#239: Why You Wake Up During The Night, Is Too Much Nut Butter Bad For You, How To Get Rid of Food Cravings, Exercise Benefits of Alcohol, And More!

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Is too much nut butter bad for you? Why you wake up during the night how to get rid of food cravings. Do collagen supplements work? Natural remedies for seasonal allergies? And are there exercise benefits to alcohol?

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 athlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

So are you feeling a little woozy and lightheaded?

I lost a lot more so than usual. Lost a lot of blood this morning actually. You lost it? You.

Well, somebody knows where it is.

I purposefully lost it. Hopefully someone knows where it is. Heck, I sure hope they do. I gave about eight vials worth of blood, which actually looks like a lot of blood according to my five year old son who is sitting there as I gave it. Daddy, that's a lot and a lot of blood. So a lot and a lot of blood. But it was only like 40 milliliters, so that's a lot.

That's pretty.

Well, that's, that's about, that's about 110 of what you'd give if you were going to go donate blood for the good of people in general or to lower your levels of ferritin or iron or whatever the case may be. So considering, here are my thoughts on that, considering that I did this right before I'm on my way to a race and I'll explain why in a second. It's supposed to take three to four weeks to bounce back from a typical blood donation of 400 to 500 milliliters. So my approximation is if you take about, you know, 10% or so of that, because I gave about 10% that much blood, that is probably gonna take me about three to four days to like bounce back from something like that, you know, like fully physiologically in terms of rebuilding plasma.

So it's Tuesday, so Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, you should be back on track.

Saturday morning, which is race day. Yeah.

So that seems like a dimming.

Yeah. So the whole reason I'm doing this, for folks who didn't know, I'm doing back to back triathlons on one of the hardest triathlon courses on the face of the planet, the Wildflower Triathlon down in California. Half Ironman Saturday morning Olympic Distance Sunday morning, full on performance testing via a wellness FX performance panel on today. And then as soon as I get back from the race. So we're going to see what kind of shiznat happens to the human body when you do stupid stuff to it. So it should be.

But you're going to do your absolute best to mitigate the stupid stuff in between. Right. Like you're going to pull out all the stops in terms of recovery and just prevention of any of the real deleterious effects of beating your body to a pulp.

Exactly. And we'll publish all this crazy science over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com so it should be fun.

And of course you're going to have a great big steak tonight, right?

Tonight, yeah. Great big steak. I was thinking maybe just a can of coconut water. Maybe some. Maybe a carrot. Maybe multiple carrots.

Soybeans.

I'm really feeling like partying, so. Yeah, we'll see. I am drinking a cup of pu Erh tea right now though. You ever had Pu Erh tea?

No, and it doesn't sound like something I want to have.

It's really, really good. It's like this super strong kind of nutty green tea. But it specifically is considered like one of the honorable ancient Chinese teas. And I picked up, you have a nice fresh batch. I shouldn't say fresh. Cause it's like aged but it's pu Erh tea and it's got this really nice kind of stabilizing effect. I like it. It's fun. It's nice to branch out from basically like Lipton's brew or coffee or whatever. So it's interesting stuff. Pu erh news flashes.

To get these and other illuminating news flashes, make sure you follow ben@twitter.com BenGreenfield and also go to facebook.com bgfitness and you can also go to Google if you're an ultra nerd that embraced that technology, which not many, many people have.

Google plus is cool. Google plus is cool. We post stuff on Google all the time. Like I post stuff on Facebook. You don't get other places. Google. So yeah, it's fun. I like all this social media anyways though we should have mentioned that. In case nobody noticed, we do have kind of some new rollicking tunes.

Rollicking, yes.

So if you can name the movie that the brand new Ben Greenfield fitness podcast tunes came from, then kudos. More power to you.

Nothing to give away. I guess the Prince of Tides and.

Apparently I was wrong. But we are going to give something away. At the end end of this episode. So if you happen to be someone who has left a review on itunes, then stay tuned because we've got a cool Stay ituned stay Ahaha. Coming up. All right, let's see what came across the radar this week. Interesting study called the association of GI distress in ultramarathoners with race diet. I guess they could have called it diarrhea in crazy runners and probably gotten the same effect. But what they did was they took a bunch of ultra runners running the javelina jundred which is 161 kilometer ultra marathon 6.5 loops on a desert trail. Which just sounds fantastically exciting and somewhat painful and masochistic as all ultra runs do. But they measured the folks body mass pre race and then after each loop and then they did surface surveys after each loop on the amount of nausea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, all that stuff. So really fun study one of those ones that I'm sure research intern just.

Like, excuse me sir, how nauseous are you feeling right now?

That's a great survey question. Let's check those underwear. Anyways, takeaway was that a race diet with a higher percentage of fat and a higher intake rate of fat and actually resulted in protection from GI distress and the runners who were eating a higher percentage of fat based fuels like seed and nut and chia seed and medium chain triglyceride type of fuels had less GI distress than the racers doing the traditional high carb intake during the event. Isn't that interesting?

That is. Is that because they were running at a lower effort because they didn't have that rocket fuel carbohydrate in their system?

They corrected for that. I mean they corrected for the fact basically runners. No, there wasn't a performance difference in the fat fueled versus the carbohydrate fueled runners.

I was kind of being devil's advocate there by asking that because traditionally speaking, people have always believed that if you're fueled by fat or if you're using fat as fuel, you can't go as hard or as fast. And when you go, everybody knows when you go harder and faster you have a little more GI distress.

Now amazingly, the guy who ate the big Mac and took a week to do it showed the lowest rate of GI distress. No, I'm just kidding. Good for you. So yeah, no high fat intake, seeds, nuts, stuff like that during ultra runs turns out to be protective from GI distress which flies in the face of what we sometimes think. Another interesting study was on the fact that your body can actually make storage glycogen out of fatty acids. Now this is super interesting because last week we touched on how easy it is in someone who's eating like a low carb diet for your body to make storage, storage carbohydrate, storage, liver and muscle glycogen out of those proteins, specifically glutamine, but also some of the other proteins you get in like a protein powder or steak or whatever else. Well, it turns out I'm not going.

To attempt to say the process that makes that.

Yes, the word you made up last week, which was interesting.

Yes, I'm not going to say that again.

Sounded really smart though. But anyways, it was totally wrong. Here's another one. This is called Evidence for Gluconeogenesis from Fatty Acids in Humans. Comprehensive study that looked at all of the different pathways via which fats and fatty acids can indeed be used to form storage glycogen in humans. And this is really interesting. And this kind of again shatters the paradox that you have to eat carbs to store carbs, or even that you have to eat protein to store carbs. It turns out that there are multiple pathways via which your body can take fatty acids and convert them into carbohydrates into storage fuel that could be used during exercise, that could feed into this whole Krebs cycle the same way that carbohydrates can, that can result in significant access to fast ATP stores during fast exercise. Super interesting stuff. So your body can make glucose and can make glycogen out of fatty acids. So that was another one that I think is super interesting. Again, flies in the face of what we've been led to believe from an exercise science standpoint.

Is this the first study of its kind, finding that there are a couple.

Other kind of pathways or routes that have been proposed via which this mechanism might take place in other studies. And I will link to this study in the show notes, by the way, like whether acetone can get converted from fat into carbohydrate and the different metabolic pathways that might exist. But this was the first study that really looked into things hardcore.

Cool. Well, look forward to more studies coming out showing similar stuff.

Yeah, screw on your propeller hat, baby. Go along for the ride. The last thing that I wanted to mention was a study that came out that looked at the use of probiotics and fermented derivatives and the effect on fat loss. And this study, which I'll also link to in the show notes, which was actually done by the Milk Science Research Institute in Japan, sounds like A fascinating research institute, the Milk Science Research Institute. Yeah. Basically what they did was they gave obese individuals fermented milk beverage, kind of like a kefir every day. And what they found was a significant reduction in visceral fat mass, which is the bad fat mass, the belly fat kind of fat mass. That tends to be a real cardiovascular risk factor and a real issue issue in obese individuals. The spare tire, the stuff that produces inflammation. Yeah. High insulin, high what's called H1 or HBA1C levels. All of this decreased in the people who are getting the probiotics. And so here's evidence that eating fermented foods or taking probiotics not only has kind of that immune system enhancing and gut stabilizing effect that most folks know that it does, but it also has a pretty potent fat burning effect, especially in overweight or obese people.

Did they talk about the strain of probiotic that was being used?

Lactobacillus, something, something, something, something. So does that link to the study covers about $100? Yeah. You know, there's. There's so many out there, but I don't remember which. Which colony or whatever it was, but it was, you know, one of the more common ones you're gonna find in fermented beverages. So. Okay.

Yeah, that was. What I was wondering was if it was one that we'd actually be able to find in common use here or if it was like a really specific strainer only for Japan, only available to.

The Milk Research Institute in Japan.

Exactly.

And there was like 10 billion a day of this probiotic. And that's a reasonable amount. That's like what you could find in a supplement or, you know, by eating some kimchi and some kefir and some fermented foods every day. So those are the news flashes.

They were delicious.

Special announcements.

So people are apparently very interested in not losing their hair. Who knew?

Who knew? Now that was the most downloaded track on the new Ben Greenfield Fitness Top Hits album.

It was.

What was it exactly?

It was the best ways to stop hair loss is the track. And it's been downloaded by far the most over all the other tracks. Not to say that there's been a whole lot of activity, but it hasn't been around for long. And extra excitement here. If I had a drum, I would do a drum roll. The version that was. Thank you. The version that was released today. Today being Tuesday, May. Nope, April 30, actually has all the tracks available for Download as a single.

99.

The previous version. If you've Gone there before. If you went there before today, you probably saw the album only label next to six of the 10 tracks. Well, we've corrected that and now all of the album or all of the tracks are Downloadable as a 99 cent single.

Sign. There you go. So rather than melting your brain with what's the girl's name? Keisha.

Key key, dollar sign shop.

Key dollar sign shop, dollar shop. What are some of the episodes, Brock? I don't even.

We've got the benefits of fish versus fish oil. We've got the increase your hematocrit and oxygen levels, strengthen your immune system and shorten the duration. And of course, my favorite top 10 ways to boost your libido.

And there's a bunch more. But apparently we got a lot of hippie and or bald listeners. I didn't realize hair loss was such a, such an inter. Growing. Growing your hair longer perhaps was such a, perhaps a valuable and endearing topic to our listeners. So check that out.

Brand new album topics is in the show notes. If you go to episode 239 and it's the very first thing, there's an awesome picture of Ben doing a goblet squat.

Goblet squat? No, but I mean it's, it's a cool idea. Picture this. You've got, you know, your, your best buddy and he's going bald. He's losing his hair. He feels like, like crap. You guys go out and he has, he has no, no feeling of self worth. He is very self conscious. He won't, he's a terrible wingman, won't talk to the opposite sex. And you say, hey, listen, 99 cents, you could go to itunes and you can grab this, this track and it's 10 minutes long and within 10 minutes for 99 cents, I mean you could parking lot bro. And listen to this. And it's going to tell you everything you need to know about how to regrow your hair, regain vitality, get your libido back, talk to girls again, everything. It can Change lives for 99 cents. So. So there you go.

That's exactly what I was going to say. Changing lives 99 cents at a time. Ben Greenfield Fitness.

So along the same lines, cool news. I can't say too much about this right now, but what I can say is if you have a smartphone, you're gonna want to jump through that smartphone and give us a big hug because the brand new Ben Greenfield fitness app is coming out. I haven't even told Brock very much about this app. Honestly, No.

I got a weird chain of emails. One day I'm like, what is this?

Yeah. Yeah. So brand new app. What we're doing are a bunch of insider episodes every doing a bunch of premium content. I'm shooting videos every week now and we're doing like special podcasts. I recorded an hour last night with Jessa called the Naked Dirty Little Secrets with Jessa Greenfield where we revealed all sorts of embarrassing information about me. And we're putting all of that on the app. So I can't tell you for sure the exact date the app will come out. It's coming soon. Stay tuned because if you're one of the first people to grab it, you get access to all that bonus content. So it's gonna be sick or cool if you want to use it more 80s word. So yeah, there's that. Don't be square and pick it up. It's gonna be keen, slick, nifty. Nifty. You know what else is nifty?

What is going to Thailand.

Going to Thailand will be nifty. And the Thailand trip, the official 2013 Thailand freaking adventure of your life is I don't remember the day. It's like November 24th through December 4th, something like that. But something like that. If you want to get in on that, you got to register for the races. If they're full, don't worry, email me. I can get anyone who's going with my group in like Flint. So you can basically get all the details on the 2013 Thailand Triathlon Adventure. The opportunity of a lifetime. Over on the show notes for this episode. And where are the shownotes now?

Brock Easy there@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 239 Easy to remember.

We're making show notes. Super easy to remember. So like when we get to 240, it'll be BenGreenfieldFitness.com 240 and then the next one will be 241. Probably blew some people's minds with that progression, but you get the idea. So anyways, BenGreenfulFitness.com239 you can get the show notes for this episode. You can get the handy dandy. My list for this episode where we make a handy dandy list. Everything that we talk about. And Last thing, Stamford, Connecticut.

Stanford, Connecticut.

May 18th. May 18th. I'll be there doing a triathlon clinic. Essentials of triathlon training clinic. So if you're around Stamford on May 18, 1 to 4 o' clock in the afternoon, and you have nothing better to do than go geek out on triathlon swing on by. We'll put links to that in the show notes. It's 50. $50. 50 bucks to get into that clinic and it will be well worth it. We're gonna totally feed through the fire hose for three hours, so to speak. So there you go.

Thanks. Listener.

Q and A. Hi Ben. I am a 20 something year old vegan distance runner training for a marathon. I was curious as to what you think about the role of nut but and a vegan athlete's diet. In the past month I found myself overeating the Whole Foods brand cashew butter that contains safflower oil. Do you think nut butters are necessary for vegan athletes nutrition and how healthy do you consider them to be? Thank you so much for your information packed podcasts, your hard work and extensive knowledge are truly inspiring. Mmm. I love me some nut butter.

Me too. I eat spoonfuls of almond butter. Just like in front of the tv.

I used to eat spoonfuls of jiffy. Oh dude, like during college I would get the huge things of jiffy and that was like my go to. I'd either like take a bit. I'd eat the jiffy with a banana, sometimes I eat it with a dark chocolate bar, sometimes with a tablespoon.

But jiffy, that stuff is filled with sugar and vegetable oil.

I did not know that at the time. All I knew.

Well, you probably didn't even care at the time.

Heavenly goodness. So yeah. So nut butters in general. Yeah, I mean, so first of all, yes, nut butters can be a source of protein, especially if you are a vegan or a vegetarian, not athlete, but just person in general. So you can absolutely get proteins from them. And you know, the issue as most people I think are aware of, is that nuts and seeds in general have a pretty high omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acid ratio. And when you look at anthropological research on our ancestors, it suggests that they consumed omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids in a ratio of about one to one. And that ratio in our modern industrialized area as there's been this shift in the availability of omega 6 fatty acids. Acids has changed a lot. Like it' sit depends, but it can be as high as 20 to 1, sometimes 25 to 1 in some folks in terms of the amount of omega 6 fatty acids that they're getting. And the stuff that's high in omega 6 fatty acids would be like seeds and nuts, but also canola oil and soybean oil and sesame oil, corn oil, safflower and sunflower oil are huge. So a Lot of the oils that you're going to find restaurants using and the type of oils you're going to find in processed foods. So the issue here is that Omega 6s are responsible for the inflammatory cascade in your body, which it's important to have to a certain extent. Like you want your body to be able to, when you whatever, scrape your knee to have what it needs to produce the eicosanoids and send your pro inflammatory pain killing molecules to that area. But the problem is that too much Omega 6 competes with the anti inflammatory heart, healthy brain, healthy nerve, healthy omega 3 fatty acids. And specifically where the competition occurs is that omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids compete for the same conversion enzymes. So when you are eating foods that need to get converted to what are called EPA and DHA in your body, you know, say you're eating fish and you're doing a really good job taking fish oil and stuff like that, but you're at the same time eating a bunch of omega 6 fatty acids. There's going to be less conversion of those omega 3 fatty acids into what they're supposed to be in your body. So you know, the trick is kind of this delicate balance between making sure that you don't eat a ton of omega 6 fatty acids and also that you try and, you know, fight fire with fire and kind of overload your body with omega 3s so that those, you know, the competition is skewed in favor of the enzymes responsible for converting those fatty acids. So it's like the more Omega 3 you have floating around, the more conversion of like ALA into EPA and DHA you're gonna get, the more anti inflammatory potential you're gonna have. So that's the idea behind the omega 6, omega 3 fatty acid balance kind of makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. The idea isn't to eat an entirely inflammatory or anti inflammatory diet. You don't want to go one way or the other. You want to keep in balance just like everything else in nature.

Exactly. And when we go above and beyond the omega 6 fatty acids, grains and legumes in general are very, very high in anti nutrients in what are called lectins and phytic acids, as well as a lot of enzyme inhibitors. And even in many cases mold, especially if you're getting like peanuts and brazil nuts for example, are two big culprits when it comes to mold. And so, so you need to be careful. The source of the seeds and nuts and the nut butters that you use. The best way to get rid of a lot of these digestive inhibitors and what are called anti nutrients is to just take your seeds and your nuts and soak them overnight. And after they've soaked overnight, you can rinse them, you can dry them in a dehydrator or in an oven set at the absolute lowest temperature you can put your oven at, or you can dry them even like under the sun on your, excuse me, on your kitchen counter or anything like that. But that can make them a lot more digestible. And there are companies that actually do this. There are companies that will take a nut butter and they'll make a nut butter differently, meaning that they're ground at temperatures that are low, they are processed at very low temperatures, and the result is a nut that has a lot less damage done to it, a lot less free radicals, a lot lower oxidation in most cases. The type of companies that are doing this are also soaking and sprouting these nuts beforehand. I will put a link in the show notes. There's one company called Rejuvenation Rejuvenative. They should have named their company something you could pronounce rejuvenative foods. And they do stuff like probiotic ketchup and probiotic salsa and all sorts of kind of cool cultured condiments, basically. But they also do raw nut and seed butters. And there are other companies out there that do this too. Like Brazilla is a company. Raw Organic is another one. You can get the rejuvenative stuff off of, off of Amazon. And I'll put a link in the show notes for that as well. But you can get the stuff, the nut butters that are going to be the least damaging from like a nutrient and digestive inhibitor standpoint. They're still going to be high in omega 6 fatty acids, but ultimately that would be the healthiest way to go if that's going to be the way that you get your protein versus, you know, grabbing whatever nut butter off the shelf at your grocery store.

So now do you store, without sounding too perverse, do you store your nuts in the freezer?

Freezer? Brazil nuts I store in the freezer. I get them raw from the health food store and store them in the freezer because those are great for your testosterone and your zinc and your selenium. But they tend to be moldy just about anywhere that you get them unless you get them like raw, fresh from a local health food store. Unfortunately, most people think Brazil nuts smell a little rancid or moldy, and that's because they are rancid or moldy. So those I keep in the freezer we go through our almonds and our walnuts pretty quickly. We get them, we soak them, some of them we sprout, we rinse them, they stay in a jar and we don't buy them in such a huge quantity that they're gonna go rancid. So most of those just stay at room temp in mason jars in the pantry.

Yeah. I think the only other ones that we keep in the freezer around here are pine nuts. Only because we don't go through them that quickly.

Yeah. So there you go, nut butter. That's what I have to say. Go nuts on the nut butter in moderation and use the raw organic stuff. Spend the extra money. And that also will keep you from eating too much of it.

Yeah.

Hey, Ben. Hey, Brock. I have a question about an overactive bladder, especially at night, right before going to bed. So pretty much every night do everything, go to the bathroom, and then I lay down and within about 15 minutes I have the urge to get up and go pee again. So, you know, I do that and then, and I'm usually woken up about three or four hours after that and have to get up and go to the bathroom again. I remember back in college when I was racing cross country, one of our coaches always told us, if you're not waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, you're not hydrated enough. I don't know if maybe that's just something that stuck with me. I do drink a lot of water, definitely safe throughout the day and not just at nighttime. And I certainly don't get this urge to have to get up, leave everything, and go to the bathroom like I do right before bed. So I'm kind of just wondering what this might be about and if anybody else has had any similar situations like this. Thanks for all of your help. We love listening to the podcast. Thanks.

So she doesn't sound like a 70 year old man.

No. And I'm guessing her prostate probably checks out.

Okay, that's what I'm thinking too.

Probably. Probably. She may want to ask her cross country running coach about that too. So. Yeah, I mean, honestly, you always gotta give the stupid response, which is, well, make sure you don't drink too much water before you go to bed at night. But this is probably not that type of issue, especially in somebody who's an endurance athlete and kind of a stereotypical endurance athlete who's churning out a lot of cortisol with training because one of your adrenal hormones, specifically your adrenal glands that sit up on top of your kidneys, they churn out these hormones. One of them is called aldosterone. And that's response responsible for your mineral balance in your body, your sodium and your potassium balance. And in a normal body, not that you're like abnormal or freak of nature, but in a normal scenario where let's just say that you don't have a lot of cortisol that you're churning out from runs or whatever during the day, aldosterone is relatively high at night. It naturally goes up before you go to bed at night. And high aldosterone means that you're going to retain a little bit more sodium, which also means that you retain a little bit more fluid. And that means that you sleep better at night because you don't need to, need to take that dreaded walk into the bathroom or wake up at night to pee. And you know, that's one reason that you would be waking up at night to pee is simply beating up your body, you know, increasing cortisol levels. Now the other thing that happens when you increase your cortisol levels is high cortisol is just going to cause your body to rely upon blood sugar a little bit more as a fuel. And when you rely upon blood sugar a little more as a fuel, you're going to tend to go hypoglycemic more quickly. You know, you eat a dinner with high cortisol circulating in your bloodstream, you're going to notice kind of a big spike in blood sugar and then a drop in blood sugar that occurs a little bit more readily compared to if you were in kind of a well rested lower cortisol state. So that's, that's the main idea. And a lot of people kind of know this. It's like if you train too hard and you're over trained, you tend to get up at night to pee a lot. But that's the mechanism that's responsible for something like that occurring. That doesn't mean that that's the only thing that this would be though. There is also this idea behind meridians, and this is kind of a Chinese medicine thing, but there are certain meridians that are associated with certain times during the day. And when you wake up specifically at certain times during the night, that refers to that specific meridian. And, and to give you some examples, about 11pm to 1am is when your gallbladder is at its highest point of energy, it's its highest amount of metabolism that's going to occur during your 24 hour circadian rhythm. So if you find yourself waking up between 11pm to 1am it certainly could be that issue that I just talked about with cortisol. But let's say that your cortisol levels are fine, you've tested your cortisol, you know you're not over trained, you're recovering well. That could mean that you have a problem with your gallbladder. It could mean that you're drinking too much caffeine. That can put a hit on your gallbladder. It could mean that you've got too many trans fats or kind of man made fats like margarine and spreadable cream cheese and the lovely, lovely spreadable peanut butter in your diet. And that also can put a little load on your gallbladder. So that's One thing between 1am and 3am is your liver meridian. And so let's say you've had a history of pharmaceutical use or you've been drinking a lot of alcohol lately, or you've got any type of situation where you're getting exposed to a lot of toxins, a lot of pollutants, whether at work or in your city or whatever. Your liver is your detoxification organ and if it's having to work overtime, then that can be one of the issues that you'd be waking up between 1 and 3am with in a situation like that. You would want to look into maybe doing a liver cleanse. There are a variety of different ways out there there to cleanse your liver. I use sublingual glutathione, which is just like this spray underneath your tongue. You can use N acetylcysteine which is what they use in hospital settings a lot. You can use milk thistle extract. There are a lot of different liver cleanses out there and frankly most of them are pretty decent. So that's another way that you can do it. If you wanted to go more the natural route, juicing with like cilantro and parsley and some of these common liver cleansing supplements can help with that. That if the wake cycle tends to be around 1 to 3am, 5 to 7am is the large intestine. And this is something that I had to deal with when I had not to gross anybody out. Parasites. A couple of times in my life I've had parasites. And you generally about every couple weeks you start waking up like clockwork. Between about 5 to 7am and 5 to 7am is a large intestine meridian. A lot of times if you are waking up at those times, you don't normally wake up at those times, then that can indicate that you may have some kind of a colonic issue. And that can be a gut bacteria issue. It can be yeast, it can be fungus, or it could be like a parasite type of issue. And that's where you would do like a gut cleanse rather than a liver cleanse. So you use, you know, any number of these different gut cleansing compounds out there. Like Capra cleanse is the one that I keep on hand. But those are some of the, some of the times. You remember a few weeks ago, Brock, when we were talking about the whole idea that this eight hour sleep cycle might be a myth. Mm.

Yeah. We actually historically woke up in the middle of the night and actually got things done for a couple hours.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, if you wake up, you know, if you're, if you're fine, if your body's healthy and you just like wake up at midnight or whatever and, or 1am is, or 2am is a lot more common, you know, after you've been sleeping for about four hours. Hours. There's some evidence to show that that was a pretty common practice up until about 100 years ago. And this eight hour sleep cycle was more like a four hour on, two hour off, four hour on type of sleep cycle. And if you're clean and you don't have high cortisol and you know, you flush your body and you cleanse, you don't parasites and you're just a healthy person and you're waking up at night, don't fight it. I mean, get up, get some stuff done, try to stay away from computers and Kindles and stuff like that. You know, read a book, hang out with your spouse, if you know what I mean mean, or your significant other, you know, go for a walka waka and basically just live for a couple hours and go back to sleep. I mean that's another option. So you know, obviously kind of a few different issues. This is, this could be kind of multifactorial but hopefully that at least gives you a blueprint and a little bit of direction when it comes to, you know, why you wake up at certain times during the night and what to do about it if you need to do anything at all.

And I would suggest that you go find your cross country running coach and tell him to download from the itunes album hot tips, the episode about how much water do you really need to drink each day? Because you know, there's only so hydrated you can get. And I think your running coach was trying to over hydrate you.

Yep, good point. Whenever I eat my meal. I always make sure to take in a good amount of of fats, protein and carbs and make sure to get all the good nutrients in for proper nutrition. But after I'm done eating, from the point I finish my meal till the point of my next meal, I'm always craving all types of food. It doesn't matter if it's sugary food or salty food. I just want food basically. And I normally always give into the temptation. I do take chromium supplements, but that really only takes away the sugar cravings for me. So I'm just wondering if you have any tips on that. Thanks.

You know, Jeremy, I used to have the same problem. I had food emergencies between pretty much every meal and actually in the last couple of years. And I will give Ben a lot of thanks for this. I've got it very under control.

Why am I to thank for this?

That because you changed my diet around.

You're eating like higher fat.

Higher fat, much lower carbohydrate.

Also, he posted a picture of me on his refrigerator making a really scary.

Giving me the finger.

Yeah. Making a really scary face like the scary monkey from Family Guy. Just like right there on your refrigerator.

Yeah.

Cravings can mean a lot of different things. And there are a number of different kind of strong cravings that usually indicate your body can be low in a specific nutrient or vitamin or mineral. And I'll get into that in a second. But know firsthand that there can be some psychological reasons for this as well. Now, I've covered food cravings a lot before on BenGreenfieldFitness.com and what I'm going to do in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 239 is I'll link to a bunch of the previous episodes I've done done on these powerful craving control tricks that you can use to eat less food.

Like.

Keeping things in opaque versus transparent containers and using pickles and fermented foods or salty foods to control your appetite. Hot chips. Yeah. Not chips. Not salty chips. That's right. Or swizzles or licorice or anything like that. But basically little steps for eliminating, eliminating food cravings. You know, chewing a lot before you eat or while you're eating, preferably chewing with food in your mouth. I'll put a link to all this stuff in the show notes in terms of a lot of the psychological ways that you can control unhealthy eating habits or cravings. But like I mentioned, a lot of times, what you're craving can be a decent indicator of what's going on from a physiological standpoint. Just because low serotonin, dopamine, blood sugar, a lot of this can be related to what you're craving. So, for example, as we all know, craving chocolate is what? Magnesium, right? Yeah, yeah, magnesium. As Brock takes a break from eating his dark chocolate bar.

How did you know?

So chocolate is really high in magnesium. And a lot of times chocolate also gets metabolized to serotonin, especially if you're eating, like, the really good dark chocolate. And that's a mood boosting hormone. And so sometimes we tend to rely on chocolate for our serotonin levels as well. Now, chocolate and a craving for chocolate can also indicate a chromium deficiency, it can indicate a B vitamin deficiency, and it could indicate an essential fatty acid deficiency. So there are a few different things to think about if you constantly find yourself craving chocolate. And it's very, very interesting. You should just try this if you're listening and you tend to be a chocolate craver. Try adding some minerals into your diet, like use like a trace liquid minerals in the morning, or start taking some magnesium before you go to bed at night, and you may find that your chocolate cravings subside. So that's one thing to think about, carbohydrate cravings, especially for really, really sweet, starchy carbohydrates that can indicate also a mineral deficiency, specifically a chromium deficiency, but can also indicate that you've got some insulin resistance or some hypoglycemia issues going on. And your cell surface receptors may not actually be sensitive to insulin. And we went over this in last week's podcast episode about restoring insulin sensitivity and stabilizing specifically the beta cells in the pancreas. And one of my big, big recommendations in that case was to not only include more minerals and include things like chromium and magnesium, but also to use something like a bitter melon extract. And bitter melon extract is a pretty potent insulin stabilizer. So that works pretty well for carbohydrate based food cravings, like white flour based food cravings, noodles, white bread, chips, biscuits, crackers, whatever weird foods they have up in Canada that guys like Brock eat.

Poutine.

Yeah, poutine. And then as far as I said.

That like a Mexican, that was awesome.

Poutine. So that's the deal with carbohydrates and sugar in general is kind of a minerals issue. Now, salt, salt, as we kind of touched on with this whole cortisol issue in sleep, salt can be kind of an issue with stress hormone fluctuation and also low levels of electrolytes. One of the things that can really, really help you just to test this out is to get your hands on like some Himalayan sea salt. And if you're in a pinch, you don't have any Himalayan sea salt and you just want to try this out. Grab like if you're an endurance athlete and you happen to have like some electrolyte capsules around, you can just break open like four of them and put them in a glass of water and drink that. But if you tend to have cravings for a lot of salty foods, a lot of times it can just be low electrolytes, electrolyte status. And it can also be an issue with stress hormone fluctuations like cortisol. It could be an indication that you need to kind of take a few days easy and repair and recover a little bit. And the other thing that can happen when you're over stressed and you're craving salt is it can be an indication that you've got a B vitamin deficiency. And you'll find a lot of vegans and vegetarians tend to crave salty foods. And one big reason for that is their vitamin B12 detective deficient. So adding those into the diet can be helpful as well, like a vitamin B complex. So that's to do with salt. Usually it's electrolytes, vitamin B and kind of fluctuations in stress hormones. Craving fats like fried foods, oily foods, butane, that can be essential fatty acid deficiency. So we talked about omega 3 fatty acids, you know, fish and fish oil and you know, some of these healthier seeds and nuts, things of that nature. Simple essential fatty acid deficiencies can easily cause you to crave fried foods and oily foods. So you'd want to include more foods that are, that are high in the healthier fats, you know, raw yogurts and dairy and milk derivatives from preferably organic sources and eggs and healthy seeds and nuts and fish and fish oil and grass fed beef and yada, yada, yada, you know, all these healthy fats. So, so same kind of goes for cheese. It falls into that essential fatty acid deficiency category. And then if you're, if you're craving dirt, you're probably pregnant. That's the big one with that. That's the whole pica issue. Clay, dirt, chalk. Actually interestingly, ice kind of falls into that category too. It's two things. It's usually either pregnancy or low iron when you're craving stuff like ice and clay and dirt and chalk. So, so that's something to think about as well. The question is, it's like, do you just start to eat clay and dirt and chalk and ice and see if your deficiency goes away? Do you test it? There is a test that you can do and it's spendy. We'll link to it in the show notes. Even though I do realize this is expensive. It's like a $900 test, but it's from Metametrix and it's called the Metametrix ion profile. It's the same profile that I like to recommend to folks who want, want to test truly what their antioxidant levels are at versus doing this cheesy, useless beta carotene skin measurement that they do at Health Exposed. Sometimes it's an ion profile and it tests your amino acids, your fatty acids, your organic acids, everything, your vitamins A, E, B, coenzyme, Q10, folic acid, pretty much anything that you need to look at to see whether you were deficient in something. And it's a really comprehensive test again, and it's expensive, but doing a one off, you know, might be worth it, especially if you're somebody, you know, if you happen to do like a flexible savings account or a health savings account, you can kind of use that to pay for something like this. I'll put a link to Direct Labs, which will, you know, normally this test to go through your physician is going to be closer to 2000. You can at least get it closer to 900 going this way. But those are some of the things to think about when it comes to food cravings, what your food cravings really mean. And then I'm going to link to a bunch of other stuff because we've got videos and other podcasts we've done with folks like Nora Gedgaudis about food cravings. We can put all that in the show notes.

I wonder, are you actually having cravings or are you just plain hungry? Like maybe you're just not eating enough.

Yeah. And I wrote a post about this at Ben Greenfield Fitness called Is It Bad to be Hungry? And on that post I talk about when hunger is good and when hunger is bad. You should go read it. I'll pull it up and link to it in the show notes so you can go read that and find out when hunger is good and when hunger is bad. So check that out. We'll put that in the show notes. Hello, Ben and Brock.

My name is Steven.

I love the show. I've got a question about collagen supplements for joints and ligaments.

And just wondering if type 2 collagen.

Is any good, what the studies are, if it can be absorbed, if it's.

Helpful, how regular, regularly you need to take it.

I'm 49. I like working out. And I'm hoping that this will help with overall tendon and ligament strength and that it's a good thing to do. Interested in your response?

Thanks. I had no idea there was more than one type of collagen.

This is a timely question because I actually had chicken bones for lunch.

Just chewing on the chicken bone?

No, Jessa makes bone broth and it makes like the chicken bones all soft and you have like all this cartilage and stuff. You could literally just eat it. It's like, you know, it's like eating like this gelatin powder that you can get. We've talked about, like the organic Great Lakes gelatin collagen that you can buy. It's like that. You're just chewing up cartilage. And I like it. I put olive oil and salt and stuff in there, and I'll eat it up with a little bit of regular chicken meat and some carrots and celery. It's good.

Do you actually. Do you ever break the bones open and suck the marrow out?

Yeah, I mean, most of the marrow has already leached into the bone broth that she strained the stuff out of, but you're still getting a lot of the collagen and a lot of the minerals out of the bone.

Okay, so what type is that? Is that type 2?

Some of it is type 2 collagen because that's the basis for your hyaline cartilage, which is the cartilage that gets really soft and edible when you're chewing on chicken bone. So, yeah, type 2 collagen is basically a little bit of articular cartilage. It's a little bit of hyaline cartilage, and it makes up the proteins that are in that cartilage and also forms what are called fibrils, which are this fibrillary fiber based network of collagen that allows your tissue to have this tensile strength, including your skin. For example, someone who's got a collagen deficiency, a lot of times they'll get wrinkles and just bad looking skin as well. So. Yeah, type 2 dry patches. Dry patches, that's right. There have been studies that have looked at the effects of oral administration of type 2 collagen derivatives on stuff like arthritis, and they've found that it does have efficacy in terms of helping to rebuild some cartilage helping with pain relief and helping with bone density in those cases. Now, there have not been, to my knowledge, any studies directly done on folks like athletes who are rehabbing from an injury or even just athletes in general who are trying to keep their joints from breaking down. But I know from personal n equals 1 experiments that the more I use stuff like bone broth, like the Mount Capra cap reflex, which is the supplement that I use that's ground up type 2 chicken collagen, like that Great Lakes gelatin. We keep a couple of canisters of that in the pantry and I dump that into smoothies. The more I do that stuff, the better my joints feel feel, the more I eat chicken bones for lunch. But it really does from my perspective, just as an exercising athlete who beats up my body, I feel much, much better from a joint standpoint when I use this collagen. So I use the cap reflex. That's glucosamine and chondroitin from type 2 chicken collagen. And it's also got cherry juice and ginger and turmeric and proteolytic enzymes and just all sorts of magical stuff in it. But yes, I am a fan of type 2 collagen. I personally use it. You got to be careful with some of the powders and the blends out there because they do add artificial sweeteners. And not all type 2 collagens are created equal. But if you get a good, organic based, healthy type 2 collagen source, basically our sources are we make the bone broth out of organic pasture raised chicken. We get the organic Great Lakes gelatin off Amazon, and then we get the Capriflex from Pacific Elite Fitness. And those are the main sources of collagen in our diet. My wife takes Caproflex too. We swear by that stuff for joints.

Hi, Ben and Brock. My name is Tom. Every Memorial Day weekend I do a camping trip with neighbors. We camp right by a river and, and there's a lot of pollen and mold out where we camp. And it just kills my allergies. My nose gets all congested and my eyes swell up and it's just a terrible situation. I tried over the counter allergy products, but combined with a few beverages of the adult variety, that really puts me me down for the count. So I'm wondering if there's anything I can do that you would recommend that would allow me to address my allergies without actually being a sedative. So if you could answer it, I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

Poor Tom. Poor, poor Tom.

Yeah, Poor guy gets to go camping on Memorial Day weekend.

Just quit camping. Just quit celebrating Memorial Day. I mean, seriously, stay at home.

Yeah, I don't know what he's complaining about. He's mixing beer with some good antihistamine.

That's a party right there. Yeah. And a lot of these.

Once I lost, like, four hours of my life. Well, anti tattoo and was married to a monkey. Awesome.

And you lost all your hair. Yeah. Diphenhydramine and Benadryl and all these popular antihistamine over the counters. You know, they do a number on you from a. From a fatigue standpoint, and you get pretty drowsy. And they also tend to inhibit what's called GI motility. So they constipate you a little bit as well. And yeah, they're gonna make you drowsy. And some people use them even for sleep supplements. And they also work for antihistamine effect. But I think there's better natural ways to go. The first thing I should mention is that we did a podcast with Dr. David Minkoff, one of my favorite wellness docs on kids and exercise, induced asthma and allerg. And one of the main things we really geeked out on in that podcast was how most of this stuff is related to an overactive autoimmune system. And your basis is getting tested for food allergies or getting tested for food intolerances, or just working common autoimmune triggers like gluten and dairy and soy out of your diet. So that would be the number one thing. And you can go back and listen to that podcast, and we'll link to it in the show notes. But there are other things that you can do from kind of an antihistamine perspective to make breathing easier. One thing that can work really well, interestingly, is just adding some vitamin C into your diet and about 1 to 2 grams or so of just a basic vitamin C, and that acts as a natural anti histamine. So that's one really good way that you can get that in your diet or that you can. You can fight off the anti histamines or. I don't even know what I'm saying. It is an antihistamine. You know what I'm saying?

So you just dose with that leading up to. Up to the camping trip. And while you're on the camping trip, not necessarily necessarily, like for all time, just.

Yep, exactly. Magnesium. Magnesium helps with nasal allergies. It helps with breathing problems. It's got a little bit of a dilatory effect on your bronchial tubes on your soft tissue. And in addition to making sure that you include magnesium rich foods like green leafy vegetables and to a limited extent, soaked and sprouted seeds and nuts and stuff like that. Just using like a natural calm magnesium on a daily basis and you don't have to take it at night, it's not going to make you fall asleep and go head down on the breakfast table if you take it in the morning. But doing a little bit of magnesium can help with allergies and breathing problems as well. So you're looking at about 1 to 2 grams of vitamin C, about 400 to 600 milligrams of magnesium. Just stop when you get diarrhea, basically, because that also would be a fun way to celebrate Memorial Day. A few other things would be to have a cold pack around. In many cases if stuff just gets out of control. Putting a cold pack over your eyes or on your face helps to reduce a lot of that inflammation and that increased blood flow to your nasal passages and your face. Especially if you're just somewhere where you have no choice but to be there or it's a social obligation or something like that. If you're able to have a cold pack around, that can help a little bit too. And you can always just put some ice into a napkin if you have to. And dabbing that in and around your face can help out a little bit. The other thing on a similar level is photosensitivity. Sensitivity to light is going to go up when you've got a lot of rhinitis and inflammation in your nasal passages or hay fever going on. And wearing sunglasses can help to reduce your sensitivity to light and help your eye from, from getting that excessive watering and tear formation. So that's another thing that you can do in addition to putting a cold pack on your face is wearing sunglasses. So as you're walking around with your sunglasses on and your cold pack, you know, ace bandaged around your face. A few other things that you may want to consider. One is a neti pot use. You ever used one of these neti pots, Brock?

I sure have, yeah. I quite like them.

Little Aladdin's Lamp lamp. And it's an Indian remedy. It's been used for thousands of years in India to flush the sinuses and kind of keep them clear. And they're inexpensive and they're easy to use. And you just mix some electrolytes like a non iodized table salt into some water, like lukewarm water, and you pour it into the pot and you flush out Your nasal passages by leaning over a sink with your head kind of turned to one side. And it feels funny the first couple of times you do it. Pouring it into the nostril and kind of rinsing your nasal passages out. But during allergy season, that can really help using a neti pot. So that's another thing to look into.

Okay, so this next question is actually a written in question, so I'm going to have to use my voice.

It's been a while. We should put you through some, some vocal exercises because you don't get to read that many questions on the show. The lips of the tongue, the lips.

The teeth, the tip of the tongue. Red leather, yellow leather. Red leather, yellow leather.

Mama ma ma ma ma ma.

Many, many, many, many men. Okay, I'm ready.

And fire away.

I recently started brewing beer at home and wanted to know if there are any health benefits to non pasteurized brew. On the same note, I lift weights regularly and have heard alcohol is detrimental to muscle hypertrophy. I don't drink every day and when I do, it's usually only beers.

Well, first of all, the whole unpasteurized beer, organic beer thing, it does have a little bit of truth to it because when you filter the yeast out from beer, and that's something that happens when beer is pasteurized, you're getting rid of brewer's yeast and a lot of nutrients and minerals like chromium and a lot of the B vitamins and some of the healthy things you're gonna find in yeast. You know, there are some people like Dave Asprey, you know, the bulletproof exec guy, and he talked about this at the Superhuman event, how, you know, a lot of these foods like brewer's yeast and yeast based compounds have a lot of mold in them anyways. And so, you know, by avoiding those, you're actually getting more benefit or, yeah, more benefit than harm from what you're missing. But you know, I haven't seen a ton of evidence to necessarily say that you should completely eliminate yeasty foods or fermented foods. When you're looking at a beer that is unpasteurized, you kind of look at something like cow's milk, like unpasteurized cow milk. And the reason it's pasteurized is because the FDA regulates cow's milk. And it says that the animals that are producing the milk are pumped with chemicals and growth hormones, which they are. And that makes the milk that they produce unsafe to drink and unsafe to consume. And so they boil the milk and they pasteurize it and they also kill all the vitamins and the minerals that are in milk. That's one of the reasons that pasteurized milk just is not all that great for you from a nutrient standpoint, regardless of the taste perspective. And when you look at pasteurized beer, it in a similar way loses a lot of those health benefits. Because a lot of these studies that have been done on beer that have found that beer reduces your chance of blood clots or increases your HDL cholesterol or provides you with some of these B vitamins and some of these minerals. Most of those were done with unpasteurized real beer and not with the pasteurized crap that you buy at the grocery store that's not Bud or Bud Light. Exactly. And there are a lot of decent brands out there that you can buy at the grocery store without making your own beer that actually do unpasteurized beer or beer that hasn't been filtered in a way that removes that yield. I know Sierra Nevada around here is one of the more popular ones. It's not an organic beer, but it is unpasteurized and unfiltered. There are some others. Dogfish Head, which I think might be out of Portland. I don't remember. They do one. If you were to go and use Dr. Google and look for unpasteurized and unfiltered beers, you're going to find a bunch of brands and a lot of companies like grocery stores, like Whole Foods and stuff will carry these unpasteurized. An unfiltered beer. It's not like cow's milk to where it's like this, this black market that you gotta, you know, get up at midnight and sneak in your Batman gear to the local farm to find, you know, you can find this stuff at a grocery store. Yeah. The unpasteurized is healthier as far as the exercise effects. First of all, this reminds me of a study that we talked about on the podcast way back in the day, the one they did on marathon runners. Do you remember this one? They gave the marathon runners beer. Oh, de.

Alcoholized beer. Yeah.

But it was non alcoholic beer. And they found that they were three times less susceptible to infection and inflammation after the marathon. And their risk of developing a cold was cut by one third because of the high concentration of polyphenols and vitamins and minerals in that non alcoholic beer. So that was one study that they did. And then there was another study where they actually looked at the hydration effect effect of regular beer and they found that beer actually hydrated better than gatorade and one of the reasons was because the carbonation in the beer helped to quench the thirst, that the carbohydrate content of the beer was somehow getting better absorbed than what was in the Gatorade. But ultimately, when they were testing these subjects in this post exercise beverage or with this post exercise beverage where half the people got beer and the other people got some kind of a sports drink, they found that the people who got the beer tended to recover a little bit better. And I'm trying to remember, trying to remember if they used a sports drink or if they used water, it may have been water that they used. Either way though, they found that beer could rehydrate you. That was the takeaway. So it's interesting that beer even has this hydrating effect. Now, of course there is first of all the gluten and the celiac issue with beer that is derived from, from wheat and most of the beer that is not derived from wheat, like you know, omission beer or any of these gluten free beers that are celiac friendly, that type of thing, they taste like crap. But for anyone who's gluten sensitive or who's trying to live a gluten free diet, you know, beer would not be a good choice compared to something like wine or something of that nature. Now as far as alcohol in general, there are a few things that I want to make people aware of. First of all, alcohol a lot of times is blamed for making people fat. But I've found that in most cases it's what you eat along with the alcohol that tends to be more of the issue. You know, those salty chips at the Mexican restaurant versus the tequila. And that's because alcohol has a really high thermic effect. And about 20% of what you drink from alcohol is actually burnt in the processing of that alcohol. So that's one thing that's interesting is even though alcohol is labeled at seven calories a gram, it's really closer to about five and a half calories a gram because it does have a high net effect of metabolizing it. So that's one thing to think about when it comes to alcohol is if you're going to have a glass of wine with dinner, it's not going to make you fat. You just need to make sure that you adjust for your food intake with dinner. Know that the alcohol has calories, but it's not, not as big of a villain in fat gain as I think it's been made out to be. Moderate alcohol consumption has been shown to improve your insulin sensitivity, to lower your triglyceride, to improve your blood sugar control. And that is with things like wine. Red wine specifically is where most of these studies have been done in terms of insulin sensitizing effects. But that's one other thing to think about.

That's the key word being moderate in that case. Case, though.

Yeah.

And. And moderate being one glass of alcoholic beverage for a woman and two for a man.

Right, exactly, exactly. And you've probably heard that.

And you can't stockpile those.

Yeah, yeah, stocks. As fun as stockpiling is, you've probably heard alcohol, five days, I get 10 drinks, lowers testosterone. Right. That, that's another thing that, you know, I, I've even mentioned that. But you have to consume a lot of alcohol to get that lowering of testosterone. So in the studies that have shown testosterone to be lowered, they're looking at about 30 to 40 grams of alcohol per day for a three week period of time. So that's the equivalent of three drinks a day for three weeks to lower testosterone significantly. And that's some serious drinking.

That's some college drinking.

Exactly. And some serious bingeing similarly, that it takes to do it in a 24 hour time span. So again, if you're drinking heavily, you don't have to, or if you're not drinking heavily, you don't have to worry, choose my words carefully or go get a drink. You got to not be quite as worried about this hormone testosterone type of effect. So that's another thing that I think kind of alcohol gets vilified for. That's not as big of an issue. So ultimately that kind of the takeaway here is that you can get a long term effect on insulin sensitivity when you're doing something like having a glass of wine with dinner. Alcohol does not have as many calories in it as we've been led to believe. And if you're careful to adjust for the amount of calories in the actual food that you eat, that you eat along with the alcohol, you should be just fine. Unless you're binging or drinking a lot of alcohol, it's not going to be that bad for your testosterone and your hormone levels. And then finally, as far as it comes to his question about hypertrophy and what we refer to in exercise science as muscle protein synthesis, there's actually no research that shows that exercise accelerates or alcohol accelerates exercise induced muscle damage or affects muscle strength. And they've tried to do a couple of studies on it and have found nothing except that exhaustive endurance Training like running for hours followed by post workout alcohol intake in about the 120gram range, which is a lot of alcohol, significantly suppresses some of the hormones responsible for repair and recovery. So all of the people who are hanging out in the bar after an Ironman triathlon probably have a little bit to worry about, but they also probably don't care at that point.

So yeah, at that point, yeah, it's the ones who finish the extra long runs on the weekend and then go straight to the bar are probably undoing a little bit of the work that they, they did for themselves. But it doesn't sound like it's that often. Waffle.

Exactly. So that's the skinny with alcohol. I wouldn't worry about it in moderation. I personally have a glass of wine with dinner just about every night now and occasionally get out and parte. But I realize that that doesn't do the greatest things for the next day's workout. So there you go.

Now I want to clarify, just get you to clarify one thing you mentioned with the beer, the gluten that it contains gluten now more. Most beers like there are wheat beers of course that are made from wheat, but the majority of beers and ales and lagers and stuff are made from barley and hops which don't contain gluten.

Actually that's.

Where's the gluten coming from.

That's a myth. Barley and hops do contain proteins that are of a very, very similar structure to gluten. The protein in barley is called hordeen H O R D E I n and the gluten is called gliadin. And in rye there's a gluten that's called sacalin S E C A L I N and both of these proteins and people who are gluten sensitive, who have issues with gluten, who have issues with celiac. For those folks, these beers that are made of barley and that type of thing, they're still an issue. So if you're going gluten free, you basically just can't drink beer unless it literally is labeled like a full on gluten free beer.

You're right about those. Those are awful. They're not, they're not beer. They're just some sort of weird beverage.

Yeah, so that's the deal with beer. And like for me personally, beer messes me up. It flips my stomach. I feel horrible after I drink a beer. And I do fine with alcohol like wine and vodka and stuff like that, but beer isn't, is a Big no, no. For me personally, it just messes me up.

I think we had a conversation at a party in Thailand where I was standing outside, outside the tent and you were asking why? And I said, because I'm farting my way to the moon. You looked at the beer that I was holding and held up the vodka that you were holding and said, that's why I drink vodka.

That's probably a good one to end the podcast on. I think so. There we go.

So if you want to hear more about me farting my way to the moon, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com239 and you can get a link to everything, although the.

Free box of life shots.

Oh, yeah. Oh, we've got a very important thing to cover.

Okay, so we're going to start giving stuff away. If you leave a review on itunes and this box of life shots, valued at 35 bucks, this is the potent antioxidant packet that I take every single day to mitigate the effects of swimming in chlorine and living in a polluted city and stuff like that. Life shots. And I'm gonna give a box of it stick in the mail to Amy. E noss. A M y e noss. Amy noss. And Amy says this love at first listen. And she gives us five stars. Here's what she says. This is so heartwarming. I listen to Ben and Brock on my way to work and it feels like Christmas morning. Every time I find out a new episode is posted, Ben reveals the most interesting and useful information you would have believed existed. Thank you to for getting me excited about my otherwise ho hum commute. Oh, yeah, bummer. I like to think Amy would probably be depressed and living in a dumpster if it weren't for this podcast.

Yeah.

All right, so Amy, if you heard us read your review, then let us know. Write in to ben@bengreenfieldfitness.com and we are going to get your free box of life shots out to you. And then finally, we have. Speaking of spreading the love, we have a new URL that people can go to and this is a huge way to help the show out. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com love and love. And when you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.Com WAV.

Spelled W U V no, no L O.

What happens is there's a handy dandy little pre written tweet there or a Facebook post or a Google post where you can go share the wove. So there you go.

That'd be awesome. Please do that. It'll be fun.

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