CRAZY Experiments With Vegan vs. Omnivore, Weighted vs. Body Weight?!, Plant Protein vs. Animal Protein (SHOCKING!), Long vs. Short Exercise & More With "The Turner Twins."

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life podcast, we did a vegan versus meat diet a couple of years ago for Men's Health UK for the third time, I think, posted on LAD Bible again. Twins doing this experiment. And when people say, oh, I've gone vegan because it's healthier, and it's just the two of us, and again, we're not holding anyone accountable, it's just what we found, that's really not the case. The one thing we want to do is to put the last 4 12-week studies onto a table, go, right, which parts of it really benefited us? Get rid of all the negatives and go, right, yes, body weight was really good for mobility. Great, add that in. The vegan versus meat, what was really good about that? And then do a culmination of all 4 of those experiments, the best bits, try and find a twin versus twin angle in it. And then go off and see if we can get even more efficient at the workouts.

Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this.

Ben Greenfield: A few months ago, someone sent me a link to an article about these twin brothers who did an experiment to see what resulted in the best fitness response, a 20-minute versus a 40-minute gym training protocol. Like, can low volume equate to high volume? The article is interesting and I'll link to it in the shownotes. But then, it turns out these same brothers had done animal protein versus plant protein, a vegan versus omnivore diet, body weight versus using weights. And then, I took a deeper dive into these guys and they actually travel all over the world going on these crazy adventures, super inspirational. And, I wanted to get them on the show to not only talk about these crazy experiments that they run but just their life in general because I think you'll find these guys super interesting. Their names are Ross and Hugo Turner, the Turner Twins. And, all the shownotes, links to their articles, their website, their crazy adventures, and badass videos, I'll put it all at BenGreenfieldLife.com/TurnerTwins. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com/TurnerTwins. They're joining me at some ungodly hour like 1:30 a.m. somewhere across the world. So, fellas, thanks for doing this and sacrificing sleep to do it.

Morning, Ben. No, thank you. It's great to be on the show. And yes, it's 1:30 in the morning here in pretty much the middle of the outback, Western Australia. This is an unplanned location for where we're calling. We were meant to be in Hong Kong, but the project team— we're currently on a 6-month project— we're a little delayed. They said, look, go make yourself busy for a few days. So we thought, let's just go to Western Australia. So yes, it is 1:30 in the morning, but It's great to be connected. Thank you.

Are you actually on one of your crazy adventures right now?

We are, yeah. We're—

we are essentially launching a new electric vehicle by doing a global tour from the UK to Shanghai over a course of— we've lost count. It's got to be 5 months, 4 and a half months at the moment and counting. We've got another 4 weeks to go.

Well, you're going from UK to Shanghai using an electric vehicle.

Correct. Yeah, we're, um, so the idea is we are launching this new vehicle but driving quite literally every day to a dealership, revealing it, showing the local area or the local dealership or country dealership the car, having the media, the press there each night, and then driving on to the next location. So we started in September last year, drove all the way through the UK, all across Europe, and then the project has been ping-ponging across all the different countries in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and now we find ourselves about to head to Hong Kong and then traveling across China before the Beijing Motor Show at the end of this month, which is where the project finalizes and we finish.

Who designed the vehicle?

MG. So it's the new two-seater. It's called a Cyberster and it's got very sexy scissor doors that go up and down and have an incredible 0 to 60 time.

Do you guys say 0 to 100 kilometers an hour of 2.8 seconds? Very, very quick. And it's been a lot of fun, but I think we've aged maybe by 20 years on this trip.

I can imagine you guys get worn down with all these adventures you go on. I want to talk more about them. I suppose you're not thinking about changing your last name to Musk being in the electric vehicle business now. So, you're basically sponsored by this company and you guys are the pilots of the vehicle, so to speak.

Correct.

Yeah. So, we've, over the last number of years, have been on some adventures that have really pushed the boundaries or have tried to find something that we will learn that we can say to somebody, "Oh, did you know this? Did you know that?" And, the fact that we're genetically identical means that if we are doing, say, twin studies, as you highlighted earlier, whether it's a 12-week program to, um, find the difference between vegan versus meat, or whether it's body weight versus weighted, there's certainly for us, it's a learning exercise. So if we can come away having learned something through being curious, trying to discover something new, that's half the battle for us.

Right. You guys are like earthbound versions of those twin astronauts that they did the NASA study on.

Yeah, yeah. The Kelly twins.

Space exposure.

Yeah. And do you have any— is there like quite a curiosity in the media around twins, particularly in the UK?

There's—

we have an app called Zoe app. I don't know whether it's out in the US. I think it's probably going to be launching where you put a little blood glucose monitor on your arm and then they do 2 weeks of Yeah, exactly that. And then, that was started in the UK through a twin program. And because of that, there's quite a bit of hype around twins and interest in them.

I think it's kind of siloed here in terms of mostly in science and research. So, when you look at research on twins in terms of comparing genetic profiles or responses to certain diets, some larger-scale versions of the the n 1 type of things or I suppose the n 2 type of things you guys have done. There is a little bit of interest there, but I don't think a lot of people are super curious about how twins like you respond to different protocols besides guys like me and my listeners who just love to dig into, I guess, hacking to a certain extent. And, some of the stuff that you guys have done, which we'll talk about shortly, is really reflective of that. I have no twins on my side of the family to answer your question. You guys could correct me on this, but I think twins genetically tend to be maternally derived. And, my wife has two sets of twins on her side, which we didn't know about until literally we were getting the ultrasound 16 years ago and the nurse looked at both of us after the ultrasound and said, "Do you guys have a history of multiples in the family?" And, within 5 minutes, I'm texting all my buddies talking about my my double success.

Was it all a bit of a surprise having twins?

Oh, totally. Yeah. And, it's been amazing. It's been incredible. So, yeah, it was definitely a surprise though. So, how about you guys? How'd you get started doing all this in the first place, deciding to do these experiments and adventures and the like?

Well, we were very lucky. We grew up in a place called Dartmoor in Devon, which is southwest of England. It's where the surfing happens. It's where the beach culture life happens. It's a very, very beautiful part of the UK because it's in the south coast or the very south tip of the UK. We get pretty good weather. That said, we also get all the storms that come up from the Gulf of the Atlantic. And that is where we spent our childhood. We spent it camping. Fortunately, I say fortunate, we're 35 now. And as we grew up and had our teenage years, we didn't have social media. I think Facebook was obviously just kicking off around our early teens.

No, late teens.

Late teens.

Late teens.

17. Yeah, 17. So we didn't grow up with social media. So the outdoors was our media that we used as our entertainment. We weren't stuck to our phones. Phones even 15 years ago were pretty primitive. And yeah, we went camping up on Dartmoor. Water skiing, fishing in Cornwall, all the amazing outdoor recreational sports that you could possibly grow up doing, we did. And then at the age of 17, down in Cornwall on the beach, I was running into the sea, dived in and hit the bottom and broke my neck. And that was really the moment where everything changed for us.

Holy cow. And just so my audience knows, this is Hugo talking right now. So Hugo, you broke your neck.

Yeah, I broke my neck. Yes, I was, I think, voted the luckiest and unluckiest person at school leaving. And we've just rode that luck ever since. We've decided to live life to the full, make the most out of this second chance that I've had. And a couple of buddies while we're at university, at the age of 20, 21, decided that they needed a couple of guys to row the Atlantic with. And that's where all of these adventures, all of these expeditions, and all of the great unknown in our lives has come from, is just this accident, committing to the unknown and learning all these new skills, learning about ourselves, doing all these experiments has come from.

So for something like that, rowing across the Atlantic, you mentioned learning new skills. Had either of you guys ever done anything like that before?

No, definitely not. The first time— I played a lot of rugby, um, at university. The first time I rowed was the start of this record in, um, La Gomera in the Canary Islands off West Africa. So everyone says, oh, you know, how much rowing experience have you had? Zero. But rowing the Atlantic is super different from say, river rowing. I know rowing in the US is a massive thing. It's very, very different. It's very, very different. I think if you can pull a rowing machine at, say, 230 per 500 meters, say, 16 to 18 strokes a minute, you can row the Atlantic. Anyone can row the Atlantic. It's more about body management, boat management, and weathering storms. Because you're quite literally a cork floating on the top of water, there's not a lot you can do. You kind of go with it. There'll be rogue waves that'll push your boat sideways, roll your boat, push you downhill— let's say downhill, down the big waves. And you just got to kind of ride the lightning for a few months. So when people say, oh, you know, that sounds crazy, yes, it was at the time. And for us, we'd never done anything like it. We've done a few land-based activities. We've done quite a bit of water-based activities and worked on water, whether it be water skiing. We've done some sailing before. But you know what? I think the best things in life come from the unknown. And I try to describe it when we give talks wherever it is in the world, trying to talk to somebody on the same level. What's it like rowing the Atlantic? I say to them, describe the color red. If your viewers are there, like, trying to describe the color red, it's always a bit brown, but it's not orange. It's your own experience. And then until you've gone and done it, then you'll start understanding what it's like to do it. And I've always said, we've all been there when we've said goodnight to mates, whether it's at school, whether it's at home, and then one of your mates knocks on the door and goes, come on, we're going out for a beer and you're in your pajamas, you're half in bed, and yet it ends up being one of the best nights out. They're spontaneous, not planned, and you're like, actually, that's what adventure is. That's what the unknown is.

Hopefully not still in your pajamas.

Yeah, just imagine that unknown. Imagine for us getting into the rowing boat, the start of that race. We had 2 months ahead of us at least. What's it going to be like? Just embrace it. It's going to be that night out every single morning, every single day, and every single night.

Dude, what a life. That's crazy. I have said for some time that I think to live life to the fullest, it's important to have something on the calendar that scares you for that year. It could be an open mic night for poetry or guitar. It could be learning a new language, traveling somewhere new. For me, it's always a physical challenge. Me and my twin sons are training right now for a Spartan Race in Austin, Texas in June, and then a Wim Hof retreat in Germany in December. And, if I don't have something like that on the calendar, I won't push myself in the gym, I won't wake up early in the morning and do breathwork in the sauna, and I won't feel like I'm really going outside my comfort zone or making smoke come out my ears or my body in some way. But, you guys have taken it to a a whole new level with these adventures. And, the experiments, these are super interesting, the experiments. Like I mentioned in the introduction, I think the way I found you guys was through an article where you go in head-to-head testing your body. And, I want to talk about some of these experiments because what you found was super interesting. I think the one I first saw was using weights versus bodyweight training. Tell me about that one.

Yeah, so this came out of lockdown. Um, lockdown affected everyone globally. Um, gyms weren't open, and we'd done a couple of experiments before. So to give the viewers context, the idea around it was to learn something new, to be in, to give something back to, um, our audience, people who might read it in dot-coms, magazines, etc. Being twins, and being genetically identical, we thought, why don't we question some of these norms? Is red meat good? Is body weight better than normal? So we just wanted to say, well, let's try and question the paradigm and see if we uncover anything exceptional, unextraordinary, extraordinary. And so in lockdown, we thought, right, nobody can get to the gym, so why don't we see if body weight— we've heard lots about it. There's a big craze Body weight's really, really good for you. It's healthy for you. You're far more mobile, you're light, you're athletic, you're a bit like a rock climber, but you've got the strength of bodybuilders, all of that stuff. So we thought, right, let's do a 12-week study where we eat exactly the same or very similar calories intake, and one of us goes body weight, one of us goes weighted. So we found an old gym set at home, set a program out, trained 5 days a week, so kind of 3 on, day off, 2 on, day off, 3 on. And we did, I say, studies. We did our physiological tests before, during, and after so we could see a profile of what was happening.

And by the way, just so I can interrupt real quick, what were you actually looking at when you say physiological tests?

We— sorry. Yeah. So we were looking at just a general spectrum. So muscle mass, fat, what else?

Deadlifts, one bench max, or how many press-ups, how many sit-ups. So a bit of strength and a bit of endurance tests.

Yeah.

And then— got it.

At the beginning, from the top of my head, I remember trying to do And bearing in mind, a lot of our 12-week experiments come off the back of an expedition. So we're not that conditioned. We're not— wouldn't say healthy. So we did— I think I took my deadlift from 100 kilos from very little training and coming off the back of an expedition. So not really that prepped to doing a 12-week bodyweight program. So Ross, myself was just bodyweight. I didn't touch a single weight for 12 weeks. I increased my deadlift by 40 kilos.

What kind of exercises were you doing? Because obviously it's hard to simulate a deadlift with body weight.

Yeah, single leg toe touches, just body weight. That's the only kind of real standing hamstring activation I did. Glute bridges, lying down and literally just squeezing your bum. One leg, two legs. Slow reps, high reps. And it was just that simple process of activating the muscles and just getting them used to being used.

What about grip? Were you doing any like hangs or bodyweight pull-ups or anything like that?

Doing pull-ups? Yeah, doing pull-ups, which is probably one of our worst activities because we're quite long and we've got kind of rower's bodies, rower's bodies, big legs and not big arms. So yeah, we did pull-ups. Um, but everything across the board for my body weight went up, um, and I certainly felt as healthy and as lean as I had done at any time when I've been lifting weights. And Hugo, on the weighted, he certainly saw a better increase in performance across the board, but if you take into account that I hadn't done any weights whatsoever, I was probably 10, 15, 20% performance behind him across the board, from deadlifts to pull-ups, max reps, press-ups, max reps. So certainly when people say, oh, I don't have a gym, you know, there's no point— no, totally wrong. Go and do as much exercise as you can, whether it's walking, whether it's literally just touching your toes, single leg deadlift, whether it's doing as many press-ups as you can, to failure and then doing that, doing something bodyweight is absolutely amazing in terms of what results you can expect.

What did you guys see in terms of the difference as far as actual muscle was concerned?

Muscle mass, though, certainly. I think I dropped body fat and increased muscle by, say, 1 or 2 kilos for sure. Hugo saw similar performances. With his weighted and certainly gained a little bit more in terms of the muscle mass. But over a 12-week period, certainly a lot of people on social were saying, well, you guys need to do it for 12, for 12, 12 months, 6 months, 12 months to get like that real set of results. But for us, the 12-week works because we have commercial projects and expeditions that we go off on. And in that 12 weeks, um, 3 months, we can usually work within the time period between our expeditions. And that's why it's 12 weeks. Yeah, we'd love to do 6 months, but I think some of our projects will be old versus new, and all of those would certainly take, um, a wonderful turn if we could get more data. That'd be really good.

Yeah, I mean, 12 weeks is reasonable, especially when you consider the fact that musculoskeletal adaptations to training really significantly kick in at about the 4- to 6-week mark, not 6 months in or 8 months in. You get stronger, the neuromuscular adaptations occur within 2 to 4 weeks. But yeah, it's just 4 to 6 weeks before you start to see the changes. So, 12 weeks to me seems reasonable. What would have been interesting, have you guys ever heard of blood flow restriction training, BFR training?

Yeah, I've seen bits of it where they basically just restrict blood flow and then train on it.

Yeah, because I use that pretty extensively when I travel because a lot of times you just have a rusty set of dumbbells and an old elliptical trainer from the '80s in a lot of these hotel gyms. So, blood flow restriction training with body weight is very similar to weight training, superior to just body weight training. That would have been an interesting component of that as well. And, this experiment reminds me of research that's primarily been done by this guy named Brad Schoenfeld who's done a lot of high-volume, low-weight, low-volume, high-weight comparisons and found that ultimately in everyone despite extremely trained individuals, really it just comes down to time under tension and the amount of fatigue that the muscle experiences. So sure, you got to do more reps and possibly spend a little bit more time, training if you're doing body weight, but your guys' results seem to be similar to what Brad's found in his research.

Yeah, certainly for us, you've kind of hit the nail on the head is time under tension. And, a lot of people, there are a lot of articles particularly in the UK that kind of regurgitate themselves, how do you change things up, how do you get things more efficient? I think time under tension You know, if you've slowed your workout depending on what you're doing— for us, it's very much endurance-based, and so we're not looking for volume, we're not, not looking for mass of one particular muscle or pair of muscle groups. We're looking for just overall general health to get us into that really efficient zone where we can go off for months at a time, like the Atlantic, have a massive calorie deficit. There's no point for us in putting on 10 kilos of lean muscle mass to then go and eat 1,000 calories per day hiking or rowing or flying across the country, because our body is just going to go into total meltdown and shock and go, well, you were giving me 5,000 calories of good nutrition for the last 4 months, 5 months of prep and training, and now you're doing nothing. So for us, it's if we can stay on 2.5 2,000 calories, get super fit, efficient, and then just drop that deficit, calorie deficit by, say, 500 calories. Super efficient for us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And related to that, you guys also did a similar but slightly different test, I believe, or experiment where you did high volume versus low volume. Is that correct?

We've done— what have we done today? We've done 20 minutes. Yeah, 20 minutes versus 40-minute workouts. So we were in the gym for 40 minutes. One of us was 20 minutes. This was a really fun experiment for us because it brought in that dynamic of we weren't doing exactly the same time and going, right, cool, high fives, out to the gym and get back in the office. It was, right, we've just done a HIIT workout. Now one of us has to stay and do it again. And when you get to doing these experiments, we don't want to do 6 to 8 weeks of building up into it, and then the last 4 weeks are quite intense and we're at a level where we want to be.

It's—

we want to really push ourselves quite quickly to get the results, to at least show what's happening to our bodies. So yeah, the high volume, low volume, 20-minute versus 40-minute workout, was really interesting because we knew— did we know what that was?

I think we're inherently lazy in terms of us just generally. I know. I think the human population have found ways to reduce input to maximize output in every form of life, every area of life.

So the so-called MED made popular by guys like Tim Ferriss, right? Minimum effective dose.

Yeah, exactly. And, and training for us, it's, yeah, and for everybody listening, I'm sure they're training, they've got to come up with new ways of training to keep it motivational, to look at minor increases and improve efficiency. And it was really born out of that, I think. And also the underlying question, which was, well, what if we actually trained for half the amount of time how much performance will we lose or increase? Oh, yeah, or increase. And through this 40 minutes, 20 minutes, and we were trying to toy with an hour versus 30 minutes. We were thinking of 15 minutes versus half an hour. And we put it out to our audience and we said, what time frame should we look at? And generally speaking, 20 minutes, 40 minutes was the rough ballpark figure because a lot of our audience in the UK have day jobs. An hour, you can't really fit that into a lunch break. People have got young families. 20 minutes, 40 minutes seemed to be like a nice balance between both. And it was eye-opening. And let's just say this now, and this is our own experience, Ben, so I'm not going suddenly to say, everyone, right, you need to go and do this. But from what we experienced and all the data that we tracked, there wasn't really much of an uplift in performance training for 40 minutes than there was 20 minutes. So, our training program really looks anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes now.

Ben Greenfield: What's interesting is that when you look at data on, let's say, muscle maintenance, VO2 max, et cetera, it's actually a shockingly low or at least lower than what most people think amount of volume that's necessary to maintain muscle or to maintain VO2 max or mitochondrial density or anything like that. Typically, for a good— it's usually up to about 3 months or so. Once you get past the 3-month mark, it seems that slightly greater volume wins out. But, at least from what I've seen in larger studies, the extent to which higher volume wins out is not that significant compared to low volume. And so, if you're looking for a time hack, I mean, there's companies in the U.S. like one popular one that's sponsored this show before is Carrow Bike. So, it's 10 to 15-minute workout where you just have 2 all-out 10 to 20-second sprints while you're riding this bike. They advertise as a time-hacked sweat-free workout. But, it sounds to me like your guys' results are pretty similar in terms of people probably needing, assuming they're actually doing the work when they're in there, to spend less time in the gym or working out than what they might think to at least maintain decent levels of fitness.

Yeah. You've absolutely nailed it on the head. You can do a lot more with a lot less. You don't need to go and do these super, super kind of time-heavy, weight-heavy, hour-and-a-half sessions. You know, I think for 99% of the normal population, for us, if you can experiment a little bit, you know, if somebody says, oh, 12 reps doing this, this tempo is— that's exactly what you need, that's perfect for you— I think just experiment. And for us, these experiments really have shown that not one size fits all. Go and find out what works best for you. The results for the 40 versus 20 minutes, we did our weights pretty much every single day as we went through the experiment. And on our website, theturnertwins.co.uk, you can go into the fitness side there. The graphs, or the graph for tracked weight over 3 months, are literally identical.

But I think we also need to say that this, we're not —let's say high-performance athletes. I wouldn't say we're Olympic— speak for yourself. We're not Olympic athletes. We're just trying to keep a relatively, you know, middle to high level of fitness. So this is more looking at the non-elite performance athlete. And for us, this was, you know, a really, really informative, um, and good experiment to understand how our bodies react to this type of training.

Yeah, there's some crossover though. I mean, even to higher levels of competition. I've told this story, I think, before in the podcast, but one of the ways that I got into doing what I do now, which is more work online, coaching online, doing online programs, et cetera, was when I used to run a bunch of personal training gyms and studios, I always trained my clients using this minimum effective dose of exercise approach. And, I was super into Ironman triathlon and I used almost purely high-intensity interval training for Ironman triathlon training 8 to 10 hours per week versus the standard 15, gosh, up to 25. I would have peers who would go to the pool and swim a 4K and I would do 10 by 50 all out with those 50s being as hard as possible or I would have friends who would do the 2.5, 3-hour slow horrific masochistic frowny face run. And, I would go out to the track and do 10 400-meter repeats. And, that would be my workout and I'd be done in sometimes an hour or less. And, I wound up qualifying for and competing in Hawaii Ironman World Championship 6 times. And, I actually took that same program, created it into this online program called the Triathlon Dominator. I think my tagline was cross the Ironman finish line with a smile on your face without neglecting your hobbies and your friends and your family and your career, et cetera. And, it was successful. And so, I've been into this idea of minimalist training even for higher performance events for a while. So, I think you guys are really onto something. Yeah.

I certainly think it's just I know I've just said it, but just experimenting and finding out. You can read all you want, but, you know, for us, we know exactly when our sugar levels are around 3.2 because we've used these kind of arm patches that you've got, and using their mobile data, you can just connect. And when you start feeling a little blurry and a little kind of all tired and a bit spaced out, you know exactly what your blood sugar level is. If you experiment on a small level— we're not saying go and change your life and become a Amateur scientist, go and find out whether you feel good eating a banana before or whether you want to go and eat a shitload of cookies before the gym. Go and experiment and you'll be amazed at what works for you isn't what works for somebody else. And just because, dare I say, an expert has said it, yes, there's probably merit and grounding to what they do. Just twist what they're saying a little bit and make it work for you.

But we are also twins. So we've got each other to level off. And I think that's what motivates us is that even through the— what have we done now? 4 experiments. We've learned so much about how our bodies react to different types of, of fitness. So we've done a vegan versus meat diet. We've done plant protein versus animal protein, this body weighted versus weighted, and we're learning so much about it and it's really improved the way we use our time training for the better.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And, I want to talk about these nutrition experiments. What you said about self-quantification really rings true to me, especially regarding a blood glucose monitor like this because as you guys can see, I walk on my treadmill a lot while I'm podcasting. And, I went for a few months when I first started walking during the podcast, feeling very lightheaded about 15 to 20 minutes into the show. And, I usually have my breakfast before the show. And, by using this monitor, it turns out my blood sugar sometimes 15, 20 minutes in would be down in the 50s and I'd be a little dizzy and would have difficulty focusing on the guest or coming up with something witty or intelligent or halfway lucid to say. And so, based on that, I thought, well, Maybe before my morning workout, before I have breakfast, I'll just elevate my blood levels of ketones. So, if my blood sugar drops, I've got a second fuel. So then, I started taking a shot of these exogenous drinkable ketones. I don't know if you guys have ever seen these before, but they kind of give your body a fourth source of fuel and problem completely disappeared. Even if my blood sugar dropped, if I tested it now, it's probably down in the 60s, which is low. But, because I've got a bunch of ketones in my bloodstream, I don't have that hypoglycemic post-breakfast dip that I seem to have that attacks me during podcasts present anymore. And, I just knew that by testing. And, some people might think, "Well, maybe I've got low oxygen or I'm low on sleep or I don't have enough food." But, turns out for me, I was just freaking super hypoglycemic. During podcasts and just shifting to ketones fixed that.

It's really interesting to say hypoglycemic. There's so many times where once you start— and I'd probably say the best advice is to go and get one of these kind of blood glucose monitors because you can just basically just use your app, tells you exactly what you are, you know how you're feeling with a number of your sugar. For us, we've used it multiple times now over multiple experiments. And it's— I think people need to start getting a little bit more connected with their body and what's actually going on. So for me now, I know in my current state, I've just had a little coffee. I'm probably about 3.5, 3.6 on our scale. I don't know what you are, but I think having that measure going, oh, I know exactly what my body's doing. Is so informative. It's probably the biggest thing you could do because you've just said people grab a coffee because they need to feel awake and then they'll go and have a biscuit and then they'll get that massive sugar crash and then they'll have more coffee to counteract the sugary biscuits and it's just all retch and no vomit and you're not really getting anywhere. And that's a classic. Well, because there's biscuits in the office and because people have traditionally had coffee in the morning to wake you up. Well, that's what you should do. Well, why? Question it. And this is what we love doing as twins. Question why are you having a coffee? Why don't you have some sort of plant-based chicory coffee alternative? Or why don't you, dare I say, have a bolognese for breakfast? Yeah, probably pretty uncool around your friends to say I had bolognese rather than a croissant, but find out what works. And I've been eating, I say, pasta. When I was playing rugby, I was eating pasta for breakfast regularly and I was much happier and healthier and more energy throughout the morning having a main meal rather than say honey on toast or something.

Yeah, you must not be Italian. One thing I should note for listeners, you said 3-something. I think you're millimolars per liter for blood glucose. We're milligrams per deciliter over here. I think you'd What you just cited would be somewhere around 85 to 90, I think. So, still a decent blood glucose value. So, that leads me to another question I wanted to ask you guys about these nutrition experiments. Which one did you do first, the animal versus the plant protein for comparing protein sources or the vegan versus the meat-based?

We did the protein, plant protein versus animal protein. Again, this was a really, really interesting one. We thought that there would be a lot of change between the two just based on the fact that one's come from animals, one's come from plants. There's a lot of conversation when we did this, what, pre-COVID?

Pre-COVID, yeah. Particularly in the UK market, there was a massive amount of people saying plant-based It's much better, right?

There's that movie, that movie Game Changers, I think really fueled that also. Yeah, exactly that.

I think it was around that time, wasn't it? Yeah, it would have been. And we just wanted to basically simply ask, is there any difference between the two? And if so, over our 12-week program, again, we're— when we start these projects or 12-week programs, we do our, do our weights and stats before, and usually we're fairly the same. If there is a little bit of difference, say he's carrying a kilo more, maybe 2 kilos more, whether it's across fat, whether it's across muscle, that's fine. As long as that difference then is reflected and taken into account at the end, then it's— then you can start seeing kind of the differences and comparing. And it was really interesting. Again, the graphs across body weight change, whether it's fat, whether it's muscle mass, remain very, very similar in profile. So there'll be days when we'd have, um, we put on a little bit more weight for some reason or retain more weight. There'll be days when we both drop together. But the really interesting thing is the graphs did follow each other, and sometimes they went away from each other when you didn't expect it. Um, and for us, I think at the end of the 12-week program, there wasn't any real difference in meat or plant-based protein. And, what's that classic expression in the documentary? How do you get as strong as an ox when you didn't eat any meat? And, the guy's like, "Well, when did you last see an ox eat meat? It eats grass." So, there's truth in that.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm curious about the animal and the plant protein piece. Was this a post-workout supplement, one that was a whey protein versus a rice protein? Was this just a general dietary approach, or how did you set it up?

Yeah, it was exactly that. It was post-protein. So we kept on the same diet, um, and I know the purists out there, which there are, you know, a lot of them are saying, oh, you know, if you're going to go one, um, plant-based protein, one animal protein, you need to kind of separate that. There's so many different areas, as you understand, with these experiments, I'm sure people say, oh, you know, Ben, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? Did you really have to add this? You know, there's so many— yes, there's so many different ways of getting results here. For us, there's a general overall goal of just seeing what happens, letting the graphs speak for themselves, being curious.

Yeah, well, you're right. You guys aren't advertising yourselves as running like peer-reviewed human clinical double-blinded research studies. You're just twins and kind of throwing a few noodles at the wall and getting some general data out there. But, what I was asking you about was assuming you were doing this post-workout, was one of you doing a whey protein or animal-based protein shake and then one of you doing a plant-based protein shake keeping the diet the same besides that and then seeing what happened to, I'm assuming, muscle?

Yeah, exactly that. So, we're just doing shakes. Um, half an hour or less straight after a workout. The workouts were exactly the same, loads of compound lifts. That's what we like. There's no point doing a bicep curl when you can do, um, a bend and snap, clean and snatch, whatever it is. Um, so for us it was just looking at that 30-minute window, 30 minutes after exercise.

And that is almost another experiment itself, is, is trying to work out the most. I mean, obviously you want to eat straight after your workout, but what if you accidentally ate regularly 45 minutes after workout? How does that affect your training? Half an hour to 2 hours?

Yeah, you'd lean out. Yeah, a lot. Um, but yes, if your viewers have any, um, suggestions on what experiments we could do next, we're all open ears.

Yeah, yeah. So, so was the animal and the plant protein— did it turn out to just be awash, like pretty similar across the board?

Yeah, yeah. For us, definitely it was the— I said limited— a spectrum of results that we, we studied before, during and after. There was no tangible difference between the two. I certainly think for me on the plant-based— Ross was on the plant-based shake— I felt actually better on plant-based protein than I would have done. It was just a pea protein. Definitely better on that than an animal protein. Do you mix it up or are you fairly consistently on one protein?

Ben Greenfield: Well, I eat an omnivorous diet. And typically, if you're on an omnivorous diet, the source of the protein post-workout should matter a little less because by the end of the day, you're getting a pretty large set of different amino acids if you're mixing up meat, grains, legumes, et cetera. But, what's interesting is this reminds me of a study that came out a few years ago that showed that the superiority that some studies have shown of an animal-based protein like egg or whey or something with the more complete amino acid profile seems to be washed out when compared to a plant protein-based post-workout protein intake that is combined with digestive enzymes. It's kind of interesting. There's something about adding enzymes into a rice protein or a pea protein, the same type of digestive enzymes you just buy as a supplement to take before a meal to help with digestion. That seems to upregulate the bioavailability of the amino acids to make the animal protein very similar to the plant protein. I think for me, the difference would be And, what I would want to see to really know for sure would be a plant protein post-workout consumed by someone who is not eating anything but plants the rest of the day compared to a plant protein post-workout with somebody who was also including animal sources during their diet the rest of the day. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You kind of have to do vegan. You have to have a few arms. You have to have vegan and plant-based protein post-workout. Omnivore and plant-based protein post-workout, vegan and animal-based protein post-workout, and then omnivore and animal-based protein post-workout to get a full picture. But regardless, you guys basically saw that in people who are eating a similar diet that's omnivorous, the plant protein post-workout doesn't seem to be much different than the animal protein as far as muscle response.

No, pretty identical. Again, if we needed to do a greater study, you'd go for probably 6 months. You'd then get a lot more blood work, you'd get gut microbes, you do the whole profile, which I think would be really interesting. But again, for us, we've got this commercial time frame and there's no point in running an experiment 12 weeks or more when we're away on an expedition or in an area where we just physically can't get there.

One of the things that we've always been surprised at, and yes, we're twins, but we always think there's going to be differences or more differences than we actually find. Whereas, you know, we are very, very similar. And that's been one thing that surprises us is that our data will peak and trough at exactly the same time when we haven't changed anything on the program. The diet doesn't change massively, yet we will go up and down. At the same time. And it's interesting that even twins that— yes, we're both living in London at the time, we still go through these completely what seems disconnected events, and we still can't work out why our bodies do that. And maybe that's our genetics kicking in and reacting exactly the same way to the gym program. But we haven't changed anything in the gym program. We'll keep it relatively the same. Yeah. So that's been really interesting to actually see, oddly, how similar we are.

We did Vegan vs Meat Diet a couple of years ago for Men's Health UK and it got published online. And then for us, the online globe, I want to say viral kingdom, it just went mad. It's like 20, 25 languages and it It's just been for the third time, I think, posted on LAD Bible again, twins doing this experiment. And it just keeps going round and round again. And people from all over the world are getting in contact saying, can we get the results? Can we get your feedback? Can you do an interview for this magazine or.com? It's really weird when you look at the graphs. It's not like one of us has a big peak way above the average for that particular graph. Profile. And then 2 weeks later, somebody else, or Hug, has a profile peak. The peaks and the troughs are exactly the same time, but totally unrelated. But again, all twinness. And so anyway, it's all very weird.

Who followed the plant-based and who followed the animal-based?

So Hugo, me, followed the, the plant-based. And initially, starting out, it was just going to be meats, like cut meats and dairy out of the diet and snack however you wanted to snack. And then for whatever reason, I thought, if we're going to do this wholeheartedly and get some actual relatively interesting data from this experiment, I've got to go full vegan. So cut out anything that contained animal products. So crisps, like so many crisps, biscuits, snacks, they all contain some sort of dairy powder, anything, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I was like full vegan for 3 months and it was relatively painless, I want to say. But we had a great company in the UK that was sending us the food boxes, things like that.

And so what'd you guys find with the animal versus the plant?

So we did a lot of gut bacteria health, so before and after sending off poo samples, doing all that fun, fun energetic stuff in the, in that science department. And when people say, oh, I've gone vegan because it's healthier, and it's just the two of us, and again, we're not holding anyone accountable, it's just what we found that's really not the case. So there's benefits and pros. I think the biggest benefit we found is that your microbiome diversity when you're a vegan, because you're eating a lot less food, like the spectrum of food or access to foods you're allowed to eat is a lot less.

By the way, that surprises me because I would have expected, you know, a wide variety of plants, maybe herbs, spices, etc. And potentially a large amount of fiber, I would have expected more microbial diversity in the plant-based, but that's not what you guys saw.

Well, I would agree with that statement, but it's also the education of a vegan. As I was new to veganism, my, well, let's say culinary imagination wasn't trained and I was struggling to find—

I got it. Yeah. So, so, so maybe like a slightly improperly comprised plant-based diet that is not inclusive of a wide variety of compounds could lead to imbalances or deficiencies in the gut microbiome balance.

Yeah, exactly. If you said to anyone that has an omnivore diet, right, go vegan, fully vegan tomorrow, they would probably really struggle to come up with creative ideas to get all the different sources in their diet.

And they'd be having a lot of celery juice and almonds.

Yeah. And but And that's part— that was also part of the experiment. It was looking at, you know, just the convenience of a vegan diet. Is it complementary of our lifestyle? Is it accessible and can it be maintained in London? The answer is yes. But where we grew up in the sticks, down in Dartmoor, or if you lived out in the middle of Western Australia, is a vegan diet realistic, realistic and sustainable? Probably not, because it's, you know, be very, very difficult to get a variety of plant-based foods. But in London that does work. So there was kind of that, you know, other side that there was that other side of the experiment. But, you know, a lot of the experiment looked at the gut health and how my gut reacted to the cutting out of animal products. And then we were layering on top of that the physiological changes and tracking how, again, over 12 weeks doing the same training program, how our bodies would change.

I think the biggest thing we learned from Vegan vs Meat was that if you want to lower your cholesterol, go vegan. So like you're— we've got high cholesterol around 7. But Hugo's dropped down to under 5 in 3 months. Super good. But on the flip side of that, and I know getting access or learning about a vegan diet was quite difficult, so didn't really know what to eat and hence probably why the microbiome diversity dropped a little bit. But it also left you then more sustainable to— susceptible to Crohn's disease. So there's a few again on our website, theturnintoins.co.uk, you can look up some of the graphs just for the gut health. So it's a little bit of yin and it's a little bit of yang. On one side you get very good benefits and on the other side you might not. So for us, we've always said eat the rainbow, try and be as diverse as possible in that. And then you also start looking at the social environmental side of some food, like jackfruit has to be flown halfway to the UK anyway, has to be flown a huge amount of miles or shipped a lot of miles to get into supermarkets. So, do you eat local beef or do you eat jackfruit that's come from somewhere the other side of the world? What's more sustainable?

Ben Greenfield: Right, right. Like, Sacha Inchi protein and jackfruit and a lot of plant-based protein sources might be less sustainable. You could make an argument for soaking and sprouting and fermentation to unlock a lot more of the protein, but a lot of people aren't willing to do that. Did you guys notice any changes in body composition or muscle or anything like that across the animal versus the plant?

Yeah, so I was on the vegan diet and my body weight, um, started out maybe a kilo, kilo and a half below Ross's. And throughout the 3 months of training, my body weight started to drop at a pretty consistent level, finishing about 83. So I started about 84 and a half kilos and I went down to about 82 83 kilos, whereas Ross— Ross's body weight generally went up. And so there was a big divide. And this was our first big difference in all the experiments we've had, that there was a very, very clear difference for the fat as well, even though you lost—

well, the difference was 3 kilos. Yeah. So at the end, our fat percentage was pretty much the same.

So we both averaged similar fat percentages. Same peaks and troughs on the fats again as well, exactly the same program.

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where you can't, of course, say the body's in the streets that animal protein is superior to plant for muscle gain, but I would say it makes a case for the fact that it's easier probably to maintain or build muscle by eating animals if you don't want to do all the work necessary to make a plant-based diet a more anabolic diet via hunting down a wide variety of protein sources and increasing diversity, which you learned especially with the microbiome data, taking different supplements, et cetera. So yeah, it's almost like the animal-based protein or the animal or omnivorous approach just makes it easier, not superior, but definitely easier. Yeah.

Yeah, that's one of the big things that I find out.

Maybe next time we do a 3-month plant versus meat diet, you know, the plant will far, far exceed the performance side of a meat one because I'll be better trained. I know where I can get all of my nutritional gains from, etc. So maybe I'm just a really bad vegan. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Well, I'll have to stay tuned for round 2 then. The real vegan versus the omnivore diet. Diet.

The one thing we want to do, and it's probably up there with the top 3 next 12-week, um, studies, is to put the last 4 12-week studies onto a table, go, right, which was— which parts of it really benefited us? Like, get rid of all the negatives and go, right, yes, body weight was really good for mobility, great, add that in. The vegan versus meat, what was really good about that? What was good about the 20 versus 40 minutes? Probably 20 minutes. And then do a culmination of all 4 of those experiments, the best bits, try and find a twin versus twin angle in it and then go off and see if we can get even more efficient at the workouts.

Yeah, that makes sense. If you guys ever thought about doing like a low-carb, high-carb one.

Yeah, that's literally on our— I think that's the next one we're going to do, which will be really interesting because I respond very, very well to high fat and you just get a little chubs on the calves.

Have you guys ever actually done a genetic profile? You say you respond really well to high fat and of course there are genes that would dictate that, like maybe you don't have the APOE4 gene or you have a low inflammatory response to saturated fats or something like that. Have you guys tested your actual genetic makeup to see how similar you are genetically?

No, no, no, we haven't.

Be quite an interesting one to do that.

Yeah, it was less than $200 to do a salivary test or a blood spot test for your genes. You could probably get that sponsored, by the way, by a company like True Diagnostics or something. That'd be interesting because it gives you a whole new set of data to play with. I've tested my son's And, they're basically identical except one snip. One has a higher propensity to convert testosterone into estrogens. Besides that, they're identical genetically.

It's really interesting that whole nature-nurture twins. Your sons are identical yet there are differences. I know it sounds funny, but we still get a little blown away by when we do some of our twin studies, particularly when we go to the Department of Twin Research in central London. And there's so many twins. And one of the doctors is talking about a set of 70-year-old twins that have just come in. They're identical in absolutely every way except now one's got cancer and the other one doesn't. Yet they've quite literally lived together their entire lives. You know, nature, nurture. Why don't they both have it at the same time? Why is one not got it?

You know, fascinating. Yeah, so many variables there, connection, friendships, toxin exposure, maybe getting some kind of Lyme or mold or mycotoxin early in life. Yeah, there's a lot there. How about these expeditions and adventures? Do you guys have anything else beyond the electric vehicle planned or anything that's super notable that you've done besides rowing the Atlantic that you think would be cool for people to know about?

Well, maybe I look at a quick project we did a couple of years ago and then one that we're planning at the moment. But a couple of years ago, we took a yacht and converted it to a hydrogen fuel cell to run off a hydrogen fuel cell and look at the hydrogen fuel cell energy process and the pros and cons of that. We also did a trek across the Greenland ice cap. One of us was in the old gear that the explorers 100 years ago used to cross the ice caps. While, whilst we were comparing the new and the latest technology food, um, to try and highlight how hard it was to be an explorer 100 years ago.

Oh my gosh, who, who drew the short straw on that one?

Well, exactly, the short straw. This is exactly what we're talking about, you know. For us, it's, you know, when you see somebody in leather shoes, bamboo poles, wooden skis, um, tweed trousers, woolly pulley jumper. You know, you look at the difference and you go, well, obviously, um, branding, science and materials, engineering, um, diet, all of that stuff, lightweight space tech, the modern stuff is going to be much better. Carbon fiber poles, wooden poles, all that, of course that's going to be better, right? And then you look at the data and you're like, holy shit, like half of the stuff we're wearing, the old stuff, is better than modern stuff. You start understanding why that is, and that's because the knowledge of how to operate, wear, and use that old woolly pulley, leather shoes, bamboo poles, all of that stuff 100 years ago is now lost. So it's understanding the limitations. And yes, say 0 degrees to -10, you have one layer of woolly pulley. -10 to -15, you've got to put another shirt on. Anything, you know, there's those stages. Whereas these days you can buy a £1,000 down jacket that takes you from from -5 to -40 fairly comfortably. So it's just understanding how your kit works, but also it works for a reason. Yeah, we've all got grandparents who've worn woolly pulleys in the garden or walking the dog. You know, there's method behind that madness. It does work. And this is what we love about these, um, experiments that we do, whether it's in the gym with the 12 weeks or whether it's out in the field on expeditions, is you know, you look at it side by side and people laugh and they're like, oh, who drew the short straw? I'd probably say modern only just gets the short straw, but it is the short straw. And we've gone on to do other expeditions in other environments where we've done old versus new. Um, and this is where we're trying to develop a bit of a TV idea, is going off into this, these different environments. You know, could this person have survived if they'd had old stuff, or would it be more beneficial have new stuff and all that stuff. So—

That is a great idea for a show. I would watch that. And then, part of this reminds me, a lot of it probably comes down to grit, perseverance, and the possibility that humans in the past might have been a little bit harder, so to speak, just based on lifestyle being more physically demanding. I think about back to Ironman, not to kick that horse to death, but Dave Scott, Mike Allen, these guys were riding old heavy steel bikes and yet laying down bike times in the Ironman that are comparable to what probably 90% of the field on these super tricked-out carbon fiber electronic shifters are doing because these guys just, they trained hard and worked hard and so they could get by on just pure heavy steel.

Yeah. And again, we question it, why do people when they train go and buy a super lightweight carbon bike, use your old one because surely that's going to make it harder, right?

Yeah. And, plus, you could probably be better spending that money on supplement and diet, lose 4 pounds and get all that money back that you spent on the lighter bike.

Yeah. It's really once we get into the idea of questioning it and just maybe pushing against the status quo of what somebody said or what just is the norm. For us, why don't you wear some heavier clothing? Why don't you cycle a heavy steel bike? Why don't you go and, dare I say, wear a t-shirt swimming just to make it that little bit more resistive? Make it hard for you training. And then, when you get to the start line, go and wear something super lightweight, super slippery, go and ride a bicycle that's 1 kilo.

Yeah, it's so true. My trick was I used to train with the same bike because the biomechanics are important. But I'd use an old crappy set of non-aerodynamic wheels and tires that weren't as inflated as the ones I'd use on race day. And, even that made a big difference. Once I got the race wheels on, it felt like a whole different animal. So, that's a really good point. And, how about anything crazy you guys have planned in the next few months here? Yeah.

There's a project we're planning this year which is focusing again on battery electric technology, which is to set the altitude world record with an electric paramotor above the French Alps. So we're going to go and have some fun, test some technology, look at the performance of battery technology within the aviation space. We've got another project planned, I think, in South America, which is to— which aims to set the altitude world record with an electric off-roader. And yeah, at the moment we're looking at balancing our time between experimenting and testing with new emerging technologies, and particularly battery technology. I'm sure we've probably got another hydrogen fuel cell expedition project in the, in the pipelines, as well as, um, looking at probably another physical fitness comparison. And, I think we're probably going to go down the high-fat, high-carb, but it'd be interesting if your listeners have any thoughts and ideas on what our next experiment should be.

That's a great idea.

Unleash the beast. You guys, if you're listening in, the show notes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/TurnerTwins. Go there, give us some ideas, leave your questions and your comments and your feedback for Ross and Hugo. Give them some ideas. I don't know, climbing Everest naked versus clothed or swimming with the sharks versus swimming with the goldfish. You name it, just throw your ideas out there. And, their website, by the way, is turnertwins.co.uk. Even just the 4 experiments we talked about, the high volume, low volume, the body weight versus weighted, the animal versus the plant protein, and the omnivore versus the vegan, those are incredible reads on their own. So, I'll link to all those in the show notes. Guys, this has been incredible. You're an inspiration and I'll be watching you from afar and rooting for you on your next adventure and in your next experiment too to see who gets the pizza and the pasta and the bread and who gets stuck with, I don't know, macadamia nuts.

Well, it's funny you say that. These are all experiments and ideas. What are they saying? Isotonic drinks versus a beer. For rehydration. There's method in the madness. They do say that a beer is just as good.

It is actually. You're right. Potentially some diminishing returns once you get to a certain amount of beer, but yeah, you're right. Some of the things you find, they're just crazy. I used to do a lot of writing for different fitness magazines and training magazines, so I was always finding these strange examples. And, I still love it when I stumble across guys like you who are up to this stuff. So, guys, thank you so much. For everybody listening in, again, it's bengreenfieldlife.com/turnertwins. Ross, Hugo, go get some sleep, guys. Thank you very much. Thank you. Alright. Alright, I'll talk to you guys later. Folks, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Ross and Hugo, the Turner Twins, signing out from Ben Greenfield Life.

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