Episode #192: What Happens When You Exercise Too Much

In this podcast, what happens when you exercise too much? Also, the ketogenic diet versus the metabolic typing diet. Are E cigarettes a healthy alternative? Which is better, ground turkey or beef? What is mugicha? Should you take a hot or cold bath? Post exercise? A list of healthy oils. Bonking hours after a workout. Does protein influence fat loss? And do beets cause cancer?

Welcome to the Ben Green Greenfield Fitness.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. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. I'm Brock and as always, Ben Greenfield is in the house. As they say.

Howdy ho. I'm actually a little bit nervous. I'm going to go to the dentist tomorrow.

What? You haven't been to the dentist in like 35 years?

Almost well over a decade since I've been to the dentist, but I decided that I want to go to the dentist. I had a tooth that kind of got chipped off when I was playing sports when I was a kid and it's getting a little bit discolored. And so I'm going to go see a holistic dentist or what might also be called an alternative dentist or biologic dentist or whatever you want to call it.

That's awesome. I had no idea that existed.

Oh yeah, yeah, it's big. I think Hal Huggins, I believe is the name of the fellow who's kind of headed up that movement. But yeah, it's a huge part of the alternative health movement. I mean, it's kind of like a non surgical approach to gum disease. Really, really big on reducing bacteria in the mouth, really big on like replacing mercury or other kind of potentially toxic materials and dental fillings with alternatives and really basically like a holistic approach to gum disease and dental fixes. And I have no clue if there is a holistic option to make my tooth look better that wouldn't put a lot of toxins into my mouth. But that's what I'm going to this guy to find out.

It's worth a try.

That's right. So yeah, we'll be headed to the dentist and that's what's big on, on the, on the Ben Greenfield calendar this week.

That's pretty big. Well, let's, let's jump right into the news flashes. Then news flashes. Okay. Twitter.com BenGreenfield and of course, Google is. Lighten up the world with all kinds of new studies and interesting tidbits. What do you want to bring to the people's ATT today.

Over at Google? The Ben Greenfield Fitness Google page, which is always available right there on the right sidebar over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com yeah, I wish the.

URL wasn't so ridiculously long, otherwise we could tell you. But Google really hasn't got that down yet.

They haven't figured out it's longer than PI. It's a big long number. So yeah, it's weird because like Facebook, our Facebook page is facebook.com bgfitness and then the Google page is like google.com1914.

Don'T punch that in though, because he's just making that up.

I am. It's probably someone's Social Security number. An article in the New York Times came out about whether or not exercise makes you overeat. And I thought it was really interesting because they took these folks and they had them vigorously one group vigorously rode a stationary bike and the other group just kind of sat down. And this was for a full hour. And in the people who had been sitting for an hour, when they were exposed to some high fat sugary items like glistening cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes and cookies, the food reward system in their brain just lit up like, you know, like Christmas. And that didn't really happen to anywhere near as great an extent in the folks who had been writing for an hour. And so it turns out that exercise may have an appetite suppressing effect, but these effects have not really been noticed in shorter exercise sessions. And so the fact that you may actually need to be working out for kind of a long period of time to suppress the appetite is something to note, especially when it goes hand in hand with another study that was it was in the Journal of Sports Medicine this month in April 2012. And it was about exercise and appetite and weight management and kind of understanding the compensatory response to exercise. And there certainly is a propensity for folks who exercise to compensate by increasing their energy intake later on in the day by eating more. And so putting these two resources together, basically what it comes down to is that if you're exercising for an hour or more at a fairly intense pace, it's likely that it's going to have an appetite suppressive effect. And it could help you out with something like weight loss if you're well Aware that you need to be careful about competition, compensating for calories later on in the day and not overeating later on because you exercised. And then if you're exercising for less than an hour, which I know is a real life situation for most folks, just realize that that's not going to have this magical appetite suppressing effect that a lot of folks say it's going to have. But at the same time, you're probably going to be less likely to engage in compensatory eating later on when you put all of the studies together. For the most part, though, exercise is not a futile method for controlling weight and certainly can improve body composition. And that does actually fly in the face of some talk that's out there that says that you don't have to exercise at all to lose weight and that exercise is not necessary. I would say that we're pretty much programmed for some form of physical activity, whether it be exercise or just moving a lot. And that's always a good idea. Also on the Google page looked at a study that investigated basically people who were using a phone app called Eatery. And these folks were from over 50 countries. And they looked at them over five months and found that based on the data they collected from this app, that breakfast eaters tended to eat significantly healthier throughout the day when they'd had breakfast, and that the healthiness of that food or their propensity to avoid junk food or processed high sugar foods was lower. And they also found that when those people were at home eating, they were likely to, well, specifically about 12.7% likelier to eat healthier. So some interesting effects from just eating breakfast and eating at home and kind of prioritizing the healthy breakfast. And one thing that I wanted to note about that was that a big, big part of breakfast that I think a lot of people may not be aware of is that when you eat breakfast, it is part of your circadian rhythm. We're kind of wired up to eat in the morning and that stimulates gastric acid secretion the rest of the day. And so what it can do is it can improve your digestive capabilities and improve the health of your gut throughout the rest of the day. If you can grab breakfast at some point in the morning. One of the things that can help out with this is to not get up and do a really, really hard workout and then wait a long time and eat breakfast. And I think that some people kind of misunderstand when I've talked about intermittent fasting or working out in the morning and done something like that. The problem with that is that when you wake up in the morning and light hits your eyes, cortisol gets released by your body. And that's kind of what wakes you up and makes you active. Well, you go out and exercise on top of that, that's stimulating even more cortisol production. You skip breakfast, you're getting even more cortisol production. Essentially, you're starting your day off by stressing your body out and throwing it off its circadian rhythm. So my recommendation for breakfast is that if you are already at your goal body weight, don't stress yourself out by using a lot of, you know, fasting and hard workouts and stuff in the morning, get up, have breakfast, include some protein with it, preferably. And that's a great way to start the day if you're trying to lose weight, tap into some of your body storage fat, that type of thing. It's okay to do some intermittent fasting to kind of wake up in the morning and do some exercise before you have breakfast. But when I say exercise, I mean like a backyard yoga session or walk with the dog. Not anything really, really stressful. So just a few thoughts about starting your day there.

And when you're talking about intermittent fasting, you're actually talking like 12 to 15 hours of not eating. Not sort of have a snack at 9pm and maybe eat breakfast at 8am like that's not considered a fast at all, even if you do throw in a workout before that.

If you want to use fasting to lose weight and to burn fat, stack more of the fast in the evening than you do in the morning. Meaning that, like, have dinner, you know, over by seven and just don't eat after that. And then you can get up in the morning and, you know, go for a walk with the dog, come back and have breakfast, you know, at, you know, eight or nine or whatever. So, you know, don't eat a bunch at 9pm, get up, destroy your body with an exercise session, wait three hours to eat and then have breakfast. So that's kind of the opposite scenario. And then the last thing I wanted to mention just real quick was I noticed a study that came out that looked at something we've talked about on the show before. Kind of fun, the use of a mouthpiece when you're out there exercising and doing hard stuff. That action of chomping down can actually improve your ability to handle stress. And it turns out in this study that recently came out in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, it improves your neuromuscular force and power production. If you have one of these, one of these mouthpieces in like a mouth guard in when you are doing this type of high power, high force production type of work. So I'll put a link in the show notes to the mouthpiece I've recommended before on the show. It's one that I use. You fortunately don't have to get custom fitted for it at your dentist anymore. So it turned from a $500 expense into like a, I think it's like a 40 $50 mouthpiece.

Oh nice.

But yeah, you can, you can put it in during your weight training sessions and it does help. I mean if you've got some, some heavy squats, deadlifts, cleans, tough power strength gym session planned, you know, throw on your, throw on your tunes, put in your mouthpiece and go to work.

I like putting a leather belt between my teeth. That just makes me feel more manly.

But you're also wearing your viking hat at the gym too.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Horns, right.

So I keep my long flowing locks out of my eyes.

It's good luck.

Special announcements.

Okay, lots of stuff going on@BenGreenfieldFitness.com as usual. I have to ask you about one thing. You did that grizzly triathlon on the weekend and I saw the videos that you posted on your website with Dave Erickson and at the end of one you were eating a banana with butter on it.

That's, that's not like a special magical post race recovery food. That's like because our, our heat, I raced in the men's pro heat and we left at like, our race started at like 3 o' clock in the afternoon and by that time everything that was left at the post race food table was gone except bananas and butter because I had some bagels there earlier in the day. So butter banana.

That's terrible. I thought you were doing it. Just I actually had no idea why you're doing it. That's why I had to ask that.

That literally was all that was left.

Fair enough then.

So yeah, as far as special announcements go, article over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com a couple days ago about everything you need to know about why you get cellulite and how to get rid of cellulite. So go check that article out if you've got cottage cheese issues on your thighs or anywhere else.

And warning to guys out there, do not send that link to your girlfriends or to your mom. They will take offense.

Just reference some other article on the website and Keep your fingers crossed that they somehow discover that one while they're there. And then, as far as a few other announcements, a new kind of biofeedback device that I've been messing around with for training, I'll put a link to it in the show notes, but it's called the Pair Biofeedback Device. And what it does is you can take your MP3 player, let's say you've got an ipod shuffle, you can plug it into this Pair device and it'll play your music or it'll play your podcasts, but at the same time, the pair will take feedback from a heart rate monitor or from a foot pod or anything like that. And it will tell you your heart rate, like, at specific intervals during the workout. And they'll just kind of get overlaid, you know. So if you're listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast, at some point, you know, five minutes, 10 minutes, depending on the workout you're doing, it'll come in and say, you know, whatever, you're in zone two. Let's go ahead and work a little harder, get you up into your target zone. Or it'll tell you you're currently striking at 90 be per minute while you're out running, that type of thing. But the really cool thing about this is that when you get the pair, it comes with a bunch of workouts that it will literally walk you through. And there's running workouts, biking workouts, weight training workouts, et cetera. So what you can do is you download a workout onto this thing and it'll walk you through the workout, but you can still be listening to your podcast and your other music as it's walking you through the workout, because all it's doing is that specific intervals during the workouts telling you, okay, here's the part where you go hard, here's your target heart rate zone. And then while you're doing that interval, it'll interrupt every once in a while to let you know if you're in the right zone or not. And for somebody like me who likes to just tune out or kind of zone out and just have something in my ears while I'm working out and not be looking too much at my watch or at some kind of a dashboard panel on a treadmill or something like that, kind of a cool way to just have it all coming through your ears and, you know, it allows you to do things like, you know, pay attention to the road if you're on a bike, or, you know, not constantly be, you know, looking at A watch or something like that while you're, while you're, for example, weight training. So how is that spelled?

Is that P A I R or.

P A R E E A R, like the fruit.

Okay.

Yeah. Pair biofeedback.

And so it obviously comes with like a heart rate monitor, foot pod, cadencer.

Yeah, constant. It comes with all the stuff that you need. So, yeah, it's pretty cool. I dig it. So check that out. And it's small, too, which is nice. It's not much bigger than a little ipod shuffle. A few other special announcements for this week would be the superhuman coach@superhumancoach.com My mentorship program for fitness coaches, triathlon coaches, trainers, people of that nature. You can check that out. You can watch a video. And the first workshop that we did over there, and that is still open for new members to come in. So over at superhumancoach.com, you can get into that. And we'll be having our first workshop, which is going to be devoted to kind of a real, real big overview of optimizing human performance. Kind of hacking the body for optimizing performance from like a supplement standpoint is taking place here in about two weeks. So check that out if you're a fitness coach or a trainer. And then I'll also be presenting a lot of these concepts over at my upcoming workshop in Dubai on May 11 and May 12. So if you're over in the Middle east, near Dubai, then follow the link in the show notes that we'll put in there to check that out. And yeah, I think those are most of the announcements. Did I miss anything, Brock?

I don't think so. Did you want to talk at all about the podcast that came out on Friday?

Oh, yeah, Body Language, if you're interested in body language. Really cool guy, Kirk Duncan, I interviewed him last Friday. If you didn't get a chance to check out that podcast and you like Body Language, check that out along with the infographic that I put. But along with that podcast over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com about little tips and tricks for altering your body language to kind of make you look more attractive or more powerful. It's cool stuff. This Friday, I will be releasing also a special episode interview. And again, I'm going to surprise folks because I've got about six interviews in queue right now and they're all really good with all on a variety of topics from how you can use sound to hack your ability to perform better, to how to use a combination of compression and ice during an exercise. Session to maximize lactic acid production and get you fit a lot more quickly. Tons of interviews I've got, so I'm going to be putting out something good this Friday, so stay tuned.

So you've got to tune in to find out.

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Listener Q A. Okay, as usual, awesome questions, everybody. Keep them coming. These are very interesting topics that everybody's asking about. And once again, if you have a question for the podcast, you can just go to the very bottom of any of the pages on the website. There's a little form to fill out. You can also call 1-877-209-9439 or Skype to Pacific Fit. And if you do Skype in, you'll sound like this guy.

Hi Ben, I have a question regarding the information that Peter Adia brought to the podcast about two weeks ago and how it relates to the metabolic testing that you recommend from Bioetics. I was wondering, because Dr. Addia said that ketosis is either on or off, whether someone like me personally, who is a protein type with kind of a 40% protein, 40% fat, 20% carbohydrate ratio that's recommended for me, can benefit from ketosis or can optimize, operate optimally with ketosis and lower my protein content, or whether I should kind of avoid ketosis because it's not conducive to my metabolic type. Thanks, man. Bye.

Okay, so Brandon listened to the podcast was that two Fridays ago, and I guess he's got some questions about it.

Okay, yeah. So of course go back and listen to that podcast with Peter Attia if you want to know exactly what a ketogenic diet is. We've talked about it a few times on the show before. And you know, back in podcast number 187, which I'll link to, I talked a little bit about metabolic typing and how I've become a little bit disenchanted with it. And the main reason is that the more and more research that I did looking into metabolic typing, the more I found that it's got a real background in kind of a combination of quackery and a lot of really pretty subjective observations in terms of the way that certain people's bodies respond to higher protein versus higher carb or the way that certain people's bodies are fast oxidizers versus slow oxidizers. And so the whole idea behind the metabolic typing is that you've got your slow oxidizer. And the slow oxidizer tends to be described as someone who has kind of a low appetite, who has really low but kind of steady energy levels, who is typically recommended to eat like a low fat, what would be called low pure purine amino acid containing foods like certain fish and chicken and turkey and eggs and low fat dairy and stuff like that. And they tended to be allowed to eat a little bit more carbohydrate than the other metabolic type, the fast oxidizer. And the fast oxidizer tends to be described as somebody who has a bigger appetite, who craves proteins and fatty foods. And that person is typically recommended to have higher fat, higher protein intake, higher amounts of kind of like what would be called high purine containing foods, fatty red meats and stuff like that. And then you've got your mixed metabolic type, which is kind of a mix of the two. And just like any diet exercise program that is kind of spelled out with really specific recommendations like this, it's, it's easy to quickly become convinced that it's steeped in science. But when you really go and look at metabolic typing, there's not a lot of really great science behind it. It was invented by a dentist back in the 60s. And while it is true that certain foods are certainly going to have a significant effect on an individual, metabolic typing just doesn't have enough research behind it for me to really believe in it as the end all for choosing what diet is going to work for you. In reality, I think that a lot of these metabolic types that seem to be able to be identified by taking a comprehensive metabolic typing questionnaire, a lot of them really seem like issues that arise with people based off of conditions that we tend to see in society. Like when you look at slow oxidizers and the way that they're described, you know, these people that tend to feel better when they eat a higher amount of carbs, for example, or the people that, you know, don't do quite so well when they eat fatty meats and stuff like that, these type of folks tend to kind of fall into the same category as people who would tend to be insulin resistant or leptin resistant or basically like pre diabetic or prone to diabetes type 2. And there may be more of like an underlying, underlying issue behind being a slow Oxidizer that kind of predisposes someone to do well or feel good on certain foods and feel bad on certain foods. That's more related to a disease state or health state more than it is a metabolic type. And the same thing with a fast oxidizer. When you look at the way that a fast oxidizer is described, someone who's really thrown off by carbohydrates, who has a higher appetite, that type of thing, a lot of the same ways that a fast oxidizer is described is the way that you describe someone who has hypothyroidism or a food insensitivity or someone who has kind of an autoimmune reaction to a food. And so the more that I look at metabolic typing, the more I'm convinced that the way that you respond to a food is a lot of times related to an underlying condition in your body that could probably be addressed in terms of anything from leaky gut to insulin resistance, to leptin resistance, to a lot of other kind of biochemical issues. So getting down to answer the actual question here about how a ketogenic diet relates to or works with the metabolic typing diet. And if you've found that, like in Brandon's case, he describes that he's like, he does really well on the higher protein, higher fat type of diet and would be described as a fast oxidizer according to the ketogenic or according to the metabolic typing diet, if he's already found that he does really good on higher protein, higher fat intake, what he may want to do, if he's already following this metabolic typing diet and he wants to kind of see how his body does with the ketogenic diet, just back off the protein a little bit, step up the fat a little bit and see how you look, feel and perform. And really, I would not worry too much that you're going to break some rule and destroy your body by straying from your metabolic typing diet and going into maybe like a much, much lower carbohydrate intake, 40, 50 grams of carbohydrates per day, and kind of seeing how your body does with that. And last thing I should mention on this before I kind of shut up and we move on to the next question, is that I'm not necessarily a proponent of a ketogenic diet per se, and I always approach this on an individualized basis. If I'm working with, say, like an ironman triathlete, I really don't think that that individual should be on a ketogenic diet. Because a ketogenic diet simply doesn't really provide as many carbohydrates as you need to, like, support your immune system and support your incredibly high levels of activity when you're on something like an ironman training program. So, you know, it really depends. If you are someone who's sitting at an office working out, you know, 30 to 60 minutes, you know, a few times a week, you could actually do pretty well on a higher fat intake and burning fatty acids primarily as a fuel. And there's a. There could be a lot of really great health implications from doing something like that, but it really depends on what you're going after and how you're living and what your goals are.

Even Dr. Addia sounds like he's a huge advocate of just trying it out. Like, that's sort of what he's done many times now, is just tested it out, been a. What do you call it, a test subject of one, and just see how it works.

Yeah. And I think I mentioned this. When I am in the off season, I try to go ketogenic. I eat higher fat. I really limit my carb intake. And I'm willing to accept the slight performance deficit that could come along with that just because I'm not racing and doing really, really intense training sessions. And, you know, it allows me to set up my year so that there is a period of the year where I'm really basically a fat burning animal. But during race season, late spring, early summer, kind of rolling right around the time that we are in right now. Yeah, my carb intake certainly goes up. And I mean, like, you know, Brock, I coach you, so you've got access to my private diet and exercise log. And you may have noticed if you look at it, you're seeing more sweet potatoes, yams, chocolate, yogurt, stuff like that, just because I'm exercising more and I'm racing more.

Yeah. And they're strategically put into the day, too. It's not just sort of spread out all over the place. That's part of the key.

Yep, exactly.

All right, so our next audio question comes from Joe.

Hi, Ben and Brock. I have a question for you. For the podcast, it's Joe again. Just want to say, Brock, I give you some love. I feel like you're left out a lot of times only because Ben's kind of a genius, but here we go. I was a smoker for the better part of a decade. I quit about four years ago, cold turkey. I started picking up cycling and running again. And then I'm a pretty Good age grouper right now when it comes to triathlons. However, I do feel the occasional need for some kind of nicotine suppressant, I guess when I get highly stressed, which is very, very rarely, or if I have a really nice buzz on having a couple drinks here and there, which happens, well, quite regularly with all these new E cigarettes coming out. Are any of these options viable when it comes to having one for that quick fix every now and again? Or to prevent myself from cigarette off somebody else at the bar? Other than that, thank you very much. Great podcast. Hope you guys are having a good time and hope to hear from you soon.

Bye, Joe, thank you very much for the love. I appreciate it. And you're right, Ben is kind of a genius. It's hard living in this shadow.

Depends on how many cups of cold pressed coffee I've had before. There you go. Actually did have a nice cup of that. My wife's been making coffee in the evening and putting it in the refrigerator in the French press. So we, we tap that in the morning. And I still stick pretty close to my limiting myself to only 8 to 12 ounces of coffee per day. But that cold pressed coffee on a nice summer morning is pretty good stuff to wake up to. So speaking of chemical addictions, so when we're talking about E cigarettes and whether or not they're actually safe or harmful for you, there is some research on them and the research tends to kind of go back and forth. And of course there are definitely political ramifications and political interests when it comes to the research on this stuff. So the first thing that I should mention about the E cigarettes or kind of explain about the E cigarettes for people who don't really, really understand what happens here is they simulate tobacco smoking by producing this vapor. And the vapor basically produces a lot of the same physical sensations as smoking a cigarette, a lot of similar flavors of inhaled tobacco smoke, but it doesn't actually contain a lot of the potentially carcinogenic compounds that a tobacco containing cigarettes would have. Now the device uses typically some kind of a heat to vaporize a liquid solution. And the liquid solution is it's basically glycerin based or what's called glycol based. And that, you know, it's the same way that if you think about like a humidifier, you know, vaporizing water and you know, you inhaling that similar situation that we're looking at here, except it's a different kind of liquid and you can get them in different flavors, you can get them in different nicotine concentrations, including Nicotine free versions. And so you could technically use an E cigarette or varying concentrations of nicotine in E cigarettes to wean yourself off of smoking tobacco based cigarettes in the same way that you might use gum or a patch. And from the research that I've seen, I would certainly say that there's compelling evidence that there are going to be lower levels of potentially carcinogenic compounds or known carcinogenic compounds in an E cigarette versus in a tobacco containing kind of traditional cigarette. As far as how much your risk of getting cancer goes down, I can't say for sure. There are some things in an E cigarette that could still be potentially carcinogenic, like that liquid that's actually getting vaporized. Coming from glycol, I believe it's called diethylene glycol is a compound that can be found in some of these E cigarettes that could still be a little bit carcinogenic, but the risk is a lot lower than like a tobacco containing cigarette. There is some risk that it may still have some of the same, like airway constrictive effects as a regular cigarette and still cause some inflammation in the airway. There was one study that was done in the journal called Chest. That's not a porn magazine, it's a journal. And basically it was research on the E cigarette and whether or not it actually caused that bronchoconstriction. And it did show that users of E cigarettes did show signs of airway constriction. But I did notice that the participants that they used in that study were smokers. So it could possibly be that their bodies were responding with bronchoconstriction to the use of an E cigarette just as a response to cigarettes in general, because they'd been conditioned to have that response to regular cigarettes. So that study I'm not totally convinced by, and it was fairly small as well. So the main thing that I want to look at though and talk about for Joseph is just smoking kind of in general. Just because anytime you're addicted to or need to get your buzz from or have a craving for anything from carbohydrates to cigarettes, typically it's indicating an underlying neurotransmitter issue. And neurotransmitters are just the way that your brain communicates with your body and with other sections of your brain. And the main ones that you hear about, that you read about are serotonin. That's a big one. Acetylcholine is another. There's one called GABA and another called dopamine. And those are kind of your four main neurotransmitters. And deficits or imbalances in any of these neurotransmitters can cause significant amounts of craving and even some personality issues, and in some cases, some fairly serious psychological or psychiatric issues. If you look at something like serotonin, for example, serotonin is made from an amino acid called tryptophan. And tryptophan is something you find in fish and poultry and dairy. And even if you're eating enough tryptophan, or say, like taking a tryptophan supplement to increase your serotonin levels, which is going to be one of the feel good chemicals for your brain, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to increase your serotonin levels if you're using tryptophan. And the main reason for that is that there are other foods and other compounds that basically can keep tryptophan from getting absorbed in the gut and getting converted to serotonin. And a big, big part of that scenario can be whether or not you've got a healthy gut, whether or not you've got enough probiotics in your gut, Whether or not you have a leaky gut that maybe has been damaged by something like wheat germ agglutinin from high gluten intake. And this kind of comes down to what's known as the brain gut axis, or basically how the health of your gut can affect the ability of your brain to produce neurotransmitters properly. When you eat foods that are supposed to help with production of those neurotransmitters, and that's just one example. With something like serotonin, dopamine is similar, but dopamine is made from a different amino acid called tyrosine, instead of tryptophan. And technically, eating higher tyrosine containing foods could help with dopamine production. But again, if your gut is unhealthy and the brain gut axis is thrown off, then that's really not going to help with that. Other issues in terms of neurotransmitters is like high stress, high cortisol, that's going to deplete neurotransmitters, and it's going to cause them to turn over more quickly, so you run out of them more quickly. The sleep, or the quality of your sleep can have a pretty significant effect in terms of how your brain actually responds to neurotransmitters. Anytime you're taking any type of pharmaceuticals that can affect neurotransmitter production, any type of toxins in the environment. And I went into this in an article at BenGreenfieldFitness.com about how personal care products and cleaning solvents and BPA and water bottles and stuff like that can affect your body and have kind of a neurotoxic effect. One of the main areas that neurotoxins are going to affect is your production of neurotransmitters. One other really important thing is that hormones and any type of hormonal imbalance can be a pretty serious issue when it comes to your ability to produce neurotransmitters. And for example, like in women, if you've got an estrogen deficiency or an excess of xenoestrogens from the environment or from exposure to chemicals, that can really significantly affect serotonin production, high cortisol levels, I mentioned earlier, that's another issue with stress or with excessive exercise. And that can affect neurotransmitters as well and increase cravings. So when it comes down to something like craving a cigarette or even having an addictive personality, going out drinking, feeling like you got to get buzzed, grabbing an E cigarette or regular cigarette and smoking, that all of that indicates that there's probably some type of a neurotransmitter going, neurotransmitter deficit going on on a deeper level. And so if I personally started to get a lot of cravings for something, or I started to find myself kind of going off the deep end in terms of anything from nicotine to caffeine to excessive exercise to excessive carb intake, first thing I would look at would be the health of my gut, and I would look into to healing the gut. Basically. I've talked about, for example, the GAPS diet. When I'm going over to Dubai here in a couple weeks, two hours of my presentation over there are simply devoted to fixing your gut and healing your gut. And so I don't have two hours to go into it now, but that's super important. And doing something, like I mentioned the GAPS diet, for example, It's a perfect example of a way that you can heal your gut and have a significant effect on your neurotransmitter production. In addition to the gut, I would make sure I'm getting adequate sleep. I would make sure that I'm controlling stress in other areas of my life and especially addressing any amount of high cortisol. I would be looking at any amount of neurotoxins that could be coming in from an environmental standpoint and start using, like, natural cleaning chemicals. Make sure I'm not using a lot of personal care products that are stacked with chemicals and neurotoxins and then address any type of potential hormonal imbalances. And that may be something as simple as, you know, going to, like, you know, direct labs.com and ordering, you know, a salivary hormonal panel so you can see if you're deficient in testosterone or deficient in growth hormone or, you know, you've got DHEA deficiency or cortisol's too high. And once you see if you do have hormonal deficits, then you can start to work on those based on the information that I give in this podcast. So kind of wrapping it all up. E cigarettes are probably a better choice than tobacco containing cigarettes. But anytime you're craving anything like that, it indicates a neurotransmitter deficits or imbalance that can be corrected through lifestyle modifications.

Awesome. Well, let's kick those cravings, everybody. I know I've got. I certainly am guilty of the caffeine cravings.

Mm, yep. That and dressing up like a Viking at the gym.

Oh, really? I have to kick that too?

I don't know if that's classified as a craving as much as maybe like some kind of a mental disease.

It's a compulsion.

Yeah.

Anyway, on to Dave's question. And Dave says there's a lot of old health trends being busted in the last 10 years. Can you bust this one? Is ground turkey really more healthier than ground beef? I need to know. Beef is sure more tastier.

You know, there are probably like a thousand websites out there and articles and books that tell you ground turkey is better than ground beef. And if you look at all of them and they're based off of the idea that turkey and chicken and poultry are lower in fat than beef, I think that we have successfully debunked the idea on this show that just because a food is lower in fat than another food, that the lower fat food is better. And in many cases, that lower fat food may indeed be worse in its less natural form. So when you look. Look at lean ground turkey versus ground beef. Yeah, the chicken and turkey are sometimes lower in fat than beef, but not always. Like legs and thighs and wings and chicken or turkey, those can actually be fairly high in fat. And poultry is high in fat if you leave the skin on too. So if you're just coming at this from a fat and calorie standpoint, kind of depends on the section of the animal that you're talking about. However, when you look at something like conjugated linoleic acid, which is the type of fat that kind of puts your body into fat burning mode. And we've talked about it on the show before, but that's really, really high in beef. Much, much higher in beef than it's going to be in turkey. Beef not only has higher levels of the conjugated linoleic acid in it, but it's also got about twice as much iron, it's got a ton more zinc. So you're going to have a lot more success with say like increasing testosterone when you're using something like beef versus turkey. Vitamin B12 huge in beef compared to turkey. And that's another very, very important vitamin when it comes to metabolism. And you're going to find that folks that have or that are eating red meat a lot of times just do better with things like recovery from exercise and exercise performance because of the added zinc and iron and B12 that they're getting. And then they'll have a lot of times better appetite control and better metabolic efficiency from the higher amounts of conjugated linoleic acid acid. So I have no issue with eating poultry, I have no issue with turkey or with chicken. But beef is going to be better in most cases from a pure nutritional standpoint. One other thing to think about is that it's a lot easier to find a good grass fed beef with a really high anti inflammatory omega 3 fatty acid content compared to a chicken and turkeys, which are a lot of times just tougher to give as many calories as they need to get from grass. And most of the time you're going to find chickens and turkeys maybe have max about 25% grass fed intake, their omega 3 content just tends to be lower than beef.

Here's a question for you. When you go to the grocery store and you're looking on the shelf, it's really easy to find lean and extra lean ground beef, but it's really hard to just find like normal ground beef. Is there really a that big of a difference? Like should, should we all be concerned with actually looking for regular ground beef as opposed to lean or extra lean?

If, if you're looking to get a lot of those cholesterol and hormone supporting saturated fat, then I would certainly be potentially just grabbing a different form of beef or at least supplementing the lean ground beef that you're able to find so easily at the grocery store with maybe some fattier cuts of prime rib or some other type of cut that you can get from a different section of the butcher. We personally don't do a lot of ground turkey or a lot of ground beef just because it is lower in fat. And we find that our bodies do a lot better when we're just getting like, we typically will grab like a grass fed beef, occasionally some bison or buffalo just from the local health food store. Or depending on the year, sometimes we'll actually have a cow that we've purchased, you know, in the freezer.

Okay, let's move on to the next questions actually from Keith. Keith's got two questions. You want to sort of tackle them at the same time or should we do do one at a time here?

Are they markedly different? Yes, let's just do them one at a time.

Okay. First one, I know you like kombucha. What do you think of mugi cha Barley tea? It was in every country kids thermos all summer long. Actually everyone drinks it from housewives to office workers.

Is this Keith in Japan?

Yes.

Oh, hey Keith. I'm going to see Keith when I go over into Japan. 70.3 he's been with me.

Yeah.

Mugi cha, it's like a barley tea. It's got some really good properties, kind of similar to like a beer. Has really good phenol properties and really good antioxidants in it. So it is a probiotic containing food similar to kombucha. So it can help with your gut flora. It's got a lot of good antioxidants in it and can do a decent job fighting free radicals like many teas and coffees actually do. And I guess the only issue that I would have was something like a barley based tea would be that if you're trying to eat a gluten free diet or limit the amount of gluten, barley is not gluten free. However, if you've got a healthy gut, you should be able to handle this just fine. If you've got leaky gut, damaged gut, celiac disease, and you have some severe reactions to bread and wheat and stuff like that, mugicha tea may not be the cat's meow for you, but if you know, you're really, if you have a healthy gut, good gut flora and you're not walking around with leaky gut syndrome or anything like that, this really wouldn't be that big of a deal.

Awesome. Okay, so Keith's second question is he says ice baths after exercise are all I hear about these days on podcast and in magazines. But here in Japan, almost every house has a high tech bathtub and 40 degrees Celsius plus plus soaks are a nightly family ritual. His wife prefers 40, but her dad likes 42 degrees and he can only stand 39 degrees. That's. You guys are very particular. Is a hot bath after normal exercise session for an uninjured runner a. No, no. After a recent half marathon, the nearest hot spring was packed with racers. I confess I've taken a hot bath before my winter long run on occasion as well.

It's a good question. There was one study in the International Journal of Sports Medicine that looked into this and compared cold water immersion with basically contrast therapy, where you'd alternate between cool water and hot water. And they had four different methods that they used in that study. So in one group of. In this case, they were actually cyclists who were actually doing some pretty hard workouts, Multi day, fairly intense daily training routines. They had one group do cold water immersion, like 15 degrees Celsius, which is like around 60 degrees Fahrenheit. They had them soak for about 15 minutes in a cold pool. And then they had another group soak in about. It was close to 40 degrees Celsius, a little over 100 degrees, but in hot water for 15 minutes. They had one group alternate between the cold water and hot water for 15 minutes. And they had one group do nothing at all. And just that group had to sit and stare longingly at the water that the other groups were getting. The folks who did the cold water immersion and the people who did the contrast water. So alternating between hot and cold.

They.

Performed better in their cycling efforts and they also felt better mentally, meaning that they reported that they felt as though they were more recovered after these sessions. The people who did the hot water baths and also the people who did no baths at all comparatively found that their performance slightly declined. That's not to say that every study that's out there has found a benefit from ice baths. Most have found at least a mental benefit. Some of the research goes back and forth in terms of the actual physical benefit. But the idea behind the ice is that it can limit some of the inflammation. And basically what it does is it constricts your blood vessels, it helps to flush waste products out of the exercise tissues, and it can also kind of decrease metabolic activity and slow down the physiological process of inflammation, so it can reduce some of the swelling and tissue breakdown. That's the idea behind the cold water bath. And if you look at hot water, it's basically doing the opposite of all those things. It's dilating blood vessels. It's potentially allowing for more swelling, more metabolic activity, potentially increased Inflammation in the area. And so post marathon, post hard bike ride, that type of thing. If you've actually done some serious muscle damage enough to cause some potential inflammation, then a hot bath after hard exercise could decrease your recovery time and is probably not the most effective way to recover from.

Wait, decrease or increase your recovery time?

I'm sorry, you're right. Increase your recovery time, decrease your recovery or decrease the effectiveness of your recovery. Yeah. So I would do. If you're gonna use a hot bath, I would use contrast therapy and go back and forth from the hot bath to the cold bath as there is some evidence that that can help out or do just the cold bath. But I wouldn't do the hot bath after a hard workout. On just like a normal easy training day where you're not doing a lot of damage or you've only exercised aerobically, that of type, type of thing, the hot bath probably is not as big of a deal.

If you go back two or three weeks in the show notes, you'll see there's actually a news flash that Ben talked about the cold bath actually perhaps being. It speeds up the recovery, but it actually makes the healing sort of wonky though. Remember that one?

Yeah, I do. And there is some evidence that because of it slows down the physiological process. It may actually slightly slow down the time that it takes the muscle to heal. But if we're talking about delayed onset muscle soreness and how you feel after a workout, if you've got a hard workout the next day especially, the benefits probably outweigh the risks of using something like a cold water bath. If you've got. If you don't have any other exercise sessions planned for a long time, it may be that a cold water bath is not going to be all that great. I know this can be confusing and a big part of that is because the research does go back and forth on it. Part of this is that you may just want to go try it out for yourself. I've personally found that if I go up to my neck in the Spokane river after a day of hard training, I feel wonderful that evening and the next day compared to when I. When I don't have a chance to get some cold water immersion.

All right, Keith onto osa. OSA says your food pyramid and consideration to eat more fat is working for me. I can go long. I can go long without eating and am slimming down effortlessly. My question is that you recommend avocado oil as healthy fatty oil. That was not listed. Okay. So you must recommend that outside of The Superhuman Food Pyramid. What other healthy fats and oils would you recommend to use that you did not list? Also, what do you think of almond oil?

Well, I know I have avocados listed on my Superhuman Food Pyramid. And for those of you listening in, you can get that one of two ways. You can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com on the right side of the page. You can just click and grab it, or you can text the word Fitness to 411247. And if you text the word Fitness to 411247, you'll just get it sent to your phone if you're in the U.S. but basically, when it comes down to your common cooking fats and how to choose which ones to use, basically the more saturated that the fat is, the more stable it's going to be at higher temperatures in most cases. And so you're looking at fats like coconut oil and palm oil as fats that are relatively safe for hot uses. Other really good oils and fats that I like in terms of their nutrient content and also their stability and their, their lack of propensity to, to get rancid or produce a lot of free radicals would be like butter. Ghee is good. Lard is good. Anytime you can get like, like fat from an animal, like a chicken fat or duck fat, anything like that would be fine. Tallow would be another option in terms of, like, saturated fats. Anything that tends to get solid at room temperature is generally in most cases going to have a higher smoke point and be more stable with use in hot conditions compared to oils that are going to be liquid at room temp. And I know that a lot of people kind of know this, but, but coconut oil, palm oil, butter, ghee, lard, those type of things would be kind of my favorite saturated fats, unsaturated fats, fats that you would use in dressings or for cold uses. Olive oil is good. Sesame oil is good. Flaxseed oil is okay for kind of moderate use. It's slightly higher in some of the omega 6 potentially inflammatory fatty acids. So you just want to be careful with flaxseed oil use. I mentioned avocado oil. That's basically an unsaturated oil that would also be slightly better for cold use. And then the ones that you want to avoid would of course be like margarine, any hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils, and then a lot of these completely unsaturated oils. And unsaturated means that they don't have any of the of the hydrogens on them. And so they tend to basically degrade really quickly with exposure to light or heat or even air. And so that would be like canola oil and corn oil and soybean oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil. Those would be some of the ones to avoid. I do know that there are just a few oils that do have slightly higher smoke points or slightly high smoke points, even if they're liquid at room temperature. For example, olive oil, not extra virgin olive oil, but regular olive oil that's actually okay to cook with. It's got a pretty high smoke point right up there. Slightly higher in many cases than coconut oil, Depending on the type of coconut oil that you use. You know, the ones that you'd also be just fine to cook with. Like I mentioned, butter, tallow, lard, coconut oil, avocado oil actually has a really high smoke point too. Just avoid corn oil, soybean oil, sunflower oil. I'll put a little chart for you. I found a good chart. I'll put it in the show notes for you over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com. what episode number is this? 192.

192. Yeah.

Yeah. So nice little easy chart. You could even, like, print off and toss in your refrigerator. That just kind of shows you which ones are going to be the best, you know, in terms of ranking good cooking oils, cooking fats. But, you know, those are some of the main ones that we use around here, so hopefully that helps you out.

I put some delicious sesame oil all over my quinoa yesterday for dinner. It was delicious.

That sounds pretty good.

I love sesame oil. All right, on to Mike's question. After two hours, after every workout, I bonk hard. I could crawl into bed and go to sleep. The worst part about it is that that I then get very edgy and my temper gets very short. I generally work out in the mornings with minimal food in my stomach. And I generally eat or yeah, I eat generally within two hours of the workout. More often than not, it's within an hour. What type of testing can or should I do to see what's going on?

You know, I guess I have three things that I'd look into. Primarily want to hear about this. The first two maybe not quite so obvious. The last one will be, I'll be Mr. Obvious on that one. But with folks who post workout tend to crash later on in the day, one thing that can cause that is hormonal imbalance. And typically in guys, it's low testosterone. So, you know, earlier I mentioned that you could use something like directlabs.com to get a full male salivary hormone panel, and I would consider doing something like that. Another issue with crashing with brain fog with low energy is food intolerance or some type of issue with the gut like H. Pylori or Candida albicans, a yeast or a fungus issue in the gut, and you can get that tested with something like a stool test. So you could do like an expanded GI panel. I'll put a link to the one that I use in the show notes, and that's literally poop in a tray, bottle it up, send it out, and get the results back a couple weeks later. Food intolerances or hormonal imbalances can certainly be an issue when you're exercising and then just crashing later on in the day. But more often than not, I find that it's an issue of inadequate caloric replenishment post workout and sharp intake of breath. For all you ketogenic low carbers out there not eating enough carbs right after you work out. I mean, Mike says he basically works out in the morning with minimal food in his stomach. Let's just say that Mike's working out for an hour and he is easily depleting all of his liver's carbohydrate stores and tapping into some of his muscle glycogen stores during that workout. Then it's possible that he is simply not giving his body enough post workout carbohydrate just to top off the storage glycogen a little bit post workout. I find that folks tend to crash pretty easily if they're constantly in a carbohydrate depleted state. So it really depends on I don't know how Mike's diet is set up, et cetera, but it could be that his activity levels just aren't really matched to the substrates that he's put into his body to be able to use as a fuel. So a lot of times I find that that is the case that people are not eating enough or eating enough carbohydrate post workout, especially if they're on a low carb, higher fat diet. And then on the complete flip side of that, if someone is not on a lower carb, higher fat diet, if they are not metabolically efficient, if they're used to eating higher carb intake, constantly fluctuating blood sugar levels, fairly insensitive to insulin, then what can happen is that you're really going to have these type of energy fluctuations no matter what. In many cases, whether you're exercising or not. And in a case like that, it may be a case where you simply need to switch to eating lower carbohydrate intake, switch to the ketogenic diet that we talked to Dr. Peter Addia about and go through those first 10 to 14 days of having fairly low energy levels and kind of feeling a little bit blah during the day as your body becomes more metabolically efficient. And then that a lot of times can fix something like this as you learn to burn fats as a fuel more easily. And for me that was the case. I used to crash a lot when I was, when I was post workout later on in the day and then when I switched to higher fat diet got myself more metabolically efficient. I'm just able to go for a longer period of time without crashing even if I'm not eating anything at all. So it just, it's very, very multifactorial. Kind of depends where you're coming from, but those are some of the things that I would think about.

Okay, so onto our next question from Kirthy Keerthi says I'm a 28 year old and I weigh 171 pounds with 20% body fat. I have a pretty active lifestyle which includes lifting weights three times a week and two to three times a week, a good 45 minute cardio with intervals, etc. My goal is to lose some fat and build lean mass. And I'm on a 2000 calorie diet with carb protein fat in a ratio of 40, 30, 30. But I sometimes go a bit high on the protein and might add 200 more calories. Does this excess protein convert into fat or does it just tax the kidneys a little bit more and get fleshed out? Do you have any suggestions on changing the ratio of carb to protein to fat intake and still create some calorie deficit?

Yeah, I'll put a link to the article that I wrote about how much protein you need and how much protein the average person actually needs in the show notes. But basically the approximate numbers would be that if you're trying to maintain what's called nitrogen balance, which, well, I'll explain what nitrogen balance is in a second. But if you're trying to just maintain nitrogen balance, then you need right around 0 point to 0.6 grams of protein per pound of body weight. And if you want to be putting on muscle significantly, then you can exceed that and you can get up to right around like 0.7 grams per pound. So those are some approximate numbers. Now nitrogen balance all that means is that when you consume protein from food or like you take, take, even like an amino acid supplement, you get nitrogen that enters into your body, and that nitrogen is going to eventually exit your body in your urine and a little bit in your sweat as ammonia and urea and uric acid, which are all the breakdown products of protein. And when the amount of protein that you eat matches the amount of protein that you're using, that's nitrogen balance. So if you don't eat enough protein, you can be in negative nitrogen balance, not have enough amino acids to be able to repair muscle. And that's a catabolic state. And you tend to kind of start to cannibalize your own lean muscle mass. And if you eat too much nitrogen and too much protein, you'll have everything that you need for muscle repair. But you have some health issues that arise because when you get in too positive a state of nitrogen balance, you start to create a bunch of ammonia and urea and uric acid, and your body actually has to filter all of that. And it can be extremely stressful on your organs and especially, as Keerthi alluded to, on the kidneys. Now, the other issue with, with excess protein intake would be that there's a gene in your body that's directly correlated to accelerated aging, and it's called the MTOR gene or the mammalian target of rapamycin gene. And if there is decreased activity in the MTOR gene, then you can basically increase your lifespan. And decreased activity in the MTOR gene is directly correlated to restricting calories and restricting excessive protein intake. And so that's kind of another reason that you want to be careful that you're not always putting your body into too great a state of nitrogen balance. Now, if you are eating too much protein, what Kirathi has asked is whether or not that excess protein gets converted into fat. And your body certainly does have mechanisms where it can take protein and it can turn it into glucose. It's a process called gluconeogenesis. So you can take protein, you can convert it into sugars, and you can burn those sugars, and potentially small amount of those sugars could even get repackaged as triglycerides in the liver and stored as fat. But the only time that your body is really going to start using protein significantly for fuel like that is gonna be, A, if you're starved, B, if you are completely empty of your liver glycogen and your muscle glycogen so you don't have enough storage carbohydrates. So you gotta start turning protein into carbs, or if you're exercising for longer than about three hours, and at that point, you can generate about 10 to 15% of your glucose energy from the formation of glucose from proteins. But in any case where you have caloric excess, it is not something that you need to worry about protein getting converted into fats. It's more that you need to worry about the ammonia buildup and the potential on your lifespan and the genetic switch that can get flipped. So ultimately, to answer Keerthi's question about ideas to create calorie deficits on a 40, 30, 30 diet, what I would personally do is get off the 40, 30, 30 diet, step up fat intake, and increase the 30% fat up to closer to 50 to 60% fat. And that should allow you to reduce calories a little bit because your appetite is going to be more satiated. And at that point, you may be able to get away with, you know, 1800 calories, 1900 calories, eat fewer calories, and shed a little bit more body fat. So eat more fat to eat fewer calories to basically lower the body fat a little bit more. If that's what you're trying to do.

It's time to bust out those old T shirts that you used to have that said, my personal trainer told me to eat more fat.

Hey, I've still got. I've got a few of them in my closet somewhere here in my office. But, yeah, those T shirts went out of production. Yeah, maybe I will bring them back at some point, but it was just a matter of, well, I'll admit it, I got lazy and I got tired of mailing out T shirts. So I outsourced T shirt production, and when I did that, I changed the design of the T shirt. But leave a comment in the show notes if you want me to bring back the eat more Fat T shirt, and maybe I will. So go to BenGreenFitness.com show notes for $1.92 and let me know your T shirt thoughts.

All right, onto Megan's question. Megan says, I got blood tests at the end of December and my TSH was pretty high, 4.6. But they were not too concerned because my T4 and T3 were normal. But I wanted to get it tested again just in case. Ben, what's tsh?

Thyroid stimulating hormone.

All right, okay. So then she said, I just got tested on Friday about one and a half months from the last test, and it's now 8.45, which a lot of.

Doctors will tell you if that gets too high, it's. It indicates that you have hypothyroid because your body's trying to make a bunch of thyroid with the high TSH.

Okay, so. And the T4 is still normal. So they want to put me on Synthroid. I know from listening to the Roby Mitchell podcast interview that he thinks some Synthroid is good, but armor thyroid might be better. So two questions. One, is Synthroid okay, or should I be definitely taking armor Armor thyroid? Two, should I be getting another test, or can a jump from 4.6 to 8.45 happen that quickly? Three, can the cause be over training?

Didn't she say two questions?

She did say two questions.

Okay, go ahead. Four.

I already take iodine 150 micrograms and magnesium 500 milligrams, along with topical on my legs every night. Should I also be taking selenium? P.S. i've eliminated virtually all wheat and soy from my diet and up protein, veggies, and fat.

Okay, I want to. I'm actually looking at this question right now. There's a couple other things here. She says she went from 10 to 12 hours of training a week and is now training more like 18 to 25 hours a week.

Yes.

So when she said she eliminated virtually all wheat and soy, she puts in parentheses, I have one third cup of edamame with veggies for dinner and two whole wheat graham crackers with banana for a snack. So there's a lot of places that we could start here. But what I want to explain, especially when we're talking to somebody who's training 18 to 25 hours a week, is that hypothyroidism can be basically something that is primary, meaning that it literally is due to you not producing adequate T3, getting converted to T4, et cetera. Or it can be secondary, meaning that your thyroid is kind of not broken, but something else is malfunctioning. Some other organ system is malfunctioning. And one of the most frequently overlooked causes of something like hypothyroidism is what's called adrenal fatigue. We've talked about adrenal fatigue on the show before, but basically what happens is that when you have low adrenal function, that can lead to low thyroid function, and it can cause really low levels of what's called thyroid binding globulin. It can cause low T4, it can cause low T3, it can cause high TSH and basically cause a lot of the issues that hypothyroidism causes. The way that this actually works is that when your adrenals are exhausted, producing way too much cortisol, everything else that's necessary when you're exercising a bunch, or when you're just kind of an easily stressed out person, which I'm guessing, and no offense to you, Megan, but just like by the way that you've written the question saying that you're gonna ask two questions and actually asking four and sounding really desperate and writing help and caps lock, I really, I don't want to sound too woo woo here, but a lot of times you can tell how easily stressed out someone is just by the way that they write question. And I mean, that alone suggests that you're probably a pretty easily stressed out. Maybe you're a type A person who exercises a lot, that's just your personality. But when your adrenals are exhausted from this kind of stress, the ability of your adrenals to handle stress is a lot of times compromised and your adrenals go into survival mode, you start to down regulate your energy production. And when you down regulate your energy production, what you're essentially doing is your body is being metabolically down regulated to slow down, to conserve energy, to try to get you to rest. And when that happens, one of the main ways that you metabolically down regulate yourself is to down regulate thyroid production, production of thyroid hormones like T4 or specifically T3. And that will result in lower T4. And that down regulation also means that you're going to increase your thyroid binding globulin. And so that means that more of the thyroid hormones that you're producing are bound and less able to act on the body cells where they would normally act. And so everything basically starts to shut down in order for you to enhance survival. And in many cases, when you're looking at something like secondary hypothyroidism and adrenal exhaustion, you may find like you did in your case, that T4 and T3 are normal, but you still have a lot of classic symptoms of hypothyroidism. Specifically, you tend to have like a, like low body temperature and low muscle reflexes and stuff like that. Basically, when you're looking at an issue like this, even if you get thyroid medication, it's only going to give you a temporary relief of symptoms whether or not you do Synthroid or armor thyroid or whatever. Because ultimately a thyroid medication in a case of secondary hypothyroidism is just a band aid, when in reality your body is really crying for help. It's crying for rest and stabilizing T4 and T3 and TSH levels without resolving the underlying symptoms is only going to drag this problem on. So as far as your question about Synthroid versus Armour Thyroid. Yeah. I mean, you could go listen to episode number 103 that we did with Dr. Roby Mitchell about why something like Armour Thyroid is a better choice because it contains the full complement of thyroid hormones, including T3, whereas Synthroid basically just contains primarily the T3 version. And by the way, Dr. Roby Mitchell also has another supplement that's similar to Armour Thyroid called Echothyroid or Thiothyro Eco Thyro. That is pretty decent. But again, I'm not a doctor, I wouldn't consider this medical advice. But if it were me and I were seeing some of the symptoms that, that you're having, I would be coming at this from an adrenal fatigue standpoint. Now, what do you do with adrenal fatigue? What do you do when your body's crying out for help? Well, generally about four weeks and up to a little over a year of really, really good recovery can help out. That means you're not doing any aerobic exercise and you're preferably limiting yourself to a maximum of about four to six hours of exercise per week, primarily from like some really controlled weight training and a few high intensity intervals. No fasted workouts, no intermittent fasting, none of that stuff. Instead, as we mentioned earlier in the show, you get up, you have a big breakfast, take care of your body, lots of proteins, lots of fats, with breakfast, eating all of the foods that are on my superhuman food pyramid because those are going to keep you from, from getting any more damage to your body, including autoimmune damage to your thyroid tissue from soy and wheat and stuff like that, which you should be completely avoiding if you've got any type of thyroid issues or adrenal issues. Totally limit caffeine. I would get dark chocolate, I would get energy drinks, energy powders, coffee, tea with caffeine, anything like that. I would really significantly limit it in the diet, but I would make sure that you are naturally stimulating your adrenals with like a high dose vitamin D and getting lots of morning sun exposure if you can. We talked about this, I think a little bit last week about how that can kind of stabilize your cortisol levels. Sleep is gonna be huge for you. You need to be going for eight hours of sleep per night. Sometimes with adrenal exhaustion, closer to like 9, 10 hours is necessary. Be in bed by about 10:30 at the latest as it's going to Throw off your circadian rhythms. If you're not. No tv, no phone, no computer before you go to bed. Preferably I would be using like some blue light blocking glasses, which is going to really help to stabilize your cortisol levels. More like Gunnar is the brand that I use. I'm wearing them right now, but especially later on in the day, those become even more important. To get some blue light blocking glasses, make sure that you're also using a little bit of magnesium before you go to bed. Gamma amino butyric acid is also really good in a case like this to really get you really good sleep. Like, there's one product I like out there called Somnidren GH that works really well. Adrenal exhaustion tends to really imbalance your mineral status. So I would be using like trace minerals. I mentioned magnesium already, but I'd also use like a liquid trace minerals. You could even use some coconut water as well. And that can really help with your potassium sodium ratios. Get on Chinese adaptogenic herbs like TNT. Get on something like a maca root, like Energy 28. Those are some of the ones that I like. Take those on an empty stomach during the day and then basically just exercise a lot, lot less than you're doing right now. So that's where I would start with something like this. And this really. This answer really needs to go on for about another hour. But that just kind of scratches the surface of where I would start with a question like this.

And Megan and probably some other people out there too that are listening to this. I want you to rewind right now just a couple of minutes to when Ben started in on that list of things that you need to do. And probably the first time he was going through it, it probably sent you into a bit of a panic and sounded like, what? I can't do that. This is ridiculous. This is totally changing my lifestyle. But if you listen to it again and really like write down what he said, break it down, it's not unreasonable. All of the things that he mentioned are pretty much what probably 85 to 90% of the population wish they would do. Like doing 18 to 25 hours a week of training is really, really unusual. Doing even 10 hours a week is really, really unusual. Most people strive for a four to six hour workout week and will do really, really well at it. So don't let it freak you out because it is different than what you're doing doing. It's, it's very reasonable. All of these suggestions.

Yep, just get into it. And I've Seen people who string themselves along and don't stop and at some point your body will stop you and it gets really unpleasant at that point. Yeah, like I, I had a bodybuilder friend who was bedridden for nine months and I'm totally not kidding you. Bedridden, couldn't get out of bed. And then you'll get to that point.

And that is absolutely, obviously way worse than, than, than doing all of these suggestions here. So. Okay, let's move on to the next question from Renee. Renee says I'm a 32 year old female runner and rower. I stay very active working out daily and mix it up with a combination of running, rowing, spin classes, boot camps and lifting. I like to compete in running and rowing races. About a year ago, I saw a sports medicine doctor discovered that my cortisol levels were sky high. She suggested I try going on off birth control pills, which I'd been on for over a decade. I did and immediately cortisol plunged to normal levels. However, I've yet to get my period. My regular doctor suggested that I need to dramatically cut back on exercise in order to start menstruating again. The sport doctor believes that the continued exercise is okay and thinks it's a matter of getting my nutrition right around the exercising. I've already added much more food intake before and after each workout. Even though I'm taking in more calories, I still haven't got my period back. Any suggestions? I want to start trying to get pregnant later this year, so I need to figure this out.

This is fairly related to the other question.

It is, yeah.

Basically what you'll need to familiarize yourself with is something called the pregnenolone steel. And that's a name that's given to an issue that occurs when the stress hormones cortisol and cortisone are overproduced. So all of the hormones that you produce in your body come from cholesterol. And one of the very first steps that happen when your body makes hormones is it converts cholesterol into something called pregnenolone. And then the pregnenolone can go on to produce a lot of other hormones like estrogens and testosterone and progesterone and a lot of the same hormones that are involved in your sexual cycle. And if your body is demanding more cortisol because you're stressed out from exercise or from lifestyle, your body is going to convert more of that pregnenolone to cortisol and it does so preferentially at the expense of the other hormones with the Only exception, really, being progesterone to some extent, can actually get produced, but most of the rest of them are kind of screwed. So that lowers testosterone, it lowers estrogen, and that's called the pregnenolone steal. And the best way to stop something like that from happening is to go back and listen to my response to Megan, really, in terms of limiting cortisol and kind of hitting the reboot button on your body. The reason that I say that is because you're doing running and rowing and spin class and boot camps and lifting. And I'm totally not blowing off your question, but I did kind of answer it when I addressed Megan's question. If you want to increase your fertility, you need to make sure that you've got adequate levels of pregnenolone. And the way that you do that is you keep your body from making cortisol. So that, in a nutshell, is my short answer, but I kind of gave the longer answer to the last listener.

Okay, well, let's move on to our final question. And this question comes from Ed. And Ed says, I've been hearing that beetroot juice is beneficial to endurance athletes. Beets contain a lot of nitrates, and nitrates are suspected carcinogens in processed meats. Are beets carcinogenic? I like the train of thought there.

No, yeah, so do I. And, you know, I. I certainly have been caught up before on the whole nitrate, nitrite, nitroso compounds being carcinogenic. And that certainly is something that is fairly prevalent that you're going to find talked about a lot in the whole meat discussion. But the fact is that not only do you produce a ton of nitrites in your own body, like saliva contains more nitrites than pretty much most of the foods that are considered to be high nitrite or high nitrite carcinogenic foods, but you've also got just basically a ton of this stuff circulating around in your body. And it just doesn't seem to make biochemical sense that nitrates and nitrites would be carcinogenic if your body is already producing this stuff in huge amounts. And some folks will wonder if it's biochemically different in hot dogs or in bacon than it is in your body. And it's not. It's the identical chemical structure. Even if you look at something like hot dogs and bacon, like the example that I used, the USDA will allow about 120 parts per million of something like nitrite in hot dogs and bacon. And most of them, if you actually test Them, they've only got like 10 parts per million in them, so they're not even close to. And that's much lower again, than what your body is already making naturally on its own. And so I'm not really convinced that nitrites and nitrates are carcinogenic. I think the reason that perhaps hot dogs and bacon and a lot of these meats that do contain nitrites and nitrates have been suggested to be carcinogenic is that because when they're cooked at high temperatures, it can create a lot of what are called heterocyclic amines or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and those are potentially carcinogenic. And so I think the issue is the cooking method in a lot of foods that can contain nitrates and nitrites more than it is the actual nitrates and nitrites themselves. So that being said, again, just the fact that beets are not a meat means that even if you do cook them at a high temperature, you're really not creating a lot of these hydrocarbons anyways. It also means that you don't need to worry about beets being carcinogenic as nitrite and nitrites are completely natural chemical compounds that your body makes a ton of on its own.

Cool. Well, that's really good to know because I love beets and I'm a big believer in using them before races, too. My personal best for a marathon was done after consuming a lot of beet juice over two days.

That's right. My kids also love beets, mostly because they like the fact that they can change the color of their something as simple as a food, and they think that's pretty cool. I have to admit that deep down inside, I think it's pretty cool too.

It is pretty cool. Well, everybody, that wraps it up. Thankfully for this week, keep sending us your questions. And do remember, we have a huge backlog of questions. So if you don't hear your question in the next couple weeks, be patient. Patient. It's coming.

Yeah. And of course, we'll put a link to everything over in the show notes. Stay tuned this Friday because I promise I'll release a great interview for you. And if you guys have questions, comments, feedbacks, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Leave your thoughts over there. Leave the podcast donation. Your donations are what keeps this thing going. And also if you get a chance, go over to itunes, leave a rating or a ranking in itunes, and thanks for listening. Have a great week and we'll be in touch next week.

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