Episode #173: Double Interview Super-Special with Tim Noakes: How To Use Your “Central Governor” and Electrolytes During Exercise.

In this podcast, while Ben is away, the sidekick will play you a couple of the most popular interviews from the archives featuring Dr. Tim Noakes.

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Hey there folks. Brock here. Today we bring you two the most popular interviews from the Ben Greenfield Fitness archives. Both of them are with Dr. Tim Noakes. And we're doing this because Ben is still off in Thailand or he's somewhere in between Thailand and the USA trying to make his way home from the Asia Pacific 70.3 World Championships race. And for those of you who haven't heard yet, Ben had a bit of an interesting time while he was in Thailand. Not exactly what he had in mind, but he's kept it interesting. Here's an excerpt for him from his race report that he put up on his website the other day. He says, two weeks prior to the race I had a nasty fall on the ice during a cold weather run and tweaked my it band. Within just a few days I was back training but not about to go and do any hard 40 to 50 mile bike rides to see if the knee would be good enough for Phuket. I just had to have faith that the knee would handle the load on race day. Then just two days prior to the race, in one of the multitude of restaurants I dined at, I got a bad batch of food and it left me sleepless and pooing my guts until race morning. So yeah, I don't think that's exactly what Ben had in mind, but he made the best of it. It sounds like he had a pretty good time anyway and he'll be back next week to do the show as Norma. So here I'm just going to cover a few special announcements. Special announcements. Awesome. Okay, special announcements. There's some cool new articles up@BenGreenfieldFitness.com this week. The first one is how to Get Legs Like Lance Armstrong. Everybody wants to have legs like Lance, right? So that's a great article to take a look at. And the second one is the four Fat Burning Functional Exercise Circuits to do Next time you need a Fast fresh new workout. And once again, who doesn't need a fast, fresh new workout? I know I do and also don't forget that Ben's book Weight Training for Triathlon the Ultimate Guide is taking Apple itunes, Barnes and Noble, Nook and Amazon Kindle by storm and it's a top seller in each of them. So if you haven't grabbed a copy yet, head over to the show notes and you can find the link to find this essential off training tool. Now on to the news flashes. Okay, lots of stuff going on in the news flashes today. And if you want to get news flashes right from Ben right when they're fresh off the press, just follow Ben Greenfield on twitter@www.twitter.com BenGreenfield now if you want to just get a taste of what he's been talking about lately. Some of the recent articles that Ben has tweeted about include exercise kills more firefighters than fires, a reason to introduce good nutrition to firehouses. Another one was cigarettes can improve running performance and caffeine gives you cancer. Now there's a little smiley face at the end of that one, so I think you need to go and check that out. There's an interesting study that compression socks help during recovery phases of an interval workout. And there was one more. It said protein rich meals are better than sugar rich meals at improving wakefulness. So those are all awesome. If you go down to go over to Twitter and follow Ben, you'll find all the links to all of those studies and I'm sure he'll be really happy to talk about those next week when he's back on the show. So now on to the featured topic. Featured Topic okay, so like I said, we're featuring a couple of interviews from the Ben Greenfield Fitness archives. Both of them are with Dr. Tim Noakes, who is an amazing fellow. The first one is called how can you use the central governor to tap into your muscles hidden potential. And the second one is the death of Gatorade, should you stop using electrolytes during exercise. I've listened to both of these. I think they're fantastic. The one about electrolytes especially, I think it was pretty groundbreaking, pretty interesting stuff. So let's get right into it. In this first interview with Dr. Tim Noakes, he's again, an amazing guy who's written a multitude of books on physiology, including the ubiquitous lore of running. And in this interview, Ben talks to Dr. Noakes about the central governor theory and asks him to describe the central governor model, asks him what the examples of the model are in sports today. And in consideration of this model, how can athletes advantageously modify their training and racing protocols? And also what type of research are you doing now on this subject? This is an awesome interview for anyone who wants to learn how to exercise harder, longer, faster, and using the principles of the central governor theory. So here it is, folks.

This is Ben Greenfield, and as promised, I am here with Dr. Timothy Noakes, who is in South Africa, professor of Exercise and Sports science at the University of Cape Town. The man himself has multiple studies and multiple books to his name, the most popular being the running book called the Lore of Running, which is one of the most comprehensive guides to that particular sport that you will ever find. And he himself has run more than 70 marathons and ultra marathons. So, very accomplished Author and athlete, Dr. Noakes, thank you for for coming on the call today.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Ben, one of the things that you are most well known for or that seems to be popping up more and more in the news these days is something called the central governor model. Can you describe what the central governor model actually is?

Yes, Ben. The basic philosophy behind the central governor model is that the body's function and performance during exercise is a regulated process. This conflicts with the traditional explanation, which is that the body has certain limitations and then when you exceed those limitations, the system fails and you get tired. As a consequence, you stop running. Now, the reality is that the human body could not be designed in that way. We couldn't run to the point where catastrophe occurs and then we stop. Because in evolution, in terms we wouldn't have got to where we are today. There has to be a control mechanism. Over a period of about 20 years research, it slowly dawned on me that the old limitations model simply didn't work, that humans don't run to the point of failure. The brain anticipates what's going to happen in the future and sets up a pacing strategy that allows you to get to the finish of whatever you're doing, be it a training session or a race, still in perfect health and good condition. Essentially, what the central governance model says is that the brain regulates all performances to ensure that you get to the finish line in homeostasis. That means with the bodily systems order, balance and before there's a catastrophic failure. That conflicts absolutely with the traditional explanation, which is a brainless model, which is that you exercise to the point where the system breaks down and then you stop. And that, as I've indicated, is a brainless model.

This brainless model. If I could interrupt briefly, why does the brainless model propose that people become fatigued during exercise? How would that model propose that fatigue occurs?

Well, what that model says is that there's some limiting condition or limiting factor in exercise. So, for example, if we put you on a treadmill and make you run faster and faster and faster, or, for example, we have you run 400 meters or 800 meters, the reason why you stop is because you run out of oxygen supply to the muscles, and the muscles become anaerobic and as a consequence produce lactic acid. The lactic acid then impairs the function of the muscle, causing fatigue, and so you stop. Or conversely, when you're running a marathon, you hit the wall when you run out of glycogen, so that the system has no anticipatory control, and it allows you to run as hard as you can until the system fails. So then. So what physiologists have spent the last 50 or 80 years doing is trying to define what's the limiting factor under all conditions. And they've never included the brain or very seldom included the brain. So it's always some other biological process in the body which doesn't include the function of the brain.

Now, to me, it does seem to make a little bit of sense what you're proposing, because in other situations, it does seem like the body will protect the brain with something like, say, hypoglycemia. The way that I understand is the body will kind of shove glucose over to the brain, with the brain being the preferential organ. How does the body actually work in the sense of regulating exercise when it comes to the brain? I mean, what goes on, on the neural level to actually hold you back from complete fatigue during exercise?

Great question. I would frame it slightly differently. The brain is there to protect itself, and at the same time, it protects the body. Because if the body breaks down, the brain breaks down. So the brain is incredibly selfish and looks after itself. But now, let's take the examples that when you're exercising and you were at risk of running out of oxygen to the muscles, at the same time, the brain is getting a blood supply and it's also getting oxygenated. And the brain will make sure that it doesn't itself doesn't run out of oxygen. So we think that perhaps during maximum exercise, what the brain is actually sensing is its own blood and oxygen supply. And it protects that. Absolutely. Now, how does it protect it? Well, it protects it by only recruiting or activating a certain mass of muscle. Now, what no one ever tells you is that to run faster, the first thing that happens is the brain must activate a larger muscle mass. Then the heart comes along and pumps more oxygen to the muscles. But no one ever tells you that the reason why Haile Gebre Selassie is such a good runner is because he recruits better muscle and perhaps more muscle than anyone else in the world. They say, oh, but it's because he transported more oxygen. Of course he does. But that's not the cause, that's a consequence. And the cause is the brain activates the muscles. Everyone knows that if you want to lift a heavy weight, you must activate more muscle. And eventually the brain says, hold on, you can't activate more muscle because if you do, you're going to rupture a muscle or you're going to break the bones. And it says, no, you can't recruit more muscle. Exactly the same in running to run faster, you recruit more muscle up to a point at which recruiting more muscle will threaten the brain and the rest of the body and will cause damage. The brain says, hold, I'll just finish that. So what the brain says is, hold on. If you activate this much muscle for this long, something's going to go wrong. So we won't allow that to happen. That's the way the brain protects itself and the rest of the body from damage.

Now, I know that many people believe that the heart is kind of the big important organ of the body. It sounds like you're kind of saying that the brain predominates. But I believe that many people think that the idea of fatigue occurs with the heart rate getting very high and then being unable to deliver oxygen to the muscles. How does that philosophy jive with the central governor model that you've described?

Well, absolutely, you have to protect the heart, and the heart is at great risk. And in fact, it's one of the best ways of disproving the other model that if the heart ever were to reach a limit, in other words, it can't pump any more blood or at a faster rate to the muscles. In fact, the first muscle to be affected would be the heart itself. The heart cannot ever reach a maximum output or else the heart will suffer and you will die as a consequence. And we see that every few weeks, a patient with heart disease exercises to the point where they overstress the heart. There's not enough blood getting to the heart, and they die as a consequence. They don't die because there's not enough blood getting to the muscles. They die because there's not enough blood getting to the heart, the heart. So the brain would never, ever, ever allow the heart to reach its maximum capacity, otherwise you would die. So that's one of the protective mechanisms. But of course, everyone knows that when you run a marathon, you don't run at a maximum cardiac output and you don't run at a maximum heart rate, you run at submaximal values. How could anyone ever say that the heart limits performance during more endurance type exercise? So what we believe, we believe that the sensations of fatigue are utterly, completely unrelated to what's going on in the rest of the body. All they there tells you how close you are to the finish, that's clear. The sensations of discomfort and fatigue rise as a linear function of how close you are to the finish. And it starts right from the start of exit. And that in a sense tells us that the brain already knows when it's going to stop you, almost as it starts. And if something occurs during the activity that is going to make it more difficult for you to finish, your fatigue sensation will rise and you will slow down as a consequence.

Now. Oh, go ahead.

So we don't see fatigue as a physical phenomenon, we see it purely as an emotion. And that's one of the great benefits of this model because it tells you however bad you feel, it's actually just your brain playing a trick on you and trying to make sure that you don't damage yourself. Once you understand that, it becomes so much easier to exercise, in my view, and certainly helped my career a bit late to become a good runner. But certainly I find it much easier to train and to compete knowing that the sensations, I'm actually generating that sensation to try to fool myself and I should perhaps try to control them and then I will be able to run faster.

So when we look at this from a training perspective, obviously we don't want to completely neglect doing things like training our body to have more muscular endurance, because I don't think you're saying that you don't need to train. But would training based on this model only involve some type of mental or emotional training? Or do you actually also try to train to help your body to recruit more muscles so that the brain fatigues less quickly, or both?

Absolutely. I think that the great coaches have always known that they're really training the brain, not the body. But maybe they haven't put it that way. And so they use all these techniques that will make you believe you can do a little bit more than you thought when you started. Someone described coaching as merely putting someone in another zone of effort that they didn't believe they could achieve. But that's what you do. You keep pushing them harder and harder and you slowly tell the brain that actually can do these things. So that's the focus on training. And, and we do it all the time. If we're training for a marathon, we slowly increase the distance until eventually we believe we can do it. And once you've got the self belief that you can do it, then it happens.

Do you believe that a greater amount of intensity or a greater amount of volume is best for helping to reduce this central governor fatigue that you've described?

I think intensity is the key. And if you look back in law of running, I think that the great runners were the ones who trained at the highest intensity. It wasn't the ones who did the most volume.

And why is that?

Because I think they teach themselves. They teach the brain that it can cope with the extra effort and that they slowly get their sensations of fatigue slightly less. I have a lovely story. One of the things that the governor predicted is that if you have a running race or any particular race and the distance between the first and the second runners is inches or a few feet, then it's clear that the second runner chose to lose. He chose to come second. People said, but how do you know that? And it's simple. The athlete didn't die. And our model tells us that he had reserve. So why couldn't he activate that reserve and kill himself? And the answer is because the brain said no. But why does the brain say no? And the brain says no because under those circumstances the athlete couldn't convince himself that it was important to hurt even more, to be so that they produce more discomfort than actually they need and they accept coming second.

Interesting.

The winner does the opposite. Now what we used to say is the guy who comes second hasn't trained hard enough and therefore he's got too much lactic acid and his heart's not pumping enough oxygen and so on and so forth. So what do you do? You go and train the guy harder when that's not. You gotta understand why did that guy accept coming second? What was it in his makeup that came from his childhood and his training and how he sees himself that caused him to become second? And that's the real question. Because it's not training and it's not physiology that makes you come second under those circumstances. It's a mental choice you make probably at a subconscious level. I've got many videos where the moment of truth, that's the key in the sporting event, the moment of truth. What is the guy thinking when he quits or he wins? And the difference is that the guy who loses says, I can't do it and then they can't do it. Whereas the winner says I can do it and then they do it. What determines that is the key to superior performance when it comes to recruiting.

These motor units and teaching your body how to neurally activate more muscles in training so that perhaps you may be able to go a little bit harder or a little bit longer during the race. Do you think that athletes who are training in a fatigued state, or say an endurance athlete would be a perfect example who's pushing themselves every day, is actually holding themselves back in terms of allowing their body to be in a state to actually recruit as many muscles as possible during the training session for the day?

Absolutely. So that the intensity comes down. And the intensity is the key, in my view, because that teaches the brain that it can go a bit harder. And so I'm not suggesting that you can ever do away with distance training, but if you read, as I said, the great runners are the ones who did the high intensity training and they did enough endurance training, but not too much. And I think that the average runner, and I'm the classic example of the average runner in my career, I also thought that you can get away with just your endurance training, which, because I think a lot of athletes train to train that actually don't train to race. And it's very few athletes who really train to race. Most of us love racing because it gives us an excuse to train. We train and train and train and it's much easier to train with your friends and talk to them and chat and so on and so forth and not to do the intense training. But if you want to change how your brain functions, I think you have to do a good proportion must be at a high intensity. And when we studied the best South African runners, the black runners in South Africa, they were training at a much higher intensity than the sort of second run of athletes.

Interesting.

I think if you.

And if you look at the Kenyans, it's the same. They have a different attitude and they push the high intensity.

In a moment, I want to ask you about good mental tricks that you can use during the race to take advantage of something like this. But just on a personal note and on a coaching note, one of the things that I found to really help my running that I literally changed this year was I switched two kind of longer one hour runs that I went on during the week to 10 by 10 treadmill sprints for 20 to 30 seconds. And I actually gained speed and gained endurance. And it seems that the athletes who I Coach who limit their volume and when they get more time, they go harder instead of going longer, seem to do better. So it's interesting, a lot of that seems to jive with what you're saying now during the race. Once you get to the race and you are in the pain cave, are there things that you can do to actually get your central governor to shut down a little less quickly?

Well, two weeks ago, I was with Rouen Larsen, who has won the Spartathlon three times and done many. He ran across America, for example. So he's a Swedish ultra marathon runner. He's in fact also rode across the Atlantic. And when people said, now tell me why did he do it? He said, you know, he's a 218 marathon. There are many 218 marathon runners who haven't achieved what he's achieved. I said it's because his brain's different and his brain sees things slightly differently than the rest of us. And I'm not sure quite what those differences are, but when they get discomfort, I don't think they see it as pain and discomfort in the same way that others might. They see it as a challenge that this is a feature of the sport. You get sore, but you carry on. So that's what I think you have to see that pain is. It's going to be absolutely individual. No one has ever really studied how do I feel pain and how do you feel pain? When we've run three quarters of a marathon, is it the same? Do we conceptualize it equally? What the central governor says is that it's your unique brain which is producing unique symptoms in you, and you need to learn how to cope with those, those symptoms. And your brain will do it slightly differently than my brain will do it. And I suspect that the best runners have got a different way of handling that discomfort. So I don't know what the answers are, but all I can say is that if you realize it's your brain playing a trick on you and you start talking to yourself in those contexts, I think it gets easier to handle and better because now you can understand what's actually going on. The only reason you're feeling fatigued is because your brain is trying to make sure you don't damage yourself. Rather than, I'm at the wall and I'm limited and my muscles are going to break down the next second if I carry on. No, no. The answer is you can still go faster, but you can only go faster if you can control your thought, thinking process. And so again, I mean, the beauty of Running is that it's all about emotional control and mental control. That's why we love it.

Interesting.

All we're adding is a dimension to that emotional control.

Okay, gotcha. Well, I've got just a couple more questions for you. The first is kind of interesting. Do you actually do anything like lifting weights or resistance training to improve neural activation or recruitment of more of your motor units for endurance training?

Okay. I don't personally, but I absolutely believe you should. So let's now get back to what makes a great runner. So what makes a great runner is they have incredibly powerful calf and lower limb muscles. If you don't have powerful muscles, you can't run fast. No one has ever said that, I'm sure on your show I always say you have to have a high cardiac calculate. Nonsense. You first must have these incredibly powerful muscles that can drive you off the ground, because the limiting factor in running is your contact time. The foot's on the ground. So to be a great runner, your foot must never, ever, ever be on the ground. It must be on the ground for a millisecond and then it must shoot you off the ground and propel you through space. So the great runners, their feet are never on the ground, and when they're on the ground, they're on the ground, for instance. And so your, your peak speed is determined by how, by how much you can reduce your contact time. To have a short contact time, you have to have incredibly powerful muscles now, but in addition, if you have incredibly powerful muscles but the rest of the system doesn't work, so that when you activate too much muscle, you threaten the homeostasis of your heart or your lungs or whatever, or your muscles, muscles. You're not going to run fast, so that's not going to help. You have to have everything in sync, but ultimately you've got to have very strong muscles. And so you must also develop the strength of the muscles. And my colleagues, Dr. Nimela and Dr. Pavlova, sorry, Pavlovian, from Finland, have done many studies showing that weight training and specific eccentric training of the lower limb does improve your running performance. So, yes, you have to have a great cardiovascular system, but if you don't have the muscles to power you to run through space, you're not going to run fast.

Interesting.

And people make a mistake because they look at a Kenyan's front leg and they see it's so small and it's so lean and that can't be powerful. Those muscles are in and they can produce enormous forces. And without that, you can't run fast.

What type of research is going on right now in this area? Is there anything that's cutting edge or new or anything that you're involved in that you want to tell people about?

Yeah, we're doing brain imaging studies and these are very difficult to do for a number of reasons. And firstly, the equipment's expensive and so on. But so what we do is secondly, the brain moves, so the head moves and you've got to stop the head movement to get the imaging of what structures in the brain are active. And we spent the last year developing a system where we can get people to cycle to their maximum whilst keeping their head still. You know that sounds silly, but in the equipment that we use, it's really difficult. We're about to embark on that study and what we hope to show is which parts of the brain become active. And we hope to show that the sensory parts become active and that they become more active the harder you exercise and that it's these sensory parts that are inhibiting the motor parts. So in the past people have looked only at the motor components and say, okay, as you run faster, you're recruiting more muscle because the motor parts of the brain are active. We're trying to look at which parts of the sensory control mechanisms.

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what actually goes on with that. This is fascinating, a fascinating topic, fascinating area of research. Dr. Noakes, I know you have a lecture to head off to, so I'd like to thank you for coming onto the call today and sharing some of this research and this central governor model with us.

It's been a great pleasure, Ben, and I must tell you, I'm just going to speak to one of the local state rugby teams. Rugby, of course is our game, not American football by the way. We just praise American football. To me it's the greatest and most complex sport in the world. Greatest coaches, greatest athletes. And we just study everything you guys do and try to apply it to our game. But anyway, the point is I'm going to speak to these guys about self belief and how self belief is so critical in determining the outcome.

Self belief is so critical in determining.

Their what to determining the outcome. Even in team or like. Of course American coaches understand that, but we kind of haven't learned that yet in South Africa. But that's the message and that's what I come to believe from looking at how the brain regulates exercise performance.

So big transfer over from your research into not just endurance sports but also some of these team sports.

Absolutely. And the Video clips I have are of Michael Phelps swimming and Jason lisak Swimming the 4x100 and swimming part of his socks on one particular day. And you can't explain it, how he does it, but his performance went up like about 5% in the final 100 meters. And it's just astonishing. And it had to be in his brain, nowhere else.

Wow.

Well, Dr. Noakes, thank you for your time today.

I'm pleasuring on your show.

All right, goodbye.

Bye.

Bye.

And now, in the second interview, Ben talks to Dr. Noakes about hydration and electrolytes. What you're going to find out in this interview with Dr. Notes might shock you, unless, of course, you've heard this interview before. Then it'll just serve as a reminder that what we've been told for years about electrolytes may not be entirely based in science. So here we go.

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 one 38, 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. 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 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, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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. So 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. So, I mean, isn't there still a huge risk of dehydration, though? I mean, 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 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 bigger. And over the Next, up till 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. And I don't want to make too many contentious statements and go to jail, but in my view, what happened was that they developed a thing called the science of hydration. The industry developed a 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 thirsty. So if I go out and drink and I reverse my thirst, I am not by definition dehydrated. So 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 wasn't a major achievement. So then they said that whenever you collapse, you dehydrate them. And 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 the 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.

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 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, of what most people can safely drink. And thereafter, this condition of hyponatremia became epidemic throughout the North America 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, if 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'd 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 ask you a question 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 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 analyzed all the studies that have currently been done in the laboratory trials. They showed that if you drink either ahead of thirst or below thirst, you form 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 once have edema of their legs to carry extra weight that they don't need at the end of the 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 races. 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's this 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 less than the 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 for 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 sweater. 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 them 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 you can get the salt concentration of your sweat almost down to nothing, and the salt concentration of urine almost down to nothing if you have to. And so 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. So my point is that it's impossible to become salt deficient in society as it is today. There's just too much salt.

What about people who are on like. Because this is really popular now, it's getting more popular among endurance athletes, this Paleo diet or eating only. Another popular one is doing 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 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 orally 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 a 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, right? It's 10 grams. So wouldn't you just kind of like run out of salt at about, you know, five or six hours?

Yeah, I just laugh when I. 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 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. And they. 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. 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, 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 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 adaptations. You have to adapt slightly back before you can do that. Now for example, you're quite right because there's 100 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. So 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 and I would not advise them to stop it immediately and continue and suddenly race without it. You have to do it slowly because we don't know what the body will do in the interim.

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 vitamins, sorry 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 to date 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?

I mean that's been done, that's been done since 1900. I mean 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 and 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 for 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 Kahn, it was about three days. Within three days, you will be conserving sodium. In other words, your excretion of sodium in sweat and urine will go down and it will stabilize at the new level. So within three days, you will be perfectly normal again. Okay, let's talk about placebos. You see, the problem is, if you believe that the sodium is going to make a difference, it'll make a 2% difference. And so 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, 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 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, you know, 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. It's only if you are hypertensive or at risk of having high blood pressure that A high sodium intake is probably, 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, I've written a book about this whole story about the fluid and the sodiums and it'll be coming out in, 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 the 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 those 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.

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 of, 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. 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 the Show Notes for this podcast episode with Dr. Noakes, and you can leave your. 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. Nokes, 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 on. 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.

All right, thanks, Dr. Noakes.

Awesome. So the podcast will be back next week with the one and only Ben Greenfield back at the podium here, and there'll be tons and tons and likely tons of your Q and A's just to make up for the lack of them this week. So until then, have a great week. Make sure to pop by BenGreenfieldFitness.com to leave any comments or ask any questions you have about either of the topics that Dr. Noakes covered in the interviews. And yeah, have a great week preparing for the holiday season. This is Brock signing out.