Episode #179: What Pharmaceutical Companies Don’t Want You To Know About Statins

In this podcast, what pharmaceutical companies don't want you to know about statins. Also light therapy, super carbs, caloric deficit, lactose intolerance, clear fluids o lifting p90x and running, staying warm during a swim, and artery inelasticity.

Welcome to the BenGreenfieldFitness.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 BenGreenfield Fitness.com.

Hello all you health, wellness and fitness fans out there. This is Brock and Welcome to the January 18, 2012 Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. And here as usual, we've got Willy Wonka himself, Ben Greenfield.

Sorry I'm late. A little bit behind. This morning I was actually doing yoga. I got up and I did yoga. Nice. I'm fairly proud of myself, which is why I was late. Kind of got stuck in a few poses. Takes a while for me to put on my stretchy pants too. It's a process.

Yeah, it's the getting them off that's the real challenge I always find.

But I did do yoga. I've been, I've been doing a little bit more yoga, had a little bit of an injury happen. And so that's, that's one of the ways that I'm keeping myself entertained is twisting myself into a pretzel.

So that's better than me. I, I rode my bike to work this morning. It was like minus 2 Fahrenheit, minus 19 this morning. But it rained like crazy last night, so my bike lock was completely frozen. It took me like probably 10 minutes to. I was sitting there breathing on it like ah, trying to get it to warm up enough to unlock. So that was my excus for being late. Not quite as fun as yoga.

That's a good way to make your bicycling more difficult though, having to melt your lock with your lungs.

Yeah, I also only had two gears that were actually working too. All the other ones were frozen.

Awesome. Sounds like similar to going across the country on a scooter. And dumb and dumber.

Just let it go, man. Just let it go.

It's hardcore. So this week I posted something interesting to the website and I wanted to mention this before we move on to the special announcements and that was that I'm giving away a bunch of stuff, including chocolate. And it's essentially just a giant giveaway. So I just wanted to remind the listeners that this thing is over on Friday in 48 hours from the time this podcast comes out. But I'm giving away Kiefer Kombucha, which if you're not familiar with those, are probiotic infused beverages and also a probiotic infused chocolate. And don't worry, I'll be sending it out over ice. I realize that even though it's freezing cold here in Spokane, it isn't in some other areas of the country. So I've got insulated packages, ice, and I'll be shooting this out to the folks who win that giveaway. If you want to find out how to win it, you got to go to the website. But head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and check that out if you want me to send you some pretty cool organic beverages and organic chocolate. And yeah, I'll shut up now and we can move on to the special announcements.

Well, I guess we already talked about the chocolate. What else is there going on?

Quick thing. For listeners who use the Android app or the iPhone app, redownload it. We moved a lot of our podcasts over to a different service that streams them out over the Internet and it will require you to delete and reinstall the app that you have on your phone. So sorry about the hassle. But the nice part about the is you got everything in one place. The blog, the podcast, the Ask Ben button, pretty much everything that you need to digest BenGreenfieldFitness.com on an Android or iPhone platform, the link to download it and both the apps are free. You just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and you scroll down on the right side of the page there in what's basically called the sidebar, there is a link to download the iPhone app and the Android app for free.

It's super easy to search for those on itunes as well as the Android Marketplace.

Correct. And the other thing is that this weekend I will be down near Sacramento, California on Saturday from about 9am to 4pm Speaking at a big health expo youth fitness event. So if you're in the Sacramento area and you want to swing by and take part of that, tons of freebies, tons of giveaways. You know, I'm doing body fat testing and fitness testing for kids and speaking along with a few other folks. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes and you can head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com this is episode number 179, right, Brock?

That's right.

So show notes for episode number 179. Check those out and you'll be able to find out if you want to come out. And you're in the Sacramento area. So there's one other thing I wanted to mention before we move on to this week's news flashes. And I'm going to pick this up and drop it just so you can hear it. Brock okay, this is about. Did you hear that? It's big. It's huge. That's the manuscript for my book that's coming out. This is the huge one, the one being released by Macmillan Press. It is called get fit for your ideal body Type. A lot of work went into this book. That's the reason I have this huge manuscript is we're going through kind of the final penning and editing and it is an enormous questionnaire that helps you identify your specific body type and then creates a fitness and a nutrition plan just for you for you to be able to get your dream body. So I wanted to just mention that I'm working on it and it will be out soon. Get the Inside edge from Ben Greenfield.

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Alright. Twitter.com BenGreenfield is the place to go if you want to get all of this information. But what did you do in the last week@twitter.Ben not a whole lot, to.

Be honest with you. I slacked this week. But I do have sitting in front of me right now the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. And there were actually a few interesting studies this week. I didn't even get a chance to tweet them yet. But if you follow me on Twitter BenGreenfield, you'll get the links to these this week because I'll be talking about them a little bit, but a few interesting studies. There was one study in which they're testing out this new in helmet temperature monitor system and they tested it out in football players. I know there's a lot of cyclists and triathletes who listen to this show who this might be interesting for. But there's this company called Hot Head Technologies and they developed this device which continuously monitors your fluctuations in body temperature and then spits it out to a personal digital assistant. Like technically it could be a phone so you could be riding your bike, let's say you're doing Ironman triathlon and you're doing the bike split. You can actually monitor your body temperature from an in helmet measuring device once this technology actually hits the streets, so to speak. And I think that's pretty cool. You know, if your coach could be monitoring your body temperature, you could be monitoring your body temperature. And you just know that you need to do a cold water dowsing or slow down or whatever when your temperature reaches a certain threshold. So that one kind of caught my attention.

That's very cool. Especially because you don't have to swallow anything like the Tour de France guys, do you? Right.

There's no swallowing and there's also pleasantly no rectal temperature. Exactly. So that makes that a lot more pleasant. Another study that I thought was interesting in here was the effect of motivational music on lactate levels during recovery from intense exercise. So this was interval training with music or without music. And what was found was that when you're listening to music, you actually buffer lactate more quickly. Like if you take your blood levels of lactate after you finish exercising, you buffer lactate more quickly when you've got music on, which that's a no brainer if you're going to go out and do a hard interval workout. By all means, if you're able to have some music on, because it's going to enhance recovery if you want every little extra bit of help. And I have really no clue what the mechanism for that is. I suspect it may be some type of increase in cardiovascular stimulus, increase in blood flow, vasodilation, the ability of more blood to be delivered to an area, thus be able to carry away more of the byproducts of lactic acid, something of that nature. But ultimately it's just, it's pretty cool.

I have visions now of every single one of my runners wearing headphones cranked up as loud as possible and I'm standing at the bottom of the hill yelling at them to stop. And they're not hearing me because they've got the tunes blaring.

Yeah, there's certainly a lot of cross country coaches and people such as yourself working with groups of athletes that probably are not going to implement this. But if you're out training by yourself, something to note. And then the last thing I wanted to mention was a study that looked at the adaptation to strength training and found that if you're going to go, go compete in a strength event that involves strength or power, you want to do your strength and power workouts at the same time that that event is going to be. And this makes sense if you think about it, but there really isn't or hasn't been in the past much research that looks into this. And I think that it certainly has crossover for any form of competition, including endurance. And I know I'm totally speculating there, but what it comes down to is, you know, if you're going to be competing in an event or a game or some type of competition, you should make sure that you're doing some workouts that are at approximately that same time. You know, let's use an example for I know a lot of people are doing like, you know, there's a half ironman in Boise, Idaho, and it starts in the afternoon. Well, if you're used to doing all your workouts in the morning, you may want to consider doing some of your tougher workouts at 2 or 3 o' clock in the afternoon so that your body is able to perform at that time of day. So it's interesting, the tie between performance and that circadian rhythm.

We are creatures of habit.

Absolutely.

Listener Q and A. Okay, our first question is an audio question and it comes from Craig.

Hey, Ben, this is Craig from Birmingham and I had a question about light therapy. I wondered what you thought about that. Some people use it for depression, but what if you're not depressed? Is it a good idea if you're in an environment where the winters are dark or you're not getting enough sunshine? And also specifically about a product that I had looked at called Circadian Blue. Anyway, if you would let me know, that would be great. Thanks. Bye. Bye.

All right, so light therapy for more than just treatment of depression.

Yeah, and Craig's right. There is more use for light therapy than just for depression. And it just comes down to your circadian rhythm. And we've talked about circadian rhythm before on the show. You've got this 24 hour cycle inside your body, your body's clock. And it's not just people that have a circadian rhythm. Bacteria do and plants do and animals do. And your circadian rhythm basically helps to cause the release of hormones, of neurotransmitters, the activity of enzymes in your body. I mean, the light dark cycle is very, very important because whether you believe that we've been around for millions of years or whether you believe we've been around for thousands of years, there is definitely a big, big part of our existence being dependent on the way that the axis of the earth is positioned and the weather and the seasons and how much light there is in the day and how much dark there is in the night and how soon that dark comes. I mean, all of that sends messages to our body and messages to our brain. So when it comes to light and kind of playing around with light, yeah, you can certainly do things that affect your hormones. For example, if you look at, like melatonin, melatonin, which is basically your sleep hormone that responds to specifically blue light, which is the type of light you're going to be exposed to if you walk out on a bright sunny morning. And when blue light is gone and it's not there, you're going to have more melatonin produced and you're going to get sleepy and want to go to bed. And this actually makes sense because when it gets dark, your blue light disappears and you fall asleep. The interesting thing is that LCD screens and computers and phones and TVs all also emit blue light in the same way that daylight does. And so if you are entertaining yourself with these type of things at night, you are sending a message to your brain to shut down the production of melatonin and potentially disrupt your sleep cycle. And at the same time, if you are presenting your brain with those or any other form of blue light, light in general works. But blue light is the most effective form for something like this. You're going to help yourself wake up and you're going to help kind of get your circadian rhythm where it needs to be. And that's why they make these devices that you can literally set next to computer in the morning or look at while you're eating breakfast. And it assists with improving your alertness and your performance and even your nighttime sleep quality later on. And they've done studies on these and found that to be the case. Obviously, it's better if you're able to, to just step out into the sun or, you know, try and expose yourself to daylight. But, you know, for example, right now it's almost 9 o' clock in the morning here in Spokane, Washington, and it's gray outside and you can barely even see any sunshine. And there'd certainly some benefit, probably, I would imagine, if I had some form of blue light here stimulating me to a little bit greater level of alertness and kind of shutting down some of that melatonin and also elevating the amount of cortisol that my body releases in the morning, which is one of the ways that your body kind of wakes itself up. So those are, you know, to me, that's kind of the main Benefit of using something like a. Like a blue light. I don't know what this circadian blue that Craig is talking about exactly is. I've never heard of that. But, you know, it's probably just one of these light boxes that you look at. And yeah, they use it for seasonal affective disorder and for depression, but it can also simply be used to put you to sleep. And of course, there are other wavelengths of light that can be used for, you know, infrared for wound healing. And, you know, they'll use some wavelengths of light to assist with hair growth and with improvement in blood circulation. You know, a lot of different uses. And we could talk for hours about light therapy, but ultimately, yeah, it can be beneficial for more than depression from a practical standpoint. You don't have to rush out and buy a light box per se. I think most people have more trouble getting to bed at night than they do waking up in the morning. So if you have trouble waking up in the morning, yeah, by all means, you may want to go out and try one of these blue light devices that emits blue light in the morning. More importantly, I would say eliminate sources of blue light in the evening, like TVs and laptops and phones. Or if you're going to use a TV or laptop or a phone at night, there's a few things you can do. Like I've shown these Gunnar. They're Gunnar glasses, and they kind of block a little bit of the radiation from the screen, but they're also tinted orange, so they essentially block out a lot of the blue light. So you could put those on when you're working on your computer at night. And that's what I've been doing. And it actually helps the screen kind of stimulate you less. There's also this app called Flux. It's Flux. It's free, and you can download on your computer. And essentially it dims your computer when it's approximately time to go to bed or when the sun's going to kind of naturally go down where you live. So that's a cool free app. It's called Flux. I'll put a link to these in the show notes for Craig, by the way, episode number 179. And then just make sure that you keep your room as dark as possible. And you may think that when you have your eyes closed that this isn't really going to matter much. But blind people are able to be stimulated by certain wavelengths of light. And it's not just what you can see that's stimulating you. Like, light can actually cause an effect on your hormones, even if you're blind. And that's why moles have a circadian rhythm. So understand that it's important to sleep in completely dark conditions and go to bed and get up in the same way that we've been doing it for thousands or for millions of years. So great question and kind of a really, really cool area.

Yeah, it goes along really well with that conversation you had with Deborah Davis. When was that? Last Friday, the podcast that came out. She talked about a lot of the same sort of ideas anyway, about keeping devices out of the bedroom and away from yourself for other reasons. But it certainly ties into the same sort of idea here.

Another good book to check out would be lights out by T.S. wiley, and that's a good one when it comes to kind of investigating how the way that we live our lives these days, staying up really late or later than we possibly should can really affect your hormones and your hormone fluctuation. So good stuff.

So I have another excuse to go to bed at 9:30 then.

There you go.

Awesome. Okay, our next question comes from Keith. And Keith wants to know about super carbs. Ben and Brock, this is a question for your podcast. This is Keith calling from near Austin.

In the beautiful state of Texas.

And then I read a recent article in the January February issue of Ultra.

Runner magazine written by Sunny Blend, who is a sports nutritionist, where she talks about the super carbs and specifically Generation.

You can and Vitagro S2 by Jenner 8.

And I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on the supercards.

Thanks a lot for your great show and I'm enjoying Brock.

You picked a real good guy to co partner with. Thank you. All right, so I really don't know who this person is that Keith was talking about. I haven't read any of these articles about super carbs, but I know you know, in sports nutrition, what they do call super carbs or super starches are basically starches that can accelerate the rate at which your body absorbs them post exercise to be able to take them up and store them away as muscle carbohydrate. So the idea is that typically what a superstarch is, it's usually derived from corn. I know that's what you can is it's basically if you get the powder. And that's all you'd want to get if you use this stuff because the actual supplements have preservatives and artificial sweeteners and nasty stuff like that in them. But I know youcan does make just a powder and it's essentially cornstarch. And what that means is that it's able to replenish glycogen a little bit faster just because of the carbohydrate makeup of it. Potato starch, you're also going to find as a superstarch, quote, unquote, superstarch. Barley starch is another one, Vitargo, that product made by Generate, that's a barley starch. And what these starches are able to do is they ramp up insulin levels to really, really high amounts, which you would think would be a bad thing, because we hear about how insulin makes you fat and causes obesity and all that. But after a workout, high amounts of insulin are actually really handy because insulin just drives carbohydrates into your muscles, which is great. So when you finished a workout, any carbohydrate that's going to cause a higher release of insulin could potentially cause you to take up muscle carbohydrate more quickly, which means that you're replenishing your energy stores more quickly. The other thing about these waxy maize starches, corn starches, barley starches, potato starches, is they have a low, what's called osmolality and osmolality, Basically what that refers to is how much water is drawn into these starches. And when a starch has a low osmolality, that means that when you eat it, you get a lot less water drawn into your stomach, and so you don't get as much bloating. And less bloating means that your stomach is going to empty a little bit quicker. And so studies have shown that these starches have a faster gastric emptying rate, too. The other thing is that they can basically be released a little bit slower when you digest them in terms of their rate of transport into the bloodstream. And so they don't spike your sugar levels quite as high. The issue is twofold here, though. With the amount of freaking money that you're gonna spend on these carbohydrates, because they're a lot more expensive than other carbohydrates. And that is that a no matter what kind of carbohydrates you eat, peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a $90 canister of engineered starch, within eight hours, your muscle glycogen levels are going to be full anyways. So it doesn't really matter unless you're going to be working out again in like an hour or two hours. And when you're going to be working out again in an hour or two hours, yeah, it makes sense to replenish your glycogen levels as much as you can. And that would, you know, this would be something for like maybe a swim meet where you're going to be competing multiple times in a day and you want to max your glycogen stores out right after you finish competing. But for most of us in our day to day activities, we work out and, and most of us aren't going to go out and smash ourselves again within eight hours. So there's very few people for whom maximizing your glycogen resynthesis post workout is worth the extra money that you'd spend on something like this versus just realizing that pretty much eating the way that you would normally eat and following your appetite is going to restore your glycogen levels just the same within eight hours. The other thing about this is that despite all of the fancy mumbo jumbo you're going to find on the Vitargo website or the UCAN website, and all the research and all the studies about higher insulin levels and slower release of the carbohydrates and less of a spike in blood glucose right after you eat it, et cetera, there's no actual effect on performance. All this stuff is great, but what it comes down to is are you going to run faster, are you going to lift heavier, are you going to bike faster? Maybe I'm completely missing something here, but, but there's actually no studies that I can find anywhere that actually show that this stuff makes you faster or stronger. It's like, you know, they make pretty graphs, but for the expense, I'm just, I'm not sold.

Well, there you go, Keith. Okay, our next question comes from Matt. And Matt asks, I run anywhere from 50 to 75 miles a week and weigh around 200 pounds. I'd like to lose about 25 pounds. What is the best way to do that while continuing my current training schedule? Is there a calorie deficit I should try to hit daily that will allow me to lose weight without sacrificing a lot of performance?

Well, when, when you're running 50 to 75 miles a week and you're wanting to lose weight, you're pretty much set up in a pretty good place to be able to do it. The trick is not to lose weight too quickly because when you lose weight too quickly, you're going to be very, what's called catabol, you're going to tend to break down your own lean muscle. You're going to tend to produce a lot of cortisol, too much cortisol, you can compromise your immune system. So you need to go about things fairly carefully. And I had a similar question actually when I was giving a talk last weekend at a wellness center. And my response was pretty similar to what I'm going to say right here. You calorie cycle. So what that means is you go about five days a week where you are being calorie restrictive. You're not eating as much as you are hungry to be eating or as much as you should be eating to basically keep your calories in and your calories out. Equation completely balanced. So you're going into a calorie deficit five days a week and a calorie deficit for someone who's about £200, you'd be anywhere in the range of about 500 to 1,000 calories a day in terms of your actual deficit. So that's how many fewer calories you're eating compared to the number of calories that you're burning. And you can find out the number of calories that you're burning by just going and googling metabolic rate. And there are calculators that come up and you can punch in your weight and your body fat percentage and your height, and they're going to give you an approximation. It's not as accurate as going to a lab and getting an actual metabolic rate test, but the equations will give you a ballpark. So let's say that you find out that you burn. Let's say you burn 2,000 calories a day for your resting metabolic rate. Well, there are multipliers that you can then multiply that number by depending on your level of activity, or if you're wearing one of those heart rate monitor watches that approximates and again, approximates is the key word here, but approximates the number of calories that you're burning during your runs. Then you just add that to your resting metabolic rate. So let's say you're burning 1,000 calories a day running. Your metabolic rate is 2,000 calories. And I'm really, really simplifying this, but that means that you're burning 3,000 calories a day. And so you would eat somewhere in the range of 2,000 to 2,500 calories a day. And that would be your calorie deficit, but that wouldn't be every day of the week. This is the kicker. This is where most people stop and they're like, okay. And they rush off and do that and they get sick and tired and throw up their hands in despair. On the weekends or on your heavier volume days, or just two days of the week that you choose, you actually eat the number of calories that your body needs to maintain calorie balance. So that would be, you know, in the case of this example that I just gave 3,000 calories a day. And what you're doing there is you're allowing your body to restore, to recover, to bounce back, to not be catabolic, to not have a depressed immune system and to be able to lose weight without running into some of the problems that can happen when you're training and losing weight at the same time. A couple other quick strategies I would throw in there for you is do some of your workouts fasted in the morning on an empty stomach. There's pretty good results that I've had with many of the athletes I work with by having them do fasted workouts to basically cause you to burn your fatty acids a little bit more efficiently. And then the other thing I would do is make sure that you're switching, especially on those calorie restrictive days, to a high fat diet. So you're burning really, really slow, burning fuel, you're not spiking your blood sugar level and you're essentially teaching your body how to process its own body fat, its own storage fat for fuel. So that's what I would do, a calorie cycle, throw in some fasted morning workouts and eat a higher fat, lower carbohydrate diet. And that ought to do it for you.

And speaking from experience, I'd say the calorie cycling those two days that you actually eat more, I think a lot of people and I did the exactly same thing, thought, oh well, Saturday, Sunday, I'll eat my, those will be my, my refeed days. But if you actually split them up during the week, it becomes more satisfying. If you throw them both together on, on the weekend, then it makes the week really long. So I ended up doing my one day was on Wednesday and one day was on Saturday and that I found that a lot more satisfying. Just I don't know if it'll work for everybody.

But yeah, it's a very good point. You don't, you don't have to necessarily, you know, have, if you're going five days on, two days off, you know, you, you can split those two days up. So yeah, good point.

Okay, next question comes from Todd. Todd says I've been lactose intolerant all my life. I started triathlon, triathlon recently and thought about taking after workout protein shakes. One problem, most seem to be dairy based. I get a Massive headache and GI issues after drinking them. Same issue with fruit juice, juice and now soy milk. Any ideas or suggestions for managing this and incorporating post recovery drinks into my routine?

Yeah, absolutely. Because I'm lactose intolerant. I used to have horrible stomach aches and I especially started getting more lactose intolerant in high school and I was drinking like three glasses of milk a day and I'd just be torn up at night and I couldn't. I just didn't know. I had no clue what lactose was or lactase or, you know, that you could be intolerant to a food. That was just a totally foreign concept for me. You know, I grew up on pizza and hamburgers and my vegetables were iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing. That was my diet growing up. I had to dig into lactose intolerance a little bit and found out some cool things. First of all, you should listen to the podcast where we talked about goat's milk versus cow's milk, because this was a real light bulb for me that not all milk is created equal. All milk has certain levels of lactose in it, and a relatively large portion of the population is lactose intolerant. So what that means is you don't have the enzyme that's called lactase that allows you to digest lactose, and that is called lactose intolerance. Now, what I found out when I interviewed Joe Stout during this podcast, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes, was that goat's milk contains less lactose than cow's milk, so it's easier to digest if you have lactose intolerance. And the other interesting thing is that a lot of lactose intolerant patients are able to thrive just fine on goat's milk with no GI distress. And one of the reasons for that is that goat's milk just matches up to the human body a lot better than cow's milk. And it's an issue of biochemistry. Basically, the proteins that are in goat's milk are better absorbed by the body. They're a smaller form of protein, they're more favorable. If you think about a goat, baby goat starts off life at about seven to nine pounds, the same as a baby person compared to a baby cow that starts off around whatever, £100. They're just very different in terms of their nutritional needs. A cow versus a goat. And that's one of the reasons that goat's milk is much more similar to human milk biochemically. So interesting stuff. And that's one option is you switch to a milk that's more favorable. The other thing that that I found is a raw, unpasteurized milk is also something that I can personally tolerate. I do just fine. I can drink a glass of that stuff, and I don't often drink a glass of milk just because it's high in calories and it's able to make you fat, unless you're trying to put on a bunch of muscle or something. Ultimately, though, I can drink raw cow's milk too, just fine. The first thing is understand that not all milk is created equal. The next thing that I would highly recommend is you look into probiotic supplementation. So the way that probiotics would help is probiotics actually have lactase in them, and that's just something that they naturally contain. Not lactose, but lactase, which is the enzyme that breaks down lactic acid. And when you consume a probiotic, these lactase enzymes that are in the probiotic actually can adhere to the lining of your GI tract and essentially give you what you didn't have before. Another way to do this would be to literally take a digestive enzyme that has lactase in it. But the interesting thing about taking probiotics is that if you use probiotics and you really build up the healthy flora of your stomach, then you don't have to use a digestive enzyme the way that you would normally use a digestive enzyme, which would be like, I'm going to have a bowl of ice cream. Oh, crap, where's my digestive enzymes? I have to take two of these right before I have the bowl of ice cream so that I'm able to digest it. That's the way digestive enzymes work. You got to take them right before the meal. But with probiotics, you could take probiotics, whatever, in the morning and be able to do just fine with lactose the rest of the day. Or as you build up your probiotics through frequent use over a period of months, you may find that you're just able to even go for a period of time without taking probiotics and be able to digest lactose just fine, just because that good bacteria lives in your stomach for a while, releasing those lactase enzymes. So there are certainly certain probiotic strains that are better. Like when you look at probiotics, you're going to see, like, Lactobaculus, acidophilus and Bulgaricus and all these different names. I'll put a link in the show notes to the probiotic that I use. It's actually made by the same folks who use that who make that goat milk. And that would be one that would certainly help you out in terms of releasing natural lactase enzymes. Just because it's derived. That probiotic is derived from goat's milk and so it has the milk digesting enzymes in it. Those are the things that I would do in terms of probiotics. Digestive enzymes. You mentioned or Todd mentioned that these are after workout protein shakes that are giving him the stomachache. Todd needs to listen to this Friday's podcast because I actually, I've personally been using a new type of protein powder and I got the folks on the phone who actually make it, but it's a protein powder that has probiotics infused in it. And this stuff is like zero bloating, zero GI distress. It basically when you eat it. And this sounds scary, but it actually has these spores in it, this spore forming probiotic. And I know that sounds really sci fi, but essentially what happens is, is that spore germinates and produces good bacteria in your stomach. And it's actually got some really cool research behind it in terms of even like in hospital clinical settings, improving abdominal pain and bloating in people who have irritable bowel syndrome and improving the immune response based on the amount of probiotics it can build up in your GI tract. It tastes amazing. It's cool stuff. I'm totally not trying to be a commercial here, but. But that came to mind right away when you read Todd's questions. This deep 30 protein is something I would really, really look into trying too. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. And yeah, that's what I would do if I were Todd.

Okay, next question comes from Jeff and this is one of those questions for Dr. Ben. We need to run the disclaimer here, here right before you answer this question.

I'll get the disclaimer ready while you read the question.

All right. Jeff says, I'm scheduled to have a colonoscopy and in part of the preparation, the colon must be cleared. So the day before and the day of the procedure, I'm only allowed to drink clear fluids. From a nutritional standpoint, are there specific fluids that would be of greater benefit to me? I'm a hard training triathlete and nutritional effects on training are a concern for me. The procedure is on a Wednesday, so on Monday he's doing a solid brick and a moderate swim. And then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday are rest days. And he said, any thoughts on the type of fluid intake or preparation prior to and post procedure. From a nutritional and exercise perspective.

Yeah, it's a good question. I'll start with the disclaimer. By the way, I should just say this at the beginning of the Q and A. I am not a doctor, and I've never been a doctor, and I've never gone to a school that would make me be a doctor or have a doctor certification. And so anything I say is not medical advice. It's just stuff that I would do or I would advise you to do if you were my mom. Does that help?

That's good. And I'm even less of a doctor than Ben, so really don't listen to me.

So if you were my mom. Jeff, going in for your colonoscopy, the reason you can't take in certain foods is kind of obvious. I mean, the stuff sticks to the sides of your colon. I mean, even like flaxseeds and seeds and nuts, Stuff like that's really bad. But you got to have stuff clear so they can go in there and see what's going on. And the reason you got to stay away from certain types of fluids, like a lot of energy drinks and flavored waters, is because red and blue dye, well, any food dye really, also sticks to the lining of your colon and keeps them from seeing things like polyps. And the last thing you want is to to find out two months down the road you have colon cancer that they missed because you had a mountain dew the day before. So make sure that you're staying away from drinks that have dyes in them. But if I were you, what I would do is just drink some of the safer, clearer drinks. For example, coconut water would be awesome for you. You've got sugar, you've got electrolytes. It digests well. Yes, you would be peeing a lot if you were relying on coconut water as your sole source of calories, but that would certainly help out quite a bit. Kombucha is another beverage that can be sweetened. You can add sugar or calories to that or coconut water if you want to actually get enough calories for these workouts. And as long as you're being sure that you're not drinking a kombucha that has food dye added to it, and turn around and look at the back to make sure there's not anything from red or green or yellow food coloring or even beet juice dye, none of that type of stuff, then something like that would be okay. As far as other clear fluids, those are really the main two that come to mind. I mean, there are certainly green teas and things of that nature out there. You can go stand in awe in the beverage section of the Whole Foods and look at 100 different types of magical drinks. But. But coconut water and kombucha are two pretty proven ones. I would also be looking into things like bone broths and clear foods like that. Jello is another one that you often are gonna find is something that you can eat before colonoscopy. But just avoid things that have lots of nuts and seeds and skins and insoluble fiber and drink those clear liquids instead. And yeah, you may need to back off on your workouts a little bit. Cause it's really, really tough to lot of calories in unless you're just basically mixing pure sugar into your clear liquids. So you may got. You may need to back off the workouts a little bit. But those are the clear liquids that I would consume if I were you.

The doctor is also going to give you this drink that. That's going to keep you pretty much chained to the. To the washroom for the day before the procedure. So I'm glad that you don't have any workouts planned for that day because you're not going to be able to do them.

Yeah, the polyethylene glycol.

Yeah, I think it's called go lightly, which is quite an understatement.

Yeah, there's a bunch of different brand names of it, but it's all. If you see the word L Y T E embedded somewhere in the name of the thing that you're drinking. What that's designed to do is push a bunch of fluid through your bowel to force out basically any poo that happens to be in your colon or anything else. And yeah, you are going to be, as Brock says, chained to the washroom or as we call it here in the US the bathroom room.

Oh, I thought you called it the toilet there.

The head.

Americans are so crude. All right, the next question comes from Bob. Bob says my question is on taking up o lifting at the tender Age of 45. Background. I have a pretty demanding day job, so I will only be able to devote two to three sessions a week max to it. Then he goes into some pretty specific information about himself that I'll just, I'll jump over. I can. I'll put them in the notes though. I. I'd be very interested in both your general recommendations for making progress on both the snatch and clean and jerk, as well as your specific recommendations on the mobility work for O lifting that I should focus on for the necessary flexibility.

Cool. O lifting for people listening and you don't know what that is. That's Olympic weightlifting. That's like what you're gonna see when you turn on the Olympics and they're doing the. The two different moves. Moves. One's called the snatch and one's called the clean and jerk. That's Olympic weightlift.

Is that also powerlifting? Is that the same thing?

It's kind of similar. A lot of times, powerlifting is just going to include a bunch of different moves. You know, cleans and deadlifts and it's. O lifting is standardized. I mean, it's literally the snatch and the clean and jerk, and you've got your body weight categories for each different lifts. And you basically go up and wait until you get to a lifter who fails to complete one successful snatch and one successful clean and jerk, and then they're out and you move on. So it's all explosive strength. It's all power. These people are extremely wiry and small and can generate huge amounts of strength, or not really strength, but power based on their body weight. And that's kind of cool because that means that O lifting can do something like help you to be more powerful, to jump higher, to produce more force without bulking up. And all it involves is making sure that you're lifting heavy weights, you're lifting them properly, you're doing these two lifts, and you're never working out to get the burn, so to speak. If there's any lactic acid being produced or anything of that nature, it's going to reduce force production, it's going to reduce power. And you're not really going to be O lifting for weight. You're going to be, you know, basically kind of lifting really light weights for size and muscle strength. And there's better ways to get size and muscle strength than the snatch and the clean and jerk. So the snatch, just to remind folks, if you want to visualize what that is, you pick the bar off the ground really powerfully. You've got a really wide grip, very wide grip. And essentially, from a squat position, you're kind of violently shrugging that bar off the ground and then jumping underneath it. You're essentially jumping downward, and your body ends up underneath that bar with the bar held overhead. You're not pushing the bar overhead as much as you're just kind of explosively throwing the bar up over your head and falling underneath it into a squat position. And then the clean and jerk, you're starting with the bar on the ground again, you are explosively pulling the bar up again, but this time falling under it so that the bar ends up on your collarbone or above your chest. And then in the second part of the move, the jerk part of the move, you are pushing your hips back and jumping one foot forward and one foot back and lifting that weight overhead. These are lifts that require a great deal of precise skill. The O lifts are not lifts that you want to mess around with necessarily, especially if you're going to go heavy and try and learn by yourself. I recommend that you actually find a weightlifting coach to teach you to lift. Like I interned for a year with the University of Idaho football program and I learned all the olifs and had a had two really cool strength coaches that taught all the football players and kind of showed me the ropes. There's no way I could have learned this stuff on my own. So learning O lifting from a podcast is a bad idea. And I'm really, really hoping that you have a coach that you're working with or have a trainer you can hire to teach you how to properly do the clean and jerk and do the snatch. Dan John is a really good coach. He's got websites and stuff and he's got a really good hour long video that is a video of him teaching the snatch and the clean and jerk. He's got a really, really great instructional voice and approach and and I will link to his video in the show notes. I'm not saying you still shouldn't have a coach around to help you out, but I would watch that video for some cool advice from a guy who I will vouch is good when it comes to learning the olifs, especially if you don't have the immediate time or money to grab a coach. So check out that video that I'll link to in the show notes. And as far as warm up, as far as dynamic, dynamic flexibility goes for something like O lifting for people who don't know what dynamic flexibility is, that's rather than standing and stretching and holding stretches, you're moving around a stretch. So you might be doing lunges and side bends. You'll see people doing dynamic stretching, doing things like Frankenstein walks where you're just like walking across the room with your legs straight, kicking your toes up to your hands as far as you can. Jumping jacks, that's a dynamic stretch. Stretch backpedaling is a dynamic stretch. Skipping and bounding and hopping, those are all dynamic stretches. As our lunging from side to side, lots of different ways that you could go with a dynamic stretch, but what I would do is basically just put a few of them together. Like a dynamic stretch that you could do is you could basically lunge across the room. Every time you lunge, lifting your arms up overhead. And then when you get to the end of the room, you can do a series of side bends, side to side, then walk back across the room doing a Frankenstein walk, turn around, walk back across the room again doing high knees where you're kicking your heels up to your butt. Do a series of jumping jacks. When you get to the end of the room, turn around, backpedal. So run backwards back down the room. And I'm sure that you're visualizing here that you do need a little bit of space to do dynamic walk. And then you can go back across the room doing high knee skipping, driving your knees up as high as you can to your chest. And then you could finish by lunging across the room doing side lunges. So you do a side lunge to one side and then you spin and pivot and do a side lunge to the other side across the room and finish with some arm swings and some leg swings. And then really the best way to warm up or do dynamic flexibility for O lifting is then go do your O lift with a broomstick or something really light that you can hold onto. That just puts you through the ranges of motion without any load. And that's going to really dynamically stretch the muscles that you're going to want dynamically stretched for the heavier weights.

Wow, that sounds quite involved for something that seems almost like an easy movement.

You will get some respect at the gym though, if you can do them properly. I mean, I work out at the YMCA and there's a couple little guys that doll lifting there and they're just a amazing. These guys are tiny, tiny dudes and the amount of weight they can lift overhead just puts me to shame in terms of what they're pulling off the ground lifting over their heads. It's pretty cool stuff.

In preparation for the podcast today, I just googled O lifting and the first thing that came up was a video on YouTube of what looked like a six or seven year old boy doing these moves.

Wow.

Anyway, okay, Al Al asks. I'm a marathon runner and I'm looking forward to trying your marathon dominator program in 2012. I'm currently in my off season and I've been doing a combination of strength training, using your 12 strength training routines for Triathletes guide and doing cardio with mixing Swimming, elliptical and bike interval routines. I just started P90X and I wanted to get your thoughts on the program and how it relates to my offseason running training. It does have a lot of volume with about one hour per day spent on focused training.

Yeah, I mean P90X is intense. Those are, you know, we're talking 60 to 90 minute workouts that just kick your butt. It wasn't designed to be done with with a run training program. Okay. And like I talked about this on the Tri Ripped video over@tri ripped.com if you're going to do P90X, just do P90X and don't combine running with it unless you want to totally overstress yourself. Get chronic fatigue syndrome, you know, overwork your adrenal glands. Sure, you could pick and choose some of the stuff from P90X and do parts of the program and that would be a better way to go. I would definitely not be doing the full on P90X program though. And by the way, stay far away from their nutrition program. I won't go into it right now, but their nutrition program is just synthetic crap. The rest of P90X program, great workouts, but I mean running is tough too. And if you're doing that along with P90X, you need to be really careful if you do decide you're going to do P90X. A few thoughts here. P90X plyometrics workout is not a plyometrics workout. That's like basically an aerobic step class is what that is. A true plyometrics workout is just a few reps done. And we were talking about this in the athletes forum. Brock. For the athletes that I coach, one of my athletes recently asked why the plyometrics workouts that I prescribed. Seemed really cautious was the word he used. And the reason for that is plyometrics are supposed to be done at maximum intensity, similar to this O lifting that we just talked about. And they focus on quality of movement and jumping as high as you can and minimizing ground contact time and really, really focusing on generating a lot of power and staying uninjured while you're doing it. You can't do a true plyometrics workout as a high intensity hour long cardio routine. Okay. That's a steps class. So if you're doing plyometrics and you want to do plyometrics and get the benefits of plyometrics making you run fast, faster, don't do the P90X plyometrics. So caution there. If You're a runner and you're worried about upper body muscle slowing you down. Stay away from the beach muscles, which is what the P90X program calls your shoulders and your arms. So P90X is designed to give you bigger shoulders and arms. If that's something you're going after, great. But understand that it could make you a slower runner. And I have no problem with that. Like I if you want to look good with your shirt off at the beach, that's great. That's one of the reasons that I designed the tri ripped program. But you need to be careful with the type of looking great program that you do. Because if you're just piling a bunch of non functional muscle on your arms and your shoulders, which is kind of what P90X does, then that's the wrong way to go about things. P90X gets kind of crunch crazy in places. There are many, many more core exercises that you could do aside from crunches. If you think of your low back as a credit card and you're bending and extending that credit card, you only have so many bends and extensions before you start to get a little white line and a crack. And your back's the same way. You do have a finite number of bends and extensions. I am fine with using crunches as like a post core workout fatiguing mechanism or maybe something to get a little blood flow to your stomach and warm up your core before working workout. But they shouldn't comprise the meat of the core workout, so to speak. And you'll find that sometimes in P90X. So the last thing is that P90X sometimes you get a lot of volume. I know they have some workouts where you're doing six different kinds of push ups and a lot of times you just don't need that type of volume to get good results. Unless you're just trying to completely beat yourself up and destroy your chest for the day day. Which again, I have no problem with that. If you know that's how you want to put on muscle and that's how you feel good is by doing that many different variations of push ups, great. But you don't have to do that many types of push ups. Two variations of push ups for a workout work just fine. So be careful with using P90X for running, especially for higher intensity running. I would. If I were using P90X and someone threw the CDs at me and they told me that was all I could use use to become a better runner. Aside from just running, I'd be using P90 x 30% of the time and running the other 60% of the time. So just kind of understand that you're going to need to adapt those workouts if you want to be a better runner. That Marathon Dominator program you talked about, marathon dominator.com, that does have strength workouts with it. So you don't have to use P90X when you're using that program either, because there is strength with that. I co designed that program with a coach over in Seattle. She's a good coach. She designed the strength portion of it. I can vouch for it. It's good stuff. So, yeah, that's what I would say to Al.

Okay, our next question comes from Power Frog, and she asks. I've been swimming a lot in open water lately in preparation for a few Olympic distance triathlons. After about 30 to 40 minutes spent in the water, my fingers and feet get numb and it takes about 30 minutes for the blood to go back into my limbs after I get out of the water, even when I go straight onto a bike or into a run. I've searched your site on how to improve blood circulation. In episode 103, you mentioned Greyhound Juice, but the website seems to be gone. Have to do a Google search for that, I guess, and see where we can. We can repoint that, but any other tips to stay warm after a swim or some tricks on how to get the blood rushing back into the fingers and feet straight after a swim?

Yeah, that Greyhound Juice was pretty awesome stuff. It's basically, it's what's called an embracing cream. Cyclists use it. It's got cayenne pepper and essential oils in it. And what it does is it warms your muscle because it covers up the muscle with some oil, which is an insulator. But it's also the peppers, essentially, those hit your PA receptors and they make you feel as though you are warm, even though you're not really warm. When your body gets a message of pain from the nociceptors that cayenne pepper is hitting, then it interprets that as warmth. And yeah, the Greyhound Juice had that stuff or had that in it. And I've still got some bottles of the Greyhound Juice underneath my bathroom counter because I bought a bunch of it before Ironman Coeur d' Alene one year when I was using that to stay warm during Ironman Coeur d'. Alene. So, yeah, I mean, using it topical lotion or a topical cream like that can work really well. If you pick up the latest issue of Lava Magazine, Lava Magazine, which is a great magazine, by the way. I write for it. That's not why it's great, but it's just a cool. It's got cool pictures in it and it's just a cool magazine. It's for triathletes. Anyways, if you pick up the most recent edition of Lava magazine, it's the one with the race car driver on the front, there's a pretty good article in that about embrocation creams and how they work and how they keep the muscles warm. And they're designed for cyclists. But swimmers swimming in cold water can certainly use them to help you out a little bit. You're still going to get hypothermic if you stay in there for too long, if you're in really cold water, because again, they aren't actually warming your body, they're just sending sensations of warmth through your body. There's a bunch of different brands out there. One that you can grab off Amazon. I'll throw a link to it in the show notes. It's called Ozone. They all basically have similar ingredients, though. Basically an insulating oil or fat that goes on your body, plus some type of a pepper that hits those receptors that make your brain think that it stinks warm. I suppose you could just try mixing some cayenne pepper in with some Crisco and smearing that in your body. And I say that slightly in jest, but at the same time, I mean, Crisco people have used that before for big open water swims. And it can keep you warm when you're in the open water. I've never tried mixing cayenne pepper into it, but it could work. Try that out right into the show or shoot a video or something and let us know how it goes.

Give us the the rest of recipe.

You lose a lot of warmth through your head, so double cap it. You can wear a silicone cap plus a latex cap or, you know, a couple silicone caps and a couple latex caps. You can get these, you know, these rubber neoprene caps from a company like Blue 70. And you know, your head is a really, really important place to protect when you're going to swim in cold water. The wetsuit, of course, goes without saying, but you can also get booties and gloves if you're going to swim in cold water. And again, a company like Blu70, they're just the company I know about because that's what I use. Like their booties and their gloves and their neoprene cap, that's something else that you could use. And I know that Power Frog says they want to swim without much buoyancy. And I would still recommend that you use a wetsuit to keep your body warm when you can make sure you keep moving. Like, our pool at the YMCA has been super cold. The boiler's been broken, so it's been about 63, 64 degrees in there. And I've just changed up all my workouts, so I don't do a lot of interval workouts where I'm stopping and going. I just do workouts where I'm moving the whole time so that my body actually stays warm. Your body is going to need a couple minutes to adjust to the cold water. And the nerves in your face get really, really sensitive to cold water. And they can give you that cold water shock response. It's called a mammalian dive reflex. And what you can do is splash cold water on your face to kind of get rid of a little bit of that response. The other thing that you can do is you can just do the first little bit of your swimming on your. Your back rather than having your face in the water, and then you've kind of gotten your body used to it, then you can turn over and do your front stroke after you've done backstroke for a little while. The other thing that you can try is focusing on something other than the cold. For me, I've just been putting my MP3 player on some hardcore techno tunes and using that to basically keep my mind off the fact that I'm pretty cold when I'm swimming there. And it usually takes me about an hour after I finish the swim to actually warm. Warm up. I think. Actually last week before the podcast, I had just come out of the water and I was cold. So last thing I would say. Earplugs. Earplugs. For some reason, those help you stay warm. That's what a lot of open water swimmers who swim in really cold conditions say. As a physiologist, I cannot say that I have any clue how that actually works, but somehow earplugs can help you to stay warm. So that's another tip.

All right, our next question comes from Gordon. And this is another Dr. Greenfield question here. Gordon says, under what circumstances would you Recommend Coming off Dr. Prescribed statins? I've been taking statins for the for most of the last 10 years and have come to believe that it's affecting my allegations athletic performance, perhaps progressively. Then I'm going to really paraphrase what Gordon said here. Basically, he's made himself a case study of one, he's gone on and off the statins over the last couple years and he's noticed that when he's off the statins, his performance gets better, but his cholesterol goes way up. Then when he goes back onto the statins, his cholesterol gets good but his performance drops down. He doesn't find that he goes quite as fast or as powerful. So based on his own experience, documented performance records and some research into how statins affect athletes, he's considering coming off the statins again against his doctor's wishes. And he wants to know, do you have any thoughts or recommendations that might help me make this decision?

Well, yeah, statins are, that's a muscle wasting medication. I mean, of course you're going to have poor performance when you're on a statin. And, and the part of it that really stinks is in most cases you don't even need them because high cholesterol isn't an issue. I'm gonna just say go back and listen to my medical disclaimer if you need to before you listen to what I'm about to say. But statins don't even increase survival in healthy people. So if you haven't ever had a history of heart disease and you've never had heart issues and you're just worried because you have high cholesterol, no study of statins on people have ever shown that they reduce mortality in men or women with elevated cholesterol. If you have no known heart disease and you've never had heart disease, statins aren't helping you and they actually compared to placebo increase your risk of death. Okay, so first of all, there may not even be a need for you to be consuming statins. And if you go and look at the research at the big research at the American Medical association research again, you'll find these studies on big, big people, large controlled trials that found that long term use of stat basically make absolutely no sense for healthy people who have high cholesterol but no history of heart disease or no present heart disease. For women, even if you do have heart disease, like a pre existing heart disease, statins completely fail to lower your risk of cardiovascular disease or lower your risk of mortality. And as a matter of fact, Journal of the American Medical association and they published a study that showed that statins in women who actually did have heart disease, that statins they did slightly lower the risk of dying from a heart attack, but that was evened out by other deaths that could have possibly been caused by the statins leaving the Overall mortality of taking a statin completely unchanged or from taking a statin completely unchanged. So in elderly people, we were just talking about the normal population, but if you look at elderly people, absolutely no effect of a statin in terms of reducing deaths from coronary mortality. In elderly people with heart disease, there was a huge trial called the Prosper trial, and it did find that there was absolutely no help with statins for people who are over the age of 65. So if you're over 65, it doesn't even matter if you have heart disease, statins aren't gonna help you. And as far as the deal with statins and comparing them to other forms of medication, that may not be quite as bad for you in terms of doing what statins do to your muscles. There is a big study in the British Medical Journal and it showed that aspirin was just as effective as statins for treating heart disease in people who heart disease. And obviously aspirin is like 10 times less expensive. So there are some serious issues with statins specifically that they can do quite a bit of damage to your muscle. They strip your muscles of what's called coenzyme Q10, so they can cause night cramps, fatigue muscles that get more damaged during exercise, and a lot of other issues. And simply taking statins and then supplementing with Coenzyme Q10 can help a lot. Little bit, but not that much. Especially when you come down to the heart of the issue, and that is that cholesterol is not the culprit when it comes to heart disease. And as a matter of fact, I would be very, very happy if I found out that I had pretty decent levels of cholesterol. And that's because cholesterol is used to move fats around in your body. So if you're eating a lot of fats, if you're eating like a high fat diet, you're going to produce more cholesterols, because cholesterol particles are the way that your body binds up fatty acids and transports around in your body. You need cholesterol for that. And there is a much, much higher correlation between the amount of insulin that you have in your body from eating a higher amount of carbohydrates, the amount of what's called leptin, and specifically leptin resistance. Leptin is a hormone that you produce that tells you that you're full. And when you eat a high carb diet and you eat a lot of starches and processed westernized foods, your body becomes resistant to life. Leptin and There is also a significant correlation between leptin resistance and heart disease. Finally, there's a significant correlation between oxidized cholesterol particles, really small cholesterol particles that are generated from eating a high amount of sugar and that can cause damage to the arteries. And there's also a high correlation between that and heart disease. Statins aren't going to help any of those factors. Changing your diet is what's going to help those factors. And actually, actually in many cases, eating more fat and less carbohydrate is what's going to help those factors. I would not be really worrying about cholesterol as much as I would about blood sugar. I would be getting a blood sugar measuring device that you can get for like, 20 bucks from your local pharmacy and measuring your blood sugar after every meal that you eat and making sure that your blood sugar is not significantly rising. It's very, very simple technique to buy a glucose and get some test strips and basically see what's happening to your blood sugar. And what you want to do is look for blood sugar that's going up really, really high, like getting higher than about 140 to 150 after you eat a meal. And you're also looking to test your blood sugar about two or three hours after a meal and see that it's returned to baseline, preferably below 100. If you're in really decent shape, you're rarely going to be seeing numbers that are above 100 when it comes to blood sugar. That's what I would be testing, that's what I would be tracking. And the other thing that I would be tracking, when you get your test results back, when you get a blood test, you should be able to see both these numbers, but it's the level of triglycerides that you have versus the levels of HDL that you have, what's called your triglyceride to HDL ratio. So if your hdl, which is the cholesterol that's responsible for carrying fats around your body and putting them where they need to be, if that HDL is high and your triglycerides aren't out of control, meaning that you're actually burning fat fairly efficiently, that's a good sign. So if you have a triglyceride to HDL ratio, just take the triglyceride number, divide that by the HDL number, and if that's two or less, great. If it is more than two, or especially if it's pushing above four, that's where you want to consider changing up your Diet to increase the amount of hdl. And the way that you would lower your triglycerides would preferably be by cutting out any type of fats in your diet that would be like omega 6 fatty acids and basically unnatural fat. So you'd want to cut out chips and scones and biscotti and even a lot of seeds and nuts and nut butters you'd want to be careful with. And you'd want to be eating more cold water fish and coconut oil and things of that nature. I know I kind of blabbed on for a while, but ultimately what it comes down is I would have a frank discussion with your doctor. Tell you what, send your doctor to trackyourplaque.com I'll link to that in the show notes. But go to trackyourplaque.com, great website. It's run by Dr. Davis, I believe, who's been on this show. And essentially what it does is it tells you everything you need to know about how to reduce your risk of heart disease. And, and I completely agree with everything I've seen on that site ever. It's called trackyourplaque.com and I know that patients have sent their doctors to check out this site before they do produce kind of like educational materials on this site that you could even just hand to your doctor when you go and see them. But ultimately, once again, disclaimer. If you were my mom, this is what I would tell you. Statins are not your friend. So.

Well, there you go, Gordon. I think that is answers your question in spades. Okay, our final question. Here we go. Chem Chem asks calcium scores got me thinking. Could a healthy as in lots and good dairy consumption lead to artery inelasticity and cause one's blood pressure to rise?

Yeah, probably. So could drinking too much water water. But yeah, calcium, if you're eating a lot of calcium, it can result in these calcifications. So if you have. I just talked about that small oxidized cholesterol. And if you've got a lot of this inflammation in the arteries from eating a high carbohydrate diet or a diet that's high in essentially processed fats, then calcium can combine with that cholesterol, it can assist with that plaque formation, it can cause a block to artery, which, you know, all that calcium can harden, and that's a serious health risk when it blocks the artery. It can also cause kidney stones when you're consuming a lot of calcium, especially when you have a magnesium deficiency, because magnesium is necessary for calcium absorption and utilization. Gosh, those are the main two things I can think of would be kidney stones or calcified arteries. But in both cases, that's something you can fix. From the clogged arteries perspective, if you're not putting yourself in a state where you have arterial inflammation from oxidized cholesterol and high carbohydrate and factory produced fat consumption, then eating a couple little containers of Greek yogurt a day, which is a huge source of calcium, is no big deal. And then as far as kidney stones go, make sure that you're taking some natural calm magnesium at night, using some topical magnesium oil, and make sure that you keep your magnesium levels elevated so that your body is staying in an ideal calcium to magnesium ratio and you're not increasing your risk of kidney stones. So ultimately it's not something that you need to worry about unless there's some other type of mistake going on in your diet.

There you go. I guess that is a wrap on episode 170. I just want to remind everybody, I actually went to itunes just the other day just to, well, to see if anybody was putting any good comments. And there have been a couple of comments recently, but not a lot of ratings. Go to itunes and give us a ranking. Hopefully it's a good one. It really helps out in the long run. I know Ben's asked for that in the past, but we haven't mentioned that in a while. So I think it's time to reinforce that again.

Yeah. And we appreciate it so much. I know. I appreciate it so much. I know, I know. I don't call out names when you donate to the show, but it's a huge help. When you go to Bengreelfitness.com, you leave a buck. It draws out a buck a month or whatever you want to leave. Huge, huge help in terms of keeping this show going. And you can do it right there on the website. So check it out and listen in this Friday for the interview with Joe Stout from Mount Capra Nutrition about that new protein powder I was talking about. It's cool stuff. You'll want to check that out if you're a protein powder junkie. And for those of you down in California area, I'll see you this weekend. And finally, be sure to go throw your name in the hat for all the cool, free organic stuff that I'm going to be mailing out to the top entrance over at the Ben Greenfield Fitness Gift giveaway. So that's about it. Thanks, Brock.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you Ben.

Alright folks, we'll. We'll catch you next week. 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. Imagine if your arms were cotton 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 trirypd.com.