Episode #190: Do Belly Fat Loss Supplements Really Work?

In today's episode, do belly fat loss supplements really work? Also, does being on your feet all day count as a warm up? Anti inflammatory foods instead of prednisone Food recommendations for a multi day hike? Do hormones and exercise create acne? The benefits of fasted exercise sessions? Are carbs really killing you? Adapting to a low carb diet? Is popcorn a superfood? And do vitamins raise your chances of death?

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 BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

Hello and welcome to episode 190. I think this is a milestone episode here. We're only 10 away from 200. Very exciting. But yes, episode 190 of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Ben, what do you think? Do we need to celebrate in 10 episodes?

We do. I don't know where I'm going to be or what I'll be doing 10 episodes from now, but if my calendar is clear, then I'm sure that we can do something like drink heavily before the episode in celebration.

How's that different than normal?

Something other than coffee? Actually, I've been up a while this morning. I'm kind of amped up on a combination of coffee and Chinese adaptogenic herbs. Those two things are kind of. They're either fighting each other or working synergistically in my body right now. I can't figure out which, but I'm feeling good and I'm probably gonna crash by about noon.

So you're gonna talk really, really fast and over the episode it'll start to slow down.

Exactly. Drastically. Exactly. But a lot of stuff to go over in this episode. So yeah, let's jump into some news flashes.

News flashes.

Okay.

There are a couple of places you can follow Ben and all of his revelations and in depth studies and stuff like that. You can go to twitter.com BenGreenfield or you can go to Google and of course I guess you can go to Facebook too. But we're going to concentrate on which one today.

Twitter or Google tweets that I put out. There are some good articles that came out on Google and you can get to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Google page by going to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and scrolling down on that right sidebar. Basically, just a bunch of little mini blogs that happen over there, including, I kind of wrote out a day in my Life in the recent. A lot of comments on that. But the first thing I wanted to mention was about circadian rhythms and flying places. I know that a lot of people who listen in travel, and I saw an interesting study that came out last month that was titled Scheduled Exercise Phase shifts the Circadian Clock in Skeletal Muscle. And what this study looked into was circadian behavior and this molecular clockwork that we have kind of built into our bodies, that's regulated mostly by our hypothalamus in our brain. And light and dark cycles are a huge cue for this in terms of when it gets light, you get the cortisol release, it affects your circadian rhythm, it leaves you awake with elevated moods, and as it gets dark, you begin to get sleepy based off of that kind of drop in cortisol and change in your circadian behavior. But what this study showed was that scheduled physical activity, meaning regularly scheduled exercise sessions, can alter circadian rhythms. And they can do that independently of things like the light dark cycle. They work in a different manner. And so the reason that I thought this was important on a practical level was that I always have had this habit when I arrive at a destination after flying a long distance of trying to do some form of physical exercise, Even if it's something as simple as a brisk walk to explore the area that I'm staying in, or another thing that I really like to do is to hop into a pool and go for a swim. I find that massively beats jet lag for me. And I think a big, big reason for that is because exercise can really affect your circadian rhythm in ways that almost override some of the messages that your hypothalamus is sending your body. So this study verified to me that I'm on kind of the right track when it comes to trying to exercise after. About travel.

So it's not suggesting that you. You maintain some sort of a schedule of exercising or even exercise before you start to travel, but really, like, once you arrive in a different time zone.

Well, you could certainly also take away the fact that if you want to kind of regulate your circadian rhythm and, for example, ensure that you feel more awake every day, start every day with exercise. That would be one example of a way to regulate your circadian rhythm. Send this message to your body that now is wake time. And doing that regularly can affect your circadian rhythm and possibly your gene expression that affects your circadian rhythm more than if you didn't exercise. So yeah, absolutely. That's one of the reasons that even doing something as simple as a series of light stretches and a little bit of aerobic exercise when you wake up can do a fantastic job setting you up for productivity and focus the rest of the day so you don't have to go and beat yourself up. You know, doing heavy squats and bench press as soon as you roll out of bed, even just a little bit can help cool. The the next thing was a study that came out on burdock root. Burdock root extract. They gave this stuff to mice and then they, they studied sexual behavior in those mice and testosterone. They found that compared to Viagra or sildenafil, which is its scientific name, burdock root extract actually caused not only a very comparable increase in sexual behavior and mice horniness, but it also caused a really big increase in testosterone. And the reason that I thought this was interesting was because we're always trying to hit occasionally on andropause and natural drop in hormones in males affecting everything from performance to libido. And this certainly caught my attention when I saw this come across. Now one of the things that you gotta realize when you see a study like this is how much of the stuff did they use? How much burdock root extract did they use in these mice? And it ranged from about 3, 300 milligrams per kilogram to 1200 milligrams per kilogram per day. So you know, for a guy like me who's around, you know, let's just round me off to 80kg. For me to take the small dose used in the study would mean I'd use about 24,000 milligrams of burdock extract to get to get a good result. And if you go to Amazon and look at something like burdock root extract, most of the servings are around like maximum 2000 milligrams. So you'd be looking at a good 12 servings of a supplemental form of it per day. However, I thought the study was interesting and even though nothing's been done in humans, I know that a lot of self experimenters listening to the show. I'll certainly put a link to the highest dose of burdock extract that I was able to find on Amazon.com it's on my bucket list. It's on my list of things to order and just kind of try out. I can't find any evidence that there are any health effects or deleterious health effects from a high dose of burdock root and this certainly isn't medical advice or even sexual advice, but if anyone wants to try out some burdock root and report on the results over here to BenGreenfieldFitness.com we'd certainly be interested in whether or not it has the same effect in humans as it does in mice.

This isn't the, this isn't actually like this wouldn't treat erectile dysfunction by the sounds of things. It's not. It wouldn't be a direct correlation with Viagra.

It actually libido, based on what I've seen in the study, it may actually treat impotence. So yes, at the doses used in the study at least, I'm just guessing at lower doses it might just make you a little bit more sexually active and certainly may amp up the testosterone a little bit. So something to think about. And then the last thing that I wanted to mention was for kids and building kids brains. And this isn't really a study as much as something I found. Somebody sent me a sample of this stuff and my kids absolutely loved it. It's basically fish oil. It doesn't taste like fish oil, it tastes like lemon pudding. It's a mix of essential fatty acids, your EPA and DPA that you get from. In this case, they get it from a wild fatty fish. And it's mixed with a little bit of emulsified vitamin D and some other compounds that are just fantastic, especially for kids developing brains. I've been giving this stuff to my kids and they love it. It's called Nano epa. So I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But for anybody who's got kids that you want to kind of help out their brains a little bit and you don't want to shove feedback fish oil down their throats, this is certainly a very tasty alternative. And of course, anytime something tastes this good, I always go to the label and check to see how much cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup they put in it. And they didn't put any of that stuff in it. The sweetener that they use is a little bit of xylitol. There's some turmeric in there for color, but it's a good high quality stuff. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. For anybody who has kids who wants to help out, help out your kids brains.

Now is there any reason why adults couldn't take this stuff?

Adults could take it, but I personally just take a few fish oil capsules. I use some Carlson's fish oil capsules or some pharmax fish oil capsules.

But I just know there are some picky adults out there as well that don't like to be burping up fish oil all afternoon or whatever.

Yeah, adults who want their lemony pudding fish oil could use this as well.

Special Announcements okay, so it looks like you're off to Dubai and then you're off to Hawaii and then you're off to Japan. This is pretty. Or wait, do I have that in the wrong order?

I don't know, just kind of hopping on the airplanes where, where the, where the ticket tells me to. Yeah, Dubai. Anybody over there in Dubai or near Dubai, May 11 and May 12, they'll be over there teaching a two day intensive seminar on how make your body superhuman. I'll be going over performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep, mental function and sexual function hormones. And that will be a two day intensive. We've got a link in the show notes for anybody around there. I do know we have a lot of listeners in Dubai who want to attend that, so check that out. And then of course, anybody who happens to be in Kona in the first week of June doing a triathlon camp down there, followed by the Hawaii 70.3 and then heading over to Nagoya, Japan. For any of you Japanese listeners, drop me a line to Ben greenfieldfitness.com if you'd like to hook up over there in Japan. And stay tuned to the Twitter feed of course, over@twitter.com BenGreenfield I'll let you know anything else that's going on as I'm in any of those areas. The other thing that I wanted to mention was a few different articles that came out this week at Ben Greenfield Fitness. Of course, the audio last Friday with Stacy Sims generated a ton of comments. I'd recommend that if you listen to that audio about how to eat during endurance activities that you go read the comments. We've got a few dozen comments on the article. Why does a guy like Lance Armstrong have gastrointestinal issues during a triathlon? Read through the comments. Tons of helpful comments from Stacy. Follow up conversations that have happened about what kind of gels contain sucrose and glucose versus what's got maltodextrin or fructose and just some really good information on that one. And I do recommend that if you plan on doing a triathlon or a marathon this year, you listen into that interview as well.

Yeah, I know there's a bunch of listeners out there that are like me too, that listen to these interviews when you're on the trainer or out for a run or something. But this is, this is one that I've actually had to listen to a second time, actually sitting down with a piece of paper and a pencil because there's just so much information in it that you really want to capture. It's not just sort of interest for interest sake. It's like this is real practical information.

Yep. And pair that with this Friday's upcoming podcast, which is more about how to train on a low carb diet, how to keep your body burning fats, because for me personally it comes down to a 1, 2 combo. I keep myself in a fat burning, high fat diet, low carbohydrate state most of the year. But then during an actual event like a hardcore Ironman race where I'm just amped up the whole time, or even during the week of that event where I'm eating a little bit higher carbohydrates to top off my liver and muscle carbohydrate stores, I'll eat a higher carbohydrate intake. And that's where I would kind of use Stacy's advice in those times. And then the advice from Peter, who we're going to be talking with on Friday for the other time, remember that you don't fuel every workout the same way. You got to change it up throughout the year. Because if you fuel every workout the same way that you're going to fuel during an event or during a race or something like that, that's too much carbohydrate. Just a little asterisk there. When we're talking about this type of thing, we're talking about, you know, just trying to use this type of stuff for a race. So and then the, the other thing was an article about how safe is your house from being a chemical wasteland? Highly recommend you go read goes into a lot of detail about a new study that came out about hormone disruptors and chemicals in consumer products. The list is pretty shocking in terms of what type of things, including green products that you see think might be safe actually do contain dangerous chemicals. I put the link to the full list there in that article as well as a list of kind of the more safe items. And by the way, for anybody listening in, my wife and I are going to teach a seminar this Sunday, the Sunday this podcast comes out. We're going to teach it in the afternoon. I've got a link to the seminar in the show notes. It is for people who are or members of our $17 a month inner circle, but we'll be doing some video demonstrations of how we make our cleaners, how we make a lot of our personal care products, and how we just basically do all this stuff from home to avoid a lot of these chemicals. So check out the podcast show notes for episode number 190 if you want to kind of get in on that. And then real quick, last thing I wanted to mention was that for anybody who owns the Ultimate Weight Training Guide for Triathletes book, I just finished an eight month training peaks plan for that that you can just plug into your triathlon calendar. And it lays out three to four different weight training sessions per week, from injury prevention to full body training. And it goes throughout the year in what's called a periodized manner, meaning I start you off with muscular enhancement and kind of a foundation phase, move into more progressive strength and then a power phase and then a RA week phase. And it's all kind of laid out there in the plan. I will put a link to the plan on the show notes for this episode so anybody who has that book and wants the plan can download it. Even if you don't have the book, the plan will still make a lot of sense. There's exercise videos and everything. And then also for any of you who don't own my Ultimate Weight Training Guide for Triathletes, I'll put a link to that Amazon book on there as well for you. So check that out if you're a weight training junkie.

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Q and A All right, we've got a lot of good questions today. A lot of them slightly not very similar, but they all sort of follow in the same vein. So I think we've got a, we've got a good collection. So let's start right in with an audio question from Craig.

Hey guys, this is Craig from the thriving Metropolis Of Kyle, Texas. I got a question for the podcast. Actually a couple questions. First one should be pretty easy. I work in an office setting managing about 50 people in a contact center, and I am on my feet all day long, walking around, helping them out. And my question is, when I go out for a lunch run, how much do I really need to warm up if I'm not walking all day beforehand? Second question is, I've got a bout of erythema nodosum on my lower leg and before I start a round of prednisone, I was wondering if there's something better that I could do that is not going to be steroids. Thanks, guys. Bye.

Man, I stand on my feet all day long. I kind of have a little bit of a standing workstation. And yeah, because I'm an afternoon, early evening exercise guy, it certainly is an issue when you're standing on your feet all day. You can't just head out the door for a run. And, and one of the reasons for that is that even when you're standing, you tend to choose the easiest position for your body to be in. And that a lot of times means that you lock your ankles and you tend to sometimes lock your knees as well to create stability. And that can create a lot of immobility in those joints as well as immobility in your hip joint. And it also can cause a lot of kind of a reduction of blood flow and a collection or pooling of blood in those areas, as well as a little bit of swelling in the feet. And so if you just kind of go straight from a day of standing up at your workstation into doing a run or maybe going to the gym or something like that, locked up hips, knees, ankles, swollen feet, and a bunch of blood collected in your legs is not going to do you any favors. So I have a couple recommendations. The first is for while you're in that standing position throughout the day, be aware of your body and kind of how you've got your body weight distributed. Lock your joints, keep your knees slightly bent so that your body can move around a little bit. And make sure that you're picking your feet up one by one and trying to move them. Keep the ankles flexible. You can do some foot circles every now and again. And try to keep your body weight mostly on the front part of your foot, which is going to also keep you from shifting your weight to your heels, locking your ankles, and locking your knees. So that's really important. Also, shifting your body weight constantly is important. Never really finding yourself locked in one place for a long period of time, but just moving and shifting. And I think you even mentioned Brock last week or a couple weeks ago when we were talking about this, how when you're standing you'll just take breaks and you'll go walk around or do some jumping jacks or something like that.

I actually set an alarm because I know that I'll forget otherwise and just like stand there for hours and hours and then try and go to the, like walk to the washroom or something. And I feel like Frankenstein's monster because my legs have completely locked up from standing there for so long.

Exactly. So do that. And then once you're done, once you're kind of wrapped up for the day and you're going to go for a run or whatever, I recommend that first of all, if you can get into an inverted position for about one minute for every hour you've been standing. So if you've got an eight hour workday and you're on your feet most of the time, what I mean by inverted position is you literally lie down on your floor with your legs propped up against the wall and this helps to drain blood from your legs. And basically if your feet are swollen, it's going to almost instantly get rid of that. It actually is. When you do it and then you stand up, it's not only relaxing and kind of invigorating, but you'll notice almost instantly that you've got this new range of motion in your feet and your legs. So do that, just get into an inverted position for one minute for every hour that you're standing. And interesting. There's another way that you can use this inverted position if you go for a run and you can get into that inverted position one minute for every mile that you've run. That's also a really good way to drain blood and drain inflammatory metabolites from your legs after a run. So if you go out and you've got some epic, let's say you do a 15 mile run at some point when you get back, if you can arrange to get yourself for 15 minutes into that inverted position with your feet up against the wall, it helps a lot.

I was at a, doing a marathon a couple of years ago and was rooming with this fellow, this older fellow who was a yoga practitioner. And when we got back from the marathon, I went out and was picking up some stuff and when I came back, he was actually like doing a headstand and he was doing exactly that. He just like, for the amount of time that I don't know if he actually did a one to one ratio, but he, yeah, he was standing on his head and just, he said his recovery from the marathon is sped up so much by doing that.

Oh yeah. And brownie points. If you can do handstand push ups as you're, as you're in that position. Or you can get an inversion table. Yeah, exactly. I've actually got an inversion table in my garage, but for me I'm just too lazy to go out there. I literally just lie on the floor and put my feet up. The other thing is in terms of range of motion, do a dynamic stretching routine. Just a five to ten minute dynamic stretching routine that's going to free up your hips, your knees and your ankles. And in the interest of time, what I'm going to do actually Craig, is recommend that you just go read the dynamic stretching routine that I posted in an article over at my Get Fit Guy site. So I'm just going to link to that in the show notes for episode number 190 here and you can go read that dynamic stretching routine. I've got a link to all the videos and just do that at the end of the day. And that's a lot better than doing like a yoga style static stretching routine. It just involves a lot of swings, a lot of quick moves and it'll make you feel magic after you've had a day of kind of standing on your feet. Magic, Magic. And then erythema nodosum. This question, follow up question from Craig about whether he should do prednisone for something like that, that's an inflammatory condition, inflammation of the fat cells under the skin. Basically a lot of different reasons that that can but it is highly correlated with an autoimmune reaction. So your body actually mounting an inflammatory reaction against some type of component, some type of environmental component. And a lot of times this comes from inflammatory bowel disease, from Crohn's, from colitis, from some type of a gut issue actually causing an autoimmune reaction that affects the skin. Now there are certainly other things that can cause this. Hepatitis is one really common cause of erythema. And this skin condition, tuberculosis is another thing that can cause it. Streptococcus infections like strep throat that can cause it. But in a lot of folks this is diet related and that's why you would get something like a prednisone shot because that's a corticosteroid medication. And what but what that is is it's a potent anti inflammatory corticosteroids suppress your immune system. So if your immune system is mistakenly attacking its own tissues, which happens in this case with the erythema, it can shut down that and it can also inhibit a lot of the inflammation. The problem is that corticosteroids have a lot of side effects. They can increase your blood pressure, they can cause mood swings, they can cause weight gain, they affect your blood sugar, simply because like a corticosteroid, it's is essentially mimicking cortisol, which can affect resistance to insulin, high blood sugar, things of that nature. It can suppress your natural release of things from your adrenal glands, like specifically hormones. And it's really one of those things where, yeah, if I've got something like, I did this a few years ago and I wanted to race Ironman, Hawaii, I hurt my knee, I'd already bought my plane ticket, I had my condo, had put a ton of prep into that race. So I went and got a cortisol injection and it was one of those balance the risk and reward. And I just went and did it. But in many cases, if you're trying to shut down inflammation and you're trying to lower the propensity of your immune system to be hyper reactive, you can achieve that through using methods other than something like prednisone. There are diets out there that are either anti inflammatory diets or diets that would be considered kind of a lower immune reaction type of diet or both. One example would be, for example, the GAPS diet, which I've talked about before on the show. But that's a very popular kind of gut healing diet that puts you in a state where you don't have a lot of high, high immune reaction containing foods that you're consuming. Another one that I really recommend you look into. And by the way, I'll put a link to the GAPS diet in the show notes of this podcast. But another type of diet that can really help with autoimmune issues and inflammation is a diet called the specific carbohydrate diet. And that not only has you eating a lot of really probiotic rich foods like yogurt, but it's also got a lot of fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi, things of that nature that are going to introduce a lot of really important good gut flora into your system. And at the same time, on that specific carbohydrate diet, you're eliminating certain forms of carbohydrates that are going to cause a lot of bacterial and potential for inflammation and an immune reaction in Your diet. And that's kind of paired with supplements that can really, really help when it comes to correcting inflammation or decreasing inflammation. Things like vitamin C to help prepare your gut, high amounts of omega 3 fatty acids from fish oil to help reduce inflammation, some zinc to boost your immune system, and again, to help with healing in the gut. Glutamine is another really, really good one. I've talked about that one before when I talk about things that you can take to help out when you're on an antibiotic regimen. Well, glutamine is an amino acid and that helps to promote healing of your intestines and kind of repairs the mucosal layer in your gut. And so this specific carbohydrate diet, which I'll also link to for you in the show notes, would be another thing that I would consider. Now, I don't want you to consider this as medical advice. I don't know if the reason that you have this erythrema, this tough, not in the erythromatic pronounced, is caused by some type of a chronic disease issue, but if it isn't, and this is related to ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease, any type of autoimmune reaction like that coming at this from a gut standpoint I think would be really, really important and certainly something that you may want to consider as an alternative to something like the prednisone. So just basically getting inflammatory compounds out of your diet and making sure that your gut is really healthy is what I would do.

Now, I was assuming that it was a prednisone cream that he was actually given to put on, because isn't it sort of like a rash or something?

Yeah, it is basically like an inflammation of the skin and it looks like a rash. A great deal of redness. You know, you've got those inflamed fat pockets underneath the skin and you could get put on an oral corticosteroid. It could also be a topical corticosteroid, but both are going to wind up putting corticosteroids into your bloodstream.

Yeah, yeah. So it doesn't really matter which way it's going. Is there anything that he could actually apply to the skin that you'd be.

Able to suggest in terms of a topical anti inflammatory? Yeah, I'm not really familiar with something that could work on that condition specifically. I mean, when you're looking at muscles, you're looking at things like arnica and topical magnesium and those type of things to help to limit inflammation from A muscular standpoint. But as far as something like this goes, where it's an autoimmune reaction, you know, I can't really think of anything that comes to mind that you could use on the skin for something like this. I mean, there are some herbal compounds that are. That maybe you could use topically for skin inflammation. I mean, aloe vera has some anti inflammatory effects. You could try something like an aloe vera. If you look at naturopathic medicine or herbal medicine I guess you'd call it. There are some other things that are topically used for skin inflammation. I'm not sure if they work for something like this, but like slippery elm extract and sage extract, there's some others out there. But what you could do is you could do something like google herbal anti inflammatories, herbal topical anti inflammatories and look into some of that stuff. But I personally don't have much experience with something like a topical for an autoimmune issue. Most of my knowledge in terms of topical stuff you can use is kind of more for muscle inflammation. So.

Yeah, fair enough. Attacking it from the inside is probably a nice way to go about it anyway.

Yeah, that's the way that I would come at this. I mean you're looking at anything topical being more of a band aid. Yeah.

All right, let's move on to the next question. It's another audio question and it comes from Tony.

Hi Ben and Bracha. Love the podcast. I was calling in to ask a question this summer. Oh, by the way, my name is Tony and I'm from Vermont. And this summer I'm planning on going after a unsupported speed record on the Long trail, which is a hiking trail that traverses the length of Vermont. It's 272 miles and unsupported means that I have to carry all my food and everything I need. I just can get water off the trail and such. So I'm calling in to inquire about good light foods that are packed with nutrients that I can bring on the trail. And I'm also looking for, wondering if Ben, you know of like a ball pike, ballpark figure of calories that I might need on a day to day basis. I've done. I'm going to have to hike about 40 miles a day to break the record of 6 days, 17 hours and I'm 5, 6, 135 pounds. That might matter to the amount of calories I need. I'm not sure. Alright, thanks a lot. And again, just a big fan of the show. Take care. Bye.

Wow, 272 miles.

Yeah. I was thinking about this and I mean like I walked a marathon once and I felt like I was walking pretty fast and doing right around like 15 minute miles. And I know that's for a speed walker that's laughably slow. But I figure when you're hiking, you're probably going to be, if you're pushing yourself right around 15 minute miles, which.

Yeah, if you're lucky.

Yeah. I mean, and that puts you hiking a good 10 hours per day. I would say Tony's probably going to be out there. 10 hours per day, minimum calories per hour burned. Hiking, just based off of studies that they've done on folks, is right around in the range of 400 to 600 calories. So I would say for a guy like Tony, slightly on the smaller end of the scale, but I don't know Tony's unique metabolism, I could say that based on 10 hours a day, 400 to 600 calories per hour, you'd be looking at around like 6,000 calories a day. Wow. Remember that anytime you see values of how many calories you're burning per hour doing something that does take into account your metabolic rate. So you know, I might burn 80 calories per hour, you know, or 100 calories per hour or however you want to put it for my metabolic rate. And that's taken into account when you see charts that show you how many calories you're burning in a specific activity, it is taking into account how many calories you're burning with your metabolic rate. So you don't have to add your metabolic rate on top of something like 6,000 calories a day. But still it's a boatload of calories. It's about twice as many as I eat on a daily basis. And so you're looking like Tony mentioned on eating light food that that's high in calories. So I'm just gonna tell you exactly what I'd do if I were in your shoes, Tony. And first of all, I would not be going after the carbolicious calories for something like this. Hiking is a relatively aerobic activity. You're gonna be able to burn a high amount of fatty acids and basically use a lot of kind of like triglyceride based fat fuels for something like this. I would be pairing that with some amino acid rich foods that are gonna protein for muscle repair and recovery and then basically not a ton of carbohydrates. So some of the things that I would carry, I Would kind of opt out of doing a lot of seeds and nuts and trail mixes because even though they're higher calorie, they do take up a lot of space. And if you're just going for squeezing as many calories from that stuff as you can in as small space as possible, I'd use a nut butter. So I get a bunch of Justin's nut butter or just almond butter that you grind at the grocery store or buy in the can, put it in Ziploc bags and squeeze it out the Ziploc bags. But I would definitely be doing nut butter. I would also include dark chocolate. That would be kind of the most carbohydrate rich thing that I'd take along with me. It's good, it's antioxidant rich. It gives you a little bit of a pick me up ton of calories. And, you know, if you've ever looked at the label of a bar of dark chocolate, most of them are like 600 calories a pop. So it's easy to find, easy to get your hands on. I would definitely be getting some dark chocolate as well. And you could use that along with the nut butter. I mean, if I was on a day hike, I'd be dipping dark chocolate and nut butter all day long. I mean, that' sthat's a great source of high, high calorie intake. Medium chain triglyceride oil or coconut oil, either one. One. Both of those are going to inject a form of fat into your body that tends to be used quite nicely by your muscles as fuel. So you can, I mean, you can pack that again in a ziploc bag, small plastic container, foil, whatever. But MCT oil or coconut oil, that's another way to go. And depending on the temperature, you'll either be drinking it or spooning it in. On the same vein, coconut manna. This stuff is super calorie dense. It tastes great. It's a mix of coconut flesh and coconut fat. There's a company called Nativa that makes it squeezes a lot of calories into a very small space. If I were going on a hike like this and go for a record like this, I'd have some coconut manna with me as well. And then I mentioned the proteins, and I would just go with something like a foil pack. Tuna or salmon, you know, you can get those at the grocery store. They're light. It's a good dose. I think it's around 200 to 300 calories of protein and a dose of that, and that's Something you can also do on a daily basis to get some of those amino acids in.

Could you do like a salmon jerky? Like a salmon or tuna jerky so it's even easier to carry?

Yep. You could use like a jerky as well. I'm not a fan of jerky, personally. I just don't like it. It. I'm not a fan of like fish jerky, beef jerky. That's why I recommend the foil pack. Just because I like the stuff that's a little bit, a little bit less chewy. But yeah, I mean, you could also do a jerky. Absolutely. The things that we're missing here when we're looking at this a little bit more deeply would be, you know, what I've just described. You're a little bit low on the fiber. You're a little bit low on the really nutrient dense, vitamin rich foods, dark chocolate. Of all those things that I mentioned is probably the richest in terms of, of antioxidants. So I would also carry three other things and these would be kind of more along the lines of like the supplement protocol. The first would be Living Fuel. I would grab their super green stuff. It's super calorie dense. Over@EndurancePlanet.com I had Christian Isaacson come on the show a few times and he was doing the five Ironman races in five days on the five different islands of Hawaii. And I had him doing a ton of Living Fuel super Greens with coconut milk. Now, I wouldn't do coconut milk if I were going on a hike just because it' sit's a little bit heavier, but I would certainly have some Ziploc bags with this Living Fuel Super Greens. I mean, because you're looking at some of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet like spirulina and sea vegetables, things like that, all kind of compressed into this supplement that's got amino acids, herbs, probiotics, digestive enzymes, minerals, vitamins, antioxidants. This is the stuff that I am always found with when I'm traveling. It's just green powder. You mix it with some water. Super dense sticks to your ribs. So as far as supplements go, I'd have that. I would also have something to control the amount of cortisol and stress that your body is going to experience during a speed hike like this. So I would do something like Chinese adaptogenic herbs. Sherpas who are climbing Mount Everest have been using these things for thousands of years. The one that I recommend is tnt. It's literally several dozen pounds of Chinese herbs extracted and Compressed into a tiny little packet. So I'll put a link to that as well as the living fuel super greens in the show notes for you. And then the last thing that I'd recommend that you have is a cleansing type of capsule. Now, anytime that I'm personally traveling and don't have access to a lot of the fresh raw foods that I typically have access to good amounts of vegetables, fruits, etc. Which you're probably not going to have because you're not going to carry a lot of this stuff in bulk. I use a cleansing capsule and the one that I use is Capricleanse. And it's a mix of a bunch of activated fibers like flaxseed meal and apple fiber and rice bran mixed with kind of a colon cleansing blend. And that's like slippery elm bark and fennel and fenugreek and marshmallow root. Some minerals in there, some green juice, but it's like a dehydrated green juice, so it's in capsule form. And then basically a botanical blend that's got a little bit of digestive anti inflammatory action in it like turmeric and ginger and yucca. And I do, if I were on a day hike, I'd be doing three of those in the morning and three of those in the evening. And that means when you're out there on the trail and you got to drop your drawers and get some out fast. I've found that if I do three in the morning and three in the evening of this stuff stuff, it doesn't leave me like running for the toilets with liquid poo. It just keeps things moving through pretty nicely. And it's a good little gut anti inflammatory too. So I'd go with something like the Capricleanse. So I do that. The tea and she and the super grains is kind of like your 1, 2, 3 combo when it comes to supplements that you take out there along with the other stuff I mentioned.

Wow. So with the. The only thing I was gonna ask was the dark chocolate, should he be looking for a certain percentage of cocao?

You know, I always go for 80% plus it's just that much more antioxidant rich. And another reason that I do that is I just tend to eat it more slowly because it's a little bit. It's a little bit more bitter and that keeps me from down in a whole bar all at once. I kind of use more kind of like the melt in your mouth type of or melt in your mouth type of approach.

Cool. All right, there you Go, Tony. Enjoy that hike and let us know how it goes. All right, we've got another audio question, and it comes from Francis.

Hi, Ben.

My name is Francis.

I have a question about hormones, acne, and exercise. So I'm just really curious if there's any connection. I'm training for marathon, and I'm wondering if there's any studies that have shown that there's a connection between acne and a lot of exercise. Anyway, thanks so much. I hope to hear back from you. Okay, bye.

Bye. Yeah, this is an interesting one, the link between acne and hormones and exercise. And you got to kind of step back and look at where acne comes from first to understand how these things could be connected. So when you look at normal human skin, you've got three layers, you've got your dermis, your epidermis, and then what's called your stratum corneum. And the outermost layer of your skin is that stratum corneum. And that's kind of your primary barrier to the external environment. And it prevents you from losing a lot of water through your skin. It prevents microorganisms from invading your skin. And what happens is sebum is produced by the sebaceous glands. And these sebaceous glands produce the sebum, and that gets secreted to this outermost layer of skin, the stratum corneum. And that helps to maintain basically this slight barrier. It's called a hydrophobic barrier that keeps a lot of stuff from coming in through the skin. And normal sebum levels help to maintain healthy skin. And when you look at somebody who's got acne, in most cases, that is a result of overproduction of sebum. And sebum is just a mix of a bunch of fats and oils and waxes and cholesterols that your body produces. And so you get too much of it produced. And what happens is it can kind of like block up pores, it can cause some inflammation, it can cause this redness that appears it's the acne. And it can also function as a little bit of a nutritional source for acne causing bacteria that live in your follicles. So when you've got too much sebum, you get plugged follicles, you get a bunch of bacteria and a high bacterial population kind of living in that follicle, and you tend to generate these pox in your face. There's a lot of stuff that regulates sebaceous gland activity and the production of sebum. So some of the things would be like androgens. So 13 year old boy starts to get a bunch of acne and that's basically because he's starting to produce male sex hormones like testosterone. And androgen hormones can cause increased sebum production. And not only that, but sebaceous gland proliferation. So a higher amount of these sebaceous glands and the, that's what can cause acne. That's why people who are also on steroids, like anabolic steroids, they can also get acne just because they get that same increase in the production of sebaceous glands. Kind of on the flip side, in females, estrogens can cause that. Men usually don't produce enough estrogen hormones to cause acne. If they're getting a lot of estrogens from the environment, like from exposure to chemicals, toxins, eating a lot of food out of plastic containers, that type of thing, they may get some type of estrogen in their body that can also cause this type of acne. In a woman, estrogen dominance would be an issue. We've talked about estrogen dominance on the show quite a bit, but kind of a similar issue. It's usually related to environmental toxins, exposure to a lot of chemicals, stuff like I blogged about this week in terms of household cleaning chemicals, stuff like that, that can have enough of an estrogen disrupting effect to where you could get overproduction of the sebaceous glands or overproduction of the sebum. Another biggie is insulin like growth factor and that's a protein hormone that you make in your liver. It's very similar in structure to insulin and research has shown that it's directly correlated with elevated sebum production. And you tend to get really, really high levels of insulin like growth factor during adolescence. You also tend to get really, really high levels of it if you're eating a high glycemic index diet, like a high amount of sugar or carbohydrates, or if you have type 2 diabetes, that's another way that you can get it. And actually milk and dairy can really cause a big increase in insulin, like growth factor one. You know, it's a good thing in that it's really good for recovery and production of growth hormones. But it can be a direct contributor to acne. So that can be another issue. And then the last thing to consider is, well, not the last thing to consider, but kind of the last kind of chemical to consider would be retinoids. And retinoids are basically signaling molecules that your body makes from vitamin A. And one of the things that they're used for is to regulate the production of sebum and the proliferation of these sebaceous glands. So if you've got a vitamin A deficiency, for example, and you don't have enough retinoids in your diet, then you could certainly also produce a lot of acne stress from something like exercise. There's also a direct correlation between stress and increased acne. It's most likely because of the production of cortisol. And what happens is cornstarch counteracts insulin and it inhibits the utilization of glucose and basically promotes insulin resistance. So you've got higher levels of insulating of insulin circulating through your bloodstream and that can cause a lot of the same issues in terms of overproduction of sebum that the increased insulin growth factor does. So a lot of different issues here. And when you step back and look at this from an exercise standpoint, somebody starts exercising more, what are they probably going to do? If they're kind of doing the traditional approach to exercise, they're probably going to start eating more carbohydrates, they may start eating more dairy and more milk for extra calories. They're going to be under greater amounts of stress, so there's a greater amount of cortisol production. And they're also going to be requiring the body to produce a greater amount of hormones and to utilize cholesterols more rapidly, resulting in the potential for vitamin A deficiency. So a lot of the things that go hand in hand with significant increase in exercise could technically also cause acne. And so what would I do if I were in Frances shoes? I would make sure I'm on a lower carbohydrate intake, a lot of low glycemic index carbohydrates. If acne is an issue, I'd totally cut dairy, I'd cut milk, I'd make sure you're on a good fatty acid supplement like a vitamin A, for example, Cod liver oil is perfect for something like that. A couple tablespoons of cod liver oil on a daily basis, clean up your environment so you're not getting exposed to a lot of excess estrogens, plastics, things of that nature. And then make sure you're recovering really well. Don't over train, give your body days where you're completely off or you're just doing some light, light activity, a little bit of foam rolling, maybe a massage to control the cortisol levels so that you're not getting the direct correlation between cortisol to insulin, to acne. And yeah, those are the things that.

I would do and stay out of the tanning booths.

That's right. That can also be an issue.

I'm not that I'm making an assumption when I say that, but I know there are a lot of bodybuilders that actually spend quite a bit of time in the tanning salons and slathering themselves with all those oils that bring out the natural colors or the unnatural colors of the skin.

That's right. And the, and the gold flakes. You got to make sure that you slather yourself with the oils and the gold flakes so you get that nice shimmery effect. You know what? I started to do spray on tan at one point when I was bodybuilding. That was kind of interesting. Did you know when you sweat, if you go and work out too soon after you get a spray on tan, you sweat and it kind of makes you look like a zebra. You've got like areas of tan and areas where the it or you sweat it off. So just kind of a quick tip for those of you spray on tanners out there or anyone else, doctor, if.

You want to look like a zebra, that's the way to do it.

That's right. So, yeah, I mean, you know, in the recommendations that I just gave, even if you're not, even if your acne isn't related to exercise, I mean, like, my wife used to have some acne issues and she switched to low glycemic index cut grains, did some of these things that I recommended and it cleared right up. So I mean, interestingly, even something as simple as cutting grains can really clear up acne. So stuff to think about for acne and best of luck. Francis.

All right, next question comes from Amy. And Amy asks, can you comment on this study regarding fasted exercise and weight loss? And the study is called exercising fasting or fed to enhance fat loss loss influence of food intake and respiratory ratio and excess post exercise oxygen consumption after a bout of endurance training.

Deep breath. Take a drink.

Okay. I'm okay.

Yeah. This looked at whether or not fasting actually does kind of kind of work. At least it attempted to. Only eight people were in the study. But what, what they compared was when you exercise fasted versus when you exercise fed, what happens to your metabolic rate? And the people who ate before they exercised well, they had a higher VO2 max. They were able to exercise a little bit harder and they also had a lower respiratory exchange ratio. And low respiratory exchange ratio basically indicates that you're Utilizing higher amounts of fat. Like if you go out and you do an all out sprint, your respiratory exchange ratio is basically one or sometimes a little bit higher than one. And that indicates complete carbohydrate utilization. When you're at rest, everybody's respiratory exchange ratio is lower. But it turns out in these folks, 12 hours after they had trained, for the folks who ate before that training session, they were actually burning more fat later on, greater lipid utilization. And what the authors concluded was that when you're doing moderate amounts of endurance exercise, in this case a 36 minute cardio session, to lose body fat when you fast before you exercise, that doesn't actually enhance fat utilization. Now this is one study among many studies that have been done on what happens when you exercise in a fasted state versus what happens when you exercise in a fed state. And honestly, the research goes back and forth. In some cases, metabolic rate is actually increased in short term fasting. And you can find studies out there that basically show an increase of anywhere from 5 to 10% after just a few days of short term fasting and investigating what happens to metabolic rate when you're doing that. Other studies have shown that fasting lowers metabolic rate, especially after prolonged periods of fasting and exercise, like doing that for weeks in a row. And so when it comes to metabolic rates and fat utilization, research goes back and forth. And I can't say for sure from one end or the other whether or not you're going to burn more fat a few hours after you've done a fasted workout versus if you had a little bit to eat after that workout. Although I know that for me personally and for all the people that I coach who use fasted workouts, it melts fat away pretty quickly. But the reasons that you would do a fasted workout go way above and beyond just this whole fat loss component or what your respiratory exchange ratio is. And what you need to look at is a concept called autophagy. And what that is is it's basically a process of how your body actually breaks down cells and repairs those cells and regenerates themselves or regenerates the cells. And your body is constantly kind of turning over cells and tearing apart and reusing cellular parts and ridding the cells of clutter and, and decreasing unnecessary cellular processes. And all of this is a process called autophagy. And what happens is that when you fast or when you engage in caloric restriction that turns up or up regulates autophagy. And what that can actually do is, is block a pathway called the mtor pathway. And even though I'm not going to get into the biochemistry of this because I've done it before on a podcast, it indirectly can cause you to have a longer lifespan and it can vastly reduce the amount of acute stress that you're under. It basically makes your body stronger and could potentially make you live longer. And so when you engage in something like intermittent fasting or periods of time during the day when you're skipping meals or even exercising in a state where you haven't been fed, what happens is that you get a really, really nice response in terms of your ability to actually improve your life and decrease a lot of factors that are risk factors for chronic disease. So the big reason for that is that it seems that with caloric restriction, there is a process that's triggered in your cells that causes your cells to clean themselves up. They activate a component called lysosomes, which breaks down old and kind of faulty proteins in your cells and rebuilds you. So the reason that I'm a fan of something like not eating for a little bit before bed, sleeping all night, getting up in the morning, waiting for a long time to eat breakfast, or even doing an exercise session before you eat breakfast is because it's a very simple way to introduce 12 to 15 hour fasts into every 24 hour period. And you're going to find that after a few weeks of doing that, you turn into basically a fat burning machine. You're able to go very long period periods of time without eating. Carbohydrate cravings begin to go away and you just start to feel a lot better. So whether or not you may have a short term enhancement in lipid utilization if you eat prior to a workout is really not important to me because I'm looking at this from just a lifestyle and a longevity standpoint more than I am from an acute response standpoint.

Cool. So it's not just all about losing body fat. It has a much broader scope to it.

It's basically dietary restriction. If you're going to restrict calories, a really, really easy way to do it is to do it while you're asleep. So, you know, like I said, you don't eat for two hours before bedtime or at least a little bit before bedtime. You sleep all night, you get up in the morning, and for me, a lot of times breakfast is at 10:30 or 11:00am and I've done an exercise session at in the morning. So you can find studies that go into dietary restriction and you get prevention of Alzheimer's disease. You get improved memory because you get increased production of brain derived neurotrophic factor which helps to increase your neurons and your memory. You get better insulin sensitivity, so your pancreas has to churn out less insulin. There are cardio protective effects. Basically your heart and your brain cells become, they're better able to withstand injury. You get less inflammation, you get resistance of neurons in your brain against excitotoxins which you're getting from your environment or from foods. Your mitochondria tend to produce fewer free radicals, so you get less free radical damage on your cell membranes. Your blood vessels are more prone to be resistive to damage from those same type of free radicals and oxidative stress. And so you're lowering your risk for diabetes, for cancer, for heart disease, for brain degeneration. I mean, what it comes down to is that the advantages of periodic periods of dietary restriction or intermittent fasting in my opinion, are far over and above any advantages of eating before you work out. So you get that small increase in lipid utilization post workout.

Yeah, I guess the only drawback is that you have a bit of a growly stomach sometimes, which really is a.

Small price to pay for the first little bit and then like that, that goes away. So yeah, I mean like even, even for me, for example, you know, it's, it's, it's 9:40 in the morning right now. Last time I ate yesterday was at about 8pm by the time I have breakfast today, It'll be probably 10:30. But I'm not eating because I'm ravenous. I'm eating because I know that my workout at about 3 or 4pm today will go a lot better if I do have something to eat at some point. But yeah, I mean the hunger pangs really aren't much of an issue.

That's awesome. I hope that clears things up for you, Amy. And I guess I didn't realize, I looked at this study, I didn't realize it was only eight people. And that that's often a good measure of whether a study is very thorough or not. Isn't is?

I mean, I don't want to be a hypocrite because I've certainly brought up studies before on this show where there were a small number of individuals and I've used those to prove a point. So I don't think that's as important as the fact that there are a lot of other things to consider that go over and above how much fat you're burning right after the workout. Yeah.

Okay, let's move on to the next question, it comes from Keely. Keely says Ben recently posted a link entitled Carbs are killing you. This was pretty interesting and I'm curious if you know where any of the information on this handout is coming from. The archive information only gives information about the website design. Is there any scientific evidence behind this, especially steps 1 through 8? And then Keely gives a link to that Carbs Are Killing youg post.

Yeah, and we'll, we'll put a link to that graphic in the show notes for sure. I thought this was a great infographic. Carbs Are Killing youg. Why Eating Fat doesn't make you fat was the name of the actual article. And steps one through eight that Keely mentions are Step one, you think about a meal that contains carbohydrates. Step two, Step two, you start producing insulin. And step three is that insulin tells your body to store fatty acids and keeps you from burning the fatty acids as energy. Step four is you get hungry. Step five is you start eating. Step six, you secrete more insulin. Step seven, digested carbohydrates from that meal that you ate enter your bloodstream as glucose. And step eight, your blood sugar levels start to rise. Well, yes, absolutely. I mean, anyany physiology book that you read or biochemistry book is gonna kind of walk you through those steps in greater detail. But absolutely, your body has a limited capacity to store carbohydrates and especially to store excess carbohydrates. So that's why when you consume a meal that's rich in carbohydrates, you can get elevated blood sugar. And one of the ways that your body is gonna get rid of that elevated blood sugar, because elevated blood sugar is horrible for your arteries and youryour blood vessels, itit degrades them extremely quickly. So your body converts all these excess carbohydrates floating around in the bloodstream to excess body fat. And the way it works is that any carbohydrates that aren't immediately used by your body in terms of energy, they're stored in the form of storage glycogen. So your body takes all these sugar molecules or glucose molecules, it links them together and it stores them as glycogen in two different places, your liver and your muscles. So once your liver is full of glycogen and once your muscles are full of glycogen, there's no more storage depot for those excess carbohydrates to go into. So then they get converted into fat. Your body, it can't make more liver or more muscles as easily as it can simply create a new fat cell to store the excess carbohydrates into or expand an existing fat cell to put the excess carbohydrates into. So the carbohydrates get converted into fat and stored in your adipose tissue, in your fatty tissue. And that's why fat free licorice and fat free popcorn and fat free anything really isn't fat free because your body is a fat storage machine and that insulin is the signal to do that. Insulin is essentially a storage hormone. It is there to put excess carbohydrate calories aside in the form of fat after it's done its job, driving them into muscles or driving them into the liver. Now, increased insulin levels also suppress your ability to use your own body fat stores for energy. Because insulin is your storage hormone. It suppresses glucagon and it suppresses growth hormone. So glucagon is what helps you to burn fat and sugar. It's kind of the opposite of insulin. And growth hormone is what you use for muscle development or for building new muscle mass. So insulin shuts down those. And then also as mentioned in that infographic, once you get that surge of insulin, what happens is you can have a stage deep drop in blood sugar and that can cause you to kind of feel hungry and perpetuate this vicious cycle. And I'll tell you what you should do if you just kind of want to look into this more, learn more about it. Read Gary Taub's book why We Get Fat or read his book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Either of those would help you a ton when it comes to understanding more on a scientific level and getting all of the different studies cited and everything. But yes, the infographic is based off of what actually occurs on a scientific level. And that's kind of the brief description of it. And those books I recommended by Gary Taubes would be a great way to learn more about this stuff if you want to delve into it a little bit more.

Awesome. That's really interesting stuff. I like how it starts with you think of a high carbohydrate meal.

Yep, yep.

It really is.

It's all.

It all starts with that one thought.

Yep. Gastric hormones, you get the insulin release and it kind of goes from there.

Awesome. Well, let's move on to Maria's question next. And Maria says, I recently purchased your Low Carbohydrate Diet for Triathletes book and I have a question about transitioning my diet. I'm a crossfitter with a history of blood sugar crashes and bong. So I'm quite apprehensive about doing a WOD or doing WOD during the first couple weeks of that diet.

WOD is a workout of the day for people listening in wad.

So she says, do you recommend cutting my carbs gradually, going low intensity on my workouts for a couple of weeks while my body adapts, or just going all out and seeing what happens happens?

First of all, just listen to this Friday's podcast with Peter Attia because we're going to get into this stuff hardcore. But basically what I would recommend that you do is go low carb on everything except for before or after your CrossFit workouts while your body adapts. Just give yourself a little bit of extra carbohydrate for those workouts and then just begin to phase out the carbohydrates for those as well. And remember my low carbohydrate diet for triathletes. If you follow the diet and you really follow it to the T from the get go, you're going to have enough carbohydrates, you're getting enough carbohydrates for your liver to have more than enough glycogen to release as blood glucose to support something like a CrossFit workout out. So you know, if you were going on a 20 mile run, it might be a little bit different. But if you're really following that diet the way that I have it written out, this isn't going to be an issue anyways. However, if you are finding that you're just having a ton of trouble, then, you know, follow everything to the T and then add a little bit of extra carbohydrate dose, you know, like half a banana or something like that right before you do your workout. And your body will kind of get through it a little bit easier. But ultimately at some point you're just going to have to get used to kind of being in fat burning mode and make that transition. And again, like I mentioned, rather than me giving this question as long a response as it probably deserves, we're going to be talking about this for an hour this Friday. Just about the whole how to cut carbs, what happens to your body, how to do it well, how to overcome some of the issues. So just listen into this Friday's interview and for those of you listening to this podcast at a later date, that's the interview with Peter Attia. Peter Adia. So hope that helps.

Yeah, the only thing I was going to add is Maria, I experienced the Same sort of thing when I started doing the Rev diet and I was training for a 70.3 right now. And like Ben said, just a banana or an apple was really all that I needed to just throw in occasionally. I didn't do it every time, but just when I knew I was going to going to crash or come close to bonking. It's pretty easy. Okay, so next question comes from Bruce. And Bruce says, hey, Ben and Brock, what do you guys make of this article about popcorn having more of the healthful antioxidant substances called polyphenols than fruit and vegetables?

Yeah, I saw this come out. I actually think I tweeted something about popcorn and chocolate are going to be the two new magic health foods based off of the high levels of antioxidants.

Bring it on.

Yeah, I mean, the study actually did find that popcorn has a lot of really, really high levels of what are called polyphenols in it. Higher levels than you would find in most fruits and vegetables. That's great. You just want to make sure that first of all, you're choosing the right kind of popcorn. Because for anybody who's seen the movie King Corn, there are some serious issues with, with genetic modification of corn and also pesticide and chemical treatment of corn. So you do certainly increase your risk of consuming insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, fumigants, and potentially genetically modifying ingredients when you're doing popcorn on a regular basis. And if you're trying to get the polyphenols, you'd probably be better off off doing something like an organic vegetable, like a non GMO vegetable instead. Now, in terms of popcorn and whether or not it's got other things in it, yeah, it's gluten free. It still is a grain. So it may have some of the issues that lectins can cause in folks. We've talked about lectins on the show before. Less of an issue than a lot of things like wheat containing foods, but still may be an issue for folks and still is a carbohydrate source, so you'd want to be careful with it. But ultimately the big thing here for me is making sure that if you're going to do something like popcorn, you choose like an organic non GMO source of popcorn. And I mean, I mean, you could literally use the Google engine and go type in non GMO certified organic popcorn. And I'm sure you can find a ton of different brands out there that you can get. There are websites just devoted to keeping a list of foods that are known to Be non gmo and you could find something that's certified that way for popcorn. So that's the main thing I'd be careful with, is, yeah, popcorn certainly is full of polyphenol. You know, my kids have a, I forget the brand that we use. It's an organic form of popcorn. They'll have some of that with some butter on it as a snack and they like that. But just be careful if you're doing conventional, whatever, microwave popcorn.

All right, so maybe the popcorn has all kinds of good stuff in it. It's got the polyphenols and everything. But we do often slather it in like butter and oil and even those terrible ketchup and sour cream and onion flavor flavored things like that. Obviously those would be bad for you. Is there something that you'd recommend? Like if you do want to put something on popcorn, like, what do you put on for your kids?

Yeah, you're right. You do need to be careful. Like even like a microwave popcorn bag, a lot of those are coated with Teflon and that'll break down once it, once it, you know, you get it in the microwave. And you know, they'll also coat the bags with another type of chemical called a fluorinated pfc and that also can break down and make its way into the popcorn itself. So we air pop certified organic, non GMO popcorn and usually it's just like grass fed butter getting poured over the stuff. If I ever do popcorn, I like to dump some cayenne pepper and some cinnamon on there and that's a nice little mix. If it's also got a little bit of butter, it's tasty. It's got, it's got kind of a nice little spice to it so you don't end up eating it by the mouthful. You kind of more eat it by the, by the single pop kernel. Just because it tends to be kind of, kind of hot. The cinnamon helps to regulate the blood sugar a little bit. So yeah, butter, cinnamon, cayenne, that's the way I'd go.

A little olive oil maybe.

Yeah, you could do that instead of butter if you wanted to.

All right, we're talking some gourmet popcorn here.

Yeah, Stay away from the cod liver oil. Wouldn't do that.

Little krill oil.

Yeah.

All right, next question comes from Ralph and Ralph asks. Mayo Clinic Health Letter, March 2012 Risk of vitamin supplements. It's a analysis of the latest research, the Iowa Women's Health study, which is 38,000 women 55 years and older for over 20 years indicated that the risk of premature death increase by 3.6% in those taking magnesium. Said, I don't know what the protocol of this study was, it's not my area of expertise. So I thought I'd ask for your thoughts.

Yeah, I saw this study. They also found a 3.9% increase in mortality for iron supplementation and a bunch of other stuff about how vitamins and supplements could kill you. In my opinion, this was a flawed study. So you look at the details of the study and it was a long study, it was an 18 year study, an observational study with questionnaires, but a long study. And they used like 38,000 women. So a lot more than the eight guys they used in that fasted study we were talking about. But they asked the women about their use of multivitamins, vitamin A, vitamin D vitamin, vitamin E, beta carotene, B vitamins, magnesium, iron, zinc. And then they also gathered self reported data. So again, all of the multivitamin data was based on a questionnaire and then all of the health data was based on self reporting. But they did self reporting based on body composition, general diet and disease. And then what the researchers did was they tried to isolate specific factors that resulted in greater death weight or greater death rate. And so they were looking at like weight and diet and disease and smoking and all this stuff and trying to control for these issues. Interestingly, they didn't even control for other stuff like hormone replacement therapy or prescription medication. And I'll mention that in a second about why I think that's kind of an issue. But they showed that women who supplemented with vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, calcium, they had significantly lower rates of death and supplemented with things like iron and copper were linked to a greater risk of death. And they found that the use of multivitamins seemed to decrease the average life expectancy or at least not increase it. And first of all, the interesting thing is that in terms of controlling for factors like controlling for age and diet and weight and physical activity level and smoking status, all they used were general questions to gather this data. And so I'm not sure how they controlled for it. Like physical activity was categorized in the study as moderate activity, less than a few times per month, once a week or twice a week. And that's pretty much all they kind of classified physical activity as. And so someone who is exercising twice a week for a few minutes. Minutes, yeah, that's certainly probably better than nothing in terms of controlling your risk of death, but it's really not going to be ideal. For doing something like preventing disease or prolonging life. And so that's just one example of the issues when it comes to self reporting using general questions. They also didn't really control for the diet that these folks were eating. So they used a dietary questionnaire, but they didn't find out if they were eating organic foods versus conventional foods. They weren't looking into whether these women were taking in artificial additives, food additives, pesticides, growth hormones, stuff like that. And if people were eating large amounts of these type of conventional or artificial foods, then that would have completely negated or could have completely negated anything positive that they were getting from something like vitamin supplementation or magnesium supplementation. So that's kind of another issue here is that they didn't really look into that at all. Another issue was that the macronutrient intake was pretty poor, in my opinion. It was about 18% protein, 30% fat, around 50% carbohydrate. And so it was a higher carbohydrate intake than I would have liked to see as well. They didn't survey at all about medication, about use of hormone replacement therapy or anything else that could potentially kind of throw a wrench in the equation of not only interaction with supplements that people are taking, but also risk of death. So, for example, we know that women who are using nutritional supplements are also more likely to be using prescription drugs. Drugs. It's just one of those things where they're more open to putting things in their mouth that go above and beyond food, like supplements or like prescription medications. And so there's certainly an issue right there where if a woman is at a higher propensity for hormone replacement therapy or use of prescription drugs, and she's also the woman who's using more supplements. Well, who's to say that the hormone replacement therapy, which has been proven to have some issues when it comes to increasing risk of cancer and death threat rates, or the use of prescription drugs, which also can be an issue. We're not to blame for the increased risk of death versus it being just the supplements. So that's an issue. The multivitamins that they were using or the supplements that they were using, I would hazard a guess that if they fell into the category of most people that I talk to or see using supplements, that these are low quality supplements. Supplements. We've talked about the issue with fillers and companies cutting costs when it comes to using cheap raw materials in their supplements. And it's likely that most of the women were not using high quality supplements. For example, in the case of magnesium, you look at magnesium oxide. That's a very cheap, a very small molecule. It's not absorbed well by the body, and you can basically get a lot of it not really doing you any good at all. Compared to things less like magnesium glycinate or magnesium citrate, which are larger molecules, they're harder to package, they're more expensive for companies to make, but they're much more easily absorbed. So there's the issue of the actual raw materials used in the supplements and whether or not those contain toxins or solvents or heavy metals or harmful bacteria or yeast or mold or pesticides or anything else, or whether or not they were actually high quality. So this, in my opinion, was a flawed study. I don't really take anything from it other than the fact that if a woman is consuming cheap supplements full of really bad raw materials and also at the same time taking in high amounts of prescription drugs, not exercising very much, and eating a subpar diet, that she could increase her risk of death. That's pretty much all I take from this study. So, you know, to me, it kind of falls into the same category as that whole red meat study that came out last week or a couple weeks ago. It's just a. You know, anytime we're looking at self reporting questionnaires, something that's not very well controlled, then you really can't take much data away from it.

You know, I know I was sort of poking fun at that earlier study for only having eight people in it, but maybe the problem with having 38,000 people in it is that you can't control for all that kind of stuff. You are doing self reporting. You're not able to really control what all the variables are because the study is so large. So you're sort of doomed if you do and doomed if you don't. Really.

Yeah, that's where a really, really important part of this comes down to customization. You know, go listen to the podcast last week that went over which blood tests you should get and what lab tests you should get. Order those lab tests, find out what's going on in your body, and then customize your diet and your supplementation protocol accordingly using high, high quality stuff. And that's the way that you live longer.

All right, well, let's move on to our final question. Comes from osa. And OSA says, what supplement would you recommend for reducing belly fat? Safslim is a new belly fat supplement that I am using that has gained a lot of traction since it appeared on the Dr. Oz show, and Montel Williams raved about it. What do you think about it? Are there better supplements on the market for specifically reducing belly fat? I know you're not mainstream like Dr. Oz, but if you could recommend one or more supplements specifically addressing belly fat, what would it be? And OSA says maybe once you open your mouth, it will sell like hotcakes all over the United States, like every supplement that Dr. Oz recommends on his show.

Yeah, I certainly remember when he first recommended this Saf Slim, because I saw it all over the Twitter sphere. It's another one of those highly marketable compounds. We know that good fats are healthy. We look at something like the type of fat that they're using in this Saf Slim, and it's very similar to conjugated linoleic acid. Conjugated linoleic acid is basically a mix of a bunch of what are called polyunsaturated fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid, or cla. It's been touted for fat loss for a while. Some studies have shown in humans that basically you can get reduced fat mass with CLA supplementation. And it's even been called the fat that burns fat. For those reasons. You'll find that a lot of supplements, far before Saflim came out were marketing CLA as a fat that you could consume that would help you to burn fat. Actual supplementation with CLA seems to be highly variable. Some studies have found effects, some studies haven't. And it could also depend on on the overall fat content of your diet and your ability to actually use fat efficiently as well. Now, as far as this actual safflower oil goes, it's a little bit different in molecular structure compared to conjugated linoleic acid. Technically, it's a high linoleic safflower oil. But the idea is that for the Saf Slim, they mostly tout a study that showed that postmenopausal women who had higher blood sugar and want to lose weight were able to increase their weight loss with the use of linoleic acid with safflower oil. And these were women who happened to have type 2 diabetes. We know that women who are postmenopausal with type 2 diabetes can benefit and lose weight faster when they're consuming safflower oil. And I certainly don't take that to mean that safflower oil or this Saf Slim can cause similar results in the rest of the population. But that's the study that they're basing this entire corporation of Saf Slim on in terms of whether or not this stuff is actually efficacious. Maybe it is. You know, like I say, the conjugated linoleic acid research goes back and forth, but you could take this Saf Slim or you could have a couple handfuls of like a raw sunflower seed as a snack, and you get the same amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids as you're getting from the safflower oil. And you're going to save yourself lots and lots and lots of money. So when it comes down to conjugated linoleggleic acid, I am not convinced that someone who's not already eating just a high amount healthy fats getting a little bit of raw seeds and nuts in their diet is going to get any advantage over somebody who's paying a lot of money for this safflower oil that may or may not work, but is certainly expensive.

And not as delicious as Saffslim. A handful of sunflower seeds is delicious.

Exactly, exactly. And plus, you've got the added fiber from. From eating something like that. Now, as far as a supplement for belly fat is concerned, here's the issue. There's multiple reasons that you could get belly fat. I mean, I can think of three right off the top of my head. Insulin resistance would be one reason that you get high amounts of belly fat. We actually just talked about this. And insulin resistance, you get that constant insulin production by the pancreas. The body produces too much insulin, blood sugar rises. Insulin has to transport the glucose somewhere to be stored as energy, so it ends up storing it in the abdominal area as fat. So insulin resistance would be one reason that you'd get belly fat. So if we look at the type of things that can help you with insulin sensitivity, it would be eating a lower amount of carbohydrates and then using supplements like cinnamon, like chromium, like vanadium, those type of things. Another reason that you could get belly fat would be from stress. And cortisol, which we mentioned earlier in the show, can not only contribute to insulin resistance, but also is directly correlated with amounts of body fat. So not only lifestyle changes and getting more sleep, but something like using Chinese adaptogenic herbs. If stress is the reason for your body fat or for your belly fat would be what you'd use in a situation like that. Menopause. We know that women who are going through menopause, they tend to get some hormonal imbalances that can affect the adrenal glands, that can affect the fat cells and increase the propensity for belly fat. So in a woman going through menopause who has issues with a sudden increase in belly fatigue, that for her it might be actually doing something like going to see someone who specializes in something like the Wiley protocol and getting a compounded natural hormone replacement therapy to balance out estrogen, testosterone and progesterone. So in very, very few cases, someone who has a low metabolism, which is very rare, might have an issue with either thyroid production or with just a naturally low metabolism, in which maybe some of these fat burners like green tea extract and stuff like that might help out a little bit. But I mean, you can go down the line of fat burners that have been commercially available over the years, from synephrine to clenbuterol to like caffeine and ephedrine, fucoxanthin on and on down the list, stuff that's supposed to boost your metabolism, stuff that's supposed to block carbs, stuff that's supposed to be the fat that increases fat burning like this conjugate linoleic acid, appetite suppressants like high fiber extracts. Most of this stuff has been studied. There was a huge study that came out in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism and it showed that a lot of this stuff can have a little bit of an effect, the benefit of maybe three or four pounds over the course of a year by using it regularly in the way that it's intended to be used. But none of it holds a candle to moving more and eating less. None of it. I mean, we're talking about a tiny, tiny percentage of the equation when it comes to using a fat burning supplement versus putting your body into a state where it's healthy, it's got enough nutrients and it's moving and it's not getting so many calories that those calories don't get stored as fat. So as far as my top number one supplement for burning off belly fat, fat doesn't exist. Totally depends on what's causing your belly fat. And once you know what's causing your belly fat, then you can take things from there. But in most cases, most of these fat loss supplements are not going to do much compared to lifestyle changes and optimizing nutrients in other areas. If you go to pacificfit.net which is where a lot of the supplements that I recommend are, what's the smallest category of supplements over there? It's the fat loss category because your digestion, the digestion section over there is twice as big as the fat loss supplement section. That's because something as simple as improving your gut flora and the way that you digest foods is going to have a way bigger effect on fat loss than amping up your metabolism with bitter orange extract or something like that.

So you know what the problem is with this answer?

What's that?

You're not going to be able to sell that like hotcakes all over the United States.

I know, I know. But you know, I would be more than happy if instead people were to use my books. Listen to this podcast, Use those methods to determine what you need and then supplement accordingly. But don't just kind of shotgun a fat loss supplement into your body, because, you know, you gotta figure out the reason that you've got belly fat first and then go from there. So.

And definitely don't listen to Montel Williams, who, he doesn't even have a doctor in front of his name. At least Dr. Oz has a doctor and his as his first name.

Seriously. Maybe that's what I need to do too, is become a doctor. I'll add that to. To my list of things to do. Sure.

We can really just get it on the Internet somewhere. I'm sure.

Kazakhstan. Cool. Well, that about wraps everything up. That does.

Before we continue being jaded and ragging on the entire pop culture, let's wrap it up.

That's right. By the way, study that just came out. I noticed this actually just came across my phone as we were recording. Green coffee bean extract extract helps pre obese men and women shed 16 pounds in 22 weeks. So we can add that one in there, too. Green coffee beans.

There you go. Dr. Greenfield says green coffee bean coming soon.

So, yeah, if you get a lot out of this podcast, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com we have some shiny new donation buttons on there. You can sign up to donate a dollar on a monthly basis or $5 or $10 or $20. Helps a ton to support the show. Or just go to itunes and leave a rating or ranking that's free. And that helps out the show too. Listen to this Friday's podcast and of course, if you have questions, comments or feedback on any of the articles or this podcast, then head over to BenGreenfieldFitness.com this episode is episode number 190. Everything I've mentioned is going to show up in the show notes for that episode. And yeah, that's about it. So thanks to caffeine and adaptogenic herbs, we got through this one, Brock, huh?

We sure did.

All right, folks, well, have a great week. And this is Ben and Brock signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

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