Ben Greenfield’s Ironman Medical Conference 2014

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.

We're going to start.

So my name is Ben Greenfield. I will apologize if my voice is up a few octaves right now. I've still got on my tighty underwear from the underpants run this morning. So slightly uncomfortable, slightly squeezed, but it's.

Kind of weird to be up here actually, because.

Five years ago I talked here and I talked about the physiology of fueling Ironman.

And at that time I was, or.

Thought I was really steeped in the latest, greatest research on how to eat during these things.

And the message that I talked about back then was pretty standard. It was right around in the range of 40 to 60 grams of some kind of a mix of fructose and maltodextrin each hour during exercise, gel and liquid sources on the run, liquid and solid sources on the bike. And that was the way that I lived.

And actually the last time that I talked, I was getting ready to race Ironman. And in that race I would eat 40, 50 gels from the start to the finish and I'd feel great during the race, then lay awake in bed at night with my feet twitching as the sugar and caffeine kind of surged through my body.

And I've made some changes since then and that's why I'm back, because I want to talk to you about some of the changes that I've made that reflect not just an emphasis on performance.

And dumping gas into the tank while.

You'Re exercising, but also an emphasis on health. And since I've made the changes that I've made, I've experienced some pretty significant biomarker changes as well in terms of.

Hemoglobin A1C, a three month snapshot of.

Fasted blood glucose levels, cortisol, testosterone, HSCRP, other inflammatory cytokines, all the things that are a little bit of a reflection of the kind of things that you're putting into your body during exercise. So today I'm going to tell you the type of things, the type of changes that I've made and that I'm working with my athletes on for fueling during training. Like each day, some of the fueling changes that kind of shatter the paradigms of what a lot of people are fueling with during training and then why.

You'D want to make some of these changes or advise your patients to make some of these changes or make these changes yourself. Who's racing, by the way, on Saturday? Okay, don't change up anything you're doing based off what I talk about. And actually incidentally, I am going to be doing some of the things that I talk about in this talk because I literally just one week ago found out that I am going to be racing on Saturday. So I will be out there, but I'm sandbagging right now that I literally just found out I was racing. So don't discount everything I have to say if you see me out there looking really, really uncomfortable.

I've put resources for everything I'm going to talk to you about@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kona14 so.

You can go there for resources if you don't like to take notes or you want some hyperlinks to things, that type of thing.

A little bit about me. Speaking of tight underpants, I used to be a bodybuilder.

Total bro science sport. Like that's where I got into the geekery of eating and physiology. Just because it's a sport where you have to look good on stage, the equivalent of your mom's underwear. Or in this case, by the way, are the photos showing up okay? Like are the slides showing up okay? From my perspective, they're kind of eh. Well, we'll see anyways though.

I used to be a bodybuilder and then I got into triathlon in college.

And I raced for Ironman triathlon for about eight years until last year. Last year was my 10th Ironman right here on the island. I thought that was going to be my last one and it turned out that it wasn't. And maybe this next one is going to be my last one.

We'll see. But what I did was I made.

A transition to Spartan racing and obstacle racing, which I've been doing a lot of these days. And that's where you jump over teeny tiny fires that they try to make look a lot bigger than they actually are in the photos and the TV coverage. But that's how I keep busy. I've got a wife and twin boys at home. My wife and I actually teach every month healthy cooking videos. We've got a little membership website where we teach people how to eat healthy, how to live healthy, how to take care of their bodies and how to strike that ideal balance between health and.

Performance and then I also have a New York Times best selling book out on training.

Well, specifically everything that goes beyond training. All the things we're gonna talk a little bit about today, nutrition, physiology, things along those lines. If you're in here and you pre.

Registered, you get a free copy of that book.

It'll be on the back table back there afterwards. And if you didn't get a copy, email me after, tell me you were here and I'll hook you up with something, some kind of a discount or something.

So let's jump in. How many of you have, even if you're not racing this weekend, how many of you have you raced?

Marathons, Ironman events, triathlons, things of that nature?

Okay, so these are going to be some familiar scenes to you. We've got the quintessential pre race pasta party.

You load yourself up with Gatorade pasta, lots of carbohydrates, huge surge in blood glucose levels.

The prevailing theme right now is that.

You need to do this type of carb load to perform well on race day.

You need to top off the glycogen.

Levels of the liver and the muscles. And so we line up like cattle at the pre race party to shove.

Pasta in our faces.

This is another very familiar scenario. And this is the way that I used to roll during faces was lots of sugar based gels on the top tube, on the seat tube, on the down tube, pretty much anywhere where I could squeeze sugar. I actually got to the point where I would shove as many gels as I could into my pants too because I got myself to the point where I could eat about six gels an hour. So I was pretty much just doing pure sugar the whole race. So I, I had a good system down. I would put the full gels in one cycling pant leg and then the empty ones in the other so I didn't litter on the course and I would have really, really sticky thighs afterwards.

This is another really popular theme in exercise nutrition and recovery is getting that whey protein or that carbohydrate based recovery.

Shake, usually that magical 4 to 1 carb to protein ratio in within 20 minutes of the workout when it's going to get soaked up by your muscles.

And we'll talk in a little bit about why the science behind this is.

Not necessarily that sound. Because all the studies that have shown.

This to be an effective post workout.

Fueling strategy were done in people who exercise in an overnight fasted state. And a lot of people are still burping up their pre workout scone when they're dumping their whey protein shake into the mixer cup. And then of course, this is a typical scenario too, carrying as many gels.

And as much sugar as you can out on the ride. Because somehow we've been led to believe that the human body is unable to.

Tap into its own fatty acids as an energy source, unable to tap into its own adipose tissue.

And so we're kind of anchored to carrying all this fuel out there with us, when indeed, based off of a lot of research that's being done now.

On fat adapted athletes and fueling with.

Things other than sugar, that may not.

Actually be the case.

Now there are a lot of athletes.

Right now using this right here insure. Plus few of the pro athletes out there right now actually they drink their insure before the race. They drink their insurer after the race. You see the insure during the race, that or the Red Bull.

And it does say on the label.

Number one, doctors approved. I don't think it says approved by doctors. It's something like number one, doctors approved insure.

But this is an ingredient list. And the fact is that even though a lot of these ingredients have actually been shown to be beneficial for short term performance and for just dumping some gas in the tank to keep the body going, they aren't necessarily ideal for the human body. You see things like milk protein concentrates that a lot of people frankly have.

An allergic reaction to, especially if they.

Have gut issues, leaky gut, et cetera. You get a lot of undigested protein.

Fragments hanging around in the bloodstream.

Canola oil, a vegetable oil that's highly prone to oxidation when you're already dumping oxidation into your body during exercise. Soy protein concentrate, another really, it's really a culprit when it comes to potentially allergenic compound that a lot of people.

Don'T do well with. Long term.

Corn oil, again, a readily oxidized vegetable oil. Some of the things in here are.

Okay, but many of them, and I'll.

Go over some of the reasons why here in a second, many of them are simply not healthy for the human body. So here's why. Some of these Frankenfuels are things that you want to be really careful with. The first is fodmaps. How many of you have had that.

Diaper moment during a run? It's happened to me during a race. I've literally run off the side of the road and had to hose my pants down at a farmer's house to rinse all of the crap that was going down my backside. During a race. I have tried every single fueling strategy that's out there. I've dealt with gas and bloating. I've coached a lot of athletes who.

Have had this trouble during exercise. And a big, big reason for that is FODMAPs. Fermentable carbohydrates.

FODMAP stands for fructans, oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols.

Readily fermentable forms of carbohydrate that frankly a lot of people don't do well with, and they especially don't do well with them during exercise. If you were to Google fodmaps, you can get a complete list of the foods that are full of these type of compounds. But actually a lot of bars, health drinks, energy drinks, gels, the type of things that athletes are consuming during exercise and then complaining about bloating afterwards, they're chock full of these fodmaps. So that's one issue. It's not like a longevity or health issue as much as it is a comfort issue for athletes. Autoimmune triggers. I talked about soy, wheat, dairy. There's a lot of these things that people just don't do that well with from an allergenic standpoint. Even just something as simple as wheat that's been bred for high yield crop, that concentrates the glutens in the wheat and, and that gluten protein is not that digestible by the human body when it's ingested in those highly concentrated amounts. Chemical preservatives. There's actually a really interesting study that.

Just came out that showed the effects of these specifically on testosterone in men.

But basically a lot of these chemical.

Preservatives can be endocrine disruptors or potential carcinogens, or they lead to the same issues as fodmaps, meaning a lot of gut disruption.

Artificial sweeteners. You're going to find these in a lot of these sports compounds too. Artificial sweeteners. The research goes back and forth on their potential to trigger appetite, cravings and things of that nature. But that's usually not weight gain.

With the population walking around this island, I don't know if you notice, is.

Not that much of an issue, but health can be. There's a lot of studies, primarily done granted, in rodents that have shown that artificial sweetener consumption can affect your gut microbiome, your gut bacteria, potentially decrease the amount of good bacteria in the gut.

Which can have an effect on the immune system. Things like sucralose Acetisal family potassium, et cetera.

But if you look at a lot.

Of things that are out there, I mean, you walk expo turn over the.

Label of everything there, almost all of.

Them have either sucralose or acetylfamin potassium in them, along with a lot of those other ingredients that were on that insure label.

This is a big one for me. I want to look good and I want my joints to feel good if I'm going to be in this sport. Long term reactive oxygen species formed by high consumption of carbohydrates along with sun exposure for long periods of time, along with heavy exercise, that can be a big, big issue with creating a ton.

Of free radicals in the body that.

Can lead to connective tissue degradation. And basically the way I think about it is this. If you see one of those older triathletes that looks really wrinkled, older than they really should be, skin is connective tissue. So if it looks like that on the outside, you've got a pretty good bet that it goes deeper than the.

Skin level when it comes to connective tissue degradation. What free radicals are doing.

Advanced glycation end products. This is what occurs. This is for example. Let me give you an example. We hear a lot and I don't.

Know if you've seen this in the news lately about high fat diets, like eating high amounts of saturated fats and this news that fat is not actually associated with as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease. And saturated fat may not actually be that bad for you, but the fact.

Is it actually is bad for you, especially if cholesterol is hanging around a long time in the bloodstream and glucose.

Is able to form glycation end products.

With that cholesterol, because that's what gives you oxidized cholesterol that can lead to.

Things like an increased cardiovascular risk or increase for cardiovascular risk.

Advanced glycation end products are basically formed.

When you've got lots of proteins and.

Lots of cholesterols hanging around in the bloodstream along with big surges in blood glucose. Not as much of an issue during.

Exercise because that glucose is burnt really, really rapidly. It's not hanging around the bloodstream for very long at all.

So this isn't an issue if your.

Exercise fuel has high amounts of glucose.

In it, but it is an issue if your daily diet is not reflective.

Of some of the things that I'm going to talk about in a second and is resulting in blood sugar fluctuation all day long, which is a really, really big practice in a Lot of athletes.

I mentioned testosterone.

There was another study that came out recently showing that endurance athletes have a higher propensity for teeth degradation for wearing of the teeth. And part of this may be due to limited salivary production based off of what the study was saying. But it may also be due to just constantly having sugar in your mouth, whether it's carbohydrate rinses or glucose, sports drinks, things of that nature. So teeth are an issue here as well.

Now there was a really interesting article.

That was in the Boulder newspaper, which of course is one of the Mecca locations for our sport.

And it was entitled Boulder Athletes Resolutions Include Throwing Out Sports Drinks and Energy Bars.

And the subtitle, I love it.

It's keeping it real. And one of the athletes, I don't remember who it was, they quoted in this article says, you don't put crap fuel into a high performance vehicle. Just because a race car is burning through all that fuel doesn't mean you don't put high quality fuel in it. Some people have the philosophy that they're training so hard and with so much intensity that it doesn't matter.

And this was me. And it is a lot of the athletes that I speak with.

You pretty much dump anything into the body that keeps it going. Any amount of glucose, fructose, maltodextrin, mixes.

Of simple and branched chain sugars, because that's what we've been told keeps the body going.

And that is true when, but it's taught to us not in the context and not through the lens of longevity, health and performance, but just through the lens of performance. And we need to be thinking deeper than that when it comes to the.

Folks that we're working with, the athletes that we're coaching and ourselves. When we're out there racing, we have to think of ourselves like high end sports cars. Although I actually would rather have like a Hummer with Gatling guns. That's more the way I roll. Okay.

Now usually when I tell someone like this, the feedback that I get is.

This stuff is engineered right? We've got like Gatorade Sports Science Institute, for example, just a fantastic laboratory churning.

Out lots of research, doing lots of tests on athletes and engineering these fuels for performance. But there's a few things that we don't take into account when we're looking at a fuel that's been perfectly engineered for athletes. The first is this. I don't know if you can see this photo very well, but this is me lying on a table at University of Connecticut. I just run three Hours on a treadmill after following a high fat diet for 12 months. They're doing a muscle biopsy of the.

Left thigh and just for giggles, they're drawing blood at the same time on the other side. And they repeated that. They flipped me over. We did fat biopsies, muscle biopsies, gut microbiome, we did full blood workup, we did resting metabolic rate beforehand. We looked at percentage of fat versus percentage of carbohydrate burned at rest and during exercise. And there was a little over a.

Dozen athletes that follow this high fat. And by high fat, in this case.

It was a full on ketogenic diet. What that means is 80 to 90% fat based diet, which by the way, I do not endorse. I think that it's kind of a cool biohack if you really want to see what it feels like, or there are some medical applications such as epilepsy.

I'm a bigger fan of a 50.

To 60% fat based diet.

But regardless, this was an interesting study.

They had another group of athletes who followed a traditional diet, the traditional diet that's preached to us currently in prevailing.

Sports nutrition literature, which is about 50 to 60% carbs or so. Pretty reflective of the USDA food pyramid really.

And then small amounts of protein or moderate amounts of protein and very small amounts of fat.

Well, this study was really interesting because it highlights the fact that I showed you that slide of the person running around with all the gels attached to their body, like all the carbohydrate that.

They had out there with them.

Now, what is taught right now in the textbooks is that the human body is capable of oxidizing 1.0 grams of.

Fat per minute during exercise.

That's the maximum amount of fat that we can tap into. Well, when they took all of us fat adapted athletes who were eating a more, I would argue, ancestral diet, a little bit healthier diet based on higher amounts of fat, lower amounts of carbohydrate. They took us, they put us on the treadmill, we were burning 1.5 to 1.7 grams of fat per minute, literally not quite double the fat oxidation. But we were easily burning 30% more fat as a fuel source during exercise than we would have when eating a higher carbohydrate based diet. And it was very, very interesting. And this research hasn't quite been published yet. This was really recent, but it's literally going to rewrite the textbook on how much fat the human body is actually able to oxidize during exercise, which is cool for two reasons, it means glycogen conservation for longer events like an ironman or a marathon.

So you're tapping into less muscle and liver glycogen.

And it also means that you're able.

To burn your own fatty acid stores more efficiently as a fuel.

Another thing that's not taken into account is ingredient cost. Right? It's simply less expensive. And it's more profitable for a lot of sports nutrition companies to get their.

Hands on fructose and maltodextrins and simple.

Sugars, versus some of the more expensive.

Ingredients like chia seeds and pumpkin seeds and raw almonds and nut butters. I mean, if you look at a bar at the grocery store that's actually made with the good stuff and doesn't have a lot of these sugars in it, it's like 15 bucks compared to $2 for the one with the sugar. There's a reason for that.

There's they're harder, more expensive ingredients to.

Get your hands on.

But sometimes cost is not taken into account when we're thinking about why something.

Is being recommended to us. It might be simply recommended to us because it's easier to subsidize the growth of corn and grain, at least here in America, and it's cheaper to produce.

Ingredients that have sugar, the human palate. We're more likely to eat something that tastes like a sugar cube than a pumpkin seed. That's just the way that we're wired. Just like rodents, the taste of something sweet triggers a dopamine response in humans that keeps us coming back for more to that sweet taste. And so it's very, very easy to.

Get used to eating gels, to get used to eating these sports drinks and.

Sweeter bars, simply because that triggers that dopamine release, not necessarily because it's engineered.

To be perfectly compatible with the human body.

And then there's the big one, real foods versus convenience.

Right? So it's hard to pedal a bicycle around with 100 pounds of bananas or real food on your bike.

It's very, very easy to take these packaged doses of sugar and put them onto a bike in a really aerodynamic format. Now, I would argue, and I'll show you how you could do this, that you can actually get a combination of lower sugar intake, more reliance upon fatty.

Acids, and more nutrient dense foods and still be relatively aerodynamic. And I'll show you how that's done in a second here. It's not like that, by the way, although that is a cool idea, and I don't know if that's patented but.

Anyways, so that's how I lived. Like I mentioned, I spoke here five years ago, and that was how I lived. I would do really well. I would win races, I would cross.

The finish line, then feel like crap.

And my bloods were crap and I didn't feel good.

And I had gas and bloating and cortisol and really bad fasted blood glucose and very high hemoglobin A1C, and all of these things that showed that something.

Even though I was really fit on.

The outside, I was not fit and.

Healthy on the inside. And one of the things that I do is I work for a company called Wellness fx.

They send me the bloods of all.

Their triathletes, their crossfitters. They're endurance athletes, they're cyclists, they're ultra runners.

And I see the same patterns over and over and over again.

Metabolic dysregulation in people who actually should.

Be really, really fit and be preferentially burning fat as a fuel with low levels of inflammation.

But it's simply not the case based.

Off the way that people are feeling their bodies. And you sitting in this room right.

Now, you can be an agent of change once you go out, equipped with this knowledge about some other ways to fuel the body. So this is what I used to do, right? And you see this over and over again.

Peanut butter, right? It's like a staple for endurance sports staple for me in college. Jiffy peanut butter bread did lots and lots of whole wheat bread and whole grain bread, which actually, depending on the brand, has a higher glycemic index than.

White bread, but did a lot of.

Bread because it was the brown carbohydrate, right? It's good.

A lot of visits to the bakery.

Shop, the local coffee shop, the coffee shop stops on the bike. All of that, of course, was a staple in my routine.

A lot of trail mixes, of course.

With the chocolates and the peanuts and the raisins and basically as much of.

That sugar mixed with a lot of vegetable oils.

If you turn over and you look at the label of most trail mixes out there, it's canola oil, soybean oil, safflower oil, a lot of readily oxidized vegetable oils that are in these quote unquote healthy trail mixes and granolas.

I did a lot of milk, did.

Basically almost the equivalent of a full.

Gallon of 2% milk a day, right?

Because we've all seen the chocolate milk campaigns that that is the ultimate natural.

Recovery food fresh from the cow's teat.

After it's been homogenized and pasteurized and had all the high fructose corn syrup dumped into it. That's like the ultimate recovery drink. And I went through a lot of.

Chocolate milk as well and wondered why.

My wife wanted to kick me out of bed every night because of my gas and bloating.

You know, a lot of the stereotypical energy bars, it's not that all of.

Them are bad, but a lot of them are chock full of the type of ingredients I just got done talking about.

Now things have changed. Now I ask myself two simple questions about the fuel that I'm using for training, and we'll get into the fuel for racing here momentarily. Like, I'll talk about some of the compromises, some of the things you need.

To take into account when you're heading out for a run or a bike ride.

But right now, day to day fueling, when I wake up in the morning, I ask myself two questions, very simple questions. Is it nutrient dense and is it digestible? Is it nutrient dense and is it digestible? So if you take something that's really.

Championed as a superfood right now, like.

Quinoa, for example, right. Incredibly nutrient dense grain.

It beats rice and brown rice and a lot of these other grains definitely kills wheat. It's got higher amounts of amino acids.

And I can ask myself, is it nutrient dense? Is it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Is it digestible? If I go buy organic quinoa at Costco, is it digestible? Well, actually, quinoa is covered with saponins. That's a soap like irritant because it, as a plant is designed to resist digestion so that you can poop it out somewhere else for more quinoa to grow. So even though it's nutrient dense, it's not digestible. Now I can take quinoa and I.

Can make it digestible.

I can soak it overnight, I can.

Rinse it, I can get all the saponins off it, and I can make.

Hot cereal with it in the morning and then it's fine. You take something like white rice. Is white rice digestible?

Heck, yeah.

I don't know many people that can't.

Have a big thing of white rice before a race and not feel fantastic or eat white rice for lunch and not feel pretty good.

But is it nutrient dense? No. So I asked myself these questions, and now I'm going to show you the staples in my diet and the staples in the diets of the athletes who I'm working with now to give them the ultimate combination of health and Performance, the things that they go to the grocery store to buy when they go.

To the grocery store, when they make themselves.

Bone broth.

Okay.

There's this old proverb that bone broth.

Can resurrect the dead and you can.

Actually order bone broth.

If your patients and your athletes don't want to buy or make their own bone broth, there are companies like the Brothery that actually will ship bone broth anywhere in the US Bone broth is chock full of amino acids.

It's incredibly supportive for the gut, it's great for the joints.

It's actually very, very easy to make with a whole chicken. Most of my athletes I've taught how to make bone broth in a day. That's one of the staples in our diet.

I have a cup of bone broth.

Almost every single day. I love it. So you can eat the chicken and the bones and make soup. It's an incredibly versatile food. And yes, you can buy it.

The stuff you buy at the grocery store though, you got to be careful.

Again, msg, very, very high amounts of sodium, lots of preservatives. So you always want to look at the label of even some of these ancestral foods. Eggs.

Do a lot of pastured eggs with the yolk. Great source of vitamin K2. I coach a lot of vegan and.

Vegetarian athletes and I try to get.

Most of them to at least shift.

To including eggs in their diet simply because of the K2 and a lot of the fat soluble vitamins that are very, very important for things like bone structure, proper absorption of vitamin D. If you look at the labs of athletes, like we all hear about vitamin D, like hydroxy 25 hydroxy vitamin D as.

Being a good marker of ability to.

Form steroids and hormones and recover.

And it's tanked in a lot of athletes and one of the reasons for.

That is inadequate amounts of vitamin K. So you'll see a lot of athletes taking 2000, 3000, 4000 international units of vitamin D and their 25 hydroxy vitamin D levels stay low. If you fix magnesium and you fix vitamin K2, a lot of times vitamin D turns out to be just fine.

Do a lot of seaweed. Seaweed is a great source of iodine, selenium, a lot of minerals because it.

Sits in the sea and that's a staple in my diet. I do a lot of nori, seaweed wraps, nori, kelp, dulce, all that kind of stuff. That's another huge staple. I don't know what that is.

Oh, organ meats.

I Actually order things like head cheese, liver sweet breads. I order from a company called US Wellness Meats. I go to the local butcher organ meats, especially for an athlete who can tolerate these.

Incredibly important for hormonal balance.

And chock full of even more fat soluble vitamins than eggs. And yes, you can make them taste good. I soak my liver in lemon juice for a day and I cook it up in butter with bacon and onions. I usually dredge it in some eggs and then some coconut flour and fry it up. It's really good. Ask me for the recipe afterwards. But liver is actually incredibly supportive for the hormones.

This was one of the only ways.

That I kept my thyroid regulated when I was in that ketogenic state simply because I was not taking in enough hormone precursors. And I actually started taking in a bunch of organ meats and was able to turn my thyroid around when I was doing the high fat diet. The Inuits have actually done the same thing. They eat an 80 to 90% fat based diet and they figured out that organ meats have to be a huge part of their diet in order to support hormones.

Lots of raw seeds and raw nuts, not roasted or heated like even my Brazil nuts. I order them in the shell, I keep them in the freezer so they don't get moldy or oxidized or anything like that. Great hormonal precursor. Raw almonds, raw walnuts.

If you have patients or athletes who.

Are going to the bulk food section at the grocery store, a lot of that stuff is moldy, it's oxidized, it's been there a while. But if they can get the fresh raw nuts and not heat them or.

Else use a dehydrator if they like to kind of have them a little.

Bit crunchier, that's a great source of.

Nutrient dense fuel as well. Do a lot of shellfish. Just like seaweed, it's very, very high in minerals. So I love like oysters, shrimp, things of that nature. Some people complain about the potential for it being like a bottom feeder full of toxins or whatever, but there are. I won't get into the whole take activated charcoal when you eat shellfish argument right now, but it is nutrient dense natto.

We do a lot of natto natto especially again for vegan and vegetarian athletes.

Fantastic source of fat soluble vitamins, especially vitamin K2. It's like eating snot, but I actually really like it. I roll it up with white rice in a nori based seaweed wrap. It's a big staple in Japan.

Just like Eggs.

If you have an athlete, like a.

Vegan or vegetarian athlete, who really needs.

Fat soluble vitamins, natto is another great staple in their diet.

I do fruit, even though I am.

Slightly lower in carbohydrates. Lots of dark, rich, deeply colored fruits for the antioxidants. The anthocyanins, pomegranates, berries, raspberries, blueberries, all that stuff I choose over and above things like apples, pears, melons, et cetera.

Lots of fermented food.

I mean, I talked about the gut.

Bacteria when it came to artificial sweeteners, but you can also support good bacteria with the foods that you eat. Sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, that natto that I showed you, fermented soy, like miso, all of these things are incredibly supportive to the gut bacteria. And you guys, athletes aren't eating these. But it's so easy. I mean, nowadays, if you live in.

A place that has a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe's or any of these fancy grocery stores, they have good fermented foods that haven't been heated to high temperatures that have good live bacteria in them. But it's also incredibly easy for an athlete to learn. Just like bone broth, chop a bunch of cabbage and carrots and pour a little bit of whey from the top of yogurt and put some salt on there, cover that with Saran Wrap, leave it on the kitchen counter for 48 hours and bam, you've got probiotic rich kimchi.

I mean, these are things that we've.

Kind of forgotten how to do, but.

It'S so, so simple to put good bacteria into your body versus buying the.

$80 bottle of probiotics.

Quinoa. I mentioned that already. Again, that's another staple in my diet. I do eat bread, but we actually eat sourdough bread. Sourdough is the one type of bread that's actually been fermented. And that fermentation process actually makes it much more digestible. It deactivates a lot of the things in wheats and other grains that can potentially inhibit digestion.

We make our own sourdough bread from a local wheat that we buy that we know hasn't been bred for high yield crop. But you can actually, if you're going to eat one type of bread, sourdough bread. I was actually just over across the street at Daylight Cafe eating lunch right before this and I had avocado and an egg on sourdough bread with some sprouts.

So sour bread, fine.

If you're going to eat Bread.

So a typical day in myself and the athletes I work with do like a green smoothie with lots of kale and dark leafy greens.

And I put coconut milk and fats in there. Usually some type of a fermented beverage.

Or a coconut water, like kombucha, coconut water, something like that for like the mid morning snack. What I call a big ass fatty salad for lunch where we're just. Most people are kind of sedentary around the lunch hour, so we don't do.

A lot of carbs or proteins for lunch because both have the potential to spike blood glucose and cause a surge in insulin. So it's just like a huge bed of as many vegetables as you can grab.

And then we'll put like avocados, raw seeds, raw nuts, a little bit of fish on there. Big ass fatty salad for lunch. Coconut milk with protein and nuts. That's a perfect example of something that I'll eat pre workout. Medium chain triglycerides and something like coconut milk are readily available fat based fuel source that for the most part not quite as well as medium chain triglyceride oil, but coconut oil, coconut milk, that.

Type of thing, a lot of those.

Fats can bypass digestion and be readily utilized as a fuel. And I'll put a little bit of proteins in there for a slow amino.

Acid bleed and then some nuts to keep me satiated.

Dark chocolate and red wine.

Okay, I'm a total sucker for this.

Stuff, but my trick is that, and.

I do this with my athletes, especially the ones who need to lose weight, we time it so it's post workout. And this sucks for the athletes who are working out in the morning because it usually doesn't happen.

But when I walk in from a workout, I know I'm in an insulin sensitive state. And any glucose I dump into my body is much more likely to be.

Shuttled into muscle tissue to restore glycogen levels.

So I have my big glass of wine and my dark chocolate post workout.

In the afternoon or the evening before dinner. And that's one of the ways that I'll work cheat foods into an athlete's diet is it's always post workout or when they're in a really insulin sensitive state.

Plus when you finish a workout and you have a glass of red wine.

It spins your dials so much easier, which is great. You save money on wine because I only drink to feel it. And then roasted vegetables, potatoes, fish, stuff like that for dinner. But I just wanted to give you guys a snapshot of how some of These foods would actually reflect themselves in.

A typical diet of an athlete or.

A patient or client that you're working with now.

I also don't want to leave you.

High and dry when it comes to racing.

So with racing, we've got some options, too that I say are real food ish options. Because when I tow the starting line, I do not want a bunch of sweet potatoes wrapped into aluminum foil in.

My bike jersey with a huge humpback catching wind as I ride down the lava fields of Hawaii.

I like the concept of just taking the giant clump of bananas and all.

The sweet potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil along with you.

But for the most part, if you're.

Racing, that just doesn't work because it's not aerodynamic. And it irks me when I see the person with the $12,000 bike sitting up with the water bottle with the huge straw. I like to take into account the fact that a lot of athletes, especially the athletes out there this weekend, they want to compete, right?

So if we can find real food ish options that don't cause some of the issues.

FODMAPs, reactive oxygen species, advanced glycation end products, fermentation chemicals, preservatives, endocrine disruptors, things like that. If we can find real food sources that are also able to give us a competitive advantage and keep us aerodynamic, that's what we're going for. That ultimate combination of health and performance.

Okay, so I'm going to give you three options that work really well. Three options, and any of these work.

It's one of those things where there's.

More than one way to skin a cat. Option one is easy to digest carbs, easy to digest proteins, and easy to digest fats. Because when you add proteins and you add fats along with the carbohydrates, and you're able to dump less carbohydrate into your body. When I did Ironman Canada last year, I took in 100 calories of carbohydrate per hour. When I raced Ironman the year before, I was at 400 calories of carbohydrate per hour. The difference was that I topped off my race day fueling with proteins and with fats so I could consume fewer amounts of carbohydrates, produce less of that metabolic disruption, that fermentation, that reactive oxygen species, et cetera, that occurs when you're consuming just pure carbohydrates. So these are just two examples. I'm not married to any specific brand, really. Generation Youcan is it was originally designed.

For Management of diabetes because of the very, very low insulin release that occurs during exercise or the low insulin release that occurs when you consume it. People who know their physiology know that doesn't really matter during exercise because you're pretty insulin sensitive during exercise anyways. So I don't like that as an argument to use you can during exercise.

But I like that it's a very slow release into the bloodstream, so it.

Allows you to spike your blood glucose.

A little less and it mixes well.

With protein and fat sources.

I haven't found some people to be able to handle the very long chain.

Molecular weight carbohydrates that are in YouCan. And so in that situation I recommend something like Infinite.

It's a stevia sweetened potato based starch.

And it tends to burn pretty clean. It's one that I've used successfully with athletes. Mix with some of the other things I'm about to show you.

So these are just two examples of clean fuels that don't have frankenfuel ingredients added to them. Easy to digest fats. That would be step two of option one. Coconut oil. That works pretty well. Again because the medium chain triglycerides in coconut based fat sources they can bypass digestion and be used for beta oxidation by the cells. They churn out ketones, which are actually a preferred fuel source for the diaphragm and the heart. So they're really, really great as a fuel source during exercise. Coconut oil, unless you're going to put some in a ziploc bag in many environments it's not liquid. Here in Hawaii it worked perfectly because out there in the heat it's going.

To be liquid and you can add it to water bottles.

I'm a bigger fan of MCT oil.

Just because it's like fractionated extracted coconut.

Oil and it has more dense MCTs in it. You got to be careful with this. I haven't found any athletes to be.

Able to tolerate more than 2 tablespoons per hour of this stuff without exploding out their backsides. So be careful with MCT oil.

But it can really be used quite effectively to use less of a carbohydrate based fueling source.

And you top it off with mct.

The other thing is the armed forces are starting to use this type of stuff now and experiment with it because it allows you to maintain a state of hyper alertness.

And that would be ketones.

You can buy ketones.

There are laboratory companies like Sigma Tech that actually sell liquid ketones. They taste like jet fuel. They taste really, really nasty.

But they actually can be used, again, like I mentioned, preferentially by the heart and by the diaphragm without you actually.

Having to digest fats that you would get from coconut oil or medium chain triglycerides. There was a really, really interesting study just done by a guy named Dr. Dominique Agostino, and he works with Navy SEALs. He did a VO2 max test to test VO2 max efficiency and economy with using ketones during exercise. And it worked really well.

This is like the pointy edge.

This is total biohacking experimentation. Not many sports nutrition companies are putting ketones in their fuels now, but if you're a nerd and you want to really dig into this stuff, ketones as a potential fuel source to add in are another option.

Chia seeds.

I'm going to have chia seeds in.

My water bottle on Saturday. If you soak these things, they give.

You a nice slow release of fatty.

Acids and amino acids. About a tablespoon is 60 calories worth.

And that's a really, really nice option for fats too, that you can even mix with things like MCT oil, for.

Example, and then finally, easy to digest proteins. So we've got easy to digest carbs, easy to digest fats, and then for easy to digest proteins, there's again a.

Few different ways to skin this cat.

About 5 to 10 grams of an amino acid, like a pre digested amino acid source for each hour of exercise works really well. You can get amino acids in capsule form, you can get them in powder form, they can be added to water bottles, they can be kept in a Ziploc bag and chewed or swallowed during.

The ride or the run.

But about 5 to 10 grams of amino acids per hour added in with.

The fats and the carbohydrates.

Now, eventually, I'm hoping that there is.

A nutrition company that will figure out the chemistry to get all this stuff.

Into one fuel source. But right now, the way I do it, and my athletes who want to.

Use this type of fueling protocol with the easy to digest carbs, proteins and fats do it, is we just premix everything in water bottles. Some of them use a blender and we just blend it all up, dump it into the water bottle and it really works.

A few other protein sources, you can use collagen as a protein source. You can also use bone broth as a protein source.

And that's actually something you can put.

In a water bottle and drink during exercise. So easy to digest carbs, easy to digest fats, easy to digest proteins is Option one, Option two is fuel in the bottle, food in the pocket. If you want solid fuel sources. The best resource on this is a book called Real Food Portables. Has anybody read this one?

It's by Alan Lim, who worked with professional cycling team. I think he was with Radio Shack.

And he's got all sorts of fantastic recipes in there for like these rice cakes that you can make with a little bit of bacon, a little bit of egg or some honey or some chia seeds. It wraps up really well in aluminum foil and it's relatively aerodynamic for a bike jersey. And it's real food. And he's got some really great recipes in there.

This is just a photo of for example, the rice cakes that he recommends.

Now one of the problems is when you eat solid food like this, a lot of people don't remember step two. And step two is that you have to introduce liquids into the GI tracts to allow that fuel to be absorbed properly. So you can't just ride your bike down the road munching on a rice cake and expect for you to be able to digest that well without dumping some type of a salt and water based solution into the stomach that helps drive your GI tract into the proper.

Concentration of for you to be able to empty and absorb the real foods.

So this is where. Well, I'll get to that in a second. What the fuel in the bottle part is. But the idea here is if you're doing solid foods, you have to have a liquid designed to push that solid food in and preferably something other than water. There's a few companies out there right now that have developed formulas that help solid food sources.

Like I'm about to show you empty.

From the stomach a little bit more quickly. Some of the solid food sources that I find.

Okay.

And that I tell my athletes it's.

Fine if they eat them.

They don't jive too well with running. But for cycling, I like Hammer. They use good ingredients.

Non gmo, gluten free, lactose free in many cases. I like Living Fuel. They make one that has like a coconut oil chia seed base.

Larabar. Most of those are good unless an.

Athlete has a fodmap or fructose intolerance issue because those are really high in fructose and fruits.

Quest bar is generally pretty decent. That no G bar, that's really cool.

I just noticed that's an animated gif. Wow, cool. That makes me look techy. All right, so no G bars, that's.

A good brand as well. Zing Bonk Breaker. The one that's out there on the Ironman course. I mean, what I'm going to be supplementing my Chia seeds and honey and.

Stuff like that that I'll have my.

Water bottle with is just the bonk breakers on the energy course because bless their hearts, that's actually a pretty decent fuel as well.

And it's a lot of the GMO and a lot of the. And it's gluten free.

Health Warrior makes a good one. And then the fuel in the bottle, these are the two brands I was talking about that are good for driving this stuff and emptying the stomach when.

You'Re eating real foods.

Osmolabs and Scratch Labs, either one, both of them make a powder that you can put in a water bottle that mixes really well with a lot of the real food sources that I just mentioned. So this is another scenario that is a lot healthier for an athlete to be fueling their body with during a race season, during long training sessions or during the race itself. And then finally we've got fat based energy gels. There are a variety of companies now that have decided to shift away from pure fructose and maltodextrin and glucose and sugars and instead introduce higher amounts of fat and higher amounts of amino acids into their gel formulations. Again resulting in a need for less.

Carbohydrate, less fermentation, less glycation, reactive oxygen species. All the stuff that you know now.

That are trying to avoid, I'll show you some of them goo. Not all of their stuff is like this, but their peanut butter flavor is.

Higher fat, lower carbohydrate, a little bit.

Higher in amino acids. Artisana makes a raw almond butter.

And again all these are in aerodynamic packs that your athletes and your patients can use as they're out there.

Chocolate agave. This is really interesting. They use a dark cacao butter, a little bit of agave added to it. So again, might not be quite so hot in someone who doesn't do well with fructose.

But that's another higher fat based fuel source.

Huma. This is a gel company that uses chia seeds as one of their primary ingredients, again rather than sugar.

Justin's.

Justin's doesn't almond butter.

The chocolate almond butter is freaking awesome Pocket fuel.

Pocket fuel takes things like goji berries, chia seeds, flax seeds, bits of almond and it mixes it up with raw nut butters. So this is another lower sugar, higher fat, higher amino acid solution for an.

Athlete who doesn't want to do like the constant Sugar dump into their body.

V fuel. I believe they use Chia seeds.

Vespa is a really interesting one. It's actually this amino acid mix that they get from a wasp because the idea is that somehow a wasp flies around all day just using its own amino acids and fatty acids as a fuel source. And this extract from the wasp is supposed to help you.

I haven't seen a ton of really solid research on it, but I actually.

Use this like I take a shot before I go out to race or before a training session that I want to be in a fat adapted state for. That's another example of something that's kind of sort of a supplement, kind of sort of a gel. But it kind of falls into the category of one of these fat based.

Fuel sources, Chia Surge. One of my friends in the UK.

Dr. Tamsen Lewis, who just won Ironman UK, she used Windforce on the bike. She's kind of on the same boat as me. She's really into fat adaptation and trying to eat in a more ancestral manner.

And this is vegetable oils, but it's vegetable oils that have been extracted in a manner that hasn't subjected them to heat and pressure. So they're like non oxidized forms of oil that you can use during exercise. So this is another really good one, Windforce.

And I wrote to the company specifically to find out what their extraction process was for their vegetable oils because I was concerned when I first saw it because there were a lot of things like a sunflower oil and a safflower, et cetera in there. But it's a cold process based extraction method.

Hammer gel's peanut butter flavor, like the goo peanut butter flavor, this is one of their flavors that's higher fat and.

Has more amino acids in it.

And then yum butter makes one called.

Superfood almond butter with chia seeds, hemp seeds and goji.

So there's not a shortage of fat based energy gels that are lower in sugar that are out there for you.

To recommend or for you to experiment or for you to use. So you can get this stuff overnighted to you to use at the race on set. Just order like everything. Try it out. I want to see with each of the brands taped to your top tube.

Okay, so typical race, for example, for an Ironman.

This is actually how I raced Ironman Canada when I did Ironman Canada in a full state of ketosis. This was leading up to that study at UConn. I had bulletproof coffee for breakfast. This is where you take a cup of coffee and you blend it up with grass fed butter, some coconut oil, a little bit of cinnamon and stevia for taste. You top it off with some coconut milk. It sounds really weird, but what happens is it keeps your blood glucose from spiking and the oils actually carry some of the psychoactive components of coffee, specifically the terpenes in coffee, across your blood brain barrier. And it keeps you hyper focused for a long time. And it's basically a fat based breakfast.

Water bottles. What I had in my water bottles at that point was MCT oil, about 2 tablespoons of MCT oil, about 10 grams of amino acids, and then about.

100 calories of UCAN superstarch. I just put it all in the blender, hit blend, dumped it into my water bottles and had four water bottles ready for the bike. With that mix you could use bone.

Broth, you could use coconut water mixed.

With chia seeds and honey, that type of thing. I'm actually trying out a couple different things on race day just because I'm using this race as a little bit of an experimentation. And one of my water bottles is coconut water, chia seeds and honey because I want to see how that digests out there. So if you see me puking real.

Food bar at the end of every hour on the bike, like you grab.

A bonk break or a Coke Achieve or something else that you have in your pocket, fat based energy gels for the run. So an athlete could, for example, use a spy belt or one of these belts that allows them to carry gels.

With them and just rely on those rather than the sugar based energy gels at the aid stations during the run.

And they wouldn't even need to carry a fuel belt with all the flasks and everything. You just have a lot of gels and then another set of gels with special needs, but the fat based kind of gels and then of course the token enormous giant extra large margarita. Afterwards I'll be hanging out at a.

Bar somewhere near the finish line, hopefully before dark.

You can buy me a margarita if you see me there.

Ok. So what this comes down to though, I really want to drive this home.

For you before I open it up to Q and A.

It's not just about performance, it's about how an athlete's joints are going to feel when they're 40, when they're 50.

When they're 60 years old.

I realize this is ironic for me.

To be saying as I walk around up here with my joints taped up. I just raced Spartan World Championships two weeks ago. So I'm in recovery mode.

But what I'm getting at here is you got to take into account the joints.

You have to take into account the heart, the potential for hardened arteries, atherosclerosis, plaque formation in an athlete who is even fit on the outside, but he's dumping the wrong kind of fuels into their body.

It's like, I want the athletes who I coach and myself to be able.

To do these kind of really cool things, these grueling feats of endurance performance.

But I also want to be around to see my grandkids hit a home run.

I want to be able to play.

Football with my kids in the backyard.

Without feeling it in my knees.

I don't want a hip replacement.

I don't want to look like I'm.

100 years old when I'm 60 years old. So that's a big reason for a lot of these things, is it's not like the current nutrition paradigms are slowing us down. People are killing it. People are setting records by using maltodextrin and fructose. And the prevailing message that's preached to us by sports nutrition literature and magazines and books. But that doesn't mean that they're healthy on the inside, doesn't mean they're going to feel good in 20, 30 years. So unless a paycheck is on the line, first of all, going with a route like this is a lot healthier than. And the other thing you need to realize is that you won't necessarily go.

Faster using some of the methods that I've just described to you.

But there's no research out there to.

Show that you can't go just as fast.

So the way I look at it is if you can do just as well by fueling your body in a lot more ancestral way and by limiting fluctuations in blood sugar, chemicals, preservatives, et cetera, then why not do it?

Why not?

So again, I've got more resources@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Kona14 A list of pretty much everything that.

I recommend whenever I find something new that I want to recommend to an athlete or that I've looked into and found to really work well.

I have@GreenfieldFitnessSystems.com and then you're all going to get a book. If you pre registered, they're going to be on the back table back there.

Just grab one.

It's a short read.

Beyondtrainingbook.com though is the URL for that book. He's seen the book. It's a paperweight It's a weapon.

So, yeah, we've got time. I don't think they're going to kick us out of here for another 10 minutes.

So we've got time for questions if you guys have questions. Do I train myself using the same strategy that I just described? You always want to train your gut for race day. You always want to train your gut for race day.

So the trick is to find that balance between fueling with some of the like, even like, that's why I called them real food ish options.

Right.

Still, when I'm drinking these amino acids.

And proteins and fats, I'm not going.

To argue that they are 100% perfectly.

Compatible with the human body versus bone, broth and a sweet potato. What I do is generally about six weeks before the race minimum, I'll start to introduce those into my weekend training routines just to make sure my gut is ready for the fake stuff on race day. Other than that, I mostly try and use real food.

You suggested raw nuts versus roasted nuts.

Yeah, it's a good point.

So what he's saying is that roasted nuts are indeed higher in potentially oxidized compounds, but raw nuts a lot of.

Times have their digestive enzyme inhibitors, their phytates, their gut irritants, et cetera, intact.

So I didn't really go into this.

But ultimately, and this is what we do is we soak our nuts, we buy our nuts, we soak them overnight, we rinse them, we'll sometimes sprout them.

But usually after we soak them and.

We rinse them, we put them in an overnight food dehydrator. And that's ultimately the best way to make sure that your nuts are both not oxidized, but that also don't have a lot of their digestive enzyme inhibitors. So you just basically you get big mason jars. So when you go buy your nuts from the grocery store, put them in those mason jars, you soak them, you rinse them, you let them soak overnight, and then you can just put them in a dehydrator after that. And food dehydrators are easy to get on Amazon or Craigslist or probably make your own. I'm sure there's instructions out there somewhere. Yes.

Replacement recommendations for which for sodium. Right now I use one called athytes, which is. I mean, most of the electrolyte mixes out there are pretty decent.

You just want one that's balanced. It's not just sodium chloride. Right. You don't want to just go out there with table salt.

The issue and this Is something that.

Tim Noakes points out in his book.

Waterlogged is the human body is pretty well able to maintain plasma electrolyte concentrations even during exercise in hot conditions. Right. We just limit sweat sodium loss and we limit urine sodium loss. And we retain more sodium, more electrolytes.

When we're out there exercising.

So the question is, do we actually.

Need as many electrolytes as we've been led to believe?

So what I do is I race with electrolytes. If you cramp. Usually a cramp is because you're asking a muscle to do something that you.

Haven'T asked it to do in training.

You're either in a position on the bike for a longer period of time.

Than what you're used to, or for example, I cramped in the spartan race that I just did because we were crawling upside down on a rope over a river. And that just wasn't a position that my calves have had to be in. And they cramp.

The reason that I carry the electrolytes is because of the pickle juice study that shows that the taste of something very salty can inhibit the alpha motor.

Neuron reflex that's actually causing the cramp.

So I dump open a capsule. This is why I carry them with me. I put it in my mouth and it tastes horrible. But if you cramp, that can reverse a cramp.

So you don't necessarily take electrolytes out there with. They're not going to hurt you. It's just maybe money or extra things you don't need to carry out there with you. But you don't take them out there necessarily to use them every hour. You take them as like your backup aid if you do cramp. There are some cases that where cramping is due to severe dehydration or someone with a really poor diet going into a race extremely mineral deficient. Those kind of things happen. And in that case, electrolyte supplementation during the workout works pretty well. But ultimately, most of the salt capsules out there are pretty good formulas. So. Yes.

How did you feel in Iron Man Canada?

How did I feel in Ironman Canada? I felt really, really good.

But I should have taken in more amino acids. I took in about 5 grams per hour. I should have probably been closer to 10. I got about halfway through the marathon and started to get pretty sleepy. Like central nervous system fatigue started to set in.

I had a good race.

I raced a 9:36, but I had about mile 13 to 14 where I had to slow down quite a bit before I was able to kind of refuel and top the fuel stores back up. And it's one of those things too, where you will get to a certain point during exercise where you have to use an unnatural means to achieve an unnatural end. Right. So if I'm coming out of the energy lab out there at the end of, you know, however many hours on Saturday and I'm just dragging, I will start to try out unnatural. Like I will grab Coke. I will, you know, grab, grab things that I know are not healthy for me, that are just like caffeine and fructose and all this stuff, just so I can achieve that unnatural end that I've decided to do. And granted, that may take a few minutes off my life, but it's like you do get to some situations where you just gotta, you know, grab what's available. So, lots of questions. Let's go here. My diet is 50 to 60% fat. It's 20 to 30% protein, and depending.

Upon the level of activity for that.

Given day, 10 to 30% carbohydrate. With the lower amount of carbohydrate coming on my easier, less active days. And that's exactly how I'm eating right now. Other questions? Yes. Natto is a fermented soybean.

You can make it yourself.

You can go to the Asian food store, buy one little thing of natto, and you can spread that out in a casserole, and you can get soybeans that you've cooked, and you put them in there along with the natto that already has the bacteria on it, and you leave that out on your counter at room temperature, and you'll see it grow. You'll see all the bacteria from the natto take over the soybeans, and then you've got your own fermented natto that you can use. It's just, it's a really wonderful source of probiotics.

Some people think it tastes good. Like, my kids like it.

I like it. Some people don't like it, though. You might need a lot of ketchup. Yes. Hey, what's up?

A formula for getting used to chia seeds. Yeah, usually you got to soak them.

For a little while so that they become digestible. Usually it's like three to four hours for chia.

So if you just eat them straight.

Into the water bottle and you suck it down, that doesn't work too well.

So, for example, when I premix my chia water bottle on Saturday, I'll put.

It all in there that morning. So by the time I get up to special Needs. Depending on how freaking long the bike ride takes me, those chia seeds will have been soaking and sitting in there for a little while. It's usually about 4 to 6 ounces of water for a tablespoon or two. So yeah, it just depends on how thick you want the mixture. Right. So other questions? Maybe time for like two more questions?

Yes.

Yeah.

So it generally takes about two weeks for someone to start to feel different and for there to be a change in their respiratory quotient during rest.

Like in terms of when you shift someone to a higher fat diet, it's generally a good six months before you start to see numbers like we were seeing in the lab where people are just starting to really, really feel good.

I don't say that based on lab studies that have taken people in at various intervals in their high fat diet. I just base that on qualitative feedback.

Given to me by athletes. It's like 10 to 14 days before they quit emailing me and saying I.

Don'T have any energy because they're used.

To burning sugar as a fuel. Right. And then it's several months before you get to the point where someone can just go all day long on oils and fats and a little bit of protein.

So it's a commitment. And I think a big part of that is because it takes at least that long for mitochondrial biogenesis to occur and for fatty acid oxidation during exercise to be up regulated to the extent.

Where you can generate adequate ATP from fatty acid utilization versus relying upon glycolysis and glucose. One more question.

So like I mentioned, most of the studies done on post workout nutrition have.

Been done on people who exercise to.

Exhaustion and usually glycogen depletion in an overnight fasted state. So if you or your athlete or your patient is in a scenario where they're doing a CrossFit wad or a hard swim bike run session or something like that, and they are in an overnight fasted state, like that's their time to exercise. Post workout nutrition is indeed beneficial and actually crucial if they want to recover.

To their full extent.

Otherwise you generally restore glycogen levels within eight hours by just eating two appetite.

Whether your post workout meal is three.

Hours later and then another one at.

The five hour mark, another one at the seven hour, mark, et cetera.

And there are some situations where a multi day swim meet for a kid.

Say where they're swimming at 8, they're.

Swimming at 11, they're swimming at 2.

And they're going to swim at 4.

You want post workout nutrition every single.

Time because you don't have those eight hours to play with.

But generally, unless you're going to workout again within eight hours, or unless you.

Have Exercise 2 depletion in a fasted state, post workout snacking, post workout shakes, all that stuff is just not necessary. Well, you look really cool with the Shaker cup and the giant Jamba Juice. I'll stick around for questions if you guys want afterwards. I know they need this room at 1 so we can clear out so they can do the break and everything. I know some of you probably want lunch, but grab your book if you.

Signed up and if you have questions.

I'll be available in the back. Thanks.

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