Drinking Water For Fat Loss, 3 Ways To Keep Injuries From Piling Up, Is Deli Meat Healthy & Much More!

Episode number 289 of Ben Greenfield Fitness. Three Ways to Keep injuries from piling up. Is deli meat healthy? How to defat bone broth? Is powdered peanut butter healthy? How to maximize performance in fire gear? And where to find the Beyond Training audiobook.

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.

So you're running a little late today.

Hey, man, I'm running like an hour late, dude. I've been at the doctor all morning. All morning. So wrong. Actually, it wasn't even the doctor. There are actually no physicians there. It's just a lab where they take your blood.

Giving more blood.

Are you giving blood? No benefits of even being able to meet with a physician. They just take my blood and send me packing. I went in there to do the performance panel that I do four times a year, which is where I get my cholesterol and my cholesterol particle size, my inflammation measured, thyroid, thyroid glucose, vitamin D, magnesium, testosterone, pretty much everything. Because I want to see what kind of state my body is in. And so, as usual, once the results from that come out, I will do a little screenshot video over@bengreenfeldfitness.com and walk people through the results and everything that is wrong with yours truly.

Now you said it was the performance panel, Is that still through WellnessFX?

Yeah. Well, so here's the deal. We have the new website, Greenfield fitness systems@greenfieldfitnesssystems.com and I've listed there the main panels that myself and most of my clients get every year, multiple times a year, some people get this type of blood test and this panel, this performance panel, even though I call it the Wellness fx, it's technically owned by All Wellness FX is owned by Thorne FX.

Now, so I see. So they actually bought them.

Yeah. If you, if you order this test at Greenfield Fitness Systems, it's called like the, the. I should know, right? The Complete.

Yeah, it's got a different name now.

It's like the Complete Wellness. Instead of the performance panel, it's called the Complete Wellness. I think so, yeah. So there you go. Go find out everything that is is wrong with your body and bleed into 8 billion tubes.

New splashes.

If you enjoy social media, why don't you learn something from it and follow twitter.com BenGreenfield what are you talking about, dude?

You could learn stuff on Facebook all about how great your friends lives are.

Exactly. Or how how crazy your friends are. Sometimes I worry about some of my friends.

I think the way that it was described to me once was this whole concept of Facebook envy stems from the fact that pretty much 99% of what people post on Facebook are the good things that happen to them and the most mute, beautiful pictures of themselves. And so if you follow your newsfeed, you're constantly seeing how great everybody's life is. Not that that's a bad thing. You know, we don't want to be pessimistic or anything like that. But yeah, it's unrealistic. Facebook can be unrealistic. And I have to say, like, I am not posting any photos of myself. If I have a crappy workout and decide to walk home from a run.

That never happens.

If I instead of making a fabulous breakf that looks like it took 30 minutes to pour over and ferment and soak and sprout, I instead like eat a banana while I'm running out the door. You know, you don't post that on Facebook. Here's my. Here's my banana. What'd you, what'd you have for breakfast?

There's been nothing on Facebook since I got home from my vacation. Yeah, it's like on vacation, it's like, check this out. Look at where I am. This is amazing. And now it's like, is Brock alive?

That's right. It's all boring in comparison, dude. So anyway, back to learning something on Twitter. Twitter.com BenGreenfield what I tweeted out this week. One was a really interesting study about the effects of water intake on weight loss. And this was in the Journal of Natural Science. And it looked at the effects of simply drinking plenty of water and what happens to body fat and drop in weight when this is done in overweight people. So pretty much all they had the folks in this study do was to drink about an extra. Came out to an extra 40 to 50 ounces. There's about 1.5 liters of water over and above the usual intake.

That's a lot of water.

It's not that much, dude. That's like two. What, two water bottles, maybe two.

I guess that depends on how much water you're already drinking.

Yeah, but it's like two bike size water bottles, right? Which are.

Yeah, I guess Those are usually 750.

Yeah, those those range 20 to 24 ounces, somewhere around in there. So, yeah, 1.5 liters of water. And what they found was a significant decrease in weight, body fat, and appetite suppression in the overweight. In this case, it was female participants in this study. And all they did for eight consecutive weeks was drink more water. And so what I tweeted was fat loss pills, more CrossFit, intermittent fasting. Try drinking more water first.

That's funny. That's one of those hints that you'd see in like Chatelaine magazine or Mademoiselle or something. Yeah, but now there's actual science behind it.

And of course, the problem here is that a lot of water has fluoride and chlorine, and it's not. I don't know what they gave the people in the studies. I don't think it was like magical structured water or anything like that. But I think that if you're listening in and you want to use this as an appetite control or a weight loss strategy, pick the right water. So I've got some good ones for you here, Brock. Some of my favorite bottled waters brands. Are you ready? All right. Okay. So. So one of the better ones is a Voss. Now, Voss is spendy stuff, but it's from southern Norway and it is advertised as naturally unfiltered. And they've got still varieties, they've got sparkling varieties. I don't know if you've had this stuff. You can get it in, like, gourmet food stores. But it tastes good. It's called Voss V O S S Voss Artesian water. So. And anytime you label water as artesian, it just tastes better. Period.

Of course.

I'll give you a few more. Sangeron, that's G E R O N. Have you seen this one?

No.

Really?

I don't think I've ever paid attention to the bottles of water I buy or drink.

Okay, so one of the things you can do is you can test water for nitrates. We'll talk about nitrates later on. And I've been testing things all over my home for nitrates because I've got this new probe, it's called a lapka. And you can literally stick it into bananas and tomatoes and cucumbers and anything else. And you can measure the nitrate levels, which are directly correlated to how much fertilizer that piece of produce has been exposed to.

So do you want them to be high or low?

You want them to be low, ideally. Even though we'll talk later about how it's not as important in fruits and vegetables for nitrates to be low as much as it is in meats, for example. But when it comes to all these fruits and vegetables, it's really interesting. If I go out to my backyard garden and pop this probe into a cucumber, I've got almost non existent levels of nitrates. But if I pop it into like an organic tomato from the grocery store, it shows that it's organic compared to the amount of nitrates in a normal tomato. Which is kind of cool to know that the tomatoes I'm buying that are.

Organic are actually a difference.

Indeed organic. And then, for example, I am not going to get the organic carrots that I buy anymore because I probed those and. Which is legal in the state of Washington, by the way. Probing carrots.

Probing carrots you are allowed to do. Just not in public.

Just not in public, in the privacy of your own kitchen. My carrots nitrate levels are through the roof and they're advertised as organic carrots. So somewhere along the line they've been exposed to either fertilizer or pesticides or herbicides or something. So I'm getting the people who invented this device, which also measures like humidity, temperature. I've been measuring electromagnetic radiation in every room in my house and what happens when I unplug and plug certain things back in. Really cool device and it just plugs into your iPhone. It's called a Lapka. So Total Sedgeway.

Is that thing you dropped in the garbage just before we started the podcast?

Yeah, it was sitting on the edge of my desk, so I accidentally dropped it in the garbage.

Anyway, so back to water. So you test the water to see if it's got nitrates?

Yeah, and this Saint Geron stuff, super duper low in bacteria and nitrates. And it goes through this third party testing and everything. And this is another one you can find most of the time at like the fancier grocery stores. Like you aren't gonna find a 7 11, but they're in glass bottles, which is great to plastic. So San Juan is another one. I've got a few more that you probably are familiar with that are good brands that are high in minerals, that are pretty hygienic waters that are filtered and have little bits of mineral and sand in them, which is actually good. Things like silica and sand and mineral deposits in your water is good. You want that. It adds flavor and it also allows you to get some of the minerals that are responsible for cellular metabolism and enzyme function. All that stuff. Evian is really good. You know, we joke about Evian Being overpriced and everything, but it's actually really good French water and it's got a really good mineral content. Fiji is another one. And yes, I know that I think they're owned by Coca Cola, but that is one form of Coca Cola that I would definitely approve of if you're going to use this whole drink more water for fat loss thing. And Fiji's a good one.

Just that and the Mexican Coke.

Yeah, that and the Mexican Coke. The stuff with the real sugar instead of the high fructose corn syrup. There's not a big difference between those two, by the way. Good, good article this week over@examine.com about that. Incidentally. I'll give you a few more. Perrier. Perrier. How do you guys pronounce it up there in Canada? Perry Perrier. Yeah, Perrier is. Is really good. All their flavors have a really good mineral content and it's a nice clean water. And of course, that one also you can generally get in glass.

Yeah.

And then the, the last one I have to give a shout out to. Actually, I'll give you two more.

The.

The Gerol Steiner, just because I know a lot of stor. That's pretty good too. It's got minerals, it's got carbonic acid, it's got bicarbonate. So that one's actually a great one for athletes just because you get a little bit of buffering properties in that. So really good for like alkalinity and things of that nature. And then the last one, and I'm picking this one just because of the super sexy name Volvic Natural spring water.

Sexy to people who like medical terms.

That's right. So Volvik is from a.

Speak about your partner's body. In medical terms, it's actually because it's.

From a volcano region, but it comes from this town that is near an area that has a bunch of gray volcanic rock. And it's really good stuff, too. So there's some waters for you that you can pick up from your grocery store if you're going to add more water and you don't trust your own municipal water. That would actually be good for you and turns out, help with fat loss, too.

So all that stuff isn't. That's not based on, like taste tests and stuff. These are actual scientific studies of the water.

Yeah, but generally, like, the higher the mineral content to a certain extent, the better it's going to taste. And there are some cases where high minerals are not good. Like I. I dug a well last year on my land and it's really, really good rich water, like mineral rich water. But the iron levels are pretty through the roof on it. And hemochromatosis or iron overload can be very stressful on your heart. So I will have to add an iron filter to that water. But in most cases, decent amount of minerals are a good thing.

So the reason why I ask is there is that awesome Penn and Teller video where they went into like this high end restaurant and got this concierge like water, like a water sommelier to go around to the tables and like offer all these different kinds of water. And they were actually getting all the same water out of, out of a hose in the back of the restaurant. And people are like, oh, you can really taste the difference between this one and like $7 glasses of water, $12 glasses of water. And at the end they revealed that it was all coming out of the same hose. Yeah, people were dumbfounded, but they stood by their claim that it actually tasted better.

Well, there's the placebo effect. So you got that.

But so we're not talking about that here. This is real.

Let's throw one other news flash. Usually we do three, but we spent a long time on that one. So I'll throw one other news flash out at you. And this one appeared on the Sweat Science blog, which was about the unsung benefits of flexible blood vessels. And it was a really interesting article that went into a study just published in the Journal of Applied Physiology that points out this growing pile of evidence that your vessel function, in particular the flexibility of your blood vessels, is very important for things like heart rate variability, which we've talked about on the show before, as being the really good indicator of interplay between your nervous system and your cardiovascular function. And it's also really, really important for avoiding arrhythmias, which a lot of our listeners being like, you know, cyclists, triathletes, marathoners, weightlifters, want to make sure that they're careful to pay attention to. So vessel function is really important. And one of the things that the study points out is that as we would all expect, exercise is an extremely powerful way of preserving your vessel function and your vessel flexibility as you age. In particular, how well the inner lining of your blood vessels are able to like, be elastic, like have these elastic properties that allow them to respond to dilation and contraction. But the idea here is that there are specific forms of exercise that increase vessel flexibility better than others. And it turns out, and Brock, I'll ask you this and I'll see what you think, but Resistance training, weight training. What do you think that does for vessel flexibility?

I bet it increases it actually. That extra blood flow.

Yeah, it doesn't do a whole lot. It doesn't do a whole lot compared to, so the order of vessel flexibility. So weight training is the least important and then aerobic training is the next least important. But the thing that really, really enhances vessel flexibility is a combination of weight training with resistance or weight training with cardio. So, for example, rowers have extremely good vessel flexibility because they are doing resistance training and cardio simultaneously. Another example of this would be not traditional resistance training, but something more like super slow and controlled resistance training, like the efficient exercise protocol that Keith Norris from Paleo FX does, or the Body by Science protocol from Doug McGuff, where you're doing just like five exercises really slow and controlled to complete failure. That is a way to train cardiovascular capacity while at the same time getting stronger. Another final example would be just to do Burke's training, you know, which is the style of training that you and I are doing right now. Brock, where we're doing, you know, where both of us are training for obstacle races. So many burpees. Yeah, you'll like be out on a run, but then you're stopping and you're lifting a log or a rock, doing burpees, doing some poles, you know, continuing on through the forest, chased by wolves, carrying your spear in one hand, your heavy rock in another. Yeah. And a baby, baby wolf to get the wolves really pissed off. Just so they chase you harder. Yeah, it's hardcore. So, yeah, blood vessel flexibility, resistance training and aerobic exercise combined together are really good. We will link to that and oh, so much more over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 289 if you want to check out this week's news flashes.

Listener q and a.

Hi Bennebrock, this is Liz. I'm an avid long course triathlete and just a couple weeks before my A race, my last race of the season, I was diagnosed with a partial tear in my plantar fascia. So no longer doing that race. But my podiatrist says that I can still swim and bike and I'm going to start going to physical therapy, but I'm going to need to wear a removable walking boot for three months to keep my toes from flexing back in order to allow the tear and the fascia to scar together and heal. And of course I can't run during this time. So I'd love your advice on three things all related. First, what can I do to promote the healing of the fascia itself? Second, what can I do to keep the awkward gait of my walking boot from causing problems elsewhere on my body? And lastly, what exercises can I do during these three months to expedite my return to running once I get clearance to ditch the boot? Thanks so much. Love the podcast.

Yeah, I think it's so cool that they actually have those robo boots now that you can put on and you can walk around on broken bones, because, man, back in. Back in the day, you have these huge plaster things on, and they were just ridiculous. You couldn't get them wet, you couldn't step on them. You have to get them changed all the time because they got stinky.

I wear robo boots just for fun. So, Liz, don't feel bad. I actually just wear my movable walking boots just to basically put a little hair on my chest.

So just to make you walk like the Frankenstein's monster.

Yeah, but this is the issue, is that folks who are active get injured, and they get into some kind of gear to help them recover, whether that be an arm brace or a knee brace or a boot like this. You keep exercising and you develop muscle imbalances or gait imbalances because you're moving while trying to accommodate the piece of gear that you are tied to. So, you know, like Liz says she has, she's concerned about the awkward gait of this walking boot causing problems elsewhere on her body. And it's a. It's a legit issue. You know, I've even had something as simple as an ankle sprain. Put me in a high ankle brace and gone running with that high ankle brace, and then developed tendonitis on the underside of my foot because I was using different little foot tendons and foot ligaments and foot muscles, because I was wearing that little brace that wrapped around the bottom of my foot. So. And, you know, and then you get this vicious cycle, and this happens to athletes all the time. You know, I got it band friction syndrome. So I started to wear this brace on my knee and change the way my hips move. And then I got hip tendinitis and then throughout my back because of that, and my shoulders got all funky. And it's. It's definitely one of these things where injuries pile up. So you have to. You have to nip it in the bud and figure out how to stay fit when you're injured, how to continually move as you're injured, so that as you're moving, you're able to avoid a lot of These gait imbalances that would threaten to develop. So I have. I have three tips that I want to give to Liz. All right, the first tip is the whole concept of the unilateral, or what's called a contralateral effect. And we've talked about this on the podcast before.

This is where you. You curl do bicep curls with your left arm, but it actually is building your right arm as well.

Exactly. You get a contralateral training effect. And so you want to make sure that rather than avoiding doing exercises when the opposite side is injured because you think that that might somehow avoid you creating an imbalance, you should do just the opposite and actually train the side that isn't injured, because you will get a contralateral training effect. And interestingly, they did a study in the past couple of years in which they had folks not just do stretching or strengthening for the unaffected uninjured side, but they had them do stretching. And what they found was that there's also a contralateral flexibility and range of motion effect.

Where.

Meaning that. And this still blows my mind how this works. I suspect it's because our fascia is relatively interconnected and kind of covers our entire body. Folks would stretch their left calf, for example, and experience greater range of motion in the right ankle. So the idea here is that you should be working the opposite side. Specifically in this case, you know, if you're in the boot, you'd, let's say on your right leg, you'd want to be doing left leg calf stretches, left leg single leg press, single leg calf raises, single leg squats, if you can pull them off, things that really work that opposite side. So that's one way to make sure that injuries don't pile up is to continue to train and not be afraid. You're going to create imbalances through that continued training. Not just strengthening, but also stretching for the opposite side.

And would you continue to train? Like, would you actually go harder than you normally would or just stick with the same amount of reps and weights that you would do on any normal time.

Stick with the same programming that you're.

Accustomed to with eating for two?

Yeah, with the exception, obviously, you know, your single leg squat's going to be a lot different volume and intensity than, say, like, a double leg squat. But, yeah, ultimately, you're still training it at a relatively tough intensity. So that'd be number one. Number two would be one of my favorite modes of exercise that I really geek out on if I'm injured because it provides a great deal of both cardiovascular and also muscular resistance. Meaning? Well, what I'm referring to here is water running and water exercise. But you specifically get this hydrostatic pressure of the water against your blood vessels. So you're having to work a little bit harder from a cardiovascular standpoint. But you also are engaged in what's called an isokinetic contraction, meaning that the harder you push against the water, the harder it pushes back against you. So you get this nice strengthening effect too. And whenever I'm injured, I tend to be spending a lot of time either in a pool or a deep body of water like a lake or river, doing everything from treading to aqua jogging to wearing the. They make like resistance training gloves that increase the resistance of your hands. They make water running shoes with special built in fins that increase the resistance of your foot against the water. Water running belts. There's all sorts of ways that you can get a good workout in the water. An underwater MP3 player is essential for this because you will get bored to death running in the water. But I'm a huge fan of water resistance. All the athletes that I coach, if they get injured, one of the first things we end up doing is aqua jogging. Sprints, aqua jogging drills, leg swings, arm swings, even some forms of water aerobics. Gradually working up to water plyometrics. There are a ton of things that you can do in the water. So in addition to training the opposite side, get in the water, make it your friend. And when I'm injured, because you bounce back so quickly from it, because there's no muscle fiber tearing occurring, I'll get in the water up to every day when I'm injured to maintain fitness.

So I actually give my athletes water running workouts. As part of a taper?

Yeah, exactly. Really good for tapering if you're getting ready for a big race and you don't want a lot of joint impact. Really good stuff. Studies on how water running specifically can help maintain your maximum rate of oxygen utilization or your VO2 max. So I will put a link. I've got a whole water running section now over at greenfieldfitnesssystems.com where I've just listed some of my favorite stuff like my underwater MP3 player, water running shoes, water running belt, kind of some of the main things that you'd need. You can even add in if you want to do like hypoxic training at the same time. Like one of these front mounted snorkels with the, with the cardio cap airflow restrictor on it. Like you can make water running pretty dang Hard. Pretty macho. Pretty weight vest on Arnold Schwarzenegger, esque. Yeah, I don't. I haven't tried the weight vest yet. I don't know if I'd recommend that.

It seems like a terrible idea. Why did I say, okay, what's number three?

Be able to work Velcro really quickly. Okay, so number three would be something that I've already mentioned when I was talking about vessel flexibility. And that's this whole. It takes about 12 to 18 minutes. But it's the protocol laid out by Doug McGuff in the book Body by Science. With the idea being that if you're doing high intensity interval training, like cardio, to get yourself up to maximum energy expenditure, to really exhaust yourself, you are going to suffer in terms of form, biomechanics, increased risk of injury and all sorts of things. When you're using that as a sole means to build up tons of lactic acid or to train yourself anaerobically. If you put yourself on a series of, say, like five different basic exercises. And in Doug's book, for example, it's chest press, seated row, lat pull down, leg press, and there's one other that I'm blanking on right now. It's five exercises. And you do those exercises extremely slow and controlled to complete failure. You're building up massive amounts of lactic acid. So you're training your lactic acid buffering capacity, you're increasing vessel flexibility, you are increasing strength, you're increasing venous blood flow return to the heart, and specifically what's called peripheral resistance in a lot of your blood vessels, which also helps you to create more nitric oxide. And you get all these downstream training effects in a very safe exercise environment. So, for example, if I have an athlete who has injured their lower body but still wants to maintain their cardiovascular status, I'll not only have them do upper arm ergometer exercises, like those weird spin the resistance with your arms things at the gym, but I'll also have them do super slow and controlled chest press, super slow and controlled seated row, super slow and controlled lat pull down, and you have to go really hard. You have to check out your pride at the gym door because you might do three reps, just super slow, and it might take you two minutes to do three reps and you're completely exhausted. And that's the only three reps that you do for that, for that one machine. But that works really well, especially when you're injured. You need to get a lot of work and you need to do it in a safe format. So that's the last thing I would recommend, is grab the book Body by Science and start into the protocol that's laid out in that book. And you can do that two to three times a week. If you're going hard enough with that particular workout, you shouldn't be able to do it more than three times a week. If you can handle that workout more than three times a week, you're not working hard enough on it. But those would be my recommendations for Liz to keep injuries from piling up. Super slow training, using the Body by Science approach, some water running and then that, that contralateral training and stretching.

And she also asked in her question about some hints and stuff to heal her fascia a little bit quicker. And I'm. We've covered that before. Another podcast. So, Liz, just go and do a search on BenGreenfieldFitness.com for like healing quickly, recovering from injuries quickly, that kind of thing, and you'll find tons of stuff.

Yes, that's Brock's polite way of saying, let me Google that for you. Exactly.

Hey, Ben and Brock, this is Donald calling from Louisiana. I had a quick question about those big circular pressed together deli meats that you find in delis, Walmarts and stores like that that can't be naturally made. And I'm just wondering if that's a healthy choice. It seems like a quick way to go and grab a couple of meats and make you a quick sandwich or something before or after the gym. It seems a little too convenient and too good to be true. So I'm wondering what are the health benefits, if any, that those big pressed together kind of ham, turkey and chicken meats, what are the benefits of those or should I stay away from them? Thanks, guys.

Big circular breasts together. Turkey.

Turkey.

So, yeah, this returns to what we were talking about before when it comes.

To, oh, the nitrites.

Nitrites and nitrates. So these are compounds that have been linked to cancer in lab animals and also in humans. And you find lots of nitrates and nitrites in cured meats like ham and bacon and hot dogs and sausages and of course, these wonderful big old cold cuts that you see there in the deli case at most grocery stores. Now, the deal is that nitrates and nitrites are not necessarily unnatural. They're both naturally occurring substances that you find in food. And like we mentioned earlier, you find them in water and they're actually produced by your body's own cells. And they're important in many chemical reactions within your body. But they can also, when present in high amounts or when not opposed with natural nutrients that help them to be metabolized properly, can do things like your risk of cancer. And these reactions in terms of nitrites and nitrates being more likely to cause things like reactive oxygen species and what are called advanced glycation end products, or compounds that essentially cause you to age faster and build up plaques in the brain and increase risk of cancer and all this other stuff. These reactions are more likely to occur in the presence of protein. And meat that you would find in a cold cut is, of course, mostly protein. Now, if we look at nitrites, for example, nitrites get a lot less likely to be converted into harmful chemicals when they're consumed in the presence of vitamin C and other antioxidants. So in most of the studies that find a link between cured meats, like we're talking about these cold cuts, and cancer, this link is only observed in people who eat the most amount of cured meat, along with the least amount of vitamin C. And vegetables contain naturally high amounts of vitamin C, as do fruits. Which means that the low levels of naturally occurring nitrites and nitrates in vegetables and fruits is naturally controlled by the amounts of vitamin C and antioxidants in those vegetables and fruits. And so it's not a concern the nitrites and the nitrates in that type of environment. Now, if you're eating cured meats, and I'll talk about some of the healthier varieties, they're still going to have nitrates, nitrites and nitrates in them. But what you'd want to do is make sure that you're either treating that meat in such a way that you're not releasing a lot of what are called nitrosamines, or that you're combining them with high amounts of vitamin C and natural antioxidants.

So throw them on top of a huge salad.

Exactly. This is where things like lemon juice, salads, greens, fresh fruits, things of that nature should always be consumed along with, with cured meats when you can. And when you can, you should also look for the nitrite free versions if you're able to find those. But at least get in vitamin C and antioxidants along with cured meats. Basically eat your vegetables is what I'm trying to say. Like high amounts of antioxidants and vegetables can inhibit the conversion of nitrites into harmful compounds. So that would be one thing to bear in mind. Another thing is that not all cold cuts are created equal. So There are some cuts that are cooked. So if you think about like pastrami and roasted turkey and roast beef and ham, those cold cuts are cooked lunch meat options and they're generally derived from real animals and don't have a lot of things like high fructose corn syrup and preservatives. And you can, you can usually find nitrite and nitrate free versions, and those aren't too bad compared to the relatively fake versions of those you're going to find hanging, you know, like Oscar Myers, you know, bologna and stuff like that. So the real meats that are cured and that often don't see incredibly high heat as well are fine. And you can find the more natural versions, Some of the better ones that fall into that category, if you're looking at specific brands of good deli meats, would be Applegate Farms is a pretty good one. And for turkey there's one called, I don't know how you pronounce it, I think it's coaches. Koch. K O, C H K O C H. Koch. Yeah. Bohr's. Bohr's is not too bad. There's another one called Dietz and Watson that's D I E, T Z and Watson. And then Hormel's is also really good. And if any of those, you can find them by that brand name or the nitrite or nitrate versions, or nitrite and nitrate free versions of the others, that's gonna be pretty good. And of course, anytime you can find organic, vegetarian fed, gr. Grass fed, no growth hormones, no antibiotics, those type of meats, that's gonna be a little bit better. And frankly, if you can't find those versions and you're in a pinch, choose the leaner ones, the leaner cuts, just because less of the toxins, less of the omega 6 fatty acids are gonna get stored, just because a lot of that stuff tends to get stored in the fat. So that would be a case where you'd want to choose the leaner versions when you can. So I'm a big fan of like artisanal meats, like you know, like cold cuts with some, some aged cheese and you know, some freshly made sourdough bre type of thing. But when we're talking about the average cut at the grocery store, you just need to be careful. You need to make sure that you consume it with vegetables or fruits or some other form of vitamin C and antioxidants. Use one of those brands that I just talked about and if possible, look for the nitrite or the nitrate free.

Versions or just buy yourself a proper ham or pork roast or something. Make it at home, put it in the fridge, slice it up really thinly, and voila, you have your own delicate meats.

That's right. And any of these meats, if you cook them, whatever, saute them, mic them, anything like that, they produce a ton of nitrosamines. So if you were going to reheat these, you need to do it really, really gently. Not like this guy who I knew who like, his go to meal was, he'd take the turkey or the deli meat and put it in the microwave with cheese piled on top of it. And when you just mic it at high temperatures, the meat naturally curls around the cheese. You leave it in there for a few minutes, and then you just take it out and eat it full of its nitrosamine. Cheesy goodness.

Hey, Ben, this is Dave from Aurora, Indiana. I just made my first batch of bone broth, and it's super delicious. The question I have is when I put it in the refrigerator, it looks like there's a quarter inch of pure fat on the top. And I've just been heating it up and drinking it whole. And my question is, should I remove that fat or consumption? Thanks. Enjoy the show. Talk to you later. Bye.

Crusties.

Mmm. Bone broth. Crusties. I love crusties. We make our own bone broth here in the Greenfield household. And anybody who has made their own bone broth knows that you get this fat on the top of it and it just kind of collects there on the top, and there's some gelatin in there, there's some fatty acids and. And you can get rid of that. If you don't like chunky bone broth, especially if you're gonna move on and use your bone broth for other recipes, and you don't want those other recipes to have a bunch of, like, coagulated junk in them, or you want it to be of a certain texture. Removing the fat is really simple. I will put a video in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com289 but all you need is a spatula. And you use this thin, flat spatula and you slide it across the broth, and you can basically remove the fat really easily. You can put it separate, like a mason jar or any other storage container, and then you can use that as a cooking fat. It works really, really great as a cooking fat that you can.

I make candles out of mine.

Or you could do as Brock does and buy yourself some wicks and Stay up late at night next to the fire making candles because Brock has nothing better to do with his time than to skim fat off bone broth and make candles with it things. Seriously, do you really make candles with your bone broth fat?

No, I don't.

Okay.

I actually stir it back in. Yeah, I was going to ask you, like, the, the technique. I know it's in the video, but the technique with the spatula, do you do that before you put it in the fridge? Like. No, it's still on the stove cooling down.

No, no, you, you do it once it's basically settled. You know what? Because it's going to take a little while once you put it into the fridge to separate and it makes like this gel. So then you can, you can use that for, particularly for high heat cooking. It's very, very high smoke point, very stable at high temperatures. So that's what I would personally use it for. Interestingly, you can also simply keep that on top of the bone broth until which time you plan on using the bone broth. Because it's just like cellophane, it acts to protect the bone broth and keep it from degrading and keep all those rich and nourishing nutrients wrapped up inside the bone broth broth. So you can, you can do it that way too.

So I've had a couple of disasters where like I'm stabbing at the, the layer of fat with a knife or something to like try and get to the good stuff underneath and it just splashes everywhere. Yeah, it can be quite, quite solid.

And related to what I was talking about earlier about choosing lean meats. If you don't think the animal that the meat is from was organic or grass fed or something like that, same goes for that fat. If you're cooking some kind of a chicken or making bone broth out of a whole chicken, let's say, and you have no clue where that chicken came from, the farm, the amount of toxins in, or anything like that, then you probably would want to skim that away and not use it. So, you know, that's a case where you just have to kind of decide based off of the situation that you're in. So. Hey, Ben, what do y' all think about the dehydrated peanut butters that take away all of the, the fat before they're packaged and resold?

You crazy Americans.

You guys don't have dehydrated peanut butter up there?

I've never even heard of dehydrated peanut butter.

Oh, even, even like, like Several years ago, when I was bodybuilding, like people were getting into dehydrated peanut butter just because it's, it's like a way to get all the peanut butter goodness that a lot of people, frankly, especially in exercise, are freaking addicted to and get it without feeling guilty about all of the hydrogenated fats and trans fatty acids and everything else that we hear about is in regular peanut butter. And there's actually a brand called PB2 that's powdered peanut butter. It's really popular here in the States, again, especially among like exercise enthusiasts and especially fat phobic exercise enthusiasts, because it's a powder that they make by squeezing the oils out of the peanut, then dehydrating what's left over. And you get this powder where there's like 90% of the fat removed from the peanut source and it's just basically defatted peanut powder. And you still.

What the heck do you do with it?

Well, use it as a flavor because you aren't getting any of the monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats or the vitamin E or pretty much any of the nutritional content of the peanuts. But what you are getting is concentrated powder flavored peanut goodness that you can add to smoothies and shakes and stuff like that.

So is the protein still there?

Yeah, some of the proteins there, the PB2 stuff, that's the most popular brand of a powdered peanut butter butter. It's not organic. And conventional peanuts are some of the most heavily sprayed crops that exist. So you get a ton of toxic pesticides on this stuff. Most of the brands they've added refined sugar to to make it taste even better. And then there's a risk that we've talked about on the show before in that peanuts, because unless they're grown in a dry and arid climate, which the peanuts that are used to make this PB2 stuff are not, then you also have a relatively high risk of, of aflatoxins. So I'm not a huge fan of powdered peanut butter. I don't think it's going to be that healthy for you unless you're still kind of, let's put it this way, if I had to choose between jiffy and powdered peanut butter, I would go with powdered peanut butter just because I'm at least not putting that strain on my arteries and getting a lot of lot more of the free radicals that are going to be found in the type of fat that's in jif. But I mean, if you have the convenience and the luxury of being able to choose. I mean, go with an almond butter or, you know, raw nut butter is the way to go. Raw almond butter, raw cashew butter. You know, that is much, much better.

Macadamia butter. It's so good.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess the one, like, saving grace of powdered peanut butter is that it's not like dry heated or spray heated, so you don't have that going for it, you know, like you would with, like, powdered eggs, for example. But I'm gonna go thumbs down on powdered peanut butter.

Hi, Ben. Great podcasts. I love listening to both of them. I was just hired in a fire department and want to maximize my performance. Right now I'm in training and working hard all day wearing the protective clothing that keeps the heat in and causes me to sweat more than I ever have before while working. We are also wearing around 80 pounds of gear. Some days I can feel my legs are about to cramp up in other parts of my body as well. I'd like to know what I can do to maximize my performance in this specific situation. Also to that, I will be working night shifts when I'm finished training. Do you have any recommendations for me so that when I work my night shifts, it doesn't affect me as much? Thanks, man.

My brother's a firefighter that I was talking about earlier.

He moved back.

I didn't finish that story. Yeah, he moved back up from Hollywood. He's a. He's a firefighter. Well, he's a firefighter and a paramedic, and he's one of the guys that flies on the helicopter.

Cool. Yeah, I want a job where I go in a helicopter someday.

Me too. Yeah, Actually, no, I don't want a job where I go in a helicopter. I want a job that lets me buy a helicopter that I can then park in my backyard and just go on anytime I want.

Land on your roof.

That's right. So if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and donate $5 to the podcast, it will go into the Ben Greenfield Helicopter Fund.

The helipad on your. On the roof of your new house. Anyways, by.

By the way, for those of you who want a good laugh, and I can't talk about it too much on this show because we'd have to mark it as explicit, but Google Larry the Cable Guy. Helicopter. Have you heard that, that. That comedy part of Larry the Cable Guy?

No.

Helicopter. Helicopter. Helicopter. You'll laugh if you go goof. Google it. I can't talk Too much about it though, right now because. Yeah. Anyways, though. Maximizing performance in fire gear. First of all, just this week I found a video about stress inoculation that rocks. I watched the whole thing during lunch one day just like Spellbound. And the video is about neural based learning for firefighters. And I think anybody who's like military personnel, Seal, Police, CrossFit, like anything where you're putting your body into extreme states of stress. And also at the same time, either, you know, whatever, lifting a barbell over your head or putting an ax through a wall or pointing a gun or something like that. Like, you want to have good peripheral vision under stress. You want to be able to move more fluidly. You want to be able to visualize and handle pressure. Be both in with your eyes open and your eyes closed. You want to be able to learn how to stress, breathe properly. And you want to be able to learn how to react to and learn from your mistakes as quickly as possible, preferably in a situation where you're making mistakes and having to learn from them very quickly. So this video goes into all of that. I will link to it in the show notes, just like this free video online. I found it over on the, on the BioHacks Blog website website@BioHacksBlog.com and they even talk about like nerve gliding in that video. Have you heard of nerve gliding before, bro?

No. No, I haven't.

So nerve gliding is where you, you actually will take a nerve. And this is one way a lot of people don't realize this. They'll get carpal tunnel and go get carpal tunnel surgery or just like be plagued by carpal tunnel for months. And there's what's called a median nerve glide and an ulnar nerve glide that basically involves putting your arms out to the side. And you just, just you put your arms out to the side. I'm kind of doing it right now. You open your wrist, you move your wrist in a giant circle and then you bring your arm back to the starting position. And what that does is it causes the nerve to actually glide or slide inside its protective sleeve. You increase range of motion in a nerve and you can actually use this to both improve your movement capability, but also to decrease nerve inflammation or nerve immobility. Nerve glides are really cool. And this guy goes into that in the video too. But I would definitely watch that video. I saw this question come through and I'm like, this guy needs to see this video. Anybody who's trying to maximize performance in high levels of stress, but that doesn't really address Jim's question specifically. Like the thing with the heat. First of all, let's talk about what you can do if you do get a cramp. We've talked multiple times in the show before about how cramps are not caused by dehydration or electrolyte depletion. In most cases, unless it's really, really severe dehydration and electrolyte depletion. In most cases, cramps are caused by either fascial adhesions, meaning lack of connective tissue integrity, because you haven't been foam rolling or doing deep tissue work enough. But you have been tearing up your muscle fibers with weight training and stuff like that. So that's one thing that can cause cramping, is just not hopping on a foam roller enough or getting a massage often enough. Another thing that can cause cramping is asking your muscles to do something under performance that you haven't asked them to do in training. They go into a protective spasm to keep themselves from tearing, and that's a very, very common reason for a cramp as well. And then another thing that can cause cramping is just basic stress. Like physiological stress combined with physical stress causes the muscle to go into that same production protective spasm. And that would be more of like a neurofeedback, biofeedback approach of being able to visualize yourself in that stressful situation and gradually teach yourself to become relaxed in that situation. You know, basically be mentally ready for it. But let's say that you cram. Let's say you haven't done any of those things that we've talked about before on the show. You're in performance, whatever you're halfway through the run in Ironman triathlon, or you're in your fire gear going up the stairs and you crammed cramp. What happens is that the taste of something extremely salty can inhibit what's called the alpha motor neuron reflex that causes a cramp. So it doesn't fix the cramp by giving you salts and electrolytes. Because frankly, the taste of something salty works so fast to reverse a cramp that there's no physiological way that it is the salt being absorbed by a muscle that actually reverses the cramp. It's just the taste and the motor neuron response to that taste. So pickle juice is actually something that's been proven in studies to be able to reverse a cramp. So that's one thing that you can do. Like, you can buy pickle juice off of, like, Amazon like you can get pickle juice, but you can also go the old fashioned way. And you know, like when you, when you go to the grocery store and you buy pickles, Brock, you know the juice that's in the jar, Mm. That's pickle juice. So really amazingly there are people selling pickle juice though like as pickle juice shots like on Amazon and stuff. And anyways though, so yeah, pickle juice, you can just taste that. You can even carry an old glass container just in case and taste that. The other thing that you can do is these electrolyte capsules. Anything from like salt sticks to hammer ecaps to athletes to any of these really salty electrolyte capsules. If you carry those in a little ziploc bag or a tiny little, little plastic film container and you break it open and dump it under your tongue, it tastes nasty. But it's incredibly salty and can also reverse a cramp. So if you cramp up, just pickle juice or open up one of those electrolyte capsules and put it underneath your tongue and that can help out tremendously. I would also of course not play around with just waiting for the cramp to happen and fix it. I would instead train in specific ways that help your body to handle the heat heat and help your body to handle what it's going to be asked to handle while wearing that fire gear. So one of the things weighted vest, get like a, you know, 40 to 50 pound weighted vest. I like the ones with little velcro strap across the midsection. If you get water running in it, as Brock and I noted, you might drown. But, but ruck in that thing. I mean spend your day in that thing. Get used to that gear and get your body to experience the rigors of training in that gear. I was talking with Spartan champion and all around obstacle racing badass Hobie Cal and one of his go to workouts is he'll run 1.5 miles on treadmill. And he does it as 60 seconds hard, 20 seconds easy. And he just wears a weighted vest. And that's like his go to workout. The dude only runs like 10 miles a week period. But like his hardest workout of the week, the one that keeps him up awake at night like before he goes and does the workout is this weighted vest 1.5 mile run on a treadmill. Treadmill. So his name is Holy Cow, Hobie Cow. You could probably call him Holy Cow. So that'd be one thing. And related to that, they also make weighted compression shirts. So there's this. There's this one. There's this brand new company. It's pretty cool, actually. I want to get one. It's called Titan Force, and it's the world's only weighted compression shirt. So it's this weighted shirt that has a zipper inside it with 14 different pockets that you can put 8 pounds of hydrogel inserts into. And you can wear it hot, you can wear it cold, you can wear it when you're on the treadmill, you can wear it when you're working out, but it compresses heat or compresses cold up against your skin while at the same time providing resistance. So again, this combination of compression, heat training, cold training, whichever you choose, and then you're working against a greater amount of weight as well. So.

So the little things that make the shirt weighted, you can throw in the, in the fridge or in, in some hot water or something.

Yeah. But it just fits you like a glove versus a weight pan. Weighted vest that kind of bounces around.

I want one of those.

They're pretty sexy. Yeah, I. I'm probably gonna get one. I'll put a link in the show notes. I think you can get them on Amazon. But yeah, they're called Titan Tech shirts. So that's an option to a weighted vest as well. Jim. And then if you just want to make things easier, even harder. If you're getting in the sauna and doing some long sauna sessions, getting your body able to get rid of heat more efficiently, produce more heat shock proteins, and get all the advantages that we talked about in the podcast episode with Dr. Rhonda Patrick, which was a great episode, about how to use heat to increase your resilience to stress. Sweet sweat is this other thing that you can smear on your skin before you get in a sauna. And it's like, like wax, pomegranate, coconut oil. I think there's like some cayenne or some kind of a hot pepper type of extract in there to help bring blood flow to the surface. Aloe vera extract. And you sweat like a freaking horse when you put this stuff on and you go into a sauna or any other hot environment, and it just jacks up the sauna experience on steroids because you sweat way more. So you could use this as well just to get yourself used to being, being extremely uncomfortable in those hot situations. And, I mean, if I were in your situation and I knew that other people's lives were on the line when I was in the hot and the heat and everything, I mean, I would go out and I Would do like ruck sessions with the weight of vest on in the heat in the middle of the afternoon. And if you can't do that, you get a little heater, you set next to it like a treadmill out in your garage and you just ruck, you know, basically, heat plus weight plus activity, as simple as that sounds, the number one thing I find people cramp is they just have not prepared their bodies adequately for what the bodies are going to experience in that stressful situation.

For the people out there who don't speak American, ruck equals hike.

Yeah, it's just a fancy word for hiking, walking, whatever sort of a word for hiking. I think I've been rucking every Sunday to get ready for seal fit. And actually it was so hot this morning past Sunday, and there was so much smoke in the air from all the forest fires around here that I was kind of scared. Like I wasn't sure what was going to happen to my body with this combination of heat and smoke and everything. Speaking of firefighting, so I went to this hill by my house. It's like this super steep, it's about an eighth of a mile long or so. And just went up and down the hill, did 26 repeats up and down the hill, swearing my weighted vest. It was like the most boring work. I was listening to podcasts and just going, going up and down, up and down, up and down. Hi, Ben, I was wondering, I just.

Recently bought your book, your audiobook, or rather your Kindle version of the book.

And I was wondering exactly where this alluded to audiobook was called Audible and they say it doesn't exist. So I'm kind of interested in finding out.

Well, Charles.

Well, funny you should ask.

Funny you should ask.

Funny Brock should decide to play this question the very week. No, actually. So I've been recording. Here's the story. Here's the story.

Start from the beginning.

From the beginning. I've been recording the Beyond Training audiobook and for three years and just kind of to open the kimono here. I didn't make much money on the Beyond Training book. I didn't get an advantage. I got zero dollars for that book. I pretty much just wrote it and I get a little bit of royalty income. But trust me, when you write a New York Times bestseller, that does not mean you make much money off of it.

Yeah, it doesn't equal millionaire. It just equals success.

But I know I have a lot of podcast listeners. You know, like 80 to 90,000 people will download one of these episodes over the year that the Podcast comes out. So I was like, well, I know people are going to listen to my book. So when I, I negotiated the contract for my books, I didn't have an agent or anything. I just kind of made things up as I went. I told them, well, I want full audio rights. I want to be able to record the audio of this book and do whatever I want with it. And so my publisher was like, okay, you can do that. And so I had all these grand aspirations to, within a few weeks after the book was out, have it already. Already. Already on. Well, after spending about, about 30 hours in front of the microphone, I'm up to chapter nine. Just finished chapter nine.

There's 24 chapters.

Yeah. So you do that.

And they get progressively longer as the book goes on too.

It is taking forever to record this book. So finally, and Brock and I talked about this this week, we're like, well, let's just start putting out these chapters as soon as I record them. And that is what we're doing right now. So for those of you who may not know about this, there is a secret hidden channel of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast episode where about every month we put out two to three bonus podcasts. Insider interviews, interviews we didn't release on the main feed because we had too many interviews for that month or we had something that was a little bit more top secret or controversial. We put it all on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Premium channel over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com premium or if you use our free app, any of the episodes that you see there in the app that have the lock button next to the them, you can unlock those. If you're a Premium and it's $10 a year, actually $9.99 a year a year to have access anywhere in the world, like us International, anywhere you can have premium access. Anyways, what we're going to start doing and begin with these first nine chapters we've already started. If you own the app, which is free, or you're part of the premium channel, you don't have to own the app for that. You may have noticed that the book chapters of Beyond Training are now appearing one by one magically at the premium channel.

For the very astute people, they'll notice that we accidentally released the introduction before the preface.

There you go. So all of that is there. The introduction, preface, wrong order. Brock's fault. But check that out.

Rectify that next week.

BenGreenfieldFitness.com Premium Charles and everybody else who's wanting the audio version and eventually It'll be available on auto, but now you can just go and get access to it kind of like as it comes out, you know, step by step.

So it's sort of like when Charles Dixon used to release all of his books one chapter at a time in the newspaper.

Did you just call him Charles Dixon?

I think I did.

Charles Dickens.

Charles Dickens.

Just like that.

Marles chickens.

So, speaking of weird names, we have an interesting itunes review this week.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot about the whole itunes review thing.

And if you hear us read your itunes review on the show, then. And you email us to tell us. We will email. We will not email you. We will send you using regular mail, the little post office guy. We'll send you a Ben Greenfield fitness gear pack, a sweet Ben Greenfield fitness beanie, a BPA free, free water bottle that you can drink your Evian or your Gerol Steiner or your vulvis water from, and also a Ben Greenfield fitness workout shirt. That's awesome. That isn't like a big cotton tent, but it's actually a cool, sexy shirt.

So it doesn't get smelly the first time you wear it.

Either you can buy all that gear and support the show at BenGreenfieldFitness.com gear or you can leave us a review and it looks like, like profit mom left us a review. Nice.

And we have to read the title of the review because it sort of ties in. It's Ben Google field podcast.

All the ladies call me Google Film.

Google Field.

Google Film.

So it goes like this. Yes, that's Ben Google field. Since asking Ben is better and easier than searching on Google. He does great research and is on.

Know about the easier part.

Yeah, you have to wait, like weeks and perhaps months sometimes to get your answer. But anyway, he does great research and is on top of the latest news and products. I've learned so much over the past few years that I have been listening to the podcast. Plus, he has inspired me to go back to school to get my master's in integrative health and nutrition too. Thanks.

Masters in integrative health and nutrition. Nutrition. You know what, Brock?

What?

I can google that for you.

Have you used that website? They'll let me google that for you.

I have used Let me Google that for you.

I use that for my dad all the time because he asks me all these questions and I just send him the Let me Google that for you.

What's the URL? It's not Let me Google it. It's L, M G I F Y.

Right.

LMG I F Y.

If you just google. Let me google it for you.

You'll find lmgif Y. That's right. There it is.

It's such a great passive or passive aggressive thing to do.

Check that out. And by the way, stay tuned this weekend for another killer Insider interview. I will surprise you and let you wait with bated breath to see what that's all about. And until then, happy Googling and have a healthy day.

Thanks, Mr. Google Field.

Thank you, Google Field. Googly googly googly field.

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

Sam.