#232: Podcasting LIVE - Is Decaf Coffee Healthy, Can You Have Too Much Iron, How Often Should You Pee On The Bike And More!

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Sweet. Well, this is the live BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. This is our third attempt to start this podcast because Brock and I are podcasting live from the lobby of the Doubletree Hilton here in Spokane, Washington. Really has crappy Internet. Yeah, let's blame the Internet anyways though. So we are, we've got live listeners on a live spreecast and we also are recording for publishing this thing out to you if you're listening at a later time. And the reason that we're here together is for the Become Superhuman live event. We did not just decide to randomly.

Meet in a hotel lobby, meet in.

A hotel lobby in Spokane to record the podcast. So yeah, we're here for Become Superhuman. If you weren't able to make it here to Spokane this weekend for the live event, you could still access it via online. There's a pay per view access where you can, you can see all sorts of people duking it out. And you'll have access to the playbacks too.

Metaphorically duking it out. There's actually no, no pugilism.

I just always think of like UFC when I'm talking about pay per view. I don't know why because that's probably the only thing I ever buy. Pay per view. Yeah, considering I don't get TV reception, makes it a little hard to do much pay per view on my end. But apparently the Internet does have pay per view capabilities. So anyways, that being said today, should I do our topics? Brock? Sure. All right folks, check this out. Today we are going to be talking about fish versus fish oil. How much should you pee on the bike? Friction burns on the upper arms while running. Any thoughts on drinking your own urine? Is decaf coffee healthy? Can you have too much iron healthier.

Than drinking your own urine?

And everything you need to know about heat stroke. Alright, cool.

News flashes.

So what do you think, Brock? Should we just jump right into this week's news flashes?

Yes, I think we've bantered enough.

All right, cool. So the first news flash for this week is that it is interesting. I tweeted that basically the packages that soda comes in may be as bad as the soda itself. When it comes to blood sugar regulation.

And when you say soda, you mean like popped?

Like, I mean, I don't know, what do you guys mean up in Canada when you talk about soda?

We don't call pop soda. We call it pop soda is what you put in, like baking soda or something like that. But I know you could. Crazy Americans. So you're talking about like Coke.

Yeah. This was a study on BPA that's not only in Coke cans, but also soup cans, coconut milk, the lining, whatever. What they found was that when you are consuming stuff that's in a BPA containing can or container, that it significantly influences your ability to regulate your blood glucose levels. Meaning that part of the issue with drinking soda is not just the actual sugar spike from the soda itself, but it's also the fact that BPA basically puts your insulin levels through a crap storm and decreases your insulin sensitivity and makes it way more difficult to regulate your blood glucose levels.

So it's like a one, two punch.

It's like a one, two punch and.

Then hitting it with a bunch of sugar.

So not that our listeners necessarily are chugging Mountain Dew while listening into the podcast, but it's something interesting to note that even if you're doing something like dishwashing your Tupperware and your plastic, just that alone increases the amount of BPA that leeches off the stuff by over 40%. Meaning that you could, for example, think you're eating healthy and have heated up leftovers in a plastic container or even be eating out of a plastic container that's been dishwashed and you're going to throw your blood glucose levels out of whack, you know, along with getting man boobs and all the other stuff that goes along.

So that would be the same if you were having. If you were having a diet soda as well. So you're still doing the damage to your gut.

Yeah, exactly. Assuming that that diet soda has BPA in it. So yeah. Yep. So thought that was interesting. Another study that I tweeted this week was that there was a study that came out that gives us a big fat clue when it comes to breakfast boosting testosterone levels. And we'll link to this study in the show notes, but it was called do Fat Supplements increase physical performance? And it looked at two different types of fat supplements that you may be familiar with. If you're a supplements geek, as I know all our listeners are. Right. A propeller hat geek on supplements, basically cla, or conjugated linoleic acid and fish oil. And what this study found was that Both fish oil and conjugated linoleic acid, two different forms of fatty acid that you can use as pre workout supplements, as daily health supplements, they actually do a significant job boosting testosterone levels. Fish oil, by being basically a cholesterol precursor that allows you to create pregnenolone and then go from there into testosterone, a lot of your hormone downstreams that you're going to get out of that, and then also conjugated linoleic acid because it can actually upregulate the enzymes that are responsible for creating testosterone. So any guy, especially who's serious about amping up testosterone levels, or for example, like a woman who's on the pill, which incidentally shoves your testosterone levels into the tank, should look into not only fish oil supplementation or eating fish, but but also either conjugated linoleic acid or one of the richest sources of it from diet, which is grass fed beef. Okay, so there you have it. And the interesting thing that I also tweeted this week, since we're geeking out on fish, is that even though fish oil is going to give you a bunch of benefits like this, I'm not the biggest fan of relying on fish oil per se for a lot of these omega 3s and DHA and testosterone precursors because it can have issues. And there's a lot of talk about this, especially like in the paleo community right now, about how fish in its extracted form may be unnatural, maybe has a lot of these oxidized fatty acids that are in it, and that maybe we shouldn't be eating as many fish oil supplements as we've been led to believe that we should.

Now, is that on account of, like you always talk about it being rancid?

Now that is my take on the whole fish oil thing is that fish oil needs to be in its natural form, meaning it needs to be packaged cold. It needs to preferably be packaged with antioxidants that are going to basically make it not be rancid like astaxanthin or vitamin A. And then the other thing that's super important to make sure that you get a good natural ratio of fish oil is that it has vitamin E E in it as well. E like elephant. Now, if you can get all those components in place in a fish oil, you would be consuming a form of fish oil that is not what has been used in these studies that have found fish oil to be potentially dangerous.

So, so is that the ethyl ester form?

That would be the triglyceride form of fish oil. You Want something in this triglyceride form, something that has been cold processed and packaged with antioxidants like astounded zanthin and vitamin E. If you're just grabbing Kirkland brand fish oil off the shelf at Costco, for example, or out of the bargain bin of your local supplements outlet, you probably are doing yourself more harm than good. And so the other thing that I tweeted this week was another reason I'm a big fan of eating wild fish when you can, as opposed to taking a fish oil supplement, is that there was a new study that came out that show showed that the actual protein component of fish, when combined with the fatty acids that are in the fish, does a fantastic job regulating your blood glucose levels and sensitizing you to insulin. So this all comes down to the fact that whole food is always going to be better than the supplements. The supplements aren't necessarily bad, but what you want to make sure of when you do take the supplements is that they've been treated as naturally as possible.

And they're in addition to eating some of the whole foods as well.

Exactly.

You're not relying on that as your only source.

Right. So one of the things, and I don't know if the mic's picking you up as well as me, I'm watching the levels and you may want to talk closer to the mic when you talk. But you know, one of the things that I do is on days I eat fish, I don't do fish oil. I supplement with cod liver oil. So I'm getting some of that natural vitamin E and vitamin A as well. Well, and then the other thing is that I use, I use the super essentials brand fish oil. So a few good brands out there would be Farmax, Nordic Naturals, Carlson's is not bad. And the other one would be the, the super essential stuff from, from Living Fuel. And that is of course available over on, on pacificfit.net but like two to four capsules of that a day, you know, as, as one of these ways to bump up your testosterone, give you that anti inflammatory potential without getting a lot of the oxidized fatty acids that a lot of fish oils have in them. And we have a question from a listener, Valerie, who's listening live right now, who says, what about fish in a BPA free can? If you're buying canned fish, you're, you're definitely selling for plan B. I mean, it's not going to be fresh. I am a big, big fan of eating your meats especially as fresh as possible. So you avoid a lot of the risks of mycotoxins, molds, stuff like that. Yeah, when I'm traveling, sometimes I do grab salmon or tuna in one of those to go packets, but it's definitely not as efficacious and potentially higher in metals, higher in toxins, higher in molds than just doing like fresh fish.

So frozen would be way better than out of a can.

Flash frozen, preferably. Yeah, yeah. So the fresher you can get the meat, the better. And then the other thing that one of my athletes who I coached sent me this week was that it's scary that the tuna that you're eating at the grocery store isn't actually tuna. And if I could pull open this study, I'm holding my Kindle right now.

Tuna's not tuna.

Tuna's not tuna. Check this out.

Cows disguised as tuna.

Yeah, it's.

Bring a tuna suit.

No, it's not that a cow is disguised as a tuna.

That'd be pretty awesome though.

It is the. Well, let's see if it pulls up here. I've got it on my. On my Kindle. Basically, they did this genetic evaluation of all a ton of different restaurants in the tuna that they were serving. And what they found was that in most cases the tuna was not actually tuna. It was some other form of fish, including one type of fish called escobar, which interestingly is not a very healthy fish and can in fact in excess, cause not to candy coat it too much, but basically anal leakage. So here I just found we've said.

The word anal leakage.

59% of America's tuna is not actually tuna. Pretty scary.

Wow.

Pretty scary stuff. So there you go.

Like a small portion that is tuna, or they wouldn't be able to use tuna on the label.

You know, it could be that it's mixed with tuna, but I mean, we're talking not just about like tuna that's used in tuna salad or like, you know, blended up tuna derivatives, but straight up just like tuna that's on your plate, that's served as a filet of tuna, is in many cases not tuna. So, you know, always be careful. One thing that I do, of course, when I'm. When I'm eating sushi, sashimi, tuna fish, whatever is, I use, I do this also with shellfish activated charcoal. That's a way that you can mitigate some of the toxin exposure that you get from this stuff, your own stomach. I finally got this pulled up on my Kindle. 59% of the fish fish labeled tuna sold at restaurants and grocery stores is not in fact tuna. And that's on 1200 samples of fish from across the United States that they genetically tested this non profit group. Genetically tested. So pretty crazy stuff there. And yeah, the geeking out on fish. Those are all the news flashes for this week. And it doesn't look like any questions came through from our live listeners about any of that stuff. Stuff that we just got.

Thanks for coming back.

Yeah, thanks for coming back by the way, everybody. And yeah, let's move into this week's Q A. Okay.

Listener Q A.

So what do we got first?

No, our. Do you want to do special announcements? I guess we already talked about.

We don't really have any special announcements. We're going to put a survey in the show notes that we'd like folks to fill out if you can. But aside from that.

Yeah, definitely fill out the survey if you too gnarly and yeah, okay, let's look at Chris asks I have to urinate frequently while training and racing.

You may want to talk into the mic a little bit more.

I don't know if I can read. I have to urinate frequently while training and racing. Last weekend I had to go three times in the first 25 miles of a ride. That will just annoy me in my Ironman in May. Or what are some things I can try eliminate or experiment with to get in front of this? It's just. Is it just that I'm drinking too much water leading up to the workouts? Too much water the night before? Maybe too much water and not enough electrolytes? Maybe excessive sodium in my diet is causing me to over drink during the week. Last year I made. I had to make pit stops in two of my A races. And Chris, I. I feel your pain. I had to make a pit stop in 70.3, which is apparently not necessary.

Usually while you're reading that question, somebody complimented me on the beanie that I'm wearing on our live video feed right now. I just rode my bike down here, that's why. And no, I did not pee on the ride, in case you're wondering why I thought of that. I have done entire Ironman triathlons before without peeing one single time. And a big, big part of how often you urinate is not only due to how much you are drinking. And it certainly is true that excessive drinking and even hyponatremia can be an issue that would cause you to excessively urinate while you're riding the bike. But the other issue can basically be when you're amped up on adrenaline. When you're really pushing yourself, your body begins to shut down a lot of that urinary type of function, that voiding type of function, just because it's extra energy that you would use. And so one thing that I've told people who are perhaps training for an ironman and doing their long bike rides and finding that they gotta stop every half hour, every hour, every couple of hours to use the bathroom, is that a lot of that goes away once you're racing just because of the adrenaline and the race conditions. So that's one thing that you can. You can kind of rely on, is the fact that you're gonna naturally have to pee a little bit less. Anyways, the other thing is there. There is stuff that can cause more frequent urination. There are some foods and some beverages, two of which we're familiar with, coffee and tea. So if you're using a gel that has a caffeine in it or you're drinking a lot of coffee before your race, that's one thing that's going to be a diuretic. Not many of us, it can definitely have an effect. Not many of us utilize parsley or celery while we are in a triathlon or in a bike race. But those are two things that can be pretty potent diuretics as well. And it's actually interesting that if you. If you have a juicer, which I just got, by the way, so I'm gonna start doing some juice juicing videos for folks. But parsley and celery are two kind of like, you know, urinary detox type of compounds. Just because they void you. Yep, exactly. Interesting. Speaking of voiding, by the way, did I tell you I tried out that MEG07, that oxygenated magnesium I was talking about last week? Holy cow. That stuff cleans. Holy crap stuff cleans you out. Anyway, that's Sedgway. A few of the things that could cause more urination while you're out cycling. If you're a guy, enlarged prostate can cause that. And a lot of dudes have that and don't even realize, especially us dudes.

Who are now on the other side of 40.

Exactly, exactly. So getting on some lycopene can help that out. Getting on some zinc can help that out. And basically possibly even going in for a PSA test just to check on that. Because just from a preventive standpoint, it may be pretty important, you know, if you're an older guy having an issue with that. And of course, you know, hand in Hand with that. Just genetically, a smaller bladder can cause an issue as well. By the way, we lost our live video feed just now for the people watching this precast, but we're just gonna hope it comes back up. Yeah.

At least hopefully you can hear us.

Yeah. In the meantime, though, as far as peeing on the bike is concerned, while you're out there, like in a race, during doing an Iron man, something like that, I'm a fan of just doing it on the fly. I personally just kind of, you know, roll up the. The short leg a little bit. Or depending on. On which way I'm traveling, if I'm going downhill, I'll just pull it down a little bit and go that way. If I'm running, and I've had to go before in Ironman races, I will just literally go in my pants as I'm running and run right through it.

I can't. I've never been able to do that. I've actually, like, been on the bike, nobody around, going down a nice hill, and haven't been able, like, the 40 years of my life that I've spent trying not to pee my pants. I can't override that part of my lizard brain.

It's. You just got to go into beast.

Mode and not care to practice peeing my pants more or something. But I have noticed, like you were mentioning at the beginning, that during a race, you tend not to pee as much as when you're on a. On a long run or a long ride when you're by yourself. I've even noticed during a long run or a long ride, if I am by myself, that for, like, 10 minutes, I'll feel like, oh, no, I have to go to the bathroom. I have to go to the bathroom. Then you distract yourself for a while, and all of a sudden you're like, oh, I thought I had to go to the bathroom, and it sort of disappears. So sometimes you feel like you need to pee, but it's really not that your bladder's all that full.

Yep. And interestingly, I know I have a lot of listeners with these issues. Gonorrhea, chlamydia, and herpes could also cause you to have to urinate a little bit more frequently.

Was that Jenna last week that had herpes?

Cold sores. Cold sores, folks. Get that checked out. Chris, real quick before we get into Angela's question. Question, Brock, are you on this precast right now on the live spreecast? Because I could put you on screen potentially, if you want to log in, you could log in while I answer or while I.

Actually, since we're talking about P, why don't we jump down to Misty's question just to mess with the order a little bit.

Okay.

So Chris has an excess of P maybe.

Okay.

Misty could.

Do you want to ask Misty's question? Okay.

Misty says, any thoughts on auto urine therapy? I know it's an ancient practice among some cultures and people have even survived on their own urine when there was nothing else around. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on it for detox, immune and general health.

Yeah, this is something that kind of flies under the radar in alternative medicine a little bit. But it certainly is something that especially in ayurvedic medicine is something that they do. They literally will drink urine potentially for its possibility to remineralize you potentially. Some people argue that the antigens that are introduced are anti cancer antigens that would let your immune system create antigen antibodies against cancer. Let me put you on screen real quick here, Brock. On this precast, there are some African tribes, African populations that essentially there is a. Oh, we're on now. Okay, cool. So we should be able to see you. Cool. So there are some African populations that use this medicinal mushroom that's basically like a shroom, it's like a. What do you call it, a hallucinogenic drug. And the alkaloids that are in this mushroom get passed through in the urine and they come out intact. And a lot of these tribes, I forget the actual name of the tribe, but they will drink the urine if they can't afford to buy the mushroom. So they'll actually drink the urine of people who have taken the mushroom to get recycle recovery, this hallucinogenic effect. The other thing interestingly is from a sleep hacking standpoint, melatonin, which is the hormone produced by your pineal gland when you gotta sleep, that actually also ends up in its whole form in the urine. And so there are some alternative medical practitioners who will tell people basically to reset your circadian rhythm that what you do is you literally like save your morning urine and drink it in the evening to get your melatonin levels back up.

I've actually heard people do that with small children. Yeah, like get small children's urine first thing in the morning and collect that. Apparently there's more. It's maybe a cleaner urine or something.

Yep. And because of the effect that urine can have on things like very, very non acidic, like a, like a high ph type of poison or toxin, like a jellyfish sting or something like that, it could technically be used for something along those lines as well. However, the research on any anti cancer benefits of urophagy, I don't know if it's called urophagy. Urophagy just sounds bad. Yeah. Of urophagy. Basically there's not a lot of research behind it. There is some suggestions that this Bursinski clinic, which is the anti cancer clinic down in Texas, originally was harvesting its anti cancer compounds, its antigen based compounds from urine. But again there's no research to show that that's true either. The interesting thing is that women all over the world take horse urine every day. That's what Premarin is. And so if you're turning up your nose on this and you're a woman and you're using hormone replacement therapy in the form of Premarin, you're already kind of, already got it, kind of getting it. So there you go.

I know there's a bunch of creams as well. Like some creams for. What's that called when you're not supplementing?

Like a progesterone cream or.

No, like just for, for dry skin. Yeah, that actually has urea really well. So it's like.

Yeah, for real. Hardcore.

I want to. The dermatitis kind of.

Right, right. Psoriasis, dermatitis. Interesting. I know a lot of our listeners are probably on the edge of their seats wondering when they could start drinking their own urine. And the take on that is, especially during an ironman, you could try harvesting your morning urine and drinking at night to see if you sleep better. For me, I'd lay awake tossing and Turning until about 2:00am Guilty that I had just drank my own urine. So yeah, as far as the whole urifaggy thing, urophagy.

We'Re so grown up.

Not something I'm a big fan of. So by the way, live question from Morris here who asked on our live spreecast, wouldn't algae like spirulina or chlorella help with binding to toxins from canned tuna? This is a really great point because we just got done talking about fish and that is that, you know, nature does have a lot of cool little fixes for things. And if you look at a lot of marine based compounds like spirulina and algae, they actually do have a lot of natural chelators in them that can help to detox from a lot of the metals, the mercury, the type of stuff you're going to get in fish. So if you have fish with a side of seaweed salad or you're having like sushi wrapped in nori, you're getting some of these basic detox compounds along with the fish. Anyways, you know, it's the same thing with, with fish meat having high levels of selenium in it. Selenium is a natural mercury binding compound that can mitigate some, not all, but some of the effects of like the metal or the mercury that's in the fish. So it's interesting how nature kind of has some of this stuff hacked already.

So another.

So there you go.

Sort of step beyond eating the whole food, is actually eating the food with its surroundings.

That's right. That's right.

Okay, so let's jump back to Angela and her friction burns. Angela asks, I wanted to see if you had a solution for friction burns on the upper arms while running. If I do any distance over 7km, I seem to get burns under my arms and they are so painful.

Definitely something that I've run into before. Everything from the bleeding nipples to the chafed armpits.

Number 11.

Yeah. I mean, it's skin on skin. And once you start to sweat, you get the mineral composition of the sweat causing even more of that friction because those little tiny minerals in the sweat. And I mean, the answer is kind of stupid and simple in one way and that that is that you ensure that you always have fabric on skin or fabric on fabric. Even better. So that's why, you know, like guys always want to wear like the type of running shorts that have the lining on the inside to protect you from some of that chafing that can happen down under with the boys. You know, for women, you would want to wear some type of compound that allows you to have fabric on fabric. You know, like an undershirt that is like literally like a long sleeve undershirt or even a short sleeve undershirt where it's fabric on fabric in the armpits. You know, like an Under Armour shirt or something along those lines.

Or as a tank top that actually comes like up to. I'm going to show on Sprecast, like right up into the armpit, not the ends, sort of.

It's kind of cool. When we're doing a spreecast, we can demo, we should always do this. But yeah, I mean, basically what you're looking at is wanting to invest in one of these shirts that are specifically designed for runners to reduce that type of friction. I have specific anti chafing compounds that I'm a fan of because they're natural, because they're not introducing a lot of benzene compounds. Onto your skin surface or you're not basically creating a chemical cocktail in your armpits.

What's benzene?

Benzene is basically a potentially carcinogenic hexagonal chemical compound that a lot of these sprays like that, like the aerosol sprays that are considered anti chafing sprays. Oh, I used to use some of that stuff for triathlon. I don't go near it now because, you know, I'm not going to spray a bunch of carcinogens in my crotch before I go out and you know, do a, do a race. So I get stuff from Hammer Nutrition. They've got some good stuff. They've got Hammer Balm, which would be more for like after the damage has occurred. They've got also Hammer, Hammer Seat Saver. That's my favorite stuff. It's just all natural, like clove based extract, some olive oil, really decent stuff. And you can get a 15% discount from Hammer. We'll put the discount code in the link in the show notes. What is this episode230.232.232 over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com but I like the Hammer Seat Saver for during. I like the Hammer Balm for after. Coconut oil actually doesn't work work too badly in a pinch. If you've got a little coconut oil and you've also got some aloe vera, it works well to actually smear the coconut oil into the areas that you want. The anti chafing, put a little aloe vera oil on top of that and you get kind of the combination of decreasing some of the burn and some of the pain, but also getting nice lubing effect.

That's a great idea. It's actually really hard to wash coconut oil off. Like if you put it on your hands, you have to use the significant amount of soap to get it to break down. So that would hang around for most of the race.

Just lick your fingers and then after the race you could just lick yourself clean. Means coconut oil post race, medium chain triglyceride dosage. There you go. So yeah, those are my recommendations, Angela, as far as the friction burns go. And yeah, it's one of those things where you just got to get a shorter. You got to get some kind of an ointment. So yeah, yeah.

All right. So Dushan wrote, I've always avoided decaf because I heard that the chemicals they use in the process are bad for you. Then I heard about Swiss Water decaf, which doesn't use chemicals, but it's expensive. Then I talked To a coffee rep at Costco who told me that they washed their decaffeinated coffee and none of these chemicals remain. My wife also read that the chemicals evaporate at 190 degrees degrees and coffee gets roasted at about 350 degrees. She also read that rats were tested with the chemical and there were no effects on the rats.

I guess this is really interesting. So I have been a fan of decaf coffee for a while. I think I've mentioned on the show before that as I was growing up, my dad was a gourmet coffee roaster. By the time he got into that, he was relatively into health. My dad and mom are separated now. My mom runs the company. But because he was getting into health at the same time he was getting into coffee, the type of decaffeination process that he chose for his coffee was called a Swiss water decaffeination process. And it's just based almost on the concept of osmosis. You take coffee beans that are basically your regular coffee beans that have caffeine in them, and you soak them in water that has previously been soaked also in coffee beans. And what happens is, because the water that the coffee beans are soaking in have previously been exposed to coffee, you get all the oils and the volatile compounds, the flavors and stuff in that water. And that means that those same flavors and oils don't leach out of the coffee beans that you're soaking. However, the caffeine does leach out. So it's essentially like a soaking process. That's crazy. Well, it's like if you put something, if you. If you put a bean that has caffeine in it in a solution that is decaffeinated and you leave it in there, the caffeine is eventually going to leach out. Now, the only problem is that the oils and the flavors and stuff are going to leach out too. Unless the water that you're soaking it in already has the oils and the flavors added into it from having been previously soaked.

So it's just moving from a high to low ratio.

Exactly. Sort of like yourself. Basic osmosis. Yeah. And you can speed up the process through another kind of healthy way to decaffeinate coffee called carbon dioxide processing, where the coffee is exposed under these higher pressures to carbon dioxide, natural carbon dioxide. And it does the same kind of caffeine extracting type of process, but at a much, much faster rate. So it's a little bit easier to do.

I was thinking when you said carbon dioxide, I was thinking carbon monoxide. That's not a Good alternative.

No, I don't recommend that.

You what we exhale.

Don't shove coffee beans up your car pipe to decaf them. There are other processes. There's. So that one that I just mentioned is natural, is called the Swiss water process. The decaffeinated coffee that I personally drink is from Bootser's Coffee Pub in Moscow. I'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Russia.

No, Idaho. Close to here, actually about two hours from where we're podcasting right now. And that's the stuff that my mom makes. And then you get the bulletproof coffee. Now the bulletproof coffee is more expensive. It's like 18, $20 a pound. That's from Dave Asprey. He's actually, he's somewhere here in the hotel right now. I think he's speaking at the event. We should see if we could snag him to talk about it. But they just launched decaf coffee as well. And the cool thing is that Dave was recently writing about some recent studies on decaf coffee that find that it can basically cross your blood brain barrier and cause cause a lot of these same brain antioxidant and anti inflammatory type of effects as caffeinated coffee. But the difference is that caffeine, especially if you're doing a lot of it like before an afternoon workout or something like that, it actually decreases activity of what's called your MTOR protein. Yeah, your MTOR pathway. And this whole MTOR pathway is partially responsible for building muscle. So by guzzling a bunch of caffeine, caffeinated coffee prior to a workout, you may actually inhibit your ability to build muscle. Whereas if you take in decaf coffee, you're still going to get some of that decent brain anti inflammatory effect.

But if you don't take in the caffeinated coffee, are you going to get the workout done?

Well, here's the deal. Catch 22, all decaf coffee has caffeine in it. There are zero decaffeination processes that will result in all the caffeine being drawn out of the coffee. So you're gonna get a little bit of caffeine no matter what. You're also gonna get that placebo effect that we all know about, where if you taste decaf, you still feel like it wakes you up a little bit better.

So what is it? It has to be below 3% caffeine in order to be called decaf or.

Is it even higher? You know what, I don't remember. I pulled up the Wikipedia on decaffeination and how much caffeine is actually in decaffeinated coffee. And it says that drinking five to 10 cups of decaffeinated coffee would deliver as much caffeine as 1 to 2 cups of regular coffee, but doesn't talk about the actual standards. The type of caffeination or decaffeination that you want to avoid would be what most folks use, which is called a direct or an indirect method of decaffeination. And one is direct contact with dichloromethane or ethyl acetate, two fairly harmful compounds and chemicals. The other one is very, very similar, but it's with recycled water. So it's called an indirect method. But you still get the ethyl acetate and the dichloromethane with those processes. So, basically, if you're looking for decaffeinated coffee, you're looking for Swiss water process or carbon dioxide process. There's one other process called the triglyceride method. And with the triglyceride method, what they do is they soak the beans in a compound or in a solution that has triglycerides in it. And those triglyceride oils can remove a lot of the caffeine. And that's another kind of safe method of decaffeination. My recommendation would be, you get, like, the Swiss water decaf. The stuff I drink is called incognito decaf. Put a link in the show notes. The other option, if you want to go for the more expensive route, but guarantee that it's completely free of, like, mycotoxins and fungus and stuff like that, would be to grab the Dave Asprey stuff. You're gonna pay a little bit more for that. But that one we'll put a link to in the show notes as well. And that would be the bulletproof version of the decaf coffee.

So the stuff I'm drinking from the hotel room, that was in the weird little package? Probably not.

I am pretty careful with the. With the decaffeinated coffee from, like, hotels, restaurants. Same thing as I was talking about with the fish. Like, you can use activated charcoal, as Brock puts us. All our Spreecast listeners just saw Brock ditch his Starbucks cup. You could use activated charcoal. You could use, like, energy bits, spirulina, algae tabs, stuff like that to detox. But I personally am more and more these days careful with the source of my coffee. And I've even got one of these little Aeropress coffee makers now where I can travel with that thing. It's tiny. I can take a little Ziploc bag full of the organic coffee like from Boots or from, from the Bulletproof and use that instead.

The AeroPress. Is that like a French press or.

It is a really, really tiny coffee maker that, that requires you to have finely ground coffee beans which you can grind at home, but you travel with it and you can press. It basically uses a pressure based system, vacuum based system and it's like the size of almost like the size of a 12 ounce coffee cup. And you press hot water down through the Aeropress and it basically pushes it through this little micro filter and you get some fantastic like dark rich coffee.

So it's like a, like an upgraded French press.

Exactly. So they're pretty cool. It's called a, it's called an aeropress. So check that out and we'll put, we'll put a link to the two types of coffee that I recommend. The two types of decaffeinated coffee that kind of, kind of pass exposure or pass, pass, pass our, our, our standards in the, in the show notes there. So there you go. Okay.

Our next question comes from Gareth and Gareth says, I recently got diagnosed with hemochromatosis. Nailed it.

Hemochromatosis. Nice way to go with the pronunciation.

Which means high iron levels with very high transferrin saturation but average ferritin levels. It's hereditary. It's easy to find a lot written online in relation to the impact of low iron levels on an endurance athletes, but I cannot find much information on the impact of high iron, high iron levels. Can you offer any advice? Is it a benefit or a drawback? I'm a runner doing mostly 5 and 10k distances and average about 70 miles a week. So this actually kind of goes back to a question we had a few weeks ago about.

About iron overload. Yeah, yeah. First of all, before we get into this much at all, be careful with the diagnosis because there's a lot of different ways that you can diagnose iron overload. And one of the, one of the low cost kind of readily available ways to diagnose iron overload is a serum ferritin test. And that's certainly cheap. It's certainly going to tell you your levels of iron storage protein, but it doesn't actually tell you whether or not you've got dangerous iron buildup happening in your organs. All it tells you is that you've got the capacity to be able to have that, the potential. So it's kind of an indirect method of saying that you have hemochromatosis, whereas a liver biopsy would be a better way to Go. If you really want to diagnose whether or not you've got one of these. The cool thing is that they've got a new test now that they can do via MRI that allows them to look at the amount of iron that's building up in the organs without actually doing like a full on biopsy. I wrote down the, it's called a ferroscan and it's an MRI test called a ferroscan F E R R I scan. That would be kind of a way to double check if all that you've gotten done is a serum ferritin test to look into your iron potential.

It's in your blood already and that's building up in your organs, then it's pretty much guaranteed, right?

Exactly. So that being said, the gold standard for this would be phlebotomy, bloodletting, donating blood, which is, which is good anyways, at least you're doing mankind a service. But not necessarily your endurance sports potential because obviously every time that you ditch blood, you're ditching iron, but you're also ditching a lot of oxygen and a lot of red blood cells so you decrease your oxygen carrying capacity, which is not, you know, not all that great a prospect for somebody who's running or biking or, you know, an endurance athlete. So phlebotomy would be anywhere from once a month. In serious cases. People are doing like eight times a month, bloodletting, giving blood for serious levels of hemochromatosis. But the whole problem with this is that the iron will build up in your organs, in your kidney, in your liver, basically in all these places where it shouldn't be, if you don't take care of this issue and then you can go into organ failure and have some, some serious issues. So, so that being said, some of the more natural methods that you may want to look into, if you didn't want to get like a, like a pharmaceutical chelating compound, which would be, you know, one of the things that, that would be like prescribed to you by a physician for hemochromatosis with the problem being with that is that it's going to chelate a lot of other metals too. So you essentially can go into like mineral deficiency. One would be to avoid taking in elements that are going to increase your iron absorption capacity. And the big one would be vitamin C. So I wouldn't be, if you're concerned about hemochromatosis or excessive iron levels, taking a vitamin C supplement because that's going to enhance iron absorption. On the flip side, if you've got low iron, you would actually want to take a vitamin C supplement, especially with high iron containing foods, you know, like spinach or red meat. Otherwise get your vitamin C from just basic fruits and vegetables, not from vitamin supplementation, herbal supplements that you would want to be careful with if you didn't want to leach iron. If you are concerned about your iron levels or concerned about anemia, but that you may want to include if you've got really high iron levels or high risk of hemochromatosis. One would be dandelion root and one would be milk thistle extract. Two well known cleanses that also are going to do a pretty decent job like sucking iron out of the body. And so if you, if you overuse that kind of stuff, if you look at your supplements and you're doing like a daily cleanse that has milk thistle extract or dandelion root or something like that, and a hyssop root is another common cleanse ingredient that you're going to find in so some quote unquote, you know, daily health type of, type of tonics. The issue is that if you're at high risk of anemia, if you've got low iron, if you're an endurance athlete, that stuff is not going to do you any favors at all. So that's another thing that you'd want to be careful with if you have low iron levels, but that you would actually want to include if you're trying to get rid of hemochromatosis naturally. Calcium is another thing that can include inhibit iron absorption. So using a calcium supplement or eating lots of calcium rich foods again is something that you'd want to consider if you have hemochromatosis, but you'd want to actually be careful with excessive calcium supplementation if you're concerned about anemia or low iron levels. What else? Manganese is a compound that is actually going to protect you against excessive iron buildup. You're going to find manganese and a lot of like antioxidants type of compounds. A lot of multivitamins have manganese. You can buy it in its regular form at like a health food store. But that would be another one to look into. The other thing that would block absorption of iron would be vitamin B6, especially if you combine it with vitamin C. So again something that you would want to be careful with excessive vitamin B6 and excessive vitamin C if you had something like anemia or something like that, that, but something that you may want to consider if you don't. And then the last thing would be like Tea, coffees, tannins, stuff like that. That stuff will all help to decrease iron absorption. And so, you know, again, something to be careful with if you have anemia. But if you're concerned about hemochromatosis, you may want to consider a little bit of extra black, black tea, a little bit extra coffee, you know, doing like milk thistle, hyssop root, dandelion roots, you know, being careful with or like using like calcium supplements, eating calcium rich foods, looking into bloodletting potentially up to a few times a month. Those would be some of the main ones. Buy some leeches. Buy some leeches.

Just attach them. Just buy some leeches across your armpits.

There you go. Yep. So. So those are the biggies when it comes to. You know, there's Also, there's one Dr. Minkoff who's also here speaking this weekend. He has a supplement called Heavy Metal Detox. It might just be Metal Detox, I don't remember, but I've talked about that one on the show before. And that one would be another one that you'd want to consider. You notice there's a bunch of like big old basketball players walking around the lobby right now.

Yeah, it's good.

I think UCLA might be playing Gonzaga this weekend.

So those are like real basketball players? Oh, yeah, yeah, they might be famous.

I mean, Gonzaga is right next door. We're literally like, we could, we're stone's throw from, from the whole Bulldog Stadium where the number one college basketball team in the country is playing.

Okay, so they're not the millionaire basketball players there.

They're. Yeah, but they're, they're going to be very good. Good school. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we got one more question here.

One more. All right, one more from Sherry. If everybody on Spreecast is wondering why I keep leaning right in front of Ben, it's just to make sure I'm getting onto the microphone. This year I entered my fourth 100 mile race. It was 93 degrees come race day and at mile 34, the aid stations ran out of water. I went approximately 10 miles in 93 degrees with no water. I continued on to mile 50 but stopped due to major brain fog and spring sweating heavily while walking. It took me about three weeks to get mentally back to normal. They say that once you've had heat stroke, you are more prone to having it again. If I acclimatize myself prior to going into a race, if I know that it's going to be hot, will I have the possibility of feeling the same even if I'm Hydrated.

Yes. Having heat stroke once is definitely going to make heat stroke stroke again in the future a little bit more likely of an issue. The reason for that is that a lot of people don't realize that when you're exercising in a hot environment, your gut permeability increases. And if you get yourself hot up to the point where you've actually gotten heat stroke, your gut permeability becomes so high that you get a ton of spots, spillage of the components that are in your small intestine, toxins, bacteria, etc. All that stuff winds up in the bloodstream and you can literally get almost like a sepsis reaction in the liver and in the kidneys that in studies have been shown to last for four to six months after that initial heat stroke. And a lot of people don't realize that. They just look at like their hydration levels. Some studies have just looked at core temperature a few months after heat stroke versus not. Not found any difference. But if you look at the, at the actual organ level, if you've had heat stroke before, you can, you can have that organ inflammation and potential for sepsis for a long time after the heat stroke actually occurs. This is one of the reasons why, like, when I'm going into Ironman Hawaii, a really hot race, I take stuff that actually decreases gut permeability and I stay away from stuff that's going to increase the permeability of my gut lining. So, for example, I take colostrum anytime I'm going out to do like a hard event because that is going to decrease gut permeability and I double up on the amount of colostrum that I take like the week of Ironman Hawaii, or, you know, for example, I'm going over to race Vietnam here and I'll take it before that as well.

So for the folks out there who aren't really up to date with what's. What we're talking about here, we've talked about colostrum before, but colostrum is actually removed. It's a piece of mother's milk.

Yeah, I mean, it's the first part of the mother's milk that it's bioactive compound that when you're exposed to it, helps to seal your gut lining, helps to activate these, what are called zonulin proteins that help to heal your gut lining. It's why children who are fed formula and not mother's milk tend to be at higher risk for, for leaky gut syndrome. But it's also something you can take advantage of as an ergogenic aid as a legal ergogenic aid. And it can do stuff like boost growth hormone and help with muscle healing. But the reason I do it is because of that decrease in gut permeability.

And you can get that in a powder form or a liquid form, right?

Yep, yep, you can get it in powder, actually. Not in liquid, I don't think. Not unless you want to go suck on a goat's teat or find a mom with a newborn baby and potentially get slapped in the face. But yeah, I mean, that's the issue. It's not like you can't rehydrate yourself even though you can stay dehydrated for several days after heat stroke. It's more of the organ and the sepsis issue due to the gut permeability that occurs when you get that heat stroke going on. So that's the big issue there. And yeah, gosh, we kind of flew through those. Oh, I'll put a recommendation. Sherry, by the way, I taught a big webinar for USA Triathlon a few weeks ago and it was on how to acclimate yourself for hot weather exercise and some of what are called the active acclimation and the passive acclimation, things that you can do. So check that out and we'll link to that in the show notes along with some of this other stuff that we talked about, like decaf coffee. And what else are we going to give people links to? We'll of course, create a my list for this episode as we always do as well. Over@mylist.com BenGreenfield a link to the Hammer Balm, the Seat saver. Just some, just some little resources for you guys. And of course to all the studies that we talked about and also to a survey. There's an important survey. It's just like about your basically your income and your demographics. But it's so that we might be able to get better hosting prices for this podcast because we've got to pay out the wazoo to host this thing.

The single most expensive part of putting on this podcast, aside from our own time, it's really, it's the bandwidth and the hosting that costs. Well, it's the hard cost that and.

The pre podcast cocaine that adds up. Sometimes we can get it for free, but.

But we have to pay.

We don't want to talk about what we have to do to make that happen. All right, so as Brock sips some of his toxic Starbucks coffee from the hotel lobby here, remember, there's still time. If you're listening into this podcast, when it comes out, which will basically be in a few hours. You could still get on the pay per view access to the live event that is this weekend. The reason that Brock and I, I are here, the Become Superhuman live event, it is going to change your life, I guarantee. This is going to be information that you can't get anywhere else. And it's going to be videos. You're going to be able to, even if you're on this precast, ask your questions. And Brock's going to be actually running this precast. So I'll be your virtual. If you ask a question, Brock can literally ask it to one of our speakers during the event. And even if you're out of our time zone, you're still going to be able to get access to. To all of the playbacks, basically for the rest of all time. Forever. So. So there you go. And of course, if you're listening into the audio version of this podcast and you want to instead see the video version where I have freshly cleaned the snot and dirt off my face from riding my mountain bike down to the hotel. And if you want to see what Brock and I look like, I was.

Hoping you were going to ride the elliptical.

I was really excited about that. I was gonna ride the Elliptigo, but then I looked at the time and that thing's slower than my mouth. Mountain bikes, so. But watch the video. We're gonna embed this video on the podcast shown us for episode number 232, so you can check that out as well. And a big hello to all. I Look see up. We got a lot of listeners watching right now.

I will see you in seven minutes for my training on Spreecast.

That's right. You gotta wrap this up soon, huh? All right, cool. So that's it, folks. The next time that you see us, if you are taking part in this precast, I'm gonna be wearing my nice suit coat and doing an intro and it's gonna be all official on stage in this beautiful auditorium and stuff. But this was just the. Just the podcast. Live. Doing it live.

Doing it live again and again. Took us a few tries. We've got two different cameras going, so I'm not sure which to look at. I'm very confused. Look at this one.

Confusing.

All right, see you all on pay per view and we'll hear you next week. Or you'll hear us next week later.

Did you know you can get personalized nutrition and fitness consulting from Ben Greenfield, no matter who you are, if you want to run a triathlon lose a few pounds, reinvent your diet, or have Ben create a training program or nutrition plan that's customized to you. Here's what you need to do. Visit tinyurl.com helpfromben that's tinyurl.com com helpfromben Ben will personally contact you within 48 hours. What are you waiting for? Visit tinyurl. Com helpfromben today and get the body and results you've always wanted.