Does Food Combining Really Work, How To Exercise With A Knee Injury, Why Do You Put MCT Oil In Bulletproof Coffee?

You can go in three, two, one, go.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, does food combining really work? How to exercise with a knee injury. Why do you put fat in bulletproof coffee? How to jump farther and higher. And how to handle more alcohol.

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

What, what are you doing over there? What's going on?

I'm walking. Brock, are you outside? I finally have my treadmill workstation.

Oh, the treadmill all set up.

Yes, I'm outside with a giant long cable. That's yummy. Yeah, I'm walking on my home office treadmill. And it's actually, it's very cool because I didn't want like treadmills are one of the biggest contributors to electromagnetic pollution. Like they just churn out a ton of emf. And I'm trying to do like the whole like zero electrical pollution office here. So it's a manual treadmill. It goes from about 2 miles an hour up to 12 miles an hour. So you can do an all out sprint on it. And I had them kind of hack together this custom job for my home office. So it's called a, it's made by a company called Samsara Fitness.

Oh yeah, okay, I've seen the Samsara stuff.

Have you seen these before? They're really cool.

They're really expensive.

Well, yeah, they aren't, they aren't cheap. But they did like a custom kind of like no frills model for me because I'm like, all I want to do is just like have it for my desk. So it's got, it's got no rails on it and you just walk on it and it fits perfectly underneath this, the standup desk that I'm using. So anyways, it's, you can check them out. They're@samsara fitness.com s a m s a r a fitness.com. and I won't walk on the treadmill the whole time.

Yeah, you're already out of breath since you're recording.

And then they're giving all of our listeners a discount code on these.

Oh, cool.

It's Ben 10. So yesterday I spent almost an hour filming in my office all the little things that I'M putting together in here that kind of make it my biohacked home office for my inner circle members. But one of the things is this cool new treadmill. So there you go.

I like it. Can you take a picture of it and we can put it in the show notes?

Yes, that is already done.

Oh, cool.

I will upload it to Instagram. We can put it in the show notes.

Awesomeness.

News flashes.

Okay, so before we jump into the news flashes here, I have to turn the lights, little hand crank on my desk down because I'm no longer on my treadmill.

Yeah, I heard a bunch of thumping and bumping and stuff going on while we were playing the music. What are you doing now?

Now I'm leaning now against my little. My pelvic chair. It's a chair that's shaped like a pelvic bone and you just kind of lean back on it. It's like a standing workstation. This one's made by a focal upright. It's called a mogo. It's like this portable little two pound standing workstation chair. And I use it, like in hotel rooms and stuff, but I've also got it in my office and I'm kind of in like a half leaning, half standing position. So cool.

That's one that. It's almost like riding a unicycle.

Yeah. So it allows you to be in a seated position without your hip flexor shortening. So we should just pretty much geek out this whole podcast and I'll just shift to a new position and describe it to our listeners the whole time.

Yeah, sadly, I'm just standing at my desk. I have one of those health mats under me. That's exciting.

Oh, nice. Yeah, I was thinking next I'll lie down on an infrared biomat and we'll just keep on.

And then the show ends as Ben falls asleep.

Okay, so news flashes this week.

Yeah, I almost forgot what we were doing here.

Yeah. So this first one's really interesting. I actually spoke last month at the Ancestral Food Symposium in Vermont, and I met a guy named Jeff Leach. And Jeff had just returned from hanging out with the Hazda tribe, the Hasda hunting tribe in Tanzania.

Oh, nice.

And we were talking, and as you do when you're talking to someone that you've just met, he mentioned that he had just that previous week gotten Hazda feces injected into him. He actually did a poop transplant from one of the members of the tribe that he was living with.

Where did they inject that?

Well, he just wrote a big article on it because the article starts he's hanging upside down from this upside down bicycle to keep the poop in his body. And he's just doing this as an N equals one experiment to see if you put an ancestral hunter gatherer gut microbe ecosystem into someone living in a modern environment, does it affect their health? And if so, how does it affect Bifidobacterium and bugs in the western gut? Does it help heal a leaky gut? Does it contribute to a better ecosystem in the gut? And the article that he wrote on it is really comprehensive. It's actually a little bit of a long article, but I tweeted it because I actually thought it was quite interesting that this gentleman had injected himself literally with what is called ancestral poop.

So I know when they do the repopulate and stuff, the feces or the gut bacteria have been sort of cleaned and sterilized and repackaged and stuff before they inject them into the person. Did he go through that process as well or was it just straight up? Somebody pooped, he took it and put it in.

I think this was a little bit more tribal.

I'm getting the feeling, yeah, yeah, you.

Need to go read the article. I'm going to link to it in the show notes. No spoilers. Yeah. Okay, so go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 296 if you want to check out what type of things people are putting into their distal colons these days.

Or go to tutor.com BenGreenfield Yes, I.

Also tweeted it out there. But for the show notes we'll link to all the articles over at 296bengreenfieldfitness.com 296 the other thing is that there was a really interesting article that came out on plant food sources for vegetarians, specifically vitamin B12 rich plant food sources. Now I know we have a lot of athletes especially who listen and athletes in general, whether vegan, vegan or omnivore or vegetarian, they tend to be mildly deficient in B12 just because of higher metabolisms and more turnover, more exercise. And while of course having a hefty piece of steak is a great way to get your B12, that's not necessarily something that a vegan or vegetarian is going to do unless it's the tofurky on Thanksgiving Day and unfortunately don't eat that stuff. Tofu is not a form of soil. There is a form of soy that contains decent amounts of B12. The tofurkey is not going to be your best bet. So I'll link to this article. But what I thought was really interesting first of all was the main takeaway from the article, which is that there is this purple. It's this what it's called, and you're going to be really familiar with it is it's called dried purple laver L A V E R. But dried purple laver is just nori. Oh, it's like it's nori seaweed that you get from the grocery store. And this is actually of all the plant sources of vitamin B12 that they measured the highest in vitamin B12 in absorbable vitamin B12. And it's also a really rich source of iron and omega 3 fatty acids. Two other things that tend to be more difficult for vegans to get. So nori is the highest source. Some of the other things they tested that were really, really high and great plant sources for vegans or vegetarians. One was fermented beans and fermented vegetables, especially like fermented soybeans like natto and miso. And one of the ones that was highest in B12 and some other nutrients was tempeh. Another thing that, and I've recommended this before on the show was edible algae like chlorella and spirulina. Very easy to get your hands on, like these edible algae bits. Like I recommended this stuff from energybits.com before, something you can kind of pop like popcorn. But that also ranked really high as a plant based source of B12 and other vitamins that vegans and vegetarians tend to be deficient in. And then they also tested some wild edible mushroom species and what they found was that wild edible mushroom species can, can kill you if you don't choose them carefully.

Yes.

Or do other crazy things. They lost a lot of researchers in that one. No, really. Shiitake mushrooms actually rank really high as a wild edible mushroom that's going to be high in B12 and have a lot of other pretty decent vitamins in it. But most of these didn't really hold a candle to nori. So there you go.

Now how much nori do you really do you need to eat for it to be efficacious? Because I've heard people like Chris Kresser say that it's actually not all, all that bioabsorbable. Yeah.

What they used in the study was 4 grams, which accounts for. They describe it as several sheets of nori. Now, several I'm going to assume. I know it's kind of weird for literature to not specify the exact number of sheets But I'm guessing it's probably like three to five, something like that. That's usually what I have with lunch is about three. I wrap up my salad and I have three nori wraps. With lunch, I just make a salad and I eat my salad with nori instead of eating it with a fork.

I usually put my scrambled eggs in nori.

That's delicious.

Just put that in there, roll it up.

That's actually a really, really good way to have nori too. I like that. So the other thing is that you want to be careful to make sure that you get nori that hasn't had a bunch of canola oil and stuff added to it. I've noticed at airports, when I'm going through airports, the little nori snacks they have at airports, if you look at the ingredient label, a lot of times they use canola oil or safflower oil or sunflower oil in those. You want either olive oil or just no oil at all. The, the sea snacks S E A S N A X Sea snacks makes a pretty good nori. And you can, you can find those on Amazon. Literally, we just get the, the plain Jane Nori from the Asian food store and that works just fine as well. I don't even remember what brand it is, but it's literally just nori, you know, nothing else.

Yeah. The ingredients list of mine is seaweed.

Mm, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which is not something that's hard to pronounce, so it must be healthy for us.

Yes, exactly.

So the last thing is heart rate variability. There was a really good article, actually, that our friend Mark Sisson published at Mark's Daily Apple about how to increase your heart rate variability. And of course, that's the one thing of all the different quantitative self quantification variables that I recommend that people test. One is heart rate variability or the most important one is heart rate variability. And I thought some of his recommendations based on research for increasing heart rate variability were very interesting. One was to drink green tea or to use something that's a rich source of L theanine. I got some of that this morning. To increase heart rate variability. I just had a giant cup of coffee in a kale smoothie. I don't know if that did the same thing.

I'm having a big cup of coffee and I took some of the smart caffeine that has, I think it has 200mg of L theanine in it.

So your heart rate variability is high.

My heart rate period is really high right now.

And I'm definitely going to be regular. So we've got that going. Yes. Another thing, there are some interesting things that were straightforward, like de stress. Don't procrastinate. Don't work too much or commute too far. The only thing I thought interesting with those was that there have actually been studies that have shown that commuting decreases heart rate variability or that procrastination decreases heart rate variability. If you're taking an exam after you've procrastinated, some things that we would consider to be common sense. Right. Yoga will increase it. Meditation will increase it. Listening to the right kind of music, like baroque music, increases heart rate variability compared to heavy metal. Again, no big surprises here. That these are all things that would de stress you. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting that I actually tried while I was measuring my heart rate variability after reading this article was alternate nostril breathing. And I thought this was really interesting. What you do is you cover up your left nostril and you breathe through your right nostril and then exhale through your left nostril and then you alternate and you go vice versa. You go in through your left nostril and out through your right nostril, just using your fingers.

Right.

To plug the appropriate nostril as you do that. What's called alternate nostril breathing. And that had a really significant increase in my heart rate variability. That was an interesting one. I just laid in bed and did that. A few other ones in there were fish oil, forest bathing, which is just like walking in nature. I love that we have to give walking in nature a special name, Forest bathing.

So I think that's a Japanese term, the forest bathing.

It is Shenyan forest bathing. Yeah, it's called walking outside. And then actually, interestingly, exercising during pregnancy was shown to increase fetal heart rate variability. So if you want to give your baby a favor and you're a mom out there, just exercising during pregnancy can actually increase heart rate variability in fetals. So there you go. How to increase heart variability.

You know what else is really interesting about that article? If you. If you go over to itunes and subscribe to their podcast. The that article was read to you by a very handsome Canadian fellow with a scratchy beard. Sounds a lot like me.

Yeah, that's right. I forgot. You're reading the articles now. Right.

For in my best announcer voice.

Yeah. So if you're not sick of Brock's voice yet, you can be.

You can be so sick of it.

Mark's daily Apple podcast. All right, well, Cool. So those are the news flashes. And if you want to kind of keep your finger on the pulse of all the news flashes that I published every day, just go to twitter.com BenGreenfield and if you want to grab any of those articles and delve into them more thoroughly, you can get the links over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 296 Nice. Listener.

Q and A.

Hey, Ben, I was wondering if you and Brock could discuss a little bit about food combining and whether the combination of macronutrients that we put together really matters in terms of fat gain or muscle gain. So thanks, Ben. If you guys could just talk through this a little bit, I really appreciate it. Thanks.

Interesting. I've heard lots of people talk about like, oh, you can't have your starches with your proteins.

Yeah. Well, let me explain what food combining is for those of you who don't know what it is. So the basic principle here is that the people who are proponents of a food combining diet say that different foods require different PH levels to digest properly, and different foods have different transit times in your gastrointestinal tract. So by eating certain food combinations, like eating a protein rich meal combined with carbohydrates, that that combination would technically be harder to digest. And so you would get decreased nutrient absorption. You would have food sitting longer in your GI tract, which might promote gas or bloating or buildup of toxins from food not kind of passing through your gut quickly enough. And so what you do is you have specific combinations that are okay and specific combinations that are not okay. And the way that most food combining diets are set up is you've got acid, alkaline, or neutral foods. So acid foods would be like meat, fish, or dairy. Alkaline foods would be like potato or rice, for example. And so you wouldn't mix acid or alkaline foods. And the entire thing has basically four rules. The first is that anytime you have fruit, it's on an empty stomach. So fruit is always by itself. The second is that starches are always by themselves or only consumed with vegetables. Like if you have a potato, it's never with a steak, it's with a vegetable. Yeah, that's like the best meal is that if you have meat, dairy, fish, eggs, et cetera, any high protein food, they have it alone. Or you could have it with vegetables. Again, vegetables are kind of like the. Okay, vegetables are the neutral food.

Right.

And then the last would be if you have seeds, nuts, things along those lines, those would also have to be consumed with vegetables and not with carbohydrate rich or protein rich food. So we're almost like isolating our fats, our protein and our carbohydrates. So question is, does it actually work? So some of my thoughts on this, first of all, the idea that certain food groups will digest better in acidic environments versus alkaline environments, or vice versa, is kind of partially true. Like carbohydrates, for example, carbohydrates will digest better in an alkaline environment in your stomach. And that's because that alkaline environment activates what are called amylase enzymes, which help you to break down the carbohydrates. Now, the thing is, though, stomach acid is going to get released when you eat any kind of food, whether it's a carbohydrate or a protein or a fat. And even if your stomach is completely empty, it's still acidic. So once anything that you eat goes into your gut, your stomach releases acid. And that can be whether you eat carbohydrate, whether you eat protein, whether you eat fat. And what happens is that once the acidic contents of the stomach move into your small intestine, your pancreas goes into action. And what your pancreas does is it releases digestive enzymes along with something called bicarbonate. And that secretion from the pancreas is alkaline. It's non acidic. It neutralizes the stomach acid in your small intestine, and that allows you to create this alkaline environment that's better for breaking down carbohydrates and that's better for breaking down fats. Whereas a lot of the protein digestion begins in the acidic environment of the stomach and still will continue to some extent in the small intestine.

That is so cool, man, the body is awesome.

Yeah, exactly. So what your body does is it will digest a meal containing proteins, carbohydrates and fats efficiently based off of this interplay between alkalinic pancreatic production and acidic stomach production. So ultimately, if you were to, say, eat protein with carbohydrates and with fat, you're going to get a little bit of extra acidic production from the stomach for that protein, you're going to get a little bit more alkaline response from the pancreas, because these two interplay very, very well. And what happens then is that would technically increase, not decreased digestive capacity. So it's almost exactly the opposite of what you would expect when it comes to food. Combining that a meal comprised of a bunch of different macronutrients mixed together would almost digest more easily because your body is working together. It works very, very well with everything mixed together. So the deal with food combining from that standpoint, from the acidity, alkalinity standpoint, is there's not much to be to be said for it and there's not much science behind whether or not it works. There are some studies that have looked into food combining that I'll tell you about here in a second. But there are also some issues with the food combining diet. Like for example, eating fruit by itself. Anytime you're looking at wanting to control blood sugar level or control say like insulin resistance or insulin response to food, anytime you're eating something that's going to cause a high glycemic response or a spike in blood sugar, if you eat that food on its own in the absence of proteins or in the absence of fats, that's going to magnify that blood glucose response. So eating fruit all by itself is actually not that great of idea from a fat loss standpoint compared to say like having an apple with a little bit of cheese or having a banana with a little bit of almond butter.

Right.

So eating fruits by themselves are not necessarily something that I would endorse. And again, there's no evidence that eating fruit by itself allows that fruit to be more easily digested versus having it with a protein or with a fat. The next thing to realize is that fat soluble vitamins, phytochemicals and what are called mixed carotenoids that you're going to find in fruits and vegetables are enhanced in terms of their absorptability when they are consumed with a fat based source like putting olive oil on your kale spinach salad, or having nuts with fruit, or even using something like butter with roasted vegetables. All of that increases the nutrient absorption from those foods. So when we're isolating fruits or even when we're isolating vegetables, we're not getting as much of the nutrients from those foods as we potentially could. So that's another issue is that you're shorting yourself from a nutrient absorption standpoint here when it comes to using a food combining diet. The next is like I mentioned, they have looked at this from a study standpoint and there's not any evidence that a food combining diet is superior for weight loss, which is why a lot of people do it. And they actually had a study where they compared a balanced diet that is just like a normal average diet. It wasn't like a high fat or a high carb diet just Kind of a normal, almost like a USDA ISH diet.

A MyPlate?

Yeah, like 50% carb, 25% protein, 25% fat. And then they used a diet that was similar in macronutrient content, but that fat followed these food combining rules. And what they found was that both diets, by the way, were calorie controlled, meaning that they were calorie restricted diets. There was no difference in the amount of weight loss between the group that followed a low calorie food combining diet versus a group that didn't pull out their hair trying to follow all these complex food combining rules based off of the chart they had hanging on their fridge. So ultimately there's no evidence that it's actually going to help you at all with weight loss. So some people do feel better when they switch to a food combining diet, and I suspect that is for one of two reasons. The first is that if you're not producing adequate digestive enzymes, for example, to break down carbohydrates or fats or proteins, a complex meal can cause heartburn, gas bloating, etc. And a lot of people have insufficient pancreatic enzyme production or insufficient digestive enzyme production, whether it's in the stomach or the small intestine. And this would be a situation where rather than using a food combining diet and shorting yourself from a nutrient absorption standpoint, potentially causing rapid fluctuations in your blood sugar and going through a lot of heartache to not necessarily have much of an effect, just take digestive enzymes, which actually, when you take them for a certain period of time, can actually help to jumpstart your own enzyme production. It's really interesting. So like a good high quality digestive enzyme supplement that you use prior to big complex meals or meals for which you normally get heartburn, gas, bloating, digestive issues, that type of thing, that's one thing that can really help. Another thing here is that if you have an overgrowth of bad bacteria, like if you have what's called a small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or if you have lack of good bacteria in the gut, any number of these issues called dysbiosis, or perhaps you've had hunter gatherer poop.

That'S what I was going to say.

Planted in you and that's causing issue. Anyways though, if you fall into one of those camps where bacterial issues are occurring, then you're also going to have a lot of difficulty with digesting meals properly. And so, you know, for example, a carbohydrate rich meal in the presence of Proteins and fats might cause fermentation of those carbohydrates, excessive fermentation of those carbohydrates, which may actually inhibit digestion of the proteins and fats and cause digestive upset. And again, the fix here is not a food combining diet. The fix here is looking at using things like oil of oregano, natural cleanses, garlic, ginger, turmeric, things that can help to clear up bacteria in the digestive tract, and then combining that with a good therapeutic grade probiotic, whether it's a soil based probiotic like Prescript Assist, or whether it's like a really good shelf stable advanced probiotic, like the Mount Capra they make, like the Caprobiotics Advanced, which is one that I travel with because it doesn't need to be refrigerated, but basically paying attention to your gut health. And you could test this too. I mean, if you go to direct labs, I like the GIFX comprehensive gut panel over there, it'll tell you pancreatic enzyme production, it'll tell you good bacteria, bad bacteria, parasites, yeast, fungus, all that stuff. So ultimately, I think that the food combining diet does not have much science behind it. I think it's one of those things where you're just going to be pulling out your hair or trying to follow all of these rules of what you combine with what, and you're just going to be a boar at parties and someone hands you the watermelon wrapped in proscetto and you have to lovingly unwrap the proscetto from around the watermelon and eat the watermelon.

That sounds delicious.

Wait 20 minutes and then have your proscetto and then prosputo, move on to your vegetables, which you need to scour to make sure there's no like bacon crumbles or anything like that in your vegetables, God forbid. So ultimately, I'm not enamored with the food combining diet and I don't really think it's going to be the best bet. If you've got gut issues, use digestive enzymes, take care of your gut bacteria, maybe get a poop implant and go from there.

Hey Ben, this is Scott in Bealesville, Maryland. I'm calling with a question on behalf of of my mom. We recently found out that she's been diagnosed with some severe knee damage in her legs due to some genetic problems. And she's been told she's probably headed for knee replacement in a few years. But she wants to get out to the gym and start working out and getting fit. And we were wondering if you had any advice for the kind of exercises or equipment she should be using? We obviously know that she should be using things like the elliptical or the bicycle over the treadmill. We were wondering if you had any other input on regiment or suggestions and we'd appreciate all your help. Thanks so much and keep up the great work.

Scott's a good boy. Looking after your ma.

Yeah, that's right, Scott. I hope you got your mom listening in.

Hi mom.

Yeah, that's most of our fans actually. Brock's mom, my mom, Scott's mom, Scott's mom. Yeah, that's pretty much it. That's it. So, you know, I just went through some knee issues myself. Like all the way leading up to this Ironman that I just did. My knees were banged up from Spartan World Championships. Since I did the Ironman, I've had to kind of nurse my knees back to health for this second set of Spartan races that I have coming up next weekend. And ultimately there are some things that I did from a third therapeutic standpoint to help with my knees. But the first thing is getting fit when you have a knee injury. Let's just look past the healing of the knees part and what can you do to get fit when you have a knee injury? Well, I actually I record and write a lot of articles for quickanddirtytips.com and I've got an entire series over there, like how to stay fit with an ankle injury, how to stay fit with a low back injury, how to stay fit with a knee injury, and I'll link in the show notes for this episode over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 296 to my article about how to stay fit with a knee injury. And it's really basic. One of the best ways to do it is just to split your workout into circuits. And for example, one of the circuits that I list in that article is an upper body circuit where you do an overhead shoulder press, seated if necessary, an assisted pull up on one of the assisted pull up machines, or a lat pull down, either one, a lying dumbbell chest press, a seated row and then an incline dumbbell chest press and then a reverse grip lat pull down. And you just like go through that circuit multiple times. And that's going to bomb the upper body pretty hard. It's going to get a lot of blood flowing. But then on an alternate day you could work the core, for example, so you could do like a seated medicine ball torso twist, like a Russian twist, and then you could do some plank variations like side planks or front planks. And then you could move on to maybe some push ups on an unstable surface like medicine ball pushup, and then onto a front plank variation and then onto more rotations in a push up position. So I like that scenario if your legs are really beat up of alternating day to day from an upper body workout circuit to a core workout circuit with some functional training thrown in and just going back and forth like that. And you could even throw in a third day of cardio exercise that isn't going to aggravate the knee, such as swimming upper body ergometers, like those machines at the gym where you're just turning the wheels with your upper body, pedaling.

With your hands kind of.

Yeah, exactly. Swimming's really the best. But rowing in some cases can be okay for the knees. It just kind of depends how hard you're pushing off. You can almost row in a manner that uses more of the back and the upper body than the knees. But ultimately, I'll link to that article for you. But the big idea here is to use weight training core and then cardio modalities that are easy on the knees. Now, as far as healing the knees, I mean, if this is like a genetic issue, like a rheumatoid arthritis or some kind of issue where you just like your knee cartilage is shot, you can't really grow that stuff back, at least not yet. Not with our current science. But if you're listening in and you just have beat up knees and you want to heal them, I can tell you some of the things that I did that worked really, really well for me. One is if you read Kelly Starrett's Becoming a Supple Leopard book and he's actually got a new book that I just read that's fantastic. If you're a runner, you need to own this book. I actually wrote to a bunch of my clients who are either runners or who are dealing with injuries. And I said, you need to get this book. It's called Ready to Run by Kelly Starrett. And one of. Well, there's two modalities in there that I really, really like. One is called Voodoo Flossing, where you get an old bicycle tube or you can get what's called a fitness band. There's a company called Rogue that sells these things called fitness bands. And you take a joint that you need to kind of milk inflammation out of or restore mobility to, and you wrap the area above and below that joint with the old bicycle tube, starting from below the heart and Working towards the heart. Right? So you're milking towards the heart and then you move that joint through a range of motion. Like, for example, you would use a bicycle tube below the knee. You'd use it above the knee and you'd wrap it around there pretty tight. And then you'd do a series, like hold onto a pole or something you can support yourself with and do a series of kind of like some deep squats where you're moving your knees through some ranges of motion and just like kind of milking the knee, milking the inflammation out of the knee. I really like that technique. It doesn't work so well if you've got, like, arthritis, no cartilage. But if it's just knee inflammation, that works really well, as does any of the deep tissue work. You know, like going hunting for tight spots, like using a lacrosse ball or, you know, like one of the. I like the beastie balls made by a company called Rumble Roller. They make this foam roller that has spikes coming out, but they also make these beastie balls that are perfect. I always have one in my bag that you can just go and hunt tight spots down with and work on. So Kelly Starrett's book Becoming a Supple Leopard, or even more specifically his new book, Ready to Run is really good. Two other things that I used quite a bit was I did a lot of covering an area with ice and then just electro stimming the hell out of it. Like taking a knee that's inflamed, putting. Like, I use the Mark Pro. And. And you may recall I did an interview with the folks at MarkPro. They offered all of our listeners a discount. At MarkPro.com you can use $32 discount code BEN and save 32 bucks off a MarkPro. But basically, this is a type of electrostimulation device that recruits muscles in a very therapeutic way. And the way that it works is you just put the electrodes around the area that hurt. You just surround that area with the electrodes. Basically you lay ice on top of that, like an ice pack, and then you just e stem it for like 15 to 20 minutes. And I was even doing that on my foot just this morning before we started recording, just just because my feet are still a little bit beat up from the Ironman marathon.

So you were doing that the entire time. We were talking in last week's podcast as well.

I don't recommend running a marathon in minimalist footwear if you haven't actually been training for set marathon. Not a good idea. And then finally, cap reflex. I've been popping cap reflex four of them, three times a day, which means I'm going through a bottle every 15 days, which is not cheap. But this is the most potent anti inflammatory joint healing formula I've ever used. It's like ginger, turmeric, glucosamine, chondroitin, tart, cherry if there's any. There ever been anything studied to help decrease joint inflammation naturally other than ibuprofen, which is unnatural. This stuff is, is the bee's knees, pun intended. So cap reflex works really well. So I like electrostim with ice. I like that voodoo flossing and deep tissue work a la Kelly Starrett. I like cap reflex. Like, that's like my holy trilogy for if I'm injured and I'm trying to knock something out of the ballpark. And then for Scott over or for Scott's mom, specifically in the show notes, I'll link to that article on how to exercise with a knee injury. If you just want some workouts that your mom can do.

Hey, Ben and Brock, this is Nick from California. Really like the show, appreciate everything you guys do. I have a question about bulletproof coffee. Specifically if there is research that shows that the terpenes in the coffee are more bioavailable or more highly absorbed with the bulletproof coffee. So basically I'm wondering if it's the mcts that are responsible for the terpenes doing their job or if something like half and half or like heavy cream would work just as well, if not better. Thanks for your time and look forward to hearing the answer on podcast. Thanks, guys.

For a while there I was drinking a lot of bulletproof coffee, but I've actually gone off of it. I'm sort of go in little waves here and there.

Yeah, I have like maybe once a week or once every two weeks or so. Like, I don't, I don't drink it just because I like to eat my calories. I don't like to drink my calories. But that's.

I love breakfast.

I actually almost, almost had a cup this morning, but I ended up having time to make my kale smoothie. So terpenes. Terpenes. Terpenes. Terpenes are hydrocarbons. And if you took chemistry, a hydrocarbon is just, it's mostly carbons and hydrogens. And in the case of terpenes, it's typically about a 5 carbon chain with 8 hydrogens on it. And a bunch of different plants make terpenes. So the coffee plants make terpenes. Marijuana makes terpenes Just about any plant that has any type or any potential for having any kind of an effect on your brain makes terpenes. Because terpenes, they actually can interact with your brain. They can cross the blood brain barrier, potentially if they are in a fat enveloped state. And they can affect serotonin and dopamine chemistry or neurotransmitter production. They can alter the permeability of cell membranes in your brain. They can bind to cannabinoid receptors in your brain. They can interact with, with a lot of different neurological receptors. And this is why a lot of different plants, from cannabis to coffee, actually have some kind of a neurological effect. It's the actual terpenes that are acting on you when they cause that effect. Now, if you listen to our episode a couple of weeks ago, we noted some of the terpenes, like cafestol and kahweal was another one in coffee. They can also increase your cholesterol, which is really interesting. They can actually interact with the liver and shut down bile acid production and increase cholesterol or fats, which is not necessarily a big deal unless you also happen to have inflammation, oxidation, high blood glucose, et cetera present in the presence of those fats. Right. Like high cholesterol isn't an issue unless there's other risk factors present. But ultimately, that's what terpenes are. That's what they do. And this is where it comes down to why you would actually put something like fat into bulletproof coffee. Because what happens is those terpenes are soluble in fat and they're better able to cross the blood brain barrier and elicit some of the actions that I just described when you consume them along with fat.

So.

The deal with using something like MCT oil, first of all, coconut oil rather than MCT oil has a couple of issues. MCT oil is a purified, kind of like fractionated form of coconut oil. So you've got much more concentrated forms of fatty acids in something like MCT oil versus coconut oil. Now, of course, if you want to kind of go down the Dave Asprey route, and he's very into mycotoxins and mold, many brands of coconut oil might actually contain mycotoxins, which is why you might get brain fog when you have bulletproof coffee with coconut oil. But you wouldn't get it after you had bulletproof coffee with MCT oil. So the way that mcts work is they're very rapidly absorbed by your body. They're a reduced chain length based fat. And so what happens is mcts will get converted into medium chain fatty acids in your liver. And when those medium chain fatty acids enter your mitochondria, they enter into what's called the Krebs cycle, which we may all be familiar with, is one of the ways that we produce ATP.

Now, one of the confusing 17 steps your body can do.

One of the things that's kicked off when medium chain fatty acids enter the Krebs cycle is ketone bodies, right? So you get elevated levels of ketones that you may not get quite as readily or in quite as high volume when you use other sources of fat aside from MCT oil. And then what happens is once MCT oil has kind of passed through the liver, gotten converted into medium chain fatty acids, those have gone through the Krebs cycle. You get citrate as a byproduct that's converted into acetyl COA that gets converted into more long chain fatty acids. And then you get things like triglycerides, phospholipids, cholesterol, et cetera, getting passed into the bloodstream where you get that binding with terpenes, basically the passing of the terpenes into the blood brain barrier, the chaperoning, you could say, of the terpenes in the blood brain barrier as they're enveloped in fat, and then you get that neurological effect. So, long story short, that entire process is going to be most readily enhanced, the most efficient, when you've got not just high terpene content in coffee, meaning that you haven't used, say, like a paper filter to filter out the terpenes, but you've used something like a French press to make your coffee or an aeropress or something like that. But then you've also used MCT oil rather than coconut oil or rather than some of these other forms of fats. Now, the other issue here is that some of these other forms of fats produce a marked insulin response or contain forms of sugar and half and half and heavy cream fat fits that bill. Now, the reason this is an issue is because I just mentioned that high levels of cholesterol, for example, produced by terpenes that have inhibited bile acid production or from the triglycerides that wind up in the bloodstream from MCT oil metabolism, these can tend to get oxidized, or you can tend to form glycation products when glucose adheres to these cholesterol particles. And so consuming things that have sugars in them, like cream and half and half, or consuming things that are going to cause a market insulin response may not be Such a good idea in the presence of these terpenes and some of the other components of coffee. Same thing with nut milk or almond milk. Same thing with sugar. Same thing with honey. Ultimately, some of the safe things you could flavor with cinnamon is okay. Stevia is okay. An unsweetened vanilla is okay. An unsweetened chocolate source is okay. MCT oil is okay. But I'd be really careful with things like creams and heavy creams. And the lesser of the evils would be to use something like coconut milk, even though it's not going to give you quite as much of a biohacked neurological effect. But ultimately, the way that I do it when I do have a cup of this coffee is I do a little bit of an unsweetened cocoa powder. I do some cinnamon, I do some stevia, I do some MCT oil, I add the coffee, I blend, and I don't even put the butter in just because frankly the butter is for more of the gut health effects that the butyric acid gives you. The butter does not contribute a neurological effect. And frankly for me, I'm just not a fan of drinking that many calories because calories do count, believe it or not. So I leave the butter out in most cases. But that's the dealio with why you would put MCT oil into bulletproof coffee.

Hey, guys. Tyler from Oregon here. I was wondering if you could talk about jumping. I imagine that like sitting, standing, walking and running, jumping is a skill that most of us haven't properly learned. So do you have any tips or resources for safe and effective jump training for both height and distance? I already have one surgically repaired ACL and I'd like to avoid tearing another one. Thanks. Love the show.

Well, the first thing, Tyler, is you need to go back in time and make sure that you were born to African American parents. Probably number one. That's helpful. Is it? Or parents with very tight hamstrings, like my wife. She is notorious for pulling a hammy. She's notorious for twisting her ankles. She's got really tight leg muscles, but she can also. Or she can't anymore, but when we were dating, she could grab the rim of a basketball hoop. I mean, she's like 5 foot 7. I mean, she's got hops, she can sprint, but she's got really, really tight hammies. So sometimes you trade in jump height and jump distance. If you've got either loose muscles from yoga or from static stretching. If you've got a high amount of slow twitch muscle fiber from triathlon. I used to be able to dunk a basketball. Once I started doing triathlons, I couldn't dunk anymore. About a year or two in, I started to lose all my vertical jump capability. Just because a lot of times your jumping muscles are kind of like your couch potato muscles, ironically. So doing too much endurance training can definitely limit your jump height, your jump distance, and then too much stretching. Those are some of the basics. But if you really want to train to jump higher, and you want to jump higher, you want to jump farther, there are some basic things that you can do, and then there are some more advanced things that you can do. Some of the basic things that you can do. No surprises here. Number one would be plyometrics, where you're squat jumps, bounds, leaps, skips, hops. It's no secret that when you do things like that, you decrease your ground contact time. You decrease what's called the time that it takes for the stretch shortening cycle in your muscles. And so you just increase your overall explosiveness and you decrease your tendon elasticity, you increase your tendon stiffness, and you allow yourself to simply jump higher when you do plyometrics. So plyometrics are one. I like jumping rope. Single leg jumping rope works really, really well in teaching you how to land properly. If we're just talking about landing mechanics, I'm a huge fan of starting with double leg jump rope and progressing to single leg jump rope. Because that's all it is is jumping and landing without any of the complexities of running. And so you're just there in place moving with the jump rope. That's a great way to teach yourself how to land properly. Another really, really good way to teach yourself how to land properly with less joint impact is just the basic box jump. Just a double leg or a single leg jump up onto a box. Like those would be the basics. The basics. But when, if you want to get into the more advanced type of things that you can do to jump, one would be to use bands. So getting into a squat rack and actually using resistance bands, like I talked about that rogue fitness company, they make like these monster bands that you can attach to a barbell and you can do squats or even squat jumps with the resistance band. And when you're accelerating the eccentric portion of the lift, meaning that when your muscle is lengthening and you're being forced to work against the resistance of the bands, as that muscle is lengthening, that can really help with your jump performance, as can having to make that quick reversal and accelerate upward rapidly with the added pulling down effect of the resistance bands. I'm a huge fan of resistance bands and using those for something like jump training.

Okay, so another thing just to be clear, the resistance band is holding you down or it's helping you go up.

It's holding you down.

Okay.

And you're working against the resistance band doing like a barbell squat with resistance bands. Another one would be your hip flex flexors. And most athletes have really super tight hip flexors. And the problem is that when you jump, tight hip flexors can create a lot of friction in the hip extensors. And they can really limit you in terms of being able to jump farther and faster. So any type of hip flexor stretch, especially dynamic hip flexor stretches, can help a ton. I like the one where you're literally just holding onto a wall, straight leg swings back and forth just to open up the hip flexors. That's really, really good. And then just avoiding long periods of time sitting. So the hip flexors aren't chronically shortened like, you know, a basketball player sitting on a bench. If they really want to perform once they head out onto the basketball court, they should be, like, kneeling on the bench or making sure that they're. They're in positions where the hip flexors are staying lengthened Rather than just being being a bench warmer with the butt. That's a really, really good way to shorten the hip flexors and affect your jumping capacity. So all basketball teams need to get this little mogo thing that I'm sitting on right now, which allows you to sit and keep the hip flexors lengthened.

I would really spoil the view from the front row. All the basketball players are sitting on stools.

Just saying, just saying. If I worked with the basketball team, they would not be sitting during. They would not be traditionally sitting. At least a few other things that I really like. One is definitely jumps, which is the opposite of a box jump. It's a little bit higher impact, but it works really, really well. This is where you just step off of a race platform. As soon as both feet touch the ground or one foot touches the ground, you reverse direction and jump again as high as you can. So that's an excellent exercise for increasing jumping capacity. Another one is to work your butt. And one of the exercises I really like is the reverse hyperextension machine. There's not a lot of machines that I like at the gym, but hitting your hamstrings, your glass glutes, and your spinal erectors all over the course of One rep with something like a reverse hyperextension machine. I'm a huge fan of that. And if you don't have a reverse hyper machine that you can use, you can literally just lay face down on a bench with everything below your hips hanging off of that bench. Lay face down on a bench with everything below your hips hanging off the bench. Then just raise your legs up in the air as high as you can. So this is a reverse hyper where you're working your butt, you're working your hamstrings, and you're working all the muscles that are gonna assist you with jumping higher or farther, but you're doing so in a low impact way. That's another great exercise for Scott's mom, by the way. That's a great butt exercise you can do if your knees are hurt is just reverse hypers. But you're holding onto a bench, just lifting your heels towards the ceiling while you're holding onto a bench. Just a couple other things I'm a fan of. Of course, the deadlift is awesome as an exercise that works every single element of the jumping chain. Just picking heavy stuff off the ground or picking heavy stuff off the ground explosively and doing that as a power clean. And then the last one, of course, would be to spend anywhere from 200 to $300 on these fancy shoes with the big platform on the bottom of them that are in the back. Springs. The men's magazines. Not even with the springs, just the. The shoes that make you walk on your tippy toes. So that rather than just walking around in your tippy toes, you can pay someone lots of money for shoes that make you walk around in your tippy toes. So the funny thing is those actually work, but so does walking, running your tiptoes. So either one, I thought for sure.

The shoes that Wiley Coyote gets when he's trying to get the road, those are cool.

One of my clients had one of those when I was. I used to do home training here in the Spokane area. Like, I would drive to people's homes and do personal training with them. And one of my clients, Dave, he had these, the spring shoes. And he had a couple of sets and, like, for some of our workouts, because he lived out in the country, we just literally run up and down country roads wearing these spring shoes, and it was awesome. It was just like bounding like a kangaroo. So pretty cool. So get yourself some Kanga shoes.

Hey, this is Alex. I know you're just in a show talking about stopping drinking. I'm. I'm wondering how to start, I stopped drinking alcohol at about 14 and I didn't start again until I hit my late 20s. A glass of red wine now and then, both for health and to be sociable. The problem is just a sip or two and I'm blitzed. Doesn't matter whether it's food or water or what. This has been going on for about 10 years. I'm just a lightweight. So I'm wondering, first, could these tiny amounts of wine be more harmful to me than. Than they are to more tolerant drinkers, given how easily I get drunk? And second, is there an enzyme I need to build up or something? How do I learn how to drink? Short of going back to college and seeing what I missed?

Thank you.

Alex is a lightweight.

Alex is like me. I can handle my alcohol if I have been drinking. But as most of us know, if you're limiting drinking, then you are going to have a harder time handling your alcohol. Before I even answer Alex's question, I just realized, I don't think we mentioned this on the podcast, but over on the Facebook page, at facebook.com bgfitness we just open entry into a 30 day no alcohol experiment where we're going to choose one person and Wellness FX is giving us their fancy panel. We're going to run a blood test on you before and then 30 days after, no drinking. And I'm gonna sit down with all your results and see what happens to the liver, the kidney, the lipids, the hormones, vitamins, everything when you do 30 days, no drinking. So if you're listening into this podcast and you wanna get on that contest, it's running right now@facebook.com bgfitness and all you do is you write like this single one paragraph essay about why you should be the first person chosen for that. And yeah, it's, it's pretty cool contest, actually. I'm totally jealous.

I feel bad that I can't.

Yeah.

Because I want to be part of this. This sounds cool.

You have to live in the US and not New Jersey or New York.

But.

So anyways though, as we, as we most of us know, there's this thing called Asian glow. And that is because of the lack of dehydrogenase enzymes, specifically aldehyde dehydrogenase and sometimes alcohol dehydrogenase that some people, especially people from some Asian cultures have that makes it so that when ethanol enters the body, it's not broken down properly. So what should happen is when ethanol enters your body from alcohol, it should first encounter alcohol dehydrogenase and that turns the alcohol into or the ethanol into acetaldehyde. And acetaldehyde is really nasty. It's like formaldehyde, you know, the embalming fluid that they put dead people in it just like it destroys proteins, it destroys DNA. It's probably why you get a hangover after you drink is the production of acetaldehyde. Now, the thing is, a lot of folks have aldehyde dehydrogenase and make it in adequate quantities. And what happens with, with aldehyde dehydrogenase is as long as ethanol isn't present in huge amounts, that overloads the aldehyde dehydrogenase that breaks down acetaldehyde, and it turns it into things like acetate, which your cells can actually burn pretty well. They're going to burn it preferentially, actually, over fats and proteins and carbohydrates, which is why you can get fat when you're combining. Drinking with high amounts of food is your body's burning the acetate rather than burning the carbs and the fats and the protein in the food. But ultimately, the body has a mechanism for breaking down acetaldehyde if you have enough aldehyde dehydrogenase and for breaking down ethanol if you have enough alcohol dehydrogenase. And actually, Esquire magazine did a really interesting article on this just last year in which they said they published this trick to being able to drink as much as you want without ever getting a hangover.

Oh, yeah, I remember that one.

And the trick was basically yeast, which is dehydrogenase. And what happens is that the problem is that all that is is it's like giving yourself a bunch of extra alcohol dehydrogenase. And as you just learned, if you're drinking a bunch and you've got a bunch of alcohol dehydrogenase in your system, whether because you're making enough of it, or you're using, like, this Esquire magazine yeast trick, you're going to produce craploads of acetaldehyde, and you're going to make yourself feel super duper crappy after a night of drinking. Unless you also take aldehyde dehydrogenase, which would theoretically break down that acetaldehyde into acetate. The problem is that there is no aldehyde dehydrogenase pill. It doesn't exist. Right. And this would be the fix for this situation is technically like the 1, 2 combo is you'd take alcohol dehydrogenase or yeast, and you'd combine that with some type of aldehyde dehydrogenase pill or supplement and that's how you would do it. But there is no aldehyde dehydrogenase pill. And a lot of people have an inefficient aldehyde dehydrogenase gene. And that's why a lot of people just can't handle alcohol, especially folks with Asian ancestry or East Asian ethnicity. Now the interesting thing is that there are supplements out there that have nutrients in them that help you to produce your own aldehyde dehydrogenase or help you to produce more aldehyde dehydrogenase if you're drinking and if you have the gene that's capable of you kind of being able to pull that trigger. If you're not of, of Eastern Asian ethnicity and you just need extra aldehyde dehydrogenase from some kind of a supplemental form, this stuff can help. There is a supplement called no Glo and no Glo is actually advertised as being able to help your body break down acetaldehyde better. And at first when I found this one, I thought, oh, so they make an aldehyde dehydrogenase pill that you could take. That's pretty cool. That would actually work. But when you look at the ingredients label for this no GLO stuff and I'll link to it in the show notes, it's basically just alpha lipoic acid. It's N acetylcysteine, it's pantothenic acid, vitamin C, vitamin A, it's basically amino acids and antioxidants. And if you happen to in your supplement cupboard have amino acids and if you happen to have antioxidants like any, any antioxidant blend or formulation like powdered vegetables, powdered fruits, greens, the one that I use is called, is called Life Shots. Like TNT has antioxidants like any of these antioxidant rich supplements. And they're all over out there. If you take that and you combine it with amino acids, you're going to support more of your own aldehyde dehydrogenase production. And you don't need to go out and buy another, yet another cell plan supplement. You can just take amino acids and antioxidants. Now if you were to combine that with using some, you know, like use that before you drink and then you do something like activated charcoal at a different time because you don't want to take activated charcoal with other supplements because it will, it will soak up and absorb those supplements that you're taking it with. So if you're using this one, two Combo, you'd take the activated charcoal after you've drank. That would be the best. Best way to combine the two. So you take the activated charcoal, like, whatever, you set it down next to your bed stand for when you're done drinking, or you put it in your pocket in a little Ziploc bag for when you're out at the bar. And you take activated charcoal to absorb a lot of the toxins that you might find in mixed drinks to absorb some of the acetaldehyde that's produced from the alcohol breakdown. And activated charcoal can work pretty well for that. So those would be your best bets would be antioxidants, amino acids, some activated charcoal, and that's. That's where I'd start.

And of course, go back to college and relive those glorious years.

That's right. That's right.

Drinking and keg stands, beer bong.

And just train yourself. It's like training. So. So, yeah, hopefully. Hopefully that's helpful. And speaking of. Of drinking high quantities, we did get a podcast entitled Unicorn Tears. Or a podcast review called Unicorn. Unicorn Tears. Did you see that? I did.

That's so sad. Why is the unicorn so sad?

Well, unicorn tears are valuable, Brock. That's why tears are kind of like. Kind of like. I don't know what, Rainbows, Unicorn tears. Bitcoins. Bitcoin tears. Anyways, if you leave a review in itunes and we read your review on the show and you hear us read your review, then you get a care package from Ben Greenfield Fitness. You get a Ben Greenfield Fitness T shirt. Cool tech T shirt. That's not like one of those big cotton tents, but that's actually a cool T shirt that makes you look sexy and muscular. And a BPA free water bottle and a beanie cap. So if you email ben greenfieldfitness.com after you hear your itunes review, Red, we'll send that to you. And we actually have a review just this week called Unicorn Tears. You want to churn it out, Brock?

I do. It goes like this. Dear Ben Greenfield, we don't hate your stinking guts. In fact, you've done wonders for our guts. Thanks for all the probiotic and fermented food tips. Nice. You don't make us vomit. Not even a little bit. You've taught us how to fuel ourselves with real food, even during our toughest activities. And a well f. Field athlete is not a pukey athlete.

That's right.

That's very true. Finally, you're not the scum between our toes.

Who was saying that? I was. I don't know. That's. That's what I want to know. Where's the other review?

We do, however, greatly appreciate your suggestions to get outside and get some dirt between our toes. We love the idea of an obstacle course in the backyard and we wish we could come and play on yours. Love nutritional geniuses Mary and Laura.

That's pretty cool. That's such a nice review.

That is nice. I'm glad they they don't think you're the scum between anyone's toes and that.

They want to come play on mine. Anyways. Anyways, email Ben greenfield fitness.com Marie and Laura and we'll hook you up with a Ben Greenfield fitness gear pack and care package sent straight to your house. I guess you can share the T shirt.

Yeah, they're gonna have to fight over there.

You got one of you can wear the T shirt and one of you can just wear the beanie. So you know what, Ben?

You don't make me vomit either.

It's good. So that about wraps up today's show. Don't forget to go to the show notes@bengreenfulfitness.com 296 Remember, we need some Internet support. So please, if you know somebody who wants to sponsor the show or sponsor BenGreenfulFitness.com with a sidebar ad for the year, email Ben GreenfieldFitness.com check out our sponsor for this episode, TrainingMask.com and use your 20% discount code BEN2014 to grow a third lung. And finally, don't forget to go find some ancient Hasda or Maori tribesmen and borrow their dung for the day.

Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

I.