#237: Is Red Meat Really Bad For You, Which Artificial Sweeteners Are Good, Is Bench Pressing Bad For You, How To Get Rid of Restless Leg Syndrome and More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, Lasik Eye surgery for Sports Performance. Natural remedies for restless leg syndrome. How to get rid of side stitches. Can blood sugar go up during exercise? What artificial sweeteners are good. And is bench press bad for your shoulders?

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.

Well, welcome back to North America, Ben.

Hey, thanks, man. I picked up some pretty good Vietnamese in the past week since I've gone. I'm a well cultured, well traveled traveler. I bet Xin Chow.

Call me a goat.

Actually, I just said hello and also exhausted my complete knowledge of Vietnamese vocabulary. You're up on me Still, I typically make a habit of trying to learn a language before I go somewhere and this trip just kind of crept up on me. I arrived in Vietnam expecting that it wouldn't really be much of an issue. You know, kind of like it is when we do our triathlon trip to Thailand. How, you know, you can get by with your whole kind of, kind of pidgin English, you know?

Oh, yeah, waving your arms and using broad words was just fine.

I take papaya and coffee, please, but they're not to be had. There was pretty much confusion over just about anything that I said. Like I would order, I remember I would order like salt in the morning and they'd bring me latte because salt sounds a little bit like latte, I guess. Exactly. And I ordered sparkling water and I got some sliced mango. That was interesting.

Well, you know that I'd take that over sparkling water any day.

Yeah, exactly. Because it's just like Perrier, those sliced mangoes. And you know, in general, I will make a better attempt. Should I go back to Vietnam to work a little bit more on the, on the language. But the triathlon went well.

That's what I was going to say. It didn't hold you back at all because you came in fifth overall and first in the age groupers. Congratulations for kicking some serious butt.

It felt good for the first triathlon of the season. Although I do need to start riding my bike a little bit longer. I think. Not like long longer, but I've pretty much been like going on 15 minute mountain bike rides and that didn't cut it for a 62k time trial. So I'm going to need.

Yeah, all by yourself too, Weren't you. You're sort of stuck between the pros and the age groupers. Run riding in no man's land.

Yeah, I was to tell you what for people listening in, just so we're not boring all the folks who don't really give a crap about triathlon, we're listening in. We'll put a link in the show notes, race report. I'll write a note to myself to do that. But I've got a race report all written up, even with some. Some pictures of all the weird foods I ate over there and. And all that jazz, so.

Well, I gotta say, it looks like you had fun. Maybe not quite as much fun as we had in. In Thailand, mostly because I wasn't there, but.

Yes.

Are you gonna do that trip again? Are you going to Thailand?

You know, I'm. I'm on the fence about it, I guess. Like, you know, if there are a bunch of listeners who are jonesing to go, like, like I'll put the trip together, you know, that. That's the whole. It's been taken over by a group called challenge, which means it's probably going to be even better because this challenge group puts on really, really good events. But I guess I would need to hear from listeners. I mean, if you're a listener and you're listening and you want to do the Thailand trip, that's basic. Comes out to about like November 20th, something through the first week in December. Leave a comment on the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com or fire me an email. I guess I' gauging interest and if people want to do it, you know, I'll do it. I guess I'd probably need, you know, 10 people or so to want to go to make it. Make it worthwhile to put a trip together for folks.

But yeah, and I can speak from personal experience that it is well worth it. It was a real once in a lifetime kind of experience. Although I may end up doing it again and then it'll be a twice in a lifetime experience. But I'll bring my own bike this time.

Yeah. So we should probably just change the title of this podcast to Asian Travel Tips.

There you go.

All right, let's do it. News flashes.

All right, as always, Ben will now bring down the knowledge upon us.

Drop the knowledge bombs. I'm gonna go grab my steak out of the refrigerator and chew on it while we talk about this first issue that popped up.

No, you can't eat meat. What are you crazy? Especially not red meat.

You don't want to know how many tweets, Facebook posts I got about this whole TMAO and red meat issue. And I kind of blew a lot of what people were asking me about off just because a. There's been a lot of really good articles written on it by folks who I respect in the nutrition environment. Guys like Paul Geminet, author of Perfect Health Diet, and Mark Sisson and Dave Asprey and Chris Kresser and Chris Masterjohn. And a lot of these folks who I consider to have their head screwed on pretty straight when it comes to nutrition have kind of debunked this study that came out. But for those of you who aren't really familiar with what's going on here is there was this latest media uproar over the fact that red meat is once again being blamed as the primary cause of atherosclerosis and heart disease and basically lighting off a nuclear bomb within your body. And the idea behind this is the carnitine, the carnitine that's found in red meat, which ironically, it's also found in dairy and tempeh and fish and stuff like that too. But basically this was a study that had a couple different components to it. And what the study was was they fed people these 8 ounce steaks, and they also gave the people, along with the steaks a side of 250mg of a carnitine supplement. And what they found delicious in the folks who they gave this to was the omnivores, the meat eaters showed increased blood and urine levels of this stuff called trimethylamine oxide, or tmao. And that's a compound that is purportedly associated with cardiovascular disease. And the vegetarians and vegans who somehow defied their nutritional paradigms and actually ate the steak, they showed lower levels of this TMAO in their blood and their urine. And so the other thing that they tested was what was actually producing the tmao. And so what they also did with folks was they administered antibiotics to them. And so they totally wiped out their gut flora. And when they wiped out their gut flora, that eliminated this stake induced increase in tmao. And so what that told the researchers was that it was the actual intestinal microbiota, you know, the gut bacteria in the stomach that was metabolizing this carnitine from the supplement and the carnitine from the steak into tmao. And then what they did was they allowed the human subjects guts to kind of repopulate with good bacteria. So they gave them some time after those antibiotics and they gave them more steak. And they found that once again, the increase in TMAO appeared. And, and that kind of confirmed that what's happening when you eat a steak is your gut flora is metabolizing carnitine and that's producing this increase in tmao. Now, they went on to mice then, and it's important that the type of mice that they moved onto were a special type of mice. These are what are called APOE deficient mice. And by giving these mice that APOE deficient status, what they were doing was they were increasing those mice's mouses, those mice increasing the Mises risk of heart disease. So that's a special genetic risk marker for heart disease when you knock out APOE like that. So they were accelerating the extent to which those mice would get atherosclerosis. And they did find that in that strain of APOE deficient mice that the dietary carnitine indeed increased TMAO levels. And in the that accelerated atherosclerosis. Now, it's important to realize that that happened in the mice. It didn't happen in the humans. They didn't observe the increase in atherosclerosis in the humans. All they observed was the increase in TMAO in humans. But in mice, when they did this genetic alteration to them and gave them the carnitine, it did indeed increase atherosclerosis. In other words, what it did was it impaired the mouse's ability to remove cholesterol from their cell walls. So it created this surplus of cholesterol in the cell walls of the mouse and of the heart, and it sped up atheros. So a few kind of little issues with this, and I'm just going to totally kind of COVID the surface and we'll try and link in the show notes to some articles that go into this in greater detail. But the first is that there has been zero association that has been proven between TMAO and cardiovascular disease in humans. The only thing that we've seen is that if you take a rodent, an APOE deficient mouse, and you give it a bunch of carnitine, that is going to increase its risk for atherosclerosis. And we've seen nothing at all like that in humans. And atherosclerosis, atherosclerosis, or buildup of cholesterol in the arterial cell walls was not measured at all in humans. So that's the first thing the next thing was that the gut flora, all of these different hundreds of species that are living in our gut were what were metabolizing and creating this increase in tmao. And there was no, there was no attempt made to look into the gut health of the people that were in this study. And since we know that about 90% of the human population has gut, what's called dysbiosis or imbalances in the good versus bad bacteria in their digestive tract, pretty good chance that these folks just basically had some pretty serious gut issues going on anyways, because if you, you know, if you draw 10 people out of the population and nine out of 10 of them have some bacterial issues in the gut, then you can't go and say, well, you take a healthy person with a healthy gut and you give them steak and the same thing's going to happen. So that's another issue. As I mentioned earlier, another thing that can raise TMAO is fish. And there are so many studies that show that fish is consistently associated with better cardiovascular health, both fish oil as well as fish, that this kind of flies in the face of any suggestion that steak would increase your risk of cardiovascular disease. Now the other thing that you have to kind of take into account, and this is probably the final thing I wanted to mention, is that there was absolutely no attempt made to control for the type of meat that these folks were eating. And from everything that I can see, it was the typical grain fed from commercially raised cattle filled with hormones and antibiotics and inflammatory omega 6 fatty acids and everything else. And this wasn't like a, like a grass fed, pastured omega 3 type of, type of beef. Not happy cows, exactly. They were unhappy cows. So that really just kind of is a brief overview of what was going on. What are the problems with this study? Now I just realized, I said that I was going to put in the show notes a bunch of the links to some of the good articles that have been written on this. But you know what, I've already been doing that over on the Facebook page over@facebook.com bgfitness so just head over to there and you'll be able to see the discussion. We had a pretty good discussion going on with all the folks over on the Ben Greenfield fitness Facebook page. So I'd head over there if you want to link to some of the other things that have been talked about when it comes to this study.

Awesome. That's good to know that I don't have to throw away all my happy cow meat.

You don't you don't. But speaking of nutrition, I also wanted to mention a couple of other things. The first is I tweeted a tweet about how in our household we generally use coconut flour instead of almond flour. And I linked to a really good article about the superiority of almond flour versus coconut flour. And there are a few things that you should know if you're trying to go gluten free, you're trying to work wheat flour out of your diet, or maybe thinking that almond flour is the way to go. The first is that the calorie count of almond flour is pretty Damn big. So one cup of almond flour has the equivalent of about 90 almonds in it. So that means that you can easily, easily, from just like one serving of, like a baked goody made with almond flour, get a good 600 to 700 calories if you're not careful.

Wow.

So that's one issue is the calorie issue versus coconut flour, which is much lower in terms of the total calorie count. It comes out to about 1/2 to 1/4 as many calories. Almond flour also tends to be pretty high in these polyunsaturated fatty acids, these omega 6 fatty acids. And, you know, there's a lot of evidence to show that high levels of omega 6 fatty acids, especially heated omega 6 fatty acids, encourage kind of an inflammatory response in the body and can also deplete your antioxidants. And so, especially for people who are already exercising and kind of beating up their bodies, consumption of almond flour is a good way to kind of overload your body with even more detrimental inflammation. So that's something else to be careful of. The fats in almond flour aren't heat stable. And so, you know, processing and heat and light and pressure cause all those double bonds in that polyunsaturated fat to break. And that also can cause some damage to your cell walls. Because when you're. When you're creating a lot of free radicals like that, just like excessive exercise can create free radicals, excessive consumption of almond flour can also do that. One other issue that's kind of listed in this article, which I'll link to so folks can go and check out, is that there are some components of almonds, such as oxalates and phytic acids. And phytic acids are kind of a digestive inhibitor that can inhibit some mineral absorption. Oxalates are something that tend to not be as much of an issue unless you have leaky gut syndrome or gut dysbiosis, which we just got done talking about, or something like that. But what it comes down to is if you maybe you've got some gut issues and you're trying, let's say you're trying to go gluten free and heal your gut or something like that, and you think you're doing yourself a favor by switching to almond flour, you're probably not. So that's basically the reasons that almond flour is inferior to coconut flour.

Personally, I actually can't really taste the difference either. So if one's got that many more benefits going forward, it's not like you're sacrificing taste for it.

Right, exactly. So those are the five reasons to avoid almond flour. And we'll link to that one in the show notes as well. And then I also wanted to get into something interesting that came up when it comes to sleep. And this was an article in BBC on BBC.co.uk and they talked about the myth of the eight hour sleep night. And this is something I've mentioned on a couple of recent podcasts. But basically it is the idea that we're supposed to sleep eight hours through the night, when in fact there are hundreds and hundreds of references to history, from Homer's odyssey to anthropological accounts of tribes in Africa, to a more segmented sleeping pattern, which basically is this first sleep that begins about two hours after dusk and then this waking period of one or two hours during the night and then a second sleep. And during that waking period, people are socializing, using the restroom, having sex, doing religious activities like praying, and basically just engaging in social activities and things of that nature during the night and then going back to sleep. And it is a relatively new phenomenon, this whole concept of the eight hour sleep night or going into this panic or being all stressed out if you wake up during the night and you can't get back to sleep. And you think this lack of an eight hour sleep cycle is going to somehow do some damage to your body. And I think it's even being mitigated by a lot of these devices like X Motion and Jawbone and Fitbit and the. What's the other sleep tracker, the Z blanket on the name, the Zeobit.

Z Wave.

Yeah, it might be Z Wave, I don't remember. Anyways, though, these devices, there's tons of them, there's dozens of them. And you wake up and they tell you how many hours in a row you slept. And it makes it look bad if you actually woke up during the night multiple times or your sleep was interrupted. But the fact is you don't actually have to Worry, worry about it that much. And this is something I've been getting more and more into the habit of is like when I wake up during the night, if I'm awake, awake and I wake up during the night, then I will get up and I'll just, you know, I'll mull around sometimes I'll eat something, I'll put on my blue light blocking glasses and kind of dim my computer a little bit so it's got more of kind of that, that torch type of light rather than a modern artificial light type of background light to it and you know, work on the computer, read a little bit. And then when I'm tired, go back to sleep. There's also this idea behind sleep velocity and that is the fact that once you've started sleeping, it's easier to get back to sleep. So I also pay attention to that. If I wake up during the middle of the night and I got to use the bathroom and I can tell right away I'm like, wow, I'm really tired, I'll just plop back into bed and go back to sleep. But if I listen to my body and there's not much of kind of a sleep velocity component there and I'm just awake and alert, I'll stay awake for a little while before I go back to sleep. And I'll link to this article in the show notes to this episode so people can go read it. But I just wanted to get that out there that I in no way condone the idea that eight hours of solid sleep, uninterrupted sleep is necessary, something to go for. I'm a bigger fan of just making sure that for any 24 hour cycle you try and get something close to about eight hours of sleep.

I don't know if they addressed it in that same article, but I know the quality of the, that sleep has a lot to do with how much you actually need as well. Like getting three hours of good deep sleep is better than getting sort of weirdly loose light sleep for an entire eight hours. So you wake up and you look at the clock and go, oh no, it's only 4 o' clock in the morning, I better go back to sleep. Well, it may actually equal out if you had a deeper sleep in that four hours or whatever it was.

Right, exactly. And you know, what's that?

I think that was Nora Gagaudis that was talking about that.

I think she did bring that up. And this article actually goes into the sleep cycles and how long you should stay in each sleep cycle. And that type of thing kind of spells out the differences in terms of your stage one, your stage two, your stage three, and your deep sleep cycle and about how long you're supposed to be in each. So what it comes down to is about every 60 minutes to every hundred minutes, you go through these four different stages of sleep. So as long as you've got a few of those 60 to 100 minute sleep cycles that you go through, you're pretty good. What's the number for this episode, by the way?

It's episode 237.

Okay, so if you want links to any of this stuff, go to the show notes for episode number 237. We'll have links to any of the studies, any of the resources that we talk about. And we also will have what's called a my list for this episode, which is this helpful handy dandy list that we put together that you can access on Facebook, you can share with your friends. You know, you can be like, hey, here's, here's some interesting things that later on we're going to talk about restless leg syndrome and things of that nature. And you'll just be able to share it with your friends. If your friend has restless leg syndrome, you can say, well, hey, go check out this, my list that Ben and Brock had on the Ben Greenfield Fitness show. And just kind of a handy way that you can share stuff around. That's one of the reasons that we create my list for this show, is to make it easier for you to share the wealth, so to speak.

Plus, we like that it's got pictures.

Instead of just words. We're big on pictures. Yes. Speaking of, who wants to read when you can look at pretty pictures of reading Audible? Audible is the sponsor of this episode.

Audible podcast.com Ben that's right.

Because if you go to audible.com you are freaking screwed.

Because all you're gonna do just take all your money.

They're gonna take your money. They're not gonna give you any free book, and they're going to run away laughing. Yep. They're going to kick you in the knees and run away laughing. But if you go to audiblepodcast.com Ben all of a sudden, audible becomes your very good friend because they will give you a free book. And that also means that they sponsor this show. When you go to audiblepodcast.com Ben and we always like to kind of pick a book for you guys. So I'm going to tell you the next book that I have queued up in my Kindle because I've Been reading a lot on education, on kids and education. So I recently read Radical Unschooling and I read. What else did I read? I should have read a book on short term memory loss. I read a book on one called Radical unschooling. One called 100 Good Questions to ask your children is like conversation starters. And gosh, I'm blanking on the last.

What is that in your ear?

Yeah, exactly.

What have you shoved up your nose?

What is in your nose? But I'm gonna start into doing some more studying up on the whole kind of. I was kind of burnt out on the whole superhuman thing for a little while after the superhuman conference, but I'm getting back into that. And this next book that I've got queued up is called Enhancing Human Capacities. And you can find it on audiblepodcast.com Ben but it covers all the major forms of human enhancement like cognitive, mood, physical, moral, anti aging, life extension. And it not only gets into some of the ways that you can enhance your biology and your neural state, but also kind of goes into some of the general conceptual and moral questions about enhancing our bodies. And how far is too far in terms of everything from kind of like the whole Oscar Pistorius deal and him enhancing his body with the limbs that he, that he added and was using in the Olympic track and field to, you know, the whole idea about hormone replacement with testosterone and thyroid and whether or not that's legal or ethical and, you know, just kind of an interesting thing. It's written by some medical ethicists. And anyways, I'd recommend you check it out. It's called Enhancing Human Capacities.

Sounds awesome.

Over@AudiblePodcast.com Ben so what do you think? Should we jump into the special announcements?

I thought we already had.

Special announcements.

Okay, so I have called you Mr. Webinar in the past and it's. It's still valid. It's still true. When have you got one? Coming up on April 27th. You've got a webinar about. Ask Ben anything about minimalist triathlon training.

That's right.

That's for. That's the Inner Circle members, right?

Yes, and I have been called worse than Mr. Webinar. So you're doing all right there. Yeah. April 27th.

I'll stop calling you that after you stop doing so many webinars.

April 27th. I like to call them spreecasts. It's kind of sexier. Spreecast. So I've got a spreecast, which is a live video sprecast. And that's for all of my inner circle members and it's called Ask Me Anything About Minimalist Triathlon Training. And that's basically this whole triathlon training protocol where I'm training anywhere from six to nine hours a week in preparation for Ironman Canada. So I'm going to answer your questions, nutrition training, etc. It's 10 bucks a month to be a member of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle. Well worth every penny if you ask me based on the the amount of bonuses and webinars and PDFs and everything else that we have in there. So check that out. That's going to be April 27, which is a Saturday evening, I believe, at 6pm and of course replays of that will be available. And then I'm Also this weekend, April 20, for any personal trainers, physicians, chiropractic physicians, anybody who's kind of into the whole fitness medical, working with clients type of thing. I'm teaching another cast on adrenal exhaustion and everything that you need to know about adrenal exhaustion and over training and not only identifying it, but also digging someone out of a hole when they are in that state of adrenal exhaustion, the different phases of adrenal exhaustion, how long it takes to recover from it, that type of thing. So that's all over. You can access that by applying to become a member of the Superhuman Coach Network and you can do that over@superhumancoach.com so that's the small group of personal trainers and practitioners globally who I mentor and kind of put through basically modules each month in terms of educating them to also become Mr. Webinars. So Mr. And Mrs. Webinars.

So don't forget Mrs. Webinar. She's my favorite.

Just like Mr. And Mrs. Sweet.

While we're talking about Superhuman While we're talking about Superhuman stuff, I know you've got the Superhuman Live event down in HD format in downloadable format for a small price.

Yeah, we put together the entire become Superhuman Live event headlined by folks like Norga Gowdes and Dave Asprey and Monica Reinagle and Ray Kronice, myself Phil Maffetone. Phil Maffetone put it all together with MP3 audio downloads, HD videos. These are different than the sprecast slides takeaway notes. It's just basically an all access pass. It never expires. We'll put a link in the show notes but you can get access to all that. You can download it. I am not a big fan of these type of conferences where you buy access to the conference and you just get to watch the streaming and you can't download, so you can download these. I already put them into audio form, too, so you can listen to them while you're biking or running or working out or whatever. And we'll put a link in the show notes for this episode where you can go. You can go buy that entire thing. It's under 100 bucks, so it's actually $97, which really isn't under $100. It's basically $100, but 97 just sounds way cooler.

What I'm wondering is, do you include some of the Superhuman cocktails?

You know what, if you buy it and you send me your receipt, I'll see if I can figure out how to toss some vodka and pomegranate juice your way.

Tiny little bottle of vodka.

I gotta find some little Styrofoam cartons I can send those out to with folks. That would be fun, actually send somebody a Superhuman cocktail. Just mix it. Mix it and stuff. I don't know if that's legal. Well, you know what? I used to ship out Kombucha when I was a distributor. What's it called? Beyond Organic. And so I've got a bunch of packaging materials. Maybe we should do that. How about this? If you're a podcast listener and you go grab that Become Superhuman Live event and you send me your receipt, Ben greenfieldfitness.com I will choose three people. I will go in my kitchen and I will mix you up a Superhuman cocktail. I will put it in a nice PCB free water bottle for you. I will get into a thermal container, and I will send a Superhuman cocktail to your house. How do you like that? I have no clue. If what I just said was legal, I'm probably gonna be arrested. But I'll do it.

Don't tell the usps.

We'll figure out a way to put it on Silk Road and have people pay in Bitcoin or something like that. So the. The last thing, by the way, have you heard about that Silk Road? No, it's. Yeah. Basically what you can do is. And I've done all this just to see if you can do it. I've done everything except actually ordering illegal drugs. What you can do is you can install a cloaked browser called Tor on your computer, and then you can enter in a secret URL, which you kind of have to dig into some various websites. If you just go Google Silk Road URL, you type in the URL of the Silk Road, and then you go to a website like Coinbase or any of these other websites where you can buy bitcoin, which is digital currency. And you buy digital currency, it's fairly expensive. Right now it's kind of gone. It's like, I think it's at about $90 right now for one bitcoin. But then what you do is you can take these bitcoins and using this cloaked browser, you can buy any number of illicit drugs, guns, weapons, anything through the Silk Road and get it shipped to your house, you know, whatever, shrooms, weed, pharmaceuticals, anything. It's pretty nuts. So I actually went on the Silk Road and I was surfing around looking at all the stuff that's available on there and I was like, dang, it's this entire virtual black market that's completely untraceable by federal authorities because of the way that this Tor browser is installed on your computer. So, you know, and I'm not whiz, bang, geek or anything like that. It took me about an hour to set my computer up just because I was curious if I could do it to get to the point where I would be able to just like with one click be able to order pretty much anything off of that Silk Road website. So it's pretty nuts, but yeah.

And now Ben's computer is completely controlled by the Russian Monarch.

Yes. Anyways, though, so if we decide to sell superhuman cocktails, we'll do it through the Silk Road then. The last thing I wanted to mention was that for people who are, who are in New York, Connecticut area, kind of that Connecticut, northeast, Connecticut up by Canada. I'd like to say that I'm teaching a workshop, a triathlon workshop there in Stamford, Connecticut on Saturday, May 18th. It'll be a two hour workshop called the Essentials of Triathlon. I'm gonna do an hour on triathlon fueling, an hour on triathlon training, add in a bunch of Q and a. It's basically 50 bucks to go to the whole workshop. And the reason I'm doing it over in Stamford is I'm there for a conference that weekend. I've decided to tack on an extra day, stick around and we're going to put a link in the show notes. But that's a Saturday. So Saturday, May 18th, for anybody up in Stamford, Connecticut, head on over and reserve your spot. And Stanford's close to Fairfield and New York and New Jersey and all these other cities up there. If you know of people in that area or you yourself want to attend, check it out. We'll put a link in the show notes and you can come Hang out in Stanford.

Listener Q and A.

Hey, Ben, after listening to your podcast with Dr. Eric Cobb, I was wondering if you thought that Lasik eye surgery might positively affect performance. Thanks, Ben. Love the show. Bye. Lasers.

Now, don't point the lasers at your eyes.

Lasers.

I listened to the interview with Dr. Cobb, and I'm not entirely sure what Craig is referring to. Did Dr. Cobb say something about it being like the vision was really important?

Well, this is actually something I talk about. I was talking about the Superhuman Coach Network. And one of the modules that I teach in there is the performance module. And during the performance module, one of the things that I go into is that there are certain parameters of performance that are ideal for you to optimize if you really want your body to be, quote, unquote, superhuman performance. And it's a performance module. But what I get into are endurance, strength, power, speed, range of motion, and balance. Those are kind of the biggies. And in the balance component of that workshop, I do get into like three components of balance that really allow you to perform at a high capacity or to have really good control over your body and your nervous system. And as part of that balance module, I go into your vestibular system, which are the sense organs in your ears that give you awareness of where your head is at in space and can kind of help you with movement. Your somatosensory system, which is the proprioception and what's called the kinesthesia within your joints, your actual like, and believe it or not, your knee joint, your elbow joint, et cetera, those are forms of. They're almost like organs that can sense movement and give you awareness of joint position. And then the last system that I get into when I teach that particular workshop is the visual system, which is your eyesight and knowing with your eyes where your body is in relation to space and in relation to the ground. And technically, if you have a screwed up visual system, one third of that balance component is off. So you can influence your ability to maintain kind of a good line of gravity, a vertical line of gravity with the minimum base of support with minimal body collapse. So like the single leg stance phase of running, or like doing a single leg squat, stepping off a curb, dancing, whatever. So, yeah, I mean, there are definite advantages to strengthening your visual system.

Okay, I see. So what he's getting at is the fact that if you're, even if you're wearing glasses, you don't necessarily have that whole, not 360 degree, but like the fuller range of peripheral vision and maybe like Lower down vision and stuff. Yeah, I mean, you're missing parts of it.

There's not a huge advantage of LASIK over glasses in terms of the actual change in visual perception. It's more of like a logistical thing. Like, it's hard to wear glasses sometimes when you're playing sports. Like, you got to worry about them breaking or, you know, falling off when you start, strap them on with one of those dorky rubber band things. They fog up when it's humid. Like you mentioned, your peripheral vision is kind of reduced a little bit when you're wearing glasses. And sports like baseball and basketball and football and hockey and lacrosse, any of these type of sports, they can prevent you from playing. And obviously they're completely not suited to sports like swimming or say, like boxing or cage fighting or something like that. And I don't know how many of our listeners are doing cage fighting, but.

Still, I've broken so many pairs of glasses. Cage fighting.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's a ridiculous big issue, especially up there in Canada.

Such a bummer.

Yeah. But, you know, you take like Tiger woods, for example, and he was good before he had Lasik surgery, but he actually improved his average score after he got Lasik. And he averaged like four under par before Lasik. And if you look at his scores after he got LASIK surgery, it changed to closer to 10 under par. And there's a bunch of other pro golfers that have gotten Lasik to the point where there has been a debate on some kind of like, sports performance kind of circles. You know, ESPN had an article about this. I believe the Wall Street Journal even did something about it, about whether or not like, FDA or not fda, but whether or not, you know, what's it called? A WADA should consider LASIK to be, you know, kind of up there as with being like a performance enhancing drug, because it is, you know, it's body enhancer. It really is. We talked about this a little bit earlier in the Audible book that I recommended. But if it's illegal to take steroids because they give you an illegal performance enhancing advantage, and yet you'd risk surgery for the same kind of small increment in performance, there is kind of that argument out there that maybe Lasik is unfair because it allows someone who can get Lasik, is in a financial position to get Lasik, or is willing to go out there and get surgery for Lasik, the ability to be a better athlete. You know, you look at LeBron James, he got Lasik and he says he can see the rim and the net a lot more clearly. He's done an interview on Lasik, and his vision went from 2040 to 2015, which is pretty significant. And if you look at his field goal percentage, it went from 46 to 49%, which is also fairly significant. There's a bunch of baseball players that have gotten Lasik and improved their batting average post surgery. So, you know, you can also look at pro athletes like Troy Aikman and Tiki Barber, and a lot of these folks for visual acuity is pretty important. They've gotten Lasik.

I haven't had Lasik, but I had radial keratinomy, which was sort of the precursor. It was done with a diamond knife rather than with a laser back in 1991. And my vision is considerably better. I wasn't even able to see the clock from the bed before I had the surgery. And it's now 20 some years later, and I still see not 2020, but pretty darn close. Yeah, I think it's really helped me.

Yeah.

And I mean, there's not quite in as much of a measurable way as.

Tiger woods, but you're not 10 under par yet.

Not quite.

Yeah. You know, and there's relatively low risk to it. I mean, some people say that they get side effects like halos and glare, double vision and nightblowing. I've seen, you know, complaints about dry eyes and stuff like that, but I. I believe that those are pretty.

Yeah, I have pretty much. Pretty much every one of those symptoms. I have the dry eyes. I don't have halos, but I do have six points that come out of lights, especially at night. If I'm driving down a highway, the headlights coming towards me have six points coming out of them. But it's just. I've just completely gotten used to it. It doesn't even phase me anymore. The night blindness is a little bit annoying, but. But it's another thing you just sort of adjust to.

What about the unicorns and the rainbows that fly across your vision as your podcast?

Oh, I always had those that didn't.

Change anyways, though, so there goes one now. I'm personally of the standpoint that you should try some other stuff before you resort to surgery. Some of the methods that I kind of go into in that performance workshop that I teach in the Superhuman Coach Network is to use, you know, blue light glare blocking glasses, like a pair of gaming glasses like Gunnars, when you're working on your computer, you know, you eat a lot of these antioxidant rich foods, specifically like Lutein rich foods like spinach and broccoli, eggs, especially eggs with the yolk. Even peas and zucchini and stuff like that have pretty decent amounts of lutein in them. Fish and fish oil can really help out as well. Avoiding small fonts, avoiding eye strain can help out. Getting enough sleep can help. There's also this method out there called the Bates Method. And the Bates Method is an alternative therapy. It kind of flies under the radar, but it's aimed at improving your eyesight and it actually trains your ocular muscles to learn how to more accurately change a lens shape. And it's a series of visualization and movement protocols that you go through. And some people swear by this Bates Protocol in terms of being basically, you know, the title of the manual that's published about it is called Yoga for the Eyes. And there's another book called the Bates Method, a complete guide to improving eyesight naturally. But I, you know, that's something I would consider doing would be like eye training before I'd get into full on surgery just because I generally try and just avoid surgery in general. Knives and lasers and stuff like that when I can.

There's actually a fantastic book by Aldous Huxley called the Art of Seeing where he actually, he does. I don't know if it was the pate, the Bates Protocol that he was going through, but he did a similar thing. He went from not being able to actually read anything smaller than like a billboard to being able to read a normal book just by training his ocular nerves and muscles and stuff. It's a pretty awesome book.

Yeah, I mean, it's certainly something that I look into and we'll put a link in the show notes to the Bates Method if you want to go read up on it. I think there's even a pretty comprehensive Wikipedia entry on the Bates Method, but I'd look into that and some of these other ways that you can improve your eyesight prior to necessarily going for lasik. But either way, yeah, improving your eyesight can definitely improve your, your performance. So, you know, I guess all the stuff I just recommended goes way above and beyond just, you know, eating a carrot, but certainly things to try in addition to eating your carrots.

Who doesn't love carrots? This is a question for my father. He's got restless legs for the last quite a few years. Every time he goes to sleep at night, he twitches as soon as he shuts his eyes, his twitchy shoulders, he doesn't do any supplementation and he's just got his test back Of a sort of a lowish thyroid. I'm interested to see sort of what his next steps are. Supplementation, if you think he's lacking anything and what sort of diet he should be going on. Obviously, I think it's inflammatory. Great to hear back from you. Cheers.

Are I restless legs syndrome. And this is different, by the way. I'm sure this has happened to you, Brock, where you're just like lying there, going to sleep at night and your legs just kind of twitch off and on every now and then.

Oh yeah. When you, you step off a curb or something in your half dream state.

Oh, my wife.

Does all your limbs shoot out?

The whole bed shakes. It's, it's horrible. It's scarring.

My girlfriend actually punched me in the nose in the middle of the night last night doing that.

Yeah, I mean it's, it's border, Borderline partner abuse. No, but restless leg syndrome is totally different than that. It's, it's an actual neurological disorder where your legs like throb and pull and creep and you get all these really unpleasant sensations and this irresistible urge to move your legs. It's, it's kind of weird the way that people have described it.

I've heard people describe it as being like their bones are itchy.

Yeah, exactly. So. And you can get really bad insomnia. Obviously there's kind of this psychological burden that goes along with it as well. And you know, unfortunately, because it can happen a lot of times due to some dopamine deficits, There's a ton of docs out there who basically just prescribe what are called dopaminergic medicines where they're just subscribing or prescribing people who have restless leg syndrome with the same stuff you'd prescribe to somebody who has like, you know, depression or schizophrenia or something like that. But you know, the idea is that there, there are a couple different types of restless leg syndrome. And really it kind of depends on the way you come after it. Like there's, there's two different types. There's primary and secondary. Now primary restless leg syndrome is more peripheral nervous system related. So it is akin to usually an issue with the neurotransmitter dopamine, which helps to facilitate uniform and controlled movements. And low dopamine, or alterations in dopamine signaling can be an issue when it comes to primary restless leg syndrome. And of course, there are a bunch of different dopamine enhancing drugs, drugs, they're called dopamine agonists that can be used for something like that. Unfortunately, most are rife with side effects that really have some pretty serious addictive potential and some other side effects as well. So you got to be kind of careful with some of these pharmacological treatments for dopamine for something like a central nervous system issue or, I'm sorry, a peripheral nervous system issue or a dopamine issue. And if that is a cause of restless leg syndrome, I would first look into massage and acupuncture. And there have been some studies that have shown those to be fairly efficacious for restless leg syndrome and to provide some benefit. And exercise can help as well, just because engaging in physical activity helps to eliminate some of that restlessness that occurs in the legs, but it also strengthens the peripheral nervous system. It has been found that exercise shortly before going to bed actually exacerbates restless leg syndrome. But if you exercise earlier in the day and you have this primary form of restless leg syndrome, it can help. There is one form of a supplement or one form of dopamine called L dopa that you can look into, and you can get that, I believe, even over the counter, or protect your computer and go to the Silk Road and get it. But L dopa is something that gets converted into dopamine with the aid of vitamin B6. So using like, an L dopa supplement combined with vitamin B6 can technically help with restless leg syndrome if it is a dopamine issue. But you need to be careful with that, because anytime you're putting higher levels of a neurotransmitter in your body, you risk creating an imbalance, in this case, an imbalance between serotonin and dopamine. So I would not really recommend that you do anything like that without working with a practitioner who is well versed in measuring your urinary levels of neurotransmitters. I'd look into the Kalish system. There's a guy, I believe he lives in California, named Dr. Dan Kalish. And there are people out there who are certified Kalish practitioners who are really good at addressing neurotransmitter deficits and ensuring that testing is done in conjunction with supplementation. You also get secondary restless leg syndrome. And there are literally a couple of dozen different medical conditions that can cause secondary restless leg syndrome. A lot of times it can be an issue with diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance. It can be an issue with low levels of antioxidants, low levels of magnesium, low levels of iron. And there are a lot more kind of nutritional guns that you can pull out against something like secondary restless leg syndrome, if that's the issue. Some of the things that have been shown to help with secondary restless leg syndrome, if it is an issue, one would be making sure that you get adequate ferritin, ferritin in your diet. And ferritin is an iron storage protein. Probably the top supplement that I like for increasing your levels of iron or ferritin is one called Floradix and I'll link to that in the show notes. But it's basically a ferritin, what's called a ferritin pyrophosphate type of supplement. Another thing that has really been shown to help out is vitamin C and vitamin E. Now the issue with that is I'm not a big fan of high doses of synthetic vitamin C and vitamin E because those have also been shown to increase risk of stroke. So I'm a bigger fan of using just like a good full spectrum antioxidant, something like the life shots, which I've recommended before on this show. My personal naturopathic physician, Dr. Todd, he invented this stuff. It's what I take on a daily basis to mitigate a lot of the effects of me getting exposed to everything from chlorine to solar radiation, from flying, etc. That's a really, really strong antioxidant. That's one that I'd look into from a blood sugar standpoint. Since this restless leg syndrome can definitely be an issue with glucose tolerance. I would ensure that your evening carbohydrate intake is controlled or that you watch it, that you also consider getting on one of these supplements that can help with insulin sensitivity and glucose stabilization. My favorite one for that is bitter melon extract. There's a supplement called MPX100. It's the same thing I take when I've stuffed my face and eaten too much food. And you know, it's kind of like my oh, crap, fallback supplement for when I overeat. But it's called MPX100 and it lowers your blood glucose so you don't get as much as much of an insulin response and a spike in blood glucose. A few other things when it comes to restless leg syndrome. Valerian root, which is a great herb anyways, to help you sleep. Valerian root in studies has been shown to result in an improvement in restless leg syndrome symptoms more in women than in men. But that's another one that you could look into is valerian root extract. And that's something that you can get pretty much anywhere. You can grab that off Amazon or whatever. It's Pretty easy to find. Another thing that I would look into. And again, I'm just listing off the natural supplements that have been shown to have an effect on restless leg syndrome. Folic acid would be another one. And folic acid or folate deficiencies may play a role in the development of restless leg syndrome. And folic acid supplementation can help to treat a lot of different disorders in your peripheral nervous system. But restless leg syndrome in particular is one that's been shown to be effective. And then the last one would be magnesium. And in this case, I'd be a big fan of actually using a transdermal magnesium delivery like putting it on your legs. And I'm not. Have you used the magnesium oil before, Brock, before you go to bed at night?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I've used it like crazy. I love that stuff.

Do you get, like, the issue with the. With the sheet sticking to your legs after you put it on?

At first, yeah. But then you get sort of the scaly feeling, like almost like fish scales on your legs.

Yeah.

Anyway, so you wash it off before I go to bed.

I think it's annoying. So what I do now is there's this magnesium lotion. It's the same company that makes the magnesium spray that I used to use more. Now I use the magnesium lotion before I go to bed, and I'll put it on my legs after, like, a hard workout day. And it doesn't. It gets absorbed super quickly, and it doesn't gather on the skin. It just rubs right in. It's combined with msm, which means it absorbs really quickly into your skin. But it's basically, it's made by ancient minerals. It's called ancient minerals magnesium lotion. And it doesn't result in the same type of issues. You don't get, like, stinging. You don't get the flaking. It doesn't make the sheets feel weird against your skin. So that's the one that I'd recommend. So I know that's a lot of stuff, but those are all the things that I. That I'd recommend you look into when it comes to a thyroid issue. And you know, whether or not there is kind of a link between thyroid and restless leg syndrome. There's some evidence that high amounts of estrogen in both men and women can be associated with low thyroid and high amounts of estrogen because your liver is essentially turning over or metabolizing estrogen at a faster pace can result in a deficiency in vitamin B and a deficiency in magnesium from that increase in estrogen turnover. And so by adding magnesium into the diet, by getting some folic acid into your diet, by using, for example, that antioxidant life shots that I recommended, that also has a full spectrum of vitamin B in it, you'd be addressing some of those issues as well. So that's the skinny on restless leg syndrome and what I'd do about it. Hey, Ben and Brock. So my stomach doesn't seem to like anything in it before I run, if I eat or drink very much within about two hours of going out for a high intensity effort, I get a left sided stitch towards the end of my workout. And on my longer slow runs, which are 90 to 120 minutes, I'm drinking 4 ounces of water or less. Because if I take big sips of water during that kind of a run, I get a sloshing feeling in my stomach, which is really annoying and can often lead to a left sided stitch. Just wondering what's up with that, what.

I can do about it. I'm sure you've answered a question about.

Stitches before, so is there any way we can listen through a back catalog and find out the answer to that question? Thanks very much.

Wow. Side stitch and a sloshing feeling. That sounds kind of annoying.

Gotta love the slosh. So, you know, we talked about side stitching pretty recently.

Yeah, not that long ago.

Yeah. And you know, I wanted to mention something about that in just a second, but let me address this sloshing feeling first. And that's it's pretty straightforward. It's usually an issue that when your foot strikes the ground, your diaphragm moves upward as you exhale and your organs drop down when you foot strike. And that tension not only creates these forces that cause your diaphragm to go into a spasm and cause that side stitch, but that kind of downward jolt of the organs also causes anything that's in there, whether it's water or whatever else, to slosh around quite a bit. And so focusing on more of a rhythmic breathing pattern and you know, try not to turn blue in the face and go into hypoxia when you do this. But trying basically not to exhale when you strike your feet on the ground can really, really help out with this. Best book I can recommend to you is called Running on Air. And it's the subtitle is the Revolutionary Way to Run Better by Breathing Smarter. It's a book that I read recently and I really, really like it. I've been actually using the breathing pad patterns in that book for both running and for Bicycling. And it helps out quite a bit in terms of training your body how not to exhale and put that jolt on your organs when your foot strikes the ground. But yeah, like I mentioned, I mean, like, we talked about side stitches pretty recently and, and I have to admit.

I actually did save this question for it's. We've had. Had it for a few weeks now and I've been waiting until we had the big announcement to make just so we could, we could play this and give us a nice opportunity to talk about a new project that we've started.

That's right.

So basically we keep. Not only do we get people asking the same questions quite often, but we also get people asking for an easy way to. Well, exactly the way that this questioner asked. An easy way to find patterns, past episodes or past topics. So we, we came up with this idea to actually create albums. And I'm making quotation marks in the air when I say that and put them up on itunes.

Yeah, that. And we're also going to build a national BenGreenfieldFitness.com library up in Canada outside Brock's house. So you can just go there and check out previous episodes.

Everything will be in a, in a.

File folder, card catalog, bring your passport and your hockey stick. But yeah, magnifying glass, basically. We realize that we get a lot of these questions that have been addressed already. And just to give you kind of an idea of this, we'll play my answer here in a second to the question that we got just a few weeks ago about side stitches. Because what happens is I end up kind of rehashing some decent information that I've covered before. So Brock and I figured some, since you guys were kind of asking for an easy way to be able to go and access some previous audios that we've recorded on specific topics without having to dig through a whole frickin 90 minute podcast. We just put a bunch of them on itunes. So these are basically like mini tracks, things that we've discussed. The stuff we've got up there so far are audio episodes on the benefit benefits of fish versus fish oil. Top 10 Ways to Boost libido. How to get rid of headaches, how.

To be snacky, how to be a vegan endurance athlete.

How to eat vegetables, how much water do you really need to drink each day. How to get lean as a female athlete without destroying your health.

How to boost your immune system.

I think that's all of them. So I mean, you can go on there and you can just Basically download the full album of stuff. But we also made it so you could just. What are they, like 99 cents? $1.99, something like that.

99 cents each at the moment. And you'll notice, and I take full responsibility for this, they made a bit of a mistake. All of them were supposed to be. You were supposed to be able to download each one individually. I made a mistake. ITunes has some policies in place. I won't bore you with all the details, but just know that the next volume and the volumes afterwards, you will be able to download every single day track individually. This one, there's only four that you can actually do individually, and the rest are album only. But we will definitely fix that in the future, but hopefully it's not a big deal for this first one.

Yeah, Baruch was drinking when he put this album together. No, basically, it's my fault because when you have an episode that's longer than 10 minutes, iTunes won't let you have it available as a standalone track. So we've got a few different episodes on there. Like, I think our one about females and getting lean is longer than 10 minutes. Minutes. So you kind of got to, like, get the whole album to get access to that track. But in the future.

9.99, though.

Yeah, it's still not terrible. $9.99, but $0.99, you can go and just like. Like, if you just want to hear the. The quick 10 minutes, you know how to get rid of a side stitch, which we'll play in a second to give you a sample of the kind of stuff we we've got isolated for you. You can just go grab it off itunes. So we'll put a link in the show notes, but what we'd really appreciate is we'll create a My List list for this as well. And you can share that on Facebook any other way you want to share. But I mean, like, if you spread the good news to your friends and you tell them, hey, look, you know, whatever we heard about how to get rid of a headache naturally, and it's 10 minutes of decent advice from Ben and Brock about how to do this. Just go download the episode for $0.99 off iTunes. It's a. A pretty convenient way. I mean, you could go dig through the podcast, you know, spend an hour of your time digging through the podcast, getting it, or just grab it off of there. So anyways, I think that since I don't know which listener initially brought this up, but I've gotten a few emails about it, you know, Katie or Not Katie Sidestitch. Listener asked about this.

Yeah, she didn't say her name, did she?

Yeah, she asked about this in the audio. And so I figured it was just time that we put something together for you guys. So hopefully you enjoy it and if not, just crucify us in the comments and call us charlatans and whatever else. But I'm hoping that you guys find this kind of useful. So, yeah, we'll put a link in the show notes to it. The Ben Greenfield Fitness Special Episodes, Volume 1. Go check out all the cool stuff that we've got available for you to. To download and listen to at your pleasure. Throw on your MP3 player, get into itunes, and yeah, go have fun with it. So that being said, here's the response to side stitches. All right, side stitches. So you know what the geeky term for for side stitches is, Brock?

I'm afraid I don't.

I mean, the acronym is etap, which stands for Exercise Related Transient Abdominal Pains.

Nice.

There you go for trivia night. So there was actually really big studies that was done in the Journal of Medicine and Science and Sports and Exercise several years ago on side stitches and why they happen. So they took almost a thousand different athletes who participated in six different sports. They looked at running, swimming, cycling, aerobics, which is like, you know, the headbands and the. And the puffy socks and the leotards, of course, of course, basketball and horse riding. I would imagine they were looking at the people, not the horses, but I.

Could be maybe not.

So what they found was that of all of those athletes, swimmers were actually at the top in terms of the population that had the most trouble with side stitches. And runners were close behind. Horseback riders were actually up there, too, but the folks who were least affected were cyclists. Now, the interesting part of this was that a pretty significant number of those athletes also said that they had shoulder tip pain, which is discomfort at the bottom tip of one of the shoulder blades. And that's kind of an important clue for understanding where side stitches come from, because the tip of that shoulder blade down there is basically a referred site of pain for the diaphragm, which is kind of your main breathing muscle. So what that means is that pain that kind of emanates from the tip of the back of your shoulder blade could actually have its source in the diaphragm, which is that muscle that's separating your thoracic and your abdominal cavities. And many side stitches actually originate with an issue going on with the diaphragm. Because if you look at all of these different organs that are inside of our abdominal cavity. They bounce up and down, you know, and this, this is one reason that, you know, a runner, for example, will get more of a side stitch than a cyclist. And all of your internal organs that are bouncing up and down, especially with an impact based movement like horseback riding or running, your, your liver, your stomach, your spleen, these are supported by these little ligaments that hang down from your diaphragm. So every time these organs are bouncing up and down, they're pulling down on the diaphragm. Now, when that bouncing happens as you're breathing out during exercise, that creates a lot of stress on the diaphragm and that results in pain, it results in discomfort and results in what we describe more often than not as a side stitch. And I don't know if you've experienced this, Brock, but have you found that side stitching stitches tend to appear more on your right side than your left side?

You know, when I think about it, I think I get it more on my left, but I can't say that I've actually taken notes.

Interesting. Well, I'll get to why you might be in the minority. You might be a freak. I'll talk about why you might feel it on the left a little bit more. It has to do with your colon, actually. Oh, dear. Yeah, oh dear. But stitches on the right side of the abdominal of the abdomen are much, much more common. And that's because your liver is on the right side of your body and your liver is the heaviest organ in your abdominal cavity. So that's what creates the greatest downward force on your diaphragm. And a lot more than what the stomach or the spleen, which are on the left side of your body, might create. And perhaps you just have a really heavy stomach, Brock. Probably. Anyways, though, there's a lot of friction that can occur between the diaphragm and the liver as well, because the liver tends to kind of ride up into the upper right side of your abdominal cavity, especially during exercise. So that results in that side stitch and especially happens more often on that right side. Now one really easy remedy for side stitches is to change your breathing pattern. So if you look at like a runner, a lot of times breathing and side stitches are like linked together because breathing and stepping patterns are coordinated. So most athletes breathe out on the same leg. So if you happen to want to make yourself cross eyed, go out and go for a run and try and figure out when you're breathing out. And in many cases you might find that you're only exhaling when your right foot hits the ground. That's actually very common. They've done a study, there was one study in the Journal of Science that looked at runners and found that most runners breathe out when their right foot hits the ground. And unfortunately, what that means is that as you're breathing out and your diaphragm basically springs upward when you breathe out, that increases the tension on those ligaments. And so you're breathing out, your right foot hits the ground. The jolting action of that foot lifts your liver upward, and then that falls back suddenly while your diaphragm is still in its up position. So that creates a bunch of pressure on the diaphragm, which goes into this painful spasm that we. That we deem as a stitch. Now, of course, one easy fix for this is you change your breathing pattern. You try and focus on breathing out as your left foot hits the ground rather than as your right foot hits the ground. And you know, that's a simple fix, but something that can help a lot of folks. Now, a few other things that you can do is you can actually try and grunt just a little bit as you breathe out. And that action of grunting or almost like groaning, you know, like a Monica Sully's type of. Type of as your. As your foot hits the ground.

She's a tennis player, for those of you out there who don't know a very noisy tennis player.

She's about two octaves higher than that. That. That can help out. That somehow relieves some pressure on the diaphragm when you actually make that audible as your foot hits the ground. So that's one thing that you can do. And I've actually found myself naturally doing that. Sometimes when I get a side stitches, I'll grunt or I'll groan as that foot strikes the ground, that can help a little bit. But there are some other things that you can do, too. First of all, most runners breathe incorrectly when they're running. And this is something that I'm going to talk about at the Become Superhuman event, just to folks who are attending there about how their posture and how their breathing is during the event itself. But I've really been focusing lately on deep diaphragmatic breathing. When I'm standing in line, when I'm sitting in the car, when I'm sitting on an airplane, when I'm sitting in a conference, deep diaphragmatic breathing through the nose and out the nose, where as you breathe in, that breath originates from deep within your belly. And as you breathe out, it also originates from within your belly or deep within your rib cage. So shallow chest breathing is one of the ways that you can really over stress your diaphragm. And that's one thing that you can focus on both when you are and when you aren't running is good belly breathing. Another thing is your abdominal muscles and focusing on strengthening your abdominal muscles. I'm a big fan of side planking and front planking for this, but basically weak abdominals are going to not be able to support your internal organs and they're going to jostle up and down more if you've got weak abs. So that's another thing that you want.

To consider that's interesting. Both of those things like the deep abdominal breathing and also the strengthening of the abdomen. I think a lot of people don't actually think of breathing that low. Like everybody thinks the breath really happens from kind of like the middle of the chest to the shoulders. But that should be the last part. When you're inhaling, the last thing to move really should be your upper chest. Should all be going into your stomach at first. So it's interesting. Those both go together really well.

Yeah. And it's something you simply have to train yourself to do. I've even found for, you know, like once a week, I'm still doing my 10 by 30 second, you know, 10% grade, 10 mile an hour sprints on the treadmill. And I've even found focusing on deep diaphragmatic breathing for that, deep belly breathing for that has helped tremendously. You'd be surprised at how hard you can be going and still focus on proper breathing.

Yeah. I doubled the length of my duration of plank, like just front plank by doing diaphragmatic breathing. During that, I went from being able to hold it for like 3 minutes to over 7 minutes just by changing my breathing.

And that's a really good point. You can combine abdominal exercising like planking with deep breathing. I mentioned that. Of course, in addition to the liver, the spleen and the stomach tend to pull down on the diaphragm. So the more full your stomach is. And this is just kind of logical, most of us know this. The more down of a downward tug on the diaphragm is going to create and the more likely you are to get a side stitch. So just not drinking or eating too much before you go out, you know, that's, that's something that I think a lot of people already are kind of aware of is, is not taking in too much Fuel, especially if you're running or doing a sport like swimming, for example, would be another example.

And so is that the left side then if you have eaten or drank.

Too much, you're going to notice it more on your left side if it's more of an eating or drinking too much issue. But the other thing that you'll notice is that if you tend to have any type of bowel inflammation, or if your large intestine, just based off your anatomy, tends to rub a little bit more on the inside of your abdominal wall when you're running, that can also cause stitch like pain in both your right and your left side. Because the large intestine tends to span your abdominal wall. And in folks for whom that occurs, focusing on going back and forth between exhaling on the right side and exhaling on the left side can help out almost. Almost like switching every few minutes in terms of your breathing pattern and not sticking to one specific breathing pattern or not getting locked into one specific breathing pattern, that can help. But the other thing that can help out a lot of folks is just paying attention to clean eating before you go out for your run, Meaning that you're going to avoid things that might tend to cause a little bit more inflammation, like gluten, low, like caffeine, like alcohol. Because I know that you up there in Canada, you tend to throw back a few. What would it be? Kokanee before you head out?

Yes, Kokanee or Molson Canadian. Both of those companies make a sports drink that we consume while we run.

Nice. And then soy and dairy tends to be a big trigger too. So you may want to consider like a, a food elimination type of diet as well, to focus on those side stitches. And that I know for a lot of folks that I've worked with has made a significant difference. I've cleaned up the diet of athletes who I've worked with and had them report. All of a sudden they're like, my side stitches went away. And because all of the programs that I write out also include strength training for the abs and also include a lot of running, economy and efficiency work, who's to say how much the food elimination worked versus the strengthening, versus the work on the breathing patterns. But ultimately there's something to be said for cleaning up the diet, especially before you run as well.

Great. Well, everything has got to work in correlation with everything else, right?

Exactly. So those are the main things as far as the side stitch is concerned. And some of the things I would definitely go after visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice. Hi Ben, this is Jim. I'm 46 years old and have been performing fasted workouts for the past 25 years.

I've recently started keeping an eye on.

My blood glucose levels due to a fasted glucose test at 129 and an 8A 1C of 4.8. I've noticed that during my hard fasted workouts, my blood glucose will increase up to 35 points. This will help explain my high fasted test, but doesn't explain my high A1C. I've taken steps to lower the A1C by increasing my cinnamon intake, eating carbs only after my workouts, and supporting my.

Liver with bitter melon.

I was curious though if there was a way of quantifying that 35 point rise in terms of calories released by the liver. Thanks for your help. Yeah, it seems kind of, kind of counterintuitive that blood glucose would go up during exercise. Right? You would expect it to go down. And this is a pretty.

You're supposed to be using it all up, depleting it all. And yeah, it should be rock bottom by the time you're done.

Exactly. And this is a really confusing phenomenon for people. So exercise burns energy and eventually exercise will lower your blood glucose. But exercise is only going to lower blood glucose if your liver actually isn't producing and releasing glucose into your bloodstream to help you meet this increased demand for fuel when you're exercising. So some people do this really hard workout and complete strenuous activity and then they'll test their blood glucose levels, as all of us nerds do when we finish a workout. You go straight to the blood glucose monitor and they'll find that blood glucose is the same or it's even higher after you finish exercising. And the reason for that is because your liver actually releases extra glucose while you're exercising. And it basically is through this process called glycogenolysis. And when your body releases epinephrine or adrenaline, this hormone in response to exercise or getting excited or stressed or, or drinking a cup of coffee or whatever else, the liver releases blood glucose or releases glucose stored glucose in the liver to supply your body with needed energy. So even though exercise actually helps you to lower your blood sugar long term and improves your sensitivity to the hormone insulin long term, what can happen short term during exercise is this bump up in blood glucose from the liver. Now, interestingly, if you track not just blood glucose but also insulin levels, what you'll notice during an exercise bout Is that even though your blood glucose is increasing, your insulin levels are going down, your insulin sensitivity is improving. So your muscle is increasing its uptake of fatty acids and ketones to spare glucose for your brain, and it's consuming a little bit of glucose. But your muscles don't need high levels of insulin circulating in the bloodstream in order to do that. And your liver doesn't need a bunch of insulin circulating in the bloodstream to signal the liver to release storage glucose. As a matter of fact, low insulin levels lead to an increase in glucose output by the liver. And so, so what this means is that even though your blood glucose levels might appear to be going up in response to an exercise session or during an exercise session, long term you are actually slowing down the progression of insulin resistance and improving your sensitivity to insulin, despite your liver kind of having a mind of its own and churning out blood glucose while you're actually exercising.

Now that makes sense if you think about like insulin is known as the storage hormone. When you're in that sort of situation, the last thing you want to be doing is storing it. You're using it, your body needs to be using it right away. The muscles are gobbling it up and churning out some energy from that.

Right, Exactly. Now, I noticed that Jim said that he's been performing fasted workouts for the last 25 years. He's only eating carbs after his workout. People who are on a low carbohydrate diet do tend to be more sensitive to carbohydrate intake. And so, you know, Paul Geminet talks about this in his Perfect Health diet book, how when you're on a very low carbohydrate diet, you often see an even larger spike in blood glucose because your body is fairly insulin sensitive when you first consume that carbohydrate. Carbohydrate source. But ultimately, the benefits of a low carbohydrate intake combined with exercise outweigh any type of short term blood glucose elevation you might get during exercise or from that little bit of carbohydrate that you eat. Now, if you're really concerned about this, Jim is doing cinnamon, which lowers blood glucose. That bitter melon extract that he talked about, that's some pretty cool stuff. I've already mentioned it once. But there's, there's kind of three different groups of compounds in bitter melon extract that are responsible for this blood sugar lowering action that it has. It has one thing called corantin, which is a type of steroid that's actually more effective than diabetic drugs in terms of lowering blood glucose. It's got something called polypeptide P in it, which is an alkaloid that has a blood sugar lowering effect. It's also got what are called glycosides in it. It. And these improve glucose tolerance by preventing how quickly sugar is absorbed in your intestines. So interestingly, most of these activities of these three compounds are still going to act on glucose that you're getting from your diet, not glucose that you're getting from the liver churning out glucose. But ultimately, those are the two main things that I use to control my own blood glucose levels. I've done 23andMe.com genetic testing. I know I've got the genetic risk factor for type 2 diabetes, so I do go out of my way to take care of my blood sugar levels. But bitter melon extract and cinnamon are both really good for this kind of thing, and I'd stick with those. And I would not let blood glucose levels being elevated during exercise worry you. There is no way that I know of to test whether that 35 point rise that he's getting is from from liver glucose release versus, like dietary forms of glucose. But because of the type of diet he says he's eating, I would suspect most of it is just from liver glucose. So I have a question about artificial.

Sweeteners, and I know that lots of.

Low carb products use them, and I was wondering if you could talk about the pros and cons of them, especially how they can impact fasting, like sucralose, saccharin, xylitol, all that other stuff. Also, I like to drink tea and.

Chew gum during my morning fasts.

And I'd like to know if artificial.

Sweeteners can affect how my body reacts when I fast.

Thanks, guys.

Yeah, artificial sweeteners, they're kind of the devil.

Mmm. Yeah, yeah, the sinister sugar substitutes, as they say. You know, first of all, as far as the gum goes, I actually use a gum called be fresh gum gum, and it is a little bit healthier than most of the gums out there. In terms of the artificial sweeteners that it uses. It's gluten free, lactose free, yada yada yada, sweetened with xylitol. I think it's got a little bit of stevia in there and some vitamin B12. But ultimately I stay away from any of the gums that have sucralose and acetylsulfamy potassium and all these other kind of fake sweeteners in them. The main Ones you want to look out for, though. I'll tell you the artificial sweeteners that are okay to use. But first of all, the ones that you'd want to look out for, one would be sucralose and that's also known as Splenda. It goes by some other names as well, but you're going to find that in like Pepsi One and Diet V8 propel water. Sugar free syrup has it in there like the kind of sugar free syrup you'd get at a coffee shop. So the issue with sucralose is that it can decrease your good gut bacteria by about 50%. And compared to all the other different sugar substitutes that are out there, it's got the least number of basically what are called neurotoxic effects. But considering your gut is the home of your immune system, I would definitely, basically what I do is I just don't take any chances. I don't want to take a bunch of probiotics and eat fermented foods and take care of my gut and then kill that off with sucral. So I avoid that one. Acesulfamine potassium. The issue with that is that aspartame, no, it's different than aspartame. Acesulfamine potassium. You're also going to see that listed as acesulfamy K. It's in stuff like Coca Cola. You're going to find that in a lot of gum, like Sobey beverages, stuff like that. But what it does is it can actually cause, ironically, an increase in insulin levels levels. So it sparks an appetite craving a little while after you've eaten it, which anybody who drinks a Coca Cola zero and then they're craving food like an hour later. That's why. And there is some evidence, and this is in rodent studies, which I understand you got to kind of take with a grain of salt. But it has been linked to thyroid tumors in rodents. So that's one that I'd be careful with. Now, aspartame, which you just asked about Brock, that's the one that's known as like NutraSweet equal. I think over in Europe it's known as E951. But that's in a ton of stuff like yogurts and Diet Coke and Ocean Spray and tons of different gum. I mean, thousands of grocery store products have aspartame in them. And aspartame has been well reported in many studies to be linked to the same type of neurological issues you'd associate with something like msg. So you're looking at Dizziness, seizures, brain fog. And some studies have even linked it to stuff like Alzheimer's and nervous system issues like multiple sclerosis. Aspartame actually has methanol in it which converts to formaldehyde when you metabolize it. And that's the same stuff used to embalm a corpse. So something else to be careful of. And that also similarly to acesulfamily, potassium can spike your insulin level and also spike levels of something called leptin. And overstimulation of leptin is one way to throw off your body's ability to be able to listen to messages that you're full. And so it can affect your appetite as well. Those are some of the main ones. There are a few other ones out there that kind of fly under the radar. One is called neotamy. That's a newer one and it's basically just aspartame, but it's been renamed, named, and they made a slight chemical change to it. But you can throw that one into the same boat as aspartame. There's another one called saccharin. That's what you're going to find in Sweet N Low. And that one is kind of similar to acesulfamipotassium in terms of it having some neurotoxic effects. And there is some doubt right now about the safety of saccharin when it comes to its potential for being a carcinogenic. So that's another one that I would be careful with would be saccharin. Now as far as the sweeteners that I would consider to be okay stuff that isn't going to be quite as bad. One would be stevia. That's kind of a natural, you know, a root based sweetener. It's not. There's no studies that show that it's bad for you. It contains these compounds called steviol glycoside. So it makes it literally like 30 to 50 times more sweet than sugar. So you don't have to use too much of it. But it's been used in South America for thousands of years all over the world. It's considered a safe and natural sweetener. There's no governments that have found it to be carcinogenic or neurotoxic or anything like that. And it's relatively calorie free. So that's my top recommendation. If you're going to use gum and stuff like that. Xylitol is probably the least problematic artificial sweetener you can go for. It is still processed. I mean, it's derived from wood or derived from corn, along with like, erythritol, sorbitol, mannitol, any of these other sugar alcohols. But it's not absorbed by the body the same way that sugar is. So it has a lower effect on your blood sugar. It can cause a little bit of stomach upset by eating too much of it, but it doesn't have these carcinogenic or neurotoxic effects because it technically is. Is more natural. Aside from that, the other sweeteners that we use around here would just be like organic coconut sugar and organic raw honey.

Coconut sugar?

Yeah. Coconut sugar has a ton of micronutrients in it. It's still got calories in it, but it has a lower glycemic index. So the glycemic index of honey is above 50, sugar is above 50. Agave nectar is fairly low. But agave nectar, the way that it, it's processed, it actually has way more fructose in it than even high fructose corn syrup. So if you're looking at this from a weight loss perspective, you got to be careful with agave syrup. I'm a bigger fan of just like organic coconut sugar for that. And then raw honey is just really great because it's got a lot of micronutrients in it, Even though it is higher up on the glycemic index, still some fructose in it. If you had to choose two different sweeteners that you're going to have around for a little bit of sweetening here and there, the two that we have are organic raw honey and we get from a local source. So we get some of the immunity enhancing benefits and then organic coconut sugar. But those are kind of the things that I go after when it comes to artificial sweeteners to avoid sweeteners, that would be okay. And even the kind of gum to chew. Like I mentioned, I use the stuff called be fresh for my gum.

So that wouldn't screw up her morning fast then?

No, not really. I mean, you know, sugar alcohols have a very, very slight amount of calories in them, but it's, it's. It's pretty slight. So.

Okay, cool. You know, I know we're going a little bit long, and I was going to actually cut this last question out, but why don't. Let's go ahead and just, just do it.

Okay. Hey, guys. Who are you? On a previous podcast, you stated that you weren't a big fan of the bench press, so I was wondering if you could expound on that a little bit and maybe give me some of your alternatives. Appreciate it. Thanks. Take care guys.

One of the reasons why I wanted to actually do this question is because when you said this a few weeks ago, I believe you actually said bench press is silly and I really wanted to know why. And the conversation went on and I never really got to come back to it, but so I'm glad Matthew asked this. Why are bench press presses I'm silly.

Okay, so from a functional standpoint, bench presses are silly. Don't get me wrong. When you load up a heavy barbell and you give yourself a nice solid base of support underneath your back, you can lift a crap ton of weight and that's really good at building up fibers in your chest muscles. So if your goal is to just get muscles and get a big chest, bench pressing is pretty decent in terms of being able to do that. But it does help.

It also makes you feel really manly depending. That's why I like it.

Depending on how much you bench press. Yes, there are some people who feel less manly when they attempt to bench press at the gym. I suppose anyways though, because you have less freedom of rotation when you're holding a barbell versus holding like a dumbbell or say like a doing a push up or holding a set of cables or elastic bands, bench pressing can put more strain on your shoulder shoulders and it can create some pretty serious shoulder issues. And I've seen a lot of people who get what's called anterior shoulder pain from shoulder overuse from doing the bench press. Granted, sometimes that's because all they're doing is that gym rat habit of just doing bench press without balancing bench press out with scapular retraction exercises like seated rows and pull ups and stuff like that. But ultimately, while bench press is a good exercise for building muscle mass, I'm not a huge fan for anybody who just is trying to get that general benefit of a of a horizontal pushing type of motion. So first of all, don't do bench press period if it hurts. Same thing with dips. Dips and bench press are two exercises that can put a lot of strain on the shoulder. If you are going to do them, warm up well. Do dynamic stretching, do arm swings, do that like arm ergometer at the gym. If your gym has that, do some elastic band movements like side raises and horizontal extensions and warm up well before you go in and do some bench pressing or dips. I kind of throw both those into a similar category. When you're bench pressing, I don't recommend you use a wider than Shoulder width grip when you bench press, because going wider than shoulder width does work your chest muscles more, but it puts your shoulders at a higher risk of injury. So you generally want to go about right around, like where your shoulder starts. Don't go any wider than about a thumb's length out from that when you're holding the bar. When you're gripping the bar, make sure that you balance stuff out. Do your pulling exercises like pull ups, chin ups, seated rows, things of that nature to make sure that you're not creating a muscular imbalance which can also damage your shoulders. When you're bench pressing, work your rotator cuffs. Those are the four tiny muscles that surround your scapula or your shoulder blade. And you can easily do that with elastic band exercises, again with pull ups, seated rows, internal rotation exercises, external rotation exercises, things of that nature. If you insist on bench pressing, try and mix it up between the flat bench, the incline bench, and the decline bench. So you're working your chest muscles at different angles and also giving your shoulder a little bit of break at different angles. And then, you know, for me personally, I rarely do bench press. I'll usually do my top chest exercises are I do a lot of push ups and variations of push ups. So I'll do like Spiderman push ups where I'll do a push up but drive a knee to my opposite elbow as I do the push up and then push that leg back out as I push back up into a starting position. I do standing cable presses. I did some of these yesterday where you're standing and you're pressing the cable out in a standing position. So you're getting a lot of core activity as well. I'll do stability ball chest presses with a dumbbell. So I'll treat the dumbbell like a bench and bench press dumbbells with the stability ball. So my core and my glutes and my hips are having to stabilize me a little bit. If you really, really want a great chest workout that also challenges balance and builds overall strength, just do heavy single arm dumbbell chest chest press on a bench. And you just have to use your other arm for support and for balance. I've mentioned Dan John. We got to get on this podcast at some point. Great guy. He wrote a really good book called Interventions. Really good strength coach. But one of his exercises that I talked about in that book that he really likes is a single arm dumbbell bench press where you're just using your other arm. You know, you're like flailing it out there, trying to balance your body as you're doing a dumbbell bench press with one hand. I mean, there's nothing like building your core strength and your side to side balance like doing a bench press with a decently challenging weight using a dumbbell with one hand rather than using a barbell. So yeah, I mean, there's enough alternatives to a bench press out there that I would stick with those alternatives. Unless you're just going for pure mass. And if you're going for pure mass, by all means bench press. Bench press heavy. But take care of your rotator cuff, include some scapular retraction exercises and get some dynamic stretching in before you bench press.

So awesome. All right, we've gone really long now, so I'm going to do this in one breath. Make sure to go to itunes or go to itunes and I already screwed it up. I'm going to do it in one deep breath, go to itunes and go.

Find Ben Greenfield Fitness has never been hired to do like the legal announcements after, you know, like a pharmaceutical act out on TV and that type of thing.

That's the only reason I haven't been asked to do this.

Yeah, that and he doesn't have that sexy female vibe. But yeah, go to itunes, leave a review or a ranking in itunes. You can go to the podcast and leave a donation@BenGreenfieldFitness.com the show notes for this episode are episode number 237. Head on over there. Grab the links to everything that we talked about as well as the handy dandy my list and the link to audiblepodcast.com ben where you can grab your cool book about enhancing your body body. And finally the big, big announcement is head over to the link that we're going to put in the show notes to the brand new Ben Greenfield Fitness Volume 1 album on iTunes where you can grab little snips and clippets if that's a word on everything from how female athletes can get lean to the side stitching episode to pretty much anything you desire for 99 cents. That's a better deal than you're going to get in Tijuana on just about anything. And, and it's right on itunes from the comfort of your own computer. No need to go to Mexico for a good deal. So I believe that about wraps it up. We'll check out, we'll come to you guys next week. And yeah, thanks for listening.

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