so for sure there is considerable benefits of maybe that, that higher exposure, if it's, if it's appropriate.
But again, you know, it was really interesting as an example TNF Alpha, which is a very common inflammatory cytokine that shows up in a lot of different diseases. 1.3 moved the needle on TNF alpha, far more than 2.0 did. And so in that case is one. If, if your biggest issue was that particular cytokine is 1.5, even necessary, 1.3 could have easily solved that problem and potentially higher pressure would, would not get you where you needed to go.
So I do think there's a conversation here. You know, obviously more research necessary, but there's a conversation here about what can we do to evaluate somebody and understand what their goals are or what their health concerns are, and actually start not just saying hyperbaric is good and maybe more is better, but saying what?
Actual protocol and including in that what pressure is most appropriate to, you know, to try to get whatever response we're trying to get.
Dave: That's perfect because you may find that you should have 20 minutes of 1.3 12 minutes of 1.5, a hundred percent, and 40 minutes of two. And the science isn't done yet, but you just took out a big piece of that with your PhD.
I cannot wait to hear your talk at the biohacking conference. It's gonna be fascinating 'cause this is new information in the world of biohacking. Just in general, are you, are
Jason: you gonna come to my breakout session?
Dave: I am gonna see a video of it. I'm probably gonna be I, I'll do my best, but I know, I know. I know's.
More's a busy weekend than day hundred percent. I understand. A lot of people, they'll complain, they're like, but there's too much content. Like, I want to go see all the a hundred plus vendors and then I want to hear all these things. I don't know what to do. Or this breakout was full, like it's all recorded.
It's okay. You'll get to see it all.
Here's a question for you. There's the recent Yale study talking about how hyperbaric reduced inflammation, and I want you to compare hyperbaric to things that we all do for longevity, like calorie restriction, working out, or pharmaceuticals.
Jason: So very in, this was like a surprise during the, during the PhD process, but essentially we use the company, I guess I could probably say we use true diagnostics for our epigenetic research.
Right. And they're, they're terrific. And, and the, the content that they're collecting is incredible from a, let's say, from a researcher standpoint especially what, what I have access to doing research using there, it their testing is, is a lot more than what like a consumer would typically get because they're really like opening behind the scenes to understand, you know, all these different genes that they're essentially, you know, looking at.
And so. Other companies obviously are utilizing their technology and so what Yale did is, as opposed to doing their own direct study, what they did was a meta-analysis. So they took 50. One of the most common strategies you can think of from caloric restriction to obviously exercise. Strength versus cardio.
Combining certain, you know, um, Mediterranean diet with exercise. So some combinations of diet and exercise separately. Different diets and different types of exercise. And then other strategies like antis, alytics, rapamycin, hyperbaric. So all, you know, 51 different longevity strategies essentially. What they also did was they, they had a disease process and a healthy, so they, they, they were comparing longevity strategies, even if you were sick.
And then they also looked at it. If you had no diagnosis, where is this all falling? So. To summarize it, the, the most powerful longevity secrets, which are not hope, you know, necessarily helpful for you and I were if you had HIV and you took antiretroviral medication that had the largest impact by far on longevity.
The, the third most powerful was if you were a diabetic and you took metformin that had the, the third most impact,
Dave: but sense right after that. That makes sense because diabetes, diabetes is one of the four killers, so it, it drives all the other diseases of aging and death. So of course fixing that.
Okay. Right. So that
Jason: would be strong. Okay. What was after that? But once you remove that, even, even with disease processes high pressure and mild hyperbarics, were both the, the next two most powerful strategies against wow. Everything else you and I would do, including the anti lytics, the rapamycin diet, exercise, all the things that are obviously foundational.
So, and then if you remove disease processes, essentially hyperbaric was. Literally either the, the, the first or second most powerful in the longevity space as it relates to, uh, you know, to really moving the, the biological aging needles.
Dave: That's incredible.
Jason: Yeah. So that was, that's you, that paper. I don't think that paper's been fully released yet.
I saw a pre-publication version of it about a month ago, but that should be out. By the time this conference comes up, your, your conference or, or shortly thereafter.
Dave: Well guys, you should come to the conference and try one of the Oxy Health chambers. They'll have a bunch of 'em there so you can actually get in and feel it.
And it's funny Brian Johnson, who's been on the show and has been on stage at the conference. It does a ton of hyperbarics and he and I, both of us have done like all the longevity things you can think of that includes regular hyperbaric use. So if you wanna get full results on living for a very, very long time.
I think this is something you wanna do. The problem with Hyperbarics is that it takes a lot of time and you're sort of locked in a chamber when you do it. What is the minimum length of time of a session that's gonna be useful so I can save some time?
Jason: Yeah. You know, there's a, there's a Jason answer and then there's a research answer.
So the research answer says, we don't know almost, I've never seen a real significant study that's ever looked at less than 60 minute sessions over a period of time. So I'd say the standard is, the standard is really, it's been 60 to 90 minutes, continues to be 60 to 90 minutes. I would say one of the things that I did in the research was to look at three days a week versus five days a week.
Because you know, as you're, to your point, whether it's the duration of the session or the frequency of sessions, both are, are essentially time consuming. And so all of the research that we did and all the results that obviously I'll share. You know, along the way, whether us talking or at your conference, all of that was done at three times a week.
And so, as opposed to shortening the duration, I really just tried to, you know, shave off days during the week to see if we could still have an impact, which we did. Do I think 30 minute sessions have an impact? I do, but it, it's all about loading and unloading. I mean, that's really the way I view this. The only real, most of the benefits that you're interested in, that I'm interested in from a longevity standpoint, from the epigenetics to the, you know, mitochondrial effect, to the neuroplasticity effect.
Like all that real you know, let's say tissue regeneration effect that comes not from how much you can get in. Really from the period of time that you're offgassing the oxygen, whether that's through air brakes that I'm, you're probably familiar with, I'm sure you are during your session, like taking the oxygen off or it's just from getting in and out of this session, you know, repetitively over weeks and months.
And so you do need to have at least a significant amount of loading of oxygen inside the chamber in order to really have that off-gassing effect. I do think 30 minutes would be beneficial. I wouldn't make that your. The only way you do it, but I, so essentially I wouldn't go in for less than 30. But anytime that you could do longer, 45 to 60, I think it's worthwhile.
Dave: When I look at biological patterns we all frame reality saying more is better, more intensity, more time, gets more results. And we don't really have a lot of evidence for that. But this is why people overtrain all the time, right? Or they over fast or like, like we just overdo lots of things.
'cause we think, well, I'm gonna do a good job, so I'll do even more. All right. What I've learned is that the more you can change things rapidly. The more the body listens. So the body one's up, down, up, down. So maybe during a one hour session you could have a technician, you know, flip you from 1.3 back to 2.4 and back down to 1.8 or something.
So you kind of have a little bit of an interval training with exactly your oxygen. Is that likely to work better?
Jason: Definitely. Or let's just say somebody was like, Hey, you know, I really only have 30 minutes, but I have 30 minutes. Two or three times a day, I think you'd get more out of the 30 minute, three times a day than you might only get, let's say 90 minutes at one clip for that same Oh, you know, that same Oh, 'cause of the going up and
Dave: going down.
Jason: Yeah, exactly. So, you know. Right. I think the other thing too is, and you, you, you've probably seen this more than anybody else in this industry, is. You know, not only is more, not better, but more stuff at the same time. It's like, how many hours in a day do we have to dedicate? So, you know, at, at, at some point you have to give and take.
So, you know, hyperbaric could be a very. Pronounced component of a protocol for let's say three or four months, and then you can back it down and just do sort of maintenance doses of hyperbaric while you're now focusing on, you know, light therapy or, or, or more feedback or Right. Or bio. Right. Exactly. You know, so it's, there's gotta be a way of.
You know, bringing some of these strategies in and out of our life as well as, you know, creating, I think, you know, meaningful protocols that people could follow over time, but make it sustainable. Right. That's the key.
Dave: What do you think about the Israeli study that showed, I think it was like three months doing hyperbaric every day was lengthening telomeres.
Jason: Yeah. So. And this, this actually came up recently when I was defending the, um, my, my research. But first of all, so that was, that was, um, essentially, I think it was five days a week, 90 minutes at a time for three months, right? So five 90 minute sessions a week for, for, for 60 sessions essentially. And right, they showed basically a, roughly a 12 to 14 re percent reduction in cellular senescence, and roughly, let's say about a 20% increase in telomere length.
The assumption at first to me was, are we, are we activating the molecule? It's a reverse transcriptase, but are we activating the molecule that builds telomeres? That was my initial assumption is what was happening. We're driving energy. A lot of the a TP that our cells make go into DNA repair, DNA recovery, you know, the whole rep, you know, cellular rep replication process.
And so. You know, that requires a ton of a TP. If we're getting so much more, are we building telomeres as a result? And then what actually came up, which was interesting thought, and we don't have an answer yet, but maybe. If we're reducing cellular senescence, which we know that we are, and as a result of that activating stem cells to mobilize into this new area, to basically clean up and create younger tissues through the use of newer cells.
Are we growing a telomere inside of an existing cell, or are we just average, you know, measuring the average size of a telomere and now that we get this major stem cell upgrade, we're having longer telomeres on average as a result to newer cells? I'm not sure is the answer, but one way or another. You know, I think that was a great study, and I think it shows a lot of the potential from a regenerative and longevity standpoint as far as hyperbaric is concerned.
Dave: Is there such a thing as oxygen stacking, maybe you take stem regen to activate more stem cells or do some red light before or after, or breath work while you're in the chamber?
Jason: Yeah, I mean, I, I love all of those ideas. I think, you know, I, I, I probably have about. Maybe 12 to 15 outlined programs in our clinics that we run for, you know, what's the goal?
And once I understand the goal, or which are the right tools that would actually help you to get to that place. Stem cell's a great example. You know, people are utilizing stem cells and exosomes all the time now, and they clearly have a huge regenerative capacity. At the same time, we know that hyperbaric actually stimulates your body's own endogenous stem cells to increase mobilization into areas and stimulates.
Autophagy. So as an example, if you're already doing some fasting, which is gonna, you know, maximize your autophagy and you're doing hyperbaric, which is going to magnify that effect, and the hyperbaric is now stimulating stem cells, you're gonna create an environment that once you go through a certain protocol, you've now cleaned up a lot of the garbage cells.
You've upregulated your own healing response. You started mobilizing stem cells, and now you could add. You know, exogenous stem cells or an exogenous exosome or stem cell therapy into a, into a body that's prepared for that therapy versus, let's say going into a, a shoulder joint that's, you know, been obliterated.
It's inflamed. It's destroyed. You know, we stick a bunch of stem cells. It's almost like a surprise. The body wasn't really. Ready or in a pathway of healing and recovery, yet it still works when we do that. I just think it works incredibly faster and more effectively if we actually prime the system first.
So, you know, we've come up with quite a few. I love the red light hyperbaric, you know, red light is going to vasodilate. It's gonna activate cytochrome C inside the mitochondria. So that's also gonna prime the body, get it ready for, for hyperbaric. Hyperbaric is a vasoconstrictor, so or oxygen in general is a vasoconstrictor.
So allowing the red light to vasodilate before going into the hyperbaric kind of opens up some of those pathways, allowing for better oxygen flow, you know, and then. Cytochrome C is one part of the rate limiting step to energy production. Oxygen is another rate, limiting step to energy production, so now you're stacking really two very powerful mechanisms to remove any interference with mitochondria, being able to produce as much a TP as possible.
Dave: Some hyperbaric chambers, you have to put on only cotton clothes and the whole atmosphere is pressurized oxygen. In other chambers, you're just breathing oxygen, but it's normal atmospheric pressure. What's the difference?
Jason: Essentially, let's just say we're delivering definitively a hundred per, just to keep it consistent, we're delivering a hundred percent oxygen, let's say through a hood or a mask system in the air pressurized chamber, and then we have this a hundred percent pressurized oxygen chamber.
The therapeutic difference would be zero. The way that whole, okay, so it doesn't make a difference. It, it's, right. It's not about swimming in the oxygen. You're getting very little, if any. Probably almost no. Oxygen delivery through the skin. It all has to be respired. So whatever gas you're using to pressurize really doesn't matter so long as you're actually delivering the right gas to the person's respiratory system.
That's what matters. The biggest difference between those two environments, I would say, and to some degree, is safety. An air pressurized chamber is certainly a safer environment than a oxygen pressurized environment, like a
Dave: hundred percent. You can use your phone inside an air pressurized chamber while you're breathing oxygen, but then you have to have an oxygen mask on, and if you're in the other chambers, you have to be wearing no metal.
You have to be wearing only cotton, and it can blow up if there's a spark. So from a convenience perspective, I don't like having to get naked. And then, you know, change clothes before I get into a chamber. So I'd rather just breathe through a mask when I'm doing it, and that's what my Oxy Health Chamber downstairs does.
Okay. That, that's a really important difference. It's also more expensive if you're running a facility to get those chambers where people have to go in and change and all that. It's just, it, it seems like that's unnecessary if you live at high altitude or you travel to high altitude. Do you need to do Hyperbarics more?
Jason: Good question. You know, one of the things that's come up is, so if you live in Colorado, you're at 5,000 feet. I live in Miami. I'm at sea level. And so if you went to the exact same, let's say we both went into a soft chamber. Well, my chamber in Miami is gonna bring me 10 feet underwater equivalent. And in Colorado you're not even gonna get back to sea level yet with 1.3.
So the question is, does hyperbaric even work at Elevation? 'cause you're starting at a higher point. And what I would say is, what it seems to be is that it doesn't really matter. What matters is what. Altitude are you accustomed to or acclimated to? Because once you acclimate in Colorado, you're still gonna carry the same amount of additional oxygen.
Whether you're starting in Miami or starting in Colorado, you're still gonna have that same offgassing effect, whether you're in Colorado or in Miami. Essentially the only difference is gonna be how are you carrying the oxygen inside your body? That's the difference between Colorado and Miami as an example.
Dave: That doesn't make a lot of sense. 'cause if it, if the valves are at 1.3 atmospheres, they're at 1.3 C level atmospheres. So it's just gonna take longer to pressurize in Colorado. But you should be at the same PSI in both. Right.
Jason: You'll, you'll be at the same relative PSI, but because you started in Colorado from so much higher, it's not gonna bring you down to sea level.
And then below it's only gonna bring you. You know, four PSI more than wherever you started from.
Dave: Does that make sense? Are the valves relative or are the valves absolute. I mean, because there's valves, there's pressure on the outside of the chamber at high altitude. So the inner, the inner pressure should be higher, unless I'm doing my math wrong, right.
I'm not understanding something.
Jason: So the the gauge is set for how much pressure you can create inside the chamber, right? It's an absolute Oh. 'cause there's
Dave: less atmosphere pressing on the chamber. Right. I get it. It makes sense. Okay. So you, you couldn't put as much in otherwise the chamber would blow up.
Jason: Okay, now I see it. But essentially the effect is identical. So that, that's really, I think the important part is you don't have to go to higher pressure. 'cause you started higher. The, the, the relative effect should be the same regardless of, of where you started. So, you know, essentially you could, you can get any benefit from, you know, from, you know, from any elevation.
As, as, as far as that part goes. You know, one of the things we do, let's say whether Miami or my clinics are actually in the northeast, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, when I have patients who are gonna be flying out to altitude and they're concerned about altitude sickness, we might pre. Like preload them, right?
So we'll have them do, you know, three to five sessions a few days before they leave just as an attempt to hyperoxygenate them to give them a little bit of like wiggle room for when they get there. But if you were at high altitude, if you went skiing in Colorado and you were having altitude issues, literally the solution would be hyperbaric.
You jumped in a soft chamber at that point, it would take you almost back to sea level immediately and it would reset your system. So that's actually. That would be the solution. In that case,
Dave: when I did my high altitude mountaineering stuff in the Andes and Himalayas.
Jason: Mm-hmm.
Dave: You know, the Himalayan Rescue Association has an emergency hyperbaric tent for a reason.
Jason: Right, right. I mean that's originally the soft chambers were, they were designed specifically for that. They were designed for high altitude pulmonary edema and high altitude cerebral edema, and that was their main function. It just happens that. We could take that same tool and now optimize it, you know, in so many other ways.
Dave: If you're perfectly healthy and you decide you're gonna try hyperbarics for the first time, what's the first thing that you're gonna notice?
Jason: One. One is just to be aware of, this is a pressurized device, and so the thing you're really gonna first notice is your ears are gonna be popping, and you do need to be able to manage that, right?
So some people don't recognize that that's happening. That's, that's probably the most important thing to know is true and to be aware of and ready for, because I. You know, you could do some damage to the middle ear if you're not paying attention to that and equalizing along the way. So that's, that's number one that's most important.
But once you get past that and you're looking for what kind of benefits might I expect for people, and I know a lot of your audience does do this for people that that track their biology, you know, whether it's, you know, HRV or their sleep, you know, or ring or garin, whatever they're using for. You know, for fitness tracking, the, the few things that we see almost immediately are increased amounts of rem.
Increased amounts of deep sleep and increased HRV. Those three things happen consistently, almost for everybody and quickly within a session or two. One of the things I wanna mention, just since I'm, I'm on that topic, if you use one of those devices, it also gives you like a sleep, you know, or a, like a sleep score or like a readiness score for your day.
They also usually weight resting heart rate pretty heavily. And what what happens is, even though HRV goes up, REM goes up and deep sleep go up. Oftentimes for the first three or four weeks, resting heart rate also goes up. And I think that the reason for that is because you heal and you repair tissue while you're sleeping.
You now have this influx of excess oxygen that your body's gonna use for healing. And I think that that keeps your body in a bit more of an active state while you're sleeping. And as a result, even though you're getting great scores and rem deep in HRV. Your readiness score or your sleep scores could not be amazing because resting heart rate might go up a beat or two, so just be aware of, you might get worse.
Total scores, even though you're seeing parameters are improving. After about a month, heart rate starts to come back down again, but HRV REM and Deep stay really pretty strong, and so people start getting incredible scores from that point on.
Dave: All of the sleep scores or morning readiness scores in the industry have a bias built into them, right? And one of them is they care more about resting heart rate than they should, because actually adequate blood pressure into your brain is more important than resting heart rate. Because if you don't have enough circulation, there's gonna be an issue there.
So if you're a little bit dehydrated, you want your resting heart rate to go up so that you have adequate brain circulation. So they just, they ignore that and it kind of drives me crazy. Me too. And then they always say, oh, I'm gonna reward you for getting eight or nine, or just more is better, which is dumb because people who are really healthy, who live the longest are getting six and a half hours of sleep or night, but they're getting 90 plus minutes of REM and deep, right?
So if I was to do it, I'd say, well. You know, let's look at our heart rate relative to our other things like REM and deep, and if those are good and our heart rate was a little bit higher, that's totally fine. Right? It's not, and then you'd also, it's not even at perspective edge of time,
Jason: right? It's not like it eight to 10 beats.
It's like. One or two, you know, per minute, right? But meanwhile, you, you went from 42 minutes of deep to like, you know, 90 minutes of deep sleep, like that's far more of a impact than, you know, than a few beats per minute on, on your right. So yeah, I see that bias all the time. And you know, I agree you could do 60, you know, or 90 minutes to two hours of remin deep sleep.
You know, if you got five hours, six hours of Remin deep combined, and then a couple hours of light sleep in between. You're, you're doing amazing. If you've got nine hours of sleep, 10 hours of sleep, but you only got, you know, 45 to 60 minutes of re deep that, that's not gonna get you anywhere.
Dave: They'll still reward that though because you got lots of sleep and like, it's like saying, I reward you feeding lots of french fries because they were food.
You're like, well, it kind of matters what food you're eating, right? A hundred percent. So for me, if I could get four hours of sleep and it was two hours of REM and two hours of deep. That would probably be really amazing. Uh, it's just hard to do that. So I have gotten those numbers on five hours of sleep, but I cheat with electrical current to do it.
So it doesn't really count. It still counts. What are the three top supplements that work with hyperbaric?
Jason: I say one of my favorites would be again, depends on the, the goal or what outcome I'm trying to accomplish, right. But from a, let's say from a performance standpoint, methylene blue would be really high on my list.
You know, again, looking at controlling infection, improving immune system, improving a TP production at the mitochondrial level. So, you know, hyperbaric is doing all three of those things. Methylene blue is doing all three of those things. And so that combination is, I. Incredibly powerful from a mitochondrial standpoint.
And the timing for that I don't think is critical other than to say it just needs to be in your system. So, you know, taking that in the morning, giving it 30 to 45 minutes and then jumping in the chamber is, is more than sufficient. I would also use in, in certain times I'll use hydrogen in combination.
So whether it's before or
Dave: after.
Jason: So, good question. So what I would say is. We know that hyperbaric increases reactive oxygen species, but not in a bad way. And that's like a whole lecture unto itself. And one of the reasons I wanted to go back to school but in a safe way. It increases reactive oxygen species in a way that you want it to, from a regenerative and, and stimulating the right healing pathways.
And And ultimately you don't wanna buffer that. You don't wanna blunt that. So some people do glutathione before every session, or hydrogen before every session. 'cause they're trying to down regulate the R os. I don't think that, you don't wanna, that's a great strategy, don't that, right? Like if you're healthy, if you're sick, yes.
If you're sick and you need to blunt that 'cause they're already over oxidized, there's a reason to do that for some people. But if you're healthy and you're optimizing, I use hydrogen, but I purposefully use it. Hours after the session to, you know, clean up some of the mess. But I don't really want it to interfere with the session itself.
So, you know, antioxidants, which glutathione would be, and hydrogen is sort of a selective antioxidant in some capacity. I would usually separate them in a. In, in a healthy person, but I still, I, there's still a lot of great interplay between hydrogen and oxygen, you know, biologically. So, those would probably be the three most common combined.
NAD would be pretty high on, or, you know, whatever version you might be using, whether it's, you know, NAD precursors or NAD pushes, or, or iv. But, you know, NAD is also gonna obviously work at the mitochondrial level, so there's a, there's a lot of good synergy there too.
Dave: I'm not sure that I would worry about.
About hydrogen suppressing free radicals. 'cause it only suppresses per Roxy nitrite, which is a free radical that doesn't have a beneficial effect that we're aware of. But glutathione suppresses way too many or vitamin C or something. So you wouldn't wanna do that before? I wouldn't sweat the hydrogen, but I, I see your point.
Who knows? Maybe Roxy Nitrite. Spikes are good and we just don't know it. And then I also would look at having enough sodium and electrolyte so that you have the right hydration in your cells seems really important. And creatine would be high on my list as well, just because having enough volume in the tissues of water is gonna make a big difference when you're sure you're doing heavy barracks, right.
Yep. Definitely can pressure alone even without oxygen, do something to reprogram your biology.
Jason: Definitely. I mean, but even when we say pressure, so let's just say we're using. Air to pressurize that chamber and we're not adding any additional, let's say oxygen to a mask, you're still gonna get increased oxygenation because the pressure is driving even the oxygen that's in the air.
A good study from like two, about almost two years ago was an air only, they actually used soft chambers. In fact, they actually, it was a University of Wisconsin. Study. They actually used the, the Oxy Health Vitas for that study, and they did 1.3 air only and they mimicked a study that looked at higher pressure's effect on stem cells.
And so they mimicked the entire methodology of the study and the, the 2.0 on a hundred percent oxygen mobilized about eight times or an eightfold increase in both mesenchymal stem cells and central nervous system stem cells Of,
Dave: of just pressure, or
Jason: that was with No, no, that was at 2.0 on a hundred percent.
Okay, oxygen there. The mimicking study that they did from Wisconsin was at 1.3 air only, but they still found about a two and a half to three times increase. So wow. Certainly not as much. But you know, again, if you're using this over years of time and you're getting close to a three x increase in stem cell mobilization, it's incredible what you can do, you know, over months and years.
Dave: And, and by contrast, the hard chambers run 80 to $120,000 and you gotta have big bottles of oxygen for them. And if you have a soft chamber, like the Oxy Healths, are they, they're slightly above 10,000 and you can use it over and over and over and share with your family and neighbors, right? So it, it's within reach as an investment for, you know, 10 plus year timeframe on a per session cost.
It becomes reasonable, but it's still a big deal. So given that you get a three x benefit from soft, even if you don't have an oxygen concentrator, which you can use on the soft, that you can't use on the hard, at least not easily. So bringing in big bottles of welding oxygen is, is what I do. Let me ask you this.
If someone, a biohacker was to use welding oxygen and bring it into their chamber versus medical oxygen, even though they come from the same tank at the supplier, what are the differences?
Jason: The reality is welding oxygen. Medical oxygen are made in the exact same facility. They are carried in the exact, initially in the exact same bottles.
The only real difference would be essentially that the medical grade bottles are. Supposed to be more well regulated and changed out and, and inspected from a, you know, toxicity standpoint internally. I don't know this to be true, but I think as bottle as medical bottles go bad, so to speak, they become welding bottles.
So there could be
Dave: Are there different, there are different bottles. They, they're, they don't look the same on the outside. I've never seen a welding style bottle in a medical facility. Have you? I mean, you, you see more than I do.
Jason: Yeah, no, I've seen the same size tanks and essentially so the ingredient, all the different, the ingredients identical.
The only real difference would be that there could be. Is there likely no. But there could be contamination in a welding that shouldn't ever show up in a medical grade tank. That being said, in 20 years of operating hyperbaric clinics, we've had about three skunked tanks, even on the medical grade side.
And so, you know,
Dave: that's with and a skunked tank. I mean as a leak in it or something, or
Jason: No, like, I don't know what chemical was inside that tank, but there were some other chemical mixture that became almost like a. Like a sulfur exposure. So
Dave: there was a filling problem then because like there should be no way it would get in there unless it was on the, on the valve or Correct.
Or like some sort
Jason: of oxidation inside the tank, you know, inside the steel. Yeah. I'm not sure, but
Dave: right. I used to, in a, in a former life, I used to weld Toyota truck frames as a job and I was just, if you ever bought a Toyota truck in the mid nineties, I apologize 'cause I wasn't a good welder. But if there were impurities in welding oxygen.
We wouldn't be able to use it because it would create oxidation in the welds. Correct. And since you see them fill the medical tank and the other tank using all the same stuff, exact
Jason: same equipment,
Dave: unless there's like an issue with the hose. So I have zero issues using welding oxygen. And if you're listening to this guy, I wanna get some oxygen.
Do not ever tell the welding place that you're planning to use it for anything other than welding or for art or something, because. There's this incredible hostility because the medical regulator, people who love to charge you hundreds of dollars for the same thing, that costs 25 bucks. They get really aggressive on the businesses.
So you protect the welding business by saying, I need some welding oxygen from my art project, and then everything's all good. But if you say I'm gonna breathe it, then they're just gonna completely shut down on you. True story. And I know you can't say anything about that 'cause you're like medically licensed.
I'm an unlicensed bio hacker, so I'm just gonna call it like it is. And you know, people are gonna make their own decisions like grownups, who would've thought like, we live in a country full of grownups, do that still. I am, 'cause I'm unlicensed. I'm an unlicensed biohacker. There is no biohacker license, nor will there ever be.
But I might certify some biohackers because, well, we wanna know how to do this. If you guys think I should run a biohacker certification, hit me up on social media. I've trained about 1200 coaches years ago, and I'm thinking maybe I should do that again, especially when it comes to this longevity and consciousness stuff.
So I'm thinking about it. Minimum effective dose of hyperbaric, if you want cognitive function or longevity.
Jason: So, I mean, definitely there would've been, I mean, there still will be arguments in the industry for what that ought to be, but I would tell you that we saw pretty significant changes at 1.3 in the research that I did on cognitive performance, in memory, in short-term, long-term memory.
We also saw it in reflex testing, like speed of reflex testing. We saw in a 10, in 10, you know, the ability to maintain attention. So we use like a computerized cognitive assessment that's pretty well known in the research. And, you know, we saw different, again, different changes in mild pressure then and high pressure both affected memory significantly.
But. But attention processing speed and attention were, were also affected significantly through the mild pressure exposures.
Dave: That's helpful to know. We got time for maybe two more questions. Sure. One of them I is from, uh, the upgrade collective. Should you take binders like zeolite or activated charcoal before or after hyperbaric?
What do we know?
Jason: So in research wise, I'd say we know nothing clinically. What I would tell you is if you have reason to believe that you have some, I mean most people do have some sort of toxicity issue, but yeah, you're alive if you've done some testing to you know, to quantify that. Hyperbaric does upregulate all cellular function.
So you're gonna get an upregulation of liver function, you're gonna get an upregulation of, you know, toxin processing and essentially elimination. And so taking binders in those cases, most of the people we have with mold toxicity, heavy metal toxicity subacute bacterial infections, and we're essentially running some type of detoxification along with hyperbaric, they're all taking binders and usually after the sessions, more so than before. But yeah, I think that's a great idea, especially if you know that that's an issue you're working on.
Dave: When I first got my hyperbaric chamber many years ago, I was worried about oxygen poisoning or sleeping in the chamber the way Michael Jackson used to. What is oxygen poisoning? How much hyperbaric is too much?
Jason: So there's, there's really two types of oxygen toxicity. They're called central nervous system oxygen toxicity, and then a thing called pulmonary oxygen toxicity. In order to get pulmonary oxygen toxicity, you need to, it's a long complic, not that complicated, but how much pressure were you exposed to?
What percentage of oxygen were you breathing, and how long were you in the chamber? So for oxygen, pulmonary oxygen, toxicity, you need 1,440 units of oxygen, which is essentially breathing a hundred percent oxygen, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Okay. That would deliver. Okay. That's
Dave: hard to do.
Jason: That's a lot.
Right. So in hyperbarics, because we. Because we only do 60 minutes, 90 minutes. Essentially most hyperbaric sessions are around a hundred to 200 units of oxygen, nowhere near 1,440, so it's completely safe. And then on the central nervous system side, usually once you start to get around two atmospheres on a hundred percent oxygen.
It becomes possible. So if you're doing anything less than that, you know, 1.3, 1.5, 1.75, it's almost, I can't say it's impossible, but it's almost impossible to get central nervous system oxygen toxicity below two atmospheres. And if you're doing anything from a metabolic fitness standpoint, like doing some fasting, some diet, you know, variation.
You become more metabolically fit, which means you're utilizing oxygen far more effectively than let's say, the average wound care patient. And so it's then likely that you'll tolerate higher pressures of oxygen even without CNS O2 toxicity. But I. Below that, it would almost be possible.
Dave: So lower pressures are generally safe no matter what you do, but there still could be some edge cases where it's not correct.
And I once got to spend a few hours biohacking with Stevie Wonder, which, which just an incredible human being from a consciousness perspective. He's blind because he was in an incubator when he was young and was exposed to too much oxygen, which can damage the ocular nerve via that central nervous system.
Thing. So there definitely are cases where it happens, but those were in babies who are metabolically distressed. Correct. So, you know, there, there are risks, but I think it's generally safe. So if I had a soft chamber or I really wanted to go to sleep in my hard chamber at 1.3 atmospheres with or without oxygen, I'm unlikely to damage myself.
Jason: Yeah. You would not be, you, you, the, the numbers wouldn't ever allow you to really get to oxygen toxicity. I don't think it's that valuable because of the up and down that we were talking about. Right. Like, I'd rather you do one hour. A day, eight different times than eight hours in a row. But I don't think it's dangerous either.
Dave: But I could get one of those home robots and program it to come and change the thousand. Turn it on, turn it off, turn it off, climb, sleep. Exactly. You stay in the chamber
Jason: and it's automated. Yeah. That, that's perfect.
Dave: On that lovely futuristic note. Thank you Jason, and thank you for supporting Oxy Health at the Biohacking Conference.
And what are the names of your clinics? So people who are near you in the northeast can come and visit.
Jason: Yeah, so, hbo, USA is my, is the, is our company. We own two of our own companies, but we train a lot of people. So we have a, a location map on our website that actually points to, I dunno, 50 or 60 clinics all over the country.
That, those, those are people, not all the people that we've trained, but a lot of the people that we've trained and work with closely. So, you know, they're trusted as far as, uh, places to go if, if you're interested and there's someone nearby.
Dave: Thanks for your new PhD. I cannot wait to learn about it at the Biohacking conference.
I'm truly excited because this is gonna be breakthrough knowledge. So now, instead of just hoping it works, we're gonna get the data and personalize it. And that's what we're doing at Upgrade Labs for all of the stuff we're doing. In what order, at what settings for your biology today, and this is the future of biohacking is let's measure.
Let's do what works and let's quit doing stupid stuff that takes money and time and energy. So you're on that so hard and I love it.
Jason: That's a great, I love that. I love how you just said that. That's a, that's a, that's the perfect plan.
Dave: If you liked it's episode, you know what to do. Come to the Biohacking conference or leave a review or go do some hyperbaric whatever's gonna make you perform better, feel better, be more conscious, live longer, or whatever your goal is.
Do that. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.