Episode #191: What To Do When Allergies Affect Your Exercise

In today's podcast, what to do when allergies affect your exercise. Also, how much do you need to eat after an endurance event? Is tri ripped or triathlon dominator better for a 70.3? A genetic test to determine your potential aerobic capacity, how to heal a bruise, controlling the side effects of prednisone, how to reduce migraines should you use the mess out of seven keto dhea and wearing minimalist shoes on a bicycle.

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Hello everybody. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. This is Brock coming to you live. Well, not so live. I guess it's live while I'm doing it, but not live while you're doing it.

But you're not dead. I'm not implying exactly. Is still with us.

I'm still with you. And so is Ben, obviously, because you're talking to me.

Yeah, I just got back from a little little stroll down the river on my elliptigo, actually.

Nice.

So nothing like geeking out in the wee hours of the morning. It's kind of nice because there's not as many people out there to give you really strange looks, you know, as if you're on a Sedgway scooter. But I mean, you know, things, things. Cool. I wanted to go out and do something. Didn't want to go for a run. And I've written an article about this actually over on the website about how, how close the training in terms of the specificity of the training is. When you compare elliptical training to running with very low impact. A lot of people think elliptical training is useless, but it's not. I mean there's, I cite multiple research studies that have shown it to be very, very effective for, for improving your running.

So did you, do you have like lights and reflectors and all that kind of stuff on your elliptigo if you're going out that early in the morning?

Yeah, Yep. I'm, I'm totally outfitted. I wrap myself in Christmas lights and I use a long extension cord from my house. No, actually I just like had a T shirt and, and pants and kind of, it was like freezing rain. So I got a little cold thermogenesis in as well. So it's nice. So yeah, lots of don't need to.

Take the cold shower if you just go outside in the stand in the rain.

Exactly. So now I am on the tail end of about a 15 hour fast right now. So I slammed a few amino acids in my system. I've got some, some Chinese adaptogenic herbs here in a little bit of water and I'm ready to rumble.

Let's do it. News flashes. Okay, lots of stuff happening@twitter.com BenGreenfield which ones do you want to bring to the people's attention this week?

There's a ton of cool stuff I found this week, like a Wii Fit study. And we talked about Wii Fit before, but it turns out this study that they did was a comparison between the Nintendo Wii Fit aerobics and it was the free one run program, which is like the default program that comes with Wii Fit. And they compared that to traditional aerobic exercise and basically people who were kind of traditionally sedentary. So this wasn't with super fit folks, but the Wii Fit just like blew treadmill walking out of the water. And so it wasn't anything special on the treadmill that folks walked for 30 minutes at about a speed of three and a half, which actually for a sedentary person is a brisk walk on a treadmill. And they compared that with 30 minutes of not doing a Nintendo Wii Fit free run program on a treadmill, but just like doing it kind of running in place in front of the tv. Yeah. And the heart rate with Wii fit was like 20 beats higher, which is significant. So it wasn't just kind of a node or not very notably higher heart rate. It was, it was very significant for anybody who's, who's been at, you know, 120 versus 140 for heart rate. So I thought that was interesting. And all you moms out there who want your kids to be fit, you know, apparently if, if they'll play this, it can, it can have a decent result.

That's great. I remember seeing some, some evidence like it's probably like a year ago where people were really disappointed in the, in the fitness level that kids were getting. But I guess it wasn't specifically from the Wii Fit, it was just games on Wii.

Exactly. And this was the actual Wii Fit running game. So another study that you know, that I tweeted that kind of got a little bit of a response I noticed was a relationship between the running loads and soft tissue injuries in athletes. And the basics of this study and the way that I noticed that it was reported in a lot of places it was reported was that when you're training for speed, you have a higher risk of injury than when you're training with volume. And everybody, it seemed, was coming out and saying, well, oh, this is really good information for endurance athletes. We need to be doing more aerobic training. We need to be doing more of, you know, whatever the Maffetone philosophy or the Lydiard philosophy of, you know, higher volume long run, stuff like that. It should be noted that this study was comparing 10 meters of all out sprinting to about a 2k distance. So we're not talking about, you know, comparing a 10 mile run to doing like, you know, two mile intervals. What we're talking about are rugby players that they tested doing very, very short sprints versus doing kind of longer, moderate intensity efforts. And what they found was that anytime there was very high velocity running, that there was a higher risk of specifically lower body soft tissue injury. But always be careful when you see the headlines of a study like this because you need to look at what they were actually studying. These weren't like long distance runners comparing 100 miles a week versus 20 miles a week fast and finding 100 miles a week to be superior. These were rugby players where they found that when you're doing 10 meter all out sprints as part of a running program, your risk of injury goes up.

It depends on what your personal baseline is. I guess when you see the words long distance.

Exactly. Actually, in most studies long distance is not very long for people who are like marathoners and triathletes, long distance. And a lot of times they are referring to 1500 meters, 2000 meters. So it's all relative. And then the last thing I noted was there's. I think we've gotten questions before on this podcast about sport legs and about these supplements that are supposed to increase the amount of lactic acid that you produce. With the idea being that if you introduce lactic acid into the body prior to actually beginning something like, you know, a hard bike ride or a hard run or anything else, that's going to cause a bunch of lactic acid formation. If you start off by supplementing with something that contains lactate, then what happens is you can step up the activity of the enzyme lactate dehydrogenase, which is involved with, with basically breaking down lactate and transferring it into other muscles, like bringing it back up to the liver to be converted into glucose and stuff like that. And theoretically kind of a cool idea on paper. This was one of the first studies that I'VE seen that really looked into whether or not the stuff is effective. And so they actually gave people like a lactate dihydrate and a lactate monohydrate supplement. Very similar to what you're going to find in a lot of these supplements out there on the market. And supplementation didn't really do anything at all when it came to specifically. What they tested was a 20k time trial in cyclists, which is a fairly high lactic acid producing effort. They didn't find that it stepped up lactate dehydrogenase in the mitochondria. They didn't find really much of an effect at all of this stuff. So just a note to self that if a supplement is promising to act by loading you with lactate, it doesn't appear to be very efficacious.

Disappointing.

Yeah.

So I guess that sort of points us more in the direction of something like the lactic acid buffer rather than loading it up. Buffering it is probably a better idea.

Yep, exactly. Using something like a buffering salt. And even though sometimes you have to use them to a pretty high extent or load with them for a long time prior to the event for them to be effective, for example. Best example of something like that that I use is like extreme endurance. But I have to take that stuff for a while before I really like four to six weeks. So that's it. Special announcements.

All right, so there are a couple of very cool posts that happened@BenGreenfieldFitness.com I guess there was the podcast last Friday that was really cool. Very interesting stuff.

Yeah. We asked the question to a surgeon, engineer and physician who's very well versed in nutrition about whether or not it's possible to be extremely active and you eat a low carb diet. If you didn't listen to that podcast, listen in a lot of good information in there. And basically what it comes down to is that whether or not you're eating more carbs, if you're going to say like, you know, go to a race or you know, maybe do a really, really hard CrossFit workout or something like that, if you're trying to kind of eat lower carbohydrate, be in a, in a high metabolic efficiency, high fat burning state as much as possible kind of the rest of the time. A lot of really good practical tips in there about, about how to throw down a hard or a long workout and not completely hit the wall in terms of energy. You know, basically we cover a ton of stuff. But I mean, what it comes down to for Me on a practical level is for, you know, once I, you know, if I qualify for Ironman Hawaii this year, during a lot of my longer workouts for that race, I'm just going to be basically shooting coconut oil or medium chain triglyceride oil and doing about 90 calories or so of this low insulin releasing superstarch stuff before those long workouts. And I've been experimenting with it a little bit. Works pretty well. So listen into that podcast.

You crushed your first triathlon of the year using that sort of philosophy, didn't you, over the weekend?

Well, I did do a sprint triathlon and I won it by a lot, but I wasn't really using that for nutrition. But what I did do was I didn't carb load at all. I just continued to eat my normal high fat diet. I put a post up at Ben Greenfield Fitness where I wrote down exactly what I ate even the night before. Went to an Italian restaurant where there's pizza and pasta and stuff like that. And I had a portobello mushroom with some steak. Yeah. Went out and felt great. I don't know whether it was that or the fact that I had a very, very good poo, which I also talked about.

That doesn't even qualify as a very good one. This is like extraordinary.

Yeah, I picked up one of these things called a Squatty Potty. The company Squatty Potty sent me some to evaluate why did they have to call it that? Yeah, I know it's not the best name, but holy cow. I mean, the thing not only kind of fits underneath the toilet so it looks nice and stylish in your bathroom and doesn't look bad, but it puts you into a traditional squatting position where your rectal muscles are able to defecate much more efficiently. And I swear I had a lot of backed up fecal matter that came out the day before the race. And I won't overwhelm people here on the podcast. Just go read the article where I actually kind of explain the whole, you know, anorectal angle and, and how this thing changes it up. But yeah, it was a very, very invigorating poo.

Well, anybody who's traveled around and especially in Asia will see that like most of the, well, I shouldn't say most of the world. A lot of the world doesn't use toilets like we do in North America. And in the western world, like, it's usually just a hole in the floor and often like a spot where you're supposed to put your feet on either side of the, the whole. And it's for exactly that reason. It just lines you up in a much more effective manner. The way we were built probably too.

And the whole smoking gun thing here. But we do have very high rates of colon cancer in the US and part of it might be because of the way that we go to the bathroom. So squatty on the potty. Check it out.

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Listener Q and A.

Okay, so we got a bunch of audio questions this week, which is really nice, and a whole bunch of written questions. We are getting such a serious backlog. Please be patient. Know that we are receiving your, your questions and we will get to them. It may take a few weeks though. But let's get into our first audio question from Megan.

Hi Ben, my name is Megan and I'm calling with a question for your podcast. Basically something as an endurance athlete, I've heard multiple times, but I just haven't been able to find any substantial evidence explaining one way or another how it truly works is that when you do a big event such as a marathon or like I just did a 70.3 race this weekend, that in the days following such an event that your body has a higher caloric burn because it's repairing and rebuilding muscles and you know, you're exhausted and you're just, you know, your body's working to get back to, you know, it's base. And so what I'm wondering is, is that true or is that just one of these things that people say to make themselves feel like they can eat a lot after a big event and not have guilt? And what kind of evidence is it and what percentage? I mean, I'm imagining that it varies obviously, based on how big of a person you are, how fit you are, how many times have you done that event? Because obviously if you're a marathoner multiple times Your body is more efficient at it, and the shock of doing such an event isn't as hard on the body. So I'm just wondering if you know of any evidence or research on that. I hope that you have some kind of an answer for me. Thank you and I love the show. Bye.

So I thought this was interesting because it got me thinking. I've done this before, but it always blows me out of the water when I think about how many calories I actually burned during something like an IR Iron Man. Typical heart rate during something like that. I'm going around 10 hours, 800 calories an hour or so. So I've got 8,000 calories that I'd be burning during the event. And then if you just take. My personal metabolic rate is right around 3,000 in terms of what I've had it tested at in a laboratory. So you take the other 14 hours of the day that I'm not racing. And there's another kind of 2,000 calories that I'm burning just sitting around. So typical Ironman day, calorie burn is like 10,000 calories.

Nice.

And, you know, consuming maybe 500 calories before the race for breakfast. If I'm lucky, I'll get 4,000 calories down the hatch during the actual race. You know, split up is basically just like, you know, 40 gels or whatever. You know, during the bike and the run. It just makes me sick to think about and maybe if I really binge after the race and go all out, margarita, pizza, whatever, maybe I can get 1500 calories down the hatch. And that's about all that's going to fit into the stomach, especially post race. You add all that up, you're still staring at a 4 to 5,000 calorie deficit for somebody like me after an Ironman triathlon. And that's. You're looking at a few thousand for most people the next day. In terms of your actual calorie deficit, the hole that you've dug yourself into from a calorie standpoint, generally your liver and your muscles are going to be pretty empty of their carbohydrate stores. You've usually dipped into quite a bit of your fat as well. If you're already lean going into the race, which a lot of folks are going into something like an Ironman, you've maybe even dipped into some of your essential fat stores. So, yeah, you've got that going on. And then you've also got the fact that you're damaging muscles, especially during the marathon, which is that eccentric loading Impact based exercise that causes a real real elevation in a lot of these markers of inflammatory damage like creatine kinase and all of these what are called myocellular enzymes that have to act to repair muscle tissue. So we've got damage going on with skeletal muscle fibers. You've got the cell membranes getting damaged. You've got even what are called like your ion transport mechanisms, which is basically kind of how your nerves communicate with your muscles to actually fire those are getting damaged. And that can potentially cause a real world increase in your post exercise metabolic rate because your body has to repair itself. And even just the activity of resynthesizing all the proteins that build all these things that you're breaking down, that's pretty energetically expensive. I mean you do need greater energy utilization and so it makes sense that your resting metabolic rate would go up. As far as studies on this, you know, the only ones, the only studies that I'm aware of that look into how much repairing muscle post exercise would actually increase your resting metabolic rate was done on in weightlifting. And in the case of weightlifting it was right around like it was close to 1,000 extra kilojoules for a day long period translated into calories, that's like maybe 200 extra calories. The calorie hole that you dig yourself into just from a lot of exercise far exceeds the actual rise in metabolic rate from your body having to repair itself. I mean, burning an extra 200 calories a day in terms of your resting metabolic rate is not significantly high compared to whatever the 3,000 or 4,000 calorie hole that you've dug yourself into from just moving around a lot and not eating as much as you could during the race. So what this comes down to is Megan's friends are kind of right that a marathon or an ironman, your metabolic rate is going to stay elevated for a little while after, but it's not very significant. More of the significance is just the fact that you've burnt a lot of calories. As far as what I do typically post Ironman, I'll wake up the next morning and I will be fairly hungry. And a big big part of that is because like I mentioned, the liver and the muscle are completely empty of carbohydrate stores. So I do have a fairly carbolicious breakfast, whatever, oatmeal, stack o pancakes, waffles, whatever. And yeah, a lot of times there are some cheap foods thrown in there. I don't usually do gluten based carbohydrates, but if I'm at A breakfast buffet and there's pancakes and it's post Ironman. I don't, I don't check to see if they're buckwheat or coconut flour or whatever. I just eat the frickin things. But I really focus for the next few days post heart event like that on some important things. So the first thing you gotta realize is not only from all that sugar that you ate, but from all those free radicals that you produced and all of the metabolic byproducts of hard exercise that you produce. Your body tends to be fairly acidic after an event like that and you want to try and get a lot of what are called alkalinizing foods down the hatch. So the best example of an alkalinizing food would be like a dark leafy green. Spinach is a perfect example. It's got a ton of chlorophyll in it. Chlorophyll is a, is a really potent alkalizer. Broccoli is another example. Another thing that's really, really good actually is cucumber juice. That stuff has got a really good alkalinizing effect. Happens to be great for your liver as well. Avocados are really good. These are just some things that really help your body heal well, like dark peppers, like dark red peppers. Those actually have a fairly alkalinizing effect as well. So those are some of the foods, for example, that you could include. I'm really, really a big fan of greens supplements like Enterprime or Capra greens or Living Fuel super greens or any of these foods that are like blue green algae and spirulina and kelp and chlorophyll all kind of blended together. Those are super alkalinizing. And especially after you've really beat your body up, they can really help to stabilize your ph. So that's one kind of angle that you want to come at healing your body from like post heart event. I'd also really look at your cortisol levels, your adrenal glands and really taking care of those post big hard race events. Workout Two best things I can recommend for that would be Chinese adaptogenic herbs, which we've talked about a lot before on this show as being great for stabilizing your cortisol levels and decreasing a lot of those stress markers. And then something like maca root fruit. Maca is not a Chinese herb, but it's also very, very good in terms of lowering cortisol levels. Example of something that has Chinese adaptogenic herbs in it, like what I'm drinking right now this TNT stuff, that's good. And example, something that has maca in it. Nrg28 I actually slam a couple of those usually before an ironman. It's kind of a liquid superfood. It's got a lot of that chlorophyll in it that I mentioned. It's got the maca root. It's great for kind of setting your body up to repair. That's something to try as well. I can put a link to all this stuff in the show notes for you. And then the last thing I'd especially consider, and this should be a no brainer in terms of repairing your skeletal muscle fibers. But you're just going to need higher protein intake. Easily digestible proteins like fish. You can do amino acids, amino acid capsules, amino acid powders, you know, protein powders. One important thing is that typically in addition to your muscles being beat up a lot of times your digestive system just doesn't function that well post, you know, Ironman, post marathon, stuff like that. I would be amping up your intake of digestive enzymes. I'd be doing a bunch of probiotics. And if you're really having trouble digesting foods and I do find that this is an issue for me after I've had whatever 40 gels during a race and also just completely had my body redlined for 10 hours. Hydrochloric acid production in the stomach, it seems for some reason that stuff just seems to sit in the stomach and you have a hard time digesting it for a few days. So you could do for example a betaine hcl. Now foods has a great one. I'll link to it in the show notes for you. But pop one, two of those before your bigger meals of the day, you know, the day after something like a marathon or an ironman, all that will help as well. So you know, from a nutrition perspective that's, that's what, that's what I do. Go ahead.

Is that the stomach problem. Would that be as a result of the blood being shunted like away from the stomach while you're doing an event like that? Is that why you're like a hydrochloric acid levels would be off and sort of digestion would be a little funky.

I suspect it's more autonomic nervous system related. You put your body into running from a lion fight and flight mode for that long and it's just kind of whimpered up in a fetal position in the corner for the next few days.

So maybe something like meditation would help a little bit too that's not a nutrition thing, obviously, but anything parasympathetic nervous system sort of back online, anything that.

You'D normally recommend for extreme stress control is going to be a good idea after putting your body through the wringer. And the longer you're going, the more serious this is going to be. And, you know, it depends on you, too. If you've never run a marathon before, that's going to be enough to put your body into that state. For somebody like an Ironman triathlete, a marathon is not as big of a deal. You know, a half Ironman or an Ironman really is a big deal. So it all depends on your experience as well.

Well, I've always heard there's. I'm actually guilty of spreading this rumor as well that after a marathon you get 48 hours of calories don't count. And after a half marathon, it's 24 hours of calories don't count. I'm not actually sure where I got that from, but I guess that's not entirely true.

Yeah, it's more kind of mental than physical. I mean, for me it's alcohol doesn't count, but. And that's highly scientific.

Yes, absolutely. All right, well, let's move on to our second question. Another audio question comes from Josh.

Hi, Ben, my name is Josh Cox. I have a question for you about seasonal allergies. I guess at least that's what I think I've got for the past couple years. In April or May, it seems like something comes out that makes my heart rate stay really, really low. And I know this especially from whenever I do cycling, I'll go out and I can't seem to get it up into those third or fourth or even fifth heart rate zones. If I really try and feel pretty horrible for the duration of my ride. And I'm just wondering why this is. It's not as prevalent when I run, but I do also notice that throughout the day my heart rate is pretty low. Sometimes I'll be standing or sitting and it gets a lot lower than normal. I'll be standing with a 40 or 50 beat per minute heart rate, which isn't necessarily normal right now for my fitness level. So I didn't know if there's anything you might know about this. You know, I'm not doing any prescriptions of any sort for anything. I'm trying Quercetin right now, vitamin C. I just don't know what could be causing this, though. Thanks for the advice.

Yeah, I thought this was interesting. And basically when you step back and you look at allergies, which is what it sounds like, especially this time of year. You know, we're recording this as spring is in the air and seasonal allergies are a real issue. I would suspect that this is something allergy related. I haven't seen Josh's health history. I don't know a ton about his diet. But it certainly is reasonable that something like this could be caused by an allergic reaction. What you need to understand is how the body works when you actually do have an allergic reaction. There's kind of two main compounds that are produced. They're called oticoids, but basically they're involved in the inflammatory, inflammatory process or the inflammatory reaction to an allergenic compound that you've been exposed to, you know, whatever pollen in the air. And they affect what's called your vasomotor tone or the size of your blood vessels. So one compound is histamine, and we've probably all heard of histamine. A lot of times when you have an allergy reaction, you take an antihistamine. But histamine, basically, it modulates the tone of your blood vessels by stimulating certain receptors in your vascular walls. And this can cause, in many cases, vasodilation or expansion of blood vessels. Now, in some cases, you'll get bronchoconstriction, so you get constriction of your airways, but you'll get expansion of your blood vessels. That's one of the reasons you might get red in the face, for example, if you've got an allergy reaction. Bradykinin is the other compound that plays a role in inflammation or in the allergy response. And that also can have a similar effect. It can cause vasodilation. And so when you're looking at making a blood vessel bigger, it's just like kind of that garden hose analogy. When you've got a garden hose and it's a really big, thick, large in diameter garden hose, typically water isn't going to flow out of that quite as quickly as if you kind of kink the hose or use a smaller hose. And so if you've got a bunch of vasodilation going on, then it certainly means that your heart doesn't have to pump as hard. Your blood pressure falls, and your ability to reach a very high heart rate can decrease with this large amount of vasodilation. Now, of course, in a trained athlete, that's a good response. That's one of the reasons that the resting heart rate is lower. Just because your blood vessels are larger, your heart is Working more efficiently, your stroke volume is bigger. But in an allergenic reaction, it can also cause kind of an inability to reach the heart rate that you want to get up to. So that's what could be causing this, as far as it happening during exercise. I think we do have another question later on about exercise and allergies, and maybe we can get into.

We should just throw that in next May as well, since we're on the subject here.

Sure. Yeah. Why don't we throw in that question? We can talk a little bit more about allergies. Yeah, go ahead. Why don't you throw it in?

Okay. So, yeah, the question is from Christian, and he says, my wife and I ran a half marathon today. She appears to have a significant histamine reaction causing vasodilation. Every time she runs significant distances, her arms and legs turn purplish red and she feels her blood pressure drops. She dumps cold water on her arms at each aid station, and that helps some. The problem is worse when it's hot outside. Her hydration and nutrition are good. Her liquid nutrition has electrolytes, and she adds a salt tablet to her water. I recall your podcast interview about not needing electrolytes, but adding salt seems to help her. What are you. What other thoughts do you have? Oh, and then he actually threw in a little. A little shout out to me. So thanks, Christian.

What did he say?

He said, by the way, I really enjoy Brock's contribution to the podcast.

You mean the fact that if Brock weren't here, there wouldn't be a podcast, there'd be silence? Yeah. I completely don't even. I don't produce the podcast anymore. Brock does. So any increase in the quality of the podcast, you can thank Brock for. So exercise is always going to make allergies worse, and a big, big reason for that. I mean, it's fairly simple. It's just. It's blood flow. So there's a few different ways this works. First of all, any type of allergy reaction can certainly be related to food intake. And because your body is able to mount an allergenic reaction against food, this can be magnified when you go out and exercise. And if you're eating peanuts or shellfish or eggs or anything that kind of traditionally may cause a food allergy reaction, a lot of times you don't notice the histamine response, and you don't notice the kind of anaphylaxis and shortness of breath and a lot of the other uncomfortable things that can happen when it something like a food allergy. Until you actually start exercising and getting this stuff really picked up by the blood and getting a lot of blood kind of circulating around your system and whizzing through your organs much faster. And so you get a larger exposure to these food based allergens. So that's one thing, is that food allergies can certainly be enhanced through physical exercise. And the scientific term for something like that, like not noticing that a food is bothering you until you're out there exercising, is called exercise induced anaphylaxis. There are other things that can cause exercise induced anaphylaxis, but that's a big, big thing is a food allergy. So that's something to think about, certainly when it comes to you having this type of histamine response. And we'll talk about some of the things that you could do to kind of decrease this type of reaction and kind of control the histamine a little bit in a second. But the big, big thing that I found to be super successful in a lot of the runners that I've worked with who tend to have seasonal allergies is we just start to eliminate a lot of food allergy triggers or food components that tend to cause a little bit of an autoimmune reaction or an inflammatory response, because that's what allergies are. So if you can reduce a lot of the things that are going to cause basically the same type of response, then you've got just lower net inflammation and a lower net immune response. And so these things tend not to be as big of an issue when you head out to go for a run on a windy spring day. The biggest thing is gluten. I've found that putting a runner or somebody who's out there exercising and getting this type of anaphylactic response or allergy response, if you cut out gluten, that's a big, big one, because you can really limit the amount of gluten antibodies that circulate in the system. Especially people have a gluten sensitivity. And that really, really lowers the propensity to have issues when it comes to like a histamine reaction when you're out exercising. The thing is, though, there are a ton of other foods that are considered to be cross reactive with gluten antibodies. The main reason that a food would cause the same type of response in your body that happens when you consume gluten would be because there are foods that have the ability to kind of mimic the shape of the gluten molecule, and your immune system tends to recognize the shape of that gluten molecule, something to mount an immune response against. So some of the biggest things that have gluten cross reactivity associated with them would be like dairy. That's a biggie. So like cow's milk, if you tend to, if you cut out gluten and you tend to still have an allergy response when you're out running, you know, create a lot of mucus, get a lot of histamine, that type of thing, just cut out dairy, and that's a big one. Foods that traditionally would be considered gluten free can also cause this issue. So like buckwheat, quinoa, spelts, amaranth, millet, rye, all of kind of the grain substitutes that you might use if you're, if you're trying to steer clear of gluten, you may want to consider eliminating these as well, especially like in the, in the springtime if you're getting this type of response when you're exercising. Another thing to look at would be corn. Corn can actually cause this issue as well. So I would consider eliminating some of those things from the diet.

Our bodies are so smart in some ways, and then in other ways they're so stupid.

Yeah. Yep, exactly.

So, I mean, confused.

Yeah. And, you know, it's not to say that pollen and stuff floating around in the air still isn't going to cause some asthma or some anaphylaxis or histamine response, but I've found that that dietary perspective is the biggest one. Now, as far as other things that you can do to control, like hyperreactivity of the immune system when you're out exercising in the spring especially, I would look into acupuncture. I've been able to find multiple studies that have shown acupuncture to be effective in modulating that histamine response. And that's a deal where you can go find a local acupuncturist and call them up on the phone first and see if they kind of specialize if they've worked with runners before. But that would be one thing to look into. And if you want to know what to expect in an acupuncture section, just, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for acupuncture. I've kind of outlined what goes on when you walk into a room with an acupuncturist. It's not them driving pins into your skin with a hammer. It's pretty light stuff. Carcetin. You've probably seen the advertisements for Lance Armstrong Drinking the FRS energy drink that's got the kercetin in it, that's a good antioxidant. But it can also inhibit the inflammatory process caused by what are called neutrophils, which are active as part of the immune response with allergies. And quercetin is actually really good at preventing some of this inflammation. So you could use a carcetin supplement. Red apples are really high in quercetin. Red onions are too. Those would be things to look into in terms of quercetin concentration. It's actually highest of all foods in the skin, in the outer ring of onions, and in apple rinds. So those would be, you know, you could. You don't have to eat a bunch of onion rings, but I mean, you know, in the spring you may want to step up your intake of onions and apples because both of those are chock full of quercetin. So that'd be one thing to look into. Fish oil has a really, really positive effect in terms of helping you to produce arachidonic acid. And arachidonic acid is responsible for kind of modulating that prostaglandin response that can cause inflammation and aggravate allergies. So fish oil doesn't exactly. I may have explained that kind of incorrectly. It doesn't increase your levels of arachidonic acid, but it helps you to metabolize it faster. Helps you to metabolize it arachidonic faster. So that'd be another thing to think about. Taking is like a fish oil. So acupuncture, fish oil, quercetin. As far as other things to look into, sterols, which is basically just something you get from plants, those can be effective at alleviating some of the allergic stuff. I would look into, you know, just stepping up your plant intake, raw nuts, raw seeds, stuff like that, that's really high in plant sterols. So I'd look into that as well.

And that's specifically the raw ones, like notyou don't wanna get roasted.

Yeah, you're gonna get inactivation of a lot of the sterols with roasting and heating. So those are some of the things I would look into. And then just stay away from those common foods that are gonna cause an allergenic response. I was even able to find a study in a journal of head and neck surgery that reported that foods that are commonly involved in allergic rhinitis are foods that contain additives and artificial colors. And that would include vanillin, msg, benzoates, benzaldehyde, and A lot of the common additives you're gonna find in packaged food or processed foods, so I would steer clear of those, too. I mean, whether or not they contain gluten or whatever, I would just be eating, like, recognizable, real raw foods from the produce section more than I would be eating out of packages and boxes and stuff like that. So. A lot of stuff.

It's always a good idea anyway.

Yeah, it's always a good idea, but I mean, like, you know. Yeah, basically, you know, don't. Don't go out and eat a Chinese restaurant the day before you're gonna go for a run, especially if you're gonna be consuming like. Like msg. You know, even if you look at, like, Gatorade, it's got FD and C yellow in it, and that's considered to be one of those things that is an additive or artificial color. I mean, you know, so you got to be kind of careful. But yeah, so hopefully I haven't kicked that horse to death too much, but that's what I would do when it comes to allergies and running.

Yeah, no, that's great. And like you said before, and we started this whole allergy talk, this is the perfect time of year to get this kind of information out there. So hopefully people don't suffer as much through the next couple of months of pollen and all that stuff floating around.

That's right. Basically what it comes down to is don't go running with, like, a loaf of bread tucked under your arm or.

Tucked in your cheek.

That's right.

Okay, so we'll go back to the audio questions again, and this one comes from Brian.

Hey, Ben. My name is Brian K. I'm calling from Key West, Florida, and I love all your stuff. And I have done. I'm 49 years old, and I have done a sprint, an Olympic. Actually two sprints in an Olympic distance. Try and going over the edge. And I'm going to do a half Ironman in January. Coming up down here in Key west, we call Bone Island Tri. And to train for that, I was looking at your two programs, and I was wondering, which one would you recommend? Either the Tri Ripped or the Triathlon Domination Program. So I want to order one of them, but I'm not sure which one would be applicable for me. I do need some direction in the training side of things, and I think that that Domination Triathlon would probably be the better one. But I'd like your feedback and opin. I do have my degree in holistic nutrition as well. So the nutrition side of things I'd really gel with you on that. So it's more getting myself into shape. I weigh about 218 pounds or so. I'm 6 foot 3 and I'd really like to get down to about 195 or so or 190. So between your training and your other insight, that would be greatly appreciated. So I hope to hear from you soon, Ben. Thanks. Hope you have a great day.

So this will be pretty quick. For those of you who don't know, I've written two really big triathlon training programs that are super comprehensive Tri Ripped and Triathlon Dominator. So I'm just going to keep this really quick because I don't want to turn this into a commercial. If you're doing a Half Ironman or an Ironman triathlon, I would tend to go with something like triathlon dominator@triathlondominator.com if you're doing a sprint or an Olympic distance triathlon, then Tri Ripped over@Tri Ripped.com is going to be better for you. And you can use Tri Ripped for like a Half Ironman or an Ironman. But the person who would want to use Tri Ripped for like a Half Ironman or an Ironman would be somebody who wants to also like get a really nice muscular body and cares about their aesthetics as much as they do their performance. And that's kind of the difference between that and Triathlon Dominator is I've kind of brought a lot of bodybuilding concepts and stuff like that into Tri Ripped. So that's the difference between the two. That's the really short 30 second answer, but hopefully that helps. Short Distance Triathlon, I'd definitely go with something like Tri Ripped Half Ironman Ironman go with something like Triathlon Dominator Unless muscle and six pack and stuff like that is important to you. Yeah.

Excellent. This next question comes from somebody that I believe his name is Hunt.

Hi, Ben Hunt here. Hope you're doing well. Thanks for the show. I have a question for the show. I watched a movie or documentary from BBC called the Truth Butt Exercise and it talks a lot about the high intensity interval training that you've been a proponent of and which I've been following. And Lee like and they all talked about the Kendall governor too by the way. But I had a question they had talking about a genetic test to verify if people could increase their aerobic capacity. They did an aerobic test to this gentleman and then put him through his paces. After a month found out that the genetic test did exactly actually predicted that the gentleman would have no increase whatsoever in his aerobic pathway, but could have also said he would have been in the 15 percentile or stuff like that. I'm trying to find out what the name of that genetic test is and see if it's available, and I'm wondering if you have any information that you could provide about that. Thanks. Love the show and talk to you later.

Yeah, I couldn't tell what his name was either, but I think he may have contacted me on Twitter about this documentary, the Truth About Exercise. I watched a little bit of it and it's interesting. There is a genetic test in there where they report on this genetic test that's supposed to be able to guess the potential of your aerobic capacity. The test, as far as I know, is not mainstream, but here's what I do know. Basically what scientists have been able to identify are 11 different gene variants that are important in whether or not you're able to maximize your aerobic capacity. And there was a study in the Journal of Applied Physiology that came out and talked about this research and the title of the study was, was this Using molecular classification to predict gains in maximal aerobic capacity following endurance exercise training in humans. Typical genetic tests. They were just identifying RNA predictor genes in folks and they found that 1 in 5 individuals were unable to increase their VO2 max or their maximal oxygen capacity in response to to aerobic exercise training. And as far as the actual genetic tests that they used, I'm not really sure what they were. However, the person who oversaw the study, his name was Professor James Timmons. And I'm not going to give his email address out on the podcast, but I can tell you right now, you could go Google Professor James Timmons and his email address will come up over at the University of Birmingham. So, I mean, you probably could shoot him an email and just be like, hey, you know, where could I go? What could I do to get this type of genetic test done? And he'd probably be able to steer you in the right direction. That's what I'd do. But, yeah, it turns out that about 20% of folks may not be able to really Significantly increase their VO2 max. Is that a big deal? In my opinion, not really. Because unless you're trying to be a professional or an elite athlete competing at a very, very high level, the value that is more important than your VO2 max is what's called your lactate threshold, which is the point at which your body, it runs out of its capacity to buffer lactic acid. The muscles start to burn and you just start to slow down. That's the point where your brain starts sending a message to your muscles based off of just the amount of pain that occurs that you need to kind of throw in the towel. And that's an extremely trainable number I've never found. I've worked with, literally, gosh, I've probably worked with over a thousand athletes by now, and I've never run into anybody who wasn't able to increase their tolerance for buffering lactic acid. And when I'm training an athlete, I'm going after that number. Especially an endurance athlete, I'm going after that number far, far more hardcore than I am going after a VO2 Max because it's fairly seldom during something like a triathlon or a marathon. And those are the type of athletes that I work with quite a bit. Fairly seldom that you're ever up at your VO2 max during an event like that. And your ability to buffer lactic acid is far more important than your. Than how you know the maximum amount of oxygen that you can breathe in and out because you're very, very seldomly reaching that point where you're at a state of maximum oxygen utilization or at a point where oxygen is a limiting factor.

Cool. Well, slightly disheartening, I guess, in some ways, if you're really interested in that kind of data, but at least it's good news for the rest of us.

Yep. And, you know, as far as this type of genetic testing, you know, I wouldn't necessarily be going out and rushing to test yourself or test your kids and find out if you're going to be able to predict VO2 Max just because there's so many other things that are important in terms of your health and your athletic performance. I think VO2 max is blown out of proportion a lot of the time.

There's a lot of the genetic tests that really just sort of open a whole can of worms that maybe will be cause your life more stress than if you didn't know.

Yeah, it's kind of that whole do you really want to know when you're going to die? Question. Yeah. Okay.

Well, we've got one more audio question, and it comes from Jerry.

Hi, Ben. My name is Jerry. And my question is this. A little background first. Last night I was at the rock climbing gym. I dropped to the mat from a height of about 6ft. A couple of minutes later, I noticed I had some pain in the arch of my left foot. This pain was bad enough that it caused me to go sit down, take off my Shoe and look at my foot. And I could feel that there was like a little knot or something in that area where the pain was. And uncharacteristically for me, I decided to bag it for the evening. The pain persisted today. I have some discoloration there. The size of it is probably about the size of a quarter. And my wife, who's an rn, said, oh, you have a hematoma. If there was anything that I could do that you know of, and I know you're not an md, but anything I could do to facilitate or accelerate the healing of that tissue. I've been icing and doing that four times a day. I also have at home a small handheld ultrasound unit, an E stim unit. What little research I've done on this today seemed to lead me to believe that both of those could be used to speed wound healing. Anyway, if there's any advice you could give me on that, it would be greatly appreciated. And I love the show. Longtime listener. Appreciate it. Keep up the good work. Thanks. Bye.

That sounds painful. Ice, ultrasound, estim, all that stuff. It might help bruising a little bit in terms of increasing vascular flow, but bruising is when you have damage to all these little capillaries in the tissues under your skin. And things like ultrasound and electrostimulation, those are kind of more designed to increase blood flow on a deeper muscle tissue level for something like a sprain or a strain or a skeletal muscle tissue injury for bruises. Typically coming after things from a topical approach is a little bit more efficacious. So, for example, the easiest thing would be like arnica. I always keep arnica underneath the bathroom counter. And, you know, if I bruise myself, that's the first thing that's going on there. You can find arnica extract in a ton of stuff. Traumeel, for example, is one of the most popular things I can think of that has arnica extract in it. Or you can just like literally get like a, you know, like a, like an arnica tincture at the health food store and use something like that. So arnica is a really, really great way. It's been used for a long time as a remedy for bruises just because it has really good pain relieving and topical anti inflammatory properties. The other thing that works really, really well would be like a poultice. I don't know if. Have you ever made a poultice before, Brock?

No. I'm dying to know what that is.

Yeah, basically you get an old T shirt. It works really well. Like cotton works really, really well. For a poultice. And then you, you get something that has really good anti inflammatory properties based off of herbal medicine. Top two things would be one that's a little bit harder to find called comfrey. It's spelled C O M F R E Y. You can find it at some grocery stores, you can grow it pretty easily. But like comfrey, which basically almost looks like, looks like a larger version of the. A spinach or an arugula or cabbage. Cabbage is also really good and obviously easier to find. Both of those in a poultice have good anti inflammatory bruise healing effects. So what you do is you chop up a bunch of it and you just put it in a blender like a Vitamix or whatever and you blend it with water. So you want to get it to the texture where it's kind of like a thick soup. So not like super watery but like a, like a thick soup. You pour that into a bowl and then just using your hands add flour until it gets kind of, kind of like a doughy type of mixture. Like again not super thick but more like, more like almost like a waffle mix type of texture.

Like a pudding?

Yeah, kind of like that. So you've basically got like this green pudding. Then what you do is you spread your T shirt or whatever else you're going to use as a poultice out on the counter and you take this stuff that you've got in the bowl and you just spoon it or handful it onto the cotton and then you wrap that up. So you've got basically like into a rectangle essentially. And then what you do is you can put that into a ziploc bag and throw it in the freezer and you've got this cold poultice and you can also heat it up, you can use it at room temperature, whatever, but you just wrap that around an area that's got a bruise. And poultices are really, really good at healing bruises. You can leave them on there overnight or during the day. Super, super good, like traditional kind of like alternative medicine technique for bruises. And super easy to do. Like cabbage is easy to get your hands on. Throw it in the blender with some water, throw some flour in there, stir it up in a bowl, put it on a T shirt, wrap it up in the T shirt in like a rectangular shape. Freeze the T shirt. Once it's frozen, throw that on the bruise, Bada boom, bada bing, you're good to go.

So eventually does it start to melt and sort of seep through the cotton? Is that the Goal, you get a.

Little bit of that. I mean, it's still. Even when it's cold, you're gonna get. Get some of those healing properties as well. You can put a poultice like in the microwave or heat it up also and speed up the transfer of the healing. Basically, they're like bioflavonoids and stuff that are passing through your skin and helping to heal up the capillaries. But yeah, that's how you use that stuff.

Cool, cool. And, Jerry, can I come over and borrow your ultrasound machine someday?

Yeah, yeah. I wish I had one of those things just hanging around. You know the other thing, though, that you can get, because ultrasound machines are tough to get your hands on, just because I think they're considered like a grade 2 medical device or whatever. They're really easy to give yourself. Deep burns with would be like an infrared. You can get cold lasers. You can find those on Amazon and they have a similar effect as an ultrasound. Not quite as potent. Potent, but also not quite as dangerous. Unless you're, you know, you shine them at your eyes or something like that.

But you can't take a peek in at your unborn baby with a laser.

That's true. And I do have unborn babies hanging around a lot, so. Yeah, that's a good point.

Okay, let's move on to our next question that comes from Tommy. Tommy says, my wife is a runner and suffers from ulcerative colitis. She is really. She has a very clean diet, no grains, no dairy or legumes. Her recent flare up sent her to the doctor and they put her on prednisone. 30 milligrams two weeks, 20 milligrams two weeks. 10 milligrams two weeks. And within 24 hours of her first dose, her symptoms were much improved. What side effects can she expect and will it affect her running? Is it possible to offset the prednisone side effects with diet and supplementation? And what can she expect as the dosage increases or decreases?

Sorry.

Yeah. So basically with the colitis, the ulcerative colitis, that's basically like an inflammation in your bowels. I mean, sometimes it's because of really, really long term irritable bowel syndrome. It's very similar to Crohn's disease, which is another version of inflammatory bowel disease. And because prednisone can act as a potent anti inflammatory and little bit of an immunosuppressant, it's pretty common for ulcerative colitis to use something like a prednisone treatment. And it is effective at shutting it down. Prednisone has side effects, though. It's basically, it's called the glucocorticoid drug. And one of the reasons for that is because it essentially like mimics cortisol, which is, which basically has really good anti inflammatory effects. The same reason you would get like a cortisone injection into an inflamed, you know, say like a knee, that's that you're having a really hard time healing up and, and it kind of puts anti inflammatory effect into hyperdrive. But the problem is that you produce cortisol naturally. And when you're using a glucocorticoid medication, that begins to inhibit the ability of your body to make its own cortisols, like your adrenal glands. Basically, a big, big part of the way that your body works, like on a circadian rhythm basis and an awareness basis and an energy basis, is you churn out strategically timed levels of cortisol throughout the day. And as long as that's at a physiologically normal level, cortisol is not a problem. Although low cortisol can be a big issue, and I'll talk about why in a second. But basically, glucocorticoids inhibit a lot of the stimulating compounds that are released from your hypothalamus, specifically something called corticotropin releasing hormone. They can also decrease the production of what are called corticotrophs in your anterior pituitary gland. And all of this can affect the amount of cortisol that you're able to produce. And you may have heard before of like Addison's disease, which is like adrenal exhaustion or adrenal insufficiency. And basically that's when you have really, really low cortisol levels because you've essentially like either shut down your ability to produce cortisol levels through the use of something like prednisone, which takes over, or you've done something like chronic hard training or chronic hard stress on your body for so long that your adrenal glands just, they're exhausted. You just don't churn out cortisol anymore. And so you've got low cortisol. But in either case, once you've got low cortisol, what happens is you get low blood pressure. Okay? So like, high cortisol is one of the reasons that people can't lose weight, because basically what happens is you get sodium retention and fluid retention when you're under acute levels of stress. But eventually long term that goes away and you get low blood pressure and kind of a loss of fluid. And that's what happens with low cortisol levels when you're just completely putzed out. You can basically get a lot of long term medical conditions setting in with chronic low cortisol levels. But the main thing is muscle weakness, weight loss, nausea, headaches, lightheadedness, fatigue. Like you think of something like chronic fatigue syndrome, and that's really what you're going to experience with something like adrenal insufficiency. And you start to, you take prednisone and you quit it cold turkey. And this is what happens this low, low cortisol. So essentially, like we've talked before about what to do when your cortisol levels are too high because you're over training. And that's kind of the acute response. But chronic long term overtraining, you get this drop in cortisol. Same thing happens when you're taking something like prednisone and then you've got kind of the opposite effect and all of a sudden you're dealing with low cortisol. So one of the things that you can look into is basically in addition to coming off the prednisone really, really gradually, which is going to help a lot with these side effects. I'm not a doctor, please don't consider this medical advice. This is just what I would do if I were on something like prednisone is when you're coming off it and you're kind of starting to microdose prednisone so that you get a gradual decrease of those effects is think about ways that you can naturally increase your body's production of cortisol. Well, one of the biggest things, the biggest times of day when your body releases this huge surge of cortisol to increase your awareness is when you wake up in the morning. And not only is your body's internal clock kind of hardwired to produce more cortisol at that point, but your external environmental cues, like light hitting your eyes, is also a direct stimulator of increasing cortisol. So try and get sunlight exposure. And if you're in a northern climate where there's not a lot of sunshine right now, you may even want to consider using one of these kind of like wake you up lights that kind of simulate sunlight and get exposed to that, like chronic frequent light exposure, especially early in the day, as much sunlight as you can get, a vitamin D. And like really getting a lot of vitamin D into your system is going to amplify that response even more. So like a high dose vitamin D3 combined with like a morning sun exposure, morning light exposure, that's something that I would really focus on doing. As you're coming off the prednisone to increase your cortisol levels. There are certain herbs that are traditionally kind of known to increase cortisol output a little bit. I found one study that was done last year in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism that actually found elevated levels of cortisol produced by the use of using licorice, because licorice has this glyceritinic acid in it and that can increase your cortisol levels. So I wouldn't go out and eat a bunch of licorice, especially if you've got ulcerative colitis.

And you're not talking about Twizzlers here.

No, just like a licorice extract. Yeah. The nice thing is that licorice also can help increase the mucosin production in your stomach. I always recommend folks take a licorice extract if they're forced to use something like an ibuprofen or a non steroidal anti inflammatory drug because it can decrease the amount of damage something like that can do to your stomach. But it also helps you churn out cortisol. Specifically, the glyceritinic acid in licorice blocks an enzyme that converts cortisol to its less active form. So using a licorice extract, in this case, the people in the study were taking 500 milligrams per day of licorice extract, which you'd have to eat a lot of licorice to get. So I would use the pill form ginseng. Ginseng can act on the adrenal glands and your stress pathways, particularly your pituitary gland. And there are some studies in animals that have shown that it can increase cortisol production in a naturally good way. So ginseng can also increase the brain's sensitivity to cortisol. So that may modulate some of like the fatigue depressive type of effects you get with something like prednisone withdrawal. So using something like ginseng may also help ashwagandha. I talked about Chinese herbal medicine a little bit earlier and using adaptogenic Chinese herbs, well, ashwagandha as well as rhodiola, both traditional Chinese adaptogenic herbs, are very, very good at stabilizing your adrenals. And the weird thing is that they appear both to be capable of either raising or lowering your cortisol levels, depending on which you need. So essentially we're talking about them improving the sensitivity of your adrenal glands. So a good Chinese adaptogenic herb complex could be really, really useful as well in this case. Those are the main things that I'd recommend in terms of the drop in cortisone and the prednisone withdrawal. But I did want to make sure and mention that when it comes to something like ulcerative colitis, everything mentioned so far is basically like a band aid over the initial problem of inflammatory bowel disease or ulce ulcers or ulcerative colitis or anything else like that. So I'd certainly recommend dietary modifications and supplements to heal your gut. And maybe you've looked into this before. But for example, I've talked about the GAPS diet before, which is a specific type of diet. And there is a book called the GAPS Diet Book. I will put a link to it in the show notes for you. But basically the GAPS diet eliminates certain carbohydrates from the diet and introduces a lot of really good gut healing foods into the diet. So you do a lot of kefir and fermented vegetables to help restore proper stomach acid production. You do a lot of animal fats and things like ghee and coconut oil and butter, and you use those to help kind of heal the gut. You do a lot of probiotics to help to restore healthy gut flora balance. There's a whole list of recommended foods that you kind of include as part of your diet, while at the same time you eliminate a lot of the fructose containing foods, cheeses, grains, chocolates, yogurt, stuff like that, specific foods that may be digestive irritants. And then you combine that with not only probiotics, but other things that are known to help heal the gut and shut down inflammation, like essential fatty acids in fish oil, like vitamin A, like digestive enzymes, especially like a good pancreatic enzyme complex. And then just like general detoxification, kind of keeping your house chemical free and making sure you stay away from like new carpet and furniture and paint and stuff like that. And all of this has been shown to help quite a bit with stuff like ulcerative colitis, the GAPS diet. So I'd look into the GAPS diet. The other thing that I'd look into in terms of something that may actually help is S methylmethionine and that's got good research behind it for helping to heal patients who have gastrointestinal ulceration. And I talked about it already, I'll mention it again. But cabbage, cabbage juice is actually A really, really high source of this methionine extract. So it was actually discovered a long time ago, like back in the 40s. They found that it significantly increased the rate of healing in people who had ulcers. Cabbage juice. So something to look into as well. So. So, yeah, just remember, you never want to ignore the actual underlying cause of something like ulcerative colitis in a case like this. Last thing I want to mention, just because I've noticed it as kind of an up and coming alternative treatment for inflammatory bowel disease. And we talked about poop already on the show, so we might as well dig ourselves into this hole even deeper. But. But fecal transplants, Fecal enemas. Getting actual. Basically the bacteria removed from your colon and kind of pushing the reboot button by introducing new bacterial flora into your colon through an actual fecal transplant has been shown to be quite helpful when it comes to this irritable bowel or inflammatory bowel. So a poop transplant, as a matter of fact, may be something that can be efficacious for something like this.

Very cool. Well, Tommy, I hope that helps.

I've got lots of poop hanging around now with this squatty potty. Just give me a call and I'll hook you up.

Don't get into that business that's selling poop out of the back of your van in the dark alleys any times are hard. Things are tough at the Greenfield residents. All right, next question comes from Adam. And actually, this is our third question that begins with my wife. Everybody's got questions about their wife today. So Adam says, my wife suffers from migraines at least once every two months, usually once a month to the point where she's bedridden normally for a few hours until she throws up. Then the pain subsides within an hour. The doctors reckon it could be her pill, but I wanted your take on it. She eats the standard typical high co mode, pro, low fat. I hope you know what those abbreviations are.

High, high carbohydrate, moderate protein, low fat. Aha.

Nice. She enjoys the odd egg, but that's her approach to diet. Has no known illnesses, is a fitness instructor and healthy. Have you heard of this before? Is there any. Are there any known issues or substances or food groups that could induce this reaction?

Well, since the pill was mentioned, I mean, we can start there. There's certainly some.

Are you assuming that's the. That's birth control pill?

Yeah. I mean, I assume when I hear the pill mentioned in that context, I always assume it's just birth control pill. Basically, a lot of women get migraines more often around their menstrual periods. And my wife has had issues with this as well. And from what I've been able to find, part of this could be estrogen withdrawal. As far as that being a factor in migraines, I did find a study where researchers gave estrogen injections to postmenopausal women who are prone to getting migraines. And none of the women who were given the injections experienced a headache during that treatment. But as soon as estrogen levels dropped, the migraine headaches kind of came back. So the reason for that could be that estrogen actually influences pain pathways and influences the amount of neurochemicals that you produce, like serotonin and norepinephrine and opiates and things that traditionally play a role in pain sensitivity. And basically, estrogen withdrawal may affect the production of these type of neurochemicals. Estrogen may also have an effect on blood vessels. It can stimulate the release of nitric oxide that expands blood vessel walls. And when estrogen declines, the blood vessels can contract and expand, and that can lead to, like, this throbbing sensation that a lot of migraine sufferers describe that they actually feel. I've personally never had a migraine in my life, so I'm just going off of how my wife has described that it feels when she gets a migraine. Estrogen withdrawal could actually make the nerves in your face or your head to be hypersensitive as well. The way that this can happen is that estrogen might play a role in suppressing pain sensation in the trigeminal ner, which is a sensory nerve that supplies the face. And when estrogen levels fall, the neuronal activity in this trigeminal nerve may go up. So sensitivity to pain could increase, especially in, like, the head and neck area. And when you combine that with, like, expansion and contraction of blood vessels in the scalp, that can cause potentially, like, some kind of a migraine attack. So considering that the pill can definitely influence estrogen and may actually cause this type of estrogen withdrawal, it's certainly plausible that it could be an issue. But the thing is, and I've thought about this with my wife before, because she's had migraines on and off, and we've kind of looked at different things, food triggers, stuff like that. It seems to be that a big, big part of this is that the body shouldn't be hypersensitive to something like a fluctuation in estrogen unless there's some type of an overreactive response occurring within the actual autonomic nervous system. So basically it's a hyperreactive response response against the chemical change that's occurring within the body. And what we're doing now with my wife is kind of testing her PH to see how her PH changes throughout the month, throughout her period, as well as in response to the foods that she's eating. And rather than go into a very long explanation of why we're starting to test pH, I actually, as a matter of fact, about two hours from now, I'm going to be interviewing a gentleman who specializes in kind of how PH affects your autonomic nervous system function. And basically we're kind of using this as detective work to figure out whether an alkaline or an acid based diet or stress that influences the alkaline or acid based status of the body can affect migraines. But what it comes down to is that, yeah, certainly the pill can be at play here and it may amplify the estrogen withdrawal effects. So that's one thing to think about. But there are other potentials for a migraine trigger. For example, there is an amino acid called tyrosine, and you're going to find a derivative of tyrosine called tyramines in some foods and some drugs. And people who have migraines may not be able to properly kind of metabolize the tyrosine amino acid. And this could lead to excessive tyramines in their blood and that could cause migraines. So reducing foods that contain tyramines could be helpful in a case like this. And interestingly, foods that are higher in tyramines are fermented foods like sauerkraut and kefir, alcohol of course, as well, cheeses, stuff like that. So, you know, it's kind of a catch 22, because a lot of fermented foods I've just gotten into talking about, they can be really good for you. But if you get migraines, you may want to try eliminating these for a little while and see if your migraines go away. In my wife wife's case, they didn't. And so it wasn't an inability to properly metabolize tyramine in her case. But that's certainly something to think about. If your wife is eating fermented foods. It sounds like if she's eating a traditional high carb, moderate protein, low fat diet, she's probably not doing a lot of fermented foods. But alcohol is usually the biggest one. You know, like if you if you drink a bunch of wine and you know, then at some point over the next few days, you get a migraine. That's certainly a clue. Another thing that can cause, in terms of like a food that could cause a migraine would be arginine or food that contains arginine, because arginine is also kind of in the same way that estrogen acts on your blood vessels. Arginine is a vasodilator. So like I mentioned, migraine might be caused by contraction and expansion of a blood vessel wall in any potent vasodilator could actually cause this to happen. And the biggest arginine containing foods would be something like nuts. And another thing that's real high in arginine is chocolate. So you could try like an elimination diet where you eliminate chocolate and you eliminate nuts and also see what happens if you keep getting migraines in most cases, because a lot of this stuff can interplay with a woman's period. When I say eliminate certain foods, probably closer to 30 days is a good idea so that you're kind of covering the length of time of the menstrual cycle. But if you're going to eliminate foods, those are the ones that I would look into eliminating, like, fermented foods. Do a one month where you're eliminating fermented foods and then try another month where you're eliminating nuts and chicken chocolate, and then try another month where you're going off the pill. And that might help you over three months identify what's causing the migraines.

So that sounds like really just choosing the lesser of two evils. I mean, going without chocolate and nuts and alcohol versus getting migraine headaches. I don't envy you.

It's a tough choice. It's a tough choice. Booze and chocolate versus your head hurting every once in a while.

So, yeah, good luck with that, Adam. And I guess your wife. Okay, this next question comes from Dylan. And Dylan wrote this question in a very particular style. He seems to have a really a good way with words. But being an uptight white guy from Canada, I'm not going to do it justice. But I'll do my best. I know some guys.

Sorry, I just said oh, boy.

I know some guys at my gym are talking this 7 keto DHEA stuff up. Is it a scam? My number one goal is fat loss. If it can indeed increase my thyroid T3. I'll buy the mess out of it.

Oh, yeah.

Is that a. Does that work? I'll buy the mess out of it. Is that better?

You know, that's not actually a term that I've ever heard before, but I'm going to add it to my vernacular right now.

Excellent.

So I'm going to answer the mess out of this question. DHEA has been around since, like the late 1980s when there was a study that came out and it was basically just done on, like five guys that showed a huge decrease in body fat with DHEA supplementation. It wasn't 7 keto DHEA, which is actually a substance that that's produced during the metabolism of dhea. But I mean, essentially we're talking about kind of the same idea. Since that time, there have been other studies that have been done, usually with very, very small number of individuals that have found body fat mass reduction with DHEA supplementation in people who are already fit and lean. Okay. It doesn't appear to work in overweight subjects or people who have large amount of fat deposits. The main reason for this is that when you have a lot of adipose tissue, it basically affects the way that you metabolize androgens. And that's what DHEA is. It's basically a steroid hormone. And we naturally produce it it by our adrenal glands and our gonads and our brain, and it's a very abundant circulating steroid. We've already got a bunch of it churning around. But supplementation appears to potentially decrease body fat in already healthy men specifically. So the problem is that DHEA can really easily get converted into estrogens. And so this is certainly a concern not only when it comes to, like, you know, like, if a woman were to try to supplement with DHEA in terms of potentially increasing risk of breast cancer, but in guys, things like man boobs and a lot of other things that we worry about when it comes to, to supplementation with steroid hormones or hormonal precursors. Another thing to think about is that it is prohibited by the World Anti Doping Agency, which means that if you're one of the triathletes or runners or somebody who's competing and listening into this show, in a sport where you could get a P test after you cross the finish line, you're going to want to stay away from this stuff anyways. 7keto DHEA has very little research behind it compared to DHEA, it may not be converted into steroid hormones. Possibly that's why it's starting to become a more popular supplement, because it possibly might not affect the body's hormone levels in the same way that just like taking straight up date DHEA would. But there's very, very little research about 7 keto DHEA and its impact on human health. And at this point, I am not recommending it for those reasons and for anybody who is not competing or doesn't have a therapeutic use exemption for using something like hormones. If you're going to use something like DHEA supplementation, I would highly recommend that you do it under the care of a physician who is well versed in natural hormone replacement therapy so that you can do frequent testing, monitor your levels and ensure that you're not getting a lot of like, estrogen conversion and stuff like that.

So you'd say don't buy the mess out of it then?

I would not buy the mess out of DHEA or 7 keto DHEA. No.

Fair enough. All right, our last question comes from Phil. Phil says I am way into minimalist running shoes and use them all the time. I'm at the gym for weight training, treadmill, elliptical rowing. I use the Merrell Trail Glove, which looks like a normal shoe. It has no separate toe compartments. During the week, I try to mix up the cardio day to day. There are spinning bikes at the gym with toe clips and I'd like to add them, like to add them to my cardio repertoire. Given my time constraints, I cannot switch to my stiff cycling shoes. So my question is, what are your thoughts on cycling 100 RPM hard intervals in minimalist running shoes? I've tried the shoes without any problems, but I wonder if you knew anything showing that this to be contraindicated.

Nah, there's, I mean, there's not really any studies that look at use of minimalist shoes if you're cycling for performance. The reason that good cycling shoes have a carbon sole is because you get a lot better power transfer. And that's just simple physics. You basically get anytime you have a flexible surface, it's going to distribute the load a little less efficiently than something like a real hard carbon cycling sole. So I mean, if you're doing this for competition. Yeah. I mean, you're going to get better effects from, from throwing on some good cycling shoes and riding a bike. That way, if you're at the gym, throwing down some intervals or doing some calorie burning and hopping onto a bike with your Merrells or your Vibram trail running shoes on, not a big deal at all. You may get a little bit more kind of plantar flexion like calf utilization possible that your feet may get kind of sore. I've personally ridden. Well, specifically I did a half ironman training session a few weeks ago, I was at a hotel. All I had was a bike and my Vibrams and I just rode for two hours on a bike in my Vibrams doing intervals and stuff and it works just fine. So not a big deal at all. Unless you're like a competitive cyclist wanting really good power transfer.

Yeah, I've ridden my bike, I commute to work every day and I wear my Vibrams. And the only thing I've noticed is sometimes the pads of my feet will get a little bit sore if I'm riding a long time in my, in my, like on regular pedals. But that's mostly because it's just such a soft sole and my, my pedals are actually quite, quite pointy.

Yeah. You know, this reminds me, my wife did that same sprint triathlon that I did and she got to like the, she got like a mile in and her shoes broke. She did like the, the entire run in her sock.

Oh, wow.

I thought was pretty badass, but yeah, her feet were a little sore, but it wasn't too bad because she's been doing a bunch of her running in Vibrams and she felt like that really helped prepare her for the shoe breaking event.

Awesome. Well, basically that finishes up with our questions for this week.

Awesome. Well, yeah, if you want to access any of the recommendations I've made during this episode, the GAPS diet book, some of those supplements that I recommended to Megan about kind of post Ironman sorting the body out, that type of stuff, go to the show notes for this episode. Episode number 191. See, I actually knew the number.

You knew which number.

Yeah, remembered over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and check that out while you're there. If you want to leave a small donation, we always appreciate that immensely. It really helps the show out. And of course, you can also leave a ranking over in itunes. So until this Friday when I'm either going to be releasing that interview about the ph and alkalinity of the body, or I'm going to be releasing an interview on a different surprise topic. Stay tuned to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and we'll be in touch. Get the inside edge from Ben Greenfield Fitness delivered straight to your phone.

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