Episode #176: The Shocking Truth About Wheat

In this podcast, the Shocking Truth about wheat with Dr. William Davis. Also, fiber and fat ankle weights for cycling and running, the Ben Greenfield Food Pyramid, L Arginine for performance, juicing, shin pain, Achilles tendonitis, joint pain and Simethicone.

Welcome to the Ben greenfieldfitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hello everybody. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We're back once again in that weird space between Chris and New Year's and. Yeah, how's it going, Ben?

It's going well. Merry belated Christmas, Brock.

Thank you very much. You too. And happy early New Year's.

That's right. That's right. For folks listening into this podcast, of course, this is the New Year's episode. By the time this podcast is released, we'll be just a couple days out from 2012. So exciting new year coming up. And Brock, anything in the realm of fitness or nutrition that you got for Christmas that you'd like to tell anybody about? Any new toys?

You know, I'm so well outfitted and most of my family is so I don't want to say clueless, but they really don't understand. So I end up getting a lot of gift cards and I'm really pleased that I got a couple of really good gift cards that I can go out and. Well, I'm gonna spend most of them on Roctane for my races in 10 days because man, those things are expensive.

Yeah, that's a good sport. Gel, that's one that I recommend even though it was a little spendy.

How about you?

Yeah, I also didn't get much but I did get a gift card for Swim Outlet and so I went and bought myself some of those fancy schmancy fulcrums that basically attach to your forearms and keep you in a high elbow position while you are swimming. I don't currently use them, haven't used them, and really don't recommend them to my athletes or in my athletes workout simply because I'm not too familiar with them. But they are interesting. I want to try them out, experiment with them a little bit and see if they'd be something useful for me and the folks I coach. So picked up some of those, picked up some new fins and yeah, so those should arrive soon and should inspire my winter swimming workouts.

Awesome.

What do you think? Should we jump into this week's special announcements?

Let's do it.

Special announcements.

All right, folks, so for the special announcements this week, first of all, mark your calendars for Wednesday, January 11th. Wednesday, January 11th, at 6pm Pacific Time, I'm going to be doing a live seminar. The purpose of this live seminar is to go over a brand new triathlon training program that I'm releasing on January 12th. Literally just a few hours after the seminar, you can come to me with your questions about that program, which is called Try Ripped and anything that you want to know about what it is, what's included in it, who should be using it, what levels it's designed for, what distances, it's designed for anything that you want to know. You can come attend that seminar for free. It will be live. I will stay as long as necessary to answer all your questions. And that again is on Wednesday, January 11th at 6pm Pacific Time. I'll put a link to it in the show. Notes to this podcast episode, episode number 175@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 176. You're right. 176. Podcast episode number 176. And by the way, in today's podcast episode, fantastic interview with Dr. William Davis about wheat and the shocking truth about Wheat. So stay tuned after the Q and A to listen into that. And that kind of leads me into the last thing I wanted to mention.

Yeah, this is the last time this is going to happen.

Yeah, probably. Yes. Because we're going to start this in 2012. We're going to experiment with it and see how you like it. The majority of the folks who responded to last week's question about whether or not you wanted to see the podcast split into two shorter episodes were, yes, you would like to see a podcast devoted to Q and A and then a separate podcast devoted to that week's featured topic, resulting in two podcasts during the week from BenGreenfieldFitness.com about 40 to 60 minutes each. Now that is something that we will try out during early 2012. We'll listen to your feedback, your comments, and if you like it, we'll stay with that. And if not, we'll go back to the Mondo podcast format. But either way, be prepared for that beginning in 2012.

I think I only saw one person actually comment that they enjoyed the really long format, and that was because they were doing really long workouts and it sort of suited the the workout length. But thanks for all your feedback everybody. It was great to get a lot of emails and comments on the blog. News Flashes so Ben keeps a long list of stuff going on@twitter.com BenGreenfield and what did you have this week that you want to talk about? Ben?

Just a few things, Brock. First of all, rest periods between sets. Folks who have listened to this podcast for a long period of time know that it's my pet peeve to see folks reading magazines, books and talking on their phones in the gym. Because typically you can be doing something during a rest period between a weight training set that is a little bit more productive than that when it comes to either calorie burning or fitness or working. A different muscle group study came out in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition that looked at rest intervals. And even though the study was actually investigating rest intervals in trained men using creatine supplementation and was actually a little bit more interested in creatine, I was interested in the fact that they actually had two different groups. One group that was using two minute rest intervals between their sets and one group that was decreasing the amount of time that they rested between sets by 15 seconds each week until they got down to the point where they were only resting 30 seconds between sets. And what they found was no significant difference in training response and maximum strength between the two groups. Meaning that you can get away with resting 90 seconds left if you're currently resting 2 minutes and still get just as much fitness response during your workouts. And that's why I'm a huge fan. You know, for example, my wife and I were working out last night and what we would do is between each strength training set that we did together, we would choose a core exercise or a cardio exercise and perform that while our muscles were recovering from the from the strength training set that we did. And so you're basically doing something the entire time you're at the gym. Just works very well. And this research shows that it's not going to hold you back much.

Okay, I actually, I just want to jump in with a quick question just because last night I was doing one of the workouts that that you gave me and it actually said in the instructions you instructed me not to do, not to superset them, to actually make sure to take 90, 90 seconds between each one of the sets. It was a plyometric workout. So how is, how is that different?

Ah yes, power is different than strength. So the issue with plyometric workouts is that is the one instance where I do recommend rest, and the reason for that is it's very easy to injure yourself and it's very easy to limit the amount of power that you're able to produce. When you're doing a plyometric workout, meaning a workout that involves bounding, hopping, jumping, extremely fast movements, you want to be able to recruit as many muscle fibers as possible and perform those movements as quickly as possible. So, yes, thank you for bringing that up. I'm actually glad you brought that up because that shouldn't be glossed over. If the goal of the workout is power or plyometrics, then rest periods actually are useful for both injury prevention as well as ensuring that you're able to produce the movement as quickly as possible. Gotcha.

Cool.

The next interesting thing that I came across was the fact that the more endurance training you do, the worse your resistance training results can be. And this was actually a meta analysis, meaning a study of a whole bunch of different studies that examined the effects of, of aerobic and resistance exercise when the two are performed simultaneously. Meaning when you are pursuing an endurance training program at the same time that you are performing a resistance training program. And what a correlational analysis found when you looked at all of these different studies was that there really was a negative relationship between the amount of endurance training that you do and the amount of muscle size or muscle strength or muscle power that you're able to build. Now, this doesn't mean that endurance athletes should completely avoid. Avoid strength training, or strength athletes should completely avoid endurance training. But what it does mean is, for example, if your goal is to put on as much size as possible, say to get as muscular as possible, or your goal is to develop as much power and strength as you can possibly build to completely max out that energy system, then you don't do yourself any favors by doing things like going on long runs, doing long bike rides, doing any type of endurance training. There really is, when you look at all the studies, a pretty negative relationship between the two. So when you're really focusing on the high end of resistance training, you want to really limit the amount of aerobic training that you do. And at the same time, if you're doing heavy resistance training three, four, five times a week, and it's starting to take up a large amount of your training protocol, you're probably not doing yourself much favor. From an endurance training perspective, that makes sense. So, yeah, it is kind of common sense. But at the same time, it's nice to know that the studies show that you can't kind of have Your cake and eat it too, when it comes to resistance and endurance.

And I do love cake.

Yes, exercise helps you make bone cells instead of fat cells. This one was interesting that a listener actually alerted me to. It was research that appeared in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, which we can affectionately shorten FASEB Journal. It basically was titled Endurance Exercise Training promotes medullary hematopoiesis. And essentially what that means is that when you do endurance exercise, it can affect your stem cells. And stem cells are the type of cells that can go on to become other types of cells. In this case, they looked at stem cells that could go on to become either fat cells or bone cells. And endurance exercise triggered the stem cells to become bone cells. And that is because bone cells mean that you are able to improve your blood production, which is where a great amount of blood production takes place. Blood cell production takes place is in your bone cells. And that means you get a higher oxygen carrying capacity and you're able to engage in endurance exercise more efficiently. So it's interesting that there is that cellular response. And I just thought it was very interesting to someone who is geeked out, you can differentiate the type of cell that a stem cell becomes based on the type of exercise that you're engaging in. So yet another reason to make sure that you have some form of aerobic training in your protocol.

Yeah, that's really cool. I had no idea that you could actually influence stem cells to do one thing or the other, but that's awesome.

You can, and it's a whole field of research, and you can influence them negatively or positively. But it appears that endurance exercise, it affects them quite nicely. So the next interesting thing was a study on melatonin. And it found that melatonin restored muscle regeneration and enhanced muscle function after they injured rats. So what they did was they gave rats blunt skeletal muscle injuries. I have no clue why this wasn't accepted for human research, but for some reason it wasn't. And then they gave them melatonin and short stories that find melatonin improve the muscle healing, specifically by increasing the number of satellite cells, which are the cells that can kind of draw more healing elements into an injured area and also by reducing inflammation. Considering that sleep is one of the primary components of your melatonin regulation and production, it makes sense that if you're injured, you may want to think about skewing your day so that you're able to prioritize sleep. And that could actually to recover from an injury more quickly or as the logic kind of follows. Since workouts basically are just mini skeletal muscle injuries that you do to your body, it makes sense that when you are training that sleep is going to help you out, or at least making sure that your melatonin isn't dysregulated is going to help you out quite a bit in your fitness response, especially for heavily exercising individuals. Say, like an ironman triathlete, one of the best things you can do is not short yourself on sleep or not kind of throw off your circadian rhythm so that your melatonin production gets out of whack.

Would there be any benefit to supplementing with melatonin?

There is great possibility that that could be the case. And, you know, I personally do use melatonin. Not all the time because I don't want to train my body to shut down its own endogenous production of melatonin. But I use the hammer REM caps, which have, depending on how many you take, anywhere from 3 to 9 grams of melatonin in them. And, you know, research has shown that as little as 0.3 grams is good for help to get to sleep a little bit faster. But I use those in cases where I am kind of on a sleep cycle that I'm not used to, or I need to kind of reset my sleep cycle, or I know it's going to be tough for me to get to sleep, and I'll use those about 60 minutes before I hit the sack.

Awesome.

So the last thing I wanted to bring up was that if you're somebody who is used to eating breakfast, then not eating breakfast can really mess up your calorie consumption later on in the day. And this was a study in the Journal of Nutrition, and it looked at appetite, energy intake and the metabolic and endocrine response to food, the hormonal response to foods. And what they found was that in people who were habitual breakfast eaters, when they had them skip breakfast, it really messed up fullness and appetite and hunger ratings for the rest of the day and actually caused them to end up eating more and engaging in a higher calorie intake later on in the day, even though they skipped breakfast earlier. Means is that if you are somebody, and I would certainly be one of those people who's used to getting up in the morning and having pretty much the same thing for breakfast every day close to the same time, completely skipping breakfast can really throw off your day. And I find that it certainly does that for me. It was interesting for me to see research that shows that I'm not the only one out there. And that they have noted that it's not just in our heads, that it really does kind of affect you hormonally when you are used to eating breakfast at a certain time and you throw yourself off that balance. So for me, a big part of my productivity is creating patterns in my life and developing my life and my systems around those patterns. And for me, breakfast is one of those patterns. And I know that when I skip breakfast it does affect not only what I eat later on in the day, but also the way I feel and the way I think. So it's interesting that this happens. It's also interesting that it's really only an issue at this point based on research and people who are used to habitually eating breakfast, which suggests that I could wean myself off that potentially if I needed to.

I don't know why you'd need to though, right?

But yeah, just, you know, if it ever came to the point where, you know, I couldn't eat the same thing for breakfast every morning, I don't know, maybe a nuclear holocaust or something like that, I'd have bigger things to worry about than the lunch intake later on in the day. But interesting thing, if you're used to eating breakfast at a regular time, if you've got kind of an important day, you're trying to dial in your systems whatnot, try and keep yourself on regular breakfast consumption, a regular time. Kind of a dependable scenario there for breakfast really.

Right from the time we're toddlers are like as human beings, we're so good at or so interested in routine. That doesn't seem very surprising that if you break your routine in one way or the other, it is going to mess the rest of your day up in one way or another as well.

Absolutely.

At first glance, triathletes appear to be a pretty fit group, at least with clothes on. But it's pretty common for triathletes to have tiny arms, a thin and weak neck, a stick like midsection, and a body that's just too skinny. But just imagine if your arms were cut and defined, your chest and shoulders were ripped, your waistline was tapered like a V, your stomach was flat and hard, and your legs were sleek and curvaceous. In other words, what if you had the ultimate triathlon body? Now you can learn how to swim, bike and run fast and look incredibly sexy doing it. Go to tririppd.com to start today. That's trirypt.com. Listen listener Q& A.

Okay, we've got A great number of Q and A questions to go through before we get to that interview with Dr. Davis. So let's jump right into our first one here, which comes from Raminta. And she asks, how does fiber help with losing fat? Is fiber that has been pureed equally effective as it is in its original form? For example, pureeing vegetables for soup as opposed to raw vegetables, or blending fruit into shakes?

Great question. Let's start with the first part about fat. Fiber has a few ways that it could either decrease fat absorption or else help you to lose weight. What it does is it slows down fat absorption that you experience from the foods that you eat because fiber kind of envelops the fat globule and makes it less likely to be absorbed. So when you eat a high fiber diet, essentially not only are you probably eating foods that have a lower fat content anyways, like vegetables and fruits, but you're also kind of enveloping the fats that you do eat. And I don't want to give the impression here that I am saying that because fats are bad. But in folks who maybe aren't eating the right type of fats or who are maybe overeating fats, certainly adding more fiber into the diet could help a little bit with decreasing the amount of fat that that are absorbed. High fiber also kind of expands inside the walls of your intestinal tract and that can help you to feel fuller much faster just because it can absorb water. So that's another way that it can be kind of a weight loss aid. At the same time, once you start to eat a large amount of fiber, you get abdominal cramps and gas and bloating. So if you hear me say this and you all of a sudden rush out and start eating four or five salads a day and a few pieces of fr, you need to know that especially adding fiber to your diet quickly results in even more diarrhea and gas. So make sure, if you're inspired to step up fiber in your diet, do it slowly, just add gradually. So you know, you could start with something like the abs diet. I remember I used to preach this a lot to the folks I was working with, like at the gym, because it's easy to remember. One apple, one banana, and one salad a day. And if you're exercising and you're kind of spacing that fruit around your exercise sessions and throwing it in a salad, that's a great place to start as far as consuming that fiber in a different form than its raw form, blending it, pureeing it Juicing it, mashing it with a big hammer on your kitchen table, however you want to beat up your fruits and your vegetables.

You've been looking into my kitchen, haven't you?

There's not a ton of research behind this, really, especially on what a blender could do to fiber. But if you consider when you chomp down. Let's use an apple as an example. Let's say you eat an apple first, it's getting your molars and the amylases in your mouth that are going to start to pre digest it. And then it hits your stomach acids, and then it hits more enzymes in your digestive tract. It's hard for me to imagine that a blender could do more damage to fiber than what your digestive system could do to it. But that needs to be differentiated with juicing, which actually can remove the fiber because a lot of that fiber stays in the juicer. So if you look at the loss of fiber, I mean, again, using an apple as an example, if you can see straight through a cup of apple juice, that's pretty much got no measurable amount of fiber in it, and to make, say, a regular cup of that apple juice, you need three to four apples, depending on the size of the apple. And each of those apples is going to have around 3 to 4 grams of fiber. So you're looking at 12 to 16 grams of fiber that could have been in that juice that are no longer in that juice, which means that juice is basically just sugar. So that's really where you need to be careful with this whole idea behind juicing a fruit is you do get a pretty big loss of fiber when you do that. And so blending, pureeing, food processing, most of that, you're going to retain pretty much all of the fiber except for the stuff that sticks to the outside of the blender. And when you juice, that's not the case.

Okay, onto the next question from Christian. And Christian says, what are your thoughts on doing cycling and running drills with ankle weights on. On will this speed up skill acquisition and neuromuscular development? And then he mentions that he's looking forward to the Tri Ripped.

Nice. Okay, so first of all, Tri Ripped does not involve any ankle weights. So I have weights before. And primarily the two scenarios where I will use ankle weights is when I'm doing side lying leg raises or any type of kind of rehabilitative type of exercise or body weight strengthening exercise where I need just a little bit extra resistance. For example, I am currently working on strengthening my hip muscles. And one of the Ways that I'm doing that is I'm lying on my side and doing side lying leg raises. Well, I can attach an ankle weight to my ankle to increase resistance of that side lying leg raise. That's one example where I would use them. Another place I like to use ankle weights is on the StairMaster or the stair Mill, where you're climbing up the stairs. You can hold a dumbbell in each hand, put ankle weights on each leg, and because it's a very, very simp, a low impact motion, all you're doing is simulating. For example, if you were going to go on a hike and be wearing a pair of heavy boots and be carrying a pack, again, that's just a great way to improve strength and increase the number of calories that you burn and get a nice training response. Then when we look at running and cycling, these are two situations where I don't recommend using ankle weights. The reason I don't recommend them for cyclists is because if you look at the biomechanics of the pedal stroke, the entire front motion from top dead center all the way down to bottom dead center is a combination of the force that you're producing with your muscles and the weight of your leg. So by increasing the weight of your leg by attaching ankle weights, you're essentially making the entire downward force of the pedal stroke easier. So whereas it is harder to pull up at the bottom of the pedal stroke, you are actually missing out on much of the contraction of the quadriceps and the calves. On the downward phase of the PE stroke, you would be much better served by simply switching to a harder gear or pedaling harder. If you want to improve your cycling fitness with the use of increased force, it just throws off your biomechanics too much. And when we talk about throwing off your biomechanics and we look at ankle weights with running, it's even a bigger issue. So not only when you wear ankle weights when you're running, are you massively increasing the impact force of running. Running. Running already creates impact forces in your feet and your knees that are usually one and a half to three times your body weight, your entire body weight. Multiply that by one and a half to three, and that's about how much force is produced in your feet and your knees. When you're running, you throw ankle weights. On top of that, you're adding even more risk for injury. And you're also really affecting the way that your foot is going to hit the ground, because ankle weights are going to affect your ankle mobility. And the planes of motion that your ankle can move in, they're also going to affect the natural rolling action of your foot underneath your body after it comes in contact with the ground. Now, I mentioned that I use ankle weights when I'm on the stair mill. That's a very slow, controlled movement. That's low impact. Running is much different than that. And I do not recommend that you wear ankle weights when you are running. I think that the risks far outweigh the benefits when it comes to something like that.

It almost sounds like if you put ankle weights on the bike, you might have an unfair advantage, maybe during a race.

Well, you're also increasing the weight of the bike and the rider. So it's probably. I think that probably you're still going to go slower and work harder, but ultimately you're just training your body in a completely different way and imbalancing your muscles when you do it. So, yeah, I don't recommend it. However, if you want to roll into your next cycling race wearing a set of ankle weight, knock yourself out and let me know how that works out for you. I don't think you'll be at the front of the pack, though.

We'll see. I think I found my secret weapon.

Nice.

All right, Chuck says, interesting discussion about the food pyramid of Dr. Weil, which was a couple episodes ago. I think that was episode 174. Chuck wants to know, maybe you could discuss what the Ben Greenfield food pyramid would look like.

I don't like food pyramids. Food pyramids basically structure your day, right? You eat X amount of the bottom food and Y amount of the middle foods and Z amount of the top foods. And it's usually more amounts from the bottom to the top based on the shape of the pyramid. The problem is that not only do different people need different amounts of food based on their activity levels, their genetics, their health history, etc. But it also just introduces a great deal of inflexibility into a diet. And I'm not a huge fan of a food pyramid. I don't think that I would have a food pyramid. I guess if I were forced to create one at the bottom of the food pyramid, I would have most likely kind of an even combination of healthy fats and healthy proteins. Okay, so you've got like your coconut oils and your avocado and your olives and your olive oils and those type of things on kind of one half of the base of the food pyramid and then the other half of the base of the food pyramid, some of your healthy proteins that are really high in omega 3 fatty acids like cold water, fish, mackerel and salmon and that type of thing. And also good grass, grass fed saturated fat, full beef and free range chicken and natural farm raised cage free eggs, that type of thing. And that would be kind of along the bottom. One step up from that would be kind of like 2/3 vegetables, 1 third fruit. Kind of along those lines, one step up from that would be your healthier, kind of safer star. Your sweet potatoes, yams, beets, carrots. I would throw soaked and rinsed quinoa, amaranth and millet in there. Some of the soaked and sprouted grains and we'll get into this more in today's podcast episode. But wheat probably being your lowest priority of all of those. And then one step up from that kind of everything that's left over your cheat foods and your condiments and your herbs and your spices. So dark chocolate and garlic and ginger and tea and coffee and all that jazz. So I guess if I were forced to create a food pyramid, that's what it would look like. I'm just picturing this in my head right now and I've never really drawn this on a piece of paper, but that's about what it would look like.

So if you're not a fan of the pyramid scheme, what do you think of Even in Canada we heard when Michelle Obama came out with what is it called, my plate thing. How do you feel about that?

That it's really an improvement over the food pyramid in terms of its simplicity and its ability for someone to be able to look at and understand approximately the way that their diet should look. But unfortunately, the things that they put on the plate are really not much different than the food pyramid itself. Big glasses of drinking your calories, milk and juice and things like that up above the plate, and large amounts of grains and carbohydrate portions on the plate. Again, a plate that's fairly influenced by traditional Western diets that are fraught with issues when it comes to causing and promoting chronic disease.

Now, Chuck had a second part to his question. I don't know if you want to comment. He asks about the bulletproof diet guidelines. It's found@bulletproofexec.com yeah, it's an interesting website.

It's kind of like you've got your Paleo PC people on one side who are into mostly living the way that our ancestors would have lived and not exposing ourselves to things that we haven't evolved to become efficient at processing or able to deal with. And Then you've kind of got, on the other hand, people who are called biohackers, who will basically do things like attach electrodes to the outsides of their heads while they're speaking, while they're working, while they're sleeping to kind of enhance brainwave frequency and do things like spend millions of dollars on customized electrical setups to kind of hack their brain and get smarter and use a lot of. Usually these are people who are really, really into technology and statistics, and they're basically trying to change their lives and make themselves smarter or make themselves stronger, etcetera, by using technology to do so. And so it's kind of the complete opposite of kind of the paleo idea. For example, one thing you're going to find really, really popular among folks like this is sleep hacking, which is basically using polyphasic sleep. And we talked about this on the podcast, I think, about a year ago. And essentially what polyphasic sleep means is you try and get away with sleeping anywhere from two to five hours a night by introducing a combination of electrical technology that puts you into a deeper state of sleep when you do sleep, and then the use of like very short, evenly spaced or regularly spaced naps throughout the day. And this is all based on the idea that they've done studies in the US Military on this. And, you know, like the Canadian Marines up there, Brock, have done studies on this, and they found that this polyphasic sleep can help you get away with sleeping less. The unfortunate thing that a lot of polyphasic folks don't mention is after a while, after spending a certain amount of time in that scenario of polyphasic sleep, you start to decline in your mental function, in your physical function, and you start to experience many of the negative effects of sleep loss. So something like polyphasic sleep and sleeping just a few hours a night, or using some form of electricity to get yourself into a deep, rapid eye movement sleep more quickly could ultimately result several weeks or several months or possibly even several years down the road in some pretty serious sleep issues or sleep disorders. And it kind of makes sense because we as mammals have these circadian rhythms that are really, really important. The 24 hour sleep clock is something that people have always had, and it's based off a specific light dark cycle. And it affects everything from your body temperature and your metabolism, to your brainwave activity, to your hormone production, to your cell regeneration and pretty much any biological activity you can think of. And it's so hardwired into us that you can even take something like a totally Blind subterranean mammal like a molecule. And they're still able to maintain these sleep clocks even in the absence of a light, dark cycle. That's how hardwired this circadian rhythm is in our bodies. And for me, there's a lot of hesitation to promote or encourage something like polyphasic sleep cycles when it comes to my own performance and my recovery, recovery. And all of the research that I've seen that shows that, especially for athletes, you're really, really going to benefit from this. The seven to nine hours of sleep per night. So while I think that this whole idea behind biohacking and kind of like trying to squeeze every last ounce of benefit out of your body can have benefits kind of short term in certain scenarios where you need to be high performing for short periods of time, I think ultimately could have some pretty deleterious effects. Now, the interesting thing is that if you look at the diet that Chuck mentioned, this bulletproof exact diet, it's pretty solid. I liked what I saw. It's very close to kind of like a combination of a primal paleo diet, but it kind of allows for some of the more modern foods in moderation. Essentially. It's just like a bunch of different sliding scales. Like there's a sliding scale for, for protein and a sliding scale for fat. And it just kind of shows the better choices on one end of the spectrum and the less better choices on the other end of the spectrum. And I have no problems with what I saw on that website as far as diet goes. But in terms of everything else, I just think you need to be really, really careful in terms of playing around with your biology in that way. And I also think you need to consider the fact that there is a certain amount of beauty and happiness that comes with simplicity. And this kind of leads into. And then I'll shut up, because I know this is a really long answer. But this kind of leads into another thing that I'm personally working on right now. I can't reveal too many details about it, but essentially what it comes down to is I am developing a method to take the average Joe and kind of turn them into a superhuman. Take somebody who's good and make them great. Take somebody who is maybe already a really decent or gifted athlete and make them completely unstoppable. And one of the influencers of my entire philosophy as I create this project and design this system is that what I implement needs to be things that don't interfere with our natural biology, with our natural rhythms, and that also do not cause us to go way outside our way, using million dollar electrical programs that we hook up to our minds while we're sleeping and that type of thing to actually accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish. So there needs to be a combination of simplicity and practicality combined with science. And I think that's very important when it comes to actually making something doable for someone. I know. I kind of got into the abstract a little bit there. Podcast listeners, you'll be the first people to know about this new project that I'm doing that will probably be completed and ready to roll out by the end of 2012. But ultimately I think that when you're trying to make yourself into a better person, there are a lot of things that you need to take into account and that includes the way that your body was designed to work and the rhythms that your body was designed to work with.

This new program is codenamed Captain America by the way.

It's somewhat similar. Exactly. Go watch Captain America. And that's what I'm working on doing.

Okay, our next question is it's a little bit of. A little more in depth sort of one and it comes from Eric and Eric says, what is your opinion of L arginine as a supplement? Googling around for information on nitric oxide supplements that might help with nitric oxide production. I quickly found the L arginine and specifically Pro RG9. Yeah. So they make some pretty bold and yet vague claims about helping everything from heart disease to endurance performance. What a coincidence if I can get a boost in performance and help with any potential heart disease down the road. Sounds like a no brainer. So he's asking here, do you know of any studies that focused specifically on the effects of L arginine on performance? And he goes into a little bit of background about himself, but I think that's basically the question there.

Yeah, L arginine is a fairly research supplement of late. It's an essential amino acid. So first of all know that if you're already taking an amino acid supplement, you've probably got some of your L arginine based covered. But what it is, it's a vasodilator. So it increases the circumference of your blood vessel vessels and it does that by increasing the synthesis of nitric oxide, which is kind of like the active ingredient of Viagra, which directs nitric oxide into one specific area of a man's body. But L arginine, it's kind of got an issue even though it's got a lot of research behind it that shows that it can work for a lot of different things. And I'll get into that in a minute here. When you take it orally, it's got a really poor uptake rate in your entire intestines and it's really excessively metabolized in your liver. So when you're taking an L arginine supplement, very little of it is making it to your muscles or any of the peripheral tissues around your muscles. And when you try to increase to a really high dose of L arginine so that you just get enough, you get gastric distress and you can get diarrhea. And for that reason, for anybody who wants kind of like this nitric oxide blood vessel dilating sports performance beta benefit of increasing your nitric oxide production, I actually recommend something different. If you look into arginine metabolism, you'll understand why when you consume arginine, it's converted into a couple different components, but one specifically is called citrulline. L citrulline. L citrulline is basically converted back into L arginine once it's metabolized in the kidney, then goes on to cause that nitric oxide production. It's the main precursor for nitric oxide. And so for that reason you can actually take L citrulline as a supplement and you get a much, much higher uptake intestinally and lower metabolism by the liver and still get all the benefits of what L arginine can kind of give you. Because you're not only looking at better oxygen and nutrient delivery when you're dilating a blood vessel to a molecule muscle. There's also research that shows that it may be able to accelerate immune cell proliferation and the rate of wound healing. It definitely has some sexual performance benefits and like some quality of orgasm type of benefits. It has been shown in some studies to possibly have some anti anxiety benefits. And as far as the heart disease issue, the there was only one study I could find that looked at L arginine heart disease, but it did show a decreased risk for atherothrombosis when you actually were using an L arginine type of supplement. Although I couldn't tell if the L arginine was administered orally or via some other way in that study. But it did help with decreasing risk of heart disease from that standpoint. So there's the folks that I or the folks that make an L citrulline supplement that I know of and that I've personally used is Millennium Sports. They make one called Citrovol and that one's Decent. They also make another supplement called Nitroceps. Both of those are in pill form and there's a couple ways that you could use those. You could take them about 60 to 90 minutes prior to exercise size and you could also take them about 60 to 90 minutes prior to sexual activity. And in both of those situations you would experience some benefit. So one's called, yeah, it's Nitriceps and Citrovol. So I'm writing a note to myself. I'll link to those in the show notes. And those are made by a company called Millennium Sports, which is one company that I have investigated. Their stuff is certified good manufacturing practices. You're not going to have to worry about like having it laced with doping derivatives or anything like that, which you do have to worry about with some of these companies that are producing sports performance aids like this. But that's the deal with Arginine.

Nice. Unfortunately, the Millennium Sports I don't think ships outside of the US So sad for the rest of us.

Bummer. You know, Are you sure? Because while the company may not directly, but I know that, you know, like for example Bodybuilding to sells their stuff and I'm pretty sure that that company ships internationally. So you may not be able to get it directly through Millennium Sports, but you could probably get it through one of the resellers.

Good call. Okay, so next question comes from Ron. And Ron says, my wife and I just got a juicer after watching the documentary Fat Sick and Nearly Dead. My wife is mainly interested in the reboot program the subjects in the movie are doing. And as an ultra runner training for a hundred miler and an endurance athlete, I'm curious about how I can use this tool to increase my fitness nutrition. Any suggestions on certain juice recipes or combinations to try? Anything about nutrient timing as well.

You know, I didn't make it too far into that movie because so this guy was eating a really, really unhealthy diet and was getting over obese and really unhealthy. And that was why it was called Fat Sick and Nearly Dead, this documentary. And then he switched to basically just drinking juice. He didn't really compare the juicing diet to maybe just like eating a little bit more normal diet that didn't involve completely pulverizing every food that you eat. And that's where I kind of have an issue is I've mentioned this a few times in the past. I'm not a big fan of any diet that just has you eating one type of food group or food in one representation. And then tells you not to eat anything else. And you're going to be able to get a lot of nutrients and a lot of the calories and everything that you need from juicing. It's just that you miss out on chewing your food and enjoying a lot of things that you could be enjoying with juicing. I don't recommend fruit juicing much at all to anybody that I work with. And the reason for that is something that we've gone over before. You simply get a very, very large dose of sugar, very, very high glycemic index food all thrown into your system at one period of time. But if you're juicing vegetables, you can certainly get quite a bit of benefit, especially when you're doing something like combining those vegetables with different herbs or supplements that can have a real, real kind of high nutrient type of effect. Now, I personally don't own a juicer and don't do much juicing, so I do not want to frame myself as some type of juicing expert. But you can certainly get benefits from juicing certain types of foods. For example, I was researching juicing a couple of months ago and came across a recipe that kind of has a cleansing effect on your body and is really for your liver. So if you've been consuming a lot of pharmaceuticals or coming off high alcohol intake and you want to kind of flush that from your body, this juicing recipe involved juicing a bunch of cucumbers. And cucumbers are kind of like a liver cleansing type of vegetable. And you juice, I think it was four or five cucumbers and that was mixed with garlic and ginger root and a little bit of cayenne pepper, a little bit of stevia for sweetness, and then some omega 3 oils and a little bit of consumed with a little bit of extra virgin coconut oil to add in some healthy fats. And you take a recipe like that and it's going to have some direct healing or kind of like detoxifying type of benefits. Because let's face it, food is medicine and it can have medicinal properties. Properties. I don't want to get too far out in the left field here with this stuff because I know detoxing and detoxifying is a term that gets thrown around a lot. I'm writing an article on it right now for BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you may just need to wait for that article to come out for me to get more into that. But ultimately, what I'm getting at here is there are some situations where juicing can have benefit. I don't recommend that you include it as, as kind of like the only way that you're getting your calories in your diet. But if you are going to juice, try and stick to vegetable juicing more than fruit juicing for those blood sugar reasons. And if you need juicing recipes, I'm sure that there are books out there that are just chock full of good juicing recipes. One that I know of is from somebody who I've heard interviewed before, who seemed kind of on top of things when it came to juice when it comes to juicing. And that was the juice lady. And I think that's JuiceLady.com or thejuicelady.com cool.

Our next three questions I sort of, I'm going to think of them as our pain trio. We've got three questions that revolve around pain. So our first pain question comes from Tony. Tony says, I have a question regarding shin pain. I run about 20 to 25 miles a week and when I run I feel fine, but afterwards my shins are very tender to touch. I'm wondering what I can do to alleviate the pain.

So shin splints, you know, whenever somebody asks me about alleviating pain, it's like you always want to look at why the pain is being caused before you just cover it up. In the case of shin splints, usually it's an issue with calf, ankle or foot mobility. And so what I would first do is I would look into your shoes, what type of shoes you're wearing, have a physical therapist watch you run or get a run gait analysis and make sure that the type of shoes that you're wearing and the insoles that you have in those shoes are fit to your running style and your body because that can significantly affect your foot and your ankle mechanics. So look at that and then also look at the flexibility and also the amount of kind of tissue adhesions in your lower limb. I would be foam rolling your lower calf and you can certainly see a bunch of different foam rolling exercises over at the Ben Greenfield Fitness YouTube channel. YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFitness Just type in foam roll and it'll bring up a bunch of different lower leg foam rolling exercises with me demonstrating them. I'd also be doing stretching for the the calf. You know, a wall stretch where you're putting your toes up against the wall and leaning into the wall. A belt stretch where you're lying on your back and using a belt literally wrapped around the front of your foot to kind of pull your foot down towards your shin to improve your foot mobility. Pushing against the wall and putting your calf out behind you and stretching out your calf that way. A lot of different calf exercises that you can do to improve the flexibility in your calf because tight calves are usually what's going to cause shin splints. The other thing that you can do, and this is a big part of the marathon Dominator program, we've got a bunch of exercises in there to get rid of shin splints and you can check that out@marathondominator.com, but you lean with your back against the wall and with your legs straight. Just lift your toes one after the other up towards your shins as if you're tapping your feet in reverse. So just your heels are on the ground and you're just bringing your toes up. And if you're doing this right, you're going to feel the muscle in the front of your leg start to get really fatigued. So those are some ways that you can kind of work on what's causing those shin splints. But as far as getting rid of it, basically you want to stop running, stop the strain, because you've essentially got a lot of inflammation in that joint that runs along between your tibia and your fibula and you want to allow that inflammation to substitute side while you are resting and avoiding impact based activities. You can apply ice or cold therapy if it's really in the really early stages because that's going to reduce some of the pain and the inflammation. You can apply topical anti inflammatories like magnesium oil or an arnica based topical anti inflammatory like Traumeel is one example of one of those. And then once you're actually ready to return to activity, you want to mobilize those tissues a little bit with heat. So you can apply like a heat pad or a topical heat type of lotion to the lower leg to help the blood vessels to dilate and increase the rate of blood flow to those tissues. That can only help with healing, but it can help you not to feel those shin splints when you start running. The other thing you can do is you can warm up before a run by riding a stationary bicycle or by riding a bicycle for a little while to warm up and then start into things really slowly. Don't start in hard. Finally, one thing to look into would be, or two things actually that come to mind to look into would be taping. You can do what's called kinesthetic taping or like physical therapy taping and what this does is it helps to allow the shin to have some pressure taken, taken off of the muscle attachments that run up and down the shin. So you can get taped by a physical therapist, rock tape, @rocktape.com they sell tape and teach you how to tape yourself. So that's another good one to look into. And then also look into some sports massage specifically, kind of avoiding anywhere that causes a lot of pain along the muscles on the front of your leg. But focusing on some of the muscle compartments, especially around the calf and the Achilles can help again with the front of leg if you have some directed sports massage technique on the calves. So those are some of the things I would look into when it comes to shin splints. And yeah, you should definitely be able to get back into running gradually once you get rid of the pain.

All right, so moving around to the other side of the leg from the shin to the Achilles tendon. Samantha says, I get Achilles tendonitis on and off, year in and year out. How can I avoid it in the future? What exercises can strengthen this area? And then she mentions that she's from the uk. So a lot of the products and supplements that you suggest are not available.

First of all, pretty much most of the stuff I recommend can be shipped to the uk. For example, if you go to Pacific elite fitness@pacificfit.net, all that stuff ships to the UK. But let's focus on your question about Achilles tendonitis, which is your swelling and your redness and your pain, your tenderness on the lower part of your calf that can really develop specifically after running, running up hills, especially typically similar to shin splints that can be an issue with your footwear or your orthotics. So same as I would have recommended for shin splints, I won't repeat what I said there. Weak calf muscles can really be an issue as well. So making sure that you are strengthening your calf muscles. And typically I don't recommend calf raises for strengthening your calf muscles as much as I recommend recommend full body, lower body strength training type of activities like squats and single leg squats, deadlifts and single leg deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts and single leg Romanian deadlifts. And you can look up any of those over at my YouTube channel and see videos of them. But essentially a lower leg strength training can really help with the strength of your calves and a lot of the weak muscles that are going to cause overuse of the Achilles tendon, because that's what Achilles tendon, tendonitis is, is it's an overuse injury. If you do, when you're not running, when you're at your job, maybe, or in other situations, wear high heels, that's something you're going to want to avoid too, because that shortens your tendon and your calf muscles. And when you do that and then you go exercise and run in flat running shoes, that tendon gets stretched beyond its normal range, which puts a strain on the tendon and causes tendinitis. If you've got Achilles tendonitis already, there are a bunch of physical therapy modalities you can do and traditional modalities you can use. Iced compression, ultrasound, the type of things that you would experience in physical therapy. But really, if I could tell you that the number one thing that I've seen nip Achilles tendon in the bud almost immediately is acupuncture. So. So if you've already got Achilles tendonitis and you want to get rid of it and then focus on calf strengthening, get rid of it with acupuncture. Start strengthening your calf, making sure that you're in the right shoes, the right orthotics, not wearing high heels, and then you should be able to get back into activity without that rearing its ugly head every time you start running.

All right, episode three of the Pain trilogy, here comes from Shane.

Shane.

Shane says, I just completed my first Ironman 70.3 and wanted to say thanks to you all. Your great advice definitely helped me get through the race. My question is about how to prepare for the physical stress and fatigue of the longer races. During my recent 70.3, I felt great until the second half of the run when the joints in my knee and feet started to hurt. I had plenty of gas left in the tank and my muscles felt fine. The only thing that held me back was as joint pain. How can I prepare my body to cope with this better? My training consisted of lots of high intensity interval work as well as a longer ride and run.

The first thing that I would recommend is kind of the simple, obvious solution, and that is make sure that you're training on a surface that's similar to the surface that you will be competing on. So if you're going to be competing on concrete or asphalt, don't do all your running on trails. And if you're going to be, you know, running on trails, then make sure that you're not doing all your running on concrete or asphalt because that can be a big issue is you're just using your joints in a very different manner when you're training than when you're actually in your event. So that's kind of the simple obvious solution. But if you look at this from, from a deeper issue, synovial fluid, the, the lubricating fluid of your joints and the overall health of your joints can be heavily influenced by things like, like pharmaceuticals and your diet and supplements that you take and nutritional deficiencies. So what I would look into first of all is making sure that your levels of natural anti inflammatory fats that you take in your omega 3 fatty acid intake is really high. Be eating a lot of those Mediterranean fats that I mentioned earlier in this podcast episode. Avocados and olives and olive oil and cold water fish and hopefully taking a fish oil supplement as well. I would also look into natural anti inflammatory herbs, herbs, garlic, ginger, turmeric, curries, things of that nature. And I personally really highly recommend a supplement called Capraflex for those type of issues. I'll write a note to myself to put a link to that in the show. Notes. But basically Capra Flex is a mix of glucosamine and chondroitin which can assist with joint pain. But I really don't see them work very well unless they're combined with a bunch of anti inflammatory herbs, which I just mentioned mentioned. And Caproflex is kind of a combination of both of those. So I would look into stepping up your omega 3 fatty acid intake, including a full spectrum kind of joint support supplement like Caproflex in your diet, training on the same type of surfaces that you're going to be racing on. And then finally make sure that you're actually tapered for your race. There should be a significant decrease in activity to allow your joints to heal and your body to kind of rest and recover and be ready for the pounding that is going to experience during a race. And a lot of times that joint pain and muscle pain and injury that occurs during an event is due to an inadequate taper. So for something like a half ironman, usually it's about 10 to 14 days out that you're beginning a significant change in your levels of activity to allow your body to rest and recover and prepare for that event.

Good advice. All right, that concludes the pains segment. And now we're into our final question, actually. And our final question comes from Skip. And Skip has a very particular medical case here, but maybe you can address the question for sort of everybody and then more specifically for him. But what Skip is asking is I've heard some people suggest using Gasx, the active ingredient is Symeth for gas issues during Ironman. Is this generally a good solution for people? And he explains that his case is different. He had his large intestine surgically removed due to severe colitis, I guess, and had a pouch created in his small intestine. So his plumbing is a little bit different. But he wants to know if this, if the gas X would be a reasonable solution or do you have other suggestions? Suggestions for getting this gas during an Ironman?

Don't misconstrue this as medical advice, please. But make sure you're taking care of your digestive health, especially ensuring that your reduced ability to digest foods due to your change in plumbing is helped out with things like digestive enzymes and probiotics specific. Specifically, I would make sure that you've got stuff like that in your diet. I would also look into the possibility of taking like a betaine HCL type of supplement or some type of hydrochloric acid supplement to potentially assist with digestion as well. So really take care of things from a digestive standpoint. That being said, simethicone, or the active ingredient in gas X for gas issues during an Ironman is something I would be careful with. Simethicone is an anti foaming agent. So what it does is it decreases the surface tension of gas bubbles, meaning that you take all these tiny little bubbles or basically foam that's building up in your stomach and you decide decrease the surface tension of all those little bubbles and it makes them basically like form into one bigger bubble. So essentially that gas is able to exit from your body a lot more quickly when it's one big bubble versus when it's a bunch of little small foamy bubbles. And simethicone is fairly safe, there's not really many side effects with it. But of course, anytime you're taking something like this and combining it with with an activity in which you are wanting to be able to really absorb nutrients really, really well and make sure that stuff is moving through your system. Okay, you should be aware that I did look into the effect of simethicone on gastric transit time and stomach emptying. And basically it can increase what's called your small intestinal transit time. So it doesn't have much, much effect on gastric emptying from your stomach, but pretty significant increase in small intestinal transit time. So usually stuff should empty from your small intestines in anywhere between like 200 to 250 minutes. And that was increased by about 40 to 50 minutes in folks who are taking a simethicone containing supplement. So you're looking at foods basically moving through your small intestine much more slowly, which could potentially lead to gastric distress, especially considering that your plumbing is already changed up a little bit. So I'd be careful with something like this. I would instead focus on making sure that you're really digesting the foods that you do eat really well. Making sure that your stomach and your intestinal flora is built up with the use of of probiotics and the inclusion of high probiotic containing foods like yogurt and kefir and kombucha and things of that nature. And then also making sure that you're using digestive enzymes before you eat and maybe even considering using digestive enzymes during the actual event itself. For example, taking a digestive enzyme supplement on each hour to help you with breaking down and digesting what you're eating during that race a little bit more quickly. Again, I don't want you to misconstrue that as medical advice, but those are just some thoughts that I have for you in this situation.

And Skip, I gotta say, having altered plumbing like that and then still getting in there and doing Ironman, my hat is off to you. Good on you.

Yeah, absolutely. Very cool to see folks going out and going way outside their comfort zone when it comes to doing something like an Iron man man, even in the face of having the body altered in some way. So very cool.

All right, folks, that's the end of the listener questions for this week. And remember that we prioritize audio questions. So if you want to make sure that you get on the show, just need to Skype to Pacific Fit or there's a phone number as well, right, Ben?

There absolutely is. You can call toll free to 877-209-9439 and leave your question there. And remember, Please go search BenGreenfieldFitness.com Every single podcast is transcribed. There's a huge, very rich source of information on that site. It's likely that your question may have been addressed before. So search around on that site a little bit. Right there in the sidebar is the search. And of course, all of the show notes for each podcast episode have all the links to everything that we talk about. So head over and check those out as well prior to submitting your question.

All right, and having said that, let's hear about the shocking truth about Wheat.

Featured topic.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And way back in podcast episode number 60, I actually had a guest come on to talk about why healthy people have heart attacks and much more when it comes to the real truth behind what goes to on with your heart and your heart health. The name of the book that we talked about back then was called Track yout Plaque, and it was written by an author named Dr. William Davis. Dr. Davis is a preventive cardiologist. He has a very unique approach to cardiology, a very what I would consider to be holistic approach and perhaps one that sometimes flies in the face of what you tend to hear when it comes to heart health and how our diet especially affects our health, our heart and as we'll learn in today's interview, our belly. Because Dr. Davis has recently come out with a brand new book called Wheat Belly. And I'm going to let him tell you more about that book and why he wrote it. But Dr. Davis, thank you for coming on the podcast today.

Oh, thank you, Ben. Thanks for having me back.

So, probably kind of an involved question here, but let's just jump right in. Why did you write Wheat Belly?

Well, it's a big problem in heart disease prevention. That's what I do now. I spend much of my day just trying to identify the causes for heart disease and then show people how to correct them. Well, the number one cause for heart disease by a long stretch, you don't hear much about this. But the number one cause for heart disease in the US Today is something called small LDL particle particles, and these occur alongside high blood sugars. So I wanted a way for my patients to deal with this very, very common pattern better. So I used some simple logic. These are all people I meet with risk for heart disease. I use simple logic then, and that is two slices of whole wheat bread raised blood sugar and thereby small ldl higher than nearly all other foods. Now, most people are surprised by this, that we're told told to eat more healthy whole grains, foods that raise blood sugar higher than a Snickers bar, higher than table sugar. Nonetheless, I used that simple observation. I asked my patients to remove all wheat. I wanted to see what the effect was on blood sugar and thereby small ldl. They come back three, four, six months later and their blood sugars would be much lower. This measure of long term blood sugar behavior, hemoglobin A1c would be substantially lower. But they told me all the other things that started to happen, like losing 30 pounds and losing 3 inches off their waist and blood pressures dropping and rheumatoid arthritis improving to the point where they could stop two drugs. Depression lifting, leg edema disappearing, acid reflux disappearing in nearly all the Symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, Cranston diet disappearing or improving, the diarrhea and cramps of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis improving substantially, sometimes even cured. In other words, I started to see this whole collection of common medical problems improving dramatically and often actually disappearing. This took me by surprise, and at first I just thought it was pure coincidence. But after it kept on happening over and over again and over, I started to realize, well, wow, this is a consistent association. I then started to do it on purpose in everybody. And that's when I saw many, many cases of incredible turnarounds in health and weight. So I kind of stumbled on this almost by accident.

Do you think that all of this was due to the simple fact that eating something that has wheat in it generally means you're eating something that has carbohydrates in it and it raises your blood sugar? Or, or is there more to it than that?

There's a lot more to it than that. That's a big part of it, Ben. So the carbohydrate unique to wheat called amylopectin A, which has a unique branching structure, which makes the amylopectin A, the carbohydrate of wheat, highly digestible, highly susceptible to the enzyme amylase in our mouths and stomachs. And that explains why two slices of whole wheat bread raised blood sugar higher than table sugar. But there's more. The wheat was changed. Somewhere in the 70s there was this very, very well funded push to create high yield strains of plants, wheat, corn and soy principally. Well, wheat was a particular success from the viewpoint of the geneticists in that they converted wheat that you and I remember, a 4 1/2 to 5 foot tall amber wave of grain to a 2 foot tall high yield dwarf variant. So wheat today is not the wheat you and I think of in pictures and memory. It's a two foot tall, genetically modified. I shouldn't say genetically altered. I can't say modified because that tends to bring up all sorts of thoughts of genetic engineering and insertion of genes. This predates genetic engineering. The techniques used to generate modern wheat were far less precise or far worse than genetic engineering. Ironically, Ben, I'm no defender of genetic engineering or genetic modification, but genetic modification is a substantial improvement over the techniques, the bizarre and crude techniques used to generate plants like modern semi dwarf wheat. Wheat was changed. One of the changes, one of the changes introduced into the wheat of the 1970s that made it to your shelves, your store shelves in the 80s was a reconfiguration of a gliadin protein unique to wheat. They turned gliadin into a very powerful appetite stimulant. So when wheat products hit your store shelves in the mid-80s, it was invented in the 70s, but there was gradual adoption by farmers nationwide. And by the mid-80s, virtually all of us were buying buying wheat products made from the semi dwarf high yield variant created by geneticists. The gliadin protein in this new strain of wheat has the capacity to Increase calorie consumption. 400 calories per day per person.

You mean through appetite stimulation?

Through appetite stimulation. That's when we saw this across the board. Increase in calorie consumption followed shortly thereafter by increase in one weight, followed then by the diabetes epidemic. The gliadin protein of wheat is crucial to understanding the bad effects of wheat. But that's not all. There's more to this. The increased consumption of wheat also encouraged around the same period in the 80s, because of the low fat, eat more healthy whole grain movement, you saw an increase in consumption. People gravitated. We were told to eat more grains because they thought it was heart healthy. Plus the grains themselves had an appetite stimulant in them. This is a certain recipe for disaster. And Ben, that's what we have now. We have a disaster of weight gain, obesity and diabetes on a scale never before witnessed in human history. Not all of it is due to wheat, but a big part of it is interesting.

So this is something that kind of came up on this show on the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast last week. But we were talking about a food pyramid put out by someone who is considered to be kind of like a natural holistic physician, Dr. Andrew Weil. If you watch TV, you'll also see Dr. Oz doing this, as well as most health professionals out there recommending healthy whole grains and pasta as as the base of the food pyramid, as a very, very large part of the recommended food intake for folks. Why are people still recommending this? Is it because what you've just told me is not common knowledge? Or what's the reason that doctors don't know this stuff?

That's a big part of it, Ben. That this notion that wheat has been changed substantially, that message has not gotten to the mainstream public. They don't realize that wheat is a high yield 2 foot tall plant that is nothing like the wheat of 40 or 50 years ago. I think they've all also fallen for the false logic of nutrition. This flawed sequence of logic. If I take something bad for you white flour and replace it with something less bad for you whole grains and there's an apparent health benefit. The conclusion reached by most nutritionists is, well then a whole bunch of the less bad thing is good for you. So let me apply that flawed logic to another situation. Situation. If I tell you that unfiltered Marlboro cigarettes are bad for you and that Salem filtered cigarettes are less bad for you, by the kind of logic used by nutritionists, you and I should smoke a pack of Salems every day. Well, that's silly, of course. That is the kind of logic used in nutritional circles. And so what if we asked instead, well, gee, what's the effect of no grains? And that's where you see see incredible changes in health by removing it entirely. Unfortunately, that flawed logic dominates nutritional thinking. Factor in that the wheat has changed and that's why we have this mess on our hands now. So we've got to educate the educators and let them know that what they're telling people. Ben, I'm impressed that I've had debates with faculty members on radio. I'm talking about in nutrition experts who represent agribusiness. At first I was a bit concerned because I thought, well gee, they're going to hit me with some really tough questions. Maybe I've overlooked something here. In fact, the opposite happened. I was shocked at the level of unsophistication and ignorance, outright ignorance of these issues. I recently debated a PhD very high up executive scientist, scientist for agribusiness in Canada. And when I told him, he said I had no idea what I was talking about. I said, well, perhaps you need to be made aware that what you're being sold is wheat today is a 2 foot tall high yield variant created by genetics research in the 1970s. That comment was followed by science, by silence. And then he responded to me, well, the farmers created that so they can see over the field. Fields. In other words, there was no, he had no knowledge whatsoever that wheat had undergone this incredible change. It was news to the expert. So I feel it's our jobs to educate the educators that what they're telling people to eat ain't what it appears to be.

So you talked a little bit about kind of the lesser of two evils and how wheat can still be an evil when compared to white bread, although it may be the lesser of two evils. But I mean, is that true? If you had to choose between wheat bread and white bread, does it really matter that much?

Not really. There is a benefit. There's no question, Ben, that the literature, they are right in that if we do replace white flour with whole grain Grains or multigrains or whole wheat. There is a health benefit. There is less colon cancer, less heart disease, less heart attack, less diabetes. There's no question that's true.

Is this because of the extra fiber and nutrients?

It could be fiber, it could be B vitamins, it could be phytonutrients like flavonoids. It could be the whole picture, but it's that flawed logic. Once again, should we embrace something, something as good if it's been shown to be less bad? And I think that's the mistake being made here, that we shouldn't embrace something as being good just because it's less harmful than something else. So if I had, say, a poison like strychnine, and it's 100% fatal, and I've modified my strychnine, now it's only 50% fatal, is that good? It's less bad, but it doesn't make it good. That seems like overly simplistic logic, but it is the kind of logic used in nutritional circles. You'll see this, by the way, over and over again. Less bad must mean good. Less bad doesn't always mean good. It just means less bad.

So is there a time when wheat would be okay? Like you, for example. Do you ever eat wheat or do you just steer clear of it entirely? The reason I ask that is because. Because I know that wheat has this propensity to raise blood sugars. But, for example, I know that when you're exercising, for example, that becomes less of an issue. You've just walked in from a run and there's the opportunity to have a piece of whole grain bread with some nut butter on it or something of that nature. Would that still be an issue or a time to avoid wheat or. Or is there a time when wheat is okay?

I don't think there's a time when wheat is ever okay for anybody, Ben. So you're right. There's a blood sugar issue. That's not an issue for everybody. It's an issue for most people. If I have wheat, I have gastrointestinal distress that lasts 48 hours. I start to salivate. I'm going to throw up. I can't think straight. I can't understand the papers I'm ready reading. I have peculiar dreams. I can'tin other words. Yeah, there's a blood sugar issue, but there's many other effects here. So that gliadin protein that stimulates appetite. So if I have that exposure to the gliadin protein, I'm going to increase. I'm going to Be hungry. It might be 9 o' clock at night after a full dinner and I've got to graze and snack. I can't stop. It's a very common effect from the gliadin protein of wheat. How about the lectins of wheat? There's a group of compounds called lectins that nearly all plants have for their own protection. Wheat's lectin, called wheat germagglutinin, is very odd. It's indigestible and when you ingest it and it makes its way to your intestinal tract, it has the unique capacity to unlock the normal intestinal barriers to unwanted foreign substances. So you and I have intelligent intestinal linings. It decides what can make it through and what can't make it through into your blood bloodstream, the lectin of wheat. Wheat germagglutinin stops, disables that capacity and in effect you have wide open access of multiple foreign substances into your bloodstream, including bacterial byproducts in your small intestine colon. This is probably why people who consume wheat have more rheumatoid arthritis, multiple skin rashes, have more, more lupus, have more Hashimoto's thyroiditis, connective tissue diseases, polymyalgia rheumatica. In other words, multiple inflammatory diseases, some of them quite severe, are likely due to the lectins of wheat. I don't think there's a way to make wheat a benign thing, even if you've essentially disabled the whole blood sugar phenomenon.

So what about if you were eating the type of wheat that you would have been able to get your hands on, say 100 years ago or 80 years ago, this 4 foot tall wheat that hadn't been modified in the way that you described.

You bring up an excellent point, Ben, that I think about a lot and I talk about a lot. That is, I think this is how I would look at it every step we go back in time to earlier forms of wheat, we get a more benign form of wheat. So if we go back to the wheat of 1950, we have a much more benign four and a half foot tall type of plant. If we go back to the strains grown in 19th century US and Canada, such as Red Fife, I believe it's even more benign and less fiddled with by humans. If we go back to the European Middle ages, we have Kamut and we have Spelt even more benign. If we go back to the wheat of the Bible, Emmer wheat, that's even more benign. If we go back all the way to the wheat that was gathered by hand in the Fertile crescent, that grew wild Einkorn wheat. That's the most benign of all. Now here we have to be careful, though. If something is less bad for you, does it make it good? So I think every time we go back, Ben, we have a much more benign, less harmful form of wheat. But at what point does it become harmless and good for us? I don't think it ever. I think we have to accept that it's likely that wheat has problems for all humans who consume it, but less bad the farther back you go. So here's a rhetorical question. How good does something have to be before we embrace it as good? Does it have to be only 50% as harmful? Does it have to be 70 or 80% or even 100% less harmful before we embrace it? I think that if we were to do this with wheat, we'd find that even if we go all the way back to Einkorn, it's probably, I'm just guesstimating, 70 to 80% better than modern wheat. But it's not entirely benign. We have this notion that when humans first adopted grains into their diet, we know this from the fossil record and from the record of artifacts that humans who incorporated even wild Einkorn and Emmer wheat many thousands of years ago did suffer a downturn in health. They had more dental problems, they had more bone problems, and perhaps even more vascular disease and cancer. So there was a downturn in health when humans incorporated grains. We also know that descriptions of celiac disease, the intestinal destruction from wheat, date back to as early as 100 AD. So it's not as if all the problems with wheat are brand new new. They're not. Wheat has been a problem for humans for as long as we've consumed it. It's just been amplified and exaggerated by the geneticists work in the last few years.

What about when you soak or when you sprout nuts or grains or seeds or legumes and kind of the idea that nature has set some of these things up so that they're supposed to survive until the proper growing conditions are present. So if you take them and you eat them before that point, they do have nutrition inhibitors and toxic substances and a lot of the stuff that you've just talked about, but when you soak something like that and kind of allow it to germinate, you can kind of decrease the activity of some of these enzyme inhibitors and phytates, et cetera. So when it comes to something like that, if you were to eat Soaked or sprouted wheat. Would you say that in some situations, especially in a situation where you were more insulin sensitive or more able to use sugar, that wheat would be okay in a situation like that?

Well, we're back at that issue, Ben, of if we make something less harmful, let's say 10% less harmful. Let's say we soak our seeds and we reduce the lectin and phytate content by 10%, maybe even 20%. Is that good enough? Is it now good? I would suggest it's not good, it's just a bit less harmful. So I can tell you, when I've seen people do these kinds of things, soak their wheat or sproute it or buy the Ezekiel type breads, we see all the same stuff. Because I believe a lot of the adverse components of modern wheat are still. And by the way, all those products come from modern high yield semi dwarf wheat. So it's not as if coming from ancient forms of wheat, but they're coming from the modern agribusiness generated forms of wheat. They still have lectins, substantial quantity lectins. They still have the envelopectin, a form of carbohydrate. They still have gluten, they still have glycogen. So it's not as if all the evil has been distilled out of the seed by any of these maneuvers. It's still pretty much wheat.

So is all hope kind of lost or. I mean, is there a place where you can actually get these type of ancient grains, these ancient wheats?

You can. It's kind of impractical. I think that's going to be a conversation we all have to have in the coming few years. What happens when we can get access, say to Einkorn? Is it okay to have it once in a while? I think there are certain people who should never indulge in Einkorn, like the celiac people and the people who are exceptionally gluten sensitive. But there's lots of us who maybe just have a carbohydrate issue and maybe some issues with lectin. See, one of the problems we have is there's been insufficient study made of exposure to Einkorn and Amyrs. In other words, if the last large scale consumption of einkorn was, was 6,000 years ago, we have no clinical data, of course, documenting what the biologic and physiologic effects of consumption was. So I think that's going to be something we have to entertain and discuss and explore as these kinds of foods become available.

Yeah, I know that not everyone has access to gardens or community gardens or areas to grow. But I was just curious. I thought about maybe getting my hands on some something like this to plant in my own backyard. I'd like to kind of talk a little bit, though, about other alternatives, substitutions for people who want to cut wheat out entirely. Let's say I want to make a cookie. We're in the holidays right now. Or just getting past them. How do I make a cookie without wheat? How do I make pizza without wheat? How do I maybe have some of these things that, that I'm used to having that contain wheat and still have them without just quitting cold turkey or completely cutting those type of things out of my life?

Yeah, good point. I'm glad you bring that up because it brings up the whole notion of gluten free. So we're back again at that notion of if something is bad for you, replace it with something less bad. Can we really say a whole bunch of less bad things is good for you? Same thing. Thing here. Manufacturers have replaced wheat and the gluten of wheat with other products, nearly always corn starch, rice starch, tapioca starch, and potato starch. So those are the primary ingredients in foods like gluten free multigrain bread, or gluten free pretzels, or gluten free pasta. These foods raise blood sugar higher than even wheat. And so high blood sugars sets in motion a whole cascade of events. It causes heart disease, hypertension, high blood pressure, it causes diabetes, causes cataract formation. This is because the process of glycation, the glucose modification of proteins, when your blood glucose goes real high. So the gluten free world has made a big blunder. They thought they were doing something right by replacing wheat gluten, but they replaced it with highly digestible carbohydrates. Carbohydrates that have the unique capacity to raise blood sugars higher than even wheat. So if you look at any table of glycemic index, you'll see that a snickers bar is 41 and a Milky Way bar is 55. And two sucrose table sugar is 59 to 65. Two slices of whole wheat bread is 72 and gluten free breads are somewhere around 90 to 100. They are the worst, at least from a blood glucose standpoint. What I do is I spend a lot of my time. In fact, the last few days, I devoted much of my time to coming up with ways that you and I can have chocolate chip cookies and cheesecake and pumpkin pie and other fun foods to replace the unhealthy equivalents. I post a lot of those recipes, but by the way, there's about 30 some recipes in the book, the Wheat Belly Book. But I also post some of my new recipes on the blog that accompanies the book, which is the Wheat Belly Blog. I just put up my recipe for gingerbread cookies and the week before that for raspberry chocolate cheesecake that has a nice layer of ganache like chocolate inside.

Making me hungry now.

So it's not a diet of cardboard you been, nor of just lettuce and greens. It's a rich and varied diet of vegetables and nuts, meats and eggs and cheese and avocados and olives and olive oil and these healthy replacements for wheat. And no gluten free nonsense, carbohydrates.

Don't rush off to the grocery store and just fill your grocery cart full of gluten free foods because you're probably not going to do your blood sugar much favors doing that either.

Exactly right.

Gotcha. Well, very cool. Obviously we've only scratched the surface of what's in your book. And so for the listeners who are tuned in right now and want to find out more, I will put a link to Dr. Davis book Wheat Belly over on the show notes for this podcast episode, episode number 176from BenGreenfieldFitness.com I will also put a link to a previous episode that we did with Dr. Davis about cold cholesterol and plaque podcast number 60. So a lot of good information and I would recommend that you go through this book Wheat Belly, if you want to find out more about this in detail. So Dr. Davis, thank you so much for coming on the call today.

Oh, thank you, Ben. My pleasure folks.

I hope you enjoyed that interview with Dr. Davis. It gave me a lot to think about. I know. I am currently researching whether or not it actually is even be feasible to do something like take a form of wheat that is its more ancient and healthy form and do something like plant that in the backyard garden. I don't know how to harvest wheat, how to thresh wheat, how to do anything like that. And it's something that my wife, who is a really, really good green thumb, also isn't too familiar with. So there may be some solutions out there. But ultimately the more that I study and hear about situations like like this, the more it looks like the best case scenario is to continue to eat foods that are in their most recognizable form and to continue to avoid foods that have been modified for industrial convenience or for mass production. So again, if you want to read the book, go check it out in the show notes for this episode. Episode number number 176. So Brock, that being said, you got any big plans coming up for the new year?

Yeah, actually we talked about it last week. I asked you some specific questions about how to prepare for it. But in January on the 7th and 8th, I'm doing back to back marathons, running a half marathon on Saturday and then a full marathon on Sunday. And I'm doing this actually in, in aid of and, and raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and through their, their team and training. And I'm, I'm actually like collecting money as donations. And at this point I've actually raised the amount of money that I needed to raise to put me into the next realm where up until this point I was 75 cents of every dollar that I raised was going to the, going to the society. But now it's every cent that I raise is actually going to the society. So it's fantastic to be at this point. But if you feel like you want to do a donation, there's still time to get the tax receipt as well. And if you donate more than $20, you get a tax receipt you can go to Bit Ly. So Bit Ly Goofybrock. I'll put it in the show notes.

Very cool. I love it when folks are doing an event like this and doing it for a good cause, especially since I'll probably be drinking an entire bottle of champagne and lighting off fireworks. The time that you're competing for a.

Greater cause, you'll be talking me down. I'll be phoning you going, oh my God, what have I done to myself?

Well, no matter how you celebrate the New year, if you're listening in, happy New Year. I'm looking forward to bringing you a lot of really great content in the coming year From Ben greenfield fitness.com so until next year, this is Ben and Brock signing out. Sa.