Doctor Fact-checks Andrew Huberman's Most Controversial Health Claims

[00:00] Dr. Andrew Huberman is a Stanford professor and  one of the most famous scientists and podcasters   in the world. With over 7 million subscribers  on YouTube alone, his podcast racks up millions  

[00:14] of regular listeners. But he has been the  target of criticism over the years from   some scientists and several hit pieces have  appeared in the media. Now, to some extent,   this is normal. Once you reach a certain level of  visibility, you're going to have some haters. And  

[00:29] some of the pieces are more about his personal  life than anything he does professionally. So,   we're not going to get into any of that. I think  most people just want to know, is the content   reliable or is it bro science? So today we take an  objective look at some of Andrew Huberman's most  

[00:46] controversial claims spanning caffeine, dopamine,  testosterone, cold plunges, the AG1 supplement,   and much more. Are the claims based on strong  evidence or not so much? First up, testosterone  

[01:02] supplements. So Huberman recommends a couple of  supplements to boost testosterone with interesting   names. Tongkat Ali and Fadogia Agrestis. Now, for  people that aren't getting prescribed TRT but want  

[01:15] the increase in testosterone, there are these  plant compounds like Tongkat Ali and another one   which is very interesting. It's a Nigerian shrub  called fadogia aggrestis and it mimics luteinizing  

[01:27] hormone which is the hormone that comes out of  the hypothalamus that stimulates the testes if you   got those and your ovaries if you've got those  to make more testosterone or estrogen. And so   those two herbal supplements together can give a  significant boost in free and active testosterone.  

[01:43] So, tongkat has some clinical evidence for it,  but fadogia was shown to increase testosterone   in a study from Nigeria where they gave it to rats  for 5 days. As far as I can tell, it's never been  

[01:57] tested in human beings or shown to work. He's  also talked on different platforms about stories   of people who say they took these supplements  and their testosterone went up. I think he even   talks about his own anecdote, but the problem with  anecdotes is always the same. There's no control  

[02:11] group. So, we don't really know what's causing  what, especially because people are usually   taking more than one supplement and there's other  things going on. Just hard to tell. Okay. So what,   right? So, people can try the supplement for  themselves and if it increases their testosterone,  

[02:25] great. If it doesn't, they wasted some money,  maybe some time. No big deal, right? Well, the   other problem with random supplements is safety.  Because adverse effects, including serious ones,  

[02:37] happen all the time with supplements, including  natural supplements. And in fact, in the same rat   studies, they show that if you extend the exposure  for a few weeks, they see toxicity at the level of  

[02:50] the testes, the liver, and the kidneys. the  doses at which they start seeing toxicity   roughly correspond to the doses that a lot of  people are using to supplement Fadogia and some  

[03:02] of the doses that Andrew Huberman talks about.  Fadogia is usually taken at about 600 milligrams.   So when we do the conversion, there's some  equations to do this and I ran this real quick.   And this 600 milligrams a day dose corresponds  roughly to 50 mg per kilo per day in the rats. And  

[03:23] that's a dose at which they report toxicity in the  rats. Now obviously there's question marks here,   biological differences between rats and humans.  Maybe it's totally safe in the humans, we don't  

[03:35] see the toxicity that we see in the rats. Or maybe  we do. That's the point. We don't know. Now, I   did notice that Andrew acknowledged on his podcast  that we don't really know what happens safety-wise   with Fadogia. the side effect profile of Fadogia  aggrestis hasn't really been documented. So,  

[03:52] it's a little unclear. I just want to emphasize  that anytime someone's going to start taking   supplements that or modifying sexual hormones,  getting blood work done is extremely important.  

[04:04] it for safety reasons and also just to know  whether or not things are working. So I think   that's good to state that caveat. It's better than  not doing it. I would still have lots of concerns   because what if you have damage somewhere in  your body that doesn't show up in the blood work  

[04:18] that you happen to run or what if it causes some  irreversible damage? So you see something wrong or   you feel something wrong, you stop the supplement  but it never reverses completely. So this is why   in medicine we do things pretty carefully and we  don't recommend supplements to millions of people  

[04:35] before there are some clinical trials in human  beings, right? Just because it worked in rats   in Nigeria once and there's some stories from  friends, it's not really compelling. And let's   not forget we don't know the safety profile, we  also don't know the efficacy side, right? It's  

[04:51] not like we know that it works we just don't know  if it's safe, we don't know either one in human   beings. I just want to emphasize guys, Huberman  has many other recommendations on testosterone   that are based on very strong evidence. So, he  talks about maintaining low body fat. He talks  

[05:06] about resistance training. He talks about the  importance of sleep. He emphasizes lifestyle,   that you're going to get most of your results from  the basics, a healthy diet and exercise. And these   supplements are going to give you maybe a small  nudge. So, that's an important clarification. And  

[05:22] he does that very clearly. So, I'm not trying to  tell you that everything he says is bunk. Not at   all. Right? He says lots of things that are solid.  This is more random and maybe because it's random,   it's become more famous and more controversial and  people ask about it. Personally, I wish he would  

[05:37] have kept it out, but that's me. By the way, I  posted all of this breakdown, everything that   I'm talking about in this video on X and I tagged  Andrew and I asked him a number of questions and   I asked him to comment. I haven't heard back, but  if he ever wants to talk about any of this or has  

[05:54] different arguments or disagrees or has seen  different evidence, happy to chat anytime. Next,   cold plunges and dopamine. So, this is another  famous one. Andrew often talks about a study  

[06:06] where cold exposure increased dopamine levels  by 250%. The subjects also experienced a 250%   increase in dopamine concentrations. And I do  believe that these documented effects in humans  

[06:22] explain much of the enhancement of attention and  of feelings of well-being and mood that people   typically experience after doing deliberate  cold exposure. So this is technically true.   This is referring to a study where they took  10 young men and they exposed them to baths,  

[06:40] water of three different temperatures and  the lowest one which was 14° C caused their   baseline dopamine level to go up 2.5 times so  250%. But there's a number of problems with the  

[06:54] implications here because this level of dopamine  was measured in the plasma, in their blood, and   dopamine doesn't cross the blood brain barrier.  So it doesn't go from the plasma into the brain.  

[07:06] So the dopamine that's produced and acts in the  brain and the dopamine that's produced in the body   and that's in the plasma, we say peripherally,  these are two different compartments and they   have different physiological functions. This  dopamine in the body and the plasma is part  

[07:23] of a stress response. So cold is a stressor.  It fires up your sympathetic nervous system,   kind of your fight or-flight response, and that  causes some of these hormones to be produced by  

[07:35] your adrenal glands that sit at top your kidneys:  adrenaline, noradrenaline, and dopamine. And they   have all kinds of physiological functions in  the body. They regulate the muscle of the artery  

[07:49] walls to contract and dilate. They also regulate  kidney function and metabolism in general. So,   it's a response to stress in the body. But this is  completely different from the actions of dopamine   in the central nervous system, which is what we  typically associate with dopamine, the reward  

[08:06] and the motivation and the pleasure, right?  We normally think of dopamine as the pleasure   hormone or the pleasure neurotransmitter. To me,  it's a huge logical leap to associate these plasma  

[08:18] levels of dopamine to these mood effects that we  associate with dopamine in the nervous system.   Here he is suggesting that connection again.  What's interesting about deliberate cold exposure,   you know, cold plunge or what have you, is that  people generally report feeling very good almost  

[08:36] like a mild euphoria for many hours afterwards,  elevated focus many hours afterwards. And that   maps beautifully onto the I can see those  images in the the paper now of the you know   the big dopamine increase and the norepinephrine  increase and I think it's three graphs set above  

[08:50] one another vertically in that paper where  I mean this is long arcs of dopamine release   way above baseline. Now, alertness and feeling  awake after cold exposure, yeah, we would expect  

[09:02] that even from the sympathetic nervous system  stimulation. But as for any of these mood related,   the euphoria, the pleasure, the drive, the  motivation that we associate with dopamine in  

[09:15] the central nervous system, I wouldn't conclude  any of that link from this. And the first time   I heard him suggest this, I thought this was too  obvious of an oversight, that maybe I'm missing  

[09:27] something and somebody would have said something.  Turns out somebody did. Professor Steven Quartz,   who has researched dopamine, he had a similar  reaction, but he worded it much more strongly. He   wrote, "These are obviously false and misleading  statements. Plasma dopamine, so blood dopamine,  

[09:43] cannot be used to infer central dopamine levels."  By central, he's talking about central nervous   system. Huberman even establishes this parallel  between cold exposure and stimuli like nicotine  

[09:57] and chocolate and sex and cocaine on the basis  that all of them increase dopamine dramatically,   like several fold, and even suggests that cold  has an advantage because all these other stimuli,  

[10:10] the effect on dopamine is transient. So it goes  up a lot but it comes down pretty quickly. Whereas   with cold he suggests the effect is maintained.  Dopamine levels started to rise somewhat slowly  

[10:22] and then continue to rise and reach levels  as high as 2.5 times above baseline. That's   a remarkably high increase. Remember if  we go back to our examples of chocolate,  

[10:36] sex a doubling above baseline, nicotine two and a  half times above baseline, cocaine the increase in   dopamine from cold water exposure of this kind was  comparable to what one sees from cocaine except,  

[10:51] except in this case it wasn't a rise and crash.  It was actually a sustained rise in dopamine that   took a very long time, up to three hours to come  back down to baseline, which is really remarkable.  

[11:05] And I think this explains some of the positive  mental and physical effects that people report   subjectively after doing cold water exposure. Now,  I couldn't find the sources for these other claims  

[11:18] on his podcast, in the description to the YouTube  video or the website, but typically where we see   this response, this big spike in dopamine that is  transient, these are measurements in the brain of  

[11:30] animals in the lab, typically rodents, rats or  mice that have micro capillaries implanted into   their brain and they're measuring dopamine levels  in specific areas of the nervous system like the  

[11:43] nuclear accumbens which is a part of the brain  that plays an important role for dopaminergic   signaling. So this has nothing to do with this  paper in humans looking at plasma levels upon  

[11:55] exposure to cold, completely different universes.  So I think this all came from, there's all these   stories of people saying they feel great and they  feel euphoric after cold plunges or ice baths or  

[12:08] whatever. And then someone found this increase  in dopamine upon cold exposure. Ah, dopamine must   explain the mood changes. But scientifically,  I don't find this argument compelling at all.  

[12:21] Another important thing to point out is this study  with the cold exposures, they're long exposures,   one hour in the cold water, whereas a lot of these  protocols for ice baths and cold exposure that  

[12:33] people are using are really short. In fact,  Huberman recommends really rapid sessions,   one to five minute sessions. So again, this has  nothing to do with that paper. There's no reason   to think that the changes they saw there would  be seen with this type of protocol. So if you  

[12:50] like ice baths or cold plunges, why not, go for  it. And there are other demonstrated benefits.   It's anti-inflammatory, speeds up recovery  after intense exercise. Athletes use it. So  

[13:02] there's other reasons to do it. This argument  of the dopamine and the mood and the reward,   I don't find it compelling. Next, the caffeine  delay. This is one of Huberman's most popular   and controversial claims. It's the idea that you  want to wait after you wake up for an hour and a  

[13:19] half to two hours before you have some caffeine to  avoid the afternoon crash. Here he is explaining   it. And there's actually a trick to avoid the  daytime uh the afternoon crash. It's not a trick,   it's biology. Caffeine is an adenosine antagonist.  It basically as the longer you're awake, adenosine  

[13:36] builds up in your bloodstream. It's what makes  you feel fatigued. Caffeine essentially blocks   the adenosine receptor, but then when caffeine  wears off, the adenosine that's still around binds   to that receptor and you crash. You feel really  sleepy. So, one thing that you can do is when you  

[13:51] wake up in the morning, don't ingest caffeine for  the first 90 minutes or so. Like really push that   off so that the adenosine and adenosine receptor  interactions can all take place and dissipate.   Then you drink caffeine. And what you'll find  is that if normally you would crash around  

[14:05] 2 or 3 in the afternoon, you don't experience  that crash anymore because caffeine wears off,   make perfect sense. Adenosine makes you tired,  makes you sleepy. Caffeine inhibits adenosine.  

[14:20] So if we wait a little bit in the morning before  we have caffeine, it gives our body time to   clear the remaining lingering adenosine so that  later on in the day when the caffeine wears off,  

[14:32] there's no adenosine around to make us tired in  the afternoon. Seems to make perfect sense. But   the reality is this is completely speculative and  it's never been shown in humans to work this way.   And researchers in this field have pointed out the  logic he lays out there doesn't even make sense  

[14:49] biologically. They write "changes in adenosine  upon waking occur on the order of minutes not   hours". So adenosine would clear pretty fast  upon waking up. And since caffeine takes a while  

[15:03] to take effect, it needs to be absorbed in your  gut, go into the bloodstream, reach your brain,   affect neurons. By that time, all the adenosine  would have been cleared out before caffeine is  

[15:15] doing anything. The researchers continue, "Any  suggestion that adenosine is continuing to decline   upon waking demonstrates a lack of understanding  of the sleepwake cycle influence on adenosine and  

[15:27] would form a poor basis for recommending delaying  caffeine for an hour and a half to two hours in   the morning". And finally, "a fundamental basis  for suggesting that delaying caffeine in the   morning prevents an afternoon crash is completely  lacking". Now, there's many reasons why someone  

[15:45] might feel better delaying caffeine, including  just placebo effect and many others. So, just do   whatever works for you. If you feel better having  caffeine later in the day or not having it, great.   Why not? If you feel better having it earlier,  right after you wake up, we don't have convincing  

[16:02] evidence to tell you that that's a problem. And  in fairness, I've seen Huberman recently somewhat   moderate or even walk back this claim, maybe  as a result of the push back it got. I regret  

[16:14] maybe even discussing it for people that crash in  the afternoon. Often times, if they delay their   caffeine by 60 and 90 minutes in the morning, they  will offset some of that. But if you eat a lunch  

[16:26] line, I think this one is similar to the dopamine.  It's an overclaim, basically an idea that someone   had and some stories, some anecdotes just  presented confidently as a scientific fact. Not  

[16:42] dangerous per se for most people at least, just  a little random. And finally, let's look at AG1,   the famous or infamous supplement. AG1  stands for Athletic Greens, and it's a  

[16:56] sponsor of Huberman's podcast, and it features  him pretty prominently on their marketing and   it's a green powder supplement and he advertises  this supplement in the middle of his podcasts. So,   you're watching him talking about some scientific  topic and suddenly he's telling you about AG1.  

[17:12] Leverage all sorts of aspects of the dopamine  system in order to increase your motivation,   especially when things get really hard or when  you have the propensity to procrastinate, which is   something that we'll get into a little bit later  in the podcast. I'd like to take a quick break and  

[17:26] acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Greens.  Athletic Greens, now called AG1. Now, I've never   heard him cite any evidence that it works, that it  does anything, but he makes all kinds of anecdotal  

[17:38] claims that are pretty striking. I discovered AG1  back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast,   and I've been taking it every day since. I find  it improves all aspects of my health, my energy,   my focus, and I simply feel much better  when I take it. Obviously, we understand  

[17:53] that this is a script. He's reading from some  teleprompter. It's it's a commercial. It's an ad.   But I personally, and let me know if you disagree  with this, I find this a little distasteful.  

[18:05] You're watching a scientist that you trust talking  about a scientific topic and suddenly he starts   telling you about this supplement he takes and is  so great. This comes with a certain implied weight  

[18:17] of science and evidence, that he has evaluated  it, that he has gone over the evidence and the   evidence is compelling, right? Just by nature of  who he is, being a professional scientist. But   the truth is this has very little evidence to back  it up. So I found a couple trials looking at AG1,  

[18:34] which is good, let me say first of all, because  a lot of these proprietary supplements that   are promoted by influencers are never tested in  trials in human beings ever. So it's a complete  

[18:47] crap shoot. Here the manufacturer, the company,  actually bothered to run trials, which is good.   And the largest one that I've seen came out last  year, recent, 2025. And it's a randomized trial,  

[18:59] triple blinded with a placebo control, so robust  design. And they followed 120 participants for 3   months. And the title that they chose is "AG1 does  not negatively impact blood safety biomarkers",  

[19:15] which is true, but it didn't impact them  positively either. It didn't do anything.   There were no significant changes to any of  the metrics they measured. And bear in mind,   AG1 is pretty pricey. I looked it up. Seems to  be $99 for one pouch, which has 30 servings. So,  

[19:33] it' be a month if you take it daily. That's for  a single pouch. If you sign up for their monthly   subscription ongoing thing, then it comes  down to about $80 per pouch per month. So,  

[19:46] it's almost $1,000 a year for this one supplement.  It's pretty steep. Now, there's another trial that   comes close to being a steel man argument. I  was thinking, okay, how would you justify this  

[19:58] or recommend this? What's the strongest argument  we can find? There is one trial where they gave   it to people on a poor diet, low in fruits and  vegetables, basically a standard western diet.   They gave them AG1 and the level in their blood  of certain vitamins, vitamin C, folate which is a  

[20:15] type of B vitamin, that went up a bit, and their  homocysteine levels came down 10% which often   happens when you increase B vitamins. So yeah, if  you eat a poor diet and you're not down to change  

[20:29] that, but you are down to take this supplement, I  think it could help get a bit more vitamins, yeah,   that's valid, I think. But bear in mind, you  could do the same thing with a run-of-the-mill   multivitamin and maybe a probiotic, right? You  get these in your grocery store for 10 times,  

[20:46] 20 times less. But Huberman tells his viewers that  he puts AG1 at the top of his list. Whenever I'm   asked if I could take just one supplement, what  that supplement would be, I always say AG1. So,  

[20:58] I don't really understand that, this is your  number one? There's so many supplements with   stronger evidence, with benefit demonstrated, that  are much cheaper. I don't get it. How do you say  

[21:10] this is number one? Look, Andrew Huberman is a  very charismatic communicator. He's a very good   speaker, very fluid speaker, and he has clearly  motivated lots of people to live healthier lives,  

[21:22] to sleep better, to exercise more, to be fitter,  to be leaner, and that's fantastic. That's a great   contribution. I think it's unfortunate, and  I mean this as constructive criticism, that   some of the claims that are peppered in there are  based on weak evidence or no evidence sometimes,  

[21:37] anecdotes or something in rats or an idea that  somebody had. And this makes it really difficult   for a viewer to separate. What's strong science,  a strong recommendation, what's just a random idea   that's never been tested or sometimes the evidence  goes against it. A viewer can't tell. And viewers  

[21:53] tune in to scientists precisely for us to do  that leg work. It's implied that we've done that,   right? And can separate the wheat from the chaff.  So, in my opinion, Andrew's content is strongest  

[22:06] without these exaggerations or more random  bits and he has lots of advice that is based   on strong science. He has a number of interviews  with world-leading scientists. So, I would keep  

[22:19] that. I would cherish that and I would be wary of  these. For a lot more on the benefits of coffee,   check out this previous video. And if you want  to see another popular influencer scrutinized,  

[22:32] fact checked, check out this video  down here. And I'll see you in there.