Fit and Healthy with Dan Miller

Foreign.

Tribathlon Podcast Finding out how ordinary people do extraordinary things.

The very same products that are being sold to athletes around the world is too heavily processed to give to the team with the logo on the back.

That's Dan Miller and this episode is Fit and Healthy. I first saw Dan Miller speak at my Vistage Group, which is an executive coaching organization where he taught us about how we could be healthy entrepreneurs. He's an award winning speaker with an incredible knowledge of the difference between being fit and being healthy. And he's also an experienced martial artist and world record holder at an endurance event. So I wanted to chat to Dan in this episode about how we can improve our performance and our health through our diet. Well as whether supplements are a complete waste of money or they're the key to our long term success. I wanted to explore what mistakes we make with regards to our health and the tactics we can use to be the best we can possibly be, to be in the best shape we can possibly be in, whether that's for sport or for life. Because there is a massive difference between being fit and being healthy. So I know you're going to take loads out of this chat with Dan Miller.

Foreign.

This podcast is brought to you by Brits Superfood. Now I've been a big advocate of wheatgrass for many years, but I only in the last year or so switched to having fresh wheatgrass that's then frozen as opposed to the powdered stuff and I found that to improve my health even more. Now I've been a big advocate of wheatgrass because I know it's kept me fit and healthy because when I've had spells where I've stopped taking it, I I've started picking up the bugs and colds and things like that again, which I never seem to get when I'm taking wheatgrass. I know it improves my immune system, my health, but also it gives me more energy and faster recovery. So loads of health benefits of taking wheatgrass. But Brits is field grown, organic, freshly frozen and they also do a load of amazing juices as well so that you can combine the two like the beetroot ones. You can have your nitrates before or after an event. You can find out more@britsuperfoods.co.uk but at the end of this podcast I'm going to give you a discount code or a referral code that will give you loads of benefits. So a discount, some free products, some free shipping, but they also have, which is worth just mentioning here, 110%, 30 day money back guarantee. So if you're not feeling better having taken this for 30 days, they'll give you your money back and an extra 10%, which is absolutely bonkers. But that's how confident they are on the health benefits that you will see as a result of taking wheatgrass just for 30 days. So anyway, hang on to the end of this podcast and I'll give you a great discount code. This podcast is also brought to you by the Tribeathlon app, the app that helps you find events to compete in, people to train with, also to know which events your friends are entering. You can download the app from tribeathlon.com so you can get training and get competing in a more fun and more easy way. So, Dan, welcome to the tribeathlon podcast. Having seen you speak as part of my Vistage group. Well, I said to you before we started this, I've got a longer list of questions for you than I've had for anybody else that I've interviewed on this podcast. So thank you so much for joining me. I can't wait to chat to you over the course of the next hour or so. So let's kick things off for those people that don't know Dan Miller, do you want to tell us a bit about your story? Tell us where you've come from, what you're doing, and why you're, you know, renowned in the speaking world, and why I've sort of stumbled across you as a result of that?

Yeah, well, so I started, let's go way back to where I evolved. My evolution occurred primarily in North Dakota. And for global listeners that have no idea where that is, that's what we call south to Canada. That's why you'll hear a little bit of that Winnipeg accent coming out of me. So I grew up in North Dakota. I spent 47 years of my life in the capital city of North Dakota. And then I started migrating further south to Colorado Springs for a year and a half and then even further south to Nevada. And I currently live in Searchlight, Nevada. I've got a hundred acre ranch out here and it's nice and quiet and peaceful and it's a great place to be outside and the weather is always great. Yeah, so I was the nerdy kid in school, always getting picked on, always got straight A's without trying that hard. And some people are rolling their eyes at me right now, but that's just the way my brain worked. And that doesn't work out so well when you're in North Dakota and you're 12 years old. Because it's a really good way to get picked on when you're the little guy. So at 12 years old I started martial arts so that I wouldn't get picked on anymore. And that worked out fairly well. Started competing when I was 13. When I was 17, I went to do some initial tryouts for the Junior Olympic taekwondo team. Did not fare that well and that's a good thing. So while I was good in my state, I wasn't good enough to do anything beyond that. And I like that because I look at this now at 50 and go, well, I hate getting hit in the head, so I'm glad it went that way. Cause I don't like getting so I've been a competitive athlete all through my teens. Graduated valedictorian of my high school. I finished my first year and a half, two years of college while I was in high school and then went off to be an organic chemist at North Dakota State University. Never finished that degree, but I still have that science mind. I just had a couple of years to finish, but then I ended up leaving and going back and hanging out with my mother and brother. My mom was homeless for a period of time after my dad left and then I just didn't go back to school for another almost a decade. And when I went back I didn't think organic chemistry was marketable. Not that I wasn't interested, I just didn't think it was marketable enough for me. So I went back and finished my undergrad in business management and then went on to get three master's degrees on top of that, all before I was 40 and all in business. So I'm a science minded human with business degrees, which is a little odd. Stopped competing in any kind of martial arts when I was 25. Still interested in being competitive. Didn't really do anything competitive until I was, oh gosh, this is early 30s. And then I decided I was the fitness manager at a sporting goods retailer and I was in charge of buying the treadmills and helping sell the treadmills in this sporting goods store. And I read a catalog that said Paul Shields from the UK broke a world record on this treadmill that they were selling. And I thought, well, that distance doesn't look that far. I could do that. I had been a runner for three months and I thought, oh, I can break a world record. This guy did it. Which was a silly thing to think, but there was also the mentality in me that was trained by old world Korean martial artists that said if one person can do it Another person can do it, they just need to figure out how. Well, I looked at a world record on a treadmill and thought the how is easy. It's just left foot, right foot, and then you repeat that a couple hundred thousand times and you've got a world record. But I didn't realize all the nuances behind that. Right. And what it really takes. And that even an event, you know, 100 miler plus or even a 50 mile or plus, those races aren't physical, they're all mental. So 18 years ago I got on a treadmill and refused to get off for 48 straight hours. I would step off, hit the pause button just enough to use the bathroom and get back on and move. And I ended up breaking the world record on a treadmill for distance in a 48 hour timeframe. This was 18 years ago, before ultra running was cool. People were still doing it. It just wasn't. There was no Facebook, there was no Instagram, so it wasn't as trendy and cool as it is now. That record went back over to Europe in just, just under a year and I did not go back and try to reclaim that. So my ultra running career officially ended in after a world record. And then I've done a couple long runs since. But now at 50, it's, you know, if I go 10 miles, I'm good. I am totally fine with that. So that kind of brings us to where we are now. I started teaching health, wellness, nutrition, longevity and basic human evolution and why our programming doesn't match our new environment. I started teaching that about eight years ago and that came from watching my dad's death. He died at 56. He died with tears in his eyes. He was dying of lung cancer and that comes from 30 years of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day and drinking like a raging alcoholic every day of your life. And I watched my mom's health declining and I thought, I love to teach because I have been teaching martial arts for quite a while and I thought maybe there is something better I could do. So about eight years ago, I embarked on the journey of teaching people how to live better longer in the short little time they have in their bodies. And that kind of brings us to today. I love what I do. I am passionate about it. I don't want people to die early. I think we could be doing a lot better as a society and I'm going to do everything I can to teach as many people. Listen.

Fantastic. When I saw you speak as part of my Vistage group and I think you Were you were rated as. I mean, vistage attracts a lot of amazing speakers and I think you won the top speaker of the year. Was it last year? Is that right?

Two years ago? 20 years ago?

Was it amazing? And I could see why, because I got to the end of it. I mean, I'm somebody that, that loves, you know, kind of digging into the nutrition side of things and, and there was so much that I wanted to ask. But I could also see the impact you were having on the other people in my vistage group that perhaps didn't read as much on this sort of stuff. And there was, there was a lot of light bulb moments for them. So I'm really keen to dive into this. I suppose the place I'd like to start is for knowing what you know about the endurance world. What do you think that the kind of typical age grouper should be thinking out, thinking about and focusing on when it comes to their nutrition? I'm going to leave that as a fairly open question because I quite like the idea of you sort of focusing on where you think we should be, you know, what we should be thinking about.

Yeah, well, I think so. If I look at an amateur endurance athlete, I think one of the big mistakes that most of them make is the same one I made when it comes to nutrition. It's just food is fuel and that's the end of it. There's no discussion beyond food being fuel. So a carb is a carb is a carb as long as you're getting carbs. Fat is fat is fat as long as you're getting fat. And there's very little discussion. Now, this is different in the pro athletes that have specific coaches for this because there's some greater recognition here. But we don't. We look at food as fuel when we're trying to fuel ourselves to a competitive state. But we forget that food is also above and beyond fuel. Food is information to our genetic code about what's going on in the environment. And food is also raw materials for us to build new cells. And if the raw materials are not present and if the information is what I would consider bad information about the environment, we will have genetic changes, epigenetic changes, genetic expression that is not conducive to not only long life, but a more active and faster recovery state. So I think that that's where the big thing, the big disconnect happens with food and endurance athletes specifically is I can eat whatever I want. I'm going to go work it off later.

And I see a lot of that, you know, I see it with, with the whole endurance world. Yes, there's a, you know, you can eat whatever you like because you're going to burn it off. But so where, what should people be focusing on to try and understand how they should be, you know, how they should be eating better, for example?

Yeah. Well, this is. So it's the same for endurance athletes as it would be for any human. It goes back to what are you programmed to eat? Right. So if we look at human programming and the human being as a species, if we look at genetic research and some of the geneticists and talk to them about how long does it take humans as a species to adapt to environmental changes, you'll find numbers ranging between 20,000 and a million years. So for human DNA to fully adapt species adaptation to an environmental shift, including a food environment or a blue light environment, or a TV environment or an information environment, what I call modern society, we need a minimum of 20,000 years all the way out to some parts of our genetics will take about a million years to adapt the food that we're eating today. And I can go anywhere from honey stingers to Clif bars to every piece of nonsense in between those we might not be ready for at the genetic level. And so we have to start asking from a food perspective, what would have we eaten 3,000 years ago, whether we're doing an endurance event or not. What if we, if I step outside where I live right now, what would have been on the menu a couple thousand years ago? That's probably going to be the best thing for me to be eating now. And that changes seasonally, especially in a place like the uk, right? You're not going to find any fruit outside right now at all. You're going to find more fatty fish, you're going to find more fatty animals that you could hunt. You might find some root vegetables yet. You might find some nuts and seeds maybe, right? So your diet should shift seasonally based on where you live, not where you're from. I can't ask you to eat like your ancestors. If you're from Tonga and you move to Iceland, you're not going to find coconuts up there. So you can't eat the same based on where you're from. You need to consider, where do you live now? If I stepped outside with none of modern society, what would be available to eat? And try to eat as close to that as possible. And then we look at caloric intake from there, right? If you're going to burn 3,000, 4,000 calories on your ride today. I need to make sure that I'm supplementing your food with that. Enough calories from the food you could find on the ground. Living on the planet, growing out of the ground. Plants and animals, your choice. I would suggest more animals in the wintertime. That's just how it would have been thousands of years ago.

So that's interesting, isn't it? So thinking about that, is it any particular type of animals? So you're obviously not telling everybody that they should be vegetarian. It sounds like you're saying a nice balance is the best way forward. Is there a particular type of meat that they should be looking to?

Yeah. So this gets conflated a lot depending on who you're listening to.

Right.

So if you, if you watch certain documentaries or if you listen to certain scientists, or if you talk to certain individuals that have a dogmatic approach to nutrition, they will say absolutely, never eat red meat. The question I always ask is what red meat are you referring to? Right. Are you referring to the cow that I get at the fast food place that's surrounded by a wheat bun and some french fries? Or are you referring to an elk that I hunted myself? Because elk would also be red meat in this situation. So what red meat? That's always the question. So for me, I don't care what people eat as long as it's plants, animals. If they choose not to eat animals, that's on them. If they want to go full vegan or full vegetarian, go for it. But you're going to have to consider some nutrient deficiencies that you will have to make up through supplementation. If you are going that route. There are just some nutrients we are horrible at finding in plants that are available in animals. So you will need to consider supplementing. But I don't look at my vegan clients and friends and my vegetarian friends as doing anything bad because I understand where some of that motivation might come for me. I eat a lot of red meat, I eat a lot of cow. But the cow that we buy is pasture raised, grass fed, grass finished, and they slaughter in a very humane way. And it's from a sustainable ranch where it's a zero carbon footprint. Actually, their animals have a negative carbon footprint because they do sustainable agriculture. So we buy really, really high quality meats or go hunt it ourselves. One of those two. And there are no studies saying that those meats are bad for me. There just aren't that studies. Most of the studies saying that meat is horrible for us are epidemiological studies that have been done through Surveying people rather than hard metabolic studies done in a metabolic ward showing that this food is not good versus this food. So I just ask that people get away from deep fried foods, foods made with heavy amounts of grain, added vegetable oils, some of the added fats. Just get away from anything with an ingredient list. And if you stick with foods that don't have an ingredient list, say plants or animals, and make it that simple, any plant, any animal, any combination you want, then you've got a good raw material profile, you've got a good information profile, and then you just fuel accordingly and you shove as much in as you need to to fuel your endurance event. If somebody's saying I need slower burning carbohydrates, I'm going to reach for pasta. Any of the potatoes are a way better source than pasta. More information, more raw materials, better for your body than a pasta would be. Especially if we put them in the fridge overnight, reheat them, then we've got an even slower burning carbohydrate than just eating them right out of the oven.

So that's, so that's interesting. So I was expecting you to say that all white starchy products are, are bad. That should be ignored. But past. So if we're carb loading before an event and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on carb loading, you're saying potatoes would be a better route to achieving that than using something like pasta.

Absolutely. And I don't carb load for any event and I don't have my athletes carb load for events. You'd really have to start doing that a week prior to make sure your glycogen levels are high enough. And you can only store so much. So once your glycogen levels are full, you're not going to store anymore. If I prep two weeks prior, I don't need to overload my body the day or two days before and have this big gigantic thing hanging around in my gut that I need to deal with because I ate too much. I have a really hard time in modern society with any kind of pasta or bread just because those are carbohydrates with very little nutritional value. In most cases they have been. They're so far removed from what nature intended them to be that they're worth nothing from nutritional value. And there's where I go back to athletes, specifically endurance athletes tend to choose whatever's got fuel and they're not considering raw materials. And if you don't consider the raw materials of vitamins, minerals, the salts, all of the Other micronutrients, your muscle recovery is not going to be the same. Your performance is not going to be the same. Because in order to perform you need much more than just the fuel source source. You need a lot of these micronutrients and co factors to produce some of the energy sources that you're going to need for that event. We can do a lot better.

And so coming on to the micronutrients, then how do we assess what micronutrients? Is there any kind of a standard range of micronutrients you would be saying we should be taking to supplement a normal diet? Or how would you approach knowing what to take? Because the supplement world is a. Well, it's a good sales world, isn't it?

It's a dicey world. We could get into supplements and how that's really dicey because there's no oversight. In most countries, supplements have no oversight whatsoever. So I can sell you whatever I want to call it a vitamin and good luck to you. I hope you buy two of them because there's no vitamins in it and there's nobody watching. Especially here in the United States. It is just the Wild West. So when it comes to I like to just give myself a little bit of insurance there. I take a whole food multivitamin supplement. And what I mean by whole food is that it's just freeze dried foods in a capsule that I take for my micronutrients to make sure I have enough. That way I know I've got my micronutrients covered. And if I'm, let's say I'm eating too much of one color food or too much meats and not enough vegetables or where I might be missing some, I might be having some micronutrient gaps. I know I've got myself covered with my micronutrients because I'm taking the whole food vitamin supplement. In addition to eating only plants and animals, some people will take the whole food vitamin supplement and then go, well, I can eat whatever I want now. And that's why you see a lot of the studies and there's a very, very important one that shows multivitamin takers have a higher mortality rate than those that don't take a multivitamin and simply might be because that's exactly what's happening. I take my vitamin and go eat whatever I want because I have my vitamin. So what I always encourage people to understand is it's your daily actions and it's your program that sets your health. The vitamin supplements or any other supplements are in addition to and designed to support your daily efforts, not replace your daily efforts.

So would something like that then replace the need for taking something like Omega 3? I'd be interested to hear your belief on the Omega 3 to 6 ratio. And is that solved by the kind of whole food nutrient approach?

Well, so you can, right. If you're eating enough fatty animals, that's where you're going to get most your omega 3s. You can get a little bit of a really good Omega 3 mix from things like hemp and flax if you're into the seed families at all. But so I choose to supplement with additional omega 3s as well just to make sure omega threes are very anti inflammatory. Your body uses a lot of omega 3s and omega 6s for different hormone production. Different. Even some of the cannabinoids that are produced in our own body use a matrix of some of those fats. So it's important for us to have enough fat not only for our nervous system but for muscle recovery and for some of our energy production and for anti inflammatory effects. So when I look at my diet, the meat that we eat is very anti inflammatory because it's never been fed grain. So that animal will have a fatty acid profile that's very, very similar to what you'd find in the wild. So very similar to elk, very similar to what you might even find from wild caught salmon or some of the other cold water fish that we find in the wild. So even though I'm eating super clean, I still put some additional omega 3s in my body just for the extra insurance.

Brilliant. And so what for those people that haven't read up much about omega, I know you said it's omega 3 is antifa inflammatory, but why should people take their omega 3 levels really seriously?

Well, it's because the main thing is the inflammation. Inflammation and I mean systemic inflammation. So when we look at, it's hard for us to picture how many systems are working in conjunction with one another in the body. I mean we probably, if you remember all the way back to middle school when you were learning the human bodily systems, you learned about the skeletal system and the circulatory system and the endocrine system and the digestive system. There's. So you learned about 11 systems, there's a 12th system called the endogenous cannabinoid system that's also active, that acts as a puppet master for all of the other systems. All of those systems are going to rely on not having a lot of inflammation. Inflammation is a horrible Thing, especially if it's systemic. And there's simple blood tests we can test for when looking for this. But the more fatty acids you have that are omega 6, the more inflammation you will tend to have. And if we look at heavily processed meats and heavily processed foods, they typically have a higher omega 6 content than omega 3. In the US it's about a 20:1 ratio in most Americans diets, meaning 20 omega 6 is to 1 omega 3. And that ratio should be closer to 2 or 3 to 1, not 20 to 1. So we're eating the wrong foods, heavily processed vegetable oils and everything which are very inflammatory. So when somebody in the US is eating that kind of a diet and they're told take an Omega 3 supplement, they adjust that ratio and that lowers inflammation. What would be better to tell those people is take an Omega 3 supplement and stop eating garbage. And then you can adjust that ratio even further. And with reduced inflammation, we see everything from a better functioning brain, faster muscle recovery, less joint pain, better mood, you name it. You've got all kinds of things that go along with lowering inflammation. That's the primary reason it's good for the heart, it's good for the vascular system, it's good for conditions like certain arthritis. It's super important for your brain because the majority of your brain and the myelin sheath around your neurons are made up of a fatty acid.

Fantastic. Thank you for explaining that. And you mentioned about the importance of what the meat that you're eating has eaten. And this took me back to reading the plant paradox by Dr. Stephen Grundy. And he talks a lot about you eat your or you are what you ate ate. I think that's how he says it. So. And I'd never really thought about that in terms of, you know, he was finding that people that had a gluten intolerance were having gluten issues even though they didn't think they were eating any gluten, but they were eating chicken that was, that had been eating gluten. How so you mentioned about grass fed beef, how, you know, how else can you approach your diet to ensure that you're kind of not falling foul of things like that?

Well, so here's what I always tell people. It's a quiz, right? So what do they call organic food in Guatemala?

All food.

I should think they call it food. Some countries, there is not a word for organic because they don't spray nonsense on their food, they just grow food. Right. So in my society here in the US and where you're at In Europe, we have to start paying attention to where we're spending our money on food because that's how we're voting every day. So every day is a chance to vote. Are you going to vote for more pesticides because it's cheaper or are you going to spend a little bit more money on organic when it comes to plants? Because it might be a little bit more money, but you are voting for less pesticides on the planet? Every time we buy organic, if we can afford it, we are asking the organic producers to make more of their product, thus increasing their market share and hopefully lowering prices over time for those that might not be able to afford it. Every time we do that, we're starving out those people that produce foods with pesticides sprayed on them. This is what I ask folks to do if they are able to always buy organic, buy the highest quality, least pesticide sprayed food you can possibly buy. When it comes to plants and then when it comes to animals, you look for the buzzwords that you would expect to be healthier, right? Some of these mean nothing, right? Like a, like a cage free chicken means nothing. That means, that means that they open a door on the outside of the warehouses for 15 minutes twice a day. But these chickens are still living a horrible life, fed heavy amounts of grain. We just think cage free means they're cage free and it's still not a good treated bird. So what we look for, and I tend to have a personal relationship with where I get my meat. I know John at Grassland Beef, he's a dear friend and love that man to death. All of the animals that are produced out of that place have been treated with dignity and respect. So it's good to have a good relationship with who's providing your meat or go get it yourself. I mean, if you were to go hunt a deer right now, you'd know how that deer died. Because you were the one that took its life. You have a closer relationship with that animal. And, and you know what? That deer was just doing deer things its whole life. Whatever deer do, whatever deer eat, it wasn't in a feedlot. It wasn't tortured, it wasn't taken away from its family at birth. So a lot of what we try to do with the meat we eat is the same thing that my vegan and vegetarian friends are trying to do. Create less suffering. Just make sure that you get a humanely treated, pastured animal that is fed and eaten its whole life, a native diet. Cows do not eat grain in nature. They never have. They eat grain when we Feed them grain, corn and wheat into a cow will make it fat very quickly. That is what cows are typically fed at the end of their life. I know that is what happens here in the US I choose not to buy into that industry. We get our cows from somebody who has fed them grass their whole life, let them grass, graze themselves in the pasture, then humanely slaughter them. So they're not going to a slaughterhouse being tortured at the end of their life. We do the best we can. Right. If I'm buying fish at the store, I'm not going for farm raised. I'm going for wild caught, sustainably harvested. I'm going to spend the extra money on the product that was harvested from its most natural environment.

Well, speaking as a farmer's son, I massively endorse what you're saying there.

That's.

That's really good advice. When I started, so to kind of explain a little bit about why I was so interested in this subject, I did unleash the power within the Tony Robbins event eight years ago. And I, you know, went to that three stone heavier than I am today and just left with this, you know, absolute determination to change my approach to health. That's what got me into eating. And eating far healthier than I was at the time. Drinking less. Then that led on to exercise. Then that's kind of gone crazy and out of hand and is now, you know, Ironman's and the like. So. So that kind of sparked my interest and then. But when I got into the endurance world, I found this big conflict because all of the energy bars and energy gels and the things that I was told that I needed to consumed to allow me to cycle 100 miles or whatever it was at the time. And I'd look at the ingredients and it looked like some chemistry experiment because I didn't know any of the names that were on the back of it. I'd be really interested to know. So having done more of these podcasts on this subject, I know that, I know that maltodextrin is a particular common ingredient in a lot of the energy gels. Where do you stand on.

The kind.

Of mainstream energy products and how do you think people should fuel their endurance activities in a healthy way?

Yeah. So anytime we're looking at an endurance event, especially 50 plus miles, anything longer than that, we're going to have to look at. If you're running it fast, right. If I'm going slow and just kind of taking my time to push through it, if I'm deep into Nutritional ketosis. I don't need to eat at all. I don't need fuel if I have some body fat and I'm deep into ketosis because my body's just eating its own body fat. And that is a very sustainable fuel source. 3,500 calories per pound. I can get a lot of running in if I'm bursting, if I'm trying to do any kind of speed work in there, I'm not going to do very well if I'm choosing to fuel in a ketosis state. So most people will be burning a mix of fat and sugar through their endurance events. And it's that sugar that is being sold to those folks in those gels, packets and wafers and bars. They're heavy amounts of carbohydrates, most of them severely processed Maltodextrin. Because it's a very, very slow burning prebiotic type fiber. It breaks down very, very slowly, if at all, and is used usually as a thickening agent. But here's my advice. The less ingredients, the better. If you can pronounce them, you're doing better. I know there's things out there like fat fudge is a fantastic little packet that you can take with you. It's a minimally processed food, maybe not sold specifically in a lot of those. And that's fat with a ph. So fat fudge maybe not sold specifically in the endurance world, but a good option for that. So I just say look, the least amount of ingredients the better. If you want some solid sugar, find one of the smashed dried fruit roll up type products that don't have sugar added, right? Just a bunch of dried, smushed up fruit in a wafer or a strip or a roll up or whatever that's going to give you lots of sugar. If you're looking for sugar, some of that slower burning stuff you should have been eating the last two weeks anyway just to build up some of that glycogen. But for those instant boost sugars, that fruit are always the best option there. I know a lot of folks are going towards honey. I fully support a lot of the folks that are using honey based products as well. Honey is a much more natural sugar. If you can get a little wax mixed in there and just chew on some raw honeycomb, even better. Because then you've got the chewing that goes along with that liquid sugar. Anyway. The fewer ingredients the better. If you're using something that you. I mean, I won't name the names of any of these bars but. But let me tell you, I talked to a cyclist who was on a protein for one of the nutritional bars and they would have a Sunday feed every Sunday after their Sunday ride and the team would eat together and there was never any of the nutritional bars on the table. So she looked at the, at the CEO of the company and said, how come your bars are never here for our Sunday feeds? And he said, those are way too processed for me to feed my athletes. The very same products that are being sold to athletes around the world is too heavily processed to give to the team with the logo on the back. It just didn't make any sense to me. But that was a really good awakening for me to go, wait a minute, this is all just about selling stuff and there is a better way to do it. So there are some super clean nut butters out there that are fantastic sources of energy that folks can go look for. Depending on what region they're in, they might not be able to find it. But that's the magic of the Internet. You can get just about anything.

Well, the nut butter world seems to have come on leaps and bounds in recent years. Certainly in the UK we actually had a nut butter called Piper Nut sponsoring a few of our podcasts. And, you know, no palm oil, just really good quality products. And yeah, I can agree with that. You mentioned using fruit to fuel and I remember when I heard you talk about a talk at the Vistage Group that you were really anti fruit juices. You basically put Coca cola and orange juice in this in the same bracket as far as I could see. Talk me that I left that talk slightly confused about that. Tell me why a fruit juice is so bad but fruit is good.

Well, so it might not be necessarily bad except your liver and your pancreas aren't going to like it so much. So when we look at sugar in nature, it's important for us to realize that all sugar found in nature for humans is chewable and always has been. And that's the key. It's not that fruit is bad. It's when you throw away the fiber and you just drink it without the chewing. You're doing a disservice to your liver and your pancreas. And you can see this. It's easy to measure. You just put any way to measure glucose. You can stick your finger every half an hour or you can just put a continuous glucose monitor on the back of your arm and see the difference in your sugar, in your blood sugar when you drink juice versus when you eat the equivalent amount of that fruit. Let's say it's orange juice for an example. The average glass of orange juice has about six oranges worth of juice in it. All right, so six oranges. I would like to watch you eat six oranges and see how long that takes. And then I'm going to leave because I don't want to see what happens next because of all of the fiber. It's going to cause a huge problem. So nature's way to slow anyone down from eating too much sugar is add some fiber, throw some water in there, and then make you chew it. And the chewing is where the magic happens for us humans because we have an enzyme in the saliva called amylase. And amylase only serves one function, and that's to break down sugar. So the more we chew, the more saliva, the more saliva, the more amylase, the more we break down that sugar. And the chewing and the sugar go hand in hand. And nature's done all the math, right? If I pick a low glycemic fruit like a raspberry, you don't have to chew a raspberry very much, but it's also quite low sugar, considering. Compare that to say, a very, very high sugar vegetable like a beet or a carrot. Lots of sugar in those. How much do you have to chew a beet and a carrot?

A lot.

A lot, right. And how much fiber is in those? A lot. And there's also a little bit of water. So the things that we look at in nature for the cues to stop us from consuming too much sugar, fiber, water and chewing are how those calories kind of self regulate. You're not going to over consume sugar from carrots because of the fiber in the church chewing. That going to over consume sugar from oranges because of the fiber in the water. Right. You might not be the chewing that wears you out there, but the fiber in the water will soon catch up to you and you'll say this was a bad idea and you'll never do it again. If I juice those things, I can drink the sugar from 12 different fruits and vegetables in less than 10 minutes. And that's just. It's a good way to get micronutrients in very quickly, but not good long term for the pancreas and the liver. And those two organs are the ones that you have to make sure last to 100 years as well. So it's not just looking for, I need sugar and I need it now. Well, then a juice is going to be great. If you're having a hypoglycemic reaction, get some juice in your body. But if you're trying to spare your liver and your pancreas to make sure they last to well over 100 years just like the rest of your body, it's probably not a good idea to do that on a regular basis.

And so the same would apply for smoothies then, would it? Yep. So that's. Yeah. Okay, so that's, that's really interesting. I hadn't picked up on that being the reasons because I left thinking, well, is my breakfast smoothie with some protein, with some vegan protein in there as bad as, as a, as a glass of orange juice? But it sounds like it is.

Well, so you mentioned something very important there, because this is the one thing we can do if we're drinking a smoothie to slow that sugar down. Add a bunch of fats, good healthy omega 3s, and add some protein. Those are all going to help balance out that reaction. Protein and carbohydrates tend to have different reactions in your body, and some fat will slow that metabolic rate down so it won't hit your pancreas as hard. And again, people can test this whenever they choose to drink your smoothie. If you have a continuous glucose monitor on your arm, you can see that curve and watch how high it gets versus the same thing from a glass of orange juice. And then you can take all that data and compare it to just eating that appropriate amount of foods and see how that differs. One of the things people will find right away is that it takes me much, much longer to eat the food that's vitally important. That's the way it was supposed to be. It's only in our modern society, in the last, what, how many, not even 100 years, that we started to blend and drink things like that in large scale, especially in the last 30 years, this has become a huge thing. Blend it and drink it, because you're on the go quickly. I don't know if that's always the best idea. Certainly a good way to get protein and some other nutrients in quickly, but I don't know if it's the best idea. I think it, the closer you can stay to the way we did it a couple thousand years ago, the better.

So in that case, would you, would you avoid all sort of protein powders, whey protein, vegan or hemp protein, or do you think some are worthwhile and have their functions?

No, I think that's, that's a good distinction. I would avoid that with sugar because of the amylase and the chewing, but with protein and fat, I don't you know, unless you're drinking too much fat, you can again have some severe GI upset. But I don't see that with protein shakes at all. I think that's a really good way for people to fill in those gaps. A really good way for athletes to provide their body with very fast usable protein after a workout so they can get on track for muscle recovery. And if there's a little bit of carbohydrates in there, we're going to be fine. Right. It's when we start pushing that anything past 10 grams of protein in that serving that we start maybe running into issues to depending on how much protein is in there, more than 10 grams of carbohydrates rather are in that. I get kind of dicey if the carbohydrates go over 10. So, you know, we can metabolize protein much, much differently in a liquid form than we can sugar. So I don't mind the protein shakes at all. As a matter of fact, I tell my clients, if real food isn't available and you're hungry, make sure you have an on the go protein shake available.

And do you have a preference as to whether it's whey or. Or plant based?

Well, again, so if we look at absorbability, if I'm dealing with the pro athlete, I'm going to go for the most bioavailable protein I can find. For the average person, I'm not. And the reason for that is it doesn't matter. It really doesn't. You're not getting paid to do this. You're not trying to shave microseconds off of your time. It really doesn't matter if your bioavailability is at 70% or 90%. It really doesn't. In that respect, I tend to lean towards hemp as a source for protein because it is one of the most complete protein sources ever found in a plant. It also, if we can maintain some of the healthy fats in that plant, we can also get a really nice Omega 3 kick from the same thing that's given us our protein. And hemp is a very sustainable carbon negative plant for the planet. It's a really good thing for us to be growing more of. Whereas whey protein, again, high bioavailability, good for somebody. I'm going to use a really quality hydrolyzed whey protein for my athletes, but I don't want to play into that farmed animal world if that makes sense when I'm dealing with just the average population of people. If I'm dealing with somebody who's not a professional athlete and they're an amateur athlete and they're just going for a really good time or to beat their own primary. Pick a protein as long as it's a good healthy one. Right. I stay away from soy and I try to stay away from most animal based proteins. For those folks, hemp is a much better plant to lean into there.

Brilliant. And actually the reason I started using hemp protein was because of Steven Grundy from again from Plant Paradox. Because a lot of the plant based proteins he's not, not keen on because of the lectins. So that's nice to hear. One of the other things that came out of Unleash the Power within for me was this was my first introduction to wheatgrass. So I started taking my omega threes and started taking wheatgrass regularly. And I was the sort of person that probably got a cold or a flu or something like once or twice a year at that point. And I noticed as time went on, in fact five years went on and I hadn't had one ailment at all. And then I started to question, well, is that just because I'm eating? You know, my whole diet is a lot cleaner. So I stopped having the wheat grass and the Omega 3 and over the course of the next couple of years I picked up a couple of bugs again. And since switching back to having wheatgrass and my omega threes again, not, not a bug at all. So I'd be interested to know, we've really talked about the omegas. What are your thoughts on wheatgrass and supplements similar to that? Like for example, spirulina?

Yeah, again, those are that when we look at that, that boils down to good raw materials. Right. When your body has enough raw materials to do its own job, sickness is very rare. And all you're doing with wheatgrass or spirulina or any of the other products that are similar to that, you're putting a lot of extra antioxidants and micronutrients in your body, antioxidants being some of those. The micronutrients are helping your body do exactly what your body needs to do. For us to get the flu seasonally isn't normal. It is not normal for that to roll through us. I haven't been sick in eight years. It is not an accident that I'm never sick. It is very intentional because of the way I treat my body. Good raw materials in lots of antifragile activity, which I know you're going to ask me about later. And then I'M just not sick. And it's not that I'm lucky and it's not that I have good genetics. It's that I'm treating my body with dignity and respect through considering raw materials on a daily basis. What am I putting in and how can I make sure that it's enough for my body to do what it needs to do. That support is really essential for our body. One of the big, big things that are missing when we look at micronutrient discussions in most modern diets is vitamin D. We are not doing well. And if you look at the current situation with the virus that's running around the planet, those with high levels of vitamin D in every study I've seen so far I've read seven of them fare much better than those with low levels or chronically depleted levels of vitamin D. Vitamin D is not just a vitamin and some of these other cofactors and vitamins are not just vitamins. Vitamin D is a pro hormone immune modulator. So it actually modulates the immune response and has been shown to modulate some inflammatory responses. So also a powerful anti inflammatory in the brain and we just call it a vitamin and think I got to have some vitamin D. It's vitally important that we start looking at some of these raw materials and making sure that we have ample amounts of them in our body.

Funnily enough, I think that people are starting to cotton onto this because I happened to mention to my wife earlier on today we've run out of vitamin D, but we did a week or so ago and she said I know I've ordered it but we can't get it at the moment. Apparently everyone's cottoning onto the vitamin D approach, which is a great thing. And so would you. Is that the sort of thing that you take in addition to your whole food nutrient or would that again be included in that?

Yeah. So most vitamin D is going to come in conjunction with some sort of fat source. So omega 3 with vitamin D is a really good there. You can find plenty of products out there that have the omega 3 and the vitamin D combined together. And that's how we used to. If we look at our evolutionary past, that's how humans used to get vitamin D in the winter, go kill a fish and eat the whole thing. And the fat in that animal would have the vitamin D in it. Right now if you go to a pharmacy or a vitamin store, you buy vitamin D. Chances are they harvested that vitamin D from a cold water fish. That's where most of the Stuff we're buying from pharmacies comes from. So that's what we used to do in our diet. And that's another reason why dietary requirements should change seasonally based on the sun's position where we live. It's always going to be where you live because you're going to experience a very different winter where you live than I am. I'm only going to get down to Fahrenheit, about 42 degrees. You will get much, much colder where you are. There probably won't be snow where I'm at. You're probably going to experience some of that white fluffy stuff and I'll have more sun because I'm much further south. So our diets change seasonally where we live. And you, where you live, would have eaten primarily fish and fatty animals, which means your vitamin D intake would have gone up from that source, from the dietary source. And in the summer you would have eaten less of that, but you would have been outside more. And that's where vitamin D comes from. When you don't have it from your diet is from putting sun on your skin. So when we look at this, if we just move back outside, it all fixes it itself. Eat what you can find outside and spend time out there. And a lot of this stuff just works itself out. If we can find a way to live as close to nature as possible and keep modern medicine, that's where things are going to get awesome for us because that's where we can start adding decades to our lifespan instead of just one or two years.

Amazing. And actually, I think this is exaggerated in endurance athletes because in the summer, summer we're out on long runs or out on the bike for long periods of time, or we might be doing open water swimming as opposed to in the pool in the winter. My run this morning was in the complete darkness and rain. My cycling, some of that will switch to the turbo trainer in the garage. And obviously the swimming pools are my only source of swimming when we can use them, which we can't at the moment. So absolutely, I think the vitamin D swing on an endurance athlete is even greater than probably for most people. Now, you touched on antifragile. I'd never heard this term before I saw you speak. So I dare say there's a few people out there that are far more clued up than I am thinking. What is antifragile? Explain what you mean by antifragile, because I'd not heard it termed in this way before.

All right, so this is a term coined by Nassim Talib. He wrote a book entitled Antifragile. Some of your listeners might recognize Nassim's name from the book he's really well known for called Black Swan, which in business most. Yeah, you're nodding your head. You've heard Black Swan, right? So most people have heard Black Swan. He also wrote Antifragile. And antifragile is this concept in science that's called hormesis or hormetic stress. And this is a concept of, you know, look, no chaos is ok. We like no chaos. That means things are safe and happy and good. Some chaos is better than okay. So we can actually increase our performance with a little bit of chaos. Too much chaos and we can die. So if we look at bodily systems in humans and where we evolved, almost every system I can think of in the human body benefits from some chaos. If I want to make my bones stronger, thicker, more dense, what do I do? I go lift some heavy stuff or I go for a run. Pounding, jarring, Heavy lifting is going to make greater bone density. So that's going to help me as I age. Greater bone density is going to make sure my skeleton lasts longer with a of lot breaking. So we think doing that stuff in crushing and breaking and destroying would be bad, but if we do it just enough, it's actually better than not doing it at all. If you push that too far, right, you pick up something too heavy, not only can you break a bone, but you can rip a tendon straight off of the bone. So we can tear ourselves apart if we push it too far. And any of my endurance athletes that have ended up with any kind of the micro breaks in the metatarsals on the feet, I don't know if you've ever experienced that, where you get those little tiny cracks in the bones in your feet and then your feet just ache until all that starts to get stronger. That's exactly what I'm talking about. You're running too much. Scale it back a little. You've gone too far onto the chaos scale. If we look at a cardiovascular system, it works this way as well. If you never exercise, okay, your heart's going to do average things. If you sometimes go into extreme chaos, and I'm talking about high intensity interval sprinting, your heart will actually perform much, much better because you've done some of those chaotic things in a limited time frame. Do too much of that and you could die of a heart attack. So our cardiovascular system is antifragile, our skin is antifragile, our brains Even functionally. This, if you've ever read a book with new information, Nassim is, he is incredibly intelligent. When you read his books, some people find it very hard to follow because his brain works so differently than most people. So just the reading. His books are an anti fragile experience because if you read too much of them, you'll start to feel dumber because you're losing information, because there's so much coming at you that you can't understand. So you have to sometimes break off even new information in bits and pieces. Smaller amounts of chaos. The immune system works like this. This is why vaccines work, right? You give a small amount of a pathogen and then you get a healthier response. Too much of that pathogen and you die. So when we talk about antifragility, some chaos, when it's chosen, is actually better for us than not having chaos at all. That's what the antifragile means. And with every bit of exercise that anyone listening to this does is an antifragile activity. You exercise and then you recover. Too much of that exercise recovery can't happen appropriately and now you're running into trouble. And I see this a lot in endurance athletes over exercise, not enough recovery time. And that's why, you know, when we talk about anti fragility, most athletes have that nailed, except they might not be doing the recovery right? They might not be getting enough sleep after some of those activities. So it's all about providing the chaos so that the rest of the time you're living better.

And you talked about this specifically with regards to temperature, didn't you? Whether it gets hot or cold. So explain how. So what you were saying was that again, we want to create some chaos by either raising our temperature up for I think a half an hour period using something like a sauna or a plunge pool or cold shower, taking it, the, taking it down. Explain that concept, but also how that fits in with exercise. So for example, can you gain your temperature raises through running, for example, or does it need to be sitting in a sauna?

Well, so when we look at temperature and we look at increases in temperature, there's a lot of really cool things that happen when you're a couple of degrees warmer than your cozy 99 degrees that you're at now when you're a couple of degrees warmer. Most pathogens can't live at that temperature. That's one of the reasons why we get a fever when we get sick from something, is that fever is our body's way of trying to kill that pathogen. So it would stand to reason then that if we can induce the fever intentionally, then if something's in there that might be have the potential to hurting us, we would kill it preemptively. Which may be one of the reasons why athletes are sick far less than their non athlete counterparts is because they're always raising their body temperature when they're doing athletic events. Now in modern society, so I can say exercise is usually antifragile with temperature, except in modern society we move indoors and we put air conditioning on us so we don't see sweat. So some of my people that are doing workouts inside are not. They're never raising their temperature. So while they're getting an anti fragile effect on their muscles, their muscles are growing and they're going to be bigger and stronger because of the destruction that they're creating in their event, they're never doing that with their temperature. So I always tell people, embrace the heat or embrace the cold on occasion. Right? Half an hour, 45 minutes a day. Some are doing it longer. If they're doing exercises outside, they're just going to need to recover better. So yes. And now when you look indoor versus outdoor, most of my outdoor athletes are getting that antifragile temperature activity. But it's bigger than just killing off the pathogens. It's also, that's one of the primary ways to kill off weak cells. Our human bodies are so fascinating because we're going to make 75 billion new cells in day. 75 billion new cells a day. Some of those cells are programmed to die and they know exactly when to die. That programmed cell death is called apoptosis. Your cell just dies. It knows when to die. It dies on time. Some cells refuse to die and they keep replicating themselves. They keep making new ones no matter what. I don't care if I'm past my Hayflick limit. Most cells only replicate about 54 times and then they die. Some cells will keep making new cells no matter what you say. Well, those cells are called tumors and sometimes cancer because they keep making themselves even though they were supposed to be dead. On the other end of that, you have cells that refuse to die. Something got broken in there and they just don't do anything. They just don't die. Those are what scientists would call senescent cells. These are aged cells that should have been dead yesterday that aren't dead yet. Well, one of the easiest ways to kill those cells is to put them under physical stress, increase the temperature a couple of degrees. A lot of those die. Cool. That temperature off a lot of those die. Stop eating so damn much food and your body will cannibalize those cells first. It's always going to go pick on the weak, right? So if we just look at our dietary needs, one of the biggest things I can get most people in modern societies, especially my non athletes, to do for better health is stop eating so much because then the body will go in and try to clean up some of that nonsense and use the spare parts to make new human. But other than that, you get even more benefits from something like a heat increase because you're also going to vasodilate. So I make my vasculature larger and if I do that at rest as an athlete immediately after my event, I'm maintaining huge blood vessels while I'm recovering, which means more nutrients to peripheral tissue, including my muscles which need it, including my brain. And it's going to, when I step out, help with vasoconstriction and recovery. So I get decreased inflammation throughout the rest of the day. But while I'm in that event, I get increased vasodilation. So I help with vascular compliance, I help with muscle recovery, I help with nutrients delivered to peripheral tissue and I help with anti inflammatory effects when I'm out of the sauna or I increase the vasoconstriction when I go into a cryo event or an ice bath. And I know the prevailing theory was back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, you ice right after an event and that's the worst idea ever. You sauna after the event and then you wait two to three hours to vasoconstrict when you're done with your training to increase your muscle recovery, you relax and recover in a hot environment, maintaining vasodilation while you're seated and recovering. That's where you put the protein shake in, that's where you put the CBD in to increase radically increase muscle recovery, protein and CBD while you're sitting in a sauna right after you did your training run, Will, and then a couple hours later you can get it into an ice bath. It's a fantastic way to increase recovery.

I'm going to come back to CBD because I know that I wanted to talk to you about that and the book that's coming out next year. But for those just quick on the anti fragile stuff and for those people that don't have a sauna available, what could they do in a normal house to achieve the same results?

Save your money and buy a sauna. I'm telling you, it's a 20 year investment and it's well worth it. When you look at some of the data, Dr. Jari Laukonen's data from Finland, he's probably got the most famous sauna study out there because it was 21 years long in 2,315 people. And the data that he shows just with heart attack reduction, with all cause mortality reduction, with Alzheimer's reduction in that particular study is well worth putting it in. But what people can do if they can't do that is find a way to sweat. Get your temperature up daily for about a half an hour. So if you're not an athlete, if you're not exercising to do that, or if you're exercising in a freezing cold environment so that you don't sweat, embrace that, embrace the heat for at least a half an hour. And for those that don't have a sauna, take a willing partner into the bedroom and close the door. I don't have to tell you what to do after that, right? If you're doing it right, that's a good way to increase your bodily temperature, your heart rate. Get some antifragile fun attention in there if you want to. Anything that increases your body temperature, really. When we look at the mechanisms that are turned on here, obviously infrared heat is going to do some different things than steam heat and do some slightly different things than dry heat from a dry sauna. But the goal is get the temperature up, kill the weak and the strong, get stronger. That works in everything. So kill the weak and the strong get stronger. Meaning if I can kill some of those senescent cells, my body will have a better time because there's less cells utilizing nutrients that aren't doing anything anyway. Those cells should have been dead a couple of days ago. They're just creating problems. One of the problems, they created some inflammatory cytokines that they produce and then that causes problems with healthy cells around them. Any way you can increase the heat? Exercise is certainly a good way to do that. If you can exercise outside in the sun, there you got your vitamin D and that if not, find an extra sweatshirt and find a way to sweat daily.

Well, it sounds like the fan that is sat in front of my bike on the turbo trainer is going to see a lot less action because that's the, that's. Yeah, I mean that's one of the ways that I sweat the most is on the turbo trainer, but without the fan. So, so okay, so that's, that's great advice. Thank you. And talk to me about cbd. And how. Tell us about this book that's coming out next year, and particularly with the endurance athlete in mind about the benefits of CBD and everything else that's going to be in that book.

Yeah. So back in late 80s, early 90s, they discovered a system in the body that. They're still only teaching this in three med schools in the US States. So it's still not being taught in medical school, even though it was, you know, 30, 40 years ago. They discovered this. The system is called the endogenous cannabinoid system, or the ecs, sometimes called the endocannabinoid system. So you heard the word cannabinoid in there, and a lot of people think marijuana, cannabis, bad, don't talk about it. This is an endogenous system that you all have that literally, and I mean this literally, controls every function of your body. Name a function I can point to how the ECS controls it. Every hormone in your body starts with a signal from the endogenous cannabinoid system. Your digestion, your reproduction, your thermoregulation, the way your skin looks and feels, the way your bones grow, the way your immune system works. All of it is controlled by the ecs. And that's why I call it the Puppet Master system, because it controls every other system in your body. And they're only teaching it in three med schools. That's the tragic part. And it's because it's got the word cannabinoid in it. And the reason that they found it, they discovered this system by looking at how cannabis binds to these receptor sites in the human body. And that's where they first discovered these receptors. So you have receptors in this system, like every other system. Think of receptors as a lock, and then you produce your own cannabinoids, your own. Your brain makes them think of these as keys. And this lock and key receptor chemical system operates and controls every other system in your body. Specifically, the system modulates homeostasis. So if I go too far away from health, this system fights to get me back. Okay, if my reproductive system or my vascular system is headed one wrong direction, this system fights to get it back. Now we know why this system is present. We look at human evolution, and we grew up alongside of a plant called cannabis. It's been in human history, it's been written about, since I found evidence of this 6,000 years before the Bible was written. So we've got thousands and thousands of years of cannabis being written into everything from Persian to Chinese to. To Anglo religious practices. And then you look at some of the evidence of how old cannabis has been found. And they found fossilized cannabis that's up to 21 million years old. So older than humans cannabis has been on this planet. We evolved alongside the plant cannabis. It wasn't necessarily super high thc, like they're growing where I live here in Nevada, where they're going to 28% THC in the plant. It was just cannabis. There's a couple of different species of cannabis, but mainly it was just wild grown cannabis. And we found out early on that you could use the oils and the seeds as food and that you could use some of the extracts of the flowers as medicine. As a matter of fact, in the United States, even in Europe, if you go back into the 1920s, there was THC. Marijuana was used as a medicine for multiple different ailments. And it's because it affects these receptors, just like your own endogenous production of cannabinoids. So when we look at what calms those receptors down, they're kind of like cup shaped receptors. And if we bind inside the cup, we can agitate. That's typically what THC would do. And we can have an opposite effect if we stop that agitation and bind to the side of that cup, which is similar to what CBD would do. In your body, you have cannabinoids that do this. Those are anandamide and 2Ag. They function almost identical to plants to the way CBD and THC function. Those are two primary plant based cannabinoids, which are called phytocannabinoids. So there's receptors on your neurons in your brain. The most prolific receptors in your brain are called CB1. So CB1 receptors are the most numerous receptors in all of your brain, in your neurological system. And guess who binds perfectly to those? THC to agitate and CBD to stop that agitation and block THC from binding. So anyone that's ever listening to this podcast that smoked too much marijuana and gotten super paranoid will know exactly what I'm talking about, right? The paranoia, that agitation of those receptors feels really weird, right? Like everyone's watching and you're thinking this about me when they're not. To combat that, CBD does the exact opposite. So we look at CBD in the human body and we look at how can this affect something like muscle recovery? On your muscles, you have CB2 receptors. You have a little bit of CB1 receptors, but CB2 receptors are affected by CBD to stop agitation and reduce inflammation, thus leading to faster muscle recovery and less delayed muscle soreness. And there's plenty of studies that show this. Athletes on a CBD regimen have less muscle recovery time and less delayed muscle soreness, so they recover faster versus somebody who's not using cbd. And I'm not saying CBD is the be all end all. I'm saying it's affecting those receptor sites, reducing inflammation, slowing agitation. It's also affecting GPR55 receptors in the body, which is something completely different. But it does affect numerous other receptor sites other than just CB1 and CBD. So yeah, I look at this for as far as sleep, CBD is a fantastic aid to sleep and recovery. As far as muscle recovery, fantastic aid there. As far as anxiety. And some of my endurance athletes are very high strung to reduce some of that anxiety. The way CBD works on the CB1 receptors, it slows and stops so much agitation. So we see a reduction in anxiety during the day as well. It sounds like I'm talking about a magic pill that does everything. And I'm not. I'm talking about a plant that we evolved beside. If we put that back in our bodies and nourish the ecs, it allows our body to do its job better.

And so how would, how would you recommend people take this? What sort of amounts are we talking about here?

Yeah, so 25 to 50 milligrams a day is a good place to start. And then if I'm looking at a really high performing athlete, I'm going to go all the way up to probably 500 milligrams a day. On heavy training days, you can't overdose on it, you can't take too much. So it just really matters how much are you willing to spend? Okay, the good high quality stuff is going to cost a little bit more money, but it's really good, high quality, organically made, no synthetic nonsense in there. And lab verified things through independent lab testing.

And I'm assuming that that is fine. As far as you know, it's not classed as a performance enhancing drug or anything like that.

Yeah. So a lot of times if somebody is drug tested, they are looking for THC specifically. So weirdly enough, THC is considered performance enhancing. So that person would need to go with what is either called a pure or an isolate cbd, which is just a single cannabinoid, that's isolate or a broad spectrum CBD supplement, which is more than just cbd. But all of the THC has been removed and they typically use a CO2 extraction process for that to get the THC out. There are some companies I work with one that has a really, really good broad spectrum CBD product and they make a really good pure product as well. They have some great letters assuring that there is 0.00% th in those products. Anyone that's not drug tested, I recommend a full spectrum product which has just a tiny bit of THC as allowable by federal law in most countries. A tiny little bit of THC is allowable because it's naturally occurring in the plant. It's not grown to specifically have a bunch of that. But you get a better, what they call an entourage effect when you have the full spectrum of plant phytocannabinoids working in concert. If I pull just a THC out, I still get a great entourage effect without worrying about failing a drug test. If I pull just the CBD out, I'm not going to have an entourage effect because I pulled out a lot of the other terpenes and minor cannabinoids. So I won't have the same kind of dramatic effect that I would if I used a broad spectrum product.

And you mentioned that it's a company that you're associated with. But what that's, you know, you're obviously therefore happy to endorse that product. What's that? What's that company?

That's Canaway. K A N N A W A Y.

And is that available in the UK.

Or is it available in the uk? And if you have show notes, I can send you a link that you can put in the show notes if people wanted to go to that link. It is available all over Europe. So even that particular company, I'm their spokesperson, which is why I endorse them. But it's not that they came to me and said, we have a bunch of money for you. I came to them and said, I want to be your spokesperson. Let's develop some products together. Because I saw them as a leader worldwide. They're open in 44 countries. They just opened Mexico. We're working on a bunch of other countries with them this year. So 44 countries in 13 countries that are prescription only. So Mexico was previously. They would. You'd be able to get. So that's how high quality. This is. The 13 countries, you have to have a doctor prescribe it, but all through Europe you can just buy this stuff and have it shipped to your house.

Fantastic. Well, yeah, we're definitely, we'll definitely put that in the show notes. So that would be brilliant. Just kind of winding up a couple of last questions that I've. I mean, I'M only a third of the way through the list of questions I've got for you. So we might have to come back and do part two or even part three in due course. But with endurance athletes, are there any other nutrients or supplements that they should be thinking of, particularly because of their endurance work? I mean, the one that I kind of springs to mind is I've heard a bit of talk recently about coenzyme Q10. So because of the kind of extra work they're getting their heart to do all of the time. I mean, the one criticism, well, not criticism, but the one jive I get from people that aren't endurance athletes. They say, you know, you wouldn't drive your car up and down the motorway all day, just all day long, because it's going to wear your car out. And surely our hearts only got so many beats, so coenzyme Q10 could potentially help us with that. But so be interested to hear your thoughts on that. But also, anything similar to that that you think an endurance athlete should really be looking at?

Well, my big thing for endurance athletes is the minerals. Magnesium is a huge thing for endurance athletes. When you look at muscle recovery, muscle cramping, potassium, so those, the fatty acids, of course, Coq 10 is vitally important. Vitamin D is hugely important, and then, you know, zinc and vitamin C just to make sure that you have enough of the. You're creating a lot of oxidative damage when you're doing this. Any endurance event is going to create tons, way more than you should. Oxidative damage. So the more antioxidant protection you can put in there, the better. If you can get some glutathione precursors in there, you can't take oral glutathione, but glutathione precursors through something like ProImmune 200, that is the. I can't even tell you how important that particular supplement is to humans. So ProImmune Formulation 200, working on getting that available all through Europe. Just having a little bit of problem with supply chain, but getting your own antioxidant protection in there, making sure that you have enough minerals. One of my favorite apps to track all this, to make sure you're getting enough dietary micronutrients, is an app called Cronometer. It's got a little target with an apple looking thing on it, Chronometer. It's going to require some work. You have to put in all of the food you're eating into the app. But then in addition to tracking proteins, fats and carbohydrates which most apps will do quite easily. This one also helps you track some of those very, very important micronutrients. And I would say if you've got consistent gaps in your micronutrients on that app, best be filling them for sure. And again, the daily multivitamin will do most of that for you. If it's a good, high quality whole food multivitamin, not some synthetic nonsense that you bought at the big box store, it's got to be a really good, high quality whole food organic multivitamin that usually fills most people's gaps. But then just your yearly physical is going to reveal a lot of what you might be missing because a lot of this can be tested for. And if you have a really good nutrition panel that's being tested for on every six months or every year with your physician, that's going to be a great way to determine if there are some gaps.

Brilliant. And I actually, on your advice, I forgot to do this until yesterday. So I started started using the Chronometer app yesterday and I've been adding my and I think it's brilliant. Only a day and a half in, but it's already telling me certain things and actually I'm already more aware of what I'm eating and my balance of carbs versus protein as a result of a day and a half of doing it. So I think I've got to get to a week before I've added enough data to identify what any, what gaps are there. But yeah, that's a really, really good app. Now I know you're a very avid reader. I think I read on your website you average reading about 100 books a year, which is. I read a lot of books, but that's even more than I read. There are so many books out there in the world of nutrition. But are there any particular ones you think you know? Are there any ones that you find yourself recommending regularly? Any particular standard? I know you sent me a brilliant document with, you know, you've massively expanded my reading list with a lot of your recommended books, but even on that there was probably 50 books that you were talking about. Quite a few read actually. But are there any particular standout books that you find yourself giving away or recommending to people, particularly athletes on this subject.

Yeah. So I'll preface it with this. If I read every nutrition book I have and did everything every nutrition book said I would not get to eat because I have books that say only eat meat and I have books that say never eat meat. So I Can't eat meat or plants. So now I'm done. I don't get to eat. I have books that say eat low fat and I have books that say eat high fat, books that say eat low carb and books that say eat high carb. So if I take all of the advice from all of the books ever, even the ones that I love, I don't get to eat anything. So what I ask people to do is stop being so dogmatic about your approach to food and realize if I turn the grid off, if I turn power off, you will eat plants and animals because that's all nature's ever given you. Saying that one of the best books. And I don't know if I even have the main book on my reading list, but it's the cookbooks I give away all the time. Are my friends at Whole 30. They just nailed it. Basically when I asked people to eat like I asked them to eat, eat plants and animals, I asked them to basically do what the folks at Whole30 are telling you to do only for those 30 days. But their cookbooks are spot on. Their slow cooker recipe book, you let a machine cook for six hours while you're doing work, that's the most brilliant thing ever. So their slow cooker recipe book is fantastic. They have a recipe book that's all their meals are 15 to 20 minutes. So it's fast and easy. So just eat like that. That would be my primary recommendation because there's a lot of fighting about plants versus animals and which one's better. And you guys, the reality is this, if you live above the Arctic Circle, you're not eating plants almost never. So you can't tell an Inuit to start being a vegan. That's why the Icelandic people are in so much trouble right now. Iceland, the number two killer is Alzheimer's. If they would pay attention to a traditional Icelandic diet, Alzheimer's would not be that big of an issue. They switched to a grain heavy diet and no fats. In an area of the world that gets 300 days of clouds a year, if you don't see the sun, you can't eat heavy grains and never have fat. It doesn't work and you start seeing neurological issues first. Neurological issues start coming from lack of the appropriate amounts of fats in the diet. That's the first thing to show up. Dr. Dale Bredesen writes about that vitamin D specifically in his book the End of Alzheimer's as being a major thing that needs to be looked at for neurological health is your vitamin D. Levels. The Icelandic people found that in the fatty fish and the whale and the caribou they used to eat. Now they're eating a grain heavy diet. So we just have to pay attention to plants and animals. And that's why I like what the Whole30 folks have done because they don't, you know, as long as it's good, high quality plants and animals, that's what they're going for.

Brilliant. It's not a book I've heard of before, so I will be ordering that. Might even make it onto my wife's Christmas list that way.

Yeah, well, let me know what you think of it because I think they did a really nice job of summing some of it up. So I just don't think people should do it for 30 days. I think that's where you should eat for the rest of your life. And then you feast on occasion, which the next time we chat maybe we can talk about the occasional feasting and why that word is so much different than cheating and why we need to really pay attention to differentiating those words.

And that was something that was on my list and how having sort of. I know you have a one day a month approach, don't you, to that? I have a slightly different approach which is how I can't remember the term anyway, five days on, two days off, weekends are three days. But yours is a whole lot stricter than that. But yes, that would. That was definitely something I wanted to chat to you about. But that will have to save that for another time. The last question I want to ask you is what are you most excited about now in terms of looking forward, whether it be with regards to your business, whether it be regards to the health and nutrition world. What most excites you looking forward?

Well, so I think if I look at my business, I want to be out of business. I don't want to be teaching people how to eat and not die early. I mean, my biggest life's goal is to make sure that I don't have a job. Because if I have a job, that means people are dying early. So it's tough for me to say what am I excited about? I did just launch some products, so I'm excited about those. But I tell people that products aren't necessary if you're doing everything right and living close to nature, they're an adjunct to make sure you're more successful in those daily actions. So I think the most exciting thing for me is the fact that I am 50 years old next month or this month, in 10 days and I'm in the best shape of my life. And that's considering I'm a former Guinness World Record holder and that was 18 years ago. I'm in way better shape at 50. I'm smarter, I'm faster and I'm stronger than I've ever been in my life. And I'm not even to the halfway point yet. I think that's what I look most forward to is just making sure I can be and set that example for others and ask them to do a little bit better tomorrow than they did today. And that it is possible to do when you are 50. It is not a downhill battle when you hit 40 or whatever people think it is. We can maintain and grow in our health as we age. So ask me in 20 years. I'm still excited about that because I will probably still be excited about that.

And still be getting fitter and healthier.

And smarter every year because I keep reading. Okay, this year it's not 100, it'll be closer to 50 books because I'm not flying as often. I use my in flight time as my college and my university. Just the minute I'm in the air, it's got to be reading. I don't do anything else. That's why I was able to read so many books every year because I'd be on four airplanes a week now with what's going on now I'm not traveling as much, but I'm still getting the education. And I've read 1600 pages of scientific research on cannabinoids in the last six months. So I'm still getting my reading and it's just on slightly different subject matters.

Fantastic. Dan, I could chat to you all evening as it is here or morning as it is there. It's absolutely fascinating. But I'm very conscious of your time and want to wind this up now. But so much great advice there. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I know that the Tribathlon listeners will get a huge amount of value out of listening to this. So a huge thank you.

I'm quite excited and I appreciate you having me here and I'll get you some follow up emails and I can't wait to schedule another one of these in a couple months.

Fantastic. That would be amazing. And I also wish you huge amounts of luck with your book and look forward to being able to share that when when it's out there. So thanks very much.

Sure.

You'll agree there was so much fascinating stuff within that conversation, whether it be why wheat grass does help us, whether it be the impact of supplements and how we can work out what supplements are right and which types of supplements, the impact of sugars and juicing and fruit juices, and how we can fuel ourselves both for our life and for our sport in a healthy way, a way that promotes our body health as opposed to one that deteriorates it. Because we, we all know that really a lot of the products that are out there for endurance sport are not particularly good for us and look like some sort of horrible chemistry experiment. So if you want to find out more about Dan, you can find that you can visit his website@danmillerwellness.com I'm going to put in the show notes, a link to that website, but also some of the resources that he talked about. And I know that there is so much stuff here that I think it's worth us listening to this one almost several times so that we can pick out the wisdom within which we can improve our long term health. So keep up the training and keep trying to be as fit and as healthy as you can be. And remember, this podcast is brought to you by Brits Superfoods. You can find out more@britsuperfoods.co.uk but if you use the link in the show notes or you use the Referral code of Tribeathlon, you'll get 10% off your orders. You'll get a free bag of juices worth £15 with every order and those will happen forever. As long as you buy from BritSuperfood with that having started with that referral code, you'll get those forever. In addition to that, you'll also benefit from that 110% money back guarantee. So if you don't see the value in it, then then you can. They'll give you your money back and an extra 10%. So go check out the link in the show notes or go to BritSuperfoods.co.uk and use the referral code Tribeathlon. And you'll get that 10% off free shipping and free juice on every order. And don't forget to download the Tribathlon app for more amazing podcasts. But also to help you train, compete and to build your tribe.