Episode #157: The Death of Gatorade – Should You Stop Using Electrolytes During Exercise?

In this podcast, should you stop using electrolytes during exercise? Do oats have gluten? Gluten free cereal? How hot should you get coconut oil? Mysterious leg cramps? Is 2% or 1% milk better training with osteitis pubis? When should you use glucosamine chondroitin? And is pulsed electromagnetic field therapy effective?

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, 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 folks, it's Ben Greenfield here, hydrating with my cup of black coffee on a beautiful morning. Today we are going to be talking about hydration and electrolytes and you're going to get some groundbreaking news about electrolytes, about hydration, and about companies like Gatorade. So whether you're out exercising or you're just sitting back and listening in, be ready for some brand new information that you probably haven't heard before. In addition, we've got a great Q and A and a few special announcements. So let's go ahead and jump right into this Week's content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Special announcements.

All right, folks, so it has been a busy past couple of weeks with me being in the hospital two weeks ago from a strange infection that spread out in my arm to traveling all last week, and I finally feel like I'm back here, home base with you, podcasting and bringing you the information that I love to bring you. So really there's not too much in terms of special announcements. I just wanted to tell you about a few things. First of all, I did release my brand new Rev Diet and that's available over@revdiet.com what that diet is is it's designed to clean out your system, initiate fat loss, kind of reinvent your eating, and then gradually bring you through a series of meal planning phases where you end up being able to progress the diet to the point where you could go out and do higher levels of activity like a marathon or an Ironman triathlon or something of that nature. So in addition to that, I will be shooting all the photos at the end of this month for my new 400 plus page manual on strength training for triathlon. Really, it's going to reinvent the way that you approach your strength training and your weight training, if you're involved in endurance sports. The next thing is that I am also working on another book that will be done on September 20th that's going to be put out by Macmillan Publishing. The title of that book is under wraps for now, but I can tell you right now that it is a huge project. The biggest book I've ever done in terms of publicity. So that should be interesting. We wait for that to come out. And then finally, for those of you who are part of my video VIP Text club, I'm involved in a little side project that I'm going to let you guys know about next weekend. So if you're not part of the VIP text club yet, you want to make sure that you join that for free. All right, we are going to jump right into this week's content after a quick special announcement that tells you about that VIP text club.

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Listener Q and A.

Hi, Ben, my name is Dushon and I was calling about oats and gluten and whether or not. My question is whether or not oats have gluten. And I've heard it's only from contamination at the mill or something like that that oats don't really have gluten, but they get them from mills that processed wheat. And if so, then does that amount of gluten matter, you know, for like, inflammation and stuff like that.

And okay, it's a great question. I'm actually going to cut DeShawn off right there because he proceeds to give me his phone number and email address and personal contact information. Remember, folks, when you leave a question for the podcast, you don't have to leave that stuff because all I have to do is cut it out. So, DeShawn, answer your question. You are correct. Oats do not have gluten in them, but they might have gluten on them. And what you mentioned about the milling is correct. A lot of people have thought that oats have gluten. There was one time where I think I even mentioned on this podcast that oats had trace amounts of gluten. And really, it's not that the gluten is in the oats. It's that the gluten is on the oats. They're a major agricultural product. They're handled by the same mills and the same processing plants and the same grain elevators that handle things like wheat and barley and rye, which does have gluten. And if you have celia disease, there's enough gluten contamination of the oats that that could cause an allergic reaction or an inflammatory reaction. That's if you have celiac disease. In addition to the milling and the processing, there is a possibility that if oats are grown in a field that previously had other gluten containing grains growing in it, some of the other gluten containing grains would naturally grow in the oat field the next year. And so that could cause the oats that are harvested from that field to be contaminated. So that could be an issue, as well as the possibility of the actual harvesting equipment used to process the grains having gluten and generating inflammation. But ultimately, folks, we're talking about trace amounts that are really only an issue if you have celiac disease. You know, it's the same reason that celiacs have to be careful with things like corn containing products like corn chips or corn tortillas, because those are also processed around gluten containing grains and around products that have a lot of gluten cross contaminants. So if you're trying to go 100% gluten free because you're convinced that something like the paleo diet is the way to go, oats aren't that big of a deal. If you are doing this because of gluten, if you're trying to go gluten free because you have celiac disease, that would be something to avoid. So great question. And we have another kind of gluten related question that came in from Craig who says, I'm looking for a gluten free cereal that I can just dump in my cereal bowl in the morning. I am adding blueberries and almond to my cereal now. Well, there are certainly gluten free cereals out there and some of them might surprise you. Like General Mills. If you get any of General Mills Rice Chex cereals, those are gluten free. You can get it in chocolate or cinnamon or honey nut or regular flavor or anything you'd like. Another cold one. Cold cereal that you'd pour milk over would be like a nature's path. Nature's path does a lot of kind of quote unquote health products and they do make a gluten free cereal. It's sweetened with fruit juice. You can get like Maple Sunrise or Vanilla Sunrise or Honey Corn Flake or any of those other sunny, healthy sounding flavors. And they also have a line of organic gluten free kids cereals like Frosted Flakes and stuff like that. Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles, those are also gluten free. Eat your heart out. And there's also a manufacturer called Glutino that makes gluten free cereals. Now in addition to that, you can get gluten free granola place like Trader Joe's and many of these health food stores, they make gluten free granola. But folks, I am not pretending that any of this stuff is healthy. It is loaded with sugar and still has in many cases a high amount of preservatives in it and other things that are simply going to put your blood sugar through the roof. Just because it's gluten free does not mean that they don't use processed free radical laden vegetable oils in it. So you need to be careful. If you look at the Trader Joe's granola has got corn flour, evaporated cane juice, which is sugar, rice flour, rice bran, raisin juice, canola oil, a bunch of seeds and nuts that I can't guarantee haven't been roasted and heated and processed thus producing a lot of these rancid free radical type of products. And it's made on equipment that also processes things like milk and eggs and peanuts and tree nuts and soy and I am not a food nazi. Okay, I'm really not a food nazi. I record my daily diet for all my clients and all the people in the Ben Greenfield fitness inner circle. I take a photograph of everything I eat and people will tell you, you know, there's lasagna and beer and wine and pizza and all sorts of things like that that show up on my diet. Completely not a food nazi, but it is a pet peeve of mine. If you're trying to eat healthy, if you're choosing products that are simply quote unquote, you know, gluten free or healthy or fat free, but then you turn around and they're loaded with sugar and loaded with vegetable oils. So if you're trying to go for a gluten free cereal, I mean, we just got done talking about oats. Go find a gluten free oat product and youi mean you can buy gluten free oats off Amazon and heat that up and you know, that's what I do almost every morning I have oats. I include some protein powder that I actually stir in. I put a little bit of almond butter in there, I put a little bit of coconut milk in there, throw a handful of fruit in there, and that's about it. Maybe a little bit of cinnamon. And that's my breakfast almost every morning. And that would technically be gluten free. Granted, it's a hot cereal, but that's a lot better way to go than buying a lot of these sugar laden, processed, gluten free cereals that really aren't all that healthy. So I'll get off my soapbox now and move on to a question from Ben.

Hi, Ben, this is Ben calling from Boise. I just had a question for you regarding supplementation with glucosamine or specifically the Caproflex product, and what kind of protocols you would recommend as far as recovery from an injury, say a cartilage tear, the knee, versus a more chronic condition such as osteoarthritis of the knee. And how would you recommend taking that product short term versus long term use? And if you've had the injury in the past, is that a product that should be kind of on the take forever list? And if so, is it safe to do so? Thank you very much. Appreciate all the information you put out there. It's great stuff and I look to forward, forward to your answer. Thank you. Bye Bye.

So we've talked a little bit about glucosamine chondroitin on the show before and it's traditionally used in the treatment of osteoarthritis in some cases, and made up of two primary ingredients. You've got your glucosamine, which is extracted from shellfish, and then you have your chondroitin, which is extracted typically from some type of cartilage product like, say, like a chicken cartilage. So the way that these two compounds act together is technically to help rebuild cartilage and decrease some of the inflammation that occurs within the joint. The question is whether or not they actually work and whether you'd use them long term if they actually did. Studies go back and forth on glucosamine chondroitin. There was a big review back in 2007 about glucosamine and chondroitin for the treatment of knee osteoarthritis and hip osteoarthritis, and that concluded that both of these can act as valuable therapies for osteoarthritis disease and may actually help to modify some of the structure of the cartilage to reduce some of the pain associated with osteoarthritis. Now remember, osteoarthritis is a lot different than you simply going for a run and coming back and being stiff and sore. That's not necessarily the reason that you take something like glucosamine chondroitin. There was another study done in 2009. This was also a review that showed that based off of all the studies to date, that glucosamine and chondroitin have shown inconsistent efficacy when they're individualized or when they're taken in their individual forms. But you can get pain relief when you combine them. So ultimately it kind of depends whether or not it works for you. I've had a lot of clients try it and say it didn't work for them. And. And it's one of those things where you may want to try it. In terms of risks, Obviously, if you have a shellfish allergy, the glucosamine is going to be an issue. In some cases, you can get a little bit of stomach upset or diarrhea. When you take heavy amounts of glucosamine chondroitin, there is a possibility that it could increase blood pressure. So if you have hypertension, that'd be something to think about before you take something like this. You asked about Capreflex, which is actually what I take when I'm injured, and I do not take that year round, but I do take Capreflex when I'm injured. Now, Capreflex is a compound and you can find it over@pacificfit.net, i'll put a link to it in the show. Notes. Capreflex is a compound that contains glucosamine and chondroitin. However, the reason that I think it works so well is because it doesn't just contain those compounds. It's got alfalfa juice, cherry juice, ginger, turmeric, white willow bark, feverfew, valerian, lemon powder, all of what are called the proteolytic enzymes like bromelain and papain. And it's also got enzymes in it like protease and cellulase and peptidase, that help you to absorb and digest these components a lot more completely. And what I find is that when you mix all these whole foods and herbs and enzymes with glucosamine chondroitin, it tends to be very effective at pain management or at managing inflammation associated with, like, you know, say, like a chronic repetitive motion injury. So I probably use something like Caproflex. I keep a big bottle in my fridge. I probably use it about seven weeks out of the year when I happen to be really beat up or injured. You know, I got hit on my bike a couple of months ago and I was using it then. So it's not something that I use year round, but I do take about nine capsules of that a day when I'm injured. And I personally find that it helps. But I have talked to a lot of people who don't find that glucosamine chondroitin does anything for them. Usually in most cases, those people haven't actually tried glucosamine chondroitin mixed with kind of this cocktail of other ingredients. So that is my answer to that question. And I will put a link to the cap reflex stuff in the show notes. We're going to move on to a question from Christy, who says, I just listened to episode number 127 where you interviewed Udo Erasmus. What is the temperature where you start to damage saturated fats? Udo mentioned not heating fats to frying temperatures, but I'm not sure what that means. Is the temperature of boiling water too high or steam? I think deep fat fryers work at about 350 degrees, which is baking temperature as well. So is baking as bad as frying? And these are all great questions when it comes to fat. And if we step back and look at the big picture when we're talking about fat, Christy, there are certain oils that are not all that great. When you heat them, they become damaged, they become oxidized, they transform into free radicals. Those can harm our cells and our cell membranes. And Udo Erasmus and I talk about that quite a bit in that episode, episode number 127. And so what you're looking at is every oil that's out there has what's called a smoke point. And when you get up to that smoke point, the oil begins to deteriorate from a chemical standpoint. So as an oil decomposes, based on that oil's individual type and temperature, it's going to create a lot of what are called hydroperoxides, and that can result in increasing levels of what are called aldehydes. And what can happen with these aldehydes is they're basically toxic compounds in their body. They suck in a bunch of free radicals and you begin to create that cellular damage. Now, the best thing that you can do to make sure that this doesn't happen is to find a smoke point chart, and you can find a smoke point chart for oils all over the place on the Internet. There are many that are out there. But essentially, once you get a list of oil Smoke points, you'll know how hot you can actually get oil before it begins to decompose. Now, Udo Erasmus, the guy that we were talking about earlier, he's much, much stricter on this. He doesn't believe that that should be heated at all. I disagree with that. I think that fats are essential for cooking, and many of them can enhance both the flavor and the quality of food when heated. Big picture is you look at saturated fats like a palm oil, and those are really ideal for cooking at higher temperatures. Unsaturated fats, like an olive oil, those actually don't do too bad in like, medium to high heat, but you'll lose a lot of the flavor of the olive oil. And then if you look at like a low heat oil, like an oil that's derived from a nut, usually you're just going to want to use those in like salads and cold dishes. So if you look at the smoke points of oils, like, one of the highest is avocado oil, which has a smoke point of 520 degrees Fahrenheit. I personally don't cook a lot with oil, avocado oil, but that's one example of an oil that's actually fairly stable at high temperatures. This will surprise some people, but an olive oil, like an extra virgin olive oil, actually has a slightly higher smoke point up around 400 degrees than coconut oil, which has a smoke point of 350 degrees. So the difference is that coconut oil retains its flavor a little bit better at that higher smoke temperature, whereas olive oil does not. So once you get your hands on, like a smoke point chart, then you'll know what you can approximately heat these oils up to. I'm not saying that every oil on a smoke point chart is all that great, but the smoke point is the place to start. If you're using a refined oil that's already been exposed to high amounts of processing, like a canola oil, you can guarantee that that oil has already been exposed to high amounts of pressure and temperature in the extraction process. And so it already has a lot of free radicals in it. So that's why we'd avoid something like a canola oil. Not because we've necessarily heated it in our kitchen, but it's been heated before it even got there. And then remember that when you're heating an oil, if you end up reheating it the second time around, its smoke point is going to be lower. So just bear that in mind. You know, if you're using a microwave or a frying pan to reheat food that's already been heated. The smoke point is going to be lower on that, so hopefully that helps you out a little bit. Get your hands on a smoke point chart and you know what I will do for you? I'll put a link to a good smoke point chart in the show notes to this episode, episode number 157 over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I'll put a link right underneath your question in the Q and A section. Christy okay, next Jen says, I have a question about nighttime leg cramps. For the past few weeks I've been wakened several times at night with extremely painful spasms in my calves, shins and feet. They subside when I get up and stretch, but are a serious disturbance to my sleep and leave me achy and tired in the morning. I am a fit 38 year old former marathoner. I'm a daily commuter cyclist. I work out at a gym three to five days a week at a fairly high intensity, do two to three yoga classes a week. My hydration and potassium intake are good. I have in the last six months switched to a diet lower in carbohydrate and have dropped about 10 pounds in that time. It makes me wonder if it could be a particular nutritional deficiency that could be causing these cramps. Well, you know, whenever I get a question like this about some mysterious issue that somebody's having, I always want to be sure to let you know I'm not a doctor. This is not considered medical advice. And the reason that I especially want to tell you that in my response to this question is there are many metabolic problems and medical issues that can cause nighttime leg cramps. Everything from diabetes to kidney failure to hypothyroidism. So my very first piece of advice for you, if you haven't recently gone in and gotten a physical and done some blood work up, go check in on what's going on with like your thyroid, your blood sugar levels, levels of enzymes, basically everything that you would want to do for a complete health checkup. That being said, the only thing that kind of leaps out at me here is that you did switch to a low carbohydrate diet. And if you were eating lots of grains, grains are really high in magnesium, like barley and buckwheat and oat bran and rice and wheat flour. All of these have really decent levels of magnesium in them. And we had somebody on the podcast, Dr. Carolyn Dean, who talked about magnesium and she did talk about leg cramps and how deficiency in magnesium tends to be a Common cause of nighttime leg cramps. And that's basically because what happens is the way that your body moves, the way that it causes your bones to actually move through space, is it contracts the muscles that join the bones together. So what that requires in order for that to happen is that these. These contractile proteins inside the muscles called actin and myosin, these fibers, they slide towards each other and away from one another, and that causes the contraction and the relaxation of the muscle. So when those proteins, when the actin and myosin become locked into one another, that's basically what a cramp is. And so what happens is the enzyme that's required to unhinge the actin from the myosin that depends on a steady supply of magnesium in order for it to function effectively. And magnesium plays an important role in the body. I mean, it plays a role in the function of over 300 enzymes. So it's no surprise that it is required to make sure that a cramp does not occur. So if you're magnesium deficient, you know, you're sweating all day. High levels of activity, which are going to deplete magnesium a little bit. Low levels of carbohydrate intake, which, again, sources of magnesium include things like grains and even fruit. It's possible that you're magnesium deficient. What would you do if you were. You could grab something like a natural, calm magnesium, you know, take 250, 500 milligrams, basically as much as you want to take until you get loose stool. You could also try, like, a topical magnesium. You can get, like, a topical magnesium. It's not an oil, but it feels like an oil. You can rub that into your legs, like 10, 15 sprays on each leg before you go to bed. Rub that in, see if that helps. That's what I would do if I were you. I'm not saying that this isn't some type of medical issue, but I would certainly kind of experiment with magnesium before you turn to a bunch of other stuff, if that's something that you're wanting to just try out. I mean, you'd see results almost right away if you did that. So that's what I would recommend. As far as sources for magnesium, I'll put a couple links for you in the show notes. Okay, next question is from Kamal, who says, I just wanted to know which milk is better for us, 2% or 1%? This is a really interesting question. Let's kind of leave aside the issues of where you're getting your milk, the hormones in the milk or antibiotics or things of that nature and just talk about what would be better, the higher fat like a 1% or a whole milk or lower fat like a 2% or a skim milk. So the fact is that even a non fat milk can support muscle recovery following exercise, which is kind of the main reason you'd want to take milk. It's got lots of this insulin like growth factor in it, it's got proteins in it, it's got sugars in is nice for a muscle recovery beverage. Back in 2009 in the International Sports Nutrition Journal, there was a study called Cereal and Nonfat Milk support muscle recovery following Exercise. I know I've vilified cereal a little bit in this podcast, but really, I mean, if you're going to have high amounts of sugar mixed with some protein after a workout is really the time to do it. So this study showed that there was a favorable response to even something like a fat free milk when it came to muscle recovery. However, there was another study that was done back in 2008 and this study was in the Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise Journal. And this actually also looked at the ability of muscle to enhance recovery. But it specifically followed uptake of amino acids, specifically phenylalanine and threonine uptake, which are very representative of your total ability to synthesize and repair muscle fibers. And what this found was that compared to a fat free milk, a whole milk has much, much better capability to improve muscle protein synthesis. So the reason for that is probably simply that when you look at the anabolic or the muscle growth properties of whole milk, they're simply preserved by keeping whole milk whole. So when you take all the fat out of a milk, it's kind of similar to taking the yolk out of an egg. You can lose a lot of the, the basic effectiveness of the food. Anytime that you isolate and remove components from a food, a lot of times you're not going to see that it works quite as well, especially when it comes to something like recovery. So, you know, in my opinion, more often than not, when you take fat out of a food, it becomes slightly less valuable, especially when we consider that the only reason to do so would be if you are concerned about fat making you fat or fat giving you heart disease, which actually has been proven not to be really all that much of a concern. So ultimately, if it was up to me, and I was choosing between 1% and 2% milk, I would go with the 1%. All right. Jeff says I'm an age grouper. Triathlete, I've recently been diagnosed with osteitis pubis. Initial scans detected a small inguinal hernia, but further investigation revealed osteitis pubis, which is causing me grief in my groin. I've been advised to lay off running for two months, but I can swim in bike. Do you have any advice to aid my recovery? Well, I want to respond to this question because I had the same issue my junior year of college. I was playing volleyball, I was doing a lot of water polo, I was teaching spin classes, I was bodybuilding, I was incredibly active and I got this osteitis pubis, which is basically just an inflammation of your pubic bone of the kind of the small bone that comes across your pubic bone. A lot of times it is misdiagnosed as a hernia and really all it is is just kind of a bony issue that if you rest, similar to a stress fracture, kind of works itself out. Now, I personally didn't run for six months. That was how long it took me. But yeah, I did a ton of swimming, cycling. I found that a recumbent bicycle, because I was not seated directly on the pubic bone, caused me to be able to kind of bicycle a lot better than sitting on an upright bicycle. Upper body weightlifting and especially using like an upper body weight training circuit where you're moving from exercise to exercise with minimal rest can really help to maintain your cardiovascular status. You can certainly do exercises in the weight room for the lower body that do not aggravate the pelvic bone. So we're talking about like calf raises, leg extensions, leg curls, things of that nature. Ultimately, this type of injury responds really well to some R and R combined with non impact exercise or exercise exercise for musculoskeletal components of your body that aren't related to the injury itself, like upper body work, but you know, it does take rest. Ultimately I responded this question to encourage you because I mean, the next year I was getting into triathlons. So once it goes away, it's not something I've ever had to deal with again. But ultimately high, high levels of activity can definitely cause this. If you are listening in and you have a bunch of kind of like groin pain that you think might be a hernia. I definitely rule out osteitis pubis because you don't want to go in for a hernia operation and find out you just had a little bit of inflammation in your pubic bone and needed to lay off for a little while. So good question. And then we have one more question before we go into our interview with Dr. Noakes today, and that question is from Paul, who says, what are your thoughts on pemf? Now, for those of you who don't know what PEMF stands for, it's pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. And what that is is it is a type of therapy that uses an electrical current to direct these magnetic pulses through injured tissue. So that's supposed to stimulate cellular repair, improve blood flow, suppress some of the inflammation, improve the heat in the area so you improve a little bit of range of motion. And this is not one of those quack devices that is sold on the Internet for thousands of dollars but has no research behind it. This has been used by Olympic athletes for a long time. It is approved by the FDA and widely available in many medical facilities for patients to use in rehab. There are many, many studies that kind of go beyond its ability to enhance musculoskeletal repair and indicate that it could be useful for everything from assisting with cognitive rehabilitation in people with Alzheimer's to helping to break up some tumor issues with some specific types of cancers assisting with erectile dysfunction, fibromyalgia, migraines, and headaches. I mean, there's a whole list. I mean, there's a huge amount of research on PubMed that suggests that this pulsed electromagnetic field therapy may actually be something quite effective for a wide variety conditions. Now, although I would recommend that if you're going to do something like this, you actually go to a physical therapy institute or a medical establishment that actually has experience with pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. You can buy actual pulsed electromagnetic field therapy units online. They're usually going to be anywhere in the range of like 2000 to $4000. And of course, before you spend that type of money on something like this, really know what you're getting into. Research the unit that you're getting. And ultimately, it's very, very interesting. You know, I did some research on it before I responded to this question on the podcast, because I didn't know that much about pulsed electromagnetic field therapy. But I was actually very, very surprised at the number of studies that suggest its effectiveness or even prove its effectiveness in some cases, the length of time it's been used for, the fact that it's been used by professional athletes for therapy. And I think that it's certainly something to look into if you have chronic pain or if you have some of these other conditions that pulsed electromagnetic field therapy may be indicated for. So there you go. Great question. I'm glad you brought it up. Occasionally I get a question where I don't know about something, but I got to go research it and I was pleasantly surprised with what I found out about pemface. So, that being said, let's go ahead and move in to this week's interview with Dr. Tim Noakes after one quick special message.

Did you know you can get personalized nutrition and fitness consulting from Ben Greenfield no matter who you are, if you want to run a triathlon, lose a few pounds, reinvent your diet, or have Ben create a training program or nutrition plan that's customized to you, here's what you need to do. Visit tinyurl.com helpfromben that's tinyurl.com helpfromben Ben will personally contact you within 48 hours. What are you waiting for? Visit tinyurl.com helpfromBen today and get the body and results you've always wanted. Featured Topic.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And for those of you who have listened to the podcast for a little while, you may remember back to podcast episode number 138, in which you learned a ton of valuable information about how to really tap into your body's muscle potential while training and while racing by using the concept of something called the central governor. And the individual who we interviewed in that post was Dr. Tim Noakes, who is a South African professor of exercise and sports science over at University of Cape Town. He himself has done a ton of marathons and ultramarathons. He wrote one of the best books out there on running called the Lore of Running, which if this type of stuff interests you, you really should check out. And he's really considered one of the the top sports science researchers on the face of the planet. So we're very privileged to have him here with us today. And today we are going to be discussing electrolytes and hydration and how what you think you know right now about electrolytes and hydration may actually be wrong. So, Dr. Noakes, thank you for coming on the call today.

Thanks, Ben. Great to be with you again.

So there is a lot of information floating around out there about how much you should drink during exercise and how many salts or electrolytes you should consume during exercise. And you, being kind of at the forefront of exercise physiology research, have formed some definite opinions on the way that people should be using water and electrolytes during exercise. So can you kind of go into what type of research and studies you've seen on this and where you stand right now?

Sure, Ben. I started running in 1969 and we were told at that time that it was very dangerous to drink during exercise. And we were further taught that only weak people drank. So if you saw someone drinking during a marathon, it was because he was weakening. And the idea was that that was when you should attack and you should run away from the athlete who was drinking because they were in distress. So that was the idea. Then in 1969, two South Africans came out with a publication which suggested that if you didn't drink enough, your body temperature would be elevated. And they published a paper in the South African Medical Journal saying that there were the dangers of an inadequate water intake during marathon running. And I started my medical career in 1969, and I happened across this article in 1970, and gee, this completely convinced me that you needed to drink a lot more. They said you should be drinking about a liter of fluid every hour that you run. And then I ran my first marathon in 1972, and again, we were restricted in how much water you could take in. There was usually one seconding station during the race. It was usually at about 20 miles. And then if you wanted more than that, you had to provide it by people would have to help you provide it. And the next year I ran the Comrades Marathon, which was a 90 kilometer race in South Africa. And to run that race, there was no fluid available. You had to provide all your own fluids. So for 90km you somehow had to find fluids. And we used to have what were called seconds, and the seconds would drive in a car. But because there were a couple of thousand people running in the race and it stretched over 90 km, you were very lucky if you got a drink every 10 or 15 kilometers. So that was the drinking plan. And it struck me that this was wrong. And so I started promoting the idea that you needed to drink much more. And I made presentations, in fact, wrote articles and wrote two chapters in books which were published by Runner's world in the 1970s. And I can recall in 1981 writing a column saying that the most important component of your performance was what you drank during the race and you could never drink enough, etc. Etc. Etc. So that was the last time I ever said that was in May 1981. And then in June 1981, I received a letter from a lady who described how she collapsed during the 90 kilometer Comrades Marathon. Now, 1981 was the first year where they had drinking stations every mile in the race. So they had 56 drinking stations in a 56 mile race. And she told me that at 40 miles, her husband, she did not recognize her husband he was watching on the side of the road, and he decided she wasn't in good shape. So he took her off the course, he put her in the car and drove her to the finish. And there she arrived at the finish, and the doctors examined her, and they said, well, of course she's dehydrated. So they gave her two liters of intravenous fluids. And she said, well, it didn't actually make me feel better. It made me feel worse. And she got back in the car and her husband said, well, maybe I should take you to hospital. So he drove her back down the course towards the start, which was in Durban, 56 miles away. And halfway there, she had an epileptic seizure and went unconscious. And she was unconscious for four days. And when she was examined in hospital, they found that her blood sodium concentration was very low. So they diagnosed hyponatremia and they treated her as best they could at the time. And fortunately, they didn't make any major errors and she survived. She then wrote to me and she said, what happened? I said, I have no idea because it's never happened, it's never been reported. And as a consequence, I decided, well, I better look into this, because it's clearly something that's not ever been described before. It's my responsibility to find out. And I was able over the next three years to find another three cases like that. And we described them and published them in the American Journal of Medicine and Science and Sports and Exercise. And we called the condition water intoxication, because we'd worked out by then that you couldn't lose enough sodium to develop the problem. It had to be water intoxication. And in fact, one of the keys was one of the ladies who developed the condition. I knew very well, and she had anorexia, and she would measure herself all the time. And she told me that she put on four kilograms during this particular race in which she developed hyponatremia. And I knew that she was a good witness. And if she said she put on four kilograms, she put on four kilograms. And of course, at the time people would say, but it's impossible to put on weight during a marathon or ultramarathon. You have to lose weight and become dehydrated. We wrote it up and described it, and that was the first case. And then I began to say, hold on, maybe it's possible to drink too much.

Interesting. Interesting. Isn't there still a huge risk of dehydration, though? What do you see when you're looking at studies? Because I know, they've done hydration studies on people running marathons or doing Ironman triathlon. What do you see in terms of, you know, what the fast people are doing, what the people who end up in the medical tent are doing? I mean, is there some type of happy medium?

Well, I'm glad you asked that question because I think we have to continue the story a little bit further and then you'll see what happens. So what happened in 1985 was that Quaker Oats bought the product Gatorade. And at that time, it was a very small product selling, I think about $100 million a year. And it was clear to me that someone at the industry decided that they needed to make this product get big. And over the next. Up till now, 2004, the product rose from selling $100 million a year of sales to over $4 billion a year. Now, when you think that Gatorade contains sugar or sugar or some constituent salt and water for that product to sell 4 billion a year, dollars a year, it's quite an achievement for a product that contains stuff that you'd find in the kitchen and you could make up yourself for it to become such an iconic product. Something happened. I don't want to make too many contentious statements and go to jail, but. But in my view, what happened was that they developed a thing called the science of hydration. The industry developed the science of hydration. And one of the components of the science of hydration is that there's this medical disease called dehydration. And that if you don't drink enough during exercise, you'll develop dehydration. Now, as a biologist, dehydration means to me that there's less water in the body than the body needs at its homeostatically regulated point. And what happens as you become dehydrated? Your blood sodium concentration rises, that stimulates your brain and it tells you, go and drink. And that is the only single symptom of dehydration. It's thirst. So if I go out and drink and I reverse my thirst, I am not by definition dehydrated. The only people who can ever be dehydrated are those who have incredible thirst. And if you've ever become thirsty, then you'll know what thirst really is. Go and get lost in the desert for two days and then you'll understand what thirst is. It is an all encompassing symptom that drives you to find water and will actually stop you exercising. That's what dehydration is in real terms. Now, what the industry had to do was convince people running a marathon where there is more fluid available than in any other place in the entire planet, more free fluid available. They had to convince people that athletes were finishing races dehydrated. In other words, they were not drinking enough, despite the fact that there were tens of thousands of gallons of fluid available. And that's what they managed to convince the United States population, athletic population. It was a major achievement. So then they said that whenever you collapse, you dehydrate. I mean, that is nonsense. We've shown for a long time that people who collapse at the end of races are no more dehydrated than the race winner. And in fact, they're usually a lot less dehydrated. Dehydration has got absolutely no part to play in causing people to collapse at the finish of races. And we know that because 85% of people who collapse in marathons collapse after they finish. And therefore it can't be dehydration because if they were dehydrated and their heart was strained, they would collapse before they finish. When their heart is working hard, they don't. They collapse afterwards. And that's because they stop. And it's the stopping that is the cause of the collapse, nothing else. And we showed years ago that if you lift the guy's legs and their pelvis above the level of their heart, within 30 seconds, they are completely normal and fully recovered. However, they still can't stand up because as soon as they stand, they get the same problem. And that is called exercise induced postural hypotension. And that is what is supposedly called dehydration. So carry on. And then the next point is, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that drinking during exercise influences your risk of developing heat stroke or so called heat illness. None whatsoever. So anyone who tells you you want us to avoid heat stroke by drinking fluids, there's utterly no evidence for that. And the other point I would make is that heat illness is a broad term which is largely wrong, because most of it is this exercise induced postural hypertension, which isn't due to dehydration. So when heat stroke occurs, it has absolutely nothing to do with fluid balance. And we know that because most cases of heat stroke occur within one hour, the first hour of exercise, and you can't be dehydrated under those conditions.

So what are you saying? That people should not be drinking during exercise? Or are you saying that the current recommendations are too high? Or what exactly are you getting at when it comes to hydration?

Okay, so if we move forward then from, remember I said that was 1985, when we showed that some people can over drink. 1987, the American College of Sports Medicine came up with the new drinking guidelines, which for the first time gave actual volumes that you should drink. They said you needed to drink between, I think, 100 and 300 milliliters every 10 or 15 minutes, or every three kilometers, I think it was. And it worked out that, that they meant, therefore you should drink between 601.8 liters per hour. So this is the first time that there was a number put to it. Then what happened was that in 1996, the American College of Sports Medicine revised that guidelines and said, you must drink as much as tolerable, and that should be up to 1.2 liters per hour. So then this value of 1.2 liters per hour came along, and that was a real problem because that is way in excess of what most people can safely drink. And thereafter, this condition of hyponatremia became epidemic throughout the North America and, and Europe. And the only countries where it didn't happen was in South Africa and New Zealand, where we had a difference.

For those of you American listeners, by the way, who are listening in, that's like right around 40 ounces, correct?

Absolutely correct. And so that guideline then caused major problems because then the incidence of this hyponatremia due to water intoxication increased dramatically. And I've traced 1,700 cases in the medical literature. Now that's the number of cases reported in the medical literature. Can you imagine how many cases occurred outside of the medical literature? And people said, there's not an epidemic of this condition. There absolutely was. And there have been 12 deaths from over drinking. Now again, of course, all avoidable. Now what happened in 2007? The American college, sorry, what happened in 2003 was that a medical organization, a marathon medical organization, came to me and said, we're not happy with the guidelines, please would you draw up your guidelines? And I gave much of the story that I'm telling you now, and I said, people should drink to thirst. That's all you have to know. Just drink to thirst. And if you lose a lot of weight, but you're drinking to thirst, it's completely safe. Those guidelines that were then accepted by the United States, track and field for all races, held by them, and to a limited extent by some marathons in North America. And then finally, in 2007, the American College of Sports Medicine revised their guidelines and said, you should drink to thirst. But you shouldn't lose more than 2% of your body weight. Now, that's a confusing message because it still suggests you must go and weigh yourself and work out how much you should drink. But the reality is that humans evolved in a very hot environment, a hot, arid environment, and we have all the evolutionary controls developed through our over the last 3 million years to make sure we drink when we need to drink, and we always drink exactly the amount we need to. And what the sports drink industry did very effectively was to say, you can't believe your subconscious controls. You have to do it consciously. And that is absolute nonsense. If that was true, no mammal would be surviving. There would be no living animals because they would all have done dead because they don't have a conscious brain to tell them when to drink. Our thirst is all you need to know is drink to thirst.

Now, to answer, you hear a lot of the time, and I've read this in multiple books and I believe even in some sports nutrition manuals that if you wait until you're thirsty to drink, that you're probably already risking dehydration.

That was developed by the sports drink industry as a selling product, as a selling option for their product. It was the driver for their product. It's got no biological basis whatsoever. If you ask any thirst expert, any person who studied thirst, they will tell you that is nonsense. Provided you drink to thirst, you're fine. Because that's how we're designed. We don't have to think about drinking. If your mind tells you to drink, just go and drink. And if it doesn't, don't drink. That's how we design. I mean, being facetious, do you go and tell your dog when to drink or your cat when to drink? No. So how do they survive? Because they've got exactly the same controls that we have, and that's all you need.

Do you find that from a practical perspective, like say during an Ironman triathlon, that simply following thirst is something that puts an athlete at risk of dehydration because they're so focused on other aspects of the race versus like drinking based on a timer or something of that nature?

Okay, well, firstly, there's a report now in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in which they analyze all the studies that have currently been done. In the laboratory trial, they showed that if you drink either ahead of thirst or below thirst, you perform suboptimally. So if you're drinking ahead of thirst, you're impairing your performance. And I've just reviewed another paper from a group in Switzerland showing that if you drink ahead of thirst, you develop edema of your legs. Now, anyone who's running, doing an ironman and who wants to have edema of their legs to carry extra weight that they don't need at the end of that ironman should realize that's exactly what they're doing if they're drinking ahead of thirst. So the people who are telling us to drink ahead of thirst, unfortunately, I've got a lot to answer for because it's completely unnecessary. Now, we have also looked at ironman finishes and it's always been shown that there's an inverse relationship between how much weight you lose and how fast you finish. Those who lose the most weight are usually the winners or run the fastest and which is the opposite of those who claim that you've got to drink a lot to win the race. The reality is the very best athletes in an Ironman lose between 6 and 12% of their body weight at the finish. Now, in the past, you'd say, well, you're going to die if you lose that. Well, they don't. They happen to win the race. And, and again, the argument is that is what humans evolved to do. We evolved to hunt in the heat, drinking very little. And the best ironman triathletes, the best marathon runners, are those who contain those genes which force them or encourage them not to drink very much when they're running. And as a consequence, they have a biological advantage because they're not carrying as much weight. So that's what people have to get into their head, that if you drink to thirst, you optimize your performance. If you drink ahead of thirst, you're just retaining water, which you don't need. If you drink less than thirst, your performance will be impaired. But in my view, it's because of the symptoms that you develop. You don't feel well if you're thirsty, and that's what impairs your performance rather than the fact that the body's got a little bit less weight.

Okay, now, so people who drink according to thirst, if we take say, like whether a pro triathlete doing an ironman triathlon or say one of the subjects in one of these studies, there's got to be kind of a range that you see, like for human beings in terms of ounces per hour or liters per hour when people do drink according to thirst. Because I'm sure the listeners listening in still, you know, if you go out and drink according to thirst, thirst, they probably want to kind of know approximately you go out for a two hour bike ride. How much water do you take with you approximately if you're going to drink according to thirst?

Well, we showed already in 1988 we went and looked at people doing lots of different events in South Africa and it turned out that most people drank about 400 to 500 milliliters per hour. And you'll have to convert that. That's about 20. Is it 20? It's about 12 ounces. Sorry, it's about 18 ounces an hour that roundabout there, I think.

And what type of conditions were those.

In that was in any condition. And it's remarkable how common that is. Okay, so I mean I will make some other comments. Firstly, we have studied also Haile Gebri Selassie when he set the world record and he's. He finished when he ran a 203 marathon, he'd lost 10% of his body weight at the finish. So just again to confirm, and that's historically the same way it's always been, the fastest runners lose enormous amounts of weight.

Would you say that there's a value to self experimentation though? And the reason that I asked that, Dr. Noakes is in kind of anticipation of our call. Over the weekend I went for a bike ride in about 90 degrees and I rode for three hours and I drank according to thirst and by drinking according to thirst, I consumed approximately 28 ounces per hour of water.

Okay, well that's so what. I'll just correct that 28 times. 28. Okay. It's a little bit ahead of. But it is hot. It was hot that day and it's under 40 ounces. It's less than the 1.2 liters.

Yeah, yeah. Significantly less.

That would be entirely appropriate. We have in fact just published a paper where we looked at military personnel exercising and listen to this. At 43 degrees centigrade, that's 112 degrees Fahrenheit in South Africa. They were fully kitted out, they were in battle dress, they were carrying a rifle and a 25 kilogram pack. And they had to race over 25 kilometers or what's that, about 14 miles or so. And they did it perfectly comfortably in just under four hours, most of them without any problems. And they drank substantially, even more. They drank up to 1.2 liters, they drank up to 40 ounces per hour. But they needed it, that was the key. They needed the fluids and they drank to thirst and they drank that amount.

So it's possible that say someone racing Ironman Hawaii may actually get close to that.

It Would. It's possible, yes. But again, you have to listen to thirst.

Well, you know, this is very interesting because I think I saw this study on these military individuals who went on this race. I thought most interesting was the electrolyte issue, which I do want to make sure that we cover. And I know we've spent a lot of time on water, so maybe this is kind of a good segue into that. How much salt did they consume?

Nothing. And they didn't need to, because your body is so well designed to regulate its body sodium concentration that the only thing that can affect your body sodium concentration is if you drink too much water. That's it. So this is another myth that has been developed by the industry, unfortunately, and it's called the salty sweat myth. And this myth holds that if you have a lot of salt in your sweat, you are losing so much that you're going to become deficient. Now, that contradicts completely everything we know about the biology of salt metabolism in the human body. So what is astonishing is that the industry managed to confuse an entire nation or an entire population of athletes. What happens if you take in a lot of salt is your body has to get rid of it, and it gets rid of it in urine and in sweat. And what you find in sweat is the excess that your body is trying to get rid of. So if you have salty sweat, it's because your diet already has too much salt in it. Now, an American, doctor, Jerome Kahn, in the Second World War, he was asked, when America entered the Second World War, they knew they were going to have to fight in the Pacific, and they knew it was hot. And the military people came to him and said, please study acclimatization and what we need to do. And he chose to measure salt balance. So he took a bunch of conscientious objectives and he made them exercise for six hours a day. And he gave him different salt intakes, and he went down to 2 grams of salt a day, which is about a fifth of what any of your listeners will be using. If you ate taking 2 grams of salt a day, your diet will be so bland, you'll hate it. He got them down to exercising for six hours a day in the heat, taking two grams a day, and their body was still in balance. So we can that you can get the salt concentration of your sweat almost down to nothing, and the salt concentration of your urine almost down to nothing if you have to. That's why you can conserve salt even on a very, very low salt diet. Now, there's no ironman triathlete who's drinking, eating only 2 grams of salt a day. My point is that it's impossible to become salt deficient in society as it is today. There's just too much salt.

So what about people who are on like. Because this is really popular now, it's getting more popular among endurance athletes is Paleo diet or eating only like. Another popular one is doing like a vegan diet. Those diets are fairly low in sodium. Would you think that those type of people would have low storage sodium levels and maybe actually need to take in more salts during exercise?

That's great because if they need to, their body will tell them again, the desire for salt is very high. You'll never allow yourself to become salt deficient on a normal diet. There were studies also in the 1930s where they tried to produce salt deficiency and they found it was impossible. The only way they could do it was to put people in a laboratory, obviously, and they feed them and they would feed them that food that was had zero salt content. Anyone who lives freely will never develop salt deficiency because we've got such a salt drive that you will always find the extra salt. So the only way salt deficiency, as I've said, is you have to be in an experiment where you are given no salt or. And that'll never happen.

So let's say you put somebody in like an ironman triathlon and they're. Let's say. I think you would agree that maybe rate of sweat loss or sodium loss might be one and a half grams per hour, something along that nature. Now if you look on like the, like, say like the Gatorade Sports Science Institute website or if you go look at the amount of sodium that people kind of have available storage wise to burn through during something like a triathlon of that length, it's somewhere in the range of like 8,000 to 10,000 milligrams or it's 10 grams. So wouldn't you just kind of like run out of salt at about five or six hours?

No, I just laugh because I've looked at that Gatorade model and what Gatorade did was they got some scientists to put together a model that would produce what they wanted, which is exactly what you've told me. And therefore they could justify taking lots of salt. But just let me remind you that the models they use, a model is meant to describe what already is known to happen. We had already shown. I didn't tell you this. In 1988 and published in 1991, we studied eight athletes who developed hyponatremia, serious hyponatremia. Three of them were unconscious and close to death. And we showed that their sodium deficit was no greater than people who finished the race without developing hyponatremia. So we proved in 1991, published in the scientific literature, that hyponatremia has got nothing to do with sodium loss. And it was written out of the literature because it was inconvenient, because sports drinks were trying to say they were better than water because they contained salt. And the magic ingredient that made them better was salt. And they didn't want someone in South Africa coming along and saying, actually, you don't need the salt to prevent hyponatremia. So that's when they developed this whole salty sweater story. And that is when they came along with this model developed by United States Army Research Institute for Environmental Medicine, which said that you could lose so much salt during a marathon or an ultramarathon that you'd become hyponatremic. If that was the case, humans would not be humans. We would have died on the Savannah 2 million years ago. The reality is that we have incredible capacity to conserve sodium. And they never built that into their model. They didn't put into their model the fact that if you were to become sodium deficient, you would secrete a hormone called aldosterone, which would cut down sodium excretion in your sweat and your urine to zero. And that doesn't happen. So if you are losing 1.2 grams of salt every hour that you're exercising, it's because your diet has so much too much salt in it that that's where it's coming from. And you are trying to excrete the previous day's excess. That's what you're doing in the Ironman. You're excreting the excess that you've accumulated the day before. And if you understand that, then you'll understand actually you're not developing a deficit. You're trying to get rid of this excess that you've got salt you had the day before. It goes even further because David Costell in 1976 showed that the sodium you take in your drink comes out in your urine. And it has to, because you've already got an excess of sodium. If you take in more salt in your drink, it has to go out in the urine. The reality is that there could be people being the Ironman, who are losing 0.0001 gram of sodium every hour in their sweat. And those are the people who might be at risk of Developing sodium deficiency, not the ones who are losing 1.2 or 1.5 grams an hour. That's the paradox.

So can people store more than what you'll see on the Gatorade website in terms of storage sodium levels? I would think that would have to.

Be the case, absolutely. And there is an internal sodium store, which, again, the Gatorade scientists have tried to suggest doesn't exist because we've spoken about it and they've said, no, it doesn't exist. But that's not true. Already in the 1950s, there were studies with radio labeled sodium, and they showed that the space in which sodium is distributed is much bigger than just the volume that is normally taught. In other words, in the bloodstream, there is an intracellular sodium store which is probably larger than the rest of the body sodium. So when you, for example, take a cadaver, a person who's just died and measured their sodium, they have much more sodium in the body than is accounted for by our usual calculations. And the calculation you're giving me underestimates the total sodium content substantially. And the sodium is thought to be stored in bone and cartilage in a different form. It's sort of tied in with other proteins. And what seems to happen is that when you need the sodium, it is released from that store and becomes available. Conversely, we are convinced that some people who develop hyponatremia do the opposite. They take sodium which is circulating in the bloodstream, and for some reason, they drive it into the cells. And as a consequence, their blood sodiums drop dramatically. And in the past, people said, yeah, yes, it's because they've lost it into the sweat or urine, but it happens so quickly that it may well have disappeared into their. Into their cells. And this has been noticed for a long time. If you give people a lot of sodium, you can't account for where it all goes to. And it must be going into the cells in a compartment that isn't readily measurable. To summarize, there's much more sodium in the body than is ever calculated on the Gatorade website. And there are mechanisms to retain sodium in your body if you were to become deficient. The only people at risk of being sodium deficient are those who have got almost no sodium in their urine or in their sweat. If you have vast amounts of sodium in your urine and your sweat, it's the excess from the day before that you're still trying to get rid of.

Now, there are, to my knowledge, 0 professional triathletes Racing something like Ironman Hawaii who aren't using electrolytes whether in capsule or some type of beverage form during the race. If they were to stop taking those electrolytes, what would happen?

That's a great question. Because the body, if you force it beyond its normal physiology it develops abnormal adaptation and you have to adapt slowly back to before you can do that. Now for example, you're quite right because there's a hundred mile race in California where clearly some people are developing low sodiums even though they're taking a lot of sodium and it doesn't make sense to us and they're not becoming over hydrated. And I think if you stock your body with even more sodium it will try to get rid of it. And if you suddenly withdraw it, you may well become, you could become sodium deficiently acutely over a day or two. So I think that if you're taking additional sodium you are stressing the system and it could make maladaptations which could be detrimental for a short time whilst you withdraw the sodium. My advice is that there's absolutely no evidence that these athletes need sodium. There's no scientific evidence that they need the sodium. If they are taking it, I would not advise them to stop it immediately and continue and certainly race without it. You have to do it slowly because we don't know what the body will do in the interim.

Oh, go ahead.

So I'm, you know again, the sodium may work in a different way. For example, if you take vitamin C at high doses it no longer acts as vitamin C, it acts as a, as a different chemical. It may be that if you take sodium at high doses during an ironman it has some role that we haven't yet described or understood. But on the basis scientific evidence published today, there's absolutely no scientific credence or reason why you should take that extra sodium.

Are there any studies or research planned or in the works to look at something like a marathon or Ironman triathlon without sodium or without electrolyte intake?

That's been done since 1900 when they started running marathons. No one took sodium and nothing happened. So that has always been done. And you mentioned our study in the military where we had these guys exercising 112 degrees Fahrenheit and they didn't take any sodium. Their blood sodium concentrations were absolutely normal and they were absolutely normal because their water content was normal. They weren't over hydrated, they weren't severely dehydrated. If you let the brain control it, it'll do a fantastic job.

Now for people listening in who, like me, depend on electrolyte capsules or have used them for a very long time, frequently during something like a half ironman or an Ironman triathlon, if we were to kind of try to wean ourselves off them. And I'm sure that any electrolyte manufacturer or someone in the electrolyte business is going to cringe when they hear me say that. Is there like a certain period of time that you think we should allow before our body kind of gets used to less sodium intake during exercise, or is there really no way to put a time on it?

In the studies by Jerome Khan, it was about three days. Within three days you will be conserving sodium. In other words, your secretion excretion of sodium in sweat, in urine will go down and it will stabilize at the new level. So within three days you will be perfectly normal. Again, let's talk about placebos. You see, the problem is, if you believe that the sodium is going to make a difference, it will make a 2% difference. The fact that you use it, you have used it, you may well believe it helps. And if you have that belief, it will help. And therefore I would be reluctant to tell you to stop taking it because of the placebo effect, which is massive. But looking for a biological explanation, and if we give it to people without them knowing what it is, then we don't find a reason why we should give it. So one has to understand that it may be acting as a placebo, in which case continue using it. But biologically, the. The body is too clever and we've got too much sodium in our diets anyway to need additional sodium.

Now, I guess kind of another question, and I know we're starting to run short on time, but a lot of these gels have sodium in them and electrolytes in them, so that even if someone were to stop taking electrolyte capsules, they're still getting salts coming in from other sources. Is there any evidence to suggest that there would be kind of a deleterious effect from taking in, say, 150 milligrams of sodium in a gel that you're consuming every 20 minutes or every 30 minutes?

The reality is that the amount of sodium present, even in a sports ring, it's homeopathic. I mean, it's really irrelevant. So absolutely, carry on. It makes really no difference at all. And it's only if you are hypertensive or at risk of having high blood pressure that a high sodium intake is probably not good for you. But very few athletes will be in that state.

Gotcha.

Yeah. So no, that little amount is really going to make no difference whatsoever if.

People want more resources on this or want to kind of go research it themselves. Do you have anything you can point them towards in terms of literature?

Yeah, well, you know, I've written a book about this whole story about the fluid and the sodiums and it'll be coming out in June next year hopefully. And I don't want to mention names or titles or anything like that, but just to let you know, I've spent 30 years studying this problem and I have written a definitive book on the whole issues, how it evolved and what you should be doing. People can look by accessing my name on Google or Google Scholar and typing in, for example, hyponatremia, H Y P O N A T R E M I A and then they'll get the full story of the studies we've done on the role of sodium or not in preventing hyponatremia. And there's a lot of very powerful stuff I've written there which has been highly critical of the sports drink industry. That would be helpful. The definitive chapter on the sodium story will be written, published, as I've said, in this book, which is going to come out next year. And then people can see where the salty sweater mythology developed and how humans are these incredible sodium conservers. So again, to make the point that as we're going back to the Paleolithic diet, which by the way, I'm a very strong advocate of and I'm really enjoying my Paleolithic diet. It's really helped my athletics. I'm really enjoying running again. I'm much lighter, I feel much, much better using this diet. My running times are back to what they were 20 years ago. I'm 62 now and I'm running as fast as I was when I was 42 and I feel fantastic. And I'm only training 40km a week.

Awesome.

So Paleolithic diet works, but the other point of the Paleolithic theory is that humans evolved in a dry, arid, salt free environment. And we evolved as runners under those conditions. And if we hadn't been able to run without drinking very much and without access to salt, humans would not, we wouldn't be humans, we wouldn't be around today. And it was. We learned to survive on the fringe with little water, little access to water and little access to salt. Yet we survived. Now we live in an environment where there's too much water and there's too much salt. And so my advice is, if you Want to be a real paleolith? Listen to your body and it'll tell you how much you need to drink and it'll tell you how much salt you need.

Wow. Well, I'm sure that people will have questions and comments about this. And folks, you know that you can go to to the show Notes for this podcast episode with Dr. Noaks and you can leave your comments and your questions and your feedback there and generate discussion because I know that this stuff is new and probably a little bit different than what you've heard in the past. So, Dr. Noakes, I want to thank you for taking the time today to come on and talk to us about this.

It was my pleasure. And I do apologize to everyone because I know there's going to be many upset people out there. And I do apologize. But it wasn't me who said you must drink a lot and it wasn't me who said you must drink a lot of salt. But I think what you have to do is when you look at the real science, you find that there just isn't any to support this advice. And I've looked at the science for 30 years and I've researched it intensively. And these are the conclusions I've come to. As I've indicated, I've written the book which is utterly evidence based. There's nothing there that's not evidence based. And what I'm telling you today is what is evidence based? And unfortunately, it may upset a lot of people, but at the end of the day, we just have to do what's good for the body. And I hope I'm telling you what is good for the body, because at this moment, what I've told you is what the science tells us.

Well, I am a big fan of self experimentation, so I'm going to play around with this a little bit between now in Ironman Hawaii and see what happens. All right, well, that's going to wrap it up. And folks, you can check out more of this discussion over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com thanks, Dr. Noakes.

Thank you very much, Ben.

Well, folks, that's going to wrap up this week's podcast. I will put links to everything that I talked about today over in the show. Notes to episode number 157@BenGreenfieldFitness.com including my new book, the Rev Diet@Revdiet.com the cap reflex that I talked about, the magnesium, the smoke point chart. I always put everything in the show notes. And of course, within a couple weeks after each interview is released, it is fully transcribed and available for you over there@BenGreenfieldFitness.com where, remember, you can also donate a dollar or anything you want to keep the show going and to support the cost of everybody downloading this podcast. Finally, remember to text the word Fitness to 411247 if you want in on that special little project I've been working on. And have a great and healthy week. This is Ben signing out from bengreenfieldfitness. Com.