Episode #196: How To Eat Healthy On A Shoestring Budget

In today's episode, how to eat healthily on a shoestring budget. Also, what to eat after a gastrectomy Dealing with iron overload, Fasted workouts and glycogen storage, different types of olive oil Treating jock itch naturally Visualizing exercise while injured, Improving running efficiency using power cranks, how diet can affect mental health, Refueling, timing and more discussion about cramping.

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

Welcome everybody to. Welcome to another episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. Here we are once again. I'm Brock and this is Ben.

I have a hard time listening to you now, Brock, without envisioning you with clown hair and like a little cupcake that you're dancing around with.

Okay, for those of you who didn't tune into the Google Hangout last week, that's what Ben's talking about. I actually didn't realize that everybody could see me. So I'm just like listening away, having a nice time, playing with the effects in Google. And all of a sudden Ben starts laughing. He's like, okay, we got to show Brock. I honestly didn't know that you could actually see me. I thought I was just fooling around on my own.

Yeah, the way Google Hangouts work is everybody's in on there. You can see, or at least I can see, and I can click on anybody to bring them up on the mainframe and show to everyone. And Google has these cool features where you can do things like, you know, in Brock's case, turn yourself into a clown with a cupcake. So anyways, I'll have to get that image out of my head so I.

Can seriously get through today's Take me seriously. Darn it.

News flashes.

Okay, as usual, lots of stuff going on at Twitter and like we said at Google as well, you had some stuff, some really cool stuff about growth hormone and stuff this week, didn't you? Yeah.

In terms of boosting growth hormone and boosting testosterone. That's something that both guys and girls can benefit from when it comes to everything from anti aging to recovering more quickly from workouts. And there was one study that was interesting that compared a group that did weight training, and one group did five repetitions for their sets of exercise. The other group did 10 repetitions for their sets. And the group that did five repetitions rested about three minutes. The group that did 10 reps rested about one minute. And the 10 rep one minute rest scenario was far superior for boosting growth hormone and testosterone. So you kind of think it'd be the opposite, that the heavier you go, the higher you'd boost the levels of those hormones. But it turns out that that's not the case.

So were they still lifting to it was just like straight 10 reps or was it like 10 reps to fatigue?

It was 10 reps using a 10 rep weight, which is generally like a percentage of one repetition max. I think it was like around 85, 90%. So.

So they were talking about failure.

Yeah, we're talking about lifting a heavy weight, but going higher than just like five reps. So probably part of that is that when you get up around that rep range, you are starting to produce some la lactic acid and you're getting a little bit of cellular stress going on. And a lot of times your body responds to that type of stress by boosting hormones versus when you go very, very low rep, very heavy, you can build power and strength, but a lot of times you don't get a similar hormonal release. There was another study that showed that in contrast to the type of release of growth hormone that you get when you're weight training, if you actually go out and take one of these growth hormone supplements, you know, like you see advertised in airplane magazines and in anti aging literature, taking growth hormone orally, like in supplement form, it doesn't increase power, it doesn't increase strength, and it doesn't increase endurance. And I'll put a link in the show notes to this episode to the study that I'm citing on this. But basically, if you're just popping growth hormone thinking that it's going to make you a better athlete or a stronger person, that is not the case. You'll get a better benefit from just training. When it comes to growth hormone release.

I guess that's good and bad news.

At the same time as you dump your growth hormone capsules.

I've just spent hundreds of dollars on this stuff, damn it.

And then another interesting study that I'll link to is that after you work out, you get an increase in your testosterone up to two times, which is doubling your testosterone levels. Unfortunately, it only lasts for about 30 to 60 minutes after you finish working out. But I, it was interesting and what I tweeted was it's a good reason to do 100 push ups before a hot day for guys out there. You actually don't see quite as much of a release in women post exercise. But in men, you do see that increase in testosterone. And so if you're going into a situation where you want some increased competitive drive or libido or whatever it is else you're looking for, you may want to work out and you can at least turn yourself into Superman or like Mario grabbing the star in the game for a good 30 to 60 minutes, you give yourself a window.

You have children, don't you?

That's right. One other thing I wanted to mention was that I'll link to this study as well in the show notes. And by the way, what episode number is this? 196. 6. Coming up on 200. Sneaking up 200 episodes. We'll have to do something big.

It's going to be the blowout special.

Brock will have two cupcakes. Yes. If you want to shut down muscle growth, take ibuprofen. I'll link to this study as well. But essentially, when you're looking at what's called a COX2 inhibitor like ibuprofen is, what happens is that the entire process of skeletal muscle regeneration is facilitated by these cell cells called satellite cells, which are basically just stem cells. And when you take ibuprofen, you essentially shut down the activity of these stem cells and their ability to help muscles repair and regenerate. So while you may mask soreness or temporarily decrease pain, you're also going to limit any type of effect that you'd get from the workout anyways. So, once again, for the same reason that I'm not a fan of taking ibuprofen before you go out for a run because it can increase your gut permeability and contributes to toxemia. I also don't recommend that you take it before you go weight train or lift because it's going to decrease the amount of muscle that you can actually build and you may end up just wasting your time.

There's pretty much nothing good about ibuprofen in conjunction with any sort of exercise, is there?

And this episode was brought to you by Advil.

Yeah.

Special announcements.

Okay, special announcements are rampant and crazy and all over the place. And so is my brain, apparently.

I just got back from Hawaii, actually, from racing down.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. Why didn't we talk about that? We're talking about my silly clown here. We should be talking about your race.

Because it was horrible.

Well, you swam the wrong direction and then lost your running gear.

Yeah, you know, I don't want to bore people with details too much, but basically I learned a few things in a triathlon. Like, first of all, even if you're towards the front of the swim pack, this is the first time this has ever happened to me. But somebody can end up swimming in the wrong direction. And if you're not looking where you're going, and if you're like me and you're just kind of following feet, assuming that you're. You're swimming behind someone who's swimming really fast and knows right where they're going, you can get screwed. And that happened to me. I ended up swimming an extra 300, 400 yards, which was not fun, especially when you're trying to, you know, when you swim fast, you're trying to in a triathlon, come out far enough ahead of the guys who are swimming slower to where you can leave them behind on the bike. And all of a sudden I was in bike packs I didn't plan on being in. And then came into transition and it was a big lineup of bags. Your run bag is in transition. And because the run transition is in a different place than the swim to bike transition, you don't see where your run bag is before you get there. And so they have volunteers handing them out. And the volunteers sent me to the wrong bag. And so I was just running around in transition for a few minutes.

That makes sense. I couldn't figure out how you didn't know where your run bag. Cause I'm used to the. When you, like you have all the transitions sort of in the same spot, so you just head for your bike basically and your stuff's all there.

And then that just put me in, into a sorry mood on the run. And I kind of had some stinking thinking going on for the first half or so and didn't run quite as fast as I wanted to. And yeah. So anyways, not the greatest rate race, but you learn your lessons and move on. And I will be headed to Japan here in a week and a half to race awesome Japan Half Ironman. So if any of you are listeners in Nagoya or in Tokyo, which I also plan on taking the bullet train over to and checking out, say hi or follow me on Twitter and I'll be sure to send out some tweets and some updates with what I'm up to. And if anybody has any tips for me for having fun in Japan, feel free to send them over or leave them as a comment in the show notes. Couple other things. I am just in the process of wrapping up the completion of the advanced fat loss module that I'll be teaching to all the personal trainers and fitness coaches who are members of my superhuman coaching mentorship program. So if you go to superhumancoach.com, you can get in on that. And we're going to be going over every single reason that someone doesn't lose fat and how to massively accelerate fat fat loss.

So is that the second of the 10 webinars that you're doing?

We had our performance webinar last month and the fat loss webinars this month. So we're also in the process of getting CEUs from the National Personal Training Certification bodies like the NASM, ACSM, ACE, NSCA, and then I'll be moving on to international certification bodies as well.

So that's very cool. That's a huge thing. I know when people are looking at spending any money on any sort of certification, that is very. Well, I know for myself that's a very important consideration. So that's huge that you've got that behind you now.

Yeah. And it costs a lot of money too to do that, I bet. Yeah. Those certification agencies do not let you just go up and slap down five bucks to get CEUs. So it's a pretty intensive process of application and lots of credit card numbers being given out. So check out superhumancoach.com if you're a personal trainer or a fitness coach. And then the last thing is Thailand is coming up. Brock and I are going to be there. We're doing a big two week trip to Thailand for any of you triathletes or spouses or boyfriends or girlfriends or kids or anybody else who wants to come along. Lots of fun over in Thailand. For two weeks. We'll be doing two races over there. Little vacation to a place called Railay Bay. Stay in another resort there in Phuket. Massive fun. We'll put a link in the show notes, but there's still room to get in on that double triathlon trip to Thailand and we'd love to have you along. We've got, I think we have 10 folks signed up so far. We're planning on taking somewhere in the range of 12 to 15. So if a few more people want in, just go to the go to the show notes. Click on the link and you'll get all the information that you need on fun in Thailand.

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

Okay, tons of very interesting and in depth questions this week. And let's start off with this first audio question that comes from an anonymous listener.

Hi Ben, I have a nutrition question. My mother is in her late 60s and several years ago she had an incident where she had surgery and part of her stomach wound up dying. She had a pacemaker put in that got an infection. She wound up losing her whole stomach. So she just had this small pouch. At this point in time, nutrition wise, she doesn't seem to be able to eat much. I mean, she eats like some Purina and butter and almond milk and not a whole lot else. And I tried to get her to take other stuff and everything seems to make her nauseous. Any ideas? Coconut milk didn't work. I don't know if she's just trained herself to be nauseous at this point, some other foods or not, but I think her health is taking a serious decline. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Something that may be able to work for that she may be able to digest easily. I would appreciate. Thanks again.

Wow, that's some unfortunate circumstances that happened there. That's very, very sad. Yeah.

You know, gastrectomy is certainly something that isn't going to completely stop you from eating or inhibit digestion completely, but it kind of does throw a wrench into the equation because your stomach is responsible for. You can kind of structurally split it up into three main functions that your stomach is going to help you out with. First of all, the muscles in your stomach actually contract and they mix and mash food that you've swallowed. And one of the reasons that it does that is to mix up food with hydrochloric acid, which is the main component in the stomach that dissolves and dissociates all these solid structures that you're eating into free molecules that can then move on into the intestinal tract and get absorbed into the bloodstream a lot better. So you've got your mechanical digestion which is where the muscles contract in the stomach, and you've got your chemical digestion, which is where the hydrochloric acid kind of gets onto the foods that you've eaten. And then you have what's called enzymatic digestion. And what that means is this hydrochloric acid actually activates a digestive enzyme called pepsin in your stomach. And pepsin is the same thing that you might take in, like a digestive enzyme supplement. And what it does is it breaks big protein molecules down into smaller protein molecules. So in terms of any of those functions being completely critical to digestion, they're not totally critical, but they really ease the process of digestion. Your pancreas still produces something called trypsin, which is similar to pepsin. It breaks down large protein molecules into smaller protein molecules. It's going to be able to help you digest protein, but not until it reaches your small intestine. Hydrochloric acid, and a lack of hydrochloric acid exposure to the food is going to mean it's a lot less likely to be broken down. You're going to get less absorption. And this is one of the same reasons that people with a stomach should be chewing their food very, very thoroughly when they eat. Because you do get some pre digestion and you do get a lot better absorption of your food, and you get fuller, faster. And you know, whether or not you've got a stomach or not, chewing your food is incredibly important in kind of pre initiating a lot of these processes. As far as gastrectomies go, one of the big issues when you don't have a stomach or when part of your stomach has been removed is something called dumping. And dumping is the highly medical term given to what happens when food or fluid foods move too quickly through your digestive system. And a lot of times you do get nausea when that happens, which is the case here. You can get dizziness, lightheadedness, cramping, diarrhea, all these issues with dumping syndrome. And there are certain types of foods that are going to basically move more quickly through your digestive system. Anything that's really hot or really cold can be an issue. Anything that's carbonated can be an issue. Anything that is low in fat, like low fat, fat free foods, the reason that that can be an issue is when you add extra fats to foods, it helps to slow down the movement of food through your system. So actually including foods that have a little bit more fat in them would be okay. Probably the issue with something like coconut milk, for example, is that that's A liquid, so it's going to empty really fast and cause that same type of nausea. Whereas if you were to do coconut milk with something like protein powder and some almond butter and some nuts and things like that, that would empty a little bit more slowly. Milk sugar tends to be an issue. Usually you want to drink things that are lactose free or just don't drink milk at all. And avoid dairy products, foods that are sugary and sweet, those tend to empty a little bit more quickly as well. And then if you drink water or any other liquids with your meals, that can also kind of increase this dumping syndrome. So, you know, it does make life kind of tough. But some of the things that you can do first of all is chew your food as completely as you can. Take a digestive enzyme supplement, preferably just so that you help out with the digestion of the food that you're missing out from having only part of your stomach there. Don't eat foods that have a lot of fiber in them, so it's easier for your digestive system to move stuff through the tract. And you can still include protein rich food. You can still include eggs and meat and fish. You can include legumes and seeds and nuts, preferably in their soaked or sprouted forms. You can include vegetables and fruits, but only in moderation because you don't want to do a lot of fiber. But the most important thing is that you not be drinking a lot of liquids with your foods, that you avoid really hot stuff, really cold stuff, and that you understand that anything that is kind of of a texture that appears that it may move through your system pretty fast, you'll want to avoid and you'll instead want to choose stuff that you can actually chew. Last thing to think about is when you're looking at a digestive enzyme, if you do find that you're having difficulty with high fat containing foods, even when they're in chewable form, think about a supplement that could help emulsify that fat and break it down into smaller, more easily absorbed drops. And one of the things that you can do is you can actually take what's called a bile supplement. So your liver actually makes bile and that gets stored in your gallbladder. And then. And when you eat a fat laden food, the gallbladder kind of basically squirts this bile into the intestine to help with fat digestion. And if you have difficulty digesting fats, taking a bile supplement. It's actually one of the more popular ones, is just called ox bile. It's been used for a very, very long time as a food supplement. That's something that you can take. It's something that helps out folks who. I've had a gallbladder removal as well. Well, so that'll help your digestive tract with digesting essential fats. And yeah, you know, I'm not a doctor. I don't want this to be mispercepted as medical advice. But those are some of the things that I would, I would consider and that about totally taps out my knowledge on the stomach. So hope that helps.

All right, well, I was gonna, I was gonna jump in with some, some extra questions because it got so my interest piqued. But I guess you're right. This isn't a medical podcast. I should leave that for a different show, I guess. And we'll go on.

And remember folks, you can always ask follow up questions in the show notes too. And you know, question like this, I know that, you know, we definitely want to address questions that you guys have and I'll try and put a spin on them to make them useful for everybody. But you know, I know that we don't have of a ton, ton of listeners who have had gastrectomies, for example, so I don't want to, you know, spend too much time answering questions like that. But at the same time, if you guys have follow up inquiries, things like that, just leave them on the show notes.

Yeah, well, and as we've noticed too in the, over the last, well, last little while anyway, people who are reading the show notes and commenting in the show notes are often experts in their own field as well. So it's a great place to start a good conversation.

Yeah. And speaking of comments on the show notes, if you guys didn't go check out the pictures of my brother that I put up fitness.com, we got a lot of comments on that one. My brother is a model and he's eating a low carbohydrate diet. I help him out with his diet. I posted his diet plan and also some pictures of him. He's really a beast. He's like 6 5, 230 pounds and he's a big dude, doesn't eat many carbs. Put a picture of him up there if you want to check it out. It's over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com it's pretty impressive.

And he is married with children. Just before you get too excited, ladies, our next question comes from Nancy.

Hello, Ben. My name is Nancy Valli. I'm taking Living Fuel Super Greens. I Was advised to just take half the dose because I'm small. And I'm also on Soleil Himalayan crystal salt. I'm having a lot of health issues, and they can't get to the bottom of it. Anyway, I have iron overload in my body, but I don't have the disease called hemochromatosis. And I notice that the living fuel has 40% iron. They told me to stay away from iron, food and stuff, food containing iron and stuff like that, but it says it detoxifies. So I just want to know if I'm doing something right or wrong. Bye.

Okay, so iron overload. Just the basics of how that works is normally you've got this regulatory mechanism in your gut where cells in your gut can sense how much iron that you actually have in your body stores. And when your body stores of iron are low, your cells absorb more iron from your gut. And when your body stores of iron are where they're supposed to be or sufficient, you don't absorb as much iron. But you can have, like, a mutation in your gene, and it's called hemochromatosis, and it's a somewhat common genetic mutation. But what it does is it inhibits the body's ability to communicate with how much iron that it actually has. So the cells in your gut absorb way too much iron, and you get more and more iron stored up in the body because the body can store iron. And so if you get exposed to an iron supplement, like in this case, like a meal replacement food that has some extra iron added to it, or even if you're using lots of cast iron cookware, anything like that could actually cause iron overload.

Really. Like cooking in a cast iron frying pan really can transfer that amount of iron into the food.

It can. People with anemia or people with low iron levels can actually benefit quite a bit from using cast iron. Of course, in this case, on the flip side, if you've got iron overload, you'd want to be fairly careful with that because, you know what can happen is you can get iron deposition in your joints and arthritis in guys. You can get basically testicular failure. You can get diabetes because your pancreas, the islet cells in your pancreas that produce insulin, those eventually can kind of get tapped out. If you've got too much iron, you can get some serious, like, psoriasis, type of damage to your liver, cardiomyopathy. So some issues with your heart when you have too much iron. So, I mean, it certainly is an issue. It's the same reason that anybody who's taken an iron supplement or like a, you know, some type of a. Like a. Like a ferrous pyrophosphate type of. Type of ferritin storage protein supplement or anything else like that, you need to test. You can't just like, blindly use iron supplements without actually testing your iron levels. So it's annoying, but it's also fairly recommended. The thing is, though, that hemochromatosis has been an issue for such a long time that, you know, essentially medicine has pretty much had two main fixes for it. One is bloodletting or phlebotomy, where you actually give blood every now and again. It's one of the reasons that women with iron overload who are having their period tend to have fewer issues than men because they do lose a little bit more blood on a regular basis, whereas men may need to be giving blood via phlebotomy. The other thing that is done is chelation therapy, where you actually take a medicine that chelates iron or helps to remove iron or other metals from the blood. In the case of pharmaceuticals, a lot of them are designed to just treat iron overload, like deferoxamine or deferocyrox. These are pharmaceutical medications that you take that are specifically designed to collate iron. If you go over to alternative medicine, there's a lot of natural chelation compounds that you can get. Like zeolite is one popular one. Clay in many cases, like bentonite, clay that you eat is something else. An alternative medicine that's used for chelation therapy. It's also used in folks who've been exposed to radiation, as well as liver cleanses and stuff like that. The issue is that in many cases, if you overdo that type of stuff, it not only can kind of keep iron from building up in the bloodstream, but you can also kind of leach a lot of minerals from your body. So you need to be careful. You can't just, you know, blindly dump a bunch of zeolite into the body and not chelate. Potentially some. Some of the minerals that you actually do need as well. So you need to be careful with this stuff and not use it in excess. But you also need to be careful with iron supplements as well. So what I would do is, you know, in something like in this case where, you know, you don't want to use something like living fuel super grains because it has some added iron, just use an alternative green supplement. You know, for example, there's. There's three that I recommend. One is the super Greens, and that's A full on meal replacement drink with calories. It's the same one that I travel with that I use as a meal replacement when I'm on an airplane or, you know, in a hotel or something like that. But there are a couple others that I recommend that don't have calories in them that are just like, you know, powders that you add to water or you know, to whatever, coconut milk or something like that. They're going to have a little bit lower levels of iron as well. One is Ener prime and the other one is Capra Greens. And I can put a link to both of those in the show notes. But yeah, that's kind of the deal with iron and what I would recommend. Again, I'll throw this in there. I know it's annoying, but I'm not a doctor. That's not medical advice. Those are just some of my thoughts on iron and iron overload.

All right, let's move on to the question from Graham. And Graham said that just catching up on some old episodes and listened to episode 175 and the interview with Hammer Nutrition ultra cyclist Steve Bourne. He's got two questions. First question is I'm hearing a seeming contradiction where you have talked regularly about fasting overnight and doing a morning session to promote fat burning based on a low glycogen state. In the interview, Steve Bourne said that waking up, you still have your muscle glycogen full and you are almost ready to race. And if racing, you only need 1 to 300 calories, which sounds very different to my belief that we are in a low glycogen state. Do I understand this correctly? So that's the first question. Do you want to do that one.

First and then sure, let's, let's address that one first. So when you wake up, you do have your muscle glycogen levels full. Basically, that's your storage carbohydrate levels. It's because you have multiple sources of glycogen in your body, multiple places where your body can store carbohydrate. But two places are your primary places where you store carbohydrate. One is your muscle, where you can store a lot of carbohydrate, like 2000 calories worth. The other is your liver, where you can store anywhere from, depending on the size of the liver and the size of the person, 200 to 400 calories of carbohydrate. So typically when you're sleeping, your body is going to tap a little bit into your liver's glycogen stores, but not so much into your muscles glycogen stores. So when you wake up, yes, you do have your muscle glycogen levels full and you could go out and you could exercise to the capacity of up to 2000 calories and be able to be just fine with that type of fasted workout. That's not to say that you should do that, because when you tap out your muscles glycogen stores, you do get a pretty big cortisol release and you can get some immune system suppression going on, which is why I never recommend doing hard morning workouts or very long morning workouts in that fasted state. However, if you're just getting up, and in this case in my interview with Steve Bourne, you're going to go do a century bike ride or this really long endurance event, what you can do is when you wake up, instead of going to the pancake feed or whatever else they have before an event like that, you instead just wake up, you get ready, you get on your bike without eating breakfast, and you start pedaling. You haven't really pre initiated the process of burning carbs preferentially over fat. The reason for that is when you get up in the morning and you're in a fasted state and you eat some carbohydrates, what that does is it increases your respiratory exchange ratio. And what the respiratory exchange ratio is, is it's a ratio of carbon dioxide produced to oxygen consumed. And an increase in the respiratory exchange ratio or an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide that you're breathing out indicates a change in energy metabolism, a shift towards carbohydrate utilization. And it simply makes sense. When you eat carbohydrates, your body will shut down fatty acid metabolism a little bit and step up carbohydrate metabolism. Because carbohydrate circulating in your bloodstream, the glucose circulating in your bloodstream, is going to become a preferential energy source. So what you'd rather have is your body for, you know, before a long endurance event, not tapping into carbohydrates, it's not shifting carbohydrate metabolism, but rather staying in fat metabolizing mode, which is what you'll be in as you're sleeping. So the idea is you get up, you get on your bike, you start pedaling, and you wait until you're 40 to 60 minutes into that ride before you start consuming carbohydrates. What you have done in that case is put your body into more of a fatty acid metabolizing mode and kept yourself from getting basically kind of pre tapping into your muscles storage carbohydrate because you put yourself into carbohydrate burning mode. So it's simply kind of playing some tricks on your respiratory exchange ratio and keeping yourself in fat burning mode for as long a period of time before going into a hard or, I'm sorry, not a hard endurance event, but like a long endurance event. On the flip side to that, or in contrast to that, I wouldn't do this before something like say an Ironman triathlon for example. And the reason for that is because you actually do use a lot of carbohydrate just right off the bat going into an event like that. Steve Bourne's example was when he was doing like 5 day long cycling events where your intensity is probably close to half that of what you'd be at during an Ironman. So understand that we're also looking at kind of an ultra, ultra endurance scenario versus something like a triathlon or a marathon or something like that.

I think one of the things to point out as well is when you talk about doing a fasted workout in the morning, you're also talking about not having eaten anything since dinner the night before. Like having dinner at like 6, 7pm and then it's a 12 or 15 hour fast. And when Steve Bourne was talking about it, I don't think he was, he was including any sort of like limiting your calorie intake the night before.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, you all need, you need, you need to look at the scenario that you're in and if it's been, you know, 15 hours since you've last eaten, then you've probably tapped out your liver's glycogen stores and you've kind of launched into your muscles glycogen stores. And you just need to listen to your body. Typically if you're really hungry going into a workout, it's better that you would have eaten something. If you're fine just rolling out and you don't get hungry until you're 40 to 60 minutes in, then that's okay in most cases.

Okay. So the second part of the question is he says, Steve Bourne says on a long event you can get two thirds of your energy from fat. My understanding was that 20 to 40% is as high as you can expect. Is this simply because the, the intensity is super low for ultra endurance, which I guess you kind of answered already.

Yeah. I mean, take your maximum heart rate, you know, and think about 65 to 70% of your maximum heart rate. If you look at exercise physiology lab values for someone exercising at 65 to 70% of their maximum heart rate. Average values you're going to see are about 60% from 80 fat and 40% from carb in terms of utilization. So even at what you may consider to be a six and a half seven on a scale of one to ten, you're still using more fat than carb. And when you get into the much lower intensities, you know, the 40 to 50% of something like an ultra endurance event, you know that fat can get skewed up towards 70 to 80% of your of what you're using as an energy source. So the answer is yes, for endurance activities, you do use a great deal of fat. But it all depends on intensity too. I mean, you take somebody who's doing, you know, let's use Ironman triathlon as example. A novice who's doing Ironman triathlon in 15 to 17 hours is going to be going at a lower intensity and burning more fat as a fuel and may need to take on fewer carbohydrates. A professional triathlete doing Ironman in eight to eight and a half hours is going to be ramped up much closer to maximum heart rate the whole time and be burning a much higher percentage of carbohydrate. And you'd eat more carbohydrates. So it depends on the situation that you're in and the intensity that you're at too.

Yeah. All right, well, let's move on to the next question from Jim. Jim says, just wanted to know if you have any info on light olive oil versus extra virgin olive oil. I used to use the extra virgin but start to get nauseous. So I've been using light olive oil on my salads, but didn't know if this stuff was healthy.

Well, the extra virgin olive oil, I mean, for anybody who's tried to dump some of that into a shot glass and take it down, it's pretty aromatic stuff. I mean, good extra virgin olive oil. It's got a high amount of what's called the oleic acid in it. And that's where you get some of that aroma. It can cause nausea just based off of its intense flavor. So I've certainly experienced that before. Just like in olive oil stores kind of taste testing their extraversion olive oil. You can get a little bit of almost like a gag reflex when this stuff has that super intense aroma. So, you know, it's usually not some type of an extra virgin olive oil allergy as much as it is Just a reaction to the intense flavor of the stuff. So the difference between extra virgin olive oil and light olive oil is that light olive oil is less pure. So it's refined past the extraction process using mechanical or thermal or chemical method. And what you get is an oil that has less color, it has less taste, but also it does have a higher smoke point. It is a little bit better to cook with. It's going to have a little bit lower levels of some of the, the healthier properties that an extra virgin kind of less refined olive oil is going to have. But you know, for example, I always have two types of olive oil around. I've talked about this on the show before. I have a regular olive oil for cooking and an extra virgin olive oil which again has a little bit higher levels of that, that heart healthy oleic acid in it for, you know, like salad dressings and things like that, or just putting on some, throwing on some tomatoes with some crackers and some sea salt, that type of thing. So ultimately, I think it's best to have two types of olive oil around. If extra virgin olive oil kind of gives you that little bit of a nausea, try something else for your cold oil. Try like a flaxseed oil. That's a fairly decent oil with a good omega 3 fatty acid profile. That would be really the main one I'd consider. Grapeseed oil potentially could be another.

Yeah, I like the grapeseed oil. It's pretty tasty. And yeah, it doesn't have that flavor punch that the extra virgin olive oil does, but it still has that nice texture.

Jim must not have Mediterranean genes.

Must not. Or maybe he left his extra virgin olive oil in a warm cupboard for too long and that's. It's gone a little rancid.

Yeah, that's a good point. The stuff can go rancid pretty easily. So keep it out of the sun and the heat for sure.

All right, well, let's move on to the next question. And it's the fellow who asked this question, asked it to be anonymous, but I just want to say, like there's. Don't, don't be embarrassed about this. Obviously we'll keep it anonymous because you asked, but it's nothing to be ashamed of. I'm an ultra runner trying to get rid of a nasty case of jock itch. I tried the toxic over the counter products, but it won't go away. Before I make a doctor's appointment, I want to see if you have any alternative ideas to deal with this. Because of my ultra running, I spend several Hours in sweaty under armour on race day. And I may be in the same compression shorts for 24 plus hours. I purchased oil of oregano from your site. I slathered it on last night and it burned like hell. I can imagine. It was like fire. Can you talk about Ji. Oh, jock itch. How to use oil of oregano to treat it and any other recommendations to get rid of it. Also, he asks, is it contagious? To my girlfriend.

Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, you talk about something not to be embarrassed about. I mean, I'm currently fighting off a little bit of like a. Like a saddle sore issue myself. And, you know, not to gross people out, but I mean, saddle sores can basically kind of get filled with inflammation and white blood cells and have some fluid seeping from them and they can, you know, essentially in many cases get infected and spread. And I've, you know, for the past few weeks I've been fighting against that. Just, you know, based off of rioting and heat and humidity and, you know, it's just kind of the nature of the beast when you're doing these activities that combine sweat and humidity and heat and clothing friction. You know, something like jock itch, that's a fungal infection. You get it in the warm, moist areas of your body, like your inner thighs and your butt and your genitals, and it kind of causes this red, itchy type of rash. And in a case like that, natural topical antifungals can come in quite handy. Some of the best ones that you do want to be careful with, because any of these type of oils, they can burn a little bit if they aren't diluted properly. Oregano oil certainly can be like that. And if you find that you put oregano oil on your skin and it burns, just mix it up, get some olive oil or any other type of oil will work and basically dilute your olive oil. You can also dilute tea tree oil the same way. I've been using magnesium chloride with some drops of oregano oil and tea tree oil mixed into it. And that has a good kind of topical antibacterial antiviral effect that you can rub into a muscle. But oregano oil and tea tree oil work really, really well as topical antifungals. I'm huge fans of those. I'm also a big fan for something like jock it. Just using hydrogen peroxide. It responds really well to hydrogen peroxide. Another topical kind of antiviral that you can use is, or, I'm sorry, antifungal that you can use is coconut oil that actually works really well. You can just basically get like an extra version of coconut oil and that rubs into any of those areas really well. I would also be looking at this from a gut standpoint and I would be ingesting foods that are going to have a natural antifungal effect and can affect skin conditions as well. Two things I would take that I personally been taking a ton of in the past few weeks is garlic. Just basically take some garlic cloves and fry them up in some grass fed butter or some coconut oil or some olive oil. The other thing is turmeric. And you can either take turmeric, you can take a couple teaspoons of it and dissolve it in hot water and drink it like tea. I personally don't enjoy the flavor of that. So what I do is I've been seasoning at least one meal per day with a high amount of turmeric and then taking turmeric capsules. Capsules, typically about five or six turmeric capsules per day. And those have the curcumin in them, which is going to be a natural antifungal as well. So from an oral standpoint, I do the garlic and the turmeric and then topically I'd consider oregano oil, but I dilute it if it burns your skin a little bit. I am a huge fan of oregano oil for both oral and topical use as antifungal as like when you're traveling a way to kind of stop airborne pathogens from giving you colds and attacking your immune system. You can definitely though dilute it even further if you don't like the way it feels on your skin. The one that I have that I use that is the private Ben Greenfield fitness labeled oregano oil is mixed in a 7 to 1 ratio with Almond oil that is usually just fine on the skin until you get it in like an open area, like close to a wound or close to an aggravated area. And I found that it can burn in that situation and cause an unpleasant sensation. So in that case you can dilute it even further by mixing it into some olive oil. Or like doing what I do, put some drops of it into magnesium chloride, like the spray on magnesium chloride, and then mix that with tea tree oil. And that works really well. And then of course, like, just like cotton, cotton ball, hydrogen peroxide works pretty well also. So that's what I would do. And yeah, by using that type of treatment, typically you can see something like that go away within one or two weeks.

So I Know, like, guys in general end up with jock itch just because of the nature of the way our bodies are built. But women have a similar problem when they wear their shorts for too long or doing these ultra events where they get the yeast infections. Would you treat that kind of the same way then?

Yep, it's a fungus. And again, we gotta be careful using words like treat because this isn't a medical show. And it seems like we're spending a great deal of this podcast talking about medical issues. But yeah, I mean, that's certainly something that you can try and remember. Only your healthcare provider or your personal physician or your pharmacist can provide you with advice on what's safe and effective in your case for your unique needs. And only they can diagnose you with your particular medical history. But these are just some ideas that I'm going to throw out there that you could try.

Excellent. Let's move on to the next question from Jenny. Jenny says, is there any research that shows whether or not visualizing exercises will help physically strengthen an area of the body? I was thinking that since I cannot exercise my left leg, it still may be helpful to picture myself doing exercises, running and racing. What do you think?

Yeah, you know, I kind of did something similar. There's a really good book out there. It's written by Maxwell Maltz, I think is the author. It's called Psycho Cybernetics and it kind of teaches you how to channel your subconscious to achieve, whether it may be achieving goals that you desire or even achieving physical goals. Kind of the whole concept of the books, the Inner Game of Golf or the Inner Game of Tennis, they're all based off of this Psycho Cybernetics book. And I'll put a link to it in the show notes. But I had a big tennis tournament a couple weeks ago and I was gone doing triathlons and I was over speaking in Dubai and spent a long period of time on a plane and I was playing mental tennis about three or four times. Over that period of time, I did about five to 10 minutes of just mental tennis matches, hitting back and forth, visualizing the serve, visualizing some forehands, visualizing some backhands. And I'm convinced that that's why when I did grab my racket after not hitting for about two and a half weeks, that I felt like I hadn't put it down. And so it can certainly help in that case when it comes to actual strength and an actual physiological response when it comes to muscle producing force, there's very little research there. About it, but there's some. There was a research study done over at the Cleveland Clinic foundation in Ohio that looked at the strength benefits of imagining exercising a muscle. And so what they did was they took a bunch of people and they split them into three groups. And so each group, for 15 minutes a day, five days a week, for 12 weeks in a row, would do a certain exercise. One group would imagine exercising their little finger muscle, another group imagined exercising their biceps muscle. And then a final group was the control group and they didn't do any exercise at all, no imaginary exercise. And then what they did was they tested, they pre tested and then they post tested these folks. And they found that the group that was thinking about exercising their little finger muscle increased the strength of their finger muscle by about 50%. And the group that was just thinking about training their biceps increased the strength of their biceps by 13%, which is actually fairly significant. So they weren't actually contracting the muscle, they were just thinking as strongly as they could about moving the muscle without actually contracting it or moving it. And so the suggestion by the researchers was that you basically get an improvement in the brain's ability to signal muscle activity. So you're essentially increasing muscle power by improving your mental power, your ability to recruit a certain muscle group. I don't really think this is going to put any gyms out of business anytime soon, but it's certainly while you're driving your car and you've got an affected limb that you can't really work out, you can certainly think about contracting it. You could also try other things though. First thing that comes to mind for me would be using something like electrical muscle stimulation, which is going to cause a muscle contraction without requiring you to move the joint. I've got a unit called a compact sport and it just allows me to attach electrodes to a muscle. And when I can't actually use a muscle, I can still. Or when I can't use a joint around a muscle, like let's say the knee's injured and you can't train your quad, you can still put these things in your quad and keep the quad somewhat strong. I personally don't use that much. I use it more for just recovery, just blood flow to a muscle. But it's certainly something that you could think about using would be like electrostimulation in addition to simply imagining the muscle contracting.

I would have hated to be part of that study, especially if I was part of the group that wasn't supposed to imagine exercising, because I'm sure I would several times a day be like, oh, crap, I imagined it.

Yeah.

And you can't undo that.

Yeah, it'd be super tough to control something like that too. But yeah, it's interesting stuff. So I certainly am not going to be riding out the imagine yourself into a triathlon workbook anytime soon.

All right, let's. Let's jump to the next question from Christian. Christian says, I recently saw an infomercial on YouTube for power cranks touting an improvement in running efficiency by using power cranks 30 minutes, three times per week. Running efficiency. Okay, I did read that. Right. Okay, what are your thoughts about this? Please keep us updated on the pod. Oh, yeah. Then he wants to want to remind you to keep. Keep everybody updated on your training and process as you're going through your going pro in triathlon. But the question was about the running efficiency is increased by using power cranks, which is a bicycle piece, isn't is.

It is a bicycle piece. And a lot of folks train with them. As a matter of fact, one of my friends, Angela Nath, who's a really, really good cyclist, she's winning a bunch of half Ironman races this year. She uses them. Bevan Docherty, who's like an Olympic triathlete who's kind of moving into Ironman distance, and he's having great success. He uses them. Leanda Cave, another really good triathlete, uses them. Conrad Stoltz, Melanie McQuaid. There's a lot of folks that use these power cranks now.

These are the ones that they basically move sort of independently. It's not. Not a fixed position, like at 6 and 9 o', clock, basically.

Yeah. So one leg can't help the other leg in making the pedals go around because the cranks are independent. And so it helps you develop more balanced leg muscles on the bike and it helps you train. Your coordination significantly improves your efficiency. Honestly, the only reason I don't have power cranks is just like, I haven't gone on my way yet to buy them or to approach power cranks about a sponsorship. I just, it's just power cranks. Every time I talk about power cranks, I always think, you know, I do need to get some of those things. You know, my business partner at the Rockstar Triathlete Academy, Carey Sullivan, he uses them, he swears by Em. So, yeah, and I'm not really affiliated with power cranks in any way, but. But I certainly would love to get into them at some point in the future because they are used by a lot of really good cyclists. That being said, in terms of running, they have mentioned before that power cranks may improve running economy, but it's kind of the smoking gun type of deal. Basically they're taking power crank, giving them to cyclists and showing that there are certain factors that are affected when you use them on the bike, such as better coordination between your hamstrings and your quadriceps muscles or between your hip flexors and your hip extensors, better utilization of oxygen while riding the bicycle, and overall better coordination. And then they're going on and they're saying, well, you know, all of those factors are also factors that are associated with improved running economy in runners. Therefore power cranks could make you a better runner. I think that that is a huge leap and I certainly would not put much credence into using power cranks to become a better runner. However, I definitely would use them and would recommend that you use them if you want to become a better cyclists. I think that they're great. You know, I personally don't really like recommend them to my athletes and stuff like that or you know, like endorse them just because I personally haven't used them. And you know, when I haven't used a certain tool, sometimes it's tough for me to kind of coach my athletes on how to use them. But at some point here I'm going to start using power cranks and start recommending them a little bit more. But that's the deal with power cranks. So certainly I don't think you can go wrong using them for riding a bike. But I. There's no actual research that shows that they're going to help you be a better runner. All of that's just kind of some smoking gun stuff that power crank says. As far as me going pro as a triathlete and keeping folks updated, I simply have not started training to that level yet. It's just, you know, kids life work has been keeping me incredibly busy. But the goal is at some point this summer to start to amp up my training as soon as life settles down. But at this point I'm still kind of in the 8 to 10 hour a week training scenario.

Well, and you do keep a blog of all your races and stuff. So if you do want to keep up to date on what Ben's doing, like race report wise. And when you went to that training camp in New York, you kept some information on your blog about that, you can always go there. We can put a link to your blog in the, in the show notes here.

Yeah, and you know, my plan is to whip myself into relatively good shape and the ability to be a little bit faster by this winter, by around December or so. So originally I was going to start more intensive training back in May, but here we are in June already and I haven't yet. So hopefully here sometime soon I will, I will start training more.

I have faith. All right, the next question comes from Rob and Rob says, I've been following your posts for some time now and I am impressed. From one professional to another. I really value your professionalism and your competence. Thanks for all you do. I'm a mental health counselor and if I were 10 years younger I would pursue a patient PhD in mental health nutrition. With this said, I was wondering if you would be willing to comment on your thoughts on our poor food choices and mental health. It's my hypothesis that all of the environmental stressors that we are exposed to food leads to the charge of the food leads to the biggest change in the decline in mental health over the last 30 years. What are your thoughts on this? And also work with the very poor. And I am wondering what you would have to offer as advice to me again if this is okay to offer my clients who cannot make the greatest food choices due to limited income. And he goes on a little bit more, but I think that basically sums it up. It's just asking for any sort of advice you have to help out with good nutrition for mental health.

Yeah, I guess first of all, from the mental health standpoint, I've talked about this on the show before, but I believe that the most important factor when it comes to that is getting access to adequate fats and adequate fatty acids and trying to educate folks that that fat free and low fat foods may actually in many cases be more harmful for the body, more deleterious to blood sugar levels and general health and risk for chronic disease, and less helpful to the brain. And I certainly think that that is aggravated even more by the amount of preservatives and potential neurotoxins, you know, like aspartame for example, that you're going to find in processed or packaged foods that unfortunately a lot of folks who are of lower income are choosing, whether it be due to coupon clipping or the perception that those type of foods are cheaper, which they're not actually, or even just a lack of education on how to properly prepare real foods and real ingredients. So you know, first of all, I want to link to an article that was written by a guy who runs a website called Primal Wisdom that kind of, kind of added up what it would look like if you were to go out and get what would be considered a fairly healthy, low risk of chronic disease type of food list and still be able to feed, you know, for example, a family of four on a budget that someone would actually have based off the maximum monthly allotment of food assistance through, for example, in this case the US Government and their supplementary nutrition assistance program or their food stamp program. Essentially the food stamp program comes out to you having access to about in the range of five to six, six dollars a day to spend on food. And the question is on five to six dollars a day, can you actually create a menu that's healthy, that's going to keep a family well fed without increasing risk of chronic disease and potentially giving them the type of fats that are going to support their mental health. Now, in this article that I'll link to foods that were used specifically to achieve this menu, like a food shopping list was beef butter, pork chop, eggs, walnuts, turnip greens. And you could also do like spinach or bok choy or kale or anything like that. Similar prices, broccoli, carrots, red peppers. And then as far as actual vitamins and supplements go, vitamin D supplements and a vitamin K supplement, two supplements which are notoriously deficient in folks, or two vitamins that are notoriously deficient in folks. And this menu for feeding a family of four on a daily basis using those type of foods came out to about $5.40 a day. Just that list of foods in terms of giving folks what they needed. And you could also add in something like a well made bone broth to that. Like literally cook down a chicken car carcass and use the bone broth, which is also very, very inexpensive to do. And you're adding a ton more gut supporting and digestive health supporting nutrients and vitamins and minerals. So that's one example of how you could do it, what a typical trip to the grocery store would look like in terms of being able to eat healthy on a shoestring budget? Of course the there's still an educational component there. You can't just dump a bunch of beef and pork chop and turnip greens and broccoli on the counter and expect someone to actually know what to do with it if the educational process is not there. And that's why I really like the concept of something like if you go to Hulu or there's a number of free websites, Netflix I believe has it as well. Like the Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution show where he goes into These schools and kind of tries to teach the kids how to cook and tries to get the school system to implement some type of education for kids that actually shows them how to prepare foods with raw ingredients. Because that's one of the reasons that folks are turning to the not only more health damaging, but also more expensive packaged and processed foods because they don't know how to properly prepare and cook these foods. So there's certainly an educational component as well. So I am a big fan of introducing some type of food education into the school system or parents taking over that process and teaching their children how to actually prepare foods in the case where parents can't do it, some type of community outreach program that shows how to properly prepare and cook these type of real foods. I'm also a big fan, kind of down along those lines of something like an urban community garden. We have these in Spokane. They're like big, large garden plots that you basically can grow stuff in and you can feed a lot of people with a community garden. And you can also teach people how to grow their own food and make people feel like they're kind of more of a process or more of part of a process of getting their healthy food when they're able to get two or three families together and have a 20 by 20 plot that they can grow carrots and beans and squash and spinach and all sorts of stuff in. And every time that you harvest a crop of fresh vegetables, you've got a ton of extra food and that can be used in a soup kitchen or a local pantry for poor people. It can also just be something that they have, you know, ad libitum access to, to just go and grab when they, you know, like same, same as me. When I, when I have lunch today, I'll walk out in my backyard and I will just rip out a few handfuls of spinach from the garden. And you know, that that is actually less expensive than me going out and buying a $4.99 bag of spinach at the grocery store. So urban community gardens, I'm a huge fan of those in terms of trying to introduce those into more poverty stricken areas as a way for folks to have access to fresh, real food. And then as far as going to the grocery store, like I mentioned, packaged foods, sodas, sports drinks, juices, all of those are expensive. They're more expensive than the natural fruit and vegetable alternatives. And we about, talk, talked about this in the show, I believe in the last podcast about the actual big study that came out that actually compared this stuff and Found that in general, eating healthier is less expensive. Getting frozen foods is fine. Frozen vegetables, a lot of times you can find those on sale, they're cheaper. You can easily stir fry them up with some meats and that's a good way to go as well. I did a ton of frozen vegetables in college just because they keep for a long time. They're easy to get your hands on and a lot of times they're. They're less expensive. I would definitely look into dry foods as well, like dry beans and legumes. If you soak those properly and you can pretty much take any bean on the planet, black beans, pinto beans, white beans, lentils, etc. And you can just Google soak and then the name of the bean that you're looking at, and it'll give you your soaking time and you your temperature and all that. But those are fine as well, and those are super satiating and have really good bang for the buck when it comes to calories and nutrients. So that's something else to look into. And just avoid the middle aisle of the grocery store. Watch the packaged and processed foods. And from a grocery store standpoint, that's a really good way to make sure that you're not throwing a bunch of, of stuff into your cart that you're overpaying for. So obviously we could fill up an entire podcast with the Healthy Eating on a Budget and some more thoughts on kind of getting poor people access to healthy food. But those are some of my initial thoughts kind of rattling around in my brain on this stuff.

Well, and it just sounds like just to sort of bring it back to the initial question, which was really very much around the mental health decline in the last 30 years being tied to perhaps the decline in the amount of good food that people are getting access to. It sounds like you really believe that with this increase in being able to have the access and have the knowledge and understanding of how to create or how to cook properly or put together the foods, that this will have a profound effect on the mental health as well?

Well, certainly, I mean, when you're looking at mental health, you're looking primarily at some type of a neurotransmitter imbalance. And neurotransmitter imbalances are either due to nutritional deficiencies, typically in many cases, deficiency of some type of a protein, because amino acids are used as building blocks for neurotransmitters, or else you're looking at an issue with the gut brain axis, meaning inflammation of the gut affecting mental performance and the brain the intimate connection between the central nervous system and what's called the enteric nervous system or the nervous system and the gut via the vagus nerve. And your gut not only produces about 20% of your body's neurotransmitters, which are crucial to your mental health, but any type of inflammation in the gut or leaky gut syndrome, anything of that nature, can distinctly affect mental performance, well being, mood, et cetera. You know, it's the same reason that, you know, kids with high amount of gluten intake and processed food intake a lot of times tend to have bigger issues with things like adhd, for example, or inability to learn properly. So, yeah, all this stuff is very, very closely related. And there are certainly some other things that can affect neurotransmitter levels, exposure to pollutants, toxins, things of that nature. But food is especially important and access to adequate proteins and fats is very important.

Obviously, there are a lot of psychological disorders and stuff out there that are well beyond a dietary issue that wouldn't suffer from having a better diet, but certainly wouldn't be cured. I don't think you're trying to say that in any way.

No.

But schizophrenia is not going to be cured by a good diet. But it could be helped, certainly couldn't be hurt.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know if we want to open that can of worms, but it may be helped by diet. There could be an argument made for that, but probably beyond the scope of this show at this point.

Yeah, I only wanted to address it because I didn't want anybody to sort of be writing in angrily afterwards saying, are you suggesting that you could cure these vast mental disorders with a little bit of bok choy? We're certainly not saying that exactly, no.

Takes a little bit more than kale to fix depression, but there's definitely a link.

Well, let's move on then. We've got another. Rob wrote in and, and he says in reference to carbs after exercise, about how many carbs should a 150 pound person consume after a one hour weight training session or a one hour long run after weight training? I currently drink a protein shake, eat a turkey wrap and an apple. I also take 1 gram of L glutamine. And after listening to a recent podcast, I'm assuming it would be better to consume the shake at a different time of day, eat more carbs after weight weight and eat more carbs after the weight training. Is this correct? Also, am I wasting the L glutamine by taking it on weight training days and not running days. Can you give me some examples of carbs that would be easy to take with me to consume after weight training? Okay, so that's sort of a separate issue there at the end, but okay, so he's looking at the timing of, of what he's eating here.

Yeah. First of all, as far as the question about L glutamine goes, I'm personally a bigger fan of using a whole amino acid supplement rather than taking just one amino acid like L glutamine. You're typically going to see a better recovery and better protein synthesis response when you use like a whole amino acid powder or a whole amino acid capsule, you know, master amino pattern, for example, is the one that I recommend. However, glutamine is going to to still help. There's research that shows that it can assist with recovery and you could do it after a run or after a weight training session. Either way, you're going to get benefit. Both cause muscle tearing, both can use the help from an amino acid like L glutamine. So in response to the bigger question though, as far as like the post workout carbohydrate, we've all been led to believe that there's this mystical, magical fueling window after a workout where you've got anywhere from 20 minutes to 60 minutes, depending on the article that you read or the book that you read, to replace the energy that you've lost during a workout by consuming this mix of carbohydrates and proteins. The issue, and I've hit on this before a little bit, but the issue is that in every study or every experiment that's investigated the benefit of immediate post workout carbohydrate replacement or protein replacement, subjects in those studies were fed after they completed an exercise they'd done in a fasted or a semi starved state, meaning that they are shown up at that lab in the morning for this test on post workout fuel without having eaten anything. And typically they're at least eight to 12 hours into a fast. And so it goes without saying that of course you're going to benefit if you eat a meal after a workout in which you were completely depleted of energy during that workout. But when it comes to this issue, how many people are actually rolling out of bed in the morning and as they do in these laboratory studies, hopping on a bike and riding to complete exhaustion and complete glycogen depletion for 90 minutes to two hours with absolutely no fuel. It's unpleasant, it's difficult, it's stressful on the body. And it's not a standard workout protocol in most cases. So when it comes to trying to figure out, oh, exactly how much carbohydrate do I eat after a meal or how much protein do I eat after a meal, I don't think you can really look at the research too hard and say, well, it's exactly this much, simply because the research doesn't really match up to real world situations. If you've had a pre workout meal, or you've had any other recent meal prior to a workout, or even if you've eaten during a workout workout, there's no crucial need to eat right after a workout. And that's, that's even more true if you don't have any other workouts planned for the day. Because just by eating when you're hungry over the course of a day, within 8 hours you will have totally replenished your amino acids, your carbohydrates, everything. Okay, so compared to any special laboratory protocol, simply eating when you're hungry, having lunch, snack, dinner, whatever, after you've had a mid morning post breakfast workout or pre breakfast workout that's going to adequately replace everything that you need now post workouts, nutrition replacement becomes more important if you're going to be working out again within four or six or even eight hours after you first worked out. If you're doing a two a day workout, something like that. If you're doing a two a day workout, let's say a swim in the morning and a weight training session in the afternoon, then yes, you may inhibit your performance during the weight training session in the afternoon if you wait two hours after that swim to eat anything. But in most cases I don't find that that's a huge issue with folks. So jumping down into the science, as far as if you are going to optimize post workout nutrition, let's say you have gotten up, you've completely exhausted your carbohydrate stores during an early morning hard exercise session, or you've done an average exercise session, but you've got another exercise session coming up in four to six hours. Based on research, you should be looking for a 3 to 1 ratio of carbs to protein, like a banana smoothie with a handful of nuts and a scoop of protein powder. Or if you have to, even though I'm not a big fan of them, any of these pre engineered recovery drinks like Goo Recovery Brew or Hammer Gel Recoverite and you would basically take in over the course of about four hours after you finish the exercise session. The number of carbohydrates that you've burnt during that session. So let's say you do it a run and you burn 800 calories during that one hour run. Then you would have some type of a meal replacement that's got 400 calories of carbohydrate in it right after the run. And then an hour later you'd have another 400 calories or so of carbohydrate. However, in most cases, it's just not the scenario that you're completely depleting your carbohydrate levels that you have to do something like that. And then the other thing, and then I'll shut up that I want to throw in here is that sometimes it's okay to be in a carbohydrate depleted state, to be forcing your body to burn fatty acids as a fuel. Because even if that inhibits your performance and you may not be able to work out out quite so hard, there are a lot of health benefits from not constantly keeping your carbohydrate levels up and not constantly causing your body to be in this anabolic insulin producing mode. So. Kind of a long answer, I know, but those are my thoughts on that.

All right, our final question comes from James and it's the dreaded cramping question, as he titled it. I'm a competitive age group triathlete and I've been having cramping issues in races. I know the usual answer is you're not training at the same intensity as I race at and or you're not taking in enough nutrition electrolytes. In my case, neither are the issue. I think in brackets. I train 15 to 18 hours per week, which includes a lot of intensity. And I'm spot on with my diet, training, nutrition and race day nutrition. I take all of it very seriously. So when it comes to cramps, I'm stumped. The cramps can come on as early as the swim and often I get them near the end of the bike though and almost guaranteed. Oh, and and also I'm almost guaranteed in the run. So yeah, anytime during the race. I never get them in the in 10Ks or 5Ks, just the longer stuff. Half marathons, Olympic triathlons, and especially half. Half iron mans, half iron men. Do I need to just load up on salt tabs? Tweak the diet? Race week. I eat clean, take hammer race preload and stay hydrated. Avoid coffee on race day. Morning help that got. I was trying to do justice to the.

I thought, I thought it was good, although I was thinking it'd be a little bit more like help. Oh, hiring higher tone.

I don't think I can do that.

With your deep, booming bass voice. Okay, so we've talked about cramping before on the show and the multiple reasons that people cramp. And you could go back and listen to the episode that I did specifically with Tim Noakes, where we talked about how low electrolyte levels and low sodium levels are typically not the reason that someone cramps, simply because the body is very, very good at regulating the electrochemical gradient that is necessary for sustaining a muscle contraction and reducing the risk of cramping. And contrary to what the Gatorade Sports Science Institute would have us to believe, the body does not have very limited amounts of electrolytes to draw on during exercise. And in most cases, from bone and other stores, we can mobilize anywhere from 50 to 70 grams of electrolytes to use, which is enough to get you through, like, a four day death march in the heat without cramping. Okay. So what it comes down to is it's very, very unlikely that it's a low sodium, low electrolyte issue unless you've been on a very low sodium diet, not replenishing electrolytes at all, and you have been doing lots and lots of sweating and mineral loss. So all of that especially is even more relevant when you say that you get cramps that come on as early as the swim in something like a triathlon, which means you're getting them before the point where you could possibly be electrolyte depleted or sodium depleted. So then we got to look at some other reasons that cramping could set in. And there are many reasons that people can cramp. From a medical standpoint, a lot of times cramping can be associated with thyroid issues simply because the thyroid is intimately related to calcium regulation. And someone who is hypothyroid a lot of times can have an issue with calcium. The reason for this is that.

What.

Happens is that when you have these particles outside of your muscle cells that can basically affect the osmotic gradient between the outside of your muscle and the inside of your muscle. So you've got this calcium pump that is between what's called the lumen of your muscle and the sarcoplasmic reticulum, which is the area of your muscle where this osmotic gradient actually lies. And when calcium ions are not getting pumped out of the muscle properly, then they remain bound to the muscle fiber, and that causes this constant muscle contraction that simply doesn't go away. So calcium Dysregulation or somehow that calcium pump being broken can definitely cause cramping. But in most cases, you've got a lot of other issues going on with thyroid and you know, like low metabolism, getting cold a lot, experiencing a lot of fatigue, and, you know, you'd have some other complaints that go way above and beyond cramping if this was a thyroid calcium regulation type of issue. The other type of things that can, that can cause cramping would be an extreme change in temperature, like hot to cold or cold to hot. And it's possible that that could happen if you got these cramps always when you're swimming in extremely cold water or something like that. But it doesn't sound from your description like that's the case. The other thing, though, that can cause cramps is simply contracting a muscle over and above what it's been exposed to repeatedly in training. And I truly believe that in most cases when folks are cramping during workouts or cramping during races, that this is the issue you're calling a muscle to go above and beyond what it's been trained to do in previous training sessions or in training leading up to a competition. And so what the muscle does in that case is it cramps. Basically, the muscle becomes unable to relax because the myosin fibers on the, on the muscle don't detach from the actin filaments. And that can be usually due to an inability for you to be resynthesizing ATP or muscle energy fast enough to cause that dissociation to occur. And it's honestly a training issue. In many cases, the gun goes off in a race, you go out way harder than you do in your training sessions and you get smoked right away and you start cramping. You stopped me in water polo. When I played water polo, I, I would tread and swim in the water way harder than I would during our practices and I would cramp. Part of that was due to the temperature of the water, which aggravates the issue even more. But a big part of it was due to just working out harder than I had exposed my body to previously. So I would consider looking at whether or not you're actually reaching your race pace intensity. And if that's not an issue, you could look at whether or not you're on a low sodium diet where you're adequately hydrated. And then finally, the other thing I would look at would be from a nutritional standpoint only supplement really that I would think of that may be able to help would be coenzyme Q10. That's something that you could technically be deficient in. I don't know if you're on like drugs statins for example, or something that can strip coenzyme Q10 from the body, but a coenzyme Q10 deficiency could cause cramping as well. And that's where you mentioned you used Hammer's Pre Race Load or Hammer's Race Preload to stay hydrated. I think that might be their off the top of my head, I don't remember, but I think it might be their glycerin hyper hydration type of compound. But I would maybe consider taking something like the Hammer's Race caps as well, which is their coenzyme Q10 supplement. And that's the one that I take. So those are some of my thoughts. I'll put a link in the show notes too, to a podcast that I listened to on cramping that really lays some of the reasons for cramping out fairly well. It's by one of my friends, David Warden recorded it on a podcast called Tri Talk, so I'd listen to that. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. I also in my book Top 20 Fueling Myths Exposed, go into the whole electrolytes issue a little bit and I'll put a link to that book in the show notes as well. It's a $7 ebook that I wrote that actually I give it to all my athletes to read actually as a primer just so that they know more than most sports nutritionists know about the most common fueling mix when it comes to sports and exercise and eating and drinking. So I'll put a link to that Fueling Myths Exposed book in the show notes as well. But those are some of my thoughts on cramping and hopefully that helps point you in the right direction.

James, Excellent. And that wraps up today's episode. Now remember yeah, that went really quickly and I guess we'll be back next week. We weren't here last week, unfortunately, because you were off in in Hawaii working your butt off. But we will be here next week and if you want to get any questions on the show, just go over to the to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and there is a little form, an Ask Ben form you can fill out. If you want to do an audio question, you can call the 1-800-OR-SORRY 1-877-209-9439 or Skype 200 Pacific Fit. And all of that is on the website as well. If you go over there I'm glad.

That after our podcasting hiatus we didn't lose our touch.

I don't know, we'll see what the response is.

I think that went great. So I know you probably got to tend to your clown makeup, Brock, so I'll let you go. Yeah, my hair is going limp, by the way. This Friday, great exercise. Coming up on our great, great podcast. Coming up on how to Sleep Better. And I interview a guy who developed this piece of technology I've been putting underneath my mattress every night. So I got him on the phone to talk about it. So it should be interesting. So tune in this Friday or Saturday depending on when I get a hankering to release it to hear more about that. So until next time, this is Ben and Brock signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com did.

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