Episode #140: The Last Diet You’ll Ever Need – Part 2

In this podcast, the last diet you'll ever need. Part 2 When to use a foam roller Fish oil Skin breakouts Body fat measurement accuracy Shrinking your stomach A supplement called Vitargo are frozen meals, healthy eating before a morning workout and rapidly digesting foods.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness.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.

Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and this podcast is actually coming out one day later than its typical scheduled release date. The reason for that is the Amazon hosting account that this podcast is hosted on has been inundated with increasingly higher and higher traffic each week. There are many, many thousands of you downloading this podcast when it's released and consequently the fees from that Amazon account have started to dig very, very deep into my own personal pocket. So yesterday I actually had to take care of some issues with the actual payment on that account. I thought about it over the course of the day yesterday. I definitely still want to continue bringing you this podcast, but it's going to take your support and a little bit of help from you. What I've done is I put a button over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com that lets you donate $1 to this podcast. It's very simple. It's a button. You push it, you donate $1 and this podcast keeps on coming to you week after week. So the decision is yours. Let's jump right into this week's content.

Special Announcements.

So this first announcement is for you triathletes over there. I am teaching in an Ironman Coeur d' Alene triathlon camp and that camp is going to be May 13th through the 15th. I have extended the registration deadline for that triathlon camp to April 15th. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to this podcast, podcast number 140 over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com for you to be able to get in to this year's camp. Now, relative to most camps, it actually is not that expensive. It's $299 for the entire weekend and that includes all of the course rides, the runs, the swim clinics, the fuel, everything that we're going to be providing to you during that camp. So you can check that out. I'll put a link in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com to the Ironman Coeur d' Alene Triathlon Camp. Now next, we're obviously talking about KC Kreischy's new book today, the Super Health Diet, the last diet you'll ever need. And I do have 12 autographed copies of that book. If you want to get this book for free, all you have to do is make a video of yourself telling me why you need this book or why you think this book would help you. And all you got to do is upload that video over to Facebook at the Ben Greenfield Fitness Facebook page. That's facebook.com bgfitness and I'll put a link to that in the show notes and you, if your video is actually entered as one of the top videos, will get that free autograph book, the Super Health Diet, which is the book we'll be talking about today. Now the last announcement is that Tuesday, April 12th is approaching quickly. And remember, at 6pm Pacific Time, 9pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, April 12th, Dr. Cohen from Bioletics and myself are going to be teaching a seminar called the Shocking Truth About Vitamin D and Fish Oil. This is going to be chock full of a bunch of content that you didn't really realize when it comes to vitamin D and fish oil. And you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and RSVP for free right there in the show notes. You will be able to ask your questions via chat or via video during that live seminar. So check that out. That's coming up Tuesday, April 12th at 6pm So I hope to see you there. And let's jump right in to this week's Listener Q and A.

Listener Q and A.

If you have a question for the podcast, remember you can just leave it over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com by clicking on the Ask Ben form. Or you can call and leave your question via audio to 877-209-9439. And the first question for today comes from listener Kelsey, who says, I recently saw a write up on a new foam roller called the rumbleroller. It has little bumps on it as opposed to just a smooth rolling surface. And that's supposed to make this foam roller superior to a conventional roller. I was wondering if you'd seen this roller or had any thoughts about it. Also, one of my therapists made me roll immediately before and after run workouts, but another said it was better to wait several hours to roll to allow time for lactic acid to accumulate. Is there a better time to roll than another. And are there times when I should not roll because it might hinder performance? Well, this is a great question. I personally use a foam roller almost every day, and here's why. Basically, you have this soft connective tissue right underneath your skin, and it wraps around your muscles and your bones and your nerves and your blood vessels, and it's called fascia. And together, muscle and fascia make up what's called your myofascial system. And for a variety of reasons, including hard exercise and sometimes not enough exercise, inflexibility, injuries, variety of reasons, the fascia and the muscle tissue underneath it get stuck together, and that's called an adhesion. And it results in restricted muscle movement and a drop in performance. It can cause pain, soreness, reduce your flexibility, reduce your range of motion. And so the idea is that there is a way to release that myofascia or to get rid of some of those adhesions. Now, traditionally, myofascial release is actually something that a practitioner does on you. They use this sustained pressure on your soft tissue while they apply what's called traction to your fascia. And it's something that you can, you can get done by a lot of times a massage therapist or a physical therapist. And that results in a softening and a lengthening of the fascia, breaking down of the scar tissue, a drop in the adhesions between the skin and the muscles and the bones, and typically an improvement in performance and improvement in range of motion, and a lot of times a decrease in nagging aches and pains. But you can do myofascial release yourself with a foam roller, and you simply do it by lying on the foam roller so that the pressure from your body weight is pushing the foam roller against your muscle and simply rolling the foam roller up and down the areas that tend to be tight or adhesive. And this, this technique is something that tends to be a lot less expensive than going to see a massage therapist or physical therapist. Now, there are little areas of your body, you know, little tiny muscles up in your shoulders and some of the areas like back, behind your knees, that it's really tough to get with a foam roller. But in most cases, for most muscles, the foam roller works just fine. I've got a bunch of free videos that show you how to foam roll over@YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness if you go over there and do a search for foam roller. Now, this rumble roller that you talk about with the little ridges sticking up out of it, that's actually the foam roller that I use, I use it almost every day and I swear by it because all those little ridges dig into the muscle a lot better than these smooth foam rollers will. Now, as far as the time to foam roll. Like I mentioned, foam rolling can help improve range of motion and help decrease tightness and soreness during exercise. So during important exercise sessions or exercise sessions where you're going to need a lot of range of motion, I recommend that you foam roll before the session. So hit those muscles for about five minutes of foam rolling before you actually go out and start a session. In addition, I do recommend foam rolling after hard workout sessions to actually help your muscle to recover. It's a form of cool down. It basically helps milk some of the inflammation up out of the muscle. Now, the therapist that told you that you need to allow time for lactic acid to accumulate was actually incorrect. Lactic acid is removed from your muscles almost immediately after you finish a workout. Your body gets rid of lactic acid very quickly. It's not what causes soreness. And you don't foam roll to get rid of lactic acid. You foam roll to simply flush a lot of the inflammation, the white blood cells, the prostaglandins, the fluid, the things that can come kind of accumulate in muscle during a hard workout and that helps to decrease some of the soreness the next day. So ultimately, best case scenario, you foam roll before workouts that are going to require a lot of range of motion or workouts where you tend to feel injured or feel body pain during. And you foam roll after workouts after which you traditionally feel like you get sore. And that's the best way to use a foam roller. So hopefully that helps out. Okay, next we have a question from Mayer who says, I started taking Udo's oil. I feel like it's making my skin break out. Is this possible? It's happened to me previously when I increased fish oil intake, but I thought it was an old wives tale that using more oil would make your skin break out. Well, the idea with Udo's oil and I did interview Udo erasmus before about this 369 oil that he has, which is basically an oil that's just chock full of omega 3 fatty acids along with small amounts of omega 6 and omega 9 fatty acids. The idea behind it is that it's a great source of fat, something you can take by the tablespoonful, for example, on a daily basis. You could even mix it and use it as a salad dressing. But occasionally when people start taking in Good oils, they can break out. And the general consensus, and I did ask Udo about this, is that it's actually toxins moving out through, through the skin. So what happens is that oil soluble toxins can build up in your tissues when you don't have enough of the type of oil that migrates to the skin present in your diet. Now, omega 3 fatty acids are the type of fatty acids that appear to move toxins more effectively than like an omega 6 or an omega 9 fatty acid or a saturated fat. And because you're vastly improving your Omega 3 profile, when you start taking something like an Omega 3 fatty acid source, you can get a breakout from that toxin release. But typically that reaction stops within anywhere from two to six weeks. So what I would do is at least take an oil like this for that period of time and then assess whether or not you're still breaking out. At that point, you might want to look into, like the soap you're using and the shampoo you're using, any type of chemical that you may become more sensitive to as you get healthier, which is often the case. So that's a great question. Hopefully that helps you out. And the next question is from listener Mike, who says, at the beginning of the year, I did hydrostatic weighing and I was told I have 10.2% body fat. But I got tested with a bod pod today and I came in at 17.4% body fat. I haven't changed my training or my diet. So which test should be more accurate? Well, I've talked a little bit about hydrostatic weighing and I've talked a little bit about the BOD pod before. And basically hydrostatic weighing is where you get dunked into a tank, you hold your breath, you go underwater, you let all the, all the air out of your lungs. And by measuring your weight underneath the water, you can get your body density. And using an equation, your body density can be converted into body fat percentage. And when you use something like a BOD pod, which is a chamber that you crawl into, you're displacing air rather than displacing water. Now, both are accurate within about 1 to 2%, which is fairly good as a body fat measurement. But the issue is that when you use something like a BOD pod, which is actually called air displacement plasmography, it can be an ineffective way to measure body fat if it's not done properly. So if you've exercised beforehand, if you are wearing a bunch of loose clothes during the test, if you've eaten beforehand, if you're dehydrated. All of this can affect the bod pod measurements, whereas water tends to be a little less sensitive to those variables. So that's one thing is you may not have been in an ideal state when you did the bod pod versus the hydrostatic way. And they've actually done studies like this before where they've taken people and they've compared the bod pod versus the hydrostatic and found that something as simple as having the baggy clothes on can vastly reduce the accuracy of the BOD pod measurement. So you gotta be in very, very tight clothes or else not wearing anything when you do bod pod to approach the accuracy of hydrostatic. And both of them, when done correctly, can be pretty accurate. So you're gonna get within 1 to 2% of either method. But interestingly, even skinfold calipers, which are those pinching calipers that pinch the skin and take a fat fold measurement at various sites on your body, can be close to the same accuracy if they're done by somebody who knows what they're doing and who has done skinfold measurements before. So, you know, you don't have to go find an expensive chamber to get into or do hydrostatic weighing. You can, you can do the skin fold and get pretty decent results. So the next question comes from David, who says, is it really possible to shrink your stomach physically by eating less? Well, the short answer is yes. They've actually done an interesting study on this. What scientists did was they had a group of obese men and women, and they split them into two groups. So there's one group that ate whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and then the other group just had 1,000 calories a day. And the scientists used these cool little latex balloons to measure the stomach capacity at the start of the study, and then four weeks later. And long term, over the course of those four weeks, the dieting group versus the control group, they reduced their gastric capacity by 27 to 36% on average. In the control group, their stomach capacity didn't change at all. Now, typically, your stomach isn't going to shrink that much by eating just a little bit less during the day. But chronic dieting or chronic chronic calorie deprivation can definitely decrease your stomach capacity. And interestingly, this effect goes both ways, because if you have a repeated intake of large meals, and especially if you binge frequently, you increase your stomach capacity. So I would imagine these people who do something like competitive eating probably have a huge stomach capacity. But the idea is that as your Stomach capacity decreases, you can tend to feel more satiated by smaller and smaller meals. And so a lot of times, if you begin eating fewer calories, whereas you may initially be somewhat uncomfortable with that, long term, your stomach can decrease in its capacity to the point where you find those smaller meals just as fulfilling. So it's quite interesting. Now we have a question about a supplement. Kara asked, what are your thoughts on the effectiveness of Vitargo as a carbohydrate source for prevention during and post workout? Well, Vitargo is basically a nutrition supplement company that makes a carbohydrate supplement that's based off of barley starch. And the idea is that the type of carbohydrate that you get from this barley starch has a very, very high molecular weight. Now, when you have something that has a high molecular weight, it tends to have a little bit less weight water or a little bit lower osmolality in terms of the water that collects around it. And so when it's consumed, it can actually move through the stomach more quickly versus the carbohydrates that are requiring more water to digest. So the Vitargo starch is a little bit more rapidly digestible, gets to your gut more quickly, gets to your small intestine more quickly, and so you get more blood glucose available to your blood, to your liver, to your muscles. And so this, this high molecular weight or weight starch is actually a pretty good way to be getting in your carbohydrates either during exercise or after. The issue is that it's expensive to make. This is a spend your supplement. And so you got to have the money to burn on the supplement if you want that higher molecular weight. And Vitargo is known for being a little bit spendier, however, because it's made from this barley starch and it's made from something called amylopectin. That high molecular weight can really improve carbohydrate absorption. So I definitely don't really have an issue with this at all. And everybody that I've talked to who has used it has not really experienced as much bloating or cramping as they get with this, the maltodextrin or the fructose or the glucose based formulas that can kind of act like a sponge and draw a little bit more water into the stomach. So it would definitely be something to look into. And it's, it's really compelling in terms of a good carbohydrate source during exercise. Okay, the next question comes from Jenny, who says, I was wondering what your opinion is of frozen meals. I used to eat a Lean Cuisine for lunch several days a week, but now only eat frozen meals if necessary for convenience. What is your opinion on eating these meals?

Not a big fan.

You can start off by looking at the sodium in something like a Lean Cuisine and you're going to find about 500 to 600 milligrams of sodium. So you're getting about 25% of your daily sodium needs within just one meal. And they have to add all that sodium not only because it's a good preservative, but also because it makes these meals that are chock full of fake additives taste a little bit better. So if you look at the actual ingredients of a typical meal, like if we take the apple cranberry chicken Lean Cuisine, we start off with blanched pasta and then we get to cooked white meat chicken, but they add modified tapioca starch to that chicken as a filler. They add a chicken flavor to actually make that cooked white meat chicken taste more like chicken. And that chicken flavor is basically natural flavors in chicken powder. And the natural flavors, as you may have heard before on this show, can come from just about anywhere. They add a whey protein, a soybean oil, corn syrup solids, modified cornstarch, chicken broth, orange juice, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, sugar, and more soybean oil. So lots of sugar, very high glycemic index, high propensity to have more, more of that carbohydrate. The massive dose of carbohydrate in these getting converted to fat in the liver. Lots of omega 6 pro inflammatory omega 6 fatty acids coming from the soybean oil. Lots of potential digestive irritants, especially in folks who have food intolerances. With the soy, with the wheat, ultimately you'd be better off going to the grocery store and picking yourself up an apple and some nuts and maybe a couple boiled eggs or some lean turkey meat. Now I found while I was traveling this past weekend, incidentally, a great little packaged meal at an airport newsstand. And it actually had a very, very decent nutrition profile and primarily natural ingredients. It was made by a company called Go Picnic. And I'm guessing you're going to see these popping up more and more at airports and convenience stores because people are becoming a little bit more health conscious. But it was incredibly filling. It was basically like a salmon spread, some dark chocolate, some gluten free trail mix, some nuts in there and it was great. So it was called Go Picnic. That'd be something to look into as well. But there are definitely better alternatives to these frozen meals. Okay. Matt asks. My stomach needs a couple hours to process breakfast. So in the morning I just eat a banana, coffee and some water and then start my training session for 1.5 to 4 hours. Will the technique I use no breakfast before a long training session be fine? Well, Matt actually included when he wrote to me in a separate email that he's a power walker and that's why he's working out for so long. He's a competitive power walker, so he's working out for this long in the mornings. The issue is that a lot of times if you're wanting to eat that good pre workout meal to make sure that you get a good workout. If it's a morning workout, you know, and you're working out at 7am, that means to digest that food you got to get up at 4:30 or 5am and that's not just practical for a lot of people. And then the other issue is that if you're wanting to kind of take advantage of the fasted workout state in terms of being able to tap into fat stores a little bit better and enhance your ability to burn fat efficiently, you're also missing out on that if you eat a big pre workout meal before you start this training session. So what I would recommend is that you just get out of bed and go straight into your training session. Take your fuel out there with you, so your gels or your fruit or whatever it is that you're eating during the training session, but don't start to consume it until you get about 30 to 40 minutes into the training session. So you're getting the advantage of both that fasted morning workout, but also getting enough fuel into your body to where you're not doing things like can cannibalizing muscle or getting a huge stress cortisol hormone response to the workout. Now the other thing, if you wanted to throw a little bit extra in there, would be to take an amino acid before you actually head out so that you are upping your blood levels of amino acids and again decreasing the chance that you're going to be cannibalizing muscle. And you could do that with something like any of the amino acid powders I've talked about before on the show, like a bioetics amino acid powder powder or a master amino pattern capsule or any of these amino acids that are going to bump up your blood levels of amino acids but not require you to eat, you know, a steak or a bunch of scrambled eggs before you head out there in your Training session. So highly biologically available amino acids can help out quite a bit. And that's the way that I would tackle a workout like this. And then, of course, when you finish, you have a big breakfast. So the last question comes from Lou, who says, my daughter had her colon removed a year ago due to an illness. With absence of her colon, her digestion has to occur rapidly and in a shorter time frame. She's a photography major. Her day is full of activity, moving gear, etc. She also works in retail 20 hours a week and rides a bike to get around. Which products would you recommend to complement or enhance her nutrition? Well, I'm a big fan of kind of going with almost like the same type of diet you would eat for irritable bowel syndrome. If you have this colostomy because you don't have your large intestine, you need foods to be digesting very easily and not causing much irritation in the digestive tract. So from a supplement standpoint, you definitely be wanting to take two things, probiotics and digestive enzymes. I'd highly recommend those so that the food that is arriving in the large intestine is as well digested as possible. And probiotics, there's any number of probiotics that you could get. And even eating yogurt would be okay if you do okay with dairy. And for digestive enzymes, I'm a big fan of something like a Capra enzyme is the one that I take by Mount Capra. That's a really good one. And you literally take that just a few minutes before a meal to help you digest that meal a little bit better. I would also have certain foods that I would avoid. For example, food with a lot of fat in it can really increase the strength of the intestinal contractions. And in a sensitive digestive system, that can cause some heartburn. It can also cause some bloating, some digestive irritation. So especially like fried fatty foods or fatty meats, be careful with things like that. So pizza, sausage, french fries, any of those type of foods. Be really careful with. I mentioned the probiotics and getting those from a dairy product. But again, that's only if she doesn't get any type of bloating or cramping or diarrhea when she eats a dairy like a milk or a cheese or an ice cream. Otherwise you want to get your probiotics from a simple probiotics capsule. Be really careful with grains. You know, a lot of people can handle grains just fine, but they do have some digestive irritants. In them. And I would recommend, if you're doing any grains, that they definitely be sprouted and soaked. Otherwise, stay away from things like weed and rye and barley. Now fruit is okay, but you got to be careful with a lot of fiber because that can be irritating to the digestive tract, especially if you've had a colostomy. So in order to make that easier to manage, limit intake of raw vegetables. Try to eat more cooked vegetables like cooked broccoli, cooked cauliflower, cooked carrots. Try and avoid eating the skin and the peel of a fruit. So if you're doing something like apples, I would recommend they be cooked and mashed rather than eating the apple with the skin. I would stay away from like high fiber cereals. I kind of already mentioned the wheat and the rye and the barley issue, but stay away from like wheat, bran cereals, things like that. Definitely corn and popcorn I would not include. And also be careful with high intake of nuts and seeds, which can also have some irritating fiber in them. A few other things that can be kind of triggers in terms of irritable bowel would be anything that has artificial sweeteners in it. So be careful with like sugar free gum, like sugar substitute packets in your coffee, even like sugar free ice cream, and of course sugar free drinks, like diet sodas. At the same time, be careful with acidic drinks, like carbonated drinks, sodas, you know, coffee, alcoholic drinks. This is really good advice for just anybody who tends to have irritable bowel. Spicy foods can contribute to some of the issues that you could have with digestion, whether you have a colostomy or irritable bowel. So be careful with like chili peppers and capsaicin. And unfortunately even chocolate can irritate the digestive tract. So I'd be careful with like a, like a chocolate as well. So a combination of avoiding some of those foods as well as taking a probiotic and a digestive enzyme would be really helpful. And so what that means is that a lot of your carbohydrates are going to come from things like cooked beets, cooked carrots, cooked sweet potatoes, cooked yams. A lot of your proteins are going to come from leaner meat based protein sources or things like eggs, protein powders, like hemp or pea based protein powders would be fine. And then a lot of your fats are going to come from things like olives, avocados, olive oil, flaxseed oil, not necessarily flaxseeds, but the actual extracted oil. And then lastly, just because a lot of absorption of electrolytes and a lot of hydration can occur in the large intestine. Make sure that you really stay on top of getting in adequate electrolytes and minerals every day and drinking enough water every day. Those are some of the things I look into. I'm not a doctor, that's not medical advice, but that's what I would do if it were my daughter. So let's go ahead and move on to part two of the interview with Casey Kreischy and the last diet you'll ever need. Part one is available in podcast number 139 and I would highly recommend that you listen into it. And that's available over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com just do a search for the last diet you'll ever need or just scroll down to podcast number 139. So let's go ahead and move on to the interview.

Featured Topic.

Welcome folks to part two of the interview with Casey Kreischy on his book the Super Health the Last Diet yout Will Ever Need. Now last week you learned a of ton ton about the premise behind weight loss health. Spas, clinics, supplements, weight loss techniques, a ton of different things that Casey talks about in this book and the reason that he wrote the book in the first place. If I could, I would actually force you to turn this off right now if you haven't listened to part one and go back and listen to part one before you listen to part two, because it's really going to make a lot of the stuff that we talk about in part two make better sense. So make sure that you listen to part one before you listen in if you can. And remember also that there will be a link to Casey's book in the show notes to this episode so that you can pick that up for your personal library, which I would highly recommend. So Casey, thanks for coming back.

Hey, glad to be back, Ben. You're doing great work out there.

Well, you know, in part one of your book, which we discussed quite a bit of last week, you talked about many of the issues in terms of weight loss and weight gain. And in part two of your book you start to talk about solutions and you jump right in by describing what you call the four corners of superfood nutrition. And what I'd like to do is talk about what these four corners are. So what are the four corners of superfood nutrition, Casey?

We'll go to the four corners. I'm going to read this one quote to kind of recap last week, a short History of Medicine 2000 BC they said, Here, eat this root. 1000 BC they said that root is healthy. That root is heathen. Say this prayer. AD 1850, they said that prayer is superstition. Drink this potion. 1940, they said that potion is snake oil. Swallow this pill. 1985, they said that pill is ineffective. Take this antibiotic. And in 2000, they said that antibiotic is artificial. Eat this root.

Full circle.

The full circle. So at the end of the day, you got to have the truth, you got to know the truth, and it'll set you free. And that's what we're trying to give here.

Gotcha.

All right, so four corners of superfood nutrition, this is. First one is calorie restriction with optimal nutrition. We know, and now more than 2,000 research studies alone, that if you cut the calories of even garbage food that you're going to increase, you're going to reduce weight, increase energy, and increase mental clarity. Basically, it's the fountain of youth. But people don't like to be hungry. And we talked last week about how you can actually lower the calories of a high protein diet, a high fat diet, a high carbohydrate diet, basically any kind of diet. If you lower the calories, you're going to get some beneficial result as a direct result. So now no practitioner that's done any research will argue against calorie restriction. We know that it works. So now the argument is, why does it work? So one group of scientists says the reason cutting the calories works is because less calories equals less of a glycemic or sugar response. So if you go to low glycemic or low sugar, you. You should get the same response as cutting the calories. And they've done studies to actually demonstrate that to be the case. And the other group of scientists says, actually it's the free radical theory of aging, because if you lower the calories, that you're actually going to reduce the combustion or the oxidative stress in the body, or the oxidation, if you will. And so lowering the calories or increasing the broad spectrum antioxidants should yield the same results as cutting the calories. And, and they've done clinical studies to actually demonstrate that to be the case. And the fourth area is our healthy fats say, like fish oil. We know that if you add fish oil to the diet, you can get similar response to cutting the calories, increasing the nutrients, reducing the sugar, and increasing the antioxidants. All of them can be accomplished largely by now adding enough fish oil to your diet and other Healthy fats. So what became obvious to me was that they're all right and you can actually do all four of them. And that should actually be the guidelines of how one should approach their diet of the four corners of optimal nutrition.

And in science they actually have a term for this calorie restriction with optimal nutrition. Or in your book you give the acronym, you call it cron, C R O N. The most interesting thing is that most diets talk about calorie restriction, obviously for the purposes of weight loss. But you note the research that shows that you get things like mitochondrial adaptation, which is great for athletes and endurance athletes especially, as well as a ton of other benefits from an anti aging perspective in terms of reducing or restricting calories. Now what would you say to somebody who says, well, that's all great, but I don't want to live until I'm 90 years old if I'm going to be hungry all the time?

Yeah, I think that is the American answer to that. And see, this is why calorie restriction doesn't work. People go off diets back to their normal thing. And you talked about some of the benefits. I mean this has been studied and everything from single celled organisms, algaes, all the way up to primates and now even in humans. And it works at every level. But you're right, people don't like to be hungry. So an athlete has been told, hey, eat 6,000 calories a day. And you have to do that to fuel your sport. But the truth is, if they would eat a lot less calories and a lot more nutrient density, as long as they assured that they got all of the 50 plus essential nutrients required to optimize metabolic function, they actually could be a better athlete and healthier and so on. So let me give a quick study that kind of puts it all together. I write about in the book that there's an article in Journal Nutrition 2002 which really says a lot about this Four Corners approach. The first group was given all that they wanted to eat. These are four groups of mice. The first group is given all they wanted to eat. A high polyunsaturated corn oil kind of diet. They ate all they want whenever they want. They live an average of 232 days. The second group, same kind of mice, same, same kind of food, but all they did now, same amount of food. All they did was add fish oil to their diets and they lived an average of 100 days longer than the 232 day control. So just by adding fish oil, you can eat like an idiot, so to speak, and add fish oil and get a benefit. So the third group was the calorie restriction group without optimal nutrition. So all they did was take the same garbage food and, and they reduced the amount of the food by 40% and they were able to add 200 days to the lifespan of these mice over the 232 day controls. So the fourth group was the same food as the third group and the same amount of food 40% less than the controls. And now they added back fish oil to the equation and they lived an average of 400 days longer than the 232 day controls just by adding fish oil and cutting the calories. So when you think about it, this is pretty much the four corners, but it does not do the optimal nutrition piece, which would even add a higher impact to it.

Now in your book you talk about superfoods and this was something that really helped me turn the corner because I went from eating a ton of calories every day and still being hungry, and now I can train for Ironman and on many days go as low as 3,000 calories, which may seem like a lot to some people, but it's not that much for an Ironman male athlete because I use a lot of these things that you talk about in your book. You have a big list of superfoods. You go down the list from dark green vegetables like spinach, kale, broccoli, asparagus, green beans, romaine and mixed greens to sea vegetables which you talk about more and explain in your book to the grain grasses. And that includes things like wheat grass, bright colored vegetables, berries, eggs from free range hen, beef, bison, chicken, turkey and lamb, all grass fed grain free and organic rice and yellow pea protein powder blend, goat milk protein, non denatured whey protein stabilized brown rice bran, sprouted legumes and grains, fresh squeezed combinations of vegetable juices, sprouts. In your book you talk more about how you actually go about finding and getting all those. But ultimately what it comes down to, and I'm speaking from personal experience here, is once your refrigerator starts to look like that, this whole calorie restriction being miserable thing goes away because you're not hungry.

You're not hungry. See, it's not about because when you eat these foods, you're not going to tap out the calories like you normally would on what you typically did and you're going to be satisfied. See the, the thing before you talk, when you talk about the four corners of superfood nutrition, you really got to talk about superfood nutrition in itself. And what does that mean? And so what we came up with was a process is that we know, and we talked about this briefly, I guess last week, that there are 50 plus essential nutrients required that the human body requires to get in your diet, with the exception of say vitamin D, which you can get some of that from the sun. But if you don't get all of these essential vitamins and minerals and enzymes and cofactors and amino acids and fatty acids, if you don't get all of the essential ones, then there's going to be a physiologic consequence and eventually death as a result of not getting these nutrients. So what we designed is a program where you actually supplement the 50 plus in the highest but the most bioavailable forms and then you add superfoods like you just described to the diet. That way you're getting all the things, because we continue to discover new things in science, new essential this or new conditionally essential that and cofactors and so on. If you combine those superfoods with those nutrients, you now have everything the body needs to thrive and to build muscle and to increase energy and to increase performance and so on. And, and that is the concept of superfood nutrition.

Gotcha. All right, so number one is this calorie restriction with optimal nutrition. Number two. What's number two?

The low glycemic low sugar, the nutrient dense food is one, as we talked about. So if you think of low calorie as just changing the types of foods to nutrient dense foods, that will help people out a bit, I believe. So when you go on to low glycemic response foods, that is eating now, there are times, particularly in athletics, like you're talking about, where you're going to need a high glycemic pop. So I'm not talking about those times. I'm talking about, generally speaking, people should try to eat foods that don't rocket their blood sugar and insulin levels immediately. So foods that are lower glycemic, the greens instead of the grains, for instance. Having a lot of greens in your diet slowly raises blood sugar, but if you eat a lot of corn, it's going to rock it up like you ate a bowl of sugar. So a lot of people have like breakfast cereals and all those kinds of things for breakfast. And a lot of athletes are still misled into thinking that a high carbohydrate, carb centric breakfast is the way to go, when truthfully you'd be better off to have a low glycemic carb centric breakfast along with enough of all the vital nutrients we talk about, plus enough protein, which is another subject in itself.

What about like high fiber, Special K, granola, muesli, those are all. Or would you consider those to be low glycemic response?

They're really not. They will raise blood sugar many hours after you eat them. Now there are times where having some oatmeal along with some eggs and a superfood smoothie or something like that can be a slow release sugar over time. But see, it's not usually the oatmeal that's the biggest of the problems. It's what people are throwing on top of that oatmeal that causes the problem because they want to sweeten it up with something like honey or they want to sweeten up with sugar or they want to sweeten it up with something else. And those are the things that cause the higher glycemic. And you know, if you have high insulin levels, it's kind of contrary to optimal performance. There are times when you want high insulin level, it's not when you're just starting your bike ride.

Yeah. And so what you're saying is rather than have like a bowl of high fiber whole grain cereal, you would want somebody to do like avocado with maybe some steamed kale and spinach and a couple of scrambled eggs and maybe a handful of nuts on the side, something like that.

Dr. Exactly. Now it's okay then to have some of that cereal along with that. But see, now you've blunted the glycemic response of that food and you won't eat as much of it as you ordinarily would have.

Gotcha, Gotcha. Alright, well that makes sense. And I guess that's probably one of the things we've talked about most on this show is kind of trying to choose the low sugar foods that aren't going to send you on such a sugar based roller coaster. And what you talk about in the book, of course makes sense from that standpoint. And some of the charts that you give are good too because you go into the glycemic load, you take something like watermelon. Why is watermelon, even though it has a really high glycemic index, not as big of a problem as it appears to be on paper.

The glycemic index is really not a good way to look at it. And many people still look at GI as the way to go on understanding the sugar, how much sugar pop it's going to give. But the truth is, the glycemic index is based on someone consuming 50 grams of carbohydrates of a substance and then comparing that to how they would have done if they had 50 grams of sugar or 50 grams of white bread or something like that. So to eat 50 grams of carbohydrates of a watermelon, you'd be eating the whole thing, you see. So not every serving of food has 50 grams in it. So the glycemic load accounts for serving size and does the division. And so glycemic load is much more. Basically, that is the number that is the descriptor of the glycemic response of a food.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

So looking at the list, the glycemic load list, you'd see where, you know, pizza might be a GI of 30, but a glycemic load of 13, you know, so, you know, jelly beans, the GI will be 78, but the net, I mean, but the GL would be 22, you know, so if you could keep your glycemic load, say around the 15 or lower area, that would be a much better off for most people.

Yeah, I think that's what confuses a lot of people. They think fruit is right up there with macaroni and cheese and pasta, when in fact there's so much water in.

It has a very low glycemic load.

Exactly.

Now, number three, we've got eating low glycemic foods or slow carbohydrate response foods. We've got calorie restriction, but with optimal nutrition. And then what do you have for number three?

Well, number three is antioxidants. Consuming a broad range of broad spectrum antioxidants, including supplementation. If you can't get there through your diet, and really you can't get there, you cannot get there from your diet enough, particularly if you're in athletics, because what do you see? Someone training really hard, they get sick, don't they? They come down with something quite easily when they're over training or at the edge of over training. Well, antioxidants are a real important piece to the recovery, really important angle to the recovery piece. And so people need to understand, though, that antioxidants are vastly different in their kinds of oxidants and the kinds of antioxidants. So most things, when you go out and you see something called an ORAC score, you're familiar with Orac, when you see an ORAC score, but people listening.

In might not be familiar with Orac.

Orac is oxygen radical absorbance capability of a food. So basically an Orac score will tell you about how potent an antioxidant is and that that really is what it's purported to do anyway. But when you see Orac score of say acai berry at 1800 per serving, or green tea at 2300 per serving, or cocoa powder at 7800 per serving, it really looks impressive. But the truth is that the, the antioxidants really are five major classes. So if you deal, if you haven't, let's say you have a, a green tea and your peroxyl radical is 2300, there's five holes in the boat and you got one of them plugged. Does that make sense? So peroxyl radical, it's peroxyl and there's hydroxyl, there's peroxide nitrite and superoxide animal, and singlet oxygen. So when you think about singlet oxygen, you're talking about a completely different type of radical attacking the body. So Orac doesn't tell you anything but about 1, which is peroxyl radical. So there's a new test out there called total Orac fn and that is a measurement of all five radical classes, which is a much better measure than a single Orac.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. And that was something interesting in your book that I find that a lot of books don't differentiate is that you can't just grab any random antioxidant off the shelf and take it because you have to have at least these four, five different types of antioxidants and you list a bunch of different foods that are good sources of antioxidants as well. Now I will not deny the benefits of antioxidants, especially from an anti aging perspective and a scavenging of free radicals perspective when it comes to people exercising a lot. Although there is a caveat to that I want to get into in a minute. But what does it have to do with weight loss?

Well, you know, it's interesting that inflammation is, you know, I'll mention the athletes first is because we now know that with the right mix of antioxidants, you can speed the pace of recovery by as much as 50%. And so when you think about an athlete that's doing a sport like let's say hockey for instance, you know, you're talking about getting recovered in two days versus four days. You know, it's really a dramatic difference in an athlete. And being sore is not often necessary if you can have these things to repair the damage as the damage comes along. So weight loss, it's the same thing, is that the body, when you have an antioxidant, you often also have an associated anti inflammatory response. And so oxidation, you've seen a lot of these weight loss supplements have green tea in it, for instance, because we know if you can quench the fire of oxidation, you can reduce the fire of inflammation as well. And so it really does have a positive effect. And like for instance, if someone eats a big sugar meal, you can feel it right in your gut. You can feel looser in your gut. You know that feeling after you had Thanksgiving desserts and that is basically an inflammatory and an oxidation response in the gut and that you actually feel looser. But after you go for a long ride and you have great exercise, you feel very tight there. And that is a, it's a profound difference that you can actually feel.

Interesting. So reduction of inflammation is going to assist with weight loss. And the issue that I was going to bring up with antioxidants and kind of the caveat that I wanted to put out there because I know some people will call me out on this, is they're listening in, is that there is recent research that suggests that high dose antioxidants might actually be bad for you. Because if you're taking in antioxidants all the time, you might actually shut down your body's own ability to be able to handle stress. And this is this research, and don't get me wrong, for people listening in, this research is done on how dose antioxidants, not on people eating pomegranates and blueberries and ground up fruit powder. What my recommendation is on this and if you have something you'd like to add, definitely add it in, Casey. But I recommend that people, when they're training hard or exposing their bodies to lots of stress, that they supplement with high dose antioxidants, but that they not do that every day so that they give their body a chance to be able to handle some of that stress. And when I say not do that every day, I'm specifically talking about like.

The high, high dose antioxidant supplements out there.

Yeah. So, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to take a disagreeing point with you there, but I think it needs to be clarified a little bit, is that taking a high dose of vitamin C and vitamin E in the form of D alpha tocopherol is basically going to go at one or two of the classes we just discussed. Okay. So self medicating, if you will, and taking a couple of pills that don't handle a broad spectrum of oxidation is not going to give you the response of taking lower amounts of broad spectrum antioxidants on a daily basis. Because see, your body, particularly if you're training, your body is tearing down and you need antioxidants big time. And so there is a way to overdose on anything. So too much of anything is bad. But covering the broad spectrum of antioxidants is a very important thing, particularly for athletes, but for anybody, because there are stressors on the body that the body's antioxidant systems just can't handle.

Well, yeah, that's interesting because you actually do make a good point here that the studies were done with single levels of some of these high dose antioxidants like the vitamin C and the vitamin E. And you're talking about using all five in this balanced kind of, kind of moderate dose.

That's what I'm talking about. See, they always want to go to beta carotene. I said beta. They want to go to D alpha alpha tocopherol, said alpha and they want to go to vitamin C. And so these are well known antioxidants, but broad spectrum they are not. See, one thing is important when you take vitamin E. Vitamin E is alpha beta gamma delta tocotrienol and alpha beta gamma delta tocopherol. So to pull out one of the weakest of those D alpha tocopherol and use that to judge your study and then also using synthetic beta carotene to try to judge a study and say antioxidants are not good is getting exactly where the drug companies would like people to be. People need to take a large quantity of broad spectrum antioxidants on a daily basis to be healthy. And the literature shows that it can extend life, delay disease, enhance performance rapidly, reverse or restore in recovery and exercise and so on. As long as you're taking the broad spectrum natural versions of these antioxidants.

Yeah, this is why I'm glad that I benefit from getting to talk to cutting edge guys like you. On the interview is for you folks listening in. I like to learn this stuff too. And I just picked up something that's going to be highly beneficial for me and hopefully for people listening in. All right, so we talked about the antioxidants and supplementing with your full range of antioxidants. Now what is number four?

Well, number four is eat super fats, fats that are good for you. People think fats make you fat, but that's really not true. As you well know, Ben, the primary super fat that we like to talk about is fish oil. Now I didn't say Omega 3 because it's such a broad category. It confuses everybody that every time somebody sees eggs with omega 3 in it or get some flax oil or whatever, they think they're doing everything they need to do regarding the Omega 3 category and it simply is not the case. It is very clear, according to the literature that you cannot take enough plant based Omega 3 in order to get the benefits talked about in the literature. The reason for that is plant based omega 3 is alpha linoleic acid ala, ala goes through the delta 6 desaturase enzyme process and converts to DGLA and eventually to DHA and rarely if any, to EPA. So EPA. I'm trying to get, I'm getting a little technical here, Ben, but epa, DHA is what you see on the side of the fish oil pillow, okay? Epa, dha, that is what you need. And basically a fish has a very highly efficient process of eating a plant omega 3 and converting it to both EPA and DHA. Basically think of a fish, a fatty fish, a wild salmon, mackerel, tuna, herring, sardine, anchovy. You think of those fish are basically Omega 3, EPA DHA factories. They have an extreme ability to create those subsets of omega 3. But when you as a human eat ala, you're only converting 1 to 5% of that ala to the DHA and nothing to EPA. The point you really want to know is yes, I need fish oil. Now people are out there trying to sell these shellfish oils instead of fish oil. That would be the green lipid oils or the, or the, what's the other one? The.

Krill.

Krill, yes, krill. And they're trying to say somehow that's better than fish oil. But that is really a marketing hocus pocus because they're trying to say because they're in the phospholipid form, that they are better absorbed than the triglyceride form, which is the normal form that a fish oil is supposed to come in. But the truth is it is marginally different. And phospholipids do absorb very well, but they have such a minute amount in these shellfish oils that you are getting an anti inflammatory effect, but you're really not getting near enough EPA and dha.

Gotcha.

So the second thing you want to look for is that you don't want to over concentrate the EPA and dha. Like a lot of these oils are doing. Now, the super concentrated pharmaceutical grade fish oils, those are too high in EPA and too high in dha. And they're not in a natural form. They're in a ethyl ester form and not a triglyceride. So I know that's getting technical, but the point is ethyl ester is not found in fish oil, is not found in nature in ethyl ester form, and it is not as well absorbed as the triglyceride form, which they cannot put it back to after they concentrate it. Super concentrate it.

Yeah. Probably not what people want to hear, but the ethyl ester form is the cheap form that you find in the cheap fish oil that you get at the grocery store.

Most of the time it is. And those are normally super concentrated. So really what you want to look for is 180 or 120 being the first number on the EPA and DHA. If that's the number, then that is the natural ratio which you find in nature.

Gotcha. All right, so cool. You just went over your four corners. You went over calorie restriction with optimal nutrition, consuming the low glycemic, low sugar foods, your broad spectrum antioxidants, and then getting into your healthy fats. And that's kind of, in my opinion, the real meat of your book in terms of laying out the structure with which people need to put together their diets. We only scratch the surface, really what you go into in your book as far as these four corners are concerned. But then you go into kind of like what I would consider all these little tricks and tips and extra things that you can do. For example, you talk about your stealth technique of preloading with essential amino acids. What is the stealth technique of preloading with essential amino acids?

Well, you jumped right to the big one there, didn't you, Ben?

That's right, yeah.

Well, the stealth technique is really fascinating. There's some terrific research out of University of Texas that showed that they were able to reverse age related sarcopenia in the elderly with just using essential amino acids twice a day, 10 grams twice a day.

Sarcopenia being muscle loss.

Sarcopenia is muscle loss which happens to everybody over time. But it really is a big problem in the elderly. Their appetites change, they don't get enough protein, they don't get any exercise.

They.

And the muscle just. You'll see this shrinks over time and disappears. And so when this gets to a significant muscle loss, it is rarely and I don't think ever been shown to be reversed, frankly. So this is really groundbreaking research. That shows that if you can get the nine essential and two or three conditionally essential amino acids in the vegetarian free form amino acid form, and you could get it in the ratios to where it would exist using the strengths of the, say, top five protein sources in nature, plus adjusting the branched chain amino acids a little bit, if you could get this formulation, you could actually increase muscle mass in the elderly. Now, what does that mean for guys that are fit like you and me? If you can increase muscle mass in the elderly? And it's really amazing what you can do in someone who is actually working out, someone who just wants to be more fit, because muscle mass is hugely important in health. So the stealth technique of preloading essential amino acids, essentially the body has great deal of capacity to store fats and a great deal of capacity to store sugars. If you know there's 500 milligrams of 500 grams of glycogen in the muscles, 100 grams in the liver, you can fuel the body for a little while on stored sugars. And the body has the capacity to convert certain amino acids into sugars to fuel the body. So it's an amazing creation. But interestingly, the body has very little capacity to store essential amino acids. And the essential amino acids are the ones that, that form all the other amino acids in the body. All the other, let's just break it down, say 10 essential, including conditionally essential, and 10 non essential. That doesn't mean they're not essential. That just means that the body can make those or create those from the essential amino acids. So the point is, when you sit down to say, a lunch and you eat a large steak at lunch, let's just say that you ate 100 grams of protein at that lunch. How long does it take you to actually get that protein? Well, it's going to be hours and even days before you're able to release those essential amino acids from that steak, depending on how well it was chewed, how well their system is working, and so on. So once it starts digesting, it takes a while to uptake, but the optimal use of the amino acids is when the, when the insulin levels are actually high. So you know this from your post workout smoothie, right, Ben? Within the 30 minute, 45 minute window after you finish your workout, you slam your protein, nutrient rich, carbohydrate beverage to get that uptake within that window. Well, if you think of a meal like this, you ate that steak, you feel really good about it because you got 100 grams of protein. But then now you realize oh my goodness. That's actually time release protein, isn't it? Because it's going to take a good while for it to start digesting and it's going to take a lot longer for it to digest. So if it were possible, like if you have a. Take a gun, for instance, let's say you have the magazine is full, if you could cock it and put a bullet in the chamber and then put another one back in the magazine. Now you preload the bloodstream with essential amino acids. So let's just say 30 minutes before you're going to eat that steak, you have 10 to 15 grams of these essential amino acids. The body will peak. The blood levels of essential amino acids will peak within that half hour. So that when you have that steak and the baked potato and the drink or whatever you're having, while you have that insulin response, your bloodstream is full of essential amino acids. They go right to work creating muscle and lean body mass in the body. Very interesting, extraordinarily effective technique to increase muscle mass, but it's also great for just anybody who wants to be more fit and more healthy.

Gotcha. Gotcha. And those are the essential amino acids, not to be confused. I know a lot of people confuse essential amino acids with branched chain amino acids. Big difference, right?

Yes, branched chain amino acids are essential amino acids, but there are only three of the essential amino acids. So there could be some benefit for preloading with branched chain amino acids, depending on what you're having for the meal. But the truth is, muscle cannot be built unless all the essential amino acids are present at one time. So what typically happens is the body will tear down another part of the body to get the amino acids to build a new part of the body. Unless there are essential amino acids available to be used for that purpose.

Gotcha. Go ahead.

Every time you eat protein, you eat it for two reasons. One is to get essential amino acids because your body first is looking for the essential amino acids and then it'll pull up some non essentials after that. And the second reason is nitrogen. So that's where you get your nitrogen. So if you think of your protein source is basically it is just a vehicle to transport essential amino acids into your body to be then turned around and used to make muscle, to make tissue, to make enzymes, to make hormones, to make all kinds of things in your body. Then you'll start appreciating protein at a different level.

Right, Cool. Last week we talked about how this wasn't just about weight loss. And I do know that many of the people who listen to this show are lean, mean fighting machines. They're not obese. They're not people that you see walking down the street and you think they need to lose weight. But they, like me, want to live a long time and look good, have nice skin, not get sick all the time. One of the things you talk about in your book is very important from that perspective. And fittingly enough, it's called age or advanced glycation end products ages. What is going on with those? What are they and how do they work and what can we do about it?

Well, athletes need to know about that because see, it's really not about being older longer, it's about being younger longer. And so being fit is a great thing. But you really, there's a lot of people who think that they can exercise away their poor eating and that works for a time, but at some point you're going to pay a price for that sort of approach. So the processes that go on in the body. So the super health diet as we talked about is not about just weight loss, it's about weight, healthy weight gain, it's about maintaining muscle mass and it's about anti aging nutrition. So anybody can benefit from this approach with various tweaks depending on what you're trying to accomplish. But you talk about advanced glycated end products. It's interesting that the letters spelled age because one of the things that is aging is advanced glycated end products. That means that a sugar and a protein have combined to the point it has caramelized the protein and it no longer is usable in the body and the body really knows not what to do with it. So basically you've caramelized a protein and people by the time they're at old age can have up to one third of their total proteins caramelized or glycated. And that is something you definitely want to avoid, particularly as an athlete. So you can block the glycation process with several things like the aminoit's amino acid, but it's really a supplement called carnosine, not to be confused with carnitine. Carnosine has been shown to be an anti glycitant. And I had said five years ago when I wrote my first book, Super Health 7 Golden Keys, that glycation would be as well known as oxidation in about five years. And here we are five years later, six years later, people still don't know about it. So it happens when you have high levels of sugar in your body. So if you eat ice cream or you eat a Lot of sugars. You're going to cause a glycation response in the body, which you want to avoid. I'm not saying don't eat ice cream from time to time, but high blood sugar levels does result in glycation, which you want to avoid.

Gotcha, gotcha. So when combined with something like inflammation, this would definitely be an issue, right?

It is definitely an issue. Now, those are the big four, so to speak. We'll talk about those for a second. But see, like living fuel that you take, that is anti. It's been tested to be anti glycotin, antioxidant, anti inflammatory and anti angiogenesis. And those are the big four that I talk about in the book. So it's really interesting that you can actually, with the right nutrition, you can modulate these processes to where they are only working for you. Because there are reasons to have oxidation in the body. There are reasons for inflammation in the body, good reasons, and there are reasons for, I really don't know any good reason for glycation, but you want to modulate that process. So oxidation we've talked about in the antioxidant nutrition section. So it's glycation oxidation and then inflammation. To have chronic inflammation is a bad idea because basically it's at the root of every disease. And also if you have inflammation, it's harder part of exercising causes inflammation and you want to quench the inflammation to help the recovery. So oxidation, inflammation, glycation, and then angiogenesis is another thing we talk about. If you twist your ankle, you want angiogenesis because it basically opens up new blood vessels to come to that area to bring more stem cells to heal it and so on, nutrients and so on. But when the injury is finished, the body pulls back those new vessels and basically goes back to normal. So angiogenesis has a function in the body, but you don't want it to run wild. Angiogenesis running wild is like a cancer cell in the body has no danger to the body unless it gets a blood supply to start feeding it, which is done through angiogenesis. And so we know that certain foods, like I list in the book, can actually regulate angiogenesis. So it's only used in the proper positive ways in the body. It's interesting to note also that a single pound of body fat Requires an additional 1 to 2 miles of additional blood vessels. So it's a very fascinating world, the human body.

So if you shut down to a certain extent, the addition of all these new blood vessels, you're going to, for Lack of a better word, starve away some of this fat because it's not getting what it needs. Dr.

Precisely.

You have a ton, a huge list of these angiogenesis regulating foods and compounds in your book. Really helpful chapter there. Now what I like is this single sentence about these advanced glycation end products because I think that this sentence in your book really sums it up about your recommendation. You say, I recommend eating at least one half of your diet as uncooked or minimally cooked live foods, mostly vegetables. And I think that just makes sense. Don't eat a bunch of stuff that's been heated up a ton, I'm sure. Well, I'm not sure, but I would imagine that you occasionally have a barbecued steak, right, Casey?

Not barbecued, but I do enjoy a grass fed beef steak from time to time. But the thing is the people that get it well done are really making their cells, their proteins in their body well done. Because that kind of heat, that kind of caramelization actually dramatically increases the glycation within the body. So those are the things that you want to make sure you're taking like your fuel or whatever it is that you're on for the broad spectrum of antioxidants and anti glycanins, the carnosine and so on. So when you do indulge like that that you block these dangerous processes.

Gotcha. Okay, so advanced glycation end products, again, we only kind of scratch the surface of what you've got in your book, but that's a good place for people to start. So you talk about frequency of eating in this book and about how often you think people should eat. How often do you think people should eat?

Very good question. This is one of the biggest, the most questions. I suspect you get that question a fair amount also, Pete, it is nutrition dogma that people should eat all the time, should graze. I mean that is really so ingrained that people consider it fact. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I mean it is. I mean diet programs, if you see the ones I list here, how many of them are saying, here's what you have for your snacks in the mid afternoon and whatever. So I took a look at this and what does the literature say about this and how does the human body work? And so interestingly, if you look at the cycle that happens in the endocrine system, that's the first thing you look at. You look at blood sugar and insulin rise to the meal, particularly if you have a high glycemic meal and then insulin will push down blood sugar until it gets back to baseline, about where you started in about three hours after a normal meal. And then from the three hour point until the next time you put food in your mouth, you're going to have what I call maximum metabolic mode. This is when the body goes from insulin significance to glucagon significance and the body starts releasing stored fats. And so you convert from the fully fed state in the first three hours to the maximum metabolic mode in the next three hours or until you eat again. So what happens when people eat all the time and people trying to gain weight, they fall into this also? They try to lose weight, they do this, they try to gain weight, they do this, they eat, say first thing in the morning and then two hours later have a snack and then two hours later have another snack and then have another meal and so on. So what happens when you have that first snack, that blood sugar rise after your meal starts to fall, coming back towards baseline and then you eat again before it gets to baseline and it goes right back up to 100 and the process starts all over again and then you do it again and the process starts all over again. It puts enormous strain on the adrenals and you're basically on a blood sugar roller coaster for the entire day. And you never got into fat burning mode. So that is the problem for most people trying to lose weight is that they can't seem to lose weight because they have a high insulin signal store fat signal on at all times. People trying to gain weight have a similar issue too. You do want to minimize the metabolic mode in people trying to gain weight and there's some tricks to accomplish that also. But the truth is, from the endocrine perspective, endocrine system, five to six hours really is ideal of a time to allow the blood, the protein or the blood sugar to go up and come back down. So now let's talk about protein metabolism and how does it all lay onto that? Protein metabolism is very interesting. When you eat something, let's just assume that it's eggs for instance. Let's just say you ate some eggs. Very, very good protein source. It's going to be one to two hours of digestion before the protein starts to release into the essential amino acid starts to release into the bloodstream. So it's going to be from one to two hours after you ate it and then starting then it's between 6 and 10 grams an hour. The essential amino acids are going to be released into the bloodstream. So if you just do the math, if you had 50 grams of protein at breakfast. And it took you, let's just say an hour later, it started releasing protein into the amino acids into the bloodstream. Then for the next five hours, it's going to be five hours before you fully utilize that protein and delivered it into the bloodstream. Does that make sense?

Yup, yup.

So now people are worried about going catabolic. Well, you're not going to go catabolic as long as you have essential amino acids in the bloodstream. So the physiology of how the body works. Also, interestingly I write about this in the book. Also there have been studies where they would intravenously apply infuse amino acids into the bloodstream and they would find that the uptake of amino acids would be very high and then it would drop significantly and then it would go up again and drop significantly around the clock, even though the same amount of protein was given at every minute of that cycle. So it's very clear that the body has cycles on which it can use the protein, rest, restore and do it again. And so that is why I believe that optimally is three properly fueled meals a day. Plus, if you're trying to gain weight or lose weight, the amino acid preloading is a very effective tool for that. And I tell a lot of people, if you get the essential amino acids and you take them at the time you ordinarily would have snacked, then that is a very positive way to gain muscle mass also. Now many people, they're like an athlete that's doing the kind of things that you teach there, the endurance athletics. Sometimes you just can't get enough calories into three meals in an athletic situation like that. So during the training or the event, you're going to want to break it up into smaller meals. But the point is, for most people, if people say, well, for breakfast I have this and then at 10 o' clock I have a snack, I say reach out towards your lunch hour and pull everything you had between breakfast and lunch back to your breakfast and eat it. Then that allows your body to do what it can do.

Yeah. You know, the interesting thing is that with the, in terms of essential amino acids, I am actually in the process of to trying, trying to cannibalize muscle. I'm trying to do the exact opposite of some of the things that you're talking about because I tend to put on a little bit of muscle in the fall and winter. I lift weights, I play basketball, I actually bulk up because I need some of that extra muscle. But I'm a few weeks out from a race now, and my body fat percentage is low enough to where I don't want it to go any lower. I don't want to drop my essential body fat too low. So the only weight that I have left to get rid of is muscle. And so whereas normally when I'm going out and I'm doing, say like a bike ride or run or something like that on an empty stomach, I would take essential amino acids right before so that I don't cannibalize muscle. I've actually quit doing that before some of these fasted workouts so that I can actually get rid of muscle. So if you want to maintain muscle, keep your metabolism up, if you're trying to lose weight and you need to lose fat, et cetera, do the exact opposite of what I'm doing and what KC is talking about right now. Very, very few situations would you actually want to cannibalize muscle. It kind of comes down to folks who are right there on the edge in terms of like right before an event where they need to be at.

A certain weight and their body fat's already low.

So are you talking about so you can stay in a class?

No, so that I can ride my bike up hills faster.

So you notice that just a small amount of muscle difference makes a difference.

Yeah, it does, it does.

I wouldn't recommend that for a lot of folks.

I don't like it. I don't like to watch my biceps shrink and the muscle waste away. So I'm saying if you don't want to see that happen to yourself, take the essential amino acids at least before you work out, because it goes both ways.

Very interesting. Because when your body fat gets as low as you're talking about and you do those fasted workouts, it has to chew up muscle.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay, well, we're kind of starting to talk about exercise, so let's just go ahead and talk about exercise. You have a chapter on exercise in this book, Casey. And before I ask you about your seven tiger moves that you describe in this book, I'm just curious, what does your workout routine look like? Are you an endurance person? Are you a high intensity interval person?

A little bit of everything.

What do you do?

You know, I am not an endurance person myself. It's never been a love of mine to start with. And according to the research, most people now you're doing endurance athletics. But most people think that they need to lose weight. They go and run on the treadmill for an hour, and that's going to make them lose weight. But what the research has shown is that approach actually causes enough of a caloric increase of a desire to eat that people end up eating away the benefits they just gained on that treadmill. And so what you really want to do is create enough of a metabolic change to where you're actually chewing up weight well beyond the workout. And so that's where high intensity interval training would come in. So I do a lot of these bodyweight exercises and what's called isoflexion, which are the seven tiger moves, where if you take your fist right now and you squeeze your fist and you tighten your arm as much as you can while it's straight, and you feel your fist is really tight, every muscle's tight. And you bend your arm while it's tight and bend it all the way up and then increase the pressure even more and go back down just like you're doing a curl. You can see that you can actually generate enough pressure, enough resistance on every muscle from the tip of your finger all the way to your spine, that you could actually put a better load on that muscle than a machine can, because you're twice as strong going down on the negatives as you were on the positives. So that is a system that I like very much. But as far as my endurance is, I do the high intensity interval training, whereas I might go run two miles, but within that two miles, I will do ten hundred yard sprints or twenty fifty yard sprints, and at full speed. And then subsequent to a sprint, I will either jog or walk up to twice as many steps as I took during the sprint. So if it's a 50 yard sprint, I might walk 50 to 100 steps or might jog 50 to 100 steps and then do it again. And that approach has been shown to actually increase endurance capability more than a long run would do. So that is one of the things I do. Another thing I do is I'll run the steps. And when I run the steps, I'm really just looking for 50 to 100 steps to run at full speed and then work my way back down and do it again, doing it between six and 10 times. That is a tremendous workout from an endurance capacity state. One other one that I really like is have you seen the sprint stepper, the, the exciser Sprint stepper?

I haven't seen that one. What is it?

It's basically a stainless steel device that just has a couple of like steps on it and it has hydraulics on it. So it lets you go really fast and you can change the tone. But you sprint basically standing in place. And it's extraordinarily good exercise for doing just 30 seconds or something like that of total workout. So 100 steps, for instance, then you get off of it. And then I go over to my heavyweight bag and I will then do 100 flurries on the heavyweight bag. After I recover from the sprint stepper, I go to the bag, I do 100 flurries as hard and fast as I can hit it. And then I get my breath back. I'll go back to the stepper and go back and forth. So to me, that is really a tremendous workout. In addition to the seven tiger moves.

I love it.

It's very. We had Art Devaney, the guy who wrote the new Evolution D diet book on a few weeks ago. He's a 73 year old man. He looks fabulous. He does a ton of this high intensity interval training, body weight stuff, mixing things up all the time. And you point this out in your book, and I'll be the first to admit it, that endurance sports, this long, slow run on a treadmill, if you're just trying to look good and to maximize weight loss and to actually keep some muscle on your body, it's really probably the least effective thing that you could do.

It's good for your health, but it's not an effective weight loss tool over time, and that's amazing. The other thing that I use is the superflex bands, which you'd like to have. This guy, Dave Herman. Do you know Dave Herman?

Sounds familiar, but I don't think we've talked.

He's the band guy. He works with mostly professional golfers and tennis players, but he's a world class trainer. But he has these stretch bands of various sizes that are just really fantastic in terms of building strength and flexibility. I use those as well.

Cool. All right, so those super health seven tiger moves, you talk about them in your book and then you go on and you finish this book with a bang with your seven golden keys to weight optimization. And this is where you kind of throw in the stuff that goes above and beyond and you go into great detail on each of the stuff seven in the book. But can you go kind of give us an overview of each of these seven golden keys to weight optimization?

Sure, sure. Number one is hydration. You know that in your sport, people are drinking other things other than water, and they're drinking tap water, which suppresses thyroid function, and they're really not hydrating properly. They're drinking coffee and soft drinks, and Even sports drinks are not good unless you're actually doing the sport in which they were designed to be used for. So people are getting hidden calories of up to 15% or more of their calories from drinks and they don't even realize it. So the number one thing most people can do to lose weight today is to switch from what they're drinking to beverages, being exclusively spring water and herbal teas. That alone will have most people changing the way they feel and their weight fairly dramatically. So that would be hydration. I go into a lot more detail on hydration in this book, but more so in my previous book, the Super Health Seven Golden Keys.

Gotcha. And we actually didn't mention you do have another book called the. What's it called again?

Super Health 7 Golden Keys to Lifelong Vitality. It has a lot. And these are all well researched and documented and people can read the references and so on.

We're talking about the Super Health Diet. For those of you listening in this other Super Health book that Casey mentioned, I have not personally read now that I've read this diet, his Super Health Diet. It's on my list. I guess from what I understand, the difference between the two books is one is really laser focused on the diet portion. The other is just basic health lifestyle. Right, right.

See that? Super Health 7 Golden Keys to Unlock Lifelong Vitality. The purpose was that is what I learned. Those seven keys are what I learned to take. My wife, who was Miss Florida and Miss Florida USA competed both Miss America and Miss usa. She got first in swimsuit at Miss USA and third runner up. Beautiful. But she came down with panic attacks and clinical depression, suicidal thoughts. And the doctors were trying to screw up with drugs and psychotherapy. And so that's when I decided that this was 15 years ago, that I was going to dive into literature and wasn't coming out without an answer. Maybe it's longer now, 17 years ago that these seven keys in the original book were the seven keys that actually restored my wife's health and restored numerous people since then. And what I've done in this particular book, the Superhealth Diet, is to show how these 7 keys apply to weight optimization.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So you got hydration and what's next?

Well, we already talked about nutrition and we talked about exercise. So those are two, three. So number four is stress. People are under stress. Stress is important. I mean, without stress, you would die because if you didn't have any blood pressure, you wouldn't be around. But there are types of stress. You got Repetitive and competitive stress like you guys are talking about here that you do that actually could extend your life. And then you got repetitive stress, which would be relational stress, financial stress, overwhelmingness, that sort of thing that can shorten your life and actually is a root cause in numerous diseases. So I talk about stress techniques here and how, you know, people that are stressed out have a hard time losing weight, the weight gain is one of the symptoms of stress, and so on. So I go into a lot of details about how to handle that and how to minimize stress in your life. And then I move on to sleep, which would be chapter of Golden Key number five. Sleep deprivation is a wartime torture that's used in every war since the beginning of man. People can keep you from sleeping long enough that by slapping you around and pouring water on your face or putting light in your face, they can actually get you to do or say just about anything they want you to. Because people go insane when they don't have enough sleep. But today we deprive ourselves of sleep on purpose. We stay up late and watch the game. Sometimes we'll stay up late and then we'll get up early in the name of exercise and health. But we've only given ourselves five hours of sleep, and it's just not enough. I mean, people who don't sleep enough, people who sleep less than six hours a night actually have higher weight gain and harder time losing weight. So it's an amazing thing how important sleep is. And so we give plenty of techniques and supplements and so on how improve one's sleep.

Yeah, I love a lot of the tips you've got in that chapter. Okay, so what comes after sleep?

Environmental hazards. People are like endurance athletics. You see people drinking out of these plastic bottles that you can't see through. The bike bottles, for instance, the ones that aren't stainless steel, they're drinking out of plastic that leeches big time. And so there are certain plastics that are better than others for when you're like on a bike. And so the ones that are like colored and you can't see through those are horrendous as far as leaking plastic into the body. And so you're out there in the name of health, and you're literally drinking down plastics and toxins and building up in your system. So there's other ones with the bpa. Some of these bottles have significant hormone disrupting chemicals that, that people are drinking into their body in the name of health. And so we tell you how to minimize that in the book. And then we talk about how perfumes and colognes and those things and how they affect the body and how terrible that actually is. We talk about heavy metals and vaccinations and medical radiation and things along those lines. Problems with the food.

Controversial topics in that chapter.

Controversial. But I have given plenty of clinical research to back it up.

You have, which I. Which I appreciate. And you even go into some very, very cool nutrients that enhance detoxification, which I thought was some fabulous information I hadn't seen before. So that was a cool chapter as well. And then what's the last one?

Last one is meditation and prayer. We know that people that are more peaceful, that have meditation that improves their breathing, extends their lives, prayer and so on, has clinical validation behind it. The Mantra Project at Duke University did a study on prayer. Half the cardiac patients were put on prayer lists worldwide and half of them were not. None of them were told whether or not they've been prayed for. And the ones that were prayed for had 50%, 50% less side effects, which is clinically significant by any measure. So I put in there the clinical validation of meditation and prayer, and people will really enjoy that chapter as well.

And of course, over 150 clinical references after that chapter. At the end of the book and from start to finish, as those of you listening in who have listened to both part one and part two of this interview, from start to finish, this super health diet book really knocks your socks off. I highly, highly recommend it. And as I told you in part one, I don't do that with a lot of books, but I read this book cover to cover and can vouch for what's in it. Now, you learned a lot in part one and part two about many of these concepts. What we didn't get into, aside from some of the even more rich details behind those concepts, is the actual eating pattern itself. I don't necessarily want Casey to give away the farm on this one and take us through the recipes and the eating habits and the meals and everything else that's in there. But I want to ensure the listener and, Casey, you could probably agree with me on this. Since you wrote the book, the entire thing is doable. You talked last week about one characteristic of a fad diet, being that it has you eating just one thing, like a grapefruit. Your meal plan is very dynamic. Do you eat this way?

I do eat this way. And in fact, the important thing people need to realize is if you can start designing your meal around what your protein source is going to be, it really is a different way to look at nutrition.

Yeah, yeah, it's a very practical tip which the book is full of. So folks, it's the Super Health Diet. There will be a link to it in the show notes to this episode, part two of this interview series with KC Kreischy. And there will also be an interview or a link to the book in part one. So pick it up. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that I would love it if every person that listens to this podcast, whether one time or on a weekly basis, does me a big favor, picks up this book and reads it. Because it's chock full of the information that you need for health success and weight loss success going down the road for the rest of your life. And I guarantee it's going to be one of the dog eared copies on my bookshelf. So kc, thanks for being so generous with your time for both these interviews.

Ben, that was wonderful. I really enjoyed it. Keep doing the great work you do out there brother.

Alright folks, until next time, this is Ben Greenfield and KC Kreischy signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Alright folks, so remember, if you want to submit a video to get a free autographed copy of that book, you can just upload the video to facebook.com bgfitness just tell me why you think Casey's book would help you. And you can also get the book right now by going to the show notes BenGreenfieldFitness.com show notes for this episode, episode number 140. And you can get your hands on that book right away. I highly recommend it. Of course. Now remember when you're over there@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I really need your help to keep this podcast going. So right there on the right side of the page, you can Click to donate $1 to keep this podcast going. And again, if everybody listens in, donates that $1 and it'll be like a $1 a month type of donation. It will help to support the podcast tremendously. Now remember some of our special events coming up. The April 12th shocking truth about Vitamin D and Fish Oil as well as the upcoming May Ironman Coeur d' Alene Triathlon Camp. All that and more over at the Show Notes for this episode at bengreenfieldfitness.

Com.

Have a great week and until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out.