#234: How Much Water Do You Really Need To Drink Each Day?

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, how much water do you really need to drink each day? Also, how to get rid of varicose veins. The difference between protein and amino acids fueling a 10 day camping trip. What causes hives? And how many hours a week should you lift weights?

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Hey, Ben, I got a question for you.

Yo.

I know it's not the usual early, early, ridiculously early time of day for you, but I gotta ask. Did you have a smooth, silky, glorious morning movement this morning?

I did. I follow my own advice, Brock.

You had a glorious movement, baby.

Yeah.

I don't know how that voice came out.

That was like Austin Powers. Yeah, I am sure that you're referring to the recent podcast with the aptly named certified health nut Troy Casey that we released. Wait, go ahead.

What? You did a podcast about poop?

Yeah. You didn't hear it? No, I just assumed that's just how you start a conversation anyways. But yeah, we geeked out on the best ways to get stuff moving smoothly and he had his take on it. I had my take on it. We put it on a podcast on a post. So there you have it, folks can go listen in. But yeah, you put it on a post. I talked about how to. How to. We put it on a post.

When you're talking about poop, you just putting it on a post. Sounds wrong.

Talked about how to. How to nuke your colon and all that stuff. And I even at some point this week, tweeted a video because one of our listeners, Joe, he got a squatty potty sent to his house and said it was the best thing that ever happened to him since his wedding day. So there you go. Really bad wedding day or really nice poop.

Yeah.

News flashes.

Okay, this is the time of the podcast where Ben tells us what the heck he's talking about every day on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Google when he puts those crazy studies up there that we're just supposed to be able to understand.

I'll do my best, man. And by the way, if. If people get bored when I'm talking about the latest news, I mean, let us know. We can certainly cut this section out, but I'm hoping it's helping somebody other than me feel like I have some justification for reading studies and geeking out on them. So I'm going to assume that folks aren't hitting the fast forward button, but if you are, let us know because I'm going to talk about some of the things that were big in the whole health and fitness realm this week. Now, one of the first things was this idea that behind this brand new concept of only ever for the rest of your life drinking one form of liquid food in its raw chemical form called Soylent. Did you hear about this, Brock?

I saw you tweet about it, but I didn't follow the link because I was terrified that it was made from people.

Crazy. This guy, he noted that the whole food market is full of waste and regulation and biased allocation with geopolitical implications and yada yada yada. So he's like, well, I'm just going to make my own food out of a basic number of chemicals that you could buy from a website or formulate yourself and make it like the perfect food for the human body. And so he did. And he started to track his biomarkers as he did so. So he was like tracking his weight. He was tracking his basic blood panel, not really detailed blood panel, but just like you and cholesterol. He was tracking his running progress and then his energy levels in terms of how he felt and what his appetite was like and he was noting these big boosts in performance. And according to him, his blood biomarkers were looking a little bit better, although I have my own thoughts on that. And he started to basically sell this stuff online. I think it's at Soylent Me or something like that. I'll put a link to this guy's article in the show notes and I have my thoughts on this, which I'll get to in a second. But it's just a mix of a bunch of stuff like he's got carbohydrates, protein, fat. He didn't put any cholesterol at all in it. Some fiber, some copper, chromium minerals, some vitamins like vitamin D and stuff like that. It looked like he was just going after the minimum recommended allowance for most of this stuff and basically turned it into this liquid blend. And he's even willing to ship people a free batch if they're willing to get like a complete blood count and a chem panel and a lipid blood test and bonus points for getting a psych eval after they use this stuff only and no food. So my thoughts on this, I really.

I'm very curious what the heck it tastes like, because if that's the only thing you're going to eat for the rest of your life, it better taste like, I don't know, something amazing.

Yeah, so here's, here's like at least chocolate. Yeah, exactly. Chocolate and peanut butter. The idea of being simple and not having a lot of variety in your diet is not necessarily bad. There was actually another study that just came out this week that showed that more variety can actually cause you to get fatter because it's harder to keep track of what you're eating, you know, how many calories, you know, where your dietary, you know, food stuff is coming from. And I know for me, if I stick to a pretty predictable diet throughout the week, I do better in terms of my body composition and my energy and stuff like that. But this takes things to a whole nother level.

So first of all, this is beyond consistency. This is like, this is exactly the same thing every day. Not just sort of the same thing or the same types of meals every day.

Yeah. First of all, the omission of cholesterol is huge. Cholesterol. You know, you look at Paul Geminet's perfect health diet, we've had him on this podcast. There's a reason that mommy's breast milk is like whatever it comes out to, like 60 to 70% fat based and much of that cholesterol because it's crucial and there's none of that in there. So he's gonna be looking down the road at fatty acid deficiencies and a lot of stuff on a bigger level that a lot of vegans and vegetarians have to kinda deal with, but at a way, way bigger level, the dosage.

But can't your body synthesize cholesterol from other fats?

Your body can do that, but you do need some dietary sources of cholesterol. And that's a good point. Brock. Your body can synthesize cholesterol from some fats, but his fat source is exclusively from olive oil, which is mostly oleic acid, not a mixed source of fats. And so the fatty acid ratio is off. There's no saturated fat, such as you would find in coconut oil. There's no gamma linoleic acid. There's no arachidonic acid. You can't kind of like synthesize all the fatty acids that you need from one single oleic acid. Fat source.

Gotcha.

Vitamin D is at only 400 international units. And yes, that's the RDA. But most folks need a lot more than that. There's no vitamin K in there. There's very few trace elements like boron, for example, in there, which for guys is really, really important for testosterone and stuff like that. The carb source is maltodextrin, which has a frankly very high glycemic index, which is why it's in most sports beverages. But he's gonna be spiking his blood glucose every single time he sucks down a bunch of maltodextrin. Protein in this, if you were to dose at the doses that he's recommending, would come out to like 50 grams a day, which is enough to cause you to not have muscle wasting happen, but not much past that. So you couldn't really be like exercising and stuff if you were on this. And for exercising individuals, the exclusion of stuff like creat and nitric oxide precursors and choline, a lot of this other stuff you're going to find naturally in meat, none of that's in there as well. So you're going to miss out on all that. And then a lot of the stuff he puts in there is superfoods like ginseng and ginkgo and stuff. It's at super, super low, low microgram based doses, way less than you would actually need. So ultimately, I think that this guy might feel pretty good, and just about anybody would feel pretty good switching from a standard American diet to the almighty Soylent. But I'm not going to be drinking any anytime soon, whether you pay me or not. So.

Yeah, yeah. And that's just a terrible name. I know he's probably doing it tongue in cheek, but I just can't help but think it's made from people. And that's just not good.

Soylent, Soylent Green.

Charlton Heston to come. And that's the stuff. Anyway. Okay, all right. It's not made from people, but it's not made for people either, so.

That's right.

But let's move along.

I'm going to talk about showers now so you can feel all clean. So usually when we talk about showers, we talk about cold thermogenesis and all that crap. And I'm not going to harp on that. I want to talk about photon showers. And I don't know if you saw this, but Delta. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. Delta Airlines unveiled a special photon shower this month at the TED Conference in Long Beach. And basically what it comes down to is they are bombarding you with natural light to reset your circadian rhythm and Trying to put this in, like literally a photon shower that you could step into at an airport or in a lounge and get this blue light.

If there's anything I learned from Star Trek, that's a bad idea because you.

Might get teletransported somewhere.

Well, the photon torpedoes were not things you want to expose yourself to.

Hmm. Well, I would imagine that these are relatively low level photon emissions. So, you know, it comes down to the fact that you have these photoreceptors in your eyes that you don't even use to see stuff. They're just used to detect light. And they're tied intimately to your circadian rhythm, to your master clock. So what you do in one of these chambers is they're called photosensitive retinal ganglion cells, these cells at the back of your eye that can only see light, not vision. And this thing just hits you with a bunch of blue light that basically resets your circadian clock for whatever area that you've arrived into. And so the idea is you get rid of jet lag. And it's similar to the idea, like I've talked before, I'll link to it in the show notes. I've talked before about, like the blue light box that you could put on your desk in the morning. It's called the nature, bright nature, bright sun touch that emits blue light. You know, it's the reason that I go out every single morning and try and look directly into sunlight or somewhere near direct sunlight, so that I start up my circadian rhythm, you jump start my cortisol, stuff like that. So same reason that if you can go outside when you fly into a new area, it can help to reset your master clock. You know, that along with a little bit of grounding and earthing and kind of making sure that your feet touch the ground. But pretty interesting that they're making it into a waterless photon shower so you.

Don'T get clean at the same time as getting awake. You just get awake.

Yeah, I believe that you just get awake, but I don't know. It could be a good hot date. Take your next date into the photon shower and see how that works out for you. Getting it on in the photon shower. The last thing that I wanted to mention was somebody sent me over a link to kind of this discussion that's going on about thyroid and whether or not endurance training can affect your thyroid hormone production. And this is something that I'm kind of geeking out on right now, not only because I'm writing this book on the Trade off between performance and health, the trade off between training and health, but also because I'm writing an article for Lava magazine right now on the idea of calorie density and nutrient density and how important that is for people who are training so that they don't put themselves into this state of hormonal depletion. And one of your hormones, of course, is thyroid. So the original article that sparked the controversy about this was written by John Kieffer, and we've talked about him on the show before. He's the guy who's into the whole carb loading protocol, which no surprise is a popular diet because you eat a bunch of pizza and potatoes and carbs at night and stuff your face. His article wasn't about carb loading. It was about how chronic levels of exercise may actually deplete your T3 levels and lead to a kind of a throttling of your metabolism and your cellular efficiency. And he cites 8 billion studies to kind of support what he's saying. Now, the idea is that on another blog, this guy named Alex Hutchinson, who we've talked about before, he runs a really good blog called Sweat Science, he basically delved into these studies a little bit more and he found some interesting things. Like, for example, you only really experience a significant drop in thyroid production when you are combining endurance training or high intensity interval training with caloric restriction. And so that's kind of the 1, 2 combo that has to be present. In addition, we talked about that a.

Couple weeks ago on the show. The combination.

Yeah, exactly. And another issue is that, for example, the drop in T3, the drop in thyroid production hormone that can occur with intense bouts of exercise that are happening all at once. What happens is you can see a dip, but then if you follow it for several weeks, it begins to rise back up. So it's like your metabolism bounces back after that initial message to your body that it might need to down regulate metabolism. So that's another thing, is that you gotta look at the difference between a short term study and a long term study. Another issue is that when you exercise, you simply metabolize T3 a lot faster. And so some of these studies that look at what's called T3 kinetics, which is how quickly you metabolize T3. One of the reasons that you would see T3 kind of disappearing more quickly in an exercising individual compared to a sedentary individual, is just the fact that we metabolize hormones more quickly, period. Which is why it's important to do things like include seaweed in Your diet like iodine from nori. I personally use a bunch of nori wraps, but you could use kelp or dulce or kombu or any of these other really, really good sources of iodine, along with, you know, selenium from stuff like raw Brazil nuts, for example. But the idea is that, yeah, you certainly can draw all of these famous runners like Alberto Salazar and Paula Radcliffe and Ryan hall and folks who have been known to have had diagnosed thyroid problems. And you could probably blame the majority of what's going on with them on a combination of endurance training and caloric depletion. Intense caloric restriction to really get as skinny as possible to win a bunch of money in a race, for example. So that's one of those deals where you're making that health versus performance trade off to put food on the table. But for most of us, as long as we're eating enough food to support our training, the thyroid issue is not one that we necessarily need to worry about, I would say, as much as some of the other hormones that tend to take bigger hits like testosterone and estrogens and. And cortisol and things of that nature.

Special Announcements all right, so it looks like you and the Fat Burning man have been keeping yourselves pretty busy lately.

We have. And I actually put this out on a podcast. He and I did a really, really quick like three minute podcast that if you're subscribed to this, you probably already heard where we talk about our favorite fat burning workout. But he and I created this website called the Lean lifesty Insider where we've got over four hours of video and audio and a bunch of transcripts and resources and all this stuff to teach people exactly what we do, each of us in our own respective way to keep our bodies in fat burning mode all day long.

So it's not just talking about being in ketosis constantly.

No, it's not. And there are, there is no pooping involved, I promise. Even though I think I hold up the squatty potty at one point. But anyways, yeah, it's over. My version of it is over@leanlifestyleinsider.com b the only difference being between my version and his version is if you don't go to B, then I don't get paid when you access it. But yeah, it's over at leanlivestillininsider.comb and we really tried to over deliver. We spent several weeks putting this together. It's one time, 47 bucks and you basically get a ticket to access it for the rest of all time. And it's just kind of some cool, practical stuff where we go over our whole breakfast and morning routine, our whole lunch and midday routine, our afternoon and our workouts, and then our evening bedtime routine, and it's just real in the trenches stuff. So I highly recommend, folks, check it out. I think it's a good. Let's put it this way. If it wasn't me on the video, I'd buy it.

So that's a good sign. And you seem to be in the mood for webinars. You've got a couple of Inner Circle webinars coming up, too.

I do. And this again, I don't want to get all salesy. I promise the special announcements will be short here, but we're doing two webinars this month in the inner circle. One is April 6th, and it's called how to Create Superhuman Kids. We're going to talk about what our kids eat, how we get them to eat, what they eat, how our kids exercise, exercise, what supplements our kids take, how to optimize sleep patterns in kids. Basically, how to maximize a kid's health and performance and vitality. I mean, you know, I've got my kids doing bear crawls around the house and kettlebell swings and medicine balls.

Oh, did you get them? The kettlebells?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Exactly. And we've only had one minor fatality with the kettlebell so far. I had to teach them to stop at shoulder height, not to go above their heads. But yeah, I mean, you know, they just turned five yesterday, actually, of stuff. And we've got them eating the right way, too, but they still enjoy life. You know, they're not. They don't feel like they're in, like, a Siberian salt mine prison. So we teach you how you, too, can have children who aren't in Siberian salt mine prisons.

Very nice.

And that is on Saturday, April 6th. That's for Inner Circle members. It's 10 bucks a month to be in the Inner Circle, and it is really the best 10 bucks a month you're ever going to spend because you pretty much have full access to me and my wife Jessa, and you can ask us anything at any time. It's one big family in there. We respond, we talk about stuff that we've talked about on podcasts and kind of delve into a little bit more. You get to see what we're eating. You get access to all the webinars we've done in the past, like healthy travel tips and time management secrets and even little things like how to make your own bone broth, how to make your own coconut milk, stuff like that. I'm also doing in April kind of a bonus webinar for the Inner Circle called Ask Me Anything about Minimalist Triathlon training. Because right now I'm training for Ironman Canada. My goal is to do it on six to nine hours of training per week, never to hit that double digit training week. And I'm going to open it up and let folks ask me anything about the tips and techniques and tools that I'm using for that. So both of those are this month's Inner Circle webinars. Again, I don't want to get all salesy, but I get excited when I got this stuff that I think is really good helpful content that's available literally for 10 bucks a month. And I think that's a slammin deal.

If you ask me, it's a steal of a deal.

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 customized to you, here's what you need to do. Visit tinyurl.com helpfromben that's tinyurl.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. Listener Q and A.

Hey Ben, I have a question about veins for you. I noticed over the past few months that I have these veins that have been popping out of both of my shoulders and in one of my biceps that are kind of like varicose veins, just not as severe. They're just zigzaggy looking. And yeah, I just want to know, are these bad? Can I get. I don't like the way they look. So can I get something? Maybe take something or put something on them to make them clear up and turn into regular veins or am I just screwed or. Yeah, if you know anything about it to help me out. I appreciate it.

Thanks. Well, Brock, I've got one word for Chris and that would be laser. Laser. A laser on a shark would be even better. That'd be one way to get rid of your varicose veins.

Then if he misses with the laser, he'll just bite your shoulder off and get done.

Yeah, it's, you know, you gotta kinda to understand like which treatments are gonna work. You have to understand what causes varicose veins in the first place. And I'll link to another podcast in the show notes that we did on varicose veins, but it's just a circulatory issue. So, I mean, your veins carry blood from whatever parts of your body. Your arms, your legs, et cetera, back to your heart. And when you're talking about the legs, which is actually where most people get varicose veins, Chris is a freak of. Freak of nature, I guess. The muscles in your legs squeeze your veins and push the blood back up to your heart. And so you have valves that stop that blood that's going back up towards your heart from following the pull of gravity back down towards your feet or down towards your arms. If we're talking about valves in the shoulder area. And when the valves wear out or they've got a lot of pressure on them, whether due to age or weight or pregnancy or lots of shoulder presses or something like that, or even lots of time on your feet, the blood can get trapped in and enlarge the vein. And so once you know what's causing them, there are some things that you can do. Now, first of all, I do want to throw out there that I'm not joking about. The lasers, like, in many cases, when we're not talking about a body part that you can actually elevate per se, you know, that's, like, already elevated and above the heart, and a body part that already has some amount of muscle tone and good circularity and vascularity, such as in the shoulders and the biceps. You know, sometimes you got to take lasers to that kind of stuff. If it is a varicose vein. Yeah.

I actually. I know somebody who may or may not be my mother who actually had some varicose veins zapped by a laser. And it was. It was amazing, the difference. It was really very, very effective and quick.

And now the whole world knows Brock's mom's medical issues.

Yeah, sorry, Mom. She isn't mine.

Yeah, well, our moms are, like, you know what, like, probably 50% of our audience, so. Yeah, so we just lost 25%. No, we just lost 50%. All right, do your math, Ben. So, anyways, what are some other things you can do if you're not gonna do lasers, whether you have veins on. On your shoulders or your biceps or your arms? Well, if we're talking about things that you can do from a food standpoint, water can not only help you a lot. And we'll talk a little bit later in the podcast about how to hydrate properly, but One thing that actually can cause stress on your leg veins. And I figure even though I think I may have promised not to talk about poop too much, I'm going to talk about it when you're strained passing a stool. I can't do it. Can't do a podcast without the poo alert. But when you're straining on the leg veins, that can actually cause some of these issues. So proper hydration and paying attention to what I talked about in the poop podcast that we just did can actually be helpful, especially if you've got varicose vein issues in your legs. Compression socks and compression tights can help a ton. You can even elevate the foot of your bed by like putting a couple of phone books under each side of your bed if you really seriously want to activate a little bit more efficient venous return. And that can also help with recovery a little bit as well. You know, if you've had a long run, if your significant other is okay with feeling like she's sleeping on slanted ground, she or he's sleeping slowly sliding off the bed. Exactly. So a few other things that can help out. One is that cold, cold exposure causes constriction of the superficial veins. It directly stimulates the smooth muscle lining of those superficial blood vessels. And so doing like hot, cold contrast type of showers can help out quite a bit with venous return and with eliminating some of these varicose veins. And again, that would work on the upper body or the lower body. There are also supplements that you can take and specifically herbal supplements that have been shown to help a little bit with vascularity or what's called venous insufficiency. One would be one called horse chestnut extract. And I'll link to a few good brands, brands in the show notes for this episode. What's the episode show note, by the way?

It's episode 234.

Episode 2, 3, 4. That's easy to remember. So we'll talk about horse chestnut, the old horse chestnut. Horse chestnut, yeah, we all love our horse chestnut.

Throw another horse chestnut on the fire.

It can be dangerous in high amounts and some people have an adverse effect to horse chestnut. If you've got a kidney or a liver issue, I don't recommend that you take it. I also don't recommend that you combine it with blood thinning medications because it does have a blood thinning effect and that's one of the ways that it really helps with venous insufficiency. But that's one thing that can help out another Thing that can help out in a different way because of the type of antioxidants in it that can specifically assist with connective tissue structure of blood vessels would be grapeseed extract and pine bark extract. And you're gonna find this stuff in a lot of different whole food antioxidants type of compounds that are out there. But you can also just get them in their isolated form and use something like that. If venous insufficiency is kind of an issue and you struggle with varicose veins or you want to kind of eliminate them. The last type of herb is one called butcher's broom, and that acts in a different manner as well. What that does is it strengthens the collagen in the blood vessel walls and helps to improve circulation a little bit. It has these components called ruskogenins in them and they can basically tighten weak and stretched vessels such as those that would be associated with varicose veins. So butcher's broom. And I assume it's named butcher's broom because of the way that the plant looks.

Butchers don't use, do they?

Maybe it's sold by a butcher with a broom. I don't know. Honestly, I'm. I haven't studied up on butchers too much. It's possible that they may use brooms. I don't know.

That's a really awful way to clean up meat.

Probably not the most efficient way to go about cleaning up ground beef and bone bits from a concrete floor. But anyways, butcher's broom. So now that you've got that visual in your head of smeared blood and bone bits on the floor of a butcher's block. Butcher's broom. There you go. So those are some of the basic supplements that you could look into and some of the measures that you could do for varicose veins. And of course, as is our MO on any of these podcasts, if you've got stuff that you've found to be effective for you, go ahead and leave them in the show notes for Chris, and I'm sure that he would love to see what you found that works for you.

Now, Chris wasn't completely certain that they were varicose veins. Is there anything else that they could be?

They could be simply enlarged valves. That's one type of thing that you can run into when you've really been working a muscle such as the biceps or the shoulders, simply because those valves are going to get bigger as more blood is flowing through the arms. One of the things that you could do about that is just a quick you know, getting so jacked. But I mean really, if you are focusing on taking something that's going to help with blood smoothness a little bit, you know, such as like the horse chestnut extract, even like a good high quality fish oil could help with this a little bit. You're going to put a little bit of less stress on those valves. But I mean, anytime you're looking at an area that's getting big like that in a vessel, it's usually a valve. So, you know, and I've personally had stuff like that going on in my shoulders before when I lift a lot. If you look at a bodybuilder up close, just about any bodybuilder is going to have those kind of issues. So, you know, in some cases it's tough to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to having like a perfect venous appearance. The other option is to just hire someone to follow you around with an airbrush. That would also, that also work.

You know, I actually personally think that those veins look pretty badass. So I think you should just, just live with it. Chris?

Yep. Get your welcome to the gun show T shirt and blast them out.

Flex away.

Hello. I'm kind of new to the whole supplement thing. I've been running for years. When you guys mentioned the MAP supplements, is that amino acids or is it protein? I'm not really, couldn't really understand when you're talking about, you know, which one those were. Because I'm very interest in starting to do something of that nature. If you could help me with that by answering that on the podcast, please. My name is Brian from Indiana. Thanks.

Oh yeah, this is a great question because it really is, it's a small differentiation between a complex amino acid pattern and actual protein.

Yeah. So it is an amino acid. Well, it's a dietary protein substitute basically that has bunch of essential amino acids in it in this purified crystalline form. And amino acids, for those of you who want the quick 5 second chemistry lesson, are the main constituent of dietary protein. So anytime you're taking in a protein powder or steak or whatever, the proteins in that are comprised of amino acids. The master amino pattern is not made from an animal source. This is like a laboratory produced essential amino acid. Even though amino acids are 100% Natur and the difference between it and most protein sources is how quickly it's digested and absorbed because the protein has already been broken down. If you look at a protein powder or a dietary protein, most proteins, and you may know this if you were in Nutrition 101 are about 4 calories per gram. So you're getting calories when you're taking in protein. And there is a need to actually digest and break down and get activated by pepsin in your stomach to start to pre digest some of those proteins and get them broken down with hydrochloric acid. Whereas when you look at something like an essential amino acid supplement such as the map, it's only about 0.04 kilocalories per gram. So there's really zero calories in it per se. All you're getting are amino acids. And for that reason you can't really count it as calories. You can't throw back whatever 10amino acid capsules after workout and expect your body to actually not be sent a message that there is caloric depletion happening. So it won't keep you out of strict catabolism if you're not including any calories at all with it. At the same time, if you don't account for those amino acids and you just take, let's say you're taking 10 grams a day of essential amino acids and you're not paying attention to making sure that you don't take quite as much protein powder, or you don't use quite as much of a protein shake, or you don't cut back on your meat intake a little bit, you can actually get too much nitrogen and too much ammonia buildup if you're not careful. So that's something to take into account as well. Now, one of the guys who was responsible for formulating master amino pattern, Dr. David Minkoff, he did like an hour long podcast over at one of the websites that I run called Endurance Planet@EndurancePlanet.com where they just geeked out on everything you'd ever need to know about essential amino acid supplements. And that was a great episode. You could find it over@EndurancePlanet.com or just look up Endurance Planet in itunes. But it's pretty fascinating how much more quickly this stuff digests. So you're looking at like three to six hours for a dietary protein from like steak or protein powder versus about 20 minutes for this stuff. You're looking at net nitrogen utilization for body protein synthesis at being about 99% for an essential amino acids capsule like MAP versus being anywhere from 16 to a maximum of right around 30% for a dietary protein. And there's really no food sensitivity or adverse reaction to it that you might get from whey or eggs or something like that. So it's pretty interesting stuff as far as Whether or not it's an amino acids or a protein, it's kind of amino acids that, yeah, they make up protein. So that's kind of the idea behind it. It's one of the staples in my supplementation protocol. I honestly don't use it every day. I use it about five to ten capsules of it before a hard workout or occasionally after a hard workout when I want to bump up my blood levels of amino acids. And I will sometimes use it to shut down appetite cravings at night. And then I'll use it during a race, like during an ironman or a half Ironman Triathlon at 5 per hour and 10 of them about a half hour before. So that's the skinny on essential amino acids.

Now, when you say you're using it to shut down cravings, do you mean you're actually like when you're feeling hungry, your stomach is growling, you take that to sort of calm down the growling or more of a you're not actually hungry, but you just want to eat something kind of craving.

Amino acids are a precursor for all of your neurotransmitters. So if you have a serotonin or a dopamine deficiency or something like that, that kind of deficiency can cause you to crave foods. And just through self experimentation, I found that during periods of heavy training when my body is having a really, really high protein turnover and high amino acid turnover, that my cravings at night go up, even if I'm accounting during the day for the excessive calorie utilization by eating more calories. And I'm convinced a big, big part of it is neurotransmitter depletion from amino acid depletion. And so during periods of heavy training, if I use those amino acids, I don't get as many appetite cravings at night. And I think it's because it's a little bit more of kind of like a neurotransmitter balancing type of thing. But that's a total N equals one deal. And I'm just saying that's something that's worked for me.

Yeah.

And we'll put a link to a really good FAQ section about Master amino Pattern in the show notes. And yeah, I mean, you can get the stuff over at Pacific Elite Fitness. It's kind of spendy. If you buy it in bulk, it's a little less spendy. But yeah, it's not a cheap supplement. But you definitely notice a difference when you use it.

Hello, Ben, this is George from Cincinnati. I'm planning for a 10 day trip with my son's Boy Scout troop this summer and looking at nutrition options. While the trip is providing food, I'm looking at personal alternative options during the day's activities. Listening to last Week's podcast on YouCan Superstarch, is that something that's effective to use for 10 straight days? I've gone back through your archives and in episode 199, there's a good question about the race in Mongolia where you suggest Pemmican bars, Living Fuel, Super Greens, chocolate nuts and a few more items. Would you suggest including Superstarch into that mix to keep me going strong for 10 days while keeping as lightweight as the possible? Enjoy the show. Thanks so much.

Now, this is an interesting idea. It never occurred to me to try using it for multiple days. Just in my mind, it's a thing used during a race and maybe during a really long workout. But yeah, could you use it as a supplement just when you're doing stuff?

I wouldn't personally because look, I mean, yeah, it's a starch. Sure it's a low glycemic index and it causes a more stable blood sugar level and all that jazz. But just like that Soylent stuff that we were talking about, A, it doesn't give you a full nutrient profile, it is just starch. And B, I mean, talk about boring. I mean, the stuff. Unless you get the stuff that has a bunch of artificial sweeteners added to it. Actually, the Cran Raz flavor is flavored with stevia, so that's one option. But I mean, you know, boredom. Seriously, I would shoot myself if I was a Boy Scout being fed. You can superstars for 10 days. I mean, as much as I would advocate using stuff. Wait, wait.

They give Boy Scouts guns? That's not good. You crazy Americans. Don't let them shoot themselves.

Yeah, to hang myself with a sailor's knot or stab myself multiple times with a pen knife, whatever. I would not advocate doing this to a child. You can. Superstarch takes the digestive system some getting used to, so there may be some gastric distress that could result from something like the this. And you could have some serious liquid or explosive poo adventures going on during this 10 day trip, which would not be.

It's like the 10th time now since you promised you weren't going to talk about it.

You know what, when we're talking about nutrition, that just comes up. So ultimately, yeah, I'm a fan of the stuff for like, you know, the five to ten hour endurance events, even the marathon, stuff like that. But just for the sake of sanity, for the sake of a child's enjoyment, and for the potential to avoid any gastric issues, I would not be using this stuff for a 10 straight day type of supplement. I would instead be going after the type of real food that I recommend to that listener. I'll link to that other podcast that we did where the guy who's doing the adventure race in Mongolia wanted to know what.

He sounded awesome.

Yeah.

And just like, I was really wishing that guy would write back in and tell us how it went. If you're listening, please tell us how that thing went. That sounded amazing.

Well, he's probably dead. He's probably frozen in a ditch somewhere in Mongolia with a backpack full of super greens and pemmican.

A boy Scout snuck up and shot him anyways, though.

Yeah. Wishing he'd stayed in New York City and done the urban A thon by men's help anyways, though. Yeah, I mean, like, I recommended to him the coco chia and chia seeds and some super greens, some pemmican, some jerky, some of the stuff that travels really well, a little bit of dark chocolate, some raw nuts, you know, stuff that has some palatability to it and that also is going to give you some of those antioxidants and polyphenols and fatty acids and, you know, even that super green stuff has probiotics in it. And just a lot of these things that your body's gonna need when you're throwing it out there for 10 days in a row. You also need to consider the different needs of young athletes or young exercising individuals. For example, studies have shown that exercising children, meaning people under the age of 13, have had 10 to 40% higher fat oxidation rates compared to exercising adults, which is yet another reason not to fuel a kid with just like starch and energy bars or candy during a day hike or a multi day hike. I'm a fan of the nuts and the seeds and. And when they're transportable, even going after guacamole, avocados, olive oil, stuff like that, even like coconut oil and medium chain triglyceride oil. That stuff can be mixed with a little bit of chocolate or a little bit of nut butter, and it can be made relatively palatable even for a kid. Kids tend to burn lower amounts of carbs like I just mentioned, but. But they do tend to rely more on exogenous carbs as a fuel when they're burning carbs. And the main reason for that is kids just store less glycogen in their liver and less in their muscles. And so you also need to understand that whereas you may be able to hike for an hour and not get hypoglycemic, a kid might need something little every half hour or so. And so you need to understand that they're going to basically burn through food stuff that they're eating during exercise more quickly. The other thing that you need to understand is that it hasn't been shown in any studies that for exercise sessions, especially 75 minutes or less, but in general, eating carbohydrates doesn't appear to give kids some kind of an extra performance advantage. However, an increase in fatty acids may. So what this means is that I would always make sure that again, another reason not to use just something like Superstarch, I would make sure that no matter what snack that you're giving a kid during a day hike or a multi day event, they are always keeping fatty acid levels elevated as well. So in other words, every time you give them a carbohydrate, try and include a little bit of fat along with it. And again, that can come down to something simple as dark chocolate with some nuts or coconut oil with some nut butter or one of these coca chia bars, bars or hammer bars or even on your stops making sure that you're fueling canned sardines and olive oil, stuff like that. But always making sure you're keeping those fatty acid levels up just a little bit. Those are some of the things to think about. And then of course, just because of kids surface areas related to their body size, they always have to focus a little bit more on hydration than adults. So you keep an eye on that. Really good resource for this. We'll try and link to it in the show. Notes would be the Real Foods cookbook over at Endurance planet. It's@EndurancePlanet.com bookstore. But that's a new book we have over there and that's got a bunch of real food recipes like rice cakes that you can make and wrap in aluminum foil and different ways to use chia seeds creatively when you're out there and just lots of little things like that. So ultimately though, yeah, don't torture the kids with friggin superstars for 10 days in a row.

Gosh, yeah. George, this sounds like a delicious camping trip.

I want to come along if you take my recommendations.

Yes. Yeah, not the you can for 10 days.

Hi Ben. Hi Brock, this is Ray from Wisconsin. I was hoping you could help me out with a problem my wife has had over the past 30 years after she Works out, she'll break out in a bad red rash. Hives starts on her feet, goes to her legs, it's on her arms and torso. And it can even happen when she's not working out. Just on a warm summer day. She doesn't even have to be in the sun. And all of a sudden you'll start to see the signs of it. Wintertime too. She can be inside a mall or grocery store and she comes home and you can start to see the rash begin to form. I hope you can provide some insight that our doctors haven't been able to give us some type of a tip as to what's going on. We'd really appreciate it. Keep up the good work, guys. Really enjoy the show. Thanks a lot. Bye.

You know, at the beginning of this question, I thought, okay, she gets hives when she finishes workouts. Oh, okay. Well, then she gets. When she's in the sun. Oh, she gets it when she's not in the sun. Ray, your wife is. She's just getting hives no matter what. That's terrible.

Yeah. And I mean, anytime you're looking at hives, it's coming down to like a histamine reaction in most cases. You know, there is this whole exercise induced thing. It's called cholinergic urticaria. And it's hives that are brought on specifically by heat, sweat, exercise, even emotional stress. Stress in some cases. And it can really kind of impair quality of life just because the symptoms can come on pretty rapidly and they can be either embarrassing or uncomfortable with some tingling and some heat and redness and stuff like that. So the mechanism of action is that histamine is released from what are called basophils, which are these cells in your bodies. And those are going to have increased activity when you're producing a bunch of immunoglobulins against potential autoimmune triggers. And hypersensitivities can be due to everything from stuff in your environment, such as pollen, for example, to elements that are in foodstuffs like gluten and soy eggs, for example, for many people. Whey for many people. Even nightshades and tree nuts can do this in some folks. Folks. And so what it would come down to is ideally doing like an anti allergenic diet or an elimination type of diet where you're getting rid of a lot of these potential triggers, preferably getting rid of all of them at once. And the big ones first, like gluten, soy, dairy, those would be some of the biggies. But then also nightshades tree nuts, even some of the root vegetables you'd want like eggplants, for example, which I guess is a nightshade or a root vegetable, maybe both. I don't know, maybe it flies under both radars. But anyways, the idea is you're eliminating all these autoimmune triggers and then you just introduce them back in one by one, preferably one every two weeks or so and you see which one might cause the, this rash or this hive to reappear. And then there you have it, Sherlock Holmes. You've got your allergen identified and like I mentioned, you can with excess cortisol or an overactive immune system from stress, also react like this. But usually it's not quite as pronounced as being just like all the frigging time. So I would go after this from like an autoimmune standpoint and you could certainly tell test something like this. I mean you could get like a metametrix immunoglobulin test. I'll link to a good one over at Direct Labs. You could get a US Biotech immunoglobulin. You could do like an ELISA food panel. You could do a Cyrex test for gluten. But I'm guessing you're gonna find a few different triggers there. So yeah, you could do that. Or you could just like move to Dubai and wear a burqa all day. There's another option for you if you want to go that route.

Or there's always the bubble as well. Become a person who lives in one of those big inflatable bubbles.

I actually want to market one of those. We could, you know, Pacific Elite Fitness, a fine purveyor of. And by the way, there's a bunch of new stuff over there. I've got a bunch of detox gear, recovery gear, muscle gaining gear, you know, like our new structured water filters that they're doing over at Greenfield Naturals. We've got, got links to those over there. Basically just everything that you'd kind of need to geek out on this stuff. It's over at Pacific Elite Fitness and every time I find something new, I pump it out over there. So that's a good resource too. But yeah, we should start selling a full body bubble. The Pacific Elite Fitness full body bubble. And it could even come with a podcast feed that goes in through like a detox HEPA filter style speaker that talks to people while they're rolling around in their, in their bubble. And it could like turn, turn red and have some sirens that go off if they come within like 10ft of, you know, unfermented soy or something like that.

I'm not investing in this.

Hey Ben, my name is Charlie from Georgia Vermont and listen to a lot of your podcasts and listen to Tim.

No.

And concerns with over hydration during exercise. I was wondering if you have any recommendations about just normal daily water intake without necessarily any exercise involvement. Just want to know what I should daily be taking for water intake to kind of maintain homeostasis. Thanks.

Wait a second, Charlie. Did you say a day with no workouts or exercise? Do you have days like that?

Weird. What? Weird people.

Something must be wrong with Charlie.

Seriously. He's living the evolutionary ancestral lifestyle, listening to his body and giving it a break every once in a while, for crying out loud. Anyways, though, I think that this whole idea behind taking how many pounds that you weigh and dividing that by two to figure out how many ounces of water that you need to drink is fraught with error. Because you can get literally up to a liter and in many cases more of water from just the food that you eat. I mean, fruits and veggies are up to 97% water. And you also can get hydrated through caffeinated beverages like coffee and tea. I mean, heck, even soda can hydrate you. And the amount of diuresis or peeing off that occurs from something like a caffeinated beverage is nowhere near the water that you're actually getting from it. And even like a cup of coffee, if you drink a cup of coffee, that's the equivalent of about 2/3 a cup of water. And so a lot of people aren't taking into account all of these exogenous sources of water that they're getting when it comes to how much to drink. So that's one thing to think about is that, you know, you don't necessarily have to get X amount of water per day, no matter what. I personally just listen to my thirst and I drink when I'm thirsty. But I can tell you something even more interesting than that, having just mentioned this concept behind structured water, and that is that your whole production of energy, the whole phosphorylation of adenosine diphosphate at the cellular level, and the whole production of energy that has a lower free energy associated with it. When water bonding is a little bit easier to break in your body, meaning that there's less free energy required to break bonds that have to change the water structure that's hydrating the cells within your body. And this may sound like kind of woo woo stuff but there's a lot of cool research going on out there that looks at the effect of hydration when you are consuming water that has been treated properly and water that is from a crappy, fluoridated, chlorine filled municipal source. And that's something to take into consideration is the type of water that you drink. And I mean, you know, if you want to get way, way out there into far woo woo land, you know, you look at research by a guy like Masaru Emoto, who even looked at water, water's hydration capacity in water that had been exposed to positive thoughts and prayers in a positive environment versus water that was exposed to negative thoughts in a negative environment. I mean, it's pretty mind blowing stuff when you start to look at this from even a spiritual perspective. So one of the things is like for example, I thank my lucky stars that, that Spokane, the city where I live, doesn't fluoridate its water because fluoride can actually block a lot of the uptake of iodine. And iodine is one of the elements that's crucial to your body properly hydrating itself. Low levels of minerals from water that's been demineralized or water that hasn't had minerals added back into it, that can also affect the amount of water that your body holds onto and hence your ability to stay in an adequate, adequate state of hydration. It's just very, very difficult to hydrate properly with bad water. And so for me, I find that I got to drink far less now that I have like a central structured water filter in my house. I use iodine, I use trace liquid minerals. And I think it's a huge, huge issue out there when it comes to people just drinking crappy water. Whether it be headaches or cramping or chronic dehydration, you really have to pay attention to what you are drinking, you know. And I turn down water in plastic bottles now. You know, I mean, you saw Brock, all the water that we gave out at the Superhuman event. Well, frankly, all the speakers were getting water from structured glass bottles and all the attendees got the brand new specialized Purist BPA free bottles. We primarily, unless we're out exercising, drink from glass, all always at home. And we use a central structured water filter, add some minerals and iodine into the mix and you know, if you really want to know what it feels like to be properly hydrated all day long and set up your body for ideal performance based off of that and not cramping and stuff like that, not that cramping is always due to dehydration. But sometimes it is. You really got to pay attention to the type of water you drink. So the ultimate answer. Answer to how much water should you drink every day? It's going to depend on the type of water that you're drinking, how many fruits and vegetables you're consuming. And, you know, there are a lot of variables in there, But I can tell you that I personally just drink to thirst and I don't pay any attention at all. And I feel fine doing just that. I drink to thirst during exercise, drink to thirst while I'm sitting at home during the day. You know, certainly throw in a little bit of kombucha and coconut water into the mix, have a cup of coffee in the morning, and yeah, I'm golden. And as my boys say, daddy, you're hydrated because your pee is the right color, because they actually. I have strange children. They actually go look in the toilet to see if dad is hydrating properly.

I'm glad somebody's looking out for you. That's good. Now, a few years ago, there was a great big movement where everybody was getting rid of their plastic bottles and they were going to like glass or aluminum. How do you feel about the aluminum bottles?

You know, I would be a little bit concerned about metal leaching from aluminum. It's not something that I use. I'm actually pretty careful with metal. I mean, like, iron from a cast iron skillet isn't that big of a deal, But I'd be careful with aluminum containers. I mean, obviously they're not going to have the BPA and stuff like that in the. But I would just be kind of careful. I'd be hesitant in terms of the source and the amount of metals that you might be putting into your body. With something like drinking regularly from an aluminum container, I find that stuff just seems to taste a little more metallic, too, which I don't like.

Yeah, yeah, it definitely tastes more metallic. And you definitely there. I don't know if there are any studies that backed it up, but a lot of people were talking about the link between aluminum and Alzheimer's being quite, quite a thing.

Yeah, you hear about that with like, you know, vaccinations and stuff like that, too. And, you know, we. I guess we don't really. We don't have to open up that can of worms right now. But aluminum would certainly be healthier than plastic. I would say stainless steel, if you're going to go with a metal source, would be better than aluminum. And I'm a big fan of glass.

So, hi, Ben, My name is Austin, and I was just wondering. I've read that that when you train with when you weight lift too much, eventually the benefits stop and it actually begins to destroy your muscles when you lift too much. So I was just wondering, at what point in time of lifting does that happen? Whereas is it lifting more than five hours a week or ten hours a week?

Just wondering, Austin. The answer is seven and a half hours.

Brock knows this, having been through rhabdo and at the hospital after his seven and a half hour weight training session. Have I.

Did I tell you the rhabdo story about the guy who put himself into rhabdobiolysis by doing a bunch of cocaine and then putting a whole bunch of weight on his shoulders and doing like 200 squats? I only know this because my girlfriend's an emergency room nurse and he came into the emergency room while she was working.

Wow. Can you imagine? You know, no. I usually call it at 100 when I'm doing the squatting on cocaine thing. So I can't imagine doing 200.

That's smart.

I typically fairly conservative when I'm snorting crack before a workout, which is hard to do when you're on crack. It's hard to hold back on crack.

We're do the wise. Okay, enough. Seriously?

Yeah. Exercise can elevate creatine kinase, and that's abbreviated ck. And you can get CK up to the extent that you might meet the diagnostic criteria for what's called rhabdomyolysis if the exercise induced elevation in CK is too high. So basically, rhabdomyolysis is this clinical syndrome that results from injury to your skeletal muscle and release of all of these metabolism and cellular contents into the extracellular fluid into your circulation. It hits your kidneys and leads to stuff like renal failure. It could lead to coagulation and in some cases even death. You'll hear about this every football season. At least a few football teams across the nation have some kind of rhabdo going on. And as we just learned from Brock's extremely educational anecdote, it can be elevated through the use of drugs and alcohol as well as infection as well. And sometimes you even get muscle pain. Sometimes you just get this increase in ck and that's accompanied by an increase in myoglobin. If you test some of the levels of liver enzymes like aminotransferases, you're gonna see an elevation in those in the blood or in the urine. And you also pee a really dark color in many cases when this is happening. And my Children, no, have never accused me of having rhabdomyolysis based on my pee color.

Daddy, Daddy. Yeah, yeah, put the cocaine down.

When you look at creatine kinase levels in folks who have been exercising with high intensity exercise or long duration exercise or weight bearing exercise, especially like eccentric muscle contractions, like lifting a muscle slow or downhill running is another perfect example. The increase in creatine kinase is hugely variable. So some people have a creatine kinase that's like 20 times normal after they run a marathon, and other times, interestingly, it's way lower in women. You'll get like 8 to 10 times normal after Ironman. Usually you see about 12 to 20 times normal, sometimes higher than that, and it can stay elevated for up to 19 days after an event. I'm actually releasing a video on Monday after this podcast comes out with this lady who's developing this way to literally test your body day after day. If you wanted to do a blood test and just find out everything that's going on after you've done a hard workout and kind of see how long your body takes to recover. Totally geeked out self quantification stuff, but cool stuff. Stay tuned Monday for that, by the way, over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com but anyway, the Sedgway and what I'm getting at here is that creatine kinase production is going to be hugely variable from individual to individual. And some people, especially based off of training history, can handle, literally, like a bodybuilder, a couple of two hour sessions a day in the weight room five to six days a week. And they're fine because they're hitting different muscle groups. Right. One day you're on your legs and your core, another day you're on your arms, and another day you're on your chest and your shoulders. And so you're getting muscle damage, but it's in different areas of tissue. And you've gotten to the point where you can metabolize creatine kinase pretty well. Yeah, there's probably still a little bit of stress on the kidneys, but not to the point of like renal failure or anything like that. What it comes down to, though, is there's no way to know unless you were to test your creatine kinase levels after workouts, but you could pay attention to qualitative variables. You know, if a muscle is sore to the touch, you shouldn't work it out again on that day. If you're depleted and you can't put up as much weight as you could the day before or the couple of days before, that's a pretty good sign. I mean really, Rule is you should always walk into a weight room and be able to meet or exceed whatever you did in the weight room in the previous workout out. And if you can't, you're probably not ready to be in there working out. You know, if I, if I walk in and I drop under the squat bar for a warm up and you know, a 45 pound plate on either side is throwing me for a loop, I shouldn't be underneath that bar. And so you got to listen to your body. And that's a situation where, you know, I'll step out of the weight room and I'll walk downstairs into the sauna with an elastic band and I'll do some external rotation and some hip abduction and some front and side planking and call it a workout and I'll try to get under the bar the next day and I'll just flip flop my workouts for the week. So I do that a lot, move my recovery day to a different day of the week depending on how I feel. So ultimately though, I know that's kind of a cop out answer, but who knows how much is too much. It's going to vary greatly depending on your training status and what your body's ready for.

That may seem like a cop out to some people, but to me, coming from an endurance athlete, athlete side of things, I've always approached weights the same way that I approach running where you're actually supposed to feel that fatigue and you're building on that fatigue. So that's really interesting. I didn't know that you should give up basically if you're not able to lift what you were the day before.

Yeah, with weights, definitely. With endurance exercise there are some situations where you want the hormetic effect of excessive stress. And so in a buildup to Ironman, I'm racing Ironman Canada in August and, and like starting around June there'll be a good eight weeks there where I'll have two or three days that are really demanding of me. And for me demanding means I'm going out for two hours worth of cycling intervals, coming back and straight off of the bike throwing in, you know, ten 400 meter repeats on the hill behind my house. And that's a really tough, demanding workout. And I guarantee that those hill repeats are not going to be the type of repeats where I'm like, oh, couldn't meet or exceed what I did last week, so I'm not going to do anymore. Sometimes you do have to push through some fatigue and discomfort, to break through a training barrier. But I don't recommend doing it in the weight room. Usually that's with one of your metabolic conditioning sessions. And as far as weightlifting goes, just because of the biomechanics, increased risk of injury, et cetera, I think you should feel fresh when you're lifting pretty much all the time.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, that finishes up the questions for today. Once again, make sure that you go down to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and check out the show notes where we put all the stuff we talked about. There's links galore this week. Some weeks are a little sparse, but this week is bananas with the links. And make sure that you check out that Lean Lifestyle Insider. There's also a link for that. Make sure that up in the inner circle webinars, head on down to Ben greenfieldfitness.com where we got everything you need.

That's right. And I should mention that for this podcast episode number 234, I'm gonna create a list using. Using my list, we're actually gonna start to embed the. Cannot focus.

That's fantastic.

All right. If you can't beat them, join them them. What we're gonna end up doing is.

We got this my list thing going on. We're gonna take that my list and we're gonna dad gum, embed it in the actual post over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com so you don't even have to surf out of Facebook if y' all don't want to. What we're gonna do is we'll create a my list that shows you every single thing that you need for.

For friggin Your. Your.

Your vessels that don't look the way that you want them to and.

And you. Your.

Your veins that are all messed up, pumped out.

That's right.

We're going to show you the. The. The what?

What was some other stuff we talked about in the podcast episode, Brock?

I don't know. I'm too busy doing a funny voice he didn't crack.

Doing crack cocaine over there and bench pressing.

We're talking about what you got. Feed what you got.

Feed them Boy Scouts. We'll do my list for that. We're going to talk about. We'll show you them. Them fancy master amino acid acid pattern capsules that you could take and shove those in your face while you're out there on the trail.

And that's a steak in a capsule. I tell you what, we'll even talk.

About them structured water filters and yeah, and how you could use them. So check out the My list. You can go to my list.com BenGreenfield you could go to Facebook page Ben Greenfield, which is over facebook.com BG Fitness or you could just head on over to vangreenfieldfitness.com show notes for episode 234. Get it on, get it out. Yeehaw. Ding dang. And we'll talk to you next week.

Over and out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com at first.

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