#235: What Is Wrong With The China Study, Is Greek Yogurt Healthier Than Regular Yogurt, Can Marijuana Help Performance And More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast, what's wrong with the China Study? Also, is Greek yogurt healthier than regular yogurt? What can you do about nervous system failure? The best natural supplements to control pain. What is evoathlete? And does marijuana increase exercise performance?

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon, and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Okay, so on Sunday, I was doing a race in HAMILTON, ONTARIO, A 30K.

Road race, as you do.

And yeah, because in Hamilton, you can't do a half marathon or a full marathon. You have to do something in between called around the Bay. And I was probably like 4km in, just starting to settle into a nice rhythm. And it's running next to a couple of guys probably around my age, and they were chit chatting away and I heard one of them say, so I was listening to this podcast the other day and this guy was going on and on about heart rate variability and, like, how you can, like, measure your stress levels and how you can, like, figure out if you're recovering from your workouts properly. And then he was talking about this thing you put on the end of your finger and it measures your oxygen saturation. And so I ran just a little bit closer. Like, was that. Did that happen to be Ben Greenfield that was talking about that? And they looked at me and said.

Yeah, yeah, it was.

I'm like, I'm Brock. And they were like, oh, my God, it's so awesome to meet you. And we all started shaking hands and had this great bonding moment for probably a good 4, 400 meters. And then I realized that they were actually keeping a pace that I wasn't able to sustain.

So shamefully, I was gonna say, you didn't hold hands and like, skip across the finish line or something like that, did you?

I wish they were significantly faster than me. So I dropped back and saw them disappear into the distance. But nonetheless, I still felt like a rock star for a few minutes there.

Wow.

Well, apparently our audience is two more people than our moms. That's great.

We've got four listeners.

Oh, cool. And how'd the 30K wind up going for you?

Well, for the first race of the season, I'm not horribly disappointed. I didn't hit the time that I wanted, but I only kind of missed it by like actually a minute and two seconds. So not horrible. But it did point out to me that there are a few things I need to work on. Like, one is hills. I lost all my time on two hills. And so I just. I know I need to attack those better. And I hate to say it, but I think I'm just carrying too much weight.

You aren't pregnant, are you?

Three months isn't passed yet.

Well, tell you what, maybe what we can do at the end of the episode, for any listeners who are interested, why don't we talk a little bit at the end of this episode about how to become a better hill climber and how we need to go about shedding some weight to get you ready for Boston Marathon.

It's not all spare tire. Only part of it is spare tire. Some of it's some muscle as well, unfortunately.

But that'd be great. That sounds like some birth control pills. Yes. All right, we better jump in.

News flashes. Okay, this is the time of the show where Ben explains all the interesting news flashes that he's been sending on twitter.com BenGreenfield@Facebook.com BGFitness and also at Google. So what have you got for us this week?

Well, Brock, I've been saying for years that there's a big, big problem with a lot of the studies out there that look into what you're eating and how what you're eating can affect your performance. And the main reason for that, as any longtime listener to this show might know, is that most of these studies were done with people who were in states. Meaning, you know, how many of us do actually frequently go out there after a good 12 hour fast and do a time trial or a hard weight training session or something like that.

Even people who work out first thing in the morning, like, personally, if I know I'm doing something first thing in the morning, I'll have a little snack before I go to bed. So like 8, 9pm so even my 6 o' clock swim isn't really in a fasted state. I've still got a lot of. A lot of stuff on board.

Yeah, I can't remember the last time I worked out in the morning. Actually, I think it was during the Superhuman live event when I had to get my ass out of bed at the ungodly hour of 6am for that boot camp. But I'm not a big morning working out person. Unless you.

That's because you don't have to get up and Go to the office every morning.

That's right. Well, I do. I have to somehow get my button gear to do the home office thing anyways though. So what happened was in the Journal of Nutrition they put out an article called Carbohydrates and Exercise Performance in Non Facet Athletes. And it was kind of one for me, one of those articles that was like, it's about time they did something like this. Finally. Yeah, finally. And that's how much of a geek I am in that I get off when I see an article come out in a journal and start pumping my fat.

That's better than Christmas.

That's right. What they reported was essentially, essentially that there is this consensus that claims an ergogenic effect of carbohydrates ingested in the proximity of or during a performance bout. But in these studies, the protocols that are used are typically very, very standardized non real world scenarios in fasted subjects who are exercising at this constant exercise intensity with the test of time to exhaustion, not a test of performance. Meaning there are typically tests of how long you can go without bec exhausted. Whereas in the real world a lot of times we're looking at how fast we can complete X amount of distance. Right. Or how much we can lift X amount of weight. So, you know, a lot of these situations don't reflect competitive real life situations. So what they did in this article was they kind of systematically summarized all of the different studies that actually did truly mimic the situation of a real life competition, meaning people exercising after they'd eaten and meaning performances that were more time trial like performance tests, like a fixed distance or a fixed time. And they went over thousands and thousands and thousands of studies. Now, of all the studies that actually looked into the efficacy of doing something like a high carbohydrate dosing or carbohydrate intervention, what was found was that the improvements from taking in carbohydrates prior to exercise were far, far lower than what is typically reported to us in say, like you know, Shape magazine or Men's Health or kind of common sports nutrition advice. And when they looked at studies that actually mimicked real life competition, what they found was that carbohydrates that you take in in the proximity of or during a performance about that is at 70 minutes or less offers you pretty much no benefit. Meaning that if your exercise session is going to be an hour to an hour and 10 minutes, there is no need for you to go out and eat carbohydrates beforehand or during. And there is a possible but much lower Significance of the effect of carbohydrates in performance durations that are longer than 70 minutes, meaning that the amount of benefit that came out of and they studied from 26 all the way up to 240 minutes. And most of these studies were on cyclists just because that's typically what a lot of these lab studies are done with very, very little effects in terms of how much carbohydrates truly help you in these real world situations. And so it was just super interesting to go through this and kind of have that come to Jesus moment where it's like, wow, we have been so wrong for so long about this stuff. So I'll link to the abstract of the study in the show notes to this episode. What is this episode number? 235. 225 to 225. I'm leaving the future. I think it's 235. I'm pretty sure this is good rating.

Oh, you're right. 235.

I knew it. Mind like a steel truck anyways though. So check it out if you're interested in kind of looking into carbohydrates and exercise performance in non fasted individuals rather than fasted individuals. So very cool. So yeah. So a couple of other things that came across the radar this week. One was that yoga can actually increase your deadlift. And this one surprised me. There was this study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning where they looked at Bikram yoga and they tested Bikram yoga in about eight weeks of Bikram yoga at three times a week. And they looked at everything from heart rate and blood pressure to VO2 max to fat mass to lean mass to lower back and hamstring and shoulder flexibility. And they also looked at hand grip strength and isometric deadlift strength. And even though after eight weeks of this Bikram yoga, which is the hot yoga, they didn't find an increase in cardiovascular measures, they didn't find an increase in maximal aerobic fitness. But what they did find, in addition to the increased flexibility, which you would have expected, was increased deadlift strength. And the hypothesis here was that many of the postures that are specifically involved in something like Bikram Yoga actually do involve kind of a forceful contraction, almost like an isometric contraction of your trunk and your shoulder muscles. And so these people actually got stronger with yoga.

So were they doing any weightlifting in the same time as yoga or they were just doing yoga for eight weeks?

No, they controlled it for any training outside of the yoga. So they were just doing yoga training versus a control group that was not doing yoga training. So there you have it. Yoga can make you stronger. I'll bet that there are much, much faster ways to get stronger. But just in case you're concerned that if you're doing a solo yoga practice, you're not going to build any strength at all, turns out that you actually can maintain some strength. And I would assume that these folks were doing a proper Bikram yoga is a 90 minute protocol. And having been through a few bikram yoga sessions myself, I can tell you there are a lot of isometric movements in there that are kind of exhausting. We'll actually talk about isometrics and why they work later on in the show, because I think we got a question about the Evo athlete program I've been doing. So we'll get into that a little bit more. Last thing that I wanted to mention, if all of our listeners haven't left already to go do their yoga, is a study that looked at the effect of cadence on cycling efficiency and what's called local tissue oxygenation. Now, this one was pretty interesting. What they did was they took a bunch of kind of recreational cyclists, triathletes, so not like elites, but people who were, you know, who had been cycling a while. And they looked at three different cycling cadences. Cycling at 60 RPM, cycling at 80 RPM, and cycling at 100 RPM. And what they found was that these trained cyclists and triathletes were more efficient and more economical when they were cycling at 60 compared to when they were cycling at 80 or at 100 RPM. And they also found that heart rate and also blood lactate levels were higher when people were cycling at 80 RPM and at 100 RPM compared to when they were cycling at 60 RPM. And so kind of the takeaway from this was that cadence of 60 rpm might actually be advantageous for performance in moderately trained athletes. And you need to contrast this with studies in the past which have found that higher RPMs do actually improve your performance. But those studies were done in elite cyclists who may have a lot more efficiency, a lot better ability to recruit more muscles at those higher cadences. And again, this is also something we'll get into because this is kind of part of that evo athlete protocol talk about as well. But what it comes down to is you don't necessarily have to shy away from gear mashing, so to speak, from being down at around 60 RPM. If you're a triathlete out there doing a triathlon, there's no evidence that that is actually going to hold you back. And it may indeed be more efficient than cycling at higher cadences.

I remember there actually being a great debate a number of years ago between triathletes and road cyclists where there was that debate of whether you should be actually doing the 90 rpm and the road cyclists were saying no, and the triathletes were. Were saying yes. So maybe it's somewhere in between.

Was it like Gangs of New York where they're out in the street with, like, shivs and pitchforks?

It was more like west side Story. They were, like, dancing and snapping their fingers at each other.

Yeah. In spandex. Yeah. Yeah.

Lots of high kicks.

Nice special announcements.

All right, Mr. Webinar, you've got a. Well, you've got a couple of webinars coming up with the inner circle. One on April 6 about how to raise superhuman children.

That's right. And you know what's funny is my kids actually wear capes about 24, 7. They've got these capes that mom made them when they were three. And one says they're Superman capes. One says T and one says R. And they do wear those capes, like, everywhere. Grocery store daycare, everywhere. So anyways, though, that's not why we titled this particular upcoming webinar.

That's the whole webinar is how to make a Cape for your Kids.

Exactly. How to sew a cape. No, it's how to Raise Superhuman Kids. And we're just going to teach you how to really optimize performance and health in your kids. That one's coming up next Saturday, April 6th. And then there's another webinar we'll be doing for the Inner Circle called Ask Ben Anything about minimalist triathlon training. So again, those are. Those are kind of limited to people who are part of the Inner circle. But it's just 10 bucks a month. And in my opinion, for everything that you get inside the circle, the best 10 bucks a month you're ever gonna spend. So check that out. We'll put a link to those in the show notes along with the times and everything. And of course, if you are in the Inner Circle, you get access to the replays of those as well as the replays of every single webinar we have ever done. And there are a lot of them in there now. Also, it's not a webinar, but Brock and I are going to be doing a guest episode of Jimmy Moore's Livin La Vida. Low carb.

That's right. I'm excited. I feel like we should wear some Carmen Miranda hats or something just to be the living la vida.

That's right. That's right. And you can call in and leave your low carb question. And I'm totally kind of going over what Brock said and ignoring it because I have no clue what Carmen Mirinda is.

She was a Spanish dancing, singing lady from the 70s that wore a big hat made of fruit and played maracas.

Oh, okay. I know who you're talking about now. Okay. I was showing my age.

No, I was showing my age.

So call in and leave your low carb question for our Jimmy Moore episode. Same way you'd call in and leave a question for any of our episodes. You either call toll free to 877-2- or you leave your message on that little speak pike pipe speak pipe speak pipe tab on the right side of the page@BenGreenfieldFitness.com A couple of other quick things in the way of special announcements. The first is that Abel James, the host of the Fat Burning show, along with myself, put together a special little package for you. And in between these special announcements and the Q and A, Brock and I will play a little special announcement that Abel and I actually put together for you. So listen into that because that's coming up in just a second. And then a couple other things. I owe an apology to people who subscribed to the podcast and saw the video that I put out this week in which I interviewed Heather from a blood testing company called Talking20. Because you couldn't hear Heather's voice. You could hear it on the website, but you couldn't hear it on the podcast. Anyways, though, if you want to to go check it out over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Heather's got this cool new service called Talking20. She's an MD, PhD, which is code word for being smart.

Super smart. And she's Canadian.

Yeah. And what talking 20 is, is you order this package and they send you 36 different cards. And you can use these cards anytime you want. You could use them 36 days in a row. You could use them for three years. But just one drop of blood on these cards and you send them back in and you get everything from organ panel to cholesterol panel to inflammatory panel to pretty much everything that you'd want to know about what's going on inside your body. But as opposed to some of the other ways to measure your biomarkers that we've talked about in the past. This does not involve getting in your car and driving to a lab or giving a bunch of blood or peeing in a cup or anything like that. Or sniffing peanut butter so you can drip saliva into a tube, which is my secret taking.

Is that what you do?

I did anyways, though. Yeah. You just send it off and. So super convenient. It's not cheap because you're buying 36 all at once. So it's like it's $1,300. If you use the special code that I put in the post, it's closer to 1100, but kind of cool, especially for people who like to geek out on biohacking. So check that out. It's called talking 20.

That can't actually be as accurate as those other tests, so can it? Because it's just one drop of blood versus all these vials.

It is. It's mass spectrometry. So it is. It's a new technology that they're using. And it's kind of the next thing before we all just get a chip implanted, you know, in our. In our forearm that allows us to monitor our biomarkers 24 7. So.

I'm not looking forward to that day.

There you go. And then the last thing I wanted to mention was that at the recent Become Superhuman live event on stage, I was showing folks the brand new 213 page manual and 14 CD set that includes everything you'd ever need to know about optimizing performance. Fat loss, recovery, digestion, brain sleep and hormones. It's this big binder you can order. It gets mailed to your house. You can also get it in digital format so it all gets downloaded straight to your computer. And even though that originally was exclusively available at the Become Superhuman live event, it is now available for anybody anywhere in the world. And I will put a link in the show notes if you want to grab that essential guide to becoming superhuman. And whether you're a personal trainer or whether you're just somebody who wants to know everything that you need to know about optimizing your body, it's a pretty cool dealio. So, hey, folks, it's me, Ben Greenfield.

And this is Abel James.

And you may recognize me, Ben, from the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast, or me.

From the Fat Burning man show.

And today, Abel and I want to tell you the number one workout that we're doing right now to burn fat. So, Abel, I'll let you take it away first. What is it that you're doing right now when it Comes to exercise to get your body as lean as possible.

All right, so the first thing that I do that a lot of people skip is a warmup. I do about five minutes of shadow boxing and light stretching. Then I go straight into doing some pull ups to failure, doing some burpees, and then I do some heavy squats and heavy deadlifts in my shed in the backyard. And that's it. It's easy and I love it right now.

Did you just say a shed in the backyard?

That's right. I work out in my shed. Or usually I work out actually in my backyard in the sun, because it's just that nice in Austin this time of year.

I was going to say the shed's about as masochistic as you can get. And just see out there doing your squats and deadlifts.

That's where my punching bag is.

So I've got this thing that I'm doing. It's called a Litvinov sprint.

I love how you geek out all the time, Ben.

I have no clue what Litvinov even means anyways, though. What I do is I've got this 50 pound dumbbell and I take it out to the hill behind my house and I do 15 dumbbell swings and then sprint 400 meters up the hill. Like, I. I drop the dumbbell, and while the dumbbell is kind of like still in. In midair, dropping to the ground, I'm. I'm off sprinting. Man, I do that eight times through. And, man, when it comes to a fat burning workout, that is about the most potent thing that I've found yet. So.

So you sprint back and forth before the dumbbell even hits the ground, Right?

Exactly, exactly. It's like a roadrunner from Looney Tunes.

That's a fat burning workout right there.

Exactly. So I guess folks are probably wondering why Abel and I are here geeking out about fat loss. And it's because we've got a new website.

That's right.

And it is basically Abel and I following each other around each other's houses with a came camera. Virtually, of course, since Abel lives in Austin and I live in Washington. And we are basically showing you everything that we do from the time we get up out of bed in the morning, all the way up through lunch, through our workouts, through dinner, through bedtime, to live what we call a lean lifestyle.

Yeah. And you'll learn things that are kind of the more advanced strategies. A lot of times on our podcasts, our shows, our blogs, we'll talk about things that are kind of generalized to the public. But these are the things that we literally do ourselves every day. All of the secrets of what we're cooking, what we're eating for breakfast, or not eating for breakfast for that matter, what we may or may not be putting in our coffee depending on the day, pretty much any supplement that we're taking and tons more. All of the I mean, Ben has all sorts of crazy gizmos that you'll be able to see. It's a blast to watch.

And Abel's house is much cleaner than mine. As your oldest, you'll find out. So anyways though, here's what you do if you want to get inside the Lean Lifestyle Insider right now. All right, so Abel, what is the URL that people can go to if they want to get in on the Lean Lifestyle Insider right now?

That would be lean lifestyleinsider.com forward/b.

That's lean lifestyle insider.com forward slash b. And I'll put a link in the show notes for you all too. Hey Abel, thanks for coming on the show.

Anytime, man.

Listener Q and A Hi Ben and Brock, it's Camille here. My question, Ben, recently I was listening to Rich Roll about all the vegan stuff and read that China Study and it was quite disturbing reading because they tell that you should remove all the animal food and your approach is quite different. And to be frank, I'm quite.

I.

Don'T know what to do now. Should I remove all the animal food? I would want to hear your thoughts on the subject. Thanks in advance for reply. That's interesting. I know a lot of people have read the China Study and had a very similar reaction like sworn off meat for the rest of their lives because it does make a very compelling argument.

Yeah, I read it cover to cover and found it quite interesting. And you know, the premise for the people who haven't read it is that all animal foods, all animal foods, you know, whether we're Talking about chicken McNuggets or grass fed beef, are responsible for pretty much every modern ailment that we have, from heart disease to cancer to everything. And so the China Study has quickly risen as this almost like this bible for the vegan and the vegetarian community because it appears at first glance to have a ton of evidence in it for meat being bad for you, for animal products being something that can cause a lot of issues. And it's called the China Study because it draws upon demographic information primarily collected from groups of people living in China who had access to meat and groups that didn't have access to Meat, even though it does go into a little bit more detail than just that. And there are some studies on rats, et cetera, as well. So it's not just about China. It was written by this guy named T. Colen Campbell, and he is, I believe, a researcher. I think he's a physician as well. But what happened was he noticed that liver cancer was an issue among Filipinos, and particularly wealthy Filipinos. And this liver cancer was happening in those wealthy Filipinos at a much higher rate than their less wealthy Filipino counterparts. And Campbell thought that this might be due to their higher intake of animal protein. And so kind of on top of that, and one of the inspirations for him going on and kind of looking into this issue in China, he also found a study that showed that high protein intake could cause potential for increased risk of liver cancer in rats, while at the same time, a low protein intake kind of seemed to prevent that liver cancer. And so Campbell basically launched into writing the China Study and not only looked at the demographics of these fol in China, but also started to study rats. And he did this series of experiments where he exposed rats to very, very high levels of what's called aflatoxin. And we've actually talked about aflatoxin on the podcast before. It's this carcinogen, and it's produced by mold that grows on peanuts and on corn. And so what T. Colin Campbell did was he gave each of these group of rats very high levels of aflatoxin, and then he fed them a diet, and he broke them into groups. And each diet contained varying levels of this milk protein called casein, which we're probably all familiar with. It's something that we get from dairy products and occasionally in some protein powders and derivatives like that as well, and, of course, in cheese. And so what happened was that in all these studies that he did, the rats that had a low, low amount of their total calories comprised of of this casein protein remained tumor free and didn't get cancer. And the rats that were eating 20% or more of their calories from casein were developing these tumor growths that show that they were starting to go into liver cancer. And so what happened was that he also decided he was going to look into the type of protein, and he reported that animal protein was kind of the worst, because in several of his experiments, when the aflatoxin exposed, rats were fed like wheat protein or soy protein, so these vegan or vegetarian protein derivatives instead of casein protein, they didn't develop cancer compared to the 20% level that the rats that were fed the animal based protein seemed to develop. And so it appeared that plant proteins were better than animal proteins, proteins and specifically reduce risk of cancer growth and so on. He went to write the China Study and report on this. But one of the issues here is that there are a lot of other studies that go way outside of this study that T. Colin Campbell did, in which she put rats in a relatively unique situation of having been exposed to high amounts of aflatoxin before even starting into the protein feeding. And these studies show that major protein, another major animal protein, whey protein, actually consistently suppresses tumor growth rather than promoting tumor growth. And that's probably because whey protein can increase levels of something called glutathione, which is that same antioxidants that I use before I go out and drink copious amounts of alcohol. But either way, whey can prevent cancer. And so that kind of flies in the face of some of Campbell's research. The other issue is there are issues here with the actual study itself in that the rats that were consuming the high casein diet were indeed developing liver cancer the way that Campbell described. And the reason that the rats in low casein group were not reported as being a group that was at as high a risk of developing liver cancer cancer is because they were actually dying earlier. And so that's a big, big flaw in the study. Basically the reason for that is because when you have a protein deficiency that prevents your liver from detoxifying your body the way that it's supposed to. So if you give me a bunch of aflatoxin and then take away all my protein, so I'm not getting the glutathione that my liver needs to keep it from dying, then what happens is I'll just die earlier. Sure, I won't get cancer, but it won't matter because I'll be dead. So that's one really, really big issue with these studies is a lot of the animals that were reported as not getting cancer, they didn't get cancer because they were dying.

I've heard more than one oncologist say that if you live long enough, if a person, if a race or any group of people live long enough, they will eventually die of canc. It's kind of a given for most living beings. If you live long enough, you will get cancer and it will kill you. So, yeah, if you die before you get it, then.

Exactly, exactly. Even one of Campbell's experiments was completely left out of the study. And that particular experiment showed that when you do what A lot of vegan and vegetarians do, which is mix proteins to form a complete protein. Like nuts and grains are perfect examples. So you're adding something like an almond to a wheat so that the lysine that's not present in the wheat is getting added to your meal because you're getting the lysine from the almonds. But for example, what was shown in one of Campbell's experiments on rats was that when you supplement wheat gluten with lysine to make a complete protein, that particular protein combination behaves exactly like casein to promote tumor growth. And so it was almost like he was cherry picking these studies to vilify animal proteins, when in fact combinations of plant proteins can cause the same issue. Once again, with the caveat here that we're talking about a population of rats put in a very unique situation in that they've been exposed to these high levels of aflatoxin. And so this is not a very, very real world scenario. Anyways. Now there are a lot of other issues with the China Study, and I could talk for a long time about them, but I think that the subject itself has been treated very, very thoroughly by someone named Denise Minger. And Denise runs a website that was originally designed to help vegans and vegetarians eat more healthy and help specifically raw foodists eat more healthy. It's over@rawfoodsos.com and Denise has written a very, very thorough anal of the China Study that does a fair job presenting both sides of the issue. But that kind of comes out on the side of showing that there's a lot of research and a lot of conclusions drawn from the China Study that you simply can't extrapolate to the general population, particularly the fact that a lot of the variables that are left out of the diets or the lifestyle of many vegans and vegetarians, such as not smoking, in many cases, avoiding vegetable oils and processed foods or foods high in preservatives, a lot of times living a very healthy lifestyle, such as a Seventh Day Adventist might do. A lot of these are confounding variables that make it so we can't simply take a large vegan and vegetarian population, point out that they're having a lower risk of cancer, turn around and blame it on the presence of animal proteins. I'll link to Denise Minger's study in the show Notes for Camille, and that would be a really, really helpful thing to go and check out.

So I was just looking up T. Colin Campbell online here and it was very unfortunate. The first thing that Popped up in my Google window was T. Colin Campbell Quack. But that aside, he's not a physician, he's a biochemist. And I actually didn't realize he also wrote Forks Over Knives, which is the other bible for vegan and vegetarians.

Well, that's a movie, isn't it? Or is it a book?

It's a book. They made it into a movie.

Okay, I gotcha. I didn't realize it was a book as well. Interesting. So, yeah, I would certainly go look into that because I didn't spend as long a time talking about it. But all these associations between cholesterol from animal proteins and cancer and the association between, you know, cancer and animal proteins, there are a lot of confounding variables in there that need to be considered. So I'd go check that out. And then, you know, if you are vegan or you are vegetarian, listen to the previous episodes that we've done. Or even go to the my List that I created over at. If you go to the Ben Greenfield Facebook page over@facebook.com bgfitness I've got an entire my list over there that gives you a really convenient, handy list of the things that you should include in your diet if you're vegan or vegetarian, because there are things missing, such as gamma linoleic acid and a lot of your omega 3 fatty acids, a lot of your vitamin B complexes, a fair amount of zinc, a fair amount of vitamin D. Things of that nature that you do want to supplement with. Check that out, too, and that would be useful for you. I've personally eaten vegan. My wife and I did raw vegan for about six months. And I did it the right way, and I felt pretty good. I didn't experience a lot of kind of the focus and the mental deficits and stuff that folks who do it the wrong way and kind of go low fat, high carb get. But I just lost a lot of muscle because I wasn't getting enough creatine and I wasn't getting enough amino acids to really support my particular level activity. And the fact that I kind of like to maintain slightly higher levels of muscle than I naturally would maintain. So. So it didn't work out for me. But that's just because I like to flex in the mirror.

Hey, Ben, this is Bill from Reno. I've got a nutrition question for you about Greek yogurt. Is Greek yogurt made with cow's milk or goat's milk? And if it is made with cow's milk, wouldn't it. Cause the same amount of intestinal leakage and gastric distress and inflammation that regular yogurt causes. What's the big difference? Here. Thanks. You know what I have to say.

To Bill Hopa.

If I had something.

To smash, I would smash my wife. And I wound up accidentally at this Greek wedding in Portland. Once when we were down there, I think we were down there for a triathlon. And we went out at night and walked into this building. It should have been a warning sign to us, but it had, like, a giant octopus on the top of it.

Oh, awesome.

And it was, like, empty downstairs, but we heard a bunch of commotion upstairs, and the hostess asked us if we wanted to go up and join a Greek wedding. So we were like, well, what the hell? We didn't have kids or anything. So we went up there, and within about 10 minutes, I was out there in the crowd doing my simulation of a chicken dance and getting ouzo poured down my throat by a server. Literally first time I'd ever had ouzo, and it was getting poured directly from the bottle into my gullet. And it was quite the experience. So didn't have any Greek yogurt there that I can recall.

It doesn't go well with you.

I know. I wouldn't imagine, but Greek style yogurt is essentially just strained yogurt. So you start with your traditional fermentation of yogurt, and after the fermentation process is complete, you then strain that yogurt using filters, and sometimes you spin it, too, to remove a significant portion of that kind of watery part of yogurt that you typically get in yogurt.

That's the whey, right?

Yeah, the watery part is wet. It's very similar to the way that my wife and I make yogurt cheese. So we'll get, like, a good organic yogurt, or my wife will make yogurt from a raw milk that we get from a local farm. And after we make the yogurt, we'll strain out all the whey and we wind up with yogurt cheese. But you can also use a similar process if you have a spinner or yogurt maker to make, like, a thick, creamy yogurt. And that's Greek style yogurt. And unlike the name suggests, it's not necessarily something that originated from Greece. I believe it was originally from some Arab region in the Middle East. But either way, it's gotten incredibly popular, as I think most folks know, especially here in the US and there seems to be kind of this myth going around that it's healthier than regular yogurt. And what it comes down to is it really, really depends on the type of Greek yogurt that you get. Because, for example, Greek yogurt does tend to have lower amount of carbs. More amount of protein tends to be, because of the absence of the large amounts of whey, lower potential for an immunoglobulin allergic reaction to tends to be for people who are into kind of the whole high fat, low carb thing, you know, higher in a lot of those fats, and it just tends to taste pretty darn good. Greek yogurt can also, if it's made with a traditional fermentation technique, be a little bit higher in probiotics. So for some of those reasons, I think it's gotten this rap as being healthier than regular yogurt. But at the same time, if you go and look at all the major brands of Greek yogurt that you could find in the supermarket, many of them have had additives and thickeners like milk protein concentrate or corn starch or gelatin, or even in some cases, ironically, they've had whey protein concentrate added to them to make them more of that kind of Greek yogurty texture that tends to sell better and have better mouth feel. So if you're getting like, yoplait, you're getting some. A Greek yogurt with a lot of additives. The same way with, like, Lucerne, which is the brand you get at Safeway here in the States and Canada too. Yeah. Cabo is another one that has a C, A, B, O, T. That one has a lot of preservatives as well. So. So if you're getting yogurt with a bunch of cornstarch added into it, that's kind of an issue. And there are decent brands out there. Stony Filled is a really good brand and they use a cultured, pasteurized, organic milk. The Oikos. Oikos. That one's a decent brand, even though it has lower levels of the active yogurt cultures than like a Stonyfield or a Chobani brand. Trader Joe's is not bad. That's another one that's pretty decent. The Olympus brand Greek yogurt is also pretty good. And we did a whole podcast where we talked about if you're going to buy your yogurt at the grocery store, which brands are going to have higher levels of probiotics and fewer preservatives added to them. And I'll link to that in the show notes for him. But what this comes down to as far as the question about intestinal leakage and gastric distress and inflammation. You know, commercial dairy is commercial dairy and many people do have adverse reactions to yogurt and just about any dairy product. And it can be a combination of the fact that we use cattle, especially here in the States, that has been bred for what's called A1 protein, which causes more inflammation in humans than in A2 cattle. We A lot of times are eating milk products that are derived from cattle that have been raised in grain fed, sit, exposed to lots of antibiotics, exposed to lots of hormones. And so whether it's a Greek yogurt or a regular yogurt, yes, it's going to create issues for you if that's the case. Now, an organic yogurt would present fewer of those issues. An organic yogurt from a pastured cow would be even better if you can get a Greek yogurt from an organic pastured cow. And kind of the best bet, if you really want to totally geek out and be the, the hairy hippie would be to just like, you know, go find a local farm, get some raw milk and make your own yogurt using yogurt starter and a yogurt machine with milk that you know is from a clean farm with organic, you know, grass fed cows. But you know, a really, really good resource for you here if you did want to, want to get a list not only of good Greek yogurts and regular yogurts, but also just decent dairy products in general. If you're shopping at the grocery store would be the food written by or the food written by. The book written by Mira and Jay Kelton called Rich Food, Poor Food. Really good resource, fantastic book I think everyone should have on their shelf for just your regular grocery shopping needs. I interviewed him on the podcast. If you go listen to that episode and of course use the, use the Amazon link at Ben Greenfield Fitness to get the book. We get a few dollars thrown in our hat.

A few shekels.

That's right, a few shekels. And yeah, that one's called rich food, poor food food. Ultimately, for someone who has an adverse reaction to milk, goat's milk is going to be better than cow's milk. And then of course like using just like a coconut milk yogurt or something like that is even going to be better than using a dairy base. And that just is going to depend on you. I've found that a lot of folks, including myself, who don't do well at all with regular commercial milk do just Fine. With unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk from a local raw dairy. And, you know, it's going to come down to whether or not that's available in your area. Jess and I are members of a, like a csa, which means that we, we take turns with six other families driving to a local farm and picking up a bunch of eggs and milk and stuff, and then it comes back into town. We all meet at a central location, grab it and, you know, tuck it under our arms and sneak back to the house. We'll try not to get pulled over. Our raw milk.

Your illegal milk?

That's right, our illegal milk.

Such badasses.

Yes. Weed is now legal in the state of Washington, but not raw milk. Actually, raw milk is legal. Is it?

Okay.

Yeah, it is. It's not like California, so they're not stomping SWAT teams into farms up here yet.

Now, you mentioned cultured milk earlier on. What does it mean when, like, I've seen cultured milk, you can get butter that's been cultured and you can get yogurt that's from cultured milk. What does that mean exactly when you culture milk?

Well, the way that I understand it is that cultured milk is kind of synonymous with that milk being a fermented milk product. So the two terms, as far as I know, are synonymous. And basically a cultured milk product would be any type of dairy product that's been fermented. So this whole process of lacto fermentation, like when you go and get a yogurt start starter, that's lactic acid bacteria, like a lactobacillus or a lactococcus or any of these different lactic acid bacteria. And when you ferment a dairy product or you culture a dairy product in that manner, it increases the shelf life of the product. And it's something humans have been doing for literally tens of thousands of years. And essentially what it allows you to do is adjust the taste of the dairy product depending on the type of, of starter culture that you use, and depending on the type of dairy that you're exposing that starter culture to. And so you're looking at everything from yogurt to kefir to sour cream to buttermilk to any of these type of things. All are examples of cultured dairy products. And then of course, cultured dairy products just act a lot better in public. They tend to walk around with bow ties, high heels, sharp eyes.

I see them all the time at the symphony and stuff. They're very, very high class folks. Yeah, that's good comedy.

Hey, Ben. Hey, Brock. Your show kicks butt. First off, before I get to my question, I'd like to say that I wish I'd heard of your podcast. Couple years ago, I did a fundraiser for the Canadian Cancer Society where I raised $70,000 for them by drumming for 121 hours straight, breaking a Guinness World Record in the process. I think you would have totally geeked out over the process for preparing, actually performing for it and the recovery of the vent. The punishment was brutal. I actually subluxed four ribs shortly after 100 hours and what we believe was a seizure around hour 116 after my core temperature plummeted. And if you feel like it, I'd love to hear you geek out about this, Especially the recovery part is after a year, I'm still fatigued. I still get out of the blue, strange cramps in my hands, my arms, my joints. I get headache spasms. And sometimes when I'm on the bike training, I have a difficult time keeping my heart rate above 120. I just cop out with no energy. I just can't keep it there.

Oh, gosh, this is a tough one.

Well, you broke a Guinness Worlds record.

Yes. Along with four riffs. Congratulations. Wow. I can just close my eyes and picture Steve. He's kind of. He's. He's built a little bit like animal and the Muppets, you know, hair flying all over the place and, like, no.

Sleeves on any T shirts.

Tattered T shirt and tattoos and the complete opposite of the cultured dairy products that we just got done talking. Exactly.

Yeah.

You know, this is a toughie. And I should probably jump in here and say that this is not a medical part podcast. I'm not a doctor.

Ben is not a doctor. And the content provided on this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical or healthcare advice.

So anyways, what this sounds like to me is an issue with your nervous system. And there are conditions kind of similar to like when you over train, except this would be like over training all at once. You know, some people take a year to overtrain your body. He did it in how many minutes did he say?

Say, 120.

121 hours. Yeah. So he did it in 121 hours, which some people take a year to accomplish. But, you know, basically you've got this autonomic nervous system, and the autonomic nervous system is part of your peripheral nervous system. It acts as your control system. It controls pretty much everything that's below your level of consciousness, like your heart rate and your digestion and your respiration rate and salivation and perspiration and, you know, all these things that are relatively involuntary. And it's divided into two systems, systems that we've talked about on the show before, the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system. So the parasympathetic nervous system is that division of your autonomic nervous system that's basically your rest and digest. So that would include your body functions like digestion and urination or your sympathetic nervous system is the part that's more fight and flow flight. So that's what would like tighten blood vessels when you stand up or increase your heart rate when you're scared or when you're getting ready to exercise hard. And this whole idea behind an autonomic nervous system failure is it falls under the category of what's called dysautonomia, which is autonomic dysfunction. It's this, this term, this kind of catch all term that describes any type of malfunction of your autonomic nervous system system. And there are a lot of different kind of conditions that would fall underneath this umbrella, but one is simply referred to as PAF or pure autonomic failure. And pure autonomic failure is a dysfunction of a lot of these different processes that are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. And so typically what happens when you've got pure autonomic nervous system failure is like your blood pressure falls really quickly when you stand up, so you get dizzy. A lot of times you become pretty intolerant of either really hot or really cold cond or you have difficulty controlling your temperature. Sometimes your pupils will widen like they'll dilate or they'll narrow out of your control. So you'll have vision issues, basically you'll get blurry vision. Sometimes you have difficulty with bladder control. And the same reason that someone who's over trained might have to get up at night to pee. Someone who's got complete pure autonomic nervous system failure may just have trouble with bladder movements, you know, all the time. And a lot of times kind of hand in hand with that. You know, a lot of guys get erectile dysfunction and you know, it's like your autonomic nervous system is just kind of, kind of blown up and it's smoking. Now, as far as how you would find out if this was indeed the case with you, there are tests that, that they do in a medical setting to find out how strong your autonomic nervous system is. And this might be something that Steve should go in and do. Autonomic nervous system test. So one of the things that they do during this test is they'll ask you to do a Valsalva maneuver. And the Valsalva maneuver is where you blow, but you can hold your breath at the same time. So you start to blow, but you block the breath from actually getting released from your esophagus. So you're like. You hold your breath like that. And what happens is, of course, you get a brief increase in blood pressure when this happens. But because you're straining, you're decreasing the entry of blood from your veins into your heart. And so when that happens, your blood pressure begins to progressively fall. And when your blood pressure begins to progressively fall, your brain senses that fall in blood pressure, and it decreases the outflow of your parasympathetic nervous system to your heart. And then that causes you to release a bunch of norepinephrine, which tightens blood vessels in your body and causes your blood pressure to go back up. And all this is happening, happening really, really quickly. But what happens is, if someone has autonomic nervous system failure, they don't get that kind of response. And so what happens is they'll do the Valsalva maneuver. Their blood vessels will constrict. They'll get that overshoot of blood pressure, but the blood pressure will stay up. And so they'll get this rapid rise in blood pressure. So you can just do the Valsalva maneuver, take your blood pressure at the same time, and you'll see a big, big rise in blood pressure. When that happens, that that can be a sign that you've got some autonomic nervous system issues going on. They also do what's called a tilt table test, which can test how well you do with regulating your blood pressure.

I've had one of those as you're.

On a tilt table. Have you?

Yeah.

You did that for your. For the cardiovascular issues that you had?

Yeah, when I had the myocarditis.

Yep, exactly. So you know my heart stuff about. Really? When you got on the tilt table, your heart stopped?

Yeah. Two minutes and 40 seconds into it, my heart stopped.

Wow.

Which is not a good thing. It's not fun.

Yeah. Yeah. Scary. We'll have to tell your story again sometime. Or people can go back and listen to the first episode that I had brought on where he told the story about the carditis. Another test that we'll do is the sweat test, because your brain will increase your sweating directly via the sympathetic nervous system traffic to the sweat glands in the skin, and it releases this chemical messenger called acetylcholine, and that acts on your sweat glands to stimulate the production of sweat. So they actually have a special form of a sweat test that tests the ability of your sympathetic nerve terminals in your skin to release this acetylcholine and increase your sweat production. And the way they do that is they apply a drug to a patch of skin that would evoke sweating at the drug site, but allows your body to release, release its own acetylcholine that results in sweat production. So if your autonomic nervous system, you'd.

Sweat in just one little spot.

Yep, exactly. So if you had a loss of sympathetic nerve terminals that would normally release that acetylcholine, applying those patches, you wouldn't sweat. So that's another thing they can test. Another one is a cold water test where you could dunk your hand in cold water for a couple of minutes and that would normally rapidly increase your blood pressure by increasing the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. System. And that wouldn't happen quite as readily in someone with the autonomic nervous system issue. So I know these are a lot of tests, but these are examples of the way that you could test whether or not your nervous system was kind of sunk, which, from what you described, everything from the inability to get the heart rate up, which suggests there probably is like a blood pressure heart rate issue, to having this fatigue and strange symptoms. And when it first happened, you had the seizure and your core temperature plummeted, vomited. I suspect that there is an issue here with the nervous system and it's something that you could go and test and you could find someone in your area. There is, if you want to Google it, what's called an autonomic disorders consortium. Autonomic disorders Consortium. And I'll try and put a link in the show notes for you, but it could help you. What we're talking about getting is dysautonomia. Dysautonomia. And that would be what you'd want to look up if you were interested in some of the common treatments for this. And there are many pharmaceutical treatments that they give somebody, like an antiarrhythmic drug or a beta blocker, you know, a lot of these kind of, kind of band aid type of drugs. If it were me. And again, I don't, don't misconstrue this as medical advice, but I'd look into this the same way that I would look into something like over training, because overtraining really, really is a little bit of nervous system fatigue. So two things that I would really look into that I've found help out people quite a bit when they've got some adrenal fatigue and some nervous system overtraining going on, which typically I would look at by just seeing a sharp drop in their heart rate variability. One would be adaptogenic herbs. And adaptogenic herbs simply allow your energy system to react, reset, and they relieve a lot of these adrenal stressors. And so, you know, the herbal tonic that I use for something like this is ti and Qi. And it's just got a lot of traditional herbs in there that basically help to restore balance, restore ki in your body. The other thing that can happen when you have nervous system dysfunction is you get a real, real imbalance in your electrolyte status. Typically you tend to retain a lot of sodium and you tend to lose a lot of trace minerals and minerals that are really, really important to your general physiologic function. And so for that reason, I also recommend, like a good trace mineral supplement to folks who are over trained or who have a lot of issues like this. Now, I don't guarantee that this stuff would help with autonomic nervous system dysfunction, but those are two things I would at least look into from kind of like a nutraceutical standpoint. And I'll certainly put links to both of these in the, in the show show notes. They're part of the recovery pack that I recommend to people over at Pacific Elite Fitness. So like a TNT Chinese adaptogenic herb, a good mineral complex, and then kind of look into some of these tests to investigate whether or not it really is an autonomic nervous system issue. If it is, you're probably going to need to do some of the other things that I recommend to folks who are overtrained, which is avoid any type of stimulating exercise, stick to some easy yoga, a lot of relaxation, a lot of stress control until you get to the point where your nervous system has recovered. So that's just kind of a brief glimpse of some of the stuff that I would look into.

I was just gonna say, no disrespect to people with epilepsy, but after you've been drumming for 116 hours. Hours. How did you know you had a seizure?

Yeah, how did you know anything?

It just looked like you were playing the drums.

This should probably go without saying. This should probably go without saying, but I wouldn't be drumming anytime soon and I actually would, would not be Doing much in the way of flipping the radio to. To Metallica or. Or anything else that has heavy drumming involved. I am, incidentally, the only person in my family who doesn't play the drums. So all my siblings play the drums.

Some people would say that's a good thing.

Well, I grew up playing the violin. I was a contrarian, and now I play the guitar.

Some people would say that's not a good thing.

Hey, Ben and Brock, this is JD Coming to y' all from Athens, Georgia. I will not say where the surgery occurred nor who performed it to protect the doctors in hospital, but it was not in Georgia, so Georgians can rest safe. I had this surgery about two years ago to fix a kidney problem I had. You see, I'm 21 now and grew up with my whole life undergoing about 60 to 80 surgeries for my kidney. This particular problem in question was an extreme diverticulitis. Along with a few other things that happened. The surgery was successful. But in the surgery, while making an incision in my back, my right lower thoracic nerve was cut. This injury causes me a great deal of pain every day, and I would like to know of any treatment other than the Neurontin I am prescribed. Thank y' all so much for all that you do. Thanks to y' all and others like Dave Asprey, Sean Croxton, and Clark Danger, I'm in the best shape of my life.

Thank you.

I bet you're in a great deal of pain. That sounds terrible.

Yeah. And gosh. Right. Lower thoracic nerve. Nerve was cut. You know, there is some stuff you can do for nerve pain. And this seems like another medically question, so I'll refer back to the previous.

Not being a doctor.

You know, you've probably heard of tens units before for low back pain, right, Brock?

Yeah. Even use them.

Yeah. And these kind of overpower some of the same stimulations that would tend to cause pain. Pain. And you can actually get what's called peripheral nerve stimulation devices that are electrodes placed along the course of specific peripheral nerves to control pain. And once the electrodes are in place, they turn on and they administer this kind of weak electrical current. And you get kind of this tingling sensation instead of pain stimulating that same sensory pathway. And you can work with the neurosurgeon or like a pain clinic to get one of these type of devices. And it can run an internal battery pack kind of similar to a pacemaker battery. And a lot of times for people who have pain, that can help you to resume a lot of Your normal activities of daily living and even exercise and things like that, even if you've got significant post operative pain. So that's one thing that I would look into, would be like peripheral nerve stimulation. There are things that you can do and these would be the same type of things that I would recommend to people who wanted to really have healthy nerves, improve nerve function, improve reaction time, stuff like that. But these are the same type of things that can also help to rebuild nerves or at least relieve some of the nerve pain. One of the things that I would recommend that you do is look into a good fatty acid balance. And not only will adequate fatty acids help to reduce a lot of the free radical generation, what's called the peroxide generation, that can cause some of this pain, but it can balance out your omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acid ratio. And specifically there's a type of fatty acid called gamma linoleic acid which can really help with nerve health. Borage oil, which you may have heard of before, is actually something that has really, really high amounts of this gamma linoleic acid in it. Primrose oil is another. So what happens is these particular oils will increase blood flow in the nervous system areas which helps to decrease a lot of the stress that the nerve can be under. It can also help to improve nerve function in general. As far as a particular supplement for that, I would recommend that the fish oil that I really stand behind, and that's the living fuel, super essentials fish oil. There are a bunch of different fish oils that are on the market. Most of them do you more harm than good because they're either rancid or they're not packaged along with antioxidants. And some of the things that help to protect fish oil from going rancid or else they're not balanced properly with things like a little bit of Omega 6 gamma linoleic acid from something like borage seed oil. So the super essentials omega that I recommend and it's the fish oil that I use, it's got an ultra pure fish oil in its natural triglyceride form. So it's not in that poorly absorbed ethyl ester form. It's got some vitamin D and some vitamin A antioxidants in it. It's got a full spectrum vitamin E in it. It's got a very, very powerful carotenoid called astaxanthin in it. And it is the best fish oil I have ever seen in my life. Life. So that's the one that I get, that's the One that my kids use and it's got about a 3 to 2. I'm sorry, not a 3 to 2. It's most fish oils have a 3 to 2. This one has a 1 to 1 EPA to DHA ratio. And since higher levels of DHA are optimal for your brain and your nerve function and overall health, really, really favorable ratio. So that is a fish oil that I will certainly vouch for and stand behind the best one that I can recommend. If you're going to use a fish oil and you don't a lot of damage that some of these conventional fish oils can cause. So I'd look into that. A few other things that really, really help with nerve function are of course your B complex vitamins. So optimization of vitamin D like dog, E like elephant, and of course vitamin B. When it comes to replacing your entire vitamin B complex, as well as optimizing your vitamin D and your vitamin E level levels, probably the top thing that I would recommend for that would be something that I personally use every single day. I don't necessarily use it for nerve function or pain. I use it to mitigate the effects of a toxic lifestyle. Lord knows how many cigarettes I smoke in addition to how many chlorinated pools I jump into. I don't smoke, by the way, just so you know, chlorinated pools, toxins, pollutants, etc. I use this stuff called life shape shots. It's got about 500% of your daily values of vitamin D. It's got your entire vitamin B complex in it, from folate to B12, B6, pantothenic acid, riboflavin, everything in really, really high amounts. It has some magnesium in it, which is an amino acid that's chelated to some of these compounds to help them to get absorbed a little bit more quickly. And it's also got zinc in it. Zinc and magnesium are actually two of the most common mineral deficiencies that you with nerve pain. Because what happens is you get an unregulated pathway in terms of the way that signals are transmitted in nerves when you've got magnesium or zinc deficiencies. So something like this would really cover your bases if you're looking at something like nerve health, especially if you combine it with a supplement like a good, high, high quality fish oil. So those are a couple of the main things I would look into when it comes to just pure pain control and pain. You know, there is one particular supplement called phenocaine. It's got phenylalanine in it which has the ability to help Your brain maintain higher levels of serotonin, so it can help with mood elevation and reduce pain in general. This DL phenylalanine precursor, there is also high, high doses of turmeric in it, which can have a decent painkilling effect. And kind of along the same lines of that, what are called curcuminoids, which are like the sub particles that make up curcumin and again, are part of the whole turmeric thing. So that's one that I would look into. Just, you know, that's what I recommend in general is like the best alternative to like ibuprofen and Advil and stuff like that.

So I took two of those yesterday after I got back from getting my teeth cleaned at the dentist.

What, phenocaine? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It helped a lot because my teeth were just like, you know, and they scrape all that tartar off of there and just hurts.

It's better than just dumping a bunch of turmeric into your mouth too, because then your teeth are orange and you gotta go back to the dentist and it creates this vicious cycle. So those are some of the main things that I would recommend. I'm trying to think if there's anything else when it comes to nerve health and nerve pain. I guess, like a lot of these chronic pain type of pharmaceutical drugs that they will prescribe for you, like Neurontin, they do decrease pain, but they can also produce excessive sleepiness, which can result in a little bit of addictive potential down the road. They can cause weight gain, they can cause you to feel like you probably shouldn't be drinking, driving a piece of heavy machinery anywhere. There are some definite issues with addiction to some of those pain drugs. So I'd be pretty careful with that and maybe try some of these natural things that I've talked about. I guess the only thing I didn't mention, which you kind of alluded to when we were talking about the China Study earlier in this podcast, was glutathione. And glutathione is pretty much one of the most potent free radical scavengers that you can consume. And you are going to get a lot of free radicals produced when your body is healing like this or when you're under a lot of pain like this. So I would look into using something like, I recommend the sublingual glutathione that you spray underneath your tongue that gets absorbed a lot better than like an oral glutathione. So that'd be another one. I know I just mentioned a bunch of stuff I'll link to all of it in the show notes as well as in the my list for this episode episode.

Gosh.

Only other thing would be acupuncture. That'd be one other thing that I would definitely look into for pain management. And that is again, a natural method that has some efficacy and some good studies behind it in terms of its painkilling effect. Hi, Ben, this is Kyle Kwan from Auckland, New Zealand. I've just listened to a podcast of Jay from evoathlete talking about some really interesting stuff. It sounded fascinating. I knew there was some really good information in there, but I didn't understand half of what he was saying. It was like technobabble. It needed like a translator in there to put it into really easy to understand language so I could understand it. I'm sure there'd be other people there with more questions than answers about some of his concepts. And that sounds really, really interesting. So I was hoping you could explain a little bit more detail or just make it easy to understand so, you know, we can incorporate some of these ideas and philosophies into our triathlon training. Enjoy the show.

Keep it up.

Thanks, guys.

The thing I'm most curious about is how can I incorporate that trick where he was putting people on the back of his truck and driving like 60 miles an hour and then making them run? I want to run 60 miles an hour.

I think, I think it was like, like 30 miles an hour and it was for very, very short distances. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's overspeed training. And I mean, since you ask, one of the ways that I'm personally replicating that is by simply running downhill as fast as possible on soft surfaces. So I literally have a, the same hill that I run up that's behind my house has like this sand slash dirt kind of loam that runs along behind beside it. And it's a super, super soft landing. So I'll run down that, you know, as fast as my little legs will carry me. And that's, that's one of the ways that I've been doing some overspeed training. I've also been doing some fin work and some elastic tubing work in the pool also to work on, on that overspeed component. That is kind of one of the components that, that Jay was talking about. And then some super, super high cadence efforts on the bike, meaning like pedaling the bike at 150 plus RPM.

Wow. You can get 150.

I can. And my goal is to get up to about 180. I want to train my leg muscles to turn over as quickly as possible so that I produce a higher economy and efficiency at lower speeds, meaning kind of training my body to pedal at Those really high RPMs that like professional cyclists are able to pedal at. But with the economy and the efficiency that appears to have been disproven in the study that I just talked about, probably because, you know, a lot of these recreational cyclists are not practicing pedaling at these higher intensities. So that's.

I've been practicing for like, almost, well, probably about a year and a half now. And the highest I've ever hit is 135.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, one of the issues is people look at it as wanting to have some resistance when they're pedaling. And you actually, you don't want the resistance. You do need to remove the resistance when you do something like this and use very, very low resistance and then just, just pedal fast, fast, fast. Now that's one aspect of this whole evo athlete thing is overspeed training. And I'm probably not going to say any of this quite as well as Jay Schroeder, the gentleman I had on the podcast, you know, and I literally went through a two day conference with him. So, you know, I'm compressing into what, into this brief answer, what he went over three minutes. Yeah, exactly. So overspeed work to improve that neuromuscular coordination and the efficiency in the economy at lower speeds, doing overspeed work with like fins and bands in the pool and short, short repeats, and then doing overspeed work in the run by even including something like soft surface downhill repeats, and then also including overspeed work on the bike by using low resistance, really high, high cadence. So I'm doing one workout per week that is a high cadence cadence type of workout for swimming, one for running, and one for cycling. Now, in addition to that, Jay has me doing some things that I actually show a video for in a post that I'm going to put as a link in the show notes to this episode, episode number 235 over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com what I did was I listed what a typical week of training looks like for me right now, and I published it on my personal blog. The address is BenGreenfield Training. Try.blogspot.com But I'll link to it in the show notes as well. Anyways, in addition to that overspeed stuff that I'm doing, Jay also has me doing essentially what are pen drops? Where you'll drop a pen or a Small object that you can hold with your arm.

Rock.

You just screwed up.

I was holding a pen. Oh, you're not supposed to drop it.

A small child, a puppy. But basically you drop it and then you catch it as, as quickly as possible. And so you can do like lateral pen drops with your arm outstretched where you open your hand, drop it, catch it as quickly as possible. And then you can also do it, for example, like bent over with the arm bent, similar as what you would do with like a one arm dumbbell row. You drop, catch and repeat. Now, Jay has kind of instructed me to do these exercises like before or after or in between a swim set or something like that. And so I actually have been swimming with a pen beside the pool. And in between those overspeed sets that I talked about, I'll just grab a pen and do like 10 drops for one hand and 10 drops for the other hand. And what that's doing is it's training my nervous system and it's training my subconscious almost to react more quickly, to anticipate. And so again, we're talking about improved economy, improved efficiency, better neuromuscular balance, better turnover. That's type of thing. So that's another thing that I'm doing, another way that I've kind of practically utilized some of the stuff that he's instructed me. The electrostimulation component of this, I'm only doing that once a week now with Jay's athletes. What he recommends is this electrostimulation unit called an ARP wave. And I believe ARP stands for accelerated recovery program. But this is very different than a standard electrical muscle stimulation unit. It's a specific waveform of electricity that allows the current to penetrate really deep to your muscle tissue without causing skin burns and stuff like that. And also basically without causing the muscle to spasm and for you to lose control over the muscle so it works a little bit more harmonious with your nervous system. Now, I don't own an ARP wave because they're very expensive and I haven't had a chance to purchase one. Yes, there are a lot of one to ten dollar donations that come in for this podcast. We truly appreciate them, but they don't justify me going out and buying an $8,000. I believe it tops out at $13,000 EMS unit. So I do have an electrical muscle stimulation unit that, you know, apparently I've even asked Jay and he's like, oh, it's a waste of time, you shouldn't use it. But I actually have noticed a little bit of benefit Personally from just experimenting with it. I have one called the Compex Sport Elite. And I mean it's not cheap either. That's like a 1,000 to $1,500 unit. But what I do is once a week I've been hooking these electrodes up to my quads and then doing another set on my hamstrings. And I do a pre prol programmed set on that EMS unit that's called an explosive strength set. So it puts my muscles under really high frequency and it can simulate like up to a really, really heavy squat. You know, basically my maximum squat. I can get that same type of feel in the muscles. And so I'm stimulating a whole bunch of muscle fibers all at once and training my nervous system without actually causing the same type of joint use or impact that I'd get if I were to go out and do a bunch of hill repeats or go out and do a bunch of squats or lunges. So what I've been doing is preceding my Saturday bike ride with a muscle stimulation session. And I've found that I feel as though I can recruit more muscles and have better coordination when I'm riding the bike after I've kind of woken up my muscles, so to speak, using this electrical muscle stimulus simulation. So that's another kind of component I'm using kind of the cheap version of the ARP wave, but that's how I'm using that. And then the other component of this, and this is one that I've been prescribed the most of by J, and that is the whole isometric extreme. Now isometric means that you hold a contraction with no change in muscle length, or as would be the case with like doing a five minute squat, a very, very slow change in muscle length. And there's a few different benefits that you derive from that. One would be that it teaches you perfect technique and perfect positioning. So, you know, the, the idea behind proper positioning means that you're able to maintain really, really good technique and reduce your risk of injury from poor biomechanics during training. So I will be doing something like an extreme isometric lunge, you know, and I was doing these last night where I will literally hold a lunge position for four to five minutes on one leg with that leg fully contracted. And that teaches me very, very good positioning. Good strength of my big toe, good strength of the same muscles that are responsible for the push off phase while running or the turnover phase while cycling. And so that's, that's one benefit to the isometric training. Another Benefit is that you're really able to put all of your mental intent into the correct musculature. And so you get very, very good body awareness and what's called kinesthesia. And the main thing that I've noticed is I am more aware of my posture and I'm more aware of where my body's at in space when I'm forced to hold these positions for long periods of time, whether it be a planking or a squatting or a lunging position or whatever the case may be. Pull up position is another one. A door frame push up, which is basically a standing push up, is another one he has me doing. So that's another thing this has helped with. The other thing that isometric exercise can do is it can help with your flexibility. So when you hold an isometric contraction at the deepest joint angle possible, such as a deep lunge position, for example, you're not only training yourself neuromuscular, muscularly and posturally, but you also improve your range of motion when you're moving through a hold like that and holding the endpoint range of motion for a long period of time. So I've found that I have a little bit better knee drive and a little bit better toe off from these type of isometric holds I've been doing. And remember, I've only been training like this for two weeks and I'm already noticing a significant difference. Another thing that happens is a ton of lactic acid builds up in the muscle because when you're holding an isometric contraction, it shuts off the blood pumps to the muscle. So the muscle gets engorged with blood and metabolic byproducts from this contraction. And that lactic acid environment vastly improves the amount of buffering capacity that the muscle has and the ability of the muscle to, once you release that contraction, shuttle all that lactic acid back up to the liver to be reconverted into glucose and kind of turned back into usable energy. So those are some of the benefits of doing the isometric training. And it's something I'm doing almost every day. You know, he's got me doing isometric squats, isometric lunges, isometric push up holds.

What My favorite isometric move is the squatty potty. The isometric teeth clench when I'm around. Delicious food.

Yeah, yeah, that's another good one. Anyways, though, as Brock totally derails my train of thought, somebody had to. That's it. That was a long answer. I know, but those are the basics. You know, if I can, hopefully that Gives you a basic idea of some of, some of the ways that this practically fleshes out and manifests in like my own training protocol. And I'm working on, you know, kind of implementing some of these concepts and some of them minimalist training protocol concepts, not only into the book that I'm writing right now, but also in the protocols of a lot of the athletes that I'm working with through Pacific Elite Fitness. So, you know, Brock, I believe I've had you doing. Doing a little bit of the. Particularly the lunge based extreme isometrics.

Yeah. All the super slow stuff. And it's, it's strangely hard. Hard.

Yeah.

At first I was like, oh, this is gonna be really boring and lame. But then I'm like shaking and sweating and going, okay, I get it.

Okay. Especially like after a run. So. Yeah, yeah. And you know, as I just alluded to it also vastly improves your form on something like a squatty potty.

That's true. Jay, you should probably tune into the April 27 web webinar that Ben's doing the. Ask Ben anything about minimalist triathlon training, because I think he'll probably talk a lot about this kind of stuff there.

I am going to go over that quite a bit. But it's Kyle, not Jay. That's the question.

Oh, sorry, sorry. Yeah.

Jay is the coach, Kyle is the question.

How am I supposed to keep all these names straight? There's me, there's you, there's Jay, there's.

Kyle, and of course we have weed man.

And weed man. Here we go.

Ben, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on smoking marijuana and the effects it might have on endurance sports. I primarily compete in the marathon. When I do smoke, it's in the evenings, long after I've trained, which is primarily in the morning. And I'll do it maybe two or three times per week. Okay, thank you.

Okay.

Well, first of all, let me say that I live in one of two lucky, lucky stuff states, Washington state. And I have been accused before of smoking a big fatty before this podcast because people say that I sound like I am high when we're recording. And I guarantee you I've never said that I am not. If you hear me start to open potato chip bags, perhaps that means that I've gotten to that point. But at this point, I actually keep myself relatively marijuana free. Free, despite the fact that it's very, very easy to get your hands on now in Washington state. And you have to be far less nervous about driving around in your car, for example. That being said, Marijuana, interestingly, has been shown to result in better lung function. Pot smokers have been shown to have better lung function, not only better lung function than cigarette and tobacco smokers, but better lung function than people who didn't smoke smoke at all.

What.

And the reason for that is because marijuana is a bronchodilator. So because of that, it may have a performance enhancing effect. And so that would be the first reason that it would potentially violate the ability for it to not be on the World Anti Doping association list, because it does indeed appear on the list of Prohibited Cells, Substances and Methods by the wada. There are three criteria that are named by the wada. Something has to be performance enhancing, something has to be potentially a health risk, or something has to be against the spirit of the sport for it to be considered something that would get you banned from an Ironman triathlon or the Olympics or something like that. So cannabis not only, as I just mentioned, has the potential to be a bronchodilation, but it may also have potential to, like, decrease your anxiety and decrease your fear. My personal opinion is that. My personal opinion is that it decreases your anxiety and your fear too much. Like, you know, there's this whole.

So much so you don't get off the couch.

Yeah, there's this whole parabolic curve in sports psychology that, you know, the tip of the curve is the zone, and you can be either overly stimulated or not stimulated enough. And I would imagine that. And that cannabis would keep you towards the low end of that zone.

I think that was the main reason all us Canadians remember the day when Ross Rubigliatti was stripped of his snowboarding medal in the Winter Olympics because he was caught with cannabis in his system. And I think that was the primary thing they were going after him for, was that it would take away his inhibition and he was able to snowboard better because he didn't care if he lived or died.

Ironically, though, it can also decreased cognitive performance. And so that's why it would violate kind of that second criteria by the World Anti Doping association as being a potential health risk, even though I really don't think it has any, like, pulmonary toxicity. I think it probably improves lung function from all the evidence that I've seen. But I guess it would depend the way that you smoke it, too, and what you're smoking it through, you know, so the last thing would be the whole role model issue issue, and whether or not there be some negative perception by your sponsors or the media or the public or something like that, but also just generally the role model for perhaps younger athletes who are looking to you as a role model and who, if they did start to use marijuana, wouldn't necessarily be of the mindset to be able to use it responsibly or properly or not overuse it, that type of thing. So those are some of the reasons that like a professional athlete or someone who is in the limelight or even someone who is competing in a sanctioned event would want to stay away from marijuana. I personally do not think that it improves endurance performance even with its bronchodilatory effect. I haven't seen any evidence that it would increase time to fatigue or performance in a time trial or something like that. That if there is evidence out there that I'm unaware of, if there are people out there doing case studies and n =1experiments. Leave your comment in the show notes. You know, go, go for it. And I'm curious to hear if there is evidence. But as far as I know, it's not really going to help you out significantly and it is banned.

There you go. And that ends the questions for today. We're all out of questions.

Well, you, you have a question though, Brock, right?

Yes, I guess I do have a question.

So, Brock, what is your main concern? The hill climbing and then losing weight. Right.

Well, and the losing weight thing is just more of a feeling than anything. Like, I don't actually feel like I'm certainly not overweight for general population, but you know, you look at the people who are winning marathons and they're. Well, first of all, they're a foot shorter than me and they're like a good 20, 25 pounds lighter than me. So I just, I feel like that would definitely be an advantage losing some weight even on the flat ground and certainly on the hills.

Yep. Yeah. Now, I would recommend some of the things that, that I personally do when I'm trying to significantly and with a great focus, lean up for an event. And I don't even take my body fat. I don't get on a scale, anything like that. I just, I pinch the little kind of like fat section right above the hip and that's how I keep track of whether or not I'm in kind of low enough body weight, slash body fat to really be able to have a good power to weight ratio for running or biking.

Right above the hip in the front or in the back?

In the front, in the front, in the front. Right there, right there above the hip bone. And some of the things that I do is first, first of all, I don't, as I Think I've mentioned before in this podcast, engage heavily in like fasted morning workouts and fasted morning cardio. But I do implement 12 hours of zero eating into every single 24 hour cycle. And during that 12 hour time frame of zero eating, each 12 hour time frame must include at least five minutes of cold thermometer genogenesis combined with approximately 20 minutes of aerobic movement. Now, for me, the aerobic movement is typically my morning ritual, if you will, which is yoga and deep breathing. And I do a bunch of different yoga movements combined with deep breathing. I throw a little bit of calisthenics in there, like some bodyweight squats and, you know, some moves like that. But you'll see that on your program that I write for you in training. Training peaks. There is that stretch that I instruct you to do every day. You know, it's a series of stretch protocols. Now, especially this time of year, as the weather is getting nicer, you can do those and kind of keep yourself a little bit chilly as you do them. So what I've been doing is I'll do my cold thermogenesis in the shower. And because it's getting to the point where it's about anywhere from 45 to 50 degrees in the morning here in Spokane, I'll go outside on my back porch. And granted it is chilly and I wear socks because my feet get really cold, but I'll do that entire stretching protocol out there. And I do all of this in a fasted state. Now, for me, typically based off of the time that I eat dinner and the time that I tend to eat breakfast 12 hours later, I'm usually doing this type of thing still an hour or two before I even eat breakfast. So after I've done this, this active movement after the cold thermogen, I've still got an hour or two of being in a fasted state. And the only thing that I'll consume during this time, and this is typically before I do the cold exposure, is some caffeine. For me, it's either green tea or coffee every time. And that caffeine can speed up the utilization of fatty acids even more. But I don't cheat on that. That's literally every day. And even when I'm traveling in airports, a lot of times I will check into a lounge and do the whole cold, cold shower thing just so that I keep that practice up as much as possible. So that's something that I've personally found. I know it flies under the radar and it seems like a weird technique. But when it comes to stuff that seems to work really, really well, that's one thing. Another thing that I've been doing quite a bit of when I want to shed weight Fast is about 30 minutes prior to dinner. I've been doing this insulin sensitizer. That's the bitter melon extract, that MPX100 stuff. If you don't have that on hand, a couple of teaspoons of cinnamon will have kind of a similar effect. It's not quite as potent, but it can work. And so you can stir a couple teaspoons of cinnamon up, you can just eat them if you want to sneeze cinnamon all over the place. But putting it into, like a decaffeinated tea in the evening is one way that you can do this. And you want that in your system about 30 minutes prior to your evening meal so that your insulin response is a little bit lower and your blood glucose levels stay more stabilized, so you get a little bit less of a fat storage response to your evening meal. That also helps out quite a bit, along with simply avoiding a lot of that evening snacking. The two ways that I avoid evening snacking that work best for me are I, I use these energy bitch, which are the algae tablets, and I'll do about 20 to 25 of those. When my wife's making popcorn, I'll pop some of those. That, or I'll do the amino acids, the amino acids capsules. Both I've found to be quite effective in reducing nighttime cravings and keeping me from engaging the type of eating at night that I found adds up day after day in terms of keeping you from. From shedding fat.

So you'd avoid the popcorn then. When Jess is making popcorn, you don't partake.

I do not partake. She puts a hell of a lot of butter on that stuff, too. And for me, sure, I'll eat it when we're sitting around during the holidays or whatever, but when I'm creeping up on weight season, that's the kind of stuff that I. When I'm creeping up on race season, rather not weight season, that's the kind of stuff that I will eliminate. Eliminate. So the other thing that I really, really focus on, especially when I'm trying to stay lean, and pretty much I've gotten to the point where this podcast is the only time I don't do this is for every hour that I'm sitting, period. And I do have a standing workstation, but sometimes I do sit, whether it's to write an article or to, you know, when I'm traveling, etc. I have to do 100 jumping jacks for every hour that I sit. So if I'm not able to get up every hour and do those hundred jumping jacks, and I do have my butt planted, say on an airplane for a couple hours or something like that, that number ups to 200. So it's pretty much this rule that for every hour that you're sitting, you got to do 100 jumping jacks. That's kind of this concept of greasing the groove and keeping the metabolism elevated. And that's another thing that works really, really well for me when it comes to little Jedi tricks throughout the day that, that assist with fat loss. So, you know, a lot of the other stuff I kind of already have worked into your program, such as not too much chronic cardio, doing some sprints, doing some heavy lifting, doing the kind of stuff that results in that fat burning, hormonal response. You know, your diet plan right now we kind of have you plugged into the higher fat, lower carb, moderate protein approach. And of course that, that also is going to be efficacious for you to stay with that. You also have all the, all kind of like the meal plans that I shared with you for each different phase of your training. Training, right?

Yeah, yeah. I just went through leading up to the race on Sunday. I was doing the pre, pre race week meals. And even though I didn't follow it strictly, it certainly gives you, it gave me a great guideline to follow.

Right.

If I didn't have exactly those ingredients in the fridge, at least I was able to be like, oh, okay, well, I don't have any chicken, but I've got some, some pork or some beef I can use.

Right, exactly. And so what you would do now that we're back into a build phase for you now, next race is you would bring back in the build week the meal plan phase for the build week, and that would be the one that you'd use here going forward. What the build week does is it's low carbohydrate 5 days of the week and then it cycles up your carbs on Saturday and kind of moderate carb on Sunday and then drops you back down to low carb on Monday. Rather than say like an off season eating phase where you'd be low carb like every, every day, for example, or a base training phase where I have a little less protein in the base training phase than in the build training phase because you're beating up your body a little bit more with the build training. So that's the concept behind that. Now, as far as the hills go, I think that one of the things that we may want to consider adding into your program, even above and beyond just the weight thing, and we did this a little bit last year, and that's Lydiard Hill repeats.

Remember the bounding and the skipping, leaping up the hill.

Exactly. Those are the workouts where I had, you know, you'd skip up the hill and then jog recovery back down. Then you'd bound up the hill and jog recovery back down. And then the last one was just straight up sprinting up the hill and then jog recovery back down. And these, these were kind of based off of Arthur Lydiard's hill training protocols. And he really used these as one of the keys in speed training, training, and in not only running form, but also hill climbing abilities. So I think that we may want to consider, instead of some of the straight up, you know, like, hill work, hill sprints, that kind of stuff, we've been doing, actually working the. The Lydiards back into your program, I think that we should. We should consider throwing those back in.

Yeah, I've sort of been doing. Leading up to the races, I had a lot of those went where you basically hike up the hill and then run like crazy when you get to the top. Yeah, and those were. Those were really hard, but they worked a very different system.

Yeah, exactly. Those are designed to load you up with lactic acid and then force you to run with. With high levels of lactic acid in your muscle.

Yeah. Actually, when I got to one of the hills in the race, I felt like I should be hiking up it. Yeah, the big swinging arms and stuff.

Exactly. And you know, a big reason for that is we were working on strength a lot in the off season and in the base training. But what I'm going to do this week when I sit down and work on your plan is work in a Lydiard Hill phase where we'll do Lydiards at least once a week for the next month and use that to improve your hill climbing.

And it's actually the time of year where I can start doing that too, because in the middle of the winter, it's pretty impossible to do that. It's dangerous. In fact, with all the snow and ice all over the place, I would have broken my ankle and perhaps my neck.

I thought you were like a hockey player, ice skater, ballerina dude.

I am. Do you want me to wear hockey skates on the hill?

Actually, that's not a bad idea. Do they call it a tutu, the ballerina thing, when guys wear it, or is it something different?

No, guys don't wear tutus.

What do they call your get up?

Tights. Tights, I guess sometimes. Unit.

Unitard. Go out and do. Go out and do lydiards in your unitard. All right.

And my hockey skates.

There you go. So, yeah, that's. That's where I would start, Brock. And, you know, that'll. That'll kind of go after the fat burning and the hill climbing and. Yeah, that's. That's some of the stuff that we'll start into, so.

Sounds good.

All right, cool.

I think I've got a plan.

Awesome. Well, I.

And it starts with eating a bunch of popcorn.

This was a good podcast. I know we went on for a while. If folks want resources to go along with this episode, just visit the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com, episode number 235. We will embed our my list for this episode right there so you can have access to some handy dandy resources that you can even share with your Facebook friends. And you can always drop a few bucks in the hat while you're there to support the podcast. And of course, we always appreciate reviews on itunes, preferably of the positive variety, if possible. So if you haven't yet subscribed or left a review on itunes, go do it. What are you waiting for? And yeah, for people who are at Paleo FX this weekend, I'll be down at Paleo FX in Austin, Texas. I am not Paleo, but I will be there in my Groucho Marx paleo disguise.

So the caveman bone in your hair.

Which is the one without the milk mustache and the caveman bone in my hair. Exactly. So, yeah, I think that's about it. And we will not burden you with any of our country twang this week.

Never again.

That's right. So this is Ben and Brock signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a great week.