Snacks for Athletes, Reducing Reflux and Gluten Sensitivity

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call. Your chance to ask me your questions. Now we're mixing things up a bit so that we can cover even more topics and feature even more questions. Now on today's show we're going to discuss snacks for endurance athletes, the difference between celiac disease and gluten sensitivity. And we're also going to talk about acid reflux which I up to 45% of people have it so many times. Solvable problem. Okay, our first question, which is a video submission from Dennis. Now I'm going to watch it and we'll check in a minute.

Boo yah. Dr. Hyman, I have an endurance athlete question for you. On a long event, running, bicycling, whatever, where you're out there over two, three hours, maybe up to 12 hours, what do you recommend as food, as fuel during those events? Is it okay for instance to have goo or something like that, some gel or energy bars? Thank you.

So Dennis, by the way, I know, full disclosure, he did my 10 day detox slots, tons of weight, went from being a slouch to doing marathons and endurance athlete stuff. It's pretty, pretty amazing. So the question is on a long event when you're out there biking or running for two, three hours up to 12 hours, what do you recommend for food and for fuel for endurance athletes? Now this brings up a great point which is we were all told we should carb load before exercise. Pasta and gooze and sugar sweetened drinks and Gatorade and this, all this stuff. Now I'm going to tell you a quick story about a friend of mine, Peter Attia and you should look at his website, eatingacademy.com or org I'm not sure. And this guy would swim from LA to Catalina island, which I don't know how many miles it is, but it's insane. And he found out he was pre diabetic because he was using all these goos and all these sports endurance treats, they're fuels that were terrible for him. And he was overweight and he was exercising all the time. Another guy had doing this same thing and crazy endurance athlete was rowing a boat from like California to Hawaii. This guy was serious and he also was pre diabetic. And both these guys found that they were pre diabetic because of all this sugar stuff and that there's a different way to do it. They use ketogenic diets to reverse their prediabetes and to have high performance endurance athletes. And there's a guy Named Jeff Volek and Stephen Finney if you want to read their stuff. It's the art of low carbohydrate performance. It explains exactly how to do this and actually convert from sugar burning to fat burning. Think about it. You've got maybe 2,500 calories of glycogen in your muscles, which you can burn through pretty quick, or you've got probably 40 or 50,000 calories of fat. If you learn how to burn fat, that's way better. And I encourage people to check it out. So you know what I do? And I like to go on long bike rides. I like to go running. I like to play tennis for hours. I mean, I make sure I'm fit and ready for going. And I use bulletproof coffee in the morning. I'll eat lots of nuts and seeds or nut butters. There's healthy bars from Primal Kitchen, which is awesome. Nice. No sugar and no junk. I make sure I use water with electrolytes. I'll have grass fed jerky. All kinds of good stuff you can use to fuel your endurance athlete performance. All right, the next question is from Antra. It was a tweet. Now let's see what she says. She says, what is the difference between gluten sensitivity and celiac disease? Ian, what's your favorite gluten free recipe? Well, here's the deal. I just had the world's expert in gluten over to Cleveland Clinic to do grand rounds for the center for Functional Medicine. And it was amazing. And I interviewed him after. I would encourage you to go on the Institute for Functional Medicine website and listen to it because it was powerful. But the bottom line is that there's a spectrum of reactions to gluten, all the way from mild and asymptomatic, but you're still getting inflammation all the way through to full blown celiac disease. And if you have a problem anywhere along that, it's not really great for you. In fact, he's found that people even who don't have any symptoms can get leaky gut from eating gluten, even if they don't have celiac disease or even non celiac gluten sensitivity. But non celiac gluten sensitivity is where you might have some level of antibodies, but it's not full blown celiac, where your gut is damaged. I read a study once where they did 30,000 people review and they found that even people who didn't have celiac, if they had elevated levels of antibodies, they had a higher risk of heart disease and cancer. So I don't think most people benefit from eating gluten for a lot of reasons. One, it's form of starch and sugar. Two, it's full of glyphosate, which is actually how you get the glyphosate, from these sprays they put on this Monsanto stuff called Glyphosate or Roundup, where they actually poison you by spraying it out at the end of the growing cycle. So I don't really encourage people to eat a lot of wheat. Little treat is fine, but I don't make a big deal out of it. Now, all of my favorite recipes are pretty much gluten free and I have a ton of them on my blog, Mark's Kitchen. I have a separate blog for that. You can head over to drhyman.com and you can go to the recipe section. I got so many recipes and I've got five cookbooks, most of which are gluten free. So I encourage you to check those out, learn how to eat real food, and realize that there's a spectrum from full blown celiac all the way to mild gluten sensitivity and most people shouldn't be eating a lot of it anyway. All right, the next question is from Meg, and it's a tweet, so. All right, so let's see what she has to say. I have acid reflux. How do I increase healthy fats in my diet without worsening my reflux? Well, reflux is super common. It affects up to 45% of the population at one time or another. So, Meg, you're not alone. And the reason is our diet. Most of the foods we eat tend to cause reflux. Fried foods, caffeine, alcohol, processed foods, and even spicy foods. Sometimes citrus foods, sometimes tomato based foods. But when you eliminate all those and you're still having trouble, you need to eat the right kinds of fat, not the bad kind of fat like fried food that's going to make you sick. I can give myself reflux by eating the wrong foods. I promise you I do sometimes because I'm not always good. But the kinds of fats that you want to be eating are olive oil, nuts, seeds, wild fatty fish. And you need to take certain steps to reduce attitude reflux, like eliminating those foods that I talked about, looking for causes like, for example, H. Pylori, which is a bacteria looking at the timing of your eating. If you eat and you go right to bed, you're going to end up with reflux. Looking at all the other triggers that we just talked about, and sometimes it's fixing other things like you have magnesium deficiency or you might have overgrowth of bad bugs in your gut or yeast. That this is what we do in functional medicine. It's what we do at the Ultra Wellness Center. If you ever have any problems, you want to sort of look at that. So I encourage you to check out my blog I wrote. Well, I've written a bunch of blogs on reflux, but I encourage you to go to drhyman.com, type in reflux or heartburn or anything like that. You're going to come up with the blogs and I go through really specific steps on how to fix it. So I'd encourage you to do that. Well, that's all the time we have. And if you like this video, be sure to share with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter. And you have any questions, you can tweet them to me or send your video submissions to Dr.hyman.com and maybe next week I'll make a house call to you. Thanks for watching.