Episode #167: Why Fat Is Good, How We’ve Been Lied To About The Obesity Epidemic, And How To Be A Fat Head.

In this why fat is good how to exhale while swimming Preventing cramps in high school athletes Are boot camps enough for strength DMAE supplements? What happens when you taper the difference between prebiotics and probiotics? Is it normal to gain weight in the winter? And what should your partial pressure of oxygen be? Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlois 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. Welcome back to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. This is Ben Greenfield. I'm your host. And before we jump into this week's special announcements, let me tell you I'm excited about the interview that I'm releasing today because it's with a guy who produced a pretty cool movie and the movie's name is Fathead. In the movie, he talks about how fat and fast food and the obesity epidemic have been blown way out of proportion. And if you saw Morgan Spurlock's movie Super Size Me, you're going to find out some things about that movie that may surprise or even disappoint you. So you may have been fed a load of baloney and you're going to learn why in today's podcast. So in addition to that, we had a couple articles go up this week over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com one was titled News Alert. You don't need to eat within 60 minutes after a Workout. I did receive a lot of kind of confusing questions from confused folks who read that and were under the impression based on everything that we're taught in sports nutrition and exercise nutrition, that you actually do have to eat within 20 to 60 minutes after workout. That is false and I tell you why in the article. But for those of you who are still confused, at the bottom of that article there's a link to a more comprehensive audio that I did. And if you're confused about the whole pre and post workout nutrition issue, just listen to that audio. It'll help you out. Okay folks, let's jump into this week's special announcements. Then we'll have the Q and A and finally move into the interview. Fathead, Mark your calendars. In 14 days, 3 hours and 28 minutes from the time that I'm recording this, I will be doing a special call in conference for all the listeners this conference is a little bit different than ones that I've done in the past. I will put a link to it in the show notes so that you can grab the phone number to dial in as well as the the Skype name to dial in if you want to dial in that way. Or you can just attend via your computers. But most of my conferences and seminars are based on fat loss, human performance, nutrition. However, I receive many, many questions, especially of late about what type of services that I offer to people who want to lose weight, who want to do a marathon or a triathlon. So what I'm going to do is do a live seminar where I answer all your questions and I've set it up so that you can log in prior to that event and actually ask your questions beforehand and I'll answer them during the call. So if you're remotely interested or have questions about what I have to offer you, then simply go to the link in the show notes for this episode, episode number 167 and you'll see the link there to where you can attend that teleseminar for free. And it will give you the day and the time. It's going to be Wednesday at noon in two weeks. So that is October 2nd at noon. Okay, a couple of other things. Podcast awards are open right now for voting. Please. If you get a chance, go vote@podcastawards.com and when you're there, the health and fitness category is the one that you'd want to jump down to. All right, folks, one other quick special announcement and then we're going to move on to this week's Listener Q and A.

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Listener Q and A.

Hey Ben, this is Jeff in Tampa, Florida. Swimming Question for the podcast when you're exhaling underwater, it seems like I've been having a problem, sort of like forcing the air out. Is there any tips that you can give about exhaling in the water? In other words, you blow out your mouth and your nose either. Or do you constantly exhale with your head in the water? Or do you kind of wait at the end? Just seem to really struggling with the whole exhale concept underwater? Appreciate your tips, insights and expertise.

Well, this may seem like a small issue, but it really is an issue that plagues a lot of swimmers trying to figure out what they're supposed to do when their head is in the water between breaths. And the deal is this. When you're swimming, you should always, always be exhaling, except when you turn your head to inhale. But there's kind of a caveat to that that I'll go into here for a second. Now, most swimmers, when they inhale during their stroke, and then they bring their face back down into the water, they kind of tend to hold their breath for a few strokes before bringing their head back up for another breath. And most swimmers will either release all that air or right before they bring their head back up for a breath. And some swimmers will even release all that air, as when their head gets out of the water to take a breath. The problem is that when you're holding your breath between strokes, a few things happen. The first is that you tense up, and whenever you exhale or breathe out, you tend to release some of that tension. It's the same way that you would release tension or stress when you're stressed out while you're sitting at your desk. If you kind of breathe out, it kind of helps to relieve that tension. You can almost feel it happen. The other thing that happens is when you're holding your breath, you get this buildup of carbon dioxide, because the only way that your body can get rid of acidic carbon dioxide is by exhaling. And so when you're not exhaling, you're keeping the carbon dioxide in your bloodstream and in your lungs. And the body has this natural mechanism where it feels this desperation to breathe when the CO2 begins building up. And so when you feel a desperation to breathe between strokes, it's probably a sign that you're not exhaling or breathing off some of that CO2 in between strokes. When you hold your breath in between strokes, it affects your buoyancy as well, because your lungs are full of air, and air floats. So it makes your chest very buoyant. But a chest that is too buoyant can cause your legs to drop in the water, kind of like anchors, and that makes a lot of extra drag around your body. So the practice of constantly exhaling in between your strokes is important. But there's kind of a paradox here, and that is that studies have shown that fatigue of inspiratory and expiratory muscles can be responsible for slowing a swimmer, especially during longer events. And what I've noticed is that when I tell swimmers that it's okay to exhale in between strokes. They tend to forcefully exhale. And what you need to be doing is more of a passive exhalation. This means that you're not fatiguing your expiratory muscles in between each stroke, but rather you're either through lightly pursed lips or through your nose, whichever is natural to you, allowing air to passively escape, and you're not forcing it out. Now, this is something that you simply need to practice. And one of the ways that you can practice doing this is you just go into the deep end of a pool and you tread water, and then you hold your breath, and you bring your face underneath the water, and you let air just kind of passively escape through your pursed lips or through your nose. And you'll feel yourself start to drop as you become less buoyant in the water. You'll feel yourself start to sink as the air is released from your lungs. But you shouldn't feel like you're forcefully blowing. You're forcefully exhaling air because that also in the same way that holding your breath creates a lot of tension, especially in the expiratory muscles around your lungs and your neck. So hopefully I didn't create more questions than I answered with that answer. But ultimately, you exhale the whole time. The exhalation needs to be passive. And what you may find is that once you get this down, you can actually go a longer period of time in between strokes without taking a breath. So if right now you're forced to breathe, you know, say, every two strokes, you might be able to breathe every four strokes if you're breathing off some of that carbon dioxide that's kind of leaving you desperate to breathe. So great question, Jeff. Hopefully that helps.

Mai had a question on cramping. I know in many episodes you broached the subject on muscle cramps, but my question is on a more broad scale. I coach a high school football team, and this is their first year playing and are having a lot of cramps. Now, most of these kids have never played football before. Most of them have been soccer players and play in the heat and are now playing on cool fall evenings in all of their pads and gear. So how do we, as a coaching staff, help the kids prevent the muscle cramps? And what is the best way to help treat the muscle cramps once they get them?

Well, back in episode number 157, here on the podcast, I interviewed Dr. Tim Nokes. And Dr. Nokes shared some pretty interesting information that we have been kind of sort of brainwashed by the Gatorade Sports Science Institute and big electrolyte and sport drink manufacturers into thinking that we need to constantly be taking in sports drink and electrolyte electrolytes during exercise, when in fact the body is very good at maintaining its blood levels and muscle levels of electrolytes by simply adjusting how much salt is lost through the kidneys and the urine or through the sweat. So ultimately, the fix for cramping in something like a high school football player, especially if a lot of players are cramping all at once, is not necessarily electrolyte supplementation during exercise. Most high school diets that I see are already very high sodium, high electrolyte. They're going into a practice with, you know, 10,000 plus grams of sodium or 10,000 plus milligrams of sodium in their body and possibly a lot more in intramuscular stores. And there is no need to be fixing this issue through the use of, you know, like a, like a Gatorade or some type of mixed sport drink, which a lot of football teams and football players actually use, even though they don't need to. So the fix for this is going to be attending to the players diets outside of practice, because it's very, very likely that they're either consuming foods that dehydrate their body or else not paying attention to adequate hydration. So if your players are drinking a lot of sports drinks with high amounts of caffeine or a lot of acidic foods, sugary foods, starchy foods, sugary drinks that tend to leach minerals, calcium, magnesium, things of that nature from the body, which can lead to cramping, you're going to need to pay attention to that and make dietary adjustments or dietary recommendations to your players about alternative things that they could drink in between practice instead of coffee or sugar laden sports drinks. The other thing that is likely happening here, especially if it's early season football, which if you're listening to this episode at the time that it comes out it is, is that muscular fatigue is a bigger issue when it comes to cramping, specifically requiring a muscle to do something that it hasn't done in training or in practice. What you get is what's called alpha motor neuron inhibition of the actual, or, I'm sorry, overstimulation of the actual muscle, and it goes into this constant state of spasm or contraction and just stays there. Used to happen to me in water polo a lot during games when I would just go all out way harder than I'd gone and practice. And a lot of times I'd Especially get cramps in my, in my calves from the, from the powerful whipping motion of the legs. So the fix for this is to train the players. You got to be doing a lot of high intensity game simulation type of scrimmages where you're actually pushing the players up to the intensity they're going to experience during the game. And you also need to be doing a lot of strength and power work in the weight room. Another cause of cramping can be inflexibility. And while the debate goes back and forth between whether or not stretching can actually reduce risk of injury, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that it could reduce risk of cramping. So I would also focus on including a flexibility component in your program, preferably with dynamic flexibility exercises like leg swings and arm swings and things of that nature. I am going to put a link in the show notes to a more comprehensive audio that I did on or that I that I have on the causes of cramping and the way that you can actually get rid of cramps. And I'm going to put a link to that in the show notes that's closer to about a 30 minute audio and I'll put that link in the show notes to this episode, episode number 167 directly underneath your question. Alright. Listener Marcy writes in and asks I just started a boot camp class three days a week. It's very hard. I'm not sure I ever sweat that much. It's showing me that I'm not in as good shape as I thought, but I'm hanging in there. Would you say that this is enough resistance training? There are days that I am quite sore or should I add some gym days in between? Well, there's a lot of folks out there that take boot camp classes, so I wanted to address this issue. Whenever you're thinking about whether or not an activity actually supplies you with the full spectrum of fitness from strength to muscular endurance to cardiovascular endurance to flexibility to balance, you need to look at the specific exercises that you're doing. I would say that a boot camp because it primarily consists in most cases of higher rep, lower weight or higher rep bodyweight type of activities combined with cardiovascular bursts is very good at targeting your muscular endurance and your cardiovascular endurance. Flexibility, balance, strength and power are not frequently addressed in a boot camp. Unless you're in the type of boot camp that includes lots of warm up stretching activities, balance components, balance games or balance challenges, or some type of strength activity like tire flipping or possibly climbing a rope would be another example of more of a strength activity. If I personally were doing boot camp three times a week and I wanted to improve strength, I would also include one to two times a week bigger moves like powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting, bench press, deadlift, squat, clean, clean and jerk. Those type of activities. Those are going to address some of the holes that boot camp is not filling in. I just released a video over@YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness in which I show four of the strength and power moves that I used frequently during my build up to Ironman Hawaii to address some of my strength and power deficiencies. So I'll go watch that if you want an introduction to some of the exercises that you could throw in in addition to this boot camp that you're doing just one to two times a week. So go check that out over@YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness Leah writes in and says, what are your thoughts on taking the supplement dmae? What are the benefits? I've heard that it can help with soreness and stiffness after working out. Well, DMAE is short for diet methylaminoethanol and it is kind of a twofold supplement. It's sold as kind of like a brain aid, and it's also sold as something for skin firming. So in terms of its effects on the brain, what happens is there's a buildup of something in the brain that's basically like a waste product of what's called pigmentation, and it can cause neurological decline when you age or when you have Alzheimer's disease and you get this buildup of what's called a beta amyloid pigment. I won't go too deep into the science behind it, but basically what DMAE can do is it can scavenge and clean up some of this pigment waste production. It's also, at a neuronal level or in your brain, a fairly potent antioxidant. It gets incorporated into the cell membranes as something called phosphatidyl dmae. And this is an antioxidant that your cells can use to scavenge a lot of the electrons that circulate around your brain. That could lead to membrane damage or could lead to some neuronal damage and possibly even some what's called protein cross linking in your brain, which is very much associated with, with Alzheimer's. As far as actual studies, DMAE has not actually been approved by the FDA as a treatment for Alzheimer's or, or really shown a ton of promise in terms of making your way smarter or anything. Like that. But if, you know, if you have a history or genetic propensity for something like Alzheimer's, it may be something that you'd want to include as a supplement. I don't think you're going to notice a lot of difference, but there may be a preventive benefit. However, in terms of cosmetic potential. DMA is included in facial creams for improving your skin quality. It's put in as an ingredient in facial cream and it actually has, in studies showed benefits in helping out with the appearance of wrinkles or dark circles under your eyes or kind of folds around your nose, a sagging neck like a, like skin that kind of sags underneath your neck as well as like the firmness of the skin around your neck. Studies have shown that it can increase skin firmness, whether in a gel or a lotion. So as far as cosmetic potential, it's a decent looking supplement. As far as risks, it may definitely increase the risk of neural tube defects. So I wouldn't go near this if you were pregnant. However, any other risks I'm not aware of or. And I haven't haven't seen any other risks aside from that. So I wouldn't use it if you're pregnant, which is really, you know, that should be said for most herbs and supplements. You shouldn't be going near most of them if you are pregnant. So that's the deal with dmae. And you ask if it can help with soreness and stiffness after working out. I have never seen this to be the case. However, if someone is listening and they're aware of research that I'm not aware of, then go ahead and leave a comment. In the show notes for this episode, episode number 167 over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Glenn says, I'm training for my first marathon. I understand something about tapering, but what really is going on physiologically during a proper taper? Surely it is more than rest. Well, you are absolutely right, Glenn. When you begin to reduce your level of physical activity leading into something like a race, for example, for me that's about 12 to 14 days prior to an Ironman triathlon. I start to really decrease my level of exercise, cut it back by anywhere from from 40 to 60%. A lot of kind of cool things happen physiologically that have been studied for many, many years. The first is an increase in your VO2 max. And it's very significant as a matter of fact, in swimmers it's been shown to increase by about 15 to 25%. That's huge. And that's over the course of a 21 day taper in swimmers that that VO2 max increase was observed. So you get a big increase in your maximum oxygen consumption. Some other things happen as well. Your exercise efficiency can improve, and that's primarily due to a decrease in your heart rate for any given effort of exercise, as well as an increase in the ability of your body to buffer some of the hydrogen that's produced when you make lactic acid during a muscle contraction. So you get improved buffering capacity and your heart isn't working quite as hard for any given level of exercise. Blood measures, specifically your actual oxygen carrying capacity and your peak hemoglobin levels, which are the components of your red blood cells that actually bind to that oxygen. Those can go up your creatine kinase levels, which is a measure of total body inflammation that goes down. So basically your body is healing itself and also bringing itself into this state of extreme fitness, as it not only improves your oxygen consumption, but also increases the amount of blood cells that are actually saturated with hemoglobin and oxygen. In terms of your skeletal muscle, you get an increase in what are called your oxidative enzymes, which are the enzymes that are capable of taking oxygen and turning it into ATP or energy. And that occurs at the level of the little energy producing components of your cell called the mitochondria. So you get increased enzyme activity in the mitochondria. You'll also get increased muscular power, which is the amount of force that you can produce over time. You'll see that in a taper. It's been observed in swimmers as well as cyclists, real increase in muscle power. And a lot of times when you're in training, you get kind of a drop in muscle power. And that's basically what's referred to as a neural inhibition due to fatigue. And that especially occurs in endurance athletes. And that power is kind of restored as you taper. As far as all of these components kind of transferring over into actual performance. You're going to see not only decreased soreness, but also improved ability to handle higher workloads as well as improved confidence. And don't worry, it's completely normal to get a little bit grumpy, a little bit moody during something like a taper. And the reason for that is you're not exercising as much, so you're not producing as many endorphins as you're used to. So you don't have as many happy hormones circulating through your body. And that is typically combined with the fact that you are getting a little bit anxious or nervous about the upcoming event that you're tapering for, you put both those things together. And I know for me, in my case, my wife doesn't like to hang around with me very much the day before I do a race because I'm kind of grumpy and touchy and that's kind of normal. So just know that there's also kind of that psychological mental component to a taper. All right. Alex says hi, Ben, I've heard you mention probiotics a few times, but there's this supplement I was planning on buying that contains prebiotics. What's the difference and which one is preferred? This is a good question. So a probiotic, which I've talked about before on the show, and I personally take, take probiotics every day, as well as eat a lot of kefir and yogurts and fermented foods that are also full of probiotic bacteria. They're basically good bacteria, strains of good bacteria that really help to improve the function of your immune system as well as your digestive system. For example, if you look at something like giardia, which is that parasitic infection that makes you really, really sick, or food poisoning or something of that nature, if you've got healthy flora, healthy amount of probiotics in your digestive system, it can crowd out a lot of these bad bacteria and essentially keep you from getting sick, keep you digesting your food a lot more completely, and also keep things like yeast and candida from overgrowing in your stomach. Because if you've got a lot of healthy microorganisms in your stomach, it's basically going to make you less likely to have a lot of the unhealthy or pathogenic organisms in your stomach. Now, of course, probiotics are a living microorganism and they need food. And prebiotics are the nourishment that the probiotic bacteria actually use to grow and to colonize prebiotics. Another name for them is synbiotics. Syn biotics. And probiotics basically feed on these little short chain sugar molecules made up of what are called fructooligosaccharides. And that's a very common component of plant based fibers. Plants contain what's called fructan. And fructan containing plants have high amounts of inulin in them, not to be confused with insulin, inulin. And inulin is a soluble dietary fiber that probiotics do really well with in terms of using as a fuel to grow and to colonize your digestive tract. So if you take anything like, like asparagus and onions and garlic and leeks and a lot of these vegetables that are really known as immune system enhancing vegetables. One of the reasons is that they're excellent sources of inulin, which feeds your probiotics and helps to grow the healthy flora in your stomach. Prebiotics are also sold as an actual supplement, although if you're eating a lot of dietary vegetables and getting a lot of dietary fiber, you're probably doing okay in terms of your, of the fuel that you have for your probiotics. I personally kind of COVID my bases in the way that I do it is I take a probiotic, I personally, right now I'm taking one made by Mount Capra called Caprobiotics. And then I take a supplement that contains inulin or high amounts of fiber. And the two that I use, one that I use is called Capra Greens, the other one is called Ener prime and those are both kind of like greens powders. And that's kind of another advantage of greens powders is they're not only very, very non acidic, a very alkaline food to put into your body, it's very, very nutrient dense, you know, and contains high energy compounds like, like spirulina and blue green algae. But they also contain high amounts of inulin and artichoke extract and a lot of these things that help to feed the probiotics or healthy bacteria in your stomach. So a really, really fantastic 1, 2 combo for your immune system and your digestive tract is probiotics plus some type of greens supplement which contains those prebiotics. So I recommend both. Alright. Paul says now that triathlon season is over, do you think it's a better idea to give my body a break and let it naturally pack a couple of extra pounds over the winter and then slim down to my new weight as the next triathlon season approaches? Or would it be more effective to start slimming down now when I don't have the same nutritional needs as I need when I'm gearing up for the new season? So the question is, do you, do you get fat or do you get fit over the winter? Well, this is kind of an interesting deal because in most mammals we see quite a bit of change occur in the winter, especially when it comes to the propensity to hibernate. Specifically, what you see is an increase in brown fat formation, which is the very kind of metabolically active type of fat that's actually quite good and doesn't really carry much risk with it, but it produces a lot of heat and helps you to stay warm in the winter. And so for a northern climate athlete, a lot of times it can vastly improve comfort to kind of increase nutritional intake a little bit, Let some of this brown fat build up and it can keep you just a little bit more warm. You know, for me, when I'm going out and doing activities like snowboarding and skate skiing and sledding and playing outside with my kids and going on long runs in the snow and doing those type of things in the winter, I like to have a little bit of extra fat for that. And the other thing that I tend to do in the off season in the winter is I pack on a little bit of extra muscle as well. I do just a little bit more eating combined with a little bit more weight training, and that kind of tends to put on lean muscle. The other thing you'll see animals doing a lot more in the winter is sleeping more. And of course, being all bundled up in bed helps you to maintain your core temperature and that, that's another natural mechanism that takes place in the winter. I find myself a lot of times in the winter sleeping eight or nine hours. And of course that's time that I would be normally up and around and possibly burning more fat. So that's probably another reason that I personally tend to gain a little bit of weight in the winter. I feel that having a season of not necessarily hibernation, but a period of time where you give your joints a little bit of a break and you let your brown fat levels build up a little bit, I think if you're a northern climate or a cold climate athlete, that's very, very useful and natural. If you live in Florida or Southern Cal or one of these areas that tends to be warm year round, I don't think that that's necessary. Although you may want to consider that it is tough on your body hormonally to never go through a period of time where you do let it relax and possibly bump up levels of natural fat just a little bit. So the way that I personally consider the, the whole get fit or get fat approach is if you've got an early season triathlon or race, you generally don't want to have a lot of pressure to lose a lot of weight for that. You know, when, when January rolls around and it does make sense to let yourself stay just a little bit more slim or focus on fat loss over the winter if that's the case. If you've really not got nothing going on until May or June, I don't See any need to focus on slimming down over the course of the early winter. And you can focus on weight loss, you know, once January or February or March rolls around, when you're kind of gearing up for the next season, I'm all about the. The yin and the yang and kind of keeping good balance. And that means that while you can stay fit year round, there's nothing wrong with letting the body fat levels go up just a little bit in the winter, as that is what. What most animals do, especially those in colder climates. Okay, Dave has a question. He says, I've been using the restwise software that you discussed. My partial pressure of oxygen is usually in the 94 to 95% range. I recently had an unplanned ambulance ride, and they measured the partial pressure of my oxygen at 93. They were very surprised it was that low. What do the numbers mean and is there an effective way to increase them? The EMT on the ambulance, knowing that I am a competitive athlete, thought it should be around 98. Well, folks, I will put a link to the episode in which I interviewed the folks from a company called restwise. And what Restwise is, is it's this online service to which you upload a bunch of different variables like your morning resting heart rate and the amount of sleep that you've gotten, your hydration levels, your appetite, the amount of muscle soreness that you have. You fill out a little profile of mood state, and essentially it tracks a quantitative version of how recovered you are. One of the things that happens is when you sign up with restwise, they send you this little thing that you put on your finger when you wake up in the morning, and it measures your oxygen saturation values. And healthy, normal, healthy oxygen saturation values are about 96 to 99% around in there. Anything below 95% can be associated with anemia or not producing enough red blood cells or breaking down your red blood cells too quickly or not really being fully oxygenated. Now, the low oxygen saturation levels would be caused by not necessarily not having adequate numbers of red blood cells, although that could affect a little bit, but more specifically, not having the ability of them to actually bind oxygen. And hemoglobin, which I discussed earlier, the component of your red blood cells that's responsible for binding oxygen relies on iron as an active component of it to bind that oxygen. And so, of course, one of the first things I recommend that folks look at when their oxygen saturation is low is their iron and what's called the storage ferritin levels. So I would certainly go do a ferritin test. You know, I did that at my local doctor's office. I just walked in and asked for it. Cost me like 40 bucks. And you can see whether or not maybe you should be taking some type of supplement that would help to increase your storage ferritin or iron levels. The one that I prefer to recommend to folks that's relatively safe, although I always recommend that you continue to test when you're supplementing with anything that contains iron in it is something called Floradix. It's called Floradix and I will put a link to it in the show notes. But basically, there are other things that you can do naturally aside from like taking an iron supplement, if your iron is okay, to increase oxygen saturation. And the first would be to make sure that you're living in an area that doesn't contain a lot of environmental pollutants, specifically carbon monoxide, which can kind of compete for oxygen on the hemoglobin and kind of keep you from. From being fully oxygenated. That just means breathing fresh air using a filter in your house. You can install something like a HEPA filter in your house. You can use like a HEPA vacuum cleaner. Keep a lot of plants around your house to produce oxygen and consume carbon dioxide. And just be careful exercising in polluted areas. For example, if you live in a. In a big city with lots of cars driving around, it's better to work out at a gym that has a good air filter than a dish is to head outside for a run. Exercise, of course, is the best way to increase the oxygen levels of the blood, but you're already doing that. However, if you're listening and you don't exercise much and you've got poor oxygen saturation, start exercising. Deep breathing and working on your posture. Also go hand in hand to helping to increase the oxygen levels of your blood, even though this isn't necessarily if you have low iron going to improve your oxygen saturation. If your iron is sufficient, it's possible that you're simply breathing kind of hypoxically. So make sure that you're deep breathing. Make sure that you aren't engaged in stressful, shallow breathing all day long or while you sleep, especially. I don't know if you have any breathing issues while you sleep, but it may be something to look into. Overweight or obese folks tend to be more prone to suffer from low levels of oxygen in the blood, again due to hypoxia and a little bit more difficulty breathing, especially when sleeping. So dialing in the weight is important for improving oxygen saturation as well. And as far as just the total health of the cardiovascular system, I do recommend that you contain or that you consume a lot of foods that contain a lot of chlorophyll and a lot of components that tends to have the ability to kind of open up the blood vessels a little bit. I would be eating a lot of dark leafy greens, a lot of dark vegetables, and including a lot of natural produce in your diet. If your diet is low in produce, if you kind of have a typical. I see guys do this more often, just a lot, eating a lot of packaged foods, a lot of processed foods, not getting a lot of fresh foods. Get a lot more produce in your diet. And that will help a little bit as well. So those are some of the ways that you can kind of help to improve your oxygen saturation a little bit. Ultimately, though, the first thing I'd look at is your iron levels, especially if you're a healthy, exercising athlete who eats properly. Because, I mean, if you look at actual studies of normal oxygen saturation versus depleted or anemic oxygen saturation, one of the most highly correlated variables is the actual levels of ferritin, transferrin or iron. And all of these could be assessed through a blood test and a ferritin test. So I'd look into that. And I will put a link also to the podcast that I did in which I interviewed the guys from restwise and they talked in a lot of detail about some of the other components of recovery and some of the things that could affect recovery. Because I mentioned red blood cells. And certainly if you've got really, really high red blood cell turnover and you're in a state of overtraining or in a state of inadequate recovery, that's also going to possibly deleteriously affect your oxygen saturation. Not a ton of evidence behind that, but I do see the two tend to be pretty well correlated. So I will put a link to that episode as well as a link to that fluorideic supplement that I mentioned in the show notes. All right, folks, we are going to move on to today's interview and featured topic with Tom Naughton.

Featured Topic.

Hey, folks, this is Ben Greenfield, and it was several months ago that I actually saw a movie I thought was highly entertaining, funny, and educational at the same time. And kind of went right down the line of a lot of stuff that we've talked about before with physicians and healthcare practitioners, nutritionists and athletes here on the podcast. And that is the concept of nutrition Intake, percentage of nutrition intake, and in particular, some of the misconceptions that are out there about fat. The gentleman who is on the other line is named Tom Naughton, and Tom is a comedian and a writer and a speaker, among other things. But he also created a movie called Fathead. I am, of course, going to put a link for you to be able to go watch Fathead after you listen to this interview, which I highly recommend. But today, Tom and I are going to talk about some of the more interesting and groundbreaking things that he shares in that movie. So, Tom, thank you so much for coming on the call today.

Oh, my pleasure, Ben. Thanks for having me.

So I know that you're not necessarily like a food scientist or a nutritionist or a dietician, but what is your background and. And what led you to create a movie about nutrition or this movie, Fathead?

You know, actually, my background was as a guy who spent adolescence, teenage years, and most of adult years as a fat guy. So, you know, I was one of the fat comedians. I wasn't like Chris Farley fat, but I was always out of shape. And the reason I made Fatheads specifically, I was kicking around ideas for a TV pilot, and I wanted to do sort of a think piece on how we treat fat people in society. I ended up watching Super Size Me sort of as research for that. I hadn't seen it before. I never saw it at the theater, but I went ahead and bought the DVD and watched it. By the time I was done, I had kind of ditched my original idea and I decided to make a documentary response instead because I thought there was a lot in Super Size Me that was ridiculous, in spite of the fact that I. It was an entertaining film because it was, you know, Morgan Spurlock's a good entertainer, but I just thought a lot of what he put out there and supersized me was misguided or wrong and decided to do my response. And it was really in the course of doing research for Fathead that I became fascinated by nutrition science. And frankly, I've been educating myself nonstop ever since.

Cool. So you actually talk about Super Size Me in the movie and you kind of criticize it. So what's. What's the deal? Because, I mean, I mean, you know, a lot of people thought that movie was. Was pretty good at vindicating fast food.

Was entertaining. You know, like I said, I'll give him that. I was laughing when. As I was watching it, but at the same time, I was getting annoyed. The first thing that annoyed me was just Kind of the overall concept of blaming McDonald's or fast food for the rise in obesity. I mean, it's ridiculous to blame certainly any particular restaurant, and I think ridiculous to blame fast food in general for that for all kinds of reasons. One, you know, I did a little digging, and one of the first things I discovered was that the meals that are served in sit down, traditional restaurants are, by and large, they're higher calorie meals than what people buy in fast food restaurants. Now, I'm not promoting fast food as health food. We all know it isn't. But really, if you look at the calorie count on a typical meal at McDonald's, it's not that high. People can easily consume more calories than that at a restaurant. People consume more calories than that at home all the time. So really just that aspect of it kind of bothered me. And the fact that he seemed to be poo pooing the idea of personal responsibility. I think he had a line in there where he said, you know, at what point does personal responsibility end and corporate responsibility begin? And as far as I'm concerned, McDonald's is never responsible for what you choose to put in your mouth. They can advertise their product, but you choose to go in there, you decide what to order as you're standing at the counter, and you decide to put it in your mouth. So that whole idea bothered me. And then what really made me just about jump out of my chair was when his nutritionist told him, well, my. And she said this twice in the film. She warned him that he was consuming more than 5,000 calories per day. Now, I spent a lot of my life as an overweight guy. I was a cereal dieter. I had a pretty clear, you know, I had a pretty clear general idea of what the calorie counts are at McDonald's. And when she said 5,000 calories a day, that was the point where I jumped up and said, something's wrong here. Because to eat 5,000 calories per day at McDonald's, you gotta be trying. And I mean, you gotta be trying hard. And he had established these rules right up front. I'll eat three meals a day. I'll only supersize if they ask me. I'll eat everything on the menu at least once. And he was only asked to supersize nine times. So that's twice a week. And again, you really can't consume 5,000 calories per day at McDonald's unless you're supersizing pretty much every meal and throwing desserts in on top of it. So it became clear to me right away that he never did follow those rules. And, you know, this was a movie promoted as, oh, look what happened to a guy who ate just three meals per day at McDonald's. Well, he didn't eat three meals per day at McDonald's. He might have had three eating sessions at McDonald's, but he was eating the equivalent of five or six meals at McDonald's. Easily.

Interesting. So you're not of the persuasion necessarily that McDonald's is healthy. You're just of the persuasion that the way that he framed why people get fat at fast food restaurants is incorrect.

Yeah, he was shooting at the wrong target. I mean, there are reasons that we've had a rise in obesity and certainly a big rise in diabetes, but it's not because of McDonald's. I didn't bring this up in my film because I wasn't aware of it at the time. But I later saw a study on what people consume and this was. They compared areas where there are a lot of fast food food restaurants to areas where there are not. And one of the things they found, it was pretty clear in the research, was fat. People consume just as many calories overall and just as much sugar and refined carbohydrates and other forms of junk, whether the fast food restaurants are there or not. If the fast food restaurants aren't around, they just buy that stuff at the grocery store, they buy it at convenience stores, they buy it at gas stations. People don't eat sugar because they go to McDonald's. People go to McDonald's because they want to eat the sugar. And if the McDonald's isn't there, they get their sugar fixed somewhere else. So it's just shooting at the wrong target. The fact that fast food restaurants exist is not the problem.

You talk a lot about saturated fat in the movie and you kind of think anti saturated fat campaigns are, I think the way you phrase it, based on lousy science. What do you mean by that exactly?

Well, there's been a lot of lousy science in pushing that whole anti fat hysteria. It really began with a scientist, and we should put scientist in quotes in this case named Ancel Keys, who pretty much decided that saturated fat, that animal fats were causing heart disease. And he did exactly what was it scientists should not do. He came to his conclusion first and then he manipulated his data to support his conclusion. Ancel Keys released a famous study called the Six Countries Study. And he put six countries on a chart and he showed their fat consumption compared to their level of heart disease. And wouldn't you know it, as fat went up, heart disease went up as well in this, you know, almost perfect diagonal line. Well, look at that. This must be the cause. Now, the problem with that was that Ancel Keys had reliable data from 22 countries, but he only chose the six that he could put on a chart and support his hypothesis. If you take all 22 of his of the data points that he had available and you put them on a chart, it looks like a. Looks like somebody shot it with a shotgun. There is no pattern. It's all over the place. So he left out countries where people did not consume much fat, but they had high rates of heart disease. He left out countries where people ate a lot of fat, but they have low rates of heart disease. France would be one of those. Your listeners have probably heard of the French paradox. Well, it's not really a paradox because we see that actually show up in a lot of populations. That's really what got it started. And a lot of scientists criticized him at the time. He really didn't get traction from for a while. But unfortunately he ended up on the board of the American Heart association, which after kind of disputing that idea themselves for many years, they suddenly, because he was on the board, they adopted the idea. They started really pushing the idea that it's fat that causes heart disease and all these other health issues. That was really the first big wave of it. What really I think cemented it in the consciousness of most Americans was a cover story on Time magazine where they had the bacon and eggs on a plate making a frowny face. And they said the bad news, cholesterol really is a killer. Now, if you read that article, and I've dug it up and read it since then, what happened was a cholesterol lowering drug, not a diet. A cholesterol lowering drug was shown to produce a slightly, and I mean slightly lower rate of heart disease in men who had genetically high cholesterol. And from this, the scientists who conducted that study made this wild extrapolation that therefore fat and cholesterol in the diet cause heart disease. Now, I'm sure you can see a lot of problems with that. First off, it's a drug study. We can't make conclusions about diet based on a drug. And second, it was, we were talking about a specific group of men with genetically high cholesterol. People with genetically high cholesterol are somewhat more prone to heart disease, although not as much as many people would think. And also the foods that they put on that Cover bacon and eggs. They really don't raise your cholesterol. So basically, we had this huge series of mistakes, one upon another, that cemented in everyone's mind that these foods cause heart disease and they just don't. One of the reasons that I'm convinced that they don't is if we accept the hypothesis that saturated fats and cholesterol and those type of foods cause heart disease, then cutting them out of your diet should reduce the rate of heart disease. Well, there have actually been several good controlled clinical studies in which researchers did exactly that. They had a control group that ate their normal diet. They had a study group that really restricted their intake of saturated fat and cholesterol. And I mean, in every one of those studies, the whole hypothesis failed. The group that did not, the group that cut back on the saturated fat and cholesterol, did not end up with lower rates of heart disease. In fact, in a couple of studies, they ended up with slightly higher rates of heart disease. That alone should have killed this whole theory, but unfortunately, by then, so many people were invested in it that it's kind of like the bat theory that won't die.

Now, you go on later on to talk about the obesity epidemic, and actually you describe it as being exaggerated. Exaggerated by the cdc. What do you mean by that exactly?

Well, by exaggerated, I'm not saying that we have not seen a rise in obesity. You can go to any airport or public street and. And you know that there has been a rise in obesity. But what I'm saying is they have for their own reasons, which we can come back to, they've blown it up bigger than it is. I came across some figures a while back, you know, some survey figures on how many people are at their ideal bmi, and if they're not, how far away are they from their ideal bmi? Well, first off, the bmi, the body mass index, is a really lousy way of measuring obesity because the body mass index is nothing more than a comparison of your height and weight. It says absolutely nothing about how fat you are. According to the BMI index. Brad Pitt is overweight. George Clooney is overweight. Tim Tebow, the quarterback on the Broncos, is over obese. Mel Gibson is obese. They're categorized as obese because they have a lot of muscle, and therefore their height to weight ratio says they're obese. So really, we should not be using BMI in the first place to be considered normal weight according to the BMI measurement. You don't have to just be not fat. You have to actually be thin. And I mean thin as in not carrying around a lot of muscle. That scale was developed, I don't remember how far back, but I think it was at least 100 years ago. This was back before people had, you know, fairly easy, affordable access to protein foods. It was before people started lifting weights. It was before gyms and health clubs and nautilus machines and all that. I think for one thing, people just in general did not have as much muscle as we tend to see on people today. So of course, people today, even if they're not fatter, are going to bethey're going to have higher BMIs, because we see a lot more people walking around these days who work out and have decent muscle tone. Now, even if we accept that the BMI is a legitimate measurement, I mean, I don't. But even if we accept it, the reason I say it's exaggerated is how many times have you heard that I. Two thirds of Americans are overweight and like a third are obese. You've probably heard that figure over and over, right?

Yeah, exactly.

All right, so let's look at that compared to bmi. If we actually look at where the population stands in relationship to bmi, the figures I dug up. Let me look over here and check them. About 18% are considered at ideal weight. There's another 20% who are considered below that. 24% of the people that we call overweight are within 10 pounds of what BMI would consider normal weight, 10 pounds. So that's a little bit of muscle, maybe a slight belly, but all of a sudden that puts you in the overweight category. And if you add up the people who are more than that, there's only 6% of the population that's, yeah, 6%, that's 50 pounds overweight and only 17% who are somewhere between 20 and 50 pounds overweight. When you add up the figures, what you get is 62% of our population is at or below their normal weight. What's considered normal weight? So that's why I say it's exaggerated.

Now, in your opinion, do you think that something like a body fat percentage measurement is better or a strict weight measurement or a weight height ratio, or do you have measurements that you feel would be better than a bmi?

Yeah, I'm not sure we need to do those measurements at all. Most people can look in the mirror and see how much fat they have hanging from them. But if we were going to do that, it should be some kind of measurement of body fat. You know, we end up with Schools now, and this just drives me out of my gourd. A lot of school systems now are checking kids BMW BMIs and then reporting them to the parents. Well, kids go through these crazy growth spurts. It's not unusual at all for kids to get thicker before they get taller. That's the body preparing to get taller. So you're going to have all these parents getting these scary letters from the school saying your child's BMI is too high. And, you know, these might be kids who really aren't fat. Some of them may not have any fat on them, you know, to speak of it all. So I think the BMI measurement needs to just go away. It's really not useful. If we're going to measure anything, we should be measuring body fat. And another point I made in the film is body fat. It's kind of an indicator of your health, but it's really not a perfect one. I'm not even sure it's a very good one. There are an awful lot of people walking around who have a little belly, but their health is fine. I found out while shooting Fathead that I was an example of that conversation with my doctor kind of went along the lines of, your blood pressure's great, your cholesterol's good, your HDL is outstanding, your triglycerides are low, your pulse is good, everything's good. By the way, you need to lose weight. And at the end of that conversation, you want to kind of look at them and go, why? What's the problem? You just told me I'm in excellent health. There are also plenty of thin people walking around who are in terrible. And there are a lot of thin people walking around who are type two diabetics. So I'm not even sure fat is where we should be focusing our efforts. If we're going to solve the problems that are turning us into a society full of sick people, we should be focusing on blood sugar. That is really where our health problems to a large extent begin.

Yeah, it's a very good point. It's kind of a. Kind of a fight almost between health and what seems to be cultural perceptions of what is, you know, what is beautiful or what is aesthetic or what is considered to be a nice body. I think a lot of people assume that that's also healthy when in many cases it's healthier to be slightly overweight.

Yeah, that's actually another interesting thing came out in the. When I was digging up research for the film, people who are considered slightly overweight, they actually have longer lifespans so, you know, we can't just say thin is, is healthy. I think trying to lose weight if you're overweight is a good goal, partly because if you really pay attention to what makes you fat, the sugars, the refined carbohydrates, and the other junk foods, then merely trying to lose weight, even if you're not entirely successful and you don't end up, you know, becoming a bathing beauty, but just by virtue of cutting those foods out of your diet in the attempt to lose weight, you will be healthier. And aesthetics aside, part of the reason, I think that there's been this push by the CDC to declare so many people obese. Unfortunately, if you look at the people in government who have been sounding the alarm on this, a lot of them have consulting contracts with pharmaceutical companies. They want obesity to be classified as a disease, because once it's classified as a disease, it will now be covered by insurance, which means people can get coverage for their weight loss drugs. And the pharmaceutical companies will be able to sell a lot more drugs. So I'm kind of suspicious as to why they want to take what is a problem, but blow it up to seem a lot bigger than it is.

Yeah, well, in Fathead, you actually made some pretty significant dietary adjustments to your own diet. And before we talk a little bit about that, because that was really interesting, if you look at the way that we're encouraged to eat quite a bit these days, which is in particular kind of low fat, what are some of the problems that you've personally found with that dietary approach or observing with that dietary approach in some of the research and the studies that you did, whether for the movie or since there's a.

Lot of problems with telling people to go on low fat diets, to me, the biggest problem is that our two sources of energy are fats and carbohydrates. If you cut the fat out of your diet, you now have to seek another source of energy, which is going to be carbohydrates. Now, if everybody who did that filled up on natural foods like sweet potatoes and low sugar fruits instead of the fat, then maybe they wouldn't have a problem. But what we've been told, if you look at the food pyramid, is that we should get 6 to 11 servings per day of grains. And even with this new MyPlate thing they've come out with, and with the new dietary guidelines, they're now telling people to get half their grains as whole grains and the other half as enriched grains. Well, for all kinds of reasons, having to do with health and how we process grains, I don't think people should be eating grains at all. It really doesn't make that big of a difference if they're whole grains or enriched grains. So by telling people to go on low fat diets, we also, we. Well, I was going to say inadvertently, but it wasn't inadvertent. We also at the same time told people to start filling up on carbohydrates, which we did. If you look at the composition of the American diet since 1977, when the USDA first started putting out guidelines, the one macronutrient in our diets that has gone up, and it's the only one that's gone up is carbohydrate intake. It's gone up quite a bit. And it's in my mind no coincidence that it's since then that we started seeing a rise in obesity and especially a rise in diabetes, because if you load up on those carbohydrates, you are risking diabetes. That's the first problem. Too many carbs. The second problem is, despite what most people have heard, fat is a very important nutrient, especially natural saturated fats, the kind of fats that we have been consuming for literally hundreds of thousands of years. Saturated fats are important for making a whole lot of hormones, including hormones that have to do with your mood, your ability to concentrate, just your ability to just feel good overall. So we've removed from the diet a lot of fats that are actually good for our brains. And I think that combined with the increase in refined carbohydrates is why we have so many kids these days who end up taking drugs for add. They are not feeding themselves in a way that's good for their brains.

Yeah, I think the link between fat and neural function is huge. And I think we're going to find a lot more, especially in kids, on that in years to come. So it's interesting.

Well, I think 20 or 30 years from now, and I hope it's no later than that, we're going to be looking back on this whole low fat diet push. You know, the way we look back on bleeding, the patients. You know, 200 years ago it was a huge mistake that a lot of people, people believed in, but scientifically it's just not correct.

Yeah, yeah. My kids have been taking fat supplements and eating a higher fat diet since they were born. And I think it's made it excellent, excellent. So in Fathead, speaking of fat intake, you actually switch yourself to a really high fat intake diet, about 50%, I believe, or a little more. And you, in terms of that diet, how much of that was actually saturated fat? And then as you went through that, what did you observe in terms of not just your weight, but your health markers and the way that you felt?

Yeah, it was a little over 50% fat by calories. And I believe it came out to being just about 23% saturated fat. So that. Well, previous guidelines, that would have been twice as much saturated fat as the USDA tells us we should eat. They've released new guidelines now cutting it to 7%. So that was, by today's guidelines, would be triple what the USDA recommends for saturated fat intake. The only health outcome of that diet was I lost weight. I felt pretty decent. The one negative was that my HDL went down. Now, that was not from consuming saturated fat, because saturated fat actually tends to raise your hdl. However, at the time I did that diet, I did have some french fries. I ate a fair amount of fried chicken since I was eating in fast food restaurants. That was back during the days when fast food restaurants were still frying food in trans fats and trans fats lower your HDL. So the 1:1 negative marker that showed up on my labs was that my HDL went down as soon as that diet was over. I went on a saturated fat pig out diet where I was eating a lot of saturated fat, but no trans fats, no vegetable oils, no fake foods. And, you know, my HDL shot up. It shot up higher than it was before.

Wow, interesting. So have you changed that diet since the movie? Have you. Have you kind of switched things up at all?

Yeah, the diet's been sort of a journey. Obviously, you know, the movie diet was just the movie diet, you know, that was all fast food for 28 days. I never intended to stick with that. That was an experiment for the sake of the film. You know, partly as my response to Super Size me, showing that eating fast food does not have to screw up your health if you make intelligent choices after that was over. At the time, I was just kind of interested in staying low carb. So basically, if it had carbs, if it had a lot of carbs, I didn't eat it. If it fit within my daily carb allowance, I did. That's kind of where I was at. As I learned more about diet, and especially as I started looking more into the whole paleo diet idea, I started examining what I was eating when my focus was just on low carb and I realized I was eating a fair amount of what I now think of as Low carb junk foods. I would occasionally have low carb pasta. Well, I looked at the label. It was one of the primary ingredients was soy flour. Well, I don't think soy is good for you now. And I was eating some of the low carb candy bars with the sugar alcohols and I was even eating some low carb cereal for a while. I eventually decided the idea of a low carb diet should not be to find processed low carb foods to serve as substitutes for your usual high carb foods. It really should be about a change in diet, heading back toward a more whole foods diet, trying to eat foods closer to their natural state. So really that's where I've ended up now.

So do you still go to fast food restaurants?

Well, I do once in a while. It's not any kind of big part of my life. If we're running around doing errands and it gets to be lunchtime and we're hungry, yeah, we'll stop at McDonald's. In that case, I'll do what I did in the film. I'll get a couple of the $1 double cheeseburgers. I'll throw away the buns. But most, we probably eat 95% of our meals at home.

Aside from McDonald's, were there any during the movie or any other times, any other fast food restaurants that you kind of frequent and that you have meals that you think would be better at those restaurants?

Well, during the. I didn't eat all McDonald's. During Fathead, I hit a variety of fast food restaurants. It was still mostly McDonald's. Without pulling out my food log, I would guess I probably ate 2/3 of my meals at McDonald's. But I also ate Del T, Taco, Taco Bell, Popeyes, Chicken, kfc. I think I might have hit Burger King and Jack in the Box a couple of times in there. You know, as far as fast food now, I did find that if you go to a Boston Market, and I don't know if everybody would consider that fast food, but you know, you walk to the counter and you walk away with a tray. So I consider it fast food. Boston Market was pretty good because it was easy to go in there and get slices of roast beef or turkey or ham, a side of spinach, a side of green beans, and that's actually a pretty healthy meal when I want something quick. Now if I don't want to go to McDonald's or whatever, we have one of these fast food Greek places nearby, I'll go there and I'll get gyros on a salad and I basically have a gyro salad. It's a pretty good, reasonably healthy meal, not high in carbohydrates.

Cool.

I like it.

So as far as Fathead goes, I now know that people are on the edge of their seats wanting to watch it. And I watched it on Netflix personally, but where else can folks see it?

If they have Netflix Instant Play, then yeah, they can do what you did. I'd recommend for those who have it, they go there first because you get to see it commercial free on Netflix. You get to see it blown up all nice and big. You know, if you have a big screen tv, that's certainly a good place to watch it. For those who don't, it's available for free on Hulu. In fact, it's done quite well on Hulu. A while back it reached number one in documentaries on Hulu and for about a week it was actually the third most watched movie in any category on Hulu. So we were very excited about that. That's the easy way to go out online and watch it for free. You know, we also sell a DVD if they go to my blog. Do you mind if I give the address?

Yeah, go for it.

Okay. Shameless self promotion here. Www.fathead that's one word. Fathead movie.com we sell the DVD version there. The advantage of the DVD is that there are bonus tracks. So in addition to to the movie, there's about 40 minutes of extra interview footage with my on camera experts. Things that I found really interesting that just didn't fit into the timeline of the film. So you get a lot more information from them. There's also a one hour speech I gave called Big Fat Fiasco where I just kind of show how this whole saturated fat theory came along and where it's gotten us.

Cool. Yeah, it's got a lot of eye candy too. It's a visually entertaining movie, so. So I liked it. Good job. And folks, I'll put a link to all that stuff in the show notes for this podcast as well. This will be podcast number 167 over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Tom, thank you so much for your time and going into some of the basis for the movie and sharing what you learned and I really encourage people to go check out the movie.

Thanks for having me on, Ben. I really appreciate it.

Alright folks. Hey, sorry about that slight buzz during that interview. I'm not quite sure what that was. I think it may have been the style of headphones that I was wearing. My apologies. That won't happen again in the future. Anyways, I will put a link to Fathead the movie in the show notes and I really do think it was, it was quite entertaining. And even if you're already convinced that that is good and that we've been a bit little, little bit brainwashed when it comes to low fat diets, grab the movie and give it to somebody you want to convince because it will probably do a better job of convincing them than you just calling them on the phone and telling them to eat more fat. So I'll put a link to that movie in the show notes and also a link to everything that I talked about today, including the live seminar that I'm going to be doing two weeks from now on Wednesday, October 2nd, where you can ask all your questions about the things that I offer in terms of my personal nutrition and fitness consulting services. I will also put a link to the Podcast Award so you can go vote@podcastawards.com and folks, continue on Twitter. If you have a podcast guest that you'd like to recommend, go to Twitter and simply recommend it to N. Greenfield. Recommend him or her Tongreenfield and use Podcast Guests hashtag Podcast Guest. I love to talk to the folks that you want to hear from, so be sure to do that. And finally, if you have any questions, comments or feedback about things that you heard today, go to the Show Notes for this episode, episode number one six seven BenGreenfieldFitness.com and leave your question while you're there. If you're able to leave a quick donation so that I can help to that you you can help me to pay for this show, the downloads and the hosting fees. So that being said, thank you so much for listening. Thanks for your support. And this is Ben from BenGreenfieldFitness.com signing out.