#229: How To Legally Boost Hematocrit, Limit The Damage From Night Shift Work, The Dangers Of Vasectomies and More!

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, how to legally boost hematocrit, limit the damage from night shift work, the dangers of vasectomies, should you eliminate all dairy if you have asthma, and how to run faster and longer.

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Well, I tried something new this morning. I put a bunch of coconut oil and butter and vanilla and cinnamon in my coffee.

There you go. Cool. I tried something new this morning too. I've been making my own natto at home. Do you know you can make that. That's that fermented soybean recipe that's super.

High vitamin K2 and, and really super high in sliminess.

It, it is a little bit snot.

Snot factor.

It's got a serious snot factor. But yeah, you basically, I mean, you go to an Asian grocery store and you buy some natto and you mix it up with some, some of your soybeans at home and you let that for a while and yeah, you can mix it up with a little white rice and eggs for breakfast. It's a great way to go. I had snot for breakfast and you had fat for breakfast.

Yeah, it sounds a little to me like yours was a little more positive experience than mine was.

Yes. Although natto can get quite odorous while you're fermenting it. So yes, buyer beware.

And make sure everybody who comes over to your house knows it's not you, it's the natto.

Blame it on the dog or blame it on the natto. There you go.

News flashes.

All right. As always, you can get these news flashes and a whole bunch of other interesting and awesome ones if you follow Ben@twitter.com BenGreenfield and you can also find him on Facebook@Facebook.com BGFitness and Google. And this is the time when Ben highlights a few of those awesome news flashes for us.

This is that time. And news flashes this week were fast and furious. But a couple of the things that I sent across the Twitter radar was an interesting article that appeared in the New York Times on yoga and how if you are a dude doing yoga, you may want to be careful. The title of this article was called Wounded Warrior Pose, which I love.

I saw this article and it's not what you people are thinking because I know I thought something different than it was actually about to.

What did you think?

I thought it had to do with the extra bits that men have.

Oh, yeah. The extra bits getting in the way. No, actually, this article was interesting because this guy had the hypothesis that basically guys get injured more than girls when doing yoga, because apparently guys who bend and stretch and contort their bodies might get held back a little bit by the little bit of extra muscle that men tend to have or the little bit of less natural flexibility that we tend to have. So what he did was he literally went and dug into the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which monitors hospital emergency rooms and got 18 years worth of annual survey data that looked at yoga practitioners that were hurt over a decade. And. And he compared the percentage of male yoga practitioners that were hurt to the actual percentage of male versus female yoga practitioners and found that there was indeed a very high, significantly high percentage of males versus females as a percentage of the whole population of yoga that were getting injured. Females tended to have more issues with fainting episodes and stuff, but tons of musculoskeletal injuries. And in guys doing yoga, granted, these were yoga practitioners who are probably doing a little bit more advanced forms of yoga than, you know, for example, the average person who might wander into a gym's yoga class. But ultimately I thought it was interesting and just thought I'd throw that out there as a caution to guys. You know, if you're getting into something like yoga, be careful.

Yeah. One thing that. That I thought of too is I wonder if it isn't just that men are a little more competitive and will push themselves a little harder, a little farther into the poses than they probably are capable of, and maybe that's part of the reason why they're getting injured.

That's true. And we're all trying to pull the Will Ferrell in Saturday Night Live move. Anyways, the one where he's got his head shoved down in his crotch and what does he say? I've been trying to do this for years. Leave me alone. So anyways, that being said, anyways, we should move on. Another tweet was basically an article, an interesting review that looked at what happens to your body when you exercise. Because there is certainly that argument out there that in order to burn fat fast, that exercise may not be necessary and that we might just be able to get away with with a little bit of physical activity here and there and eating a healthy diet. And I think that for some people that may be true, but I think that some folks tend to ignore the exercise or physical activity component too much. And one of the reasons I say this is that last night I was teaching a fat loss seminar at a local health club and there were about 60 people there or so. And during an hour and a half long 90 minute q and A, it was all a Q and A, just a board style Q and A. It wasn't a presentation or anything like that. It was just questions from the audience. It was all audience driven. Not one question about exercise. Every question was about fat loss supplements, raspberry ketones and green coffee extract and bitter orange extract and all this stuff and diet. Not one single question about exercise. I just thought it was super interesting, you know, looking out over the group of folks who were there who were mostly overweight, who were slouched in their chairs with horrible posture, who you could tell were not taking care of their bodies. And a lot of folks were looking for that magic pill. So, you know, I don't want to beat people up too much, but basically you got to think a little bit about the physical activity component. And this particular review that I linked to, and we'll link to it in the show notes too, for this episode, along with everything else we talk about, of course, was called Recent advances in the Adaptations of Adipose Tissue to Physical Activity. And it looks specifically at how your fat cells responds to physical activity. Some of the things that they found were that training, any form of exercise training, can not only increase what's called your lipolysis, which is your lipolytic rate, the rate at which you're going to break down fat cells. So you get a higher, what's called lipid turnover. But there are a few other things that happen as well. For example, you've got stem cells in your body and these stem cells can mature and become any type of different adipose tissue. They can become white adipose tissue, which is less metabolically active, or they can become brown adipose tissue, which is more metabolically active and tends to take calories and, and produce heat from those calories. You know, it's one of the reasons that I'll do something like wear one of these cool, these ice pack kind of vests to amp up my activity of brown adipose tissue. But exercise does a similar thing. And it turns out that in physically active folks, we get more maturation of stem cells into brown adipose tissue versus white adipose tissue. And hand in hand with that, you also get a reduced amount of white Adipose tissue cell and cell number. So there is that prevailing thought out there that you're stuck with as many fat cells as you have always had, and that as soon as you start eating too much that you're gonna fill up those fat cells. Well, it turns out that exercise can mitigate some of that effect and actually reduce white adipose tissue cell size and cell number. A few other things that happen is that training improves what's called angiogenesis in white. Angiogenesis is when you're feeding new blood vessels into an area. So when we are enhancing the amount of capillaries that are going into adipose tissue, we're improving the body's ability to be able to tap into that fat and use it as a fuel. And then the last thing that happens is you get an increased release of what's called adenopectin. And adenopectin is, think of it like the hormone that tells your brain how many fat cells that you actually have, how much fat you have available to be able to burn through. When your brain is more aware of that because of the adenopectin release, you're more likely to tap into that fat store and use it as energy versus if you, if you're in an inflamed state, you've got what's called leptin insensitivity, you're not producing a lot of this adenopectin. And so your brain almost doesn't have that signal being sent to it that, hey, we've got some fat cells down here that we can burn and utilize for energy. So let's go ahead. It so just, you know, everything from standing at your workstation to moving around during the day, to, you know, not putting all your faith in pills and in eating healthy, but also engaging in exercise, you know, to a moderate extent, is gonna help big time when it comes to specifically getting in a favorable state for your, for your adipose tissue.

So it was just moderate exercise. It wasn't. You don't have to go out and kill yourself doing some really high intense intervals or anything. It's really just getting some of that like non exercise activity thermogenesis that people talk about. The neat kind of stuff.

Yep, exactly. And I mean, you know, I was, I was doing a consult with one of the, you know, an Ironman triathlete lady yesterday and I was telling her, I'm like, here's. You got to think of Ironman triathlon this way. Like all this, this chronic cardio that you're doing is more likely to make you fat than it is to improve your body composition. And you need to think of this as an uphill battle between you shutting down your body's ability to be able to be metabolically efficient or increasing your cortisol to the extent where you're not going to lose weight with all this chronic endurance training that you're doing. And your goal is to try to mitigate that through proper nutrition and supplementation and lifestyle protocols. So yeah, you certainly can get into that state of too much training. And that's that whole skinny fat thing that you see a lot of times with endurance athletes. The last thing was a study that looked into beet juice supplementation. This was another recent one. They took a bunch of kind of elite team sport athletes and had them do the yo yo drill. I don't know if you guys do this up in Canada, Brock, because I'm.

Not familiar with it.

You're all freaks up there. But basically it's the, it's the CD that beeps and you're doing, I think it's like a 20 yard sprint. Every time the CD beeps and, and you just go back and forth and back and forth until you can't do it anymore. And so basically they, they tested a bunch of male team sport players doing one of these yo yo intermittent tests with and without beet juice. In this case they were doing about 500 milliliters, which comes out to like right around 16 ounces or so of beet juice. Prior to that test, they ingested it for 30 hours. Going into that test, that amount of beet juice. And what they found was that there was a significant improvement in the ability to be able to do that test. So this just kind of chalks another one up for the efficacy of beet juice. Drinking 16 ounces of like a good beet juice is still going to give you the whole red poo effect. But the suggested mechanisms of action in the article were really interesting. For example, they were showing that beet juice can protect your creatine stores from getting depleted. And creatine is that metabolite that we rely on for short, short exercise bursts of anywhere from 5 to 30 seconds in duration. It can decrease the rate at which potassium leaks from your muscle tissue, which helps to preserve the electrical potential that keeps your muscles able to fire. It could have a glucose sparing effect, meaning that you tap into your muscles glycogen stores a little less readily. There is basically a possibility that there's an increased calcium release at the muscle level at what's called the sarcoplasmic muscle level, which could also increase your force production. And then you, of course, get all of the nitric oxide produced, which vasodilates the blood vessel and allows more glucose and oxygen delivery to the tissue. When I was doing my graduate studies in physiology in my biochem class, my big article at the end of biochem class was about nitric oxide and its effect on particularly glucose delivery and oxygen uptake at the tissue level. And once again, beet juice has some pretty cool things going on when it comes to this stuff. So there you go.

If you can stomach it.

Yeah, if you can stomach it. Doesn't taste too good. The other thing you got to bear in mind, and I'll put a link by the way, to, to like a bunch of different organic beet juice or beet juice powder forms on Amazon.com in the show notes. If people want to try this stuff but do understand that a lot of beets are GMO products, it is, you know, along with corn, one of the more common genetically modified crops. So that's something to bear in mind if that's something that you want to be careful with, which I'm personally careful with. And you can get similar effects by using supplements like arginine or citrulline or if you happen to have some around before workout, Viagra. But basically, you know, all of these have a, have kind of a nitric oxide enhancing effect that's similar to beet juice, but that is not going to freak you out when you look into the toilet after your poo.

All right, today's podcast is brought to you by Audible and make sure you go to audiblepodcast.com Ben and if you sign up, if you're a brand new user and you sign up, you get a free book.

You can't really beat that. Do you know what the best seller in Audible is right now? And by the way, I've read it eight times. I never listened to it.

When I was in like grade five, my teacher actually wrote a note home to my mum asking that I'm like telling my mom that I'm not allowed to write any more book reports on this book because I, I seem to be obsessed with it. In grade five.

The Hobbit, I was a total fantasy geek growing up. I read the Tolkien series multiple times. I went through the Hobbit even more than that. So if you're into hobbits and d enchanted beasts, as we know, all of our fitness and health listeners must be sitting at home playing World of Warcraft. And probably hanging another Hobbit poster on your wall. Why not surf over to audiblepodcast.com ben and grab yourself some Bilbo Baggins adventures to listen to wherever you happen to be driving or bicycling this this winter and learn about the Hobbit. If you haven't listened to that yet or read actually is a pretty good book.

Yeah, so last week we asked people to go over to itunes and leave some reviews for us and make us laugh with the reviews. And I know Ben's been looking those over and we've got a few to highlight.

Yeah, there were some some pretty pretty interesting, pretty interesting reviews on itunes. I've got it actually pulled up here in front of me. How about this one? This isn't. This is by Buckeye Town, he says. This is an amazing podcast. It will tell you how to geek out of fitness and life. There should be a warning in front of every podcast though. Warning. The advice given here will cause you to look amazing, however, may cause you to jump up and down tied to a rope in a corner of a hotel room while eating dark chocolate and drinking tea made from some random herbs only found in the depths of China. Let's see what else we've got. Here we go. Newman D. Says. My love gauge has been stuck on empty for several months. As both my wife and girlfriend relentlessly reminded me. Your top 10 boost tips to Boost Libido is spot on, Ben. Now there's plenty of me to go around. It's happy days again for my wife, my girlfriend and my mistress. My mistress. Thanks again and keep up the great work guys. You keep up the great work. Ready? Here's a good one. As I listen to podcast 223 while running on my curve for one hour with a 10 pound weight vest and keeping a 138bpm heart rate, I question my sanity while wiping away the recently sipped green filled Kool aid from my formerly sugar stained lips. Did I really just consider taking a nap on the ground to get my earth rhythm back? Did I really just ask myself where I can buy oysters to cure my sour melons? Did that Canadian guy really just say he wears a tinfoil hat in a cold shower while urinating in a gallon jug? My gosh, I have to rethink my life anyways though. So if you guys have a funny or crazy review that you want to leave and we'll read it on the podcast. And by the way, I randomly gave out a 20 minute consult to the guy that posted that last one. Oh awesome. Anyways though there are some funny reviews on there and of course reviews always help to make us look really good in itunes and potentially scare anyone away from ever listening to our podcasts with the way that some of these reviews look. So leave your review on itunes. We'll put a link in the show notes for this episode. What episode number is this by the way, Brock?

It's 229 episode number.

229. Check it out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com we'll put a link to audible and also to your ability to leave reviews. And then of course a couple other things you should know about is over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I recently did a bunch of videos. I did a video on my new coaching programs that I'm rolling out for 2013, including my high end black box coaching program.

That is quite a package.

It is quite a package. It is 24. 7 monitoring of your sleep, heart rate, metabolism along with full biomarker testing, gastrointestinal panel testing, all your training and nutrition plans laid out. 24. 7 Access to a private line to me, private email to me, Skype whenever you need it, access to any book or program I've created or ever will create. You get instant access to all of that. It's pretty much the most concierge high end training, nutrition and life coaching program that exists and it also includes a few mastermind meetings with me at select secret locations across the globe three times a year. It's a very high end kind of executive program. You probably do need to be a kind of a high net worth person to be able to jump into this program, but it pretty much sign me up. Yeah, it pretty much kind of. I don't know if that sounds perverted, but it kind of just puts me in your pocket basically at your beck and call whenever you need me 247 so you can check that out. It's called the Black Box coaching program and we'll put a link to that in the show notes. And of course my other coaching programs are all available but they close in five days. I'm shutting down entry into any of my coaching programs for 2013 because I'm full on with the wait list right now and it's getting crazy. So if you want in, you need to go hit the show notes pretty soon and there'll be links to all of that. And then the last thing is that at the end of this particular podcast episode we are going to have an interview with Craig who is a listener who is a a traveling guy and he put together a my list that geeks out on the best travel tools and there were some cool ones on his my list which he shared on our Facebook page. So he was chosen as the one monthly listener that we get on the podcast every single month to go into their personal my list, which is like Pinterest for Facebook. And you can check all that out over at@mylist.com BenGreenfield and you can also just listen in to the end of this episode. So when the episode sounds like it's about to end, it's not really over. And there's there's 10 minutes of juicy juicy bonus at the end. So listen in.

Want to get personal access to all of Ben Greenfield's secrets? Live this march in Spokane, Washington, Ben is bringing the world's best speakers straight to you. You're going to get step by step blueprints for performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, brain sleep and hormone optimization and get insider access to private parties, special sessions for podcast listeners only, and of course, delicious locally grown organic meals. The conference is called Become Superhuman and it's already filling up fast. But you can get in now@BenGreenfieldFitness.com superhuman that's that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com superhuman. You'll come away from this live two day event completely separate life to achieve everything you want for your body, mind and performance. Whether you want to maximize fat loss, achieve an Ironman triathlon, or push your body and mind to the absolute limits of human performance. So visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com superhuman and we'll see you live and in person March 8th and 9th, 2013. Listener Q&A.

Hey Ben, my name is Dwight. Got a question about workout routines, meal plans for people that are shift workers. I'm a shift worker for the past 17 years. I rotate days, nights, days, nights, three on two all the way. So getting in a good rhythm in the gym has never been quite possible. And then as you can imagine, eating habits end up getting a little bit out of whack because if you do four don't have something prepared. You found have to stop and grab something in a fast food chain. As much as you're trying to avoid it, it happens. But anyway, I'm wondering if you can give maybe a little segment that was would cover workout routines coming off of nights, transition to the days and then maybe a good meal plan and then some of the supplements you might suggest that. There's a few I've seen on your site to take maybe something that might be specific to that. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Yeah, I don't think it was Dwight, but we have had a few questions about shift working before and it does seem to be a very common problem for people who have these especially rotating shifts where you're working days and then nights and then have a few days off. And it can be pretty confusing big time.

I actually coach. Well, I coach a couple of shift workers and one guy in particular who I coach. I know he's probably listening into the podcast, so I'll say hello right now. He is an Ironman triathlete who works night shifts and we really have had to fight an uphill battle in terms of energy levels and ability to do the prescribed workouts, but also feel good, overcome some of the hormonal fluctuations that tend to occur during night shifts. And there are some serious issues that creep up when you're throwing a curve ball at your circadian rhythm like you do on a night shift. And there's been several studies on this. They did a study in the Journal of Workplace Health and Safety on police officers and found that police officers who are working a night or evening shift and who were kind of getting the disruption in sleep that was occurring on that shift basically had lower serotonin levels than their non evening workers. And serotonin is one of our measurements of happiness and also our ability to do things like be motivated to exercise or reduce appetite cravings. And so your serotonin and your neurotransmitters take a hit. In the International Journal of Cancer, it was reported that a woman's risk of breast cancer increases by 30% from night shift work. And a big, big part of that is because of the hormonal fluctuations, in particular the estrogen dominance, estrogen being that pro growth hormone that can occur when your circadian rhythms are off. There was another study in the Science of Translational Medicine which found that night shift style work can increase your likelihood of developing diabetes or becoming obese. And this was a relative small study with only 21 individuals, but found that circadian disruption caused some serious issues with insulin sensitivity. And so that again, kind of throws a curve ball at you if you're trying to lose weight or maintain weight and you're working a night shift. Another one in the British Medical Journal found that working a night shift could cause you to be more likely to have a heart attack. And particularly ischemic strokes and coronary events were found to be higher actual blockages in folks who were working night shifts, lower levels of leptin that's the hormone that plays a pretty significant role in regulating your weight and your appetite, as well as your blood sugar and your insulin levels. That was in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Health Sciences that found that you basically had decreased sensitivity to leptin when working a night shift. I want to get into this a little bit in response to Dwight's question about workouts, but working the night shift can nearly double your risk of suffering a workplace injury. And that's because of the drowsiness, the fatigue, and the lack of focus that can occur when you are working with no exposure to natural light or in a situation where our brains have been kind of ancestrally wired to be asleep versus when you're. When you're working in the day.

So are you basically saying that shift workers are screwed then? Because that's what it sounds like.

I don't want to be harsh, but yeah, to a certain extent. You have to accept the fact that if you're going to work night shifts, you are screwed hormonally and metabolically to a certain extent. Now, the fact that you have a job or that you're making money may outweigh many of those hormonal shifts that take place. And, you know, there's a risk versus reward benefit, especially if that's how you're paying the bills and putting food on the table.

Certainly if you're doing something like being a police officer or a nurse or something too, you're providing a very necessary service. So I guess that's really important, too.

And the other thing that you have to remember is a lot of the people who they've looked at in these studies were not implementing some of the. For example, the methods that I'm going to get into in just a second as far as mitigating some of this damage. So, you know, there are ways that you can kind of hack this lifestyle of working night shifts and be able to mitigate some of the damage. So a few things to get into. First of all, what you want to do is when you're going between night shifts and day shifts, you want to put your body into a state where it can make that transition as smoothly as possible. And you can specifically do that by almost like tricking your body into thinking it's night when it's day and tricking your body into thinking it's day when it's night. Night. So taking advantage of many of these elements, such as putting a blue light blocker on your computer, like installing the Flux app on your computer, so that the screen kind of dims as you're getting closer to whichever situation that you're in, where it's going to be bedtime. So, for example, if you're a night shift worker and you're getting into day, you would actually want to kind of make sure that this app that limits the blue light that comes off your screen, if you're working on a computer, is actually getting activated in the daytime rather than the nighttime. So you're limiting your exposure to artificial lights as day approaches and you're getting ready to sleep during the day. In a similar sense, as day is approaching, if you're working a night shift, you would also want to break out like blue light blocking glasses that are going to block some of the blue light that's coming off of artificial light in your office. And you can also, if you happen to be in control of what kind of light bulbs are being used in your office, you can use like low blue light bulbs, especially in situations where again, daylight is approaching and that's going to be the time that you will be asleep. And then when you do get home and get to sleep, a few things that are going to enhance your ability to get to sleep more quickly, even when you're in that daytime state where your body technically does not really, you know, is not again, ancestrally wired to be asleep. I would recommend you use something like a, like a grounding or an earthing mat, or even like this, this pulsed electromagnetic field therapy device, the Earth pulse, to be able to get your body into that state of deep sleep more quickly and allow you to recover a little bit better when you're in that state. I would also recommend that you consider using delta brainwave tracks. I'll link to some of this stuff in the show notes. There's these CDs called the delta effect. You can get them as CDs, you can get them as MP3 downloads, but basically utilizing those when you do get home to sleep during the day, that can be useful when you wake up. If you're waking up from your daytime sleep and it's already the afternoon or the early evening or the sun is setting, I would consider using a sunrise alarm clock, like the, like a nature bright sun touch for some morning light therapy. Or I guess in this case it would be like later afternoon, early evening light therapy. So again, you're doing kind of the opposite of what someone would normally do, which would be like light therapy in the morning, and instead you're doing light therapy in the afternoon or the evening to in the afternoon or the evening give your body the impression that the sun is, is rising, basically. So as far as some things that you can do from a supplementation standpoint, I would certainly be looking into the use of melatonin. Melatonin has been looked at in a few different studies on night shift workers. Like they gave cops in one study, 5 milligrams of melatonin that they took, took at their desired bedtime, which in this case would be, you know, kind of at the beginning of the day. And it helped significantly in helping them to get better sleep when they wanted it and then feeling more alert at night when they were working their night shift. So 3 to 5 milligrams of melatonin can help out. That's about 30 to 60 minutes before you're actually gonna, gonna go to sleep. I like something like Hammer REM caps for that because those have some valerian root mixed into them as well, which can kind of help too to settle you down. Magnesium. I'm a big fan of that. Don't overuse it if you don't want the liquid poo effect, especially when you combine it with valerian root.

Double whammy.

Yeah. This guy that I'm coaching for Ironman that's doing a lot of night shift work, he uses the Somnidren gh and that's a pretty geeked out supplement made by a company called Millennium Sports, but it has gamma aminobutyric acid and what's called a somatostatin inhibitor in it. And these are a couple of things that can literally put you into almost like a coma like state pretty quickly if you take them on an empty stomach. And that's something that I'll occasionally bring when I'm going to like a race or something because it actually increases your growth hormone release while you're asleep as well, which can be useful. So those are a few things I'd look at from a supplementation standpoint and then from an exercise standpoint. The important thing to remember here is that when you are in a fatigued state, your movement patterns and your awareness and your balance, just everything in terms of your proprioception and your body awareness and joint awareness is going to decrease when you're fatigued or when you're low on sleep. And so when I'm in situations like that where I know I haven't had enough sleep, where next week I'm going to be traveling extensively, I'm flying down to, down to San Diego on Sunday to speak at Triathlon Business International. I turn around and hop on a plane at 10pm, fly into New York, get into New York at 5am and go shoot a bunch of videos for Fox Sports from noon on the rest of that day. And then I've got my Team Timex camp for the next three days, a triathlon camp out at Giant Stadium. And then I hop on a plane at 6pm and take a red eye back to Spokane a week later situation like that. I'm very careful in terms of the type of workouts that I choose. If I am well rested, I will break out the high intensity intervals and the heavy powerlifting, barbell weightlifting type of stuff because I know that my body is primed and I'll take advantage of that. So when the body is well rested, that's when you do the hard stuff, the stuff that requires good form, the stuff that has a fatigue component and the stuff that you could get injured doing if you were doing in a fatigued state or in a tired state. So save that high quality work for when you're well rested and then when you're not well rested you can still exercise and you can still kind of do workouts. But the type of workouts that I do when I'm fatigued or when I'm low on sleep, or when I know that my body isn't moving how I want to, those are more of kind of like my. The stuff I keep around my home gym and the stuff that I'll use as light travel equipment like suspension strap workouts. I like to work out with the gym stick, which is basically like a piece of flexible aluminum tubing that has a couple of elastic bands that come off of it that allow you to do it. A series of kind of like, you know, 15 to 30 rep ish range exercises that don't get you as much bang for your buck as, you know, throwing around a barbell, but still give you a decent workout. I like the Fit 10, which is another portable exercise device that I use that I can attach to a door and do really simple core and kind of running in place style exercises with. And again, I find that I'm able to do that just fine when I'm sleepy or when, you know, I haven't gotten enough rest. And then these, the other thing I've been using for my home gym that's also portable enough for travel are these push up handles called performer handles and they've actually got wheels on the bottom of them so they move around a little bit while you're doing your push ups. Or you can do like, you know, ab Rollouts, you know, floor flies, stuff like that with them. And those are pretty cool too. But just like some, some light type of home exercise equipment that you can do easy workouts with, those can help you out when you're in a, when you're in a fatigued state or even, you know, for example, when you've got, just woken up and you're getting ready to go in on your night shift and you got to get in a quick workout, those are some of the things I'd be doing from an exercise standpoint. And I'd save the heavier stuff, the higher intensity intervals for the days where you're well rested. Basically you're off days. Those are some of my recommendations though, so hopefully that kind of points you in the right direction.

Hi Ben and Doc, this is Jenny. I've heard a lot about how reducing or eliminating dairy can help with asthma. And I have mild asthma, but I do take actually medication for it and I'd like to eliminate that. I was wondering with dairy, if it's all dairy, if I've heard that goat and sheep products are more easily digestible and everything for the body. And I thought that might help with asthma as well. I also do eat eggs. And so I'm wondering if in order to get the benefits of eliminating dairy for Asthma, if it's 100% no dairy, so no egg, like these, Mount Capra protein powder, none of that. So I just wanted to see to what degree I would need to experiment with that 100% or if I could have something a little here and there. So take care.

Bye.

Yeah, I'm really curious about this one too. Is it my first question about her question is, how come are eggs considered dairy?

In many cases, somebody who's sensitive to dairy is sensitive to the proteins in eggs. And for example, I did what's called an immunoglobulin test, which lets you figure out which proteins that you're sensitive to. And I tested high on eggs, I tested high on whey and pretty much any type of cheese or dairy. And so I didn't eliminate those. And I don't eliminate those. What I'm careful to do is I don't do much in the form of eggs or dairy or whey when I know that my body is already beat up. So after like a hard training weekend or when I've been exposed in situations where there's like a cold or a flu going around, or when I'm traveling and I know that my immune system is a little bit more depressed when I'm Traveling the other time is like leading into a very high priority race. I've been very careful to kind of avoid some of those triggers. But you know, I love scrambled eggs and you know, I like me some cheese on them sometimes too. And you know, I really enjoy the, the Wendy's frosty esque taste of like the Mount Capra deep 30 whey protein. You know, even though it is a really healthy cold processed goat based whey protein, you know, it's still whey. So you know, for me that immunoglobulin test kind of influenced the when I'll actually do something like taking dairy because it can have an inflammatory effect if you are the type of person who tends to mount an autoimmune reaction against those kind of proteins. Now you could get, I'll put a link in the show notes. You could go to a company like Direct Labs and just get an immunoglobulin test for yourself. There's one called a Metametrics immunoglobulin test which would be fine for you to in most states, especially here in the US you can find that test. It's called a, I think it's a metametrics immunoglobulin panel. Now what I ended up doing after I got that test as a substitute for most of the way that I was doing in many cases this deep 30 Mount Capra goat based protein that I was doing was I just started using a vegan protein in those situations where I wanted to make sure that I was 100% clean clean. And what I use is the living protein which is a rice and pea based protein blend when I'm going to be using a protein powder. However, the thing about protein is that there can be a very distinct difference between goats and cows when it comes to the dairy products from either. In the same way that many people who are sensitive to chicken eggs eggs are not sensitive to duck eggs. I, I actually happen to to see on my immunoglobulin test that I am not sensitive to duck eggs. But I don't really go out of my way too much to hunt down ducks.

Oh, they're delicious though. Duck eggs are so good. They make such awesome, fluffy omelets.

I'm. I totally believe you. I just, I haven't gone out of my way to hunt down duck eggs. So sorry.

I'll go try it sometime.

It's delicious to let you down. Maybe I will go buy and me a duck and get it to lay eggs anyways though. So. Goat milk. Goat milk is Less allergenic. And a lot of people who find that they get an allergic reaction specifically to this protein allergen that's in cow's milk that's called Alpha S1 casein, you don't get that same allergenic reaction to goat's milk because it's got about 90% less alpha S1 casein in it compared to cow's milk. And so there was actually a study that they'd done in infants who were allergic to cow's milk and found that almost 100% of those infants could drink goat's milk with pretty much no side effects, whereas cow's milk gives vomiting, diarrhea, skin rashes, and some pretty severe effects up to the point of anaphylactic shock. So goat milk is less allergenic. The other thing about goat milk is that it is more naturally homogenized. So if you were to take some goat's milk and you were to take some cow's milk and you were to, were to put it into the refrigerator overnight, and you were to look at the different phases in terms of how it separates, and the cream goes to the top and the skim goes to the bottom, there's a lot less phase separation in goat's milk. And this is because goat's milk does not have as high a level of what's called agglutinin in it, which is what causes that cow's milk to separate. So goat's milk is naturally lower in those agglutinin levels levels, and it tends to be better digested because of that. So the problem with homogenization is that when you homogenize milk, the cell wall of that fat globule gets broken. And when that happens, it releases free radicals, specifically something called xanthine oxidase. And these free radicals can cause a lot of cellular damage and metabolic issues. Well, because goat's milk has smaller fat globules and it doesn't have a gluten in it, in it, it's in basically a naturally homogenized state. So you don't have to homogenize goat's milk. And so that's another advantage of using a goat dairy versus a cow dairy. The goat's milk, like I just mentioned, it has those smaller fat globules, and it also has higher levels of what are called medium chain fatty acids in it. Same stuff you'd find in, like, coconut milk and butter and stuff like that. And this means that when you're digesting goat's milk, you get a larger surface to Volume ratio because the fat globules, globules are smaller and you have higher levels of these medium chain fatty acids. And so what that means is your body digests the protein more smoothly and you tend to not get a lot of the issues that you would tend to get from a cow based milk or a cow based whey. When you're looking at a goat based whey or goat based milk, lactose levels are much lower in goat's milk. So you don't tend to get the same amount of lactose intolerance going on with that. The other thing about goat's milk is it simply matches up to the human body better. And the reason for that is because the proteins in goat's milk are smaller. If you look at a baby goat, it usually starts out at about seven to nine pounds, which is pretty similar to what a human baby starts out at. Whereas a baby cow starts off at at like £100. And so cow's milk is designed to support a hundred pound calf and turn it into a, you know, a 1200 pound cow. Whereas goat's milk is designed to take something that's approximately the size of a human baby and turn it into about the size of, you know, humans are about the size of the average goat in terms of being around 100 to 200 pounds. And so you get a more thermodynamically, a better thermodynamic matchup in terms of the biochemistry of goat's milk and the actual makeup of the human body. So those are all reasons that, for example, one of the main supplements that I tend to recommend is a goat milk based whey or a goat milk based yogurt. My kids were raised on goat milk and even though now they do some raw cow's milk from a local dairy that's unhomogenized and unhealthy, unpasteurized. I'm still a big, big fan, especially for babies, of going after the goat's milk as much as possible. And anyone who's sensitive to dairy, trying to choose goat based dairy sources more than a cow based dairy source. So those are some of my thoughts on the goat versus the whey thing. But if you tested sensitive to whey protein anyways, what you should do is do what I do. When you're in a situation where you really want 100% clean, just don't do whey or dairy or eggs at all. And then in other situations, just make sure that you choose the really clean versions. Like, you know, for whey, choose a goat's whey that's preferably cold processed like the Mount Capra Deep 30 stuff. And then otherwise just go with like a vegan based whey protein and never ever, ever do any dairy that's just like commercial based dairy. So you just want to be careful where you're getting your dairy from and make sure it's clean. And that includes stuff like making sure that the cheeses that you choose are like the hard cheeses, the hard European artisanal cheeses from the fancy section of the grocery store because those tend to have lower levels of growth hormone and usually it's a little less likely that it comes from an A2 cap which tends to have those higher levels of allergens in it. And when you're doing yogurt, you know you want to go with organic pastured variety and you just, if you have a dairy sensitivity, you want to be super picky with where you're getting your dairy and then a lot of times it just kind of turns into a moot point or a non issue. So yeah.

Hi Ben and Brock. Right now I'm doing a lot of interval workouts, mostly 5 minute intervals and some 1 minute intervals at the pace is recommended by the Jack They System. Also Tabata sets when I'm pressed for time along with some longer steady efforts. One big factor is that my job is very physical. I get 30 to 40 hours a week of lifting boxes, brisk walking and pushes heavy loads. So what type of training would be best for increasing the distance that I can maintain a fast pace? Thanks, Jim.

Well, first of all, thank you for the shout out to my book, Jim. I know this book kind of flies under the radar, but a couple of years ago I found spent a full year pouring through all the research on how weight training can help endurance athletes. Doing a full summation of every research study up until 2011 and then putting this together along with the weight training program for triathletes. And that book's on Amazon.com it was published by Price Publishing and it's a pretty good manual for triathletes when it comes to implementing weight training year round. So we'll link to that in the show notes. And now that I've put it in a shameless conversation, it's called Tri Ripped. No, no, that one's called Weight Training for the Ultimate Guide to Weight Training for Triathletes. Tri Ripped is a little more fringe. It's more like you know, you want to get ripped and the aesthetic component is important to you. Weight Training for Triathletes is just pure performance research based stuff.

So the reason I said that was because I think I edited that part out of the question from Jim. Jim's question was quite long, so it, it may not show up for the people listening. But Jim did talk about that book.

Gotcha. You and your darn editing.

All right, if you go on too long, I'll cut you.

Yeah, keep your question shorter or Brock will do some serious cutting. Anyways though, yeah, Jim, he mentions that he's using the Jack Daniels system and doing a lot of interval based work. And just for those of you who don't know, the Jack Daniels system basically is a system of running that divides your running performance into six different components. And Jack Daniels basically lays out that you need to have each of these components in your training system in order to become, say, a better runner. Runner. So you want to train your cardiovascular component, which would be more of the aerobic component. You'd want to train your running muscles, ability to use oxygen, which would be more of the efficiency economy kind of drill component. You want to train your lactate threshold, which is your ability to minimize lactic acid buildup or turn over lactic acid more quickly or convert it back into fuel more quickly up in the liver. You'd want to improve your VO2 max, which is your maximum oxygen uptake take. You'd want to improve your speed or your leg turnover and then also your, your efficiency. So the Jack Daniels protocol kind of, you know, has different training zones that target each of these different areas. And if you're using a Jack Daniels training system, then it sounds to me like if you're fading towards the end of a, of a race, you just need to focus more on the part of the Jack Daniels training system. That's basically the lactate threshold that efforts and the VO2 Max efforts. So we're talking about doing intervals interval sessions, like threshold interval sessions, anywhere from five to 20 minutes in duration that are about 85 to 95% intensity and then also including some shorter intervals that are at a very high intensity. Now I personally, you know, when we step back and look at this from a more practical standpoint, I have found three different types of training sessions to help me most when it comes to keeping myself from feeling like I've got jello legs towards the end of a triathlon or towards the end of anything from a 5K to a half marathon. So basically those three sessions, number one is a fast finish run. What that means is whether you're running 20 minutes or 30 minutes or 40 minutes or maybe one of your, you're one of those people who's doing 90 minute up to two hour run runs. Whatever. You're incorporating an anaerobic glycolytic, fast finish run at the end of that effort. What that means is a very, very hard two to three minute finish at an all out pace. That puts a lot of money in the bank when you're forcing yourself to do that in a fatigued state. So that would be. Number one would be to include fast finish runs. Number two would be to include long hills. Now I have a hill that's close to my house. Takes me about five minutes to run to the base of that hill hill. So that's a nice little warm up for me. And it's called Arbor Crest Hill. There's a winery at the top of it called Arbor Crest Winery. And no, I do not ever.

It's the carrot at the end of the stick.

I have yet to make it into a drinking game, but it's on my bucket list. It may be the thing that's at the end of my bucket list, depending on how that goes. But basically this hill takes about six to eight minutes to run up and it's, it's fairly steep. It's a, it's right around, you know, depending on the part of the hill that you're on a six up to a 10% grade. So you're running uphill and you're working hard the whole time and you're just loaded with lactic acid the whole time. So as your body is building up lactic acid, you're never getting to a flat or a point where it breaks up or a point where the body is getting a chance to, to rebuffer and resize some of that lactic acid. So by keeping yourself in that state for a long period of time on a long hill climb, like a six to eight minute hill climb, you can really improve your lactic acid buffering capacity. And it's a different response than if you were to do like 60 second or two minute hills followed by flats or followed by recoveries or followed by downhills because you're pretty much just running uphill the whole friggin time. You could simulate this obviously on a treadmill as well. But long.

Not many people have a hill like that around their house. Mill would be a great option.

Yeah, long hills. Or come visit me. Come out to the Superhuman Conference in March and I'll take you up Arbor Crest Hill. Maybe I'll do that. If anybody wants to stick around Sunday or Monday, we'll do a workout we can leave from my house, run to the base of Arbor Crest and do some repeats. And then the last one is running fatigued, meaning post weights or post bike. Okay, so what this means is that you're going to finish up a hard weight session. And whereas normally I say be careful because doing squats and lunges and weight training can affect your biomechanics when you're running and potentially set you up for injury, as can running after you've done a really hard bike ride. But occasionally throwing in those sessions, you don't have to do it much. Once every couple of weeks or once every month where you're just like destroying yourself. For me, a sample session, I did one of these last year and again I throw these in for fairly, fairly seldomly. But I ran to the gym, which takes me three miles to run to, and I did a squat based workout and this involved about 5 to 6 sets of heavy squats. This was a like a 5 by 5 ish type of heavy squat workout. And then I ran home. And forcing yourself to run in a state where you've got some eccentric muscle tissue damage from a weight training session or doing something similar, like doing a really hard in, like let's say you get one of these Sufferfest indoor cycling videos. You do a really hard ride where you just, you're done. At the end of the ride you're like, put me to bed now, give me a smoothie, whatever, I'm done. And instead you strap on your running shoes and you go out and run a mile with good form at a decent pace. That's another really good way to train your body to run fatigued. So those would be my top three ways that I would improve your ability, you know, your stamina for the run and then just a couple of other things. Make sure that if you've got this super physical job that you're reducing fascial adhesions, which can really hold you back too and lead to premature muscle fatigue. What I mean by that is that I would be doing a foam roller at least once a week, preferably twice a week. I'd be throwing in a massage if you can, once a month, up to once a week if you can do it. And basically make sure that you know a lot of this tension that's created in the workplace and folks who have a physical job is mitigated by doing, doing some soft tissue work when you are off the job. Last thing is, as far as lactate buffering a supplement. I've been experimenting With I have this weekly workout that I do that's 10 by 30 second sprints on the treadmill at a 10% incline, as fast a pace as I can carry, which is usually about 10 and a half to 11 miles an hour on the treadmill. I've been popping this supplement called oxaloacetate. A link to it in the show notes called oxaloacetate, it's popular among the anti aging crowd. But what it does on an exercise level is it takes lactic acid and allows lactic acid to be shuttled back up to the liver more quickly and converted into glucose which then gets shuttled back down in the muscle to be used as energy. Now I've used this stuff so far three times before one of these treadmill based sprint workouts and I have noticed a distinct difference. And I realize that's a whole case study of one deal, but considering that I guinea pig and try out a lot of stuff, it's pretty rare that I find something I can feel like that at the high intensity apparently doing what it purports to do. Oxaloacetate. And I just pop it about 30 minutes before my workout. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Oats. Again, it's more popular as an anti aging formula. But if you get one of these anti aging formulas that has oxaloacetate in it and pop it prior to an intense workout, like one where you're building up a lot of lactic acid, could be worth it. I mean it's not going to help you out too much in something like Ironman, but for a really, really intense effort, you know, 5K sprint based workout, definitely something to try. So there you go. Cool. And brownie points if you can pronounce it 10 times fast.

Hey Ben and Brock, this is Mike from New York. First is about hermeticit levels. I've noticed from blood test results over the years that my levels always seem to fall between 39 and 40. I've heard that levels above 50 are suspect for doping, so it must mean that a higher number correlates to better performance. My question, the questions are is 40 low? And all things being equal, if it were, say 45, what would it mean for me? A higher VO2 max faster times better performance. And then lastly on that is, is it possible to raise it naturally or is it even desirable to.

All right, hematocrit levels. So yeah.

So first probably explain what hematocrit is.

Sure. It's red blood cells.

The amount of red blood cells in the Blood, kind of.

It's actually the percentage of erythrocytes per unit volume of blood. But boom, my propeller hat just beat your propeller hat. So here's the deal. The higher the concentration of red blood cells that you have in your blood, the higher the oxygen carrying capacity that you're going to have. And so the more endurance or the more power you have when you're running or you're cycling or you're swimming, or you're doing any endurance sports specifically. So red blood cells are also known as erythrocytes. They have this protein in them them that's called hemoglobin. And within each of these hemoglobin proteins are molecules called hemes or hemes, depending on how you want to pronounce them up. In Canada, just because it sounds funnier, you probably say hemis or hemis, we say hemisphere. So these are these molecules that have an iron atom in the middle of them. And this iron atom can bind oxygen that you inhale and transport it to hard working muscles. It can also take carbon dioxide waste and bring it back to the lungs to be removed. So the more oxygen that gets to your muscles, the more work your muscles can do. And so it would benefit you to somehow figure out how to increase the concentration of your erythrocytes or increase the concentration of your red blood cells per unit volume of your blood. And hematocrit is just that, hematocrit is the concentration of erythrocytes per unit volume of blood. So usually how you increase hematocrit is through, you know, doing exercise intervals or aerobic exercise. And I'll get into some specific protocols here in a second. But a few decades ago, what was discovered by endurance athletes and their doctors was, is that if you take blood from an athlete's body and you remove it and then you allow time for the athlete to regenerate that lost blood. And then right before a competition, you transfuse the blood back into the athlete. That allows for an elevated hematocrit value and improves performance. Another way that you could achieve a similar effect is to administer a drug called erythropoietin or epo. And EPO signals your body to produce new red blood cells and hence for a period of time increases your hematocrit values. Most men do have a hematocrit value of about 40 to 45%. So 40 to 45% erythrocyte volume in the blood. When they aren't doing any of these type of illegal hematocrit enhancing type of techniques but when you are using something like blood doping or an EPO drug, you can get blood that pushes 50% and gets up to 60% in terms of its hematocrit levels. And that is much, much thicker blood than blood with a normal 40% hematocrit value. So that makes your heart have to work harder to pump that blood through the body and can get your heart to work so hard that you have a heart attack. Which is indeed why cyclists started dying of heart attacks. And the international cycling regulatory body, what's called the UCI, deemed that anytime you had a hematocrit above 50, that was technically unhealthy, and a cyclist was suspended from being able to compete in an event if a blood test revealed a hematocrit of 50 or higher.

Oh, so it wasn't because it was suspected of doping. It was actually for safety reasons.

Exactly. And so a lot of these athletes wanted to figure out a way to get a higher than 50 hematocrit so they could train and race faster, but then not get caught with this hematocrit of over 50 and get suspended. And so that's where a lot of of this play, you know, that you start to read about in one of these books, like, the Secret Race came into play. And, you know, with something like this, athletes would do what are called autologous blood transfusions, where you transfuse your own blood, which makes it a little bit harder to detect blood doping, you know, and there were still athletes out there dying of heart attacks, but, you know, sludgy. Yeah. Using more bioidentical versions of EPO is another way that athletes started doing it, but ultimately, it's still super dangerous stuff. So there are ways that you can naturally enhance your hematocrit. It's not going to get your levels up to the dangerous 60%, but it'll at least push you closer to that 50%, give you a little bit of increased endurance performance. Unfortunately, it's tough unless you have access to a lab to just be constantly measuring your hematocrit values. Let's say you're going to go out and do a UCI sanctioned cycling event and you're concerned that your hematocrit is above 50% because you've been incorporating some of the natural methods that I'm about to describe. You know, you're just gonna have to find a lab and test if that really, really worries you. But it's very unlikely if you use these natural methods that you're gonna be bumping yourself way up above 50%. So anyways, the first way that you can increase your serum erythropoietin or your serum EPO and your hematocrit naturally is through what's called hypoxic exercise. This does not necessarily mean that you're holding your breath while you exercise, even though that would be one way to do it would be breath holding while, you know, swimming 25 or 50 meter intervals, but pushing your body, preferably at altitude, but it doesn't have to be at altitude, pushing your body in an extremely intense manner, meaning anywhere from 120 up to 200% of VO2 max. So pretty much all outpace to the point where the body's crying for oxygen faster than oxygen can be supplied by the lungs and the bloodstream and that will increase epo. Of course there are some significant recovery implications from something like that. But like that 10 by 36 second spread mill sprint protocol that I described a little bit earlier, that's an example of something where I'm getting hypoxic and I'm really pushing my body and I am sucking wind after every single one of those. But that is a natural way, those type of high, high intensity intervals to naturally increase EPO biosynthesis.

And for those people out there who don't know, hypoxic pretty much literally means without oxygen. So when Ben says hypoxic, that's what he's meaning.

Anything longer than three minutes won't do it. Anything longer than three minutes is too long. There's no way that you're sustaining a high enough intensity in order to increase your EPO. So it needs to be about 30 seconds up to around three minutes. So you're trying to go longer than what would be called your phosphogenic energy system, meaning just using creatine phosphate, trying to cross over into what's called glycolysis, but not getting to the point where you're going erect. So you're keeping your body in an anaerobic state. So 30 second to three minute intervals that are very, very difficult. And if you're close to a mountain, like you can go skate, ski and do some of these intervals while you're skate skiing, or you can simulate altitude, or you've got access to an altitude chamber, you can do this type of stuff in, you're going to increase those results even faster. Now there are also dietary interventions for increasing your oxygen carrying capacity or you know, on the flip side for reducing anemia. If you know anemia tends to be an issue with you and you would know this. If you, if you get lethargic and dizzy and short of breath during exercise, if you, if you kind of tend to be a pale type of person, have a pale complexion, a sore tongue is another sign of anemia. A lot of weird food cravings like wanting to chew ice and stuff like that is another sign of anemia. But you know, whether or not it's anemia that you're trying to take care of, or whether you're trying to kind of boost your hematocrit valve, you want to look after dietary interventions that are going to supply your body with adequate iron or adequate proteins. So protein adequacy is one really, really important factor in erythropoietin release. Erythropoietin is highly dependent on having adequate dietary protein. So for most endurance athlete, looking at how many pounds that you weigh and trying to get about 0.7 to 0.0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight, 0.7 to 0.8 grams of protein per pound of body weight is typically going to put you in a, in a net nitrogen positive balance, or at least a net nitrogen balance that's really going to support red blood cell formation. So make sure that you're getting adequate protein. More is not necessarily better, especially if you don't want to be, you know, pooping out a straw from all those protein protein shakes that you consume. But basically getting at least adequate protein is really, really important. Be careful also kind of along along the same lines with too much of the whole intermittent fasting approach, because specifically in rat studies, fasting has been shown to lower epo. So I don't recommend doing a lot of intermittent fasting, especially in those last few weeks going into a rat race. So don't get to that state where you're not at race weight and you're having to pull out a weight loss strategy like intermittent fasting to lose weight, because that can suppress some of the EPO formation in the same way that inadequate protein intake can do that. In terms of other dietary factors that go beyond calorie deprivation and protein deprivation is two things that you'd want to avoid. Avoid dietary iron absorption can significantly influence your erythropoietin. Now, vitamin C, when consumed along with an iron rich food, is a very, very good way to absorb lots of really good heme rich iron. So that would mean, for example, you can grab something like an ascorbic acid supplement, a vitamin C supplement, a good little bit of vitamin C rich food like a grapefruit or a pomegranate or even in a pinch, one of these zip fizz capsules or something else that has a lot of vitamin C in it. And consume that before you have a nice big rib eye steak or T bone steak. And that's going to really boost the absorption of that iron and help you to enhance EPO formation. You can also get a lot of non himi based iron from dark vegetables, things like kale and bok choy and spinach and mustard greens and things of that nature. So you can use the same strategy with that stuff, even though it's going to be a little less absorbed, about four times less absorbed than a meat based iron source, such as what you'd get from a steak. There are some things that can inhibit your iron absorption. In particular a lot of the polyphenols and the tannins that are found in tea, as well as some of the phytates that are found in stuff like soy and unfermented or unsoaked or unsprouted rice or grain. So you'd want to be careful with doing kind of like the traditional vegan soybean rice grain type of thing. If you're really serious about boosting your hematocrit and your EPO and your iron values. And if you're going to consume any of those type of sources, do like I do, eat snot for breakfast and ferment your soybeans. So a few other things that you may want to take into consideration is that arachidonic acid is a particular prostaglandin precursor that can stimulate erythropoietin production. And you're gonna get high levels of something like that by including omega 3 fatty acid sources such as fish oil and cold water fish in your diet. So that's another thing to add in. And then if we look at the body and we look at substrates that are necessary for erythropoietin metabolism and synthetic, there are a few other things that the body uses and I'm just going to rattle off a couple other things for you to look into. One would be probiotics acidophilus. So make sure you're taking a probiotic or you're eating lots of probiotic rich food. One would be sulfur precursors. So making sure that you're getting like garlic, onions, stuff like that, make sure that that is present in your refrigerator or in your diet when you're shopping, or else, you know, grab some garlic capsules and use those full vitamin B complex. So again, if you're a vegan or a vegetarian, you should really consider supplementing with at least a good vitamin B12. And if not, just make sure that you're getting your meats. Zinc is also super important. So zinc, you got to be careful taking too much of it because it can impair your immune response if you take too much of it. But I'm a big fan of zinc for both testosterone as well as for this EPO issue. And then the last thing is something called coenzyme Q10, and this is something that you can supplement with. It's found in a lot of anti aging compounds. Again, it's found in a lot of full spectrum antioxidant compounds because it's a pretty potent antioxidant, but it's also required for erythropoietin synthesis. It's called CoQ10 or Coenzyme Q10. And I like to see athletes on about 100 to 150 milligrams of that on a daily basis. And in most cases, if you're taking like one of the full spectrum antioxidant blends that I recommend, like, you know, Nutra Rev or Solar Synergy or Life Shots or any of these, you're getting some adequate CoQ10 in your diet. So those are all ways that you could get that hematocrit up legally. And that's where I would start.

Okay, so we've got one last question here, and it comes from an anonymous listener. And the question is, I am thinking of getting a vasectomy, but I don't want to mess up my race season or my health. How long will I need to take off running and lifting? After the procedure, I'm less concerned about cycling and swimming, but that's also a factor. The medical literature says to don't bathe or swim for 48 hours, take it easy for two or three days, limit your activity for five days, don't exercise or lift for a total of seven days. That doesn't sound too bad, does it?

Okay, so I would not get a vasectomy. Personally, I would not get a vasectomy. And there are a few reasons why. First of all, a vasectomy can cause problems with your prostate. So your prostate is your gland that surrounds this urethra. And the urethra is that tube that delivers stuff like semen and urine. And I'm just gonna use the P word now in the penis and the prostate produces this fluid that mixes with sperm to form semen. And you know, when that gland gets inflamed, it can cause some issues, including prostate cancer. And there was a study that was in the Journal of the Medical American Medical association that showed that men who had vasectomies had a higher risk of developing prostate cancer than other men. And this was a pretty big study that studied, I think it was over 14,000 different guys who had had vasectomies. And there have been a few studies since that have showed other results, including many, many studies in China showing a link between vasectomy and prostate cancer risk. So that's one issue is the prostate cancer component. Sure, you could mitigate, mitigate some of that by using like saw palmetto extract, using some zinc, getting good, good rich sources of lycopene like stewed and cooked tomatoes in your diet. But it's certainly something to give me pause when it comes to vasectomy. Now there is also the existence of several studies that have looked into autoimmunity issues in terms of immune related disease before and after vasectomy. And what these studies looked into was what happened in terms of the body's response to a lot of things like digestive triggers for autoimmunity, inflammation, asthma, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, a lot of these inflammatory bowel disease and gut disorders, all of these traditional immune mediated mechanisms. And what they found was that at vasectomy, sperm antigens are released into the blood vessels stream and they provoke this pretty intense antisperm antibody response. And there are some significant concerns here in terms of the amount of, basically you get a vasectomy and you increase the potential of you being even more responsive or having a higher inflammatory response to stuff like gluten, whey, soy, Potential immune triggers in the diet that you may not have had any trouble with before. It's like getting stung by a, by a bunch of bees and all of a sudden being really, really sensitive to bees after that point because your body mounts this autoimmune reaction that just keeps it on hyper alert. Similar thing if you get a bunch of sperm antigens that are rolling around in your bloodstream. So vasectomies may also be a trigger for autoimmune disease. There have been a couple of studies that have shown that a vasectomy can decrease your testosterone levels by all up to 30%. And for me, that's a real kicker. Just because of, you know, we're all aware of the importance of testosterone in terms of libido and sexual performance. And what happens is if you, if you look at a lot of the initial studies, you'll find that testosterone levels are unaffected or even slightly increase after a vasectomy. And that's where a lot of this confusion exists among medical researchers, because they'll tell you that, oh, you know, vasectomies might even increase your testosterone or they're not going to have any effect at all. However, what happens is several years down the road, you get a significant decrease in testosterone. What we're looking at are the long term side effects of something like a vasectomy and not the short term response. So that means that your sexual interest, your athletic performance, your sexual performance, all of this stuff may be significantly, significantly affected by a vasectomy. Now, I personally am a big, big fan, if you're doing this for contraceptive reasons, of what's called the rhythm method of natural family planning. And that's just basically involves taking your temperature with a basal body temperature thermometer each day. And that would be for the woman. And what will happen is if you're a girl and you're doing this, you're going to notice a slight rise in your temperature during ovulation. And it's really, really slight. It's about 0.9 degrees or so. And you usually only notice that for about a day. But basically what you do is you abstain from sexual activity until after your period and until at least about three days after your temperature spikes. And if you keep a record of temperatures, then what you're going to notice is, is this pattern where you're going to notice every time that slight increase in body temperature occurs. That helps you as a woman to understand when you ovulate. And then you track that each month. You're able to tell ahead of time when you're ovulating. And that will tell you when you should abstain from sex. You can also check your cervical mucus, which is going to kind of change in texture, and it basically it gets more kind of wet and slippery during ovulation. And that's like your peak day. And you want to record that on a chart too. And that helps you figure out when you're going to ovulate. And you can also look for signs and symptoms, you know, like a little bit of pain in your lower back and tender breasts and a little bit of minor cramping. And basically what you do is once you've figured out when you ovulate, based off of one or preferably a combination of these methods, you know when to abstain from sex. You basically avoid intercourse for the days before and a few days after ovulation if you want to avoid pregnancy. And that can Be a really safe way to do it. There's a book out there called the Pill. I forget who wrote it, but I mean, it really goes into why oral contraceptives in particular destroy a woman's body. But also some of these natural fertility methods that you can use.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I mean, it sounds like vasectomies aren't the way to go, but neither are they the oral contraceptives. There's risks on both sides. So, yeah, that sounds like a much more legitimate option.

Yeah, I mean, it probably comes as no surprise to the listeners that I am definitely a fan of the natural approach, including avoiding surgery because of the prostate cancer, the immune related issues and the testosterone lowering issues. And then also using natural birth control methods, you know, and I, yeah, I've used condoms and stuff like that. I don't like go out and buy a lambskin condom or anything like that, but I try and keep things as natural as possible. So my ultimate response to this would be I'm almost hesitant to answer the question because I don't really recommend vasectomies if you are going to get one. What I would recommend is that you follow your surgeon's recommendations to. To the T. When it comes to post vasectomy physical activity. I am not a surgeon. I do not routinely do vasectomies. As a matter of fact, I never do vasectomies. And you know, I don't know too much about the recovery period on them, but I would just follow what a doc has to say on that stuff. Ultimately though, if it was me, I wouldn't do the snp. I would just not do it. Those parts are too important to me to mess around with them.

All right, well, that wraps up this episode. But don't stop listening. Even though it sounds like I'm saying the words wrapped up that episode because we still have a few minutes of Craig.

That's right.

About all of his awesome My List stuff.

We're not going to snip this thing yet.

Not yet.

As you notice, I use the word snip right there that completely go over your head. Okay, just checking.

Yeah.

So yeah, we're going to go into the My List episode with Craig here and be sure to check out all the links that we'll give you. This is episode 229. Brook.

229.

229. Over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com we'll link to the Superhuman conference. We'll link to all of my recommendations for Sleep for Goat's Milk versus Cow's Milk, my Weight Training for Triathletes book, and everything else that we talked about. So check it all out.

Audiblepodcast.com Ben to get your free book from Audible.

That's right. And we'll leave you guys to have a fun week, geeking out on improving your sleep, increasing your hematocrit, and avoiding vasectomies. So enjoy your week and Brock and I will be back next week. Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And as promised, I've got another fantastic list of must haves for you today. I've got Craig Hugger on the call, and I'll let Craig tell you a little bit about. He does. But one of the special things that we do once a month here at Ben Greenfield Fitness is we take one of our listeners who has created what's called a Mylist, and my list list. Think of it like Pinterest for Facebook, basically, where you can go collect all the things that are kind of like your best of your favorite things that help make your life better healthier, etc. And this month I took a look at Craig's My List, which he posted over to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Facebook page. And there's instructions on how to do all of this on the show notes. But anyways, Craig posted his My List over on our Facebook page and I took a look at it and thought it was pretty cool. And his list was actually a list of his must have travel items. And Craig, you've got an interesting job that makes it so that travel is kind of something that you really have to merge with health pretty carefully. So tell me a little bit about what it is that you do exactly.

Okay, well, thanks, Ben. I travel around the country. I do software training for law firms. Most of that lately has been office training. So if you use Word or Excel or PowerPoint or Outlook, then I do a lot of training for that in law firms. And I do travel quite a bit. Last year I was close to 200 nights on the road. And in addition to that, I listen to your podcast because I'm training for triathlons, so I have to get pretty good at the travel stuff.

Yeah, yeah, that's good. You've chosen the right podcast to listen to, by the way.

Okay, sure.

So you've got, you know, you've got like the best of hardware and your best of triathlon gear and your best of iPad apps. And by the way, we'll be sure and link to Craig's list in the show notes here so you guys can go Check it out. But you also have your best of travel gear and I like some of your stuff. It was some stuff that I wasn't really familiar with or that I haven't used. So tell me. I'm just going to ask you about some of this stuff and why you picked what you did. You have something called one bag. The art and science of traveling light. What exactly is that and how does that make travel more pleasant for you?

Well, that really kind of started me traveling lighter than I had before. One of my co workers, a female co worker, one day I was saying that I just couldn't travel light enough to not check bags because typically I'm gone for six days at a time and sometimes as much as three weeks. And she looked at me and she said, look, I'm a girl. I don't carry luggage. You know, I don't check bags. You can get away with it. And so she turned me onto this site and it's a site that just basically tells you how to travel lighter. And some of the folks that have testimonials on there even, you know, take international travel and don't check bags.

That's awesome. I am big time. When I'm not doing triathlons or I'm just speaking at conferences or going to conferences, I'm huge into trying to have as little as possible on me. So it's onebag.com. cool. I like it. I'm gonna have to check that out. I love discovering shiny pennies and distracting things to do on the Internet. So what about your Specter half cube? What's a Spectre half cube and how does that exactly work for you?

Well, there's a couple of packing things and the. That one is just, you know, it's a size of, I don't know, like a, like a ditty bag or something. But it's just lightweight and I, I put stuff in it. And actually on the onebag.com site, he talks about a packing method where you kind of fold everything together. And that Specter half cube, I put underwear and pajama stuff in that and that kind of forms the core of folding all the clothes kind of together.

Okay, cool. Specific half cube. I like it. I know for some people this might not seem like health and fitness tips, but I know we have a lot of people that travel that listen in. So this stuff, sure, this stuff is cool. And I love to geek out on travel myself. So you also have something that we probably could classify as falling into the health category, and that is cinnamon tooth powder with Himalayan salt. What the heck is. I understand why. Probably since that's not a liquid, it is something that might be a little bit easier to travel with, but tooth powder, Tell me a little bit about that.

Well, you know, as you mentioned, I mean, liquids. I mean, the most precious part of your travel gear is that one little bag that you get to take through with liquids. And so anything you can do with a powder is, you know, is a win. So I looked for something after hearing your podcast that, you know, fluoride is not a good thing. And so I found this. And it's really kind of old fashioned toothpaste. It's baking soda and salt and a little bit of cinnamon for flavor. So it's, you know, it's available on Amazon.com and I tried it and liked it and, you know, seems like it's a pretty good deal.

Awesome. Okay, cool people. By the way, I use charcoal toothpaste, like charcoal powder tooth toothpaste. So that's, that's awesome. I'm gonna have to check out your, your cinnamon tooth powder. So I can never get on a call with somebody if I see something that I think they shouldn't be doing without telling them about it. So, Craig, I'm gonna put you on the spot. Why are laundry soap sheets on your travel list? And did you know.

Well, that's. I don't know where you're going. No, I take, I don't. I take about half as much clothes as I wear. And so, you know, I use the laundry soap sheets to, to wash out socks and underwear, and so I can wear those twice instead of once.

Gotcha. Okay. The reason that I bring this up, and by the way, for those of you listening, Craig didn't know I was gonna bring this up, but I am because I can't keep quiet about it.

Okay?

So laundry dryer sheets are one of the highest sources of phytoestrogens and xenoestrogens in our environment. Meaning that for a guy who's trying to, you know, especially for older males, as testosterone gets converted into estrogens and things like, you know, man boobs and drop of libido and all the things that guys these days have to fight against, come into light. Laundry soap sheets are one of the worst things that you can, that you can use in your laundry, like dryer sheets or laundry soap sheets because of their phytoestrogens. So there are things that you can do. Like what I do is I Travel with the Dr. Bronner's Natural Antibacterial soap, just a little bit of that. And I generally will just take a shower with that stuff, throw it on my clothes, put my clothes into a towel, stomp up a and down a few times, and then hang them up in the, in the shower. But I stay away from any of these, these soap sheets or dryer sheets.

Well, see, I didn't know I learned something. There you go.

That was free. All right, so cool, folks. It's. You can, you can check out Craig's My list on the show notes for this episode of BenGreenfieldFitness.com episode number 229 over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and if you want to make your own my list and share it to the Ben Greenfield Fitness show and get on the show to talk about what you picked and why, and I promise I won't beat you up too bad, right? That wasn't too bad, right, Craig?

No, that wasn't too bad.

Okay, then go to mylist.com BenGreenfield and get signed up. So check it out. And thanks for coming on the call, Craig.

Thanks, man.

Finally, a solution for healthy living that actually makes sense. Ben Greenfield and his wife Jessa have cracked the code on healthy living and revealed their entire system inside the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle, where you'll get Instant access to 24.7forum, interaction with Ben and Jessa, a live monthly webinar, meal plans, videos, Ben's Body Transformation Club archives, and much, much more. If you or your family want to learn how to achieve the ultimate healthy lifestyle on a budget, then the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle is for you. Get four free videos to get you started and full access to the inner circle@BenGreenfieldFitness.com inner circle that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com innercircle We'll see you inside.