CRAZY Experiments With Vegan vs. Omnivore, Weighted vs. Body Weight?!, Plant Protein vs. Animal Protein (SHOCKING!), Long vs. Short Exercise & More With "The Turner Twins."

My name is Ben Greenfield and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, we did vegan versus meat diet a couple of years ago for Men's Health UK for the third time, I think posted on Ladbible. Again, twins doing this experiment. And when people say, oh, I've gone vegan because it's healthier and it's just the two of us and again, we're not holding anyone accountable, it's just what we found. That's really not the case. The one thing we want to do is to put the last four 12 week studies onto a table. Go right. Which parts of it really benefited us. Get rid of all the negatives and go right. Yes, body weight was really good for mobility.

Great.

Add that in the vegan versus meat. What was really good about that? And then do a culmination of all four of those experiments. The best bits, try and find a twin versus twin angle in it. Then go off and see if we can get even more efficient at the workouts.

Fitness, nutrition, biohacking, longevity, life optimization, spirituality, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Life Show. Are you ready to hack your life? Let's do this.

A few months ago someone sent me a link to an article about these twin brothers who did an experiment to see what resulted in the best fitness response. A 20 minute versus a 40 minute gym training protocol. Can low volume equate to high volume? The article is interesting. I'll link to it in the show notes. But then it turns out these same brothers had done animal protein versus plant protein, protein, A vegan versus omnivore diet, body weight versus using weights. And then I took a deeper dive into these guys and they actually travel all over the world going on these crazy adventures. Super inspirational. And I wanted to get them on the show to not only talk about these crazy experiments that they run, but just their life in general. Because I think you'll find these guys super interesting. Their names are Ross and Hugo Turner. The Turner twins. And all the show notes, links to their articles, their website, their crazy adventures and badass videos. I'll put it all@bengreenfieldlife.com Turner Twins. That's BenGreenfieldLife.com Turner Twins. They're joining me at some ungodly hour like 1:30am somewhere across the world. So fellas, thanks for doing this and sacrificing sleep to do it.

Morning Ben. Thank you. It's great. Great to be on the. Great to be on the show. And yes, it's 1:30 in the morning here in Pretty much the middle of the outback, Western Australia. This is an unplanned location for where we're calling. We were meant to be in Hong Kong, but the project team, we're currently on a six month project, we're a little delayed. They said, look, go make yourself busy for a few days. So we thought let's just head over to Western Australia. So yes, it is 1:30 in the morning, but yeah, it's great to be connected. Thank you.

Are you actually on one of your crazy adventures right now?

We are, yeah. We are essentially launching a new electric vehicle by doing a global tour from the UK to Shanghai over a course of. We've lost count. It's got to be five months, four and a half months at the moment and counting. We've got another four weeks to go.

Wait, you're going from UK to Shanghai using an electric vehicle?

Correct? Yeah, we're. So the idea is we are launching this new vehicle but driving quite literally every day to a dealership, revealing it, showing the local area or the local dealership or country dealership, the car, having the media, the press there each night and then driving onto the next occasion. So we started in September last year, drove all the way through the uk, all across Europe and then the project has been ping ponging across all the different countries in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and now we find ourselves about to head to Hong Kong and then traveling across China before the Beijing Motor show at the end of this month, which is where the project finalizes and we finish.

Who designed the vehicle?

MG so it's the new two seater, it's called a Cyberster and it's got very sexy scissor doors that go up.

And down kind of an incredible 0 to 60 time, do you guys say 100 kilometers now, of 2.8 seconds? Very, very quick. And it's been a lot of fun, but I think we've aged maybe by 20 years on this trip.

I can imagine you guys get worn down with all these adventures you go on and I want to talk more about them. I suppose you're not thinking about changing your last name to Musk, being in the elect vehicle business now. So you're basically sponsored by this company and you guys are like the pilots of the vehicle, so to speak.

Correct?

Yeah. So we've over the last number of years have been on some adventures that have really pushed the boundaries or have tried to find something that we will learn that we can say to somebody, oh, did you know this? Did you know that? And the fact that we're genetically identical means that if we are doing say twin studies, as you highlighted earlier, Whether it's a 12 week program to find the difference between vegan versus meat or whether it's body weight versus weighted, there's certainly for us it's a learning exercise. So if we can come away having learned something through being curious, trying to discover something new, that's half the battle for us.

Right. You guys are like earthbound versions of those twin astronauts that they did the NASA study on space exposure. Yeah.

And do you have any. Is there like quite a curiosity in the media around twins, particularly in the uk there's. We have a app called Zoe app. I don't know whether it's out in the U.S. i think it's probably going to be launching where you get put a little blood glucose monitor on your arm and then they do two weeks of. Yeah, exactly that. And then that was started in the UK through a twin program. And because of that there's quite a bit of hype around twins and interest in them.

I think it's kind of siloed here in terms of mostly in science and research. So, you know, when you look at research on twins in terms of comparing genetic profiles or responses to certain diets, you know, some larger scale versions of the. The N equals one type of things or I suppose the N equals two type of things you guys have done. There is a little bit of interest there, but I don't think a lot of people are super curious about how twins like you respond to different protocols. Besides, guys like me and my listeners who just love to dig into, I guess hacking to a certain extent and some of the stuff that you guys have done, which we'll talk about shortly, is really reflective of that. I have no twins on my side of the family to answer your question. You guys could correct me on this, but I think twins genetically tend to be maternally derived. And my wife has two sets of twins on her side, which we didn't know about until literally we were getting the ultrasound 16 years ago and the nurse looked at both of us after the ultrasound and said, do you guys have a history of multiples in the family? And within five minutes I'm texting all my buddies, talking to them about my, my double success.

Was it all a bit of a surprise having twins?

Oh, totally, yeah. And it's been amazing, it's been incredible. So yeah, it was definitely a surprise though. So how about you guys? How'd you get started doing all this in the first place? Deciding to do these experiments and Adventures and the like.

Well, we were very lucky. We grew up in a place called Dartmoor in Devon, which is southwest of England. It's where the surfing happens. It's where the beach culture life happens. It's a very, very beautiful part of the uk because it's in the south coast or the very south tip of the uk, we get pretty good weather. That said, we also get all the storms that come up from the Gulf of the Atlantic. And that is where we spent our childhood. We spent it camping. Fortunately, I say fortunate. We're 35 now, and as we grew up and had our teenage years, we didn't have social media. I think Facebook was obviously just kicking off around our early teens, the late, late 1717. So we didn't grow up social media. So the outdoors was our media that we used as our entertainment. We weren't stuck to our phones. Phones, even 15 years ago are pretty primitive. And yeah, we went camping up in Dartmoor. Water skiing, fishing in Cornwall, all the amazing outdoor recreational sports that you could possibly grow up doing, we did. And then at the age of 17, down in Cornwall on the beach, I was running into the sea, dived in and hit the bottom and broke my neck. And that was really the moment where everything changed for us.

Holy cow. And just so my audience knows, this is Hugo talking right now. So, Hugo, you broke your neck?

Yeah, I broke my neck.

Yes.

I was, I think, voted the luckiest and unluckiest person at school leaving. And we've just rode that luck ever since. We've decided to live life to the full, make the most out of this second chance that I've had. And a couple of buddies while we're at university at the age of 20, 21 decided that they needed a couple of guys to row the Atlantic with. And that's where all of these adventures, all of these expeditions, and all of the great unknown in our lives has come from, is just this accident. Committing to the unknown and learning all these new skills, learning about ourselves, doing all these experiments has come from.

So for something like that, rowing across the Atlantic, you mentioned learning new skills. Had either you guys ever done anything like that before?

No, definitely not. The first time I played a lot of rugby at university. The first time I rode was the start of this record.

Oh, my gosh.

In La Gomera, in the Canal Islands off West Africa. So everyone says, oh, you know, how much rowing experience had you had?

0.

But row in the Atlantic is super different from, say, river rowing. I know rowing in the US is a massive thing it's very, very different. It's very, very different. I think if you can pull a rowing machine, say 2:30 for per 500 meters, say 16 to 18 strokes a minute, you can row the Atlantic. Anyone can row the Atlantic. It's more about body management, boat management and weathering storms. Because you're quite literally a cork floating on the top of water. There's not a lot you can do. You kind of go with it. There'll be rogue waves that'll push your boat sideways, roll your boat, push you downhill, let's say downhill, down the big waves and you just gotta kind of ride the lightning for a few months. So when people say, oh, you know, that sounds crazy. Yes, it was at the time and for us we'd never done anything like it. We've done a few land based activities, we've done quite a bit of water based activities and worked on water, whether it been water skiing, we've done some sailing before. But you know what? I think the best things in life come from the unknown. And I try to describe it when we give talks, wherever it is in the world, trying to talk to somebody on the same level, what's it like rowing the Atlantic? I say to them, describe the color red. If your viewers are there, like, try and describe the colour red. It's a bit brown but it's not orange. It's your own experience and until you've gone and done it, then you'll start understanding what it's like to do it. And I've always said we've all been there when we've said goodnight to mates, whether it's at school, whether it's, I don't know, home. And then one of your mates knocks on the door and goes, come on, we're going out for a beer and you're in your pajamas, you're half in bed and yet it ends up being one of the best nights out. They're spontaneous, not planned. And you're like, actually that's what adventure is, that's what the unknown is.

Hopefully not still in your pajamas.

Yeah, just imagine that unknown. Imagine for us getting into the rowing boat, the start of that race. We had two months ahead of us at least. What's it going to be like? Just embrace it. It's going to be that night out, every single morning, every single day and every single night.

Dude, what a life. That's crazy. I have said for some time that I think to live life to the fullest, it's important to have something on the calendar that scares you for that year it could be an open mic night for poetry or guitar. It could be learning a new language, traveling somewhere new. For me, it's always a physical challenge. Me and my twin sons are training right now for a spartan race in Austin, Texas in June and then a WIM HOF retreat in Germany in December. And if I don't have something like that on the calendar, I won't push myself in the gym. I won't wake up early in the morning and do breath work in the sauna. And I won't feel like I'm really going outside my comfort zone or making smoke come out my ears or my body in some way. But you guys have taken it to a, a whole new level with these adventures and the experiments. These are super interesting, the experiments. Like I mentioned in the introduction, I think the way I found you guys was through an article where you go in head to head testing your body. And I want to talk about some of these experiments because what you found was super interesting. I think the one I first saw was using weights versus body weight training. Tell me about that one.

Yeah, so this came out of lockdown. Lockdown affected everyone globally. Gyms weren't open and we've done a couple of experiments before. So to give the viewers context, the idea around it was to learn something new to being, to give something back to our audience, people who might read it in.com magazines, etc. Being twins being and being genetically identical, we thought, why don't we question some of these norms? You know, is red meat good? Is body weight better than normal? You know, so we just wanted to say, well, let's try and question the paradigm and see if we uncover anything exceptional, unextraordinary, extraordinary. And so in lockdown we thought, right, nobody can get to the gym, so why don't we see f body weight? We've heard lots about it. There's a big craze. Body weight's really, really good for you, it's healthy for you. You're far more mobile, you're light, you're athletic, you're a bit like a rock climber, but you've got the strength of bodybuilders, all of that stuff. So we thought, right, let's do a 12 week study where we eat exactly the same or very similar calories intake. And one of us goes body weight, one of us goes weighted. So we found an old gym set at home, set a program out, trained five days a week. So kind of three on day off, two on day off, three on. And we did essay Studies. We did our physiological tests before, during and after so we could see a profile of what was happening.

And by the way, just so I could interrupt real quick, what were you actually looking at when you say physiological tests?

We, sorry, yeah, so we were looking at just a general spectrum. So muscle mass, fat, what else?

Deadlifts, One, one bench max. All how many press ups, how many sit ups? So a bit of strength and a bit of endurance tests.

Yeah. And then got it at the beginning. From the, from the top of my head I remember trying to do. And bearing in mind a lot of our 12 week experiments come off the back of an expedition. So we're not that conditioned, we're not, wouldn't say healthy. So we did, I think I took my deadlift from 100 kilos, from very little training and coming off the back of an expedition, so not really that prepped to doing a 12 week bodyweight program. So Ross myself was just body weight. I didn't touch a single weight for 12 weeks. I increased my deadlift by 40 kilos.

What kind of exercises were you doing? Because obviously it's hard to simulate a deadlift with body weight.

Yeah, single leg toe touches, just body weight. That's the only kind of real standing hamstring activation. I did glute bridges. Lying down and literally just squeezing your bum. One leg, two legs, slow reps, high reps and it was just that simple process of activating the muscles and just getting them used to being used.

What about grip? We're doing any like hangs or bodyweight pull ups or anything like that.

Doing pull ups? Yeah, doing pull ups, which is probably one of our worst activities because we're quite long and we've got kind of rowers bodies. Rowers bodies. Big legs and not big arms. So yeah, we did pull ups but everything across the board for my body weight went up and I certainly felt as healthy and as lean as I had done at any time when I'd been lifting weights. And Hugo on the weighted, he certainly saw a better increase in performance across the board. But if you take into account that I hadn't done any weights whatsoever, I was probably 10, 15, 20% performance behind him across the board. From deadlifts to pull ups, max reps, press ups, max reps. So certainly when people say, oh, I don't have a gym, there's no point, no, totally wrong. Go and do as much exercise as you can, whether it's walking, whether it's literally just touching your toes, single leg deadlift, whether it's doing as many press Ups as you can to failure and then doing that, doing something. Body weight is absolutely amazing in terms of what results you can expect.

What did you guys see in terms of the difference as far as actual muscle was concerned?

Muscle mass still certainly I think I dropped body fat and increased muscle by say one or two kilos. For sure. Hugo saw similar performances with his weighted and certainly gained a little bit more in terms of the muscle mass. But over a 12 week period, certainly a lot of people on social were saying, well, you guys need to do it for 12, for 12 months, 6 months, 12 months to get that real set of results. But for us the 12 week works because we have commercial projects and expeditions that we go off on. And in that 12 weeks, three months, we can usually work within the time period between our expeditions. And that's why it's 12 weeks. We'd love to do six months, but I think some of our projects will be old versus new and all of those would certainly take a wonderful turn if we could get more data, that'd be really good.

Yeah, I mean 12, 12 weeks is reasonable. Especially when you consider the fact that musculoskeletal adaptations to training really significantly kick in at about the four to six week mark. Right. Not, not six months in or eight months in, you get stronger. The neuromuscular adaptations occur within two to four weeks. Yeah, it's just four to six weeks before you start to see the changes. So 12 weeks to me seems reasonable. What would have been interesting? Have you guys ever heard of blood flow restriction training? BFR training?

Yeah, I've seen bits of it where they basically just restrict blood flow and then train on it.

Yeah, because I use that pretty extensively when I travel because a lot of times you just have a rusty set of dumbbells and an old elliptical trainer from the 80s in a lot of these hotel gyms. So blood flow restriction training with body weight is very similar to weight training, superior to just body weight training. That would have been an interesting component of that as well. This experiment reminds me of research that's primarily been done by this guy named Brad Schoenfeld, who's done a lot of high volume, low weight, low volume, high weight comparisons and found that ultimately in everyone, despite extremely trained individuals, really it just comes down to time under tension and the amount of fatigue that the muscle experiences. So sure, you got to do more reps and possibly spend a little bit more time training if you're doing body weight. But your guys results seem to be similar to what Brad's found in his research.

Yeah, certainly for us you've kind of hit the nail on the head is time under tension. And a lot of people, and there's a lot of, there are a lot of articles, particularly in the uk, that kind of regurgitate themselves. How do you change things up? How do you get things more efficient? I think time under tension, you know, if you've slowed your workout depending on what you're doing. For us it's very much endurance based. So we're not looking for volume, we're not looking for mass of one particular muscle or pair of muscle groups. We're looking for just overall general health to get us into that really efficient zone where we can go off for months at a time. Like the Atlantic, have a massive calorie deficit. There's no point for us in putting on 10 kilos of lean muscle mass to then go and eat a thousand calories per day hiking or rowing or flying across the country because our body is just going to go into total meltdown and shock and go, well, you were giving me 5,000 calories of good nutrition for the last four months, five months of prep and training and now you're doing nothing. So for us it's, if we can stay on 2 1/2, 2000 calories, get super fit, efficient and then just drop that deficit, calorie deficit by say, 500 calories. Super efficient for us.

Yeah, yeah. And related to that, you guys also did a similar but slightly different test, I believe, or experiment where you did high volume versus low volume, is that correct?

We've done. What have we done today? We've done 20 minutes. Yeah, 20 minutes versus 40 minute workouts. So we were in the gym for 40 minutes, one of us was 20 minutes. This was a really fun experiment for us because it brought in that dynamic of we weren't doing exactly the same time and going, right, cool, high fives out to the gym and get back in the office. It was right, we've just done a hiit workout. Now one of us has to stay and do it again. And when you get to doing these experiments, we don't want to do six to eight weeks of building up into it and then the last four weeks are quite intense and we're at a level where we want to be. It's, we want to really push ourselves quite quickly to get the results or at least show what's happening to our bodies. So yeah, the high volume, low volume, 20 minutes versus 40 minute workout was really interesting because we knew, did we know what there was?

I think we're inherently lazy in terms.

Of us just generally.

I know, I think the human population have found ways to reduce input to maximize output in every form of life, every area of life.

The so called med made popular by guys like Tim Ferriss.

Right.

Minimum effective dose.

Yeah, exactly. And training for us and for everybody listening, I'm sure they're training, they've got to come up with new ways of training to keep it motivational, to look at minor increases and improve efficiency. And it was really born out of that, I think. And also the underlying question which was, well, what if we actually trained for half the amount of time, how much performance will we lose? Or increase. Oh yeah, or increase. And through this, 40 minutes, 20 minutes, and we were trying to toy with an hour versus 30 minutes, we were thinking of 15 minutes versus half an hour. And we put it out to our audience and we said what time frame should we look at? And generally speaking, 20 minutes, 40 minutes was the rough ballpark figure because a lot of our audience in the UK have day jobs. An hour, you can't really fit that into a lunch break. People have got young families. 20 minutes, 40 minutes seemed to be like a nice balance between both and it was eye opening. And let's just say this now, and this is just, this is our own experience, Ben. So I'm not going suddenly to say everyone, right, you need to go and do this, but from what we experienced and all the data that we tracked, there wasn't really much of an uplift in performance training for 40 minutes than there was 20 minutes. So our training program really looks anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes.

Now what's interesting is that when you look at data on let's say muscle maintenance, VO2 max, et cetera, it's actually a shockingly low, or at least lower than what most people think amount of volume that's necessary to maintain muscle or to maintain VO2 max or mitochondrial density or anything like that. Typically for a good, it's usually up to about three months or so. Once you get past the three month mark, it seems that slightly greater volume wins out. But at least from what I've seen in larger studies, the extent to which higher volume wins out is not that significant compared to low volume. And so if you're looking for a time hack, I mean this is, you know, there's companies in the us like one popular one that's sponsored this show before is Carol Bike, right? So it's 10 to 15 minute workout where you just have like two all out, 10 to 20 second sprints while you're riding this bike. Right. They advertise as like a time hacked sweat free workout. But it sounds to me like your guys results are pretty similar in terms of people probably needing, assuming they're actually doing the work when they're in there to spend less time in the gym or working out than what they might think to at least maintain decent levels of fitness.

Yeah, you've absolutely nailed it on heads. Like you can do a lot more with a lot less. You don't need to go and do these super, super kind of time, heavy weight, heavy hour and a half sessions. You know, I think for 99% of the normal population for us if you can experiment a little bit, you know, if somebody says oh 12 reps doing this, this tempo is, that's exactly what you need, that's perfect for you I think just experiment. And for us these experiments really have shown that not one size fits all. Go and find out what works best for you. For you, the results for the 40 versus 20 minutes. We did our weight pretty much every single day as we went through the experiment. And on our website theturnertwins.co.uk, you can go into the fitness side there. The graphs or the graph 4 tracked weight over 3 months are literally identical.

But I think we all also need to say that this, you know, we're not, let's say high performance athletes. I wouldn't say we're Olympics.

Speak for yourself.

We're not Olympic athletes. We're just trying to keep a relatively middle to high level of fitness. So this is more looking at the non elite performance athlete. And for us this was a really, really informative and good experiment to understand how our bodies react to this type of training.

Yeah, there's some crossover though, I mean even to higher levels of competition. Like I've told this story I think before in the podcast, but one of the ways that I got into doing what I do now, which is more work online, coaching online, doing online programs, et cetera, was when I used to run a bunch of personal training gyms and studios. I always trained my clients using this minimum effective dose of exercise approach. And I was super into Ironman triathlon and I used almost purely high intensity interval training for ironman Triathlon training. Eight to 10 hours per week versus the standard 15. Gosh, up to 25. I would have peers who would go to the pool and swim a 4k and I would do 10 by 50 all out with those 50s being as hard as possible. Or I would have friends who would do like the two and a half, three hour, slow, horrific, masochistic, frowny face run. And I would go out to the track and do like 10400 meter repeats and that would be my workout and I'd be done in sometimes an hour or less. And I wound up competing in qualifying for and competing in Hawaii Ironman World Championship six times. And I actually took that same program, created it into this online program called the Triathlon Dominator. I think my tagline was cross the Ironman finish line with a smile on your face without neglecting your hobbies and your friends and your family and your career, et cetera. And it was successful. And so I've been into this idea of minimalist training even for higher performance events for a while. So I think you guys are really onto something.

Yeah, I certainly think it's just, I know I've just said it, but just experimenting and finding out, you can read all you want, but for us we know exactly when our sugar levels are around 3.2 because we've used these kind of arm patches that you've got and using their mobile data, you can just connect. And when you start feeling a little blurry and a little kind of all tired and a bit spaced out, you know exactly what your blood sugar level is. If you experiment on a small level. We're not saying go and change your life and become a amateur scientists. Go and find out whether you feel good eating a banana before or whether you want to go and eat a shitload of cookies before the gym. You know, go and experiment and you'll be amazed at what works for you isn't what works for somebody else. And just because, dare I say an expert has said it, yes, there's probably merit and grounding to what they do. Just twist, twist what they're saying a little bit and make it work for you.

But we are also twins, so we've got each other to level off. And I think that's what motivates us is that even through the what we done now for experiments, we've learned so much about how our bodies react to different types of fitness. So we've done a vegan versus meat diet, we've done plant protein versus animal protein. This body weighted versus weighted and we're learning so much about it and it's really improved the way we use our time training for the better.

Oh yeah, yeah. And I want to talk about these nutrition experiments. What you said about self quantification really rings true to me, especially regarding like a blood glucose monitor like this because you Know, as you guys can see, I walk on my treadmill a lot while I'm podcasting. And I went for a few months when I first started walking during the podcast, feeling very light headed about 15 to 20 minutes into the show. And I usually have my breakfast before the show. And by using this monitor, it turns out my blood sugar sometimes 15, 20 minutes in would be like down in the 50s and I'd be a little dizzy and would have difficulty focusing on the guest or coming up with something witty or intelligent or halfway lucid to say. And so based on that, I thought, well, maybe before my morning workout, before I have breakfast, I'll just elevate my blood levels of ketones, so if my blood sugar drops, I've got a second fuel. So then I started taking a shot of these exogenous drinkable ketones. I don't know if you guys have ever seen these before, but they kind of give your body a fourth source of fuel. And problem completely disappeared. Even if my blood sugar dropped, if I tested it now, it's probably down in the 60s, which is low. But because I've got a bunch of ketones in my bloodstream, I don't have that hypoglycemic post breakfast dip that I seem to have that attacks me during podcasts present anymore. And I just knew that by testing. And some people might think, well, maybe I've got low oxygen or I'm low on sleep or I don't have enough food. But it turns out for me, I was just freaking super hypoglycemic during podcasts and just shifting the ketones. Fix that.

It's really interesting to say hypoglycemic. There's so many times where once you start experimenting and I'd probably say the best advice is to go and get one of these kind of blood glucose monitors because you can just basically just use. Your app tells you exactly what you are, you know, how you're feeling with a number of your sugar. For us, we've used it multiple times now of multiple experiments and it's, I think people need to start getting a little bit more connected with their body and what's actually going on. So for me now, I know in my current state, I've just had a little coffee, I'm probably about three and a half, 3.6 on our scale. I don't know what you are, but I think having that measure going, oh, I know exactly what my body's doing is so informative, it's probably the biggest thing you could do. Because you've just said people grab a coffee because they need to feel awake and then they'll go and have a biscuit and then they get that massive sugar crash and then they have more coffee to counteract the sugary biscuits and it's just all wretched, no vomit. And you're not really getting you anywhere. And that's a classic. Well, because there's biscuits in the office and because people have traditionally had coffee in the morning to wake you up, well, that's what you should do. Well, why, like question it? And this is what we love doing as twins. Question, why are you having a coffee? Why don't you have some sort of plant based chicory coffee alternative? Or why don't you, dare I say, have a Bolognese for breakfast? Yeah. Probably pretty uncool around your friends to say I had Bolognese rather than a croissant, but find out what works. And I've been eating, I say pasta. When I was playing rugby, I was eating pasta for breakfast regularly. And it's so much. I was much happier and healthier and more energy throughout the morning having a main meal rather than say honey on toast or something.

Yeah, you must not be Italian. It's one thing I should note for listeners. You said a three something. I think your millimolars per liter for blood glucose. We're milligrams per deciliter over here. I think you'd, what you just cited would be somewhere around like 85 to 90. I think so.

Yeah.

You know, still, still a decent blood glucose value. So that leads me to what? To another question I wanted to ask you guys about these nutrition experiments. Which one did you do first? The animal versus the plant protein for like, you know, comparing protein sources or the vegan versus the, the meat based.

We did the protein, plant protein versus animal protein. And again, this was a really, really interesting one. We thought that there would be a lot of change between the two just based on the fact that one's come from animals, one's come from plants. There's a lot of conversation when we did this pre Covid.

Pre Covid, yeah. And particularly in the UK market, there was a massive amount of people saying plant based, it's much better.

Right. That movie Game Changers, I think really fueled that also.

Yeah, exactly that. I think it was around that time, wasn't it? Yeah, it would have been. And we just wanted to basically simply ask, is there any difference between the two? And if so, over our 12 week program, again, when we start these projects or 12 week programs, we do our, do our weights and stats before and usually we're fairly the same. If there is a little bit of difference, say he's carrying a kilo more, maybe two kilos more. Whether it's across fat, whether it's across muscle, that's fine. As long as that difference then is reflected and taken into account at the end, then it's, then you can start seeing kind of the differences in comparing. And it was really interesting. Again, the graphs across body weight change, whether it's fat, whether it's muscle mass, remain very, very similar in profile. So there'll be days when we'd have, we put on a little bit more weight for some reason or retain more weight. There'll be days when we both drop together. But the really interesting thing is the graphs did follow each other and sometimes they went away from each other when you didn't expect it. And for us, I think at the end of the 12 week program, there wasn't any real difference in meat or plant based protein. And what's that classic expression in the documentary? How do you get as strong as an ox when you didn't eat any meat? And the guy's like, well, when did you last see an ox eat meat? Eats grass?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm curious about the animal and the plant protein piece. Was this like a post workout supplement? One that was like away protein versus a rice protein? Was this just a general dietary approach or how did you set it up?

Yeah, it was exactly that. It was post post protein. So we kept on the same diet. And I know the purists out there, which there are, you know, a lot of them are saying, oh, you know, if you're going to go one plant based protein, one animal protein, you need to kind of separate that. There's so many different areas as you understand with these experiments. I'm sure people say, ah, you know, Ben, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? Did you really have to add this? You know there's so many, yes, there's so many different ways of, of getting results here. For us there's a, there's a general overall goal of just seeing what happens, letting the graphs speak for themselves, being curious.

Yeah, well, you're right. You guys aren't advertising yourselves as running like peer reviewed human clinical double blinded research studies. You're just twins and kind of throwing a few noodles at the wall and getting some general data out there. But what I was asking you about was assuming you were doing this post workout, was one of you Doing a whey protein or animal based protein shake and then one of you doing a plant based protein shake, keeping the diet the same besides that, and then seeing what happened to, I'm assuming, muscle.

Yeah, exactly that. So we're just doing Shakespeare. Um, half an hour or less straight after a workout. The workouts were exactly the same. Loads of compound lifts, that's what we like. There's no point doing a bicep curl when you can do a bend and snap clean and snatch, whatever it is. Um, so for us it was just looking at that 30 minute window 30 minutes after exercise.

And that is almost another experiment itself is, is trying to work out the most. I mean, obviously you want to eat straight after your workout, but what if you accidentally ate regularly 45 minutes after workout? How does that affect your training?

Half an hour to two hours? Yeah, you'd lean out a lot. But yes, if your viewers have any suggestions on what experiments we could do next, we're all open ears.

Yeah, yeah. So, so was the animal and the plant protein, did it turn out to just be a wash, like pretty similar across the board?

Yeah, yeah. For us definitely it was the, I said limited. A spectrum of results that we, we studied before, during and after. There was no tangible difference between the two. I certainly think for me on the plant based, Ross was on the plant based shake. I felt actually better on plant based protein than I would have done. It was just a pea protein, definitely better on that than an animal protein. Do you mix it up or are you fairly consistently on one protein?

Well, I eat an omnivorous diet and typically if you're on an omnivorous diet, the source of the protein post workout should matter a little less because by the end of the day you're getting a pretty large set of different amino acids if you're mixing up meat, grains, legumes, et cetera. But what's interesting is this reminds me of a study that came out a few years ago that showed that the superiority that some studies have shown of an animal based protein like egg or whey or something with the more complete amino acid profile seems to be washed out when compared to a plant protein based post workout intake that is combined with digestive enzymes. It's kind of interesting. There's something about adding enzymes into a rice protein or a pea protein. The same type of digestive enzymes you just buy as a supplement to take before a meal to help with digestion that seems to up regulate the bioavailability of the amino acids to make the animal protein very similar to the Plant protein. I think for me the difference would be, and what I would want to see to really know for sure. Right. Would be a plant protein post workout consumed by someone who is not eating anything but plants the rest of the day compared to a plant protein post workout with somebody who was also including animal sources during their diet the rest of the day. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You kind of have to do like vegan, you have to have a few arms, you have to have like vegan and plant based protein post workout, omnivore and plant based protein post workout, vegan and animal based protein post workout and then omnivore and animal based protein post workout to get a full picture. But regardless, you guys basically saw that in people who are eating a similar diet that's omnivorous, the plant protein post workout doesn't seem to be much different than the animal protein as far as muscle response.

No, pretty identical. Again, if we needed to do a greater study, you'd go for probably six months. You'd then get a lot more blood work, you'd get gut microbe, you do the whole profile, which I think would be really interesting. But again, for us we've got this commercial timeframe and there's no point in running an experiment 12 weeks or more when we're away on an expedition or in an area where we just physically can't compare.

One of the things that we've always been surprised at and yes, we're twins, but we always think that there's going to be differences or more differences than we actually find, whereas we are very, very similar. And that's been one thing that surprises us is that our data will peak and trough at exactly the same time when we haven't changed anything on the program. The diet doesn't change massively yet we will go up and down at the same time. And it's interesting that even twins, that, yes, we're both living in London at the time, we still go through these, you know, completely what seems disconnected events for. And we still can't work out why.

Our bodies do that.

And maybe that's our genetics kicking in and reacting exactly the same way to the gym program. But we haven't changed anything in the gym program. We'll keep it relatively the same. So that's been really interesting to actually see oddly how similar we are.

We did a vegan versus meat diet a couple of years ago for Men's Health UK and it got published online and then for us, the online globe, I want to say Viral Kingdom, it just Went mad. It's like 20, 25 languages and it's, it's just been for the third time, I think, posted on Ladbible again, twins doing this experiment and it just keeps going round and round again. And people from all over the world are getting in contact saying, can we get the results? Can we get your feedback? Can you do an interview for this magazine or dot com? It's really weird when you look at the graphs. It's not like one of us has a big peak, way above the average for that particular graph profile and then two weeks later somebody else or hug has a profile peak. The peaks and the troughs are exactly the same time, but totally unrelated, but again, all twinness. And so anyway, it's all very weird.

Who followed the plant based and who followed the animal based.

So Hugo me followed the plant based and initially starting out it was just going to be meats, like cut meats and dairy out of the diet and snack, however you wanted to snack. And then for whatever reason, I thought if we're going to do this wholeheartedly and get some actual relatively interesting data from this experiment, I've got to go full vegan. So cut out anything that contained animal products so crisp, like so many crisps, biscuits, snacks, they all contain some sort of dairy powder, anything, all kind of, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, we, I was like full vegan for three months and it was relatively painless, I want to say. But we had a great, a great company in the UK that was sending us the food, food boxes and things like that.

And so what'd you guys find with the animal versus the plant?

So we did a lot of gut bacteria health. So before and after sending off poo samples, doing all that fun, fun, energetic stuff in the, in that science department and when people say, oh, I've gone vegan because it's healthier and it's just the two of us and again, we're not holding anyone accountable, it's just what we found that's really not the case. So there's benefits and pros. I think the biggest benefit we found is that your microbiome diversity when you're a vegan because you're eating a lot less food. Like the spectrum of food or access to foods you're allowed to eat is a lot less.

By the way, that surprises me because I would have expected, you know, a wide variety of plants, maybe herbs, spices, etc. And potentially a large amount of fiber. I would have expected more microbial diversity in the plant based. But that's not what you guys saw.

Well, I would agree with that statement, but it's also the education of a vegan. As I was new to veganism, my, well let's say culinary imagination wasn't trained and I was struggling to find.

I got it. Yeah. So maybe like a slightly improperly comprised plant based diet that is not inclusive of a wide variety of compounds could lead to imbalances or deficiencies in the gut microbiome balance.

Yeah, exactly. If you said to anyone that has an omnivore diet right, go vegan, fully vegan tomorrow, they would probably really struggle to come up with creative ideas to get all the different sources in their diet.

They'd be having a lot of celery juice and almonds.

But and that's part, that was also part of the experiment. It was looking at just the convenience of a vegan diet. Is, is it complementary of our lifestyle, is it accessible and can it be maintained? In London the answer is yes. But where we grew up in the sticks down in Dartmoor or if you lived out in the middle of Western Australia, is a vegan diet realistic? Realistic and sustainable? Probably not because it's yeah, be very, very difficult to get a variety of plant based foods but in London that does work. So there was kind of that you know, other side that there was that other side of the experiment. But you know a lot of the experiment looked at the gut health and how the, my gut reacted to the cutting out of animal products and then we were layering on top of that the physiological changes and tracking how again over 12 weeks doing the same training program how our bodies would change.

I think the biggest thing we learned from vegan versus meat was that if you want to lower your cholesterol, go vegan suit like your. We've got high cholesterol around seven but Hugo's dropped down to under five in three months. Super good. But on the flip side of that, and I know getting access or learning about a vegan diet was quite difficult so didn't really know what to eat and hence probably why the microbiomesity dropped a little bit. But it also left you then more sustainable to susceptible to Crohn's disease. So there's a few again on our website eternatoins.co.uk you can look up the some of the graphs just for the gut health. So it's, it's a little bit of ying and it's a little bit of Yang. On one side you get very good benefits and on the other side you might not. You know, so it's for us, we've always said eat the rainbow, try and be as diverse as possible in that. And then you also start looking at the social, environmental side of some food. Like jackfruit has to be flown halfway through the UK anyway, has to be flown a huge amount of miles or chipped a lot of miles to get into supermarkets. So do you eat local beef or do you eat jackfruit that's come from somewhere the other side of the world? What's more sustainable? So.

Right, right. Like Sacha inchi protein and jackfruit and a lot of plant based protein sources might be less sustainable. You could make an argument for soaking and sprouting and fermentation to unlock a lot more of the protein, but a lot of people aren't willing to do that. Did you guys notice any changes in like body composition or muscle or anything like that across the animal versus the plan?

Yeah.

So I was on the vegan diet and my body weight started out maybe a kilo kilo and a half below Ross's. And throughout the three months of training, my body weight started to drop at a pretty consistent level, finishing about 83. So I started about 84 and a half kilos and I went down to for about 82, 83 kilos, whereas Ross. Ross's body weight generally went up. And so there was a big divide and this was our first big difference in all the experiments we've had that there was a very, very clear difference.

For the fat as well. Even though you lost while the difference was three kilos. Yeah. So at the end our fat percentage was pretty much the same. So we both averaged similar fat percentages.

Same peaks and troughs on the fat again as well. Exactly the same program.

Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where you can't of course, say the body's in the streets that animal protein is superior to plant for muscle gain. But I would say it makes a case for the fact that it's easier probably to maintain or build muscle by eating animals if you don't want to do all the work necessary to make a plant based diet, a more anabolic diet via hunting down a wide variety of protein sources and increasing diversity, which you learned especially with the microbiome data taking different supplements, et cetera. So yeah, it's almost like the animal based protein or the animal or omnivorous approach just makes it easier. Not superior, but definitely easier.

Yeah, yeah.

That's one of the big things that I find out. Maybe next time we Do a three month plant versus meat diet. The plant will far, far out exceed the performance side of a meat one because I'll be better trained, I'll know where I can get all of my nutritional gains from, etc. So maybe I'm just a really bad vegan.

Yeah. All right, well I'll have to stay to stay tuned for round two then that the real vegan versus the omnivore diet.

The one thing we want to do, and it's probably up there with the top three next 12 week studies is to put the last four 12 week studies onto a table. Go right. Which was which parts of it really benefited us. Like get rid of all the negatives and go right. Yes. Body weight was really good for mobility.

Great.

Add that in the vegan versus meat. What was really good about that? What was good about the 20 versus 40 minutes? Probably 20 minutes. And then do a culmination of all four of those experiments. The best bits. Try and find a twin versus twin angle in it and then go off and see if we can get even more efficient at the workouts.

Yeah, that makes sense. Have you guys ever thought about doing a low carb, high carb one that's literally on our.

I think that's the next one we're going to do which will be really interesting because I respond very, very well to high fat and you just get a little chubs on calves.

Have you guys ever actually done like a genetic profile? You say you respond really well to high fat and of course there are genes that would dictate that like maybe you don't have the APOE4E4 gene or you have a low inflammatory response to saturated fats or something like that. Have you guys tested your actual genetic makeup to see how similar you are genetically?

No, no, no, we haven't been quite.

An interesting one to do that.

Yeah, it was less than 200 bucks to get do a salivary test or a blood spot test for your genes. You could probably get that sponsored by the way by a company like True Diagnostics or something. That'd be interesting because it gives you a whole new set of data to play with. I've tested my son's and they're basically identical except one snp. One has a higher propensity to convert testosterone into estrogens. Besides that they're identical genetically.

It's really interesting that whole nature nurture twins, your sons are identical, yet there are differences. I know it sounds funny, but we still get a little blown away by when we do some of our Twin studies, particularly when we go to the department of Twin Research in central London and there's so many twins and one of the doctors is talking about a set of 70 year old twins that have just come in. They're identical in absolutely everywhere, except now one's got cancer and the other one doesn't. Yet they've quite literally lived together their entire lives. You know, nature, nurture. Why don't they both have it at the same time? Why is one not got it, you know? Fascinating.

Yeah, so many variables there. Connection, friendships, toxin exposure, maybe getting some kind of lime or mold or mycotoxin early in life. Yeah, there's a lot there. How about these expeditions and adventures? Do you guys have anything else beyond the electric vehicle planned or anything that's super notable that you've done besides rowing the Atlantic that you think would be cool for people to know about?

Well, maybe I look at a quick project we did a couple of years ago and then one that we're planning at the moment.

But a couple of years ago we.

Took a yacht and converted it to a hydrogen fuel cell to run off a hydrogen fuel cell. And look at the hydrogen fuel cell energy process and the pros and cons of that. We also did a trek across the green and ice cap. One of us was in the old gear that the explorers 100 years ago used across the ice caps, while whilst we were comparing the new and the latest technology, food to try and highlight how hard it was to be an explorer 100 years ago.

Oh my gosh. Who drew the short straw on that one?

Well, exactly, the short straw. This is exactly what we're talking about. You know, for us it's, you know, when you see somebody in leather shoes, bamboo poles, wooden skis, tweed trousers, woolly pulley jumper, you know, you look at the difference and you go, well, obviously branding science and materials engineering, diet, all of that stuff, lightweight space tech, the modern stuff is going to be much better. Carbon fiber poles, wooden poles, all that. Course that's going to be better, right? And then you look at the data and you're like, holy shit. Like half of the stuff we're wearing, the old stuff, is better than modern stuff. You start understanding why that is. And that's because the knowledge of how to operate, wear and use that old woolly pulley, leather shoes, bamboo poles, all of that stuff 100 years ago is now lost. So it's understanding the limitations. And yes, say 0 degrees to minus 10, you have one layer of woolly pulley, minus 10 to minus 15, you've got to put another shirt on anything. You know, there's those stages. Whereas these days you can buy a thousand pound down jacket that takes you from, from minus 5 to minus 40 fairly comfortably. So it's just understanding how your kit works. But also it works for a reason. We've all got grandparents who've worn woolly pulleys in the garden or walking the dog. There's method behind that madness. It does work. And this is what we love about these experiments that we do. Whether it's in the gym with the 12 weeks or whether it's out in the field on expeditions is, you know, you look at it side by side and people laugh and they're like, oh, who drew the short straw? I'd probably say modern only just gets the short straw, but it is the short straw. And we've gone on to do other expeditions in other environments where we've done old versus new. And this is where we're trying to develop a bit of a TV idea is going off into these different environments. You know, could this person have survived if they'd had old stuff or would it be more beneficial to have new stuff and all that stuff?

That is a great idea for a show. I would watch that. And then part of this reminds me a lot of it probably comes down to grit, perseverance and the possibility that humans in the past might have been a little bit harder, so to speak, just based on lifestyle being more physically demanding. I think about Back to Ironman, not to kick that horse to death, but Dave Scott, Mike Allen, these guys are riding old heavy steel bikes and yet laying down bike times in the Ironman that are comparable to what probably 90% of the field on these super tricked out carbon fiber electronic shifters are doing. Because these guys just, they trained hard and worked hard and so they could get by on just pure heavy steel.

Yeah. And again we question it. Why do people, when they train, go and buy a super lightweight carbon bike, use your old one? Because surely that's going to make it harder, right?

Yeah. And plus you could probably be better spending that money on supplement and diet, you know, lose four pounds and get all that money back that you spent on the lighter bike.

Yeah, it's really. Once we, once we get into the idea of questioning, questioning it and just maybe pushing against the status quo of what somebody said, of what just is the norm, you know, for us, why don't you wear some heavier clothing? Why don't you cycle a heavy steel bike? Why don't you go and dare I say, wear A T shirt, swimming, just to make it that little bit more resistive, make it hard for you training. And then when you get to the start line, go and wear something super lightweight, super slippery. Go and wear, go and ride a bicycle that's one kilo.

Yeah, it's so true. I like my trick was I used to train with the same bike because the biomechanics are important but I'd use an old crappy set of non aerodynamic wheels and tires that weren't as inflated as the ones I'd use on race day. And even that made a big difference. Like once I got the race wheels on, it felt like a whole different animal. So that's a really good point. And how about anything crazy you guys have planned in the next few months here?

Yeah, there's a project we're planning this year which is focusing again on battery electric technology which is to set the altitude world record with an electric power motor above the French Alps.

So we're going to go and have.

Some fun, test some technology, look at the performance of battery technology within the aviation space. We've got another project planned I think in South America which is to which aims to set the altitude world record with an electric off roader. And yeah, at the moment we're looking at balancing our time between experimenting and testing with new emerging technologies, particularly battery technology. I'm sure we've probably got another hydrogen fuel cell expedition project in the in the pipelines as well as looking at probably another physical fitness comparison. And I think we're probably going to go down the high fat, high carb. But it'd be interesting if your listeners have any thoughts and ideas on what our next experiment should be.

That's a great idea. Unleash the beast you guys. If you're listening in the show, notes are@BenGreenfieldLife.com Turner twins go there, give us some ideas. Leave your questions and your comments and your feedback for Ross and Hugo. Give them some ideas. I don't know, climbing Everest naked versus clothed or swimming with the sharks versus swimming with the goldfish, you name it, just throw your ideas out there. And their website by the way is turnertwins.co.uk Even just the four experiments we talked about, the high volume, low volume, the body weight versus weighted, the animal versus the plant protein and the omnivore versus the vegan. Those are incredible reads on their own. So, so I'll link to all those in the show notes. Guys, this has been incredible. You're an inspiration and I'll be watching you from afar and rooting for you on your next adventure and in your next experiment, too. See who gets the pizza and the pasta and the bread and who gets stuck with, I don't know, macadamia nuts.

Well, it's funny you say that. These are all experiments and ideas. What are they saying? Isotonic drinks versus a beer for rehydration? You know, there's method in the madness. They do say that a beer is just as good.

It is, actually. You're right. Potentially some diminishing returns once you get to a certain amount of beer. But yeah, you're right. Some of the things you find, they're just crazy. I used to do a lot of writing for different fitness magazines and training magazines, so I was always finding these strange examples. And I still love it when I stumble across guys like you who are up to this stuff. So, guys, thank you so much for everybody listening in. Again, it's BenGreenfieldLife.com Turner twins, Ross, Hugo, go get some sleep, guys.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

All right. All right. I'll talk to you guys later. Folks, I'm Ben Greenfield, along with Ross and Hugo, the Turner twins. Sign up from Ben Greenfield Life. Have an amazing week.

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