Episode #204: How To Modify Your Exercise And Nutrition As You Get Older

In today's podcast, how to modify your exercise and nutrition as you get older. Also, healing a broken foot, dealing with an eating and or exercise disorder, post workout nausea using the most fit suspension system. Does your body self limit? Healing your gut after radiation therapy, ammonia in your sweat and can green coffee bean extract hurt your workouts?

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

Hey.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. I'm Brock. And of course we couldn't do the show without him. Ben is here too.

And I'm sitting up very, very straight right now.

Nice. Why so erect?

I'm wearing Intelliskin.

What?

Intelliskin. It's this special T shirt that like it. It makes you have really, really good posture. It's embedded with what's called posture Q technology. And you put it on, you zip it up and.

And it shocks you every time you try to slouch.

Exactly. Yep, yep. No, it's got like this fabric in it that. Yeah, just like, it's. It's kind of cool. It's like compression gear for your upper body, but it's also got these little like ribbed posture things kind of built into it. So.

So does it get rigid like so you can't slouch? Like, does it hold you in place or is it just more the sort of squeezing that reminds you to sit up?

Kind of a little bit of both, I think. But considering I usually just podcast in my boxers, I feel like I'm dressed up right now.

I'm podcasting in a toque and mitts and parka right now because I'm in Edmonton, Alberta, way up north. It's freezing here. It's freezing. It's ridiculous. Why do people live here?

I don't know. What are you doing in Edmonton?

My mom's here.

Okay.

And my sister and my niece and nephew and all the rest of the crazy family.

I'm coming to Canada next week.

Oh yeah? For Ironman.

Yeah. I've got some athletes that I'm coaching in Ironman Canada. So I'm gonna come up there. So any listeners who are. Who are up there in Penticton, other side of the country, from. From Edmonton, but be up there doing The Canadian thing, so. Awesome.

Well, make sure you eat your fill of poutine.

I will. And I'll get my hands on some of that. Some of that. Kokanee just got back from the Ancestral Health Symposium.

Oh, and was that in Washington?

It was in Boston at Harvard. Harvard University, yeah. So I got to pretend to be a college student for a few days.

Did you get some audio stuff of anything you're going to put on the site or podcast?

No, no, it was too busy. But I hooked up with some very cool people who I'm going to get on for interviews. Some folks who have been on before and also some new people. So there's going to be some really, really good stuff coming forward on the podcast from very, very progressive thinkers who I met over there in the fields of everything from like genetic testing, like affordable genetic testing, to more stuff on like, like higher intensity training in a ketogenic or a low carb state. Just hooked up with a lot of cool people. So I will certainly be bringing some. Some good interviews here coming down the pipeline. Very cool. Yeah. So what do you think?

Kick it in the butt.

News flashes.

All right. Twitter.com BenGreenfield and of course the Google link that is impossible to read out. But just go to the website and you can follow the links. There is always the place to find all kinds of really cool and interesting news stories and a lot of studies. So what do you want to highlight this week?

Oh, man, there's so many things going on right now in research that I wanted to mention, but just a few things today. One was a tweet that I put out about a good reason for all you hot mamas out there to drink more wine. And this was actually a study that was done. It appeared in the journal Menopause, but it's called moderate alcohol intake lowers biochemical markers of bone turnover in postmenopausal women. And essentially what it found was that women who were drinking the equivalent of about a glass of wine a day actually had decreased markers of bone turnover and possible cellular mechanisms going on for increased bone density. And that would be considered moderate alcohol consumption, one glass of wine a day. But I know that there's a lot of healthy postmenopausal women out there enjoying their nightly glass of wine. And I certainly see no reason to give that up.

So bone turnover would be just sort of regeneration, like the sloughing off of some cells and the regeneration.

Yeah.

And that's a good, healthy thing to have happen.

Yeah. You basically see an increased activity of osteoblasts which are your bone building cells. Beautiful. So, yeah, tip back that Cabernet or Merlot or whatever your weapon of choice is. Ladies.

I like a nice Shiraz, ladies, if you're buying.

And Brock, of course, is postmenopausal.

Of course.

Another one that I noticed was a study on comparing different fats and their ability to produce appetite satiation, or specifically to increase levels of the hormones that are responsible for making us less hungry and decreased levels of our hunger hormones, like ghrelin, for example. This study, which incidentally was done on rodents, so you always have to take it with a grain of salt, but it looked at the effects of saturated fat. So basically like butter, rodents eating sticks of butter, olive oil, which is basically like a monounsaturated fat, fish oil and then soybean oil. And they basically compare these different fats to see which ones stabilize the appetite best. And I would have thought that butter would be the most satiating fat because.

It'S an animal fat.

Yeah. And I mean, heck, it's butter.

It's delicious and wonderful.

Yeah. And incredibly filling. But it turned out that. So, yeah, fish oil and olive oil beat out the butter and also beat out the soybeans. So it was basically fish oil and olive oil and then butter and then soybeans. So for those people who are wanting snack on forms of fat that are going to satiate the appetite, doing some things that are soaked in olive oil or macadamia nut oil would be similar to olive oil. Having some salmon or some fish oil or some cod liver oil or even artichoke oil is similar to an olive oil too, in terms of its biochemistry. It's all going to be better than choosing a saturated fat, something like a coconut oil or a butter.

So that's pretty cool. Next time I'm hungry, I'm going to have a tablespoon of olive oil.

I'm drinking it right now, just a big glass. That's why my voice sounds so smooth and silky. It's my secret. So another interesting study came out on dietary total antioxidant capacity and metabolic syndrome. So metabolic syndrome is resistance to insulin and high blood sugars and all the different things that go on metabolically that increase your risk of. Of chronic disease and dying a horrible painful death. Basically, high dietary antioxidant intakes were shown to have a favorable effect on metabolic disorders in this study. It's no surprise, I'm sure, to folks that having your antioxidants actually helps out quite a bit. But you don't have to Go out and buy a fancy bottle of acai juice or Monavie or something like that to get what you need. This study in terms of having this enormous effect on risk of disease and actually about a 38% decrease in the risk of obesity, basically the total antioxidants consumed were the equivalent of about a handful of nuts and a piece of fruit. Wow. So you don't have to go out of your way to do high dose antioxidants. Granted, there may be a greater need for that among folks who are really beating up their bodies quite a bit like athletes and highly, highly active individuals. But it's interesting how much of an effect just a handful of nuts and a piece of fruit a day can have.

That's fantastic.

And then finally, cow's milk versus goat's milk. There was an interesting comparison on estrone and estradiol levels in people who were consuming cow's milk versus goat's milk. And it was found that a dairy source from cow's milk caused much, much higher levels of estrogen compared to goat milk. I'm sorry, didn't cause higher levels of estrogen, contained higher levels of estrogen in the actual milk. So for anybody who's concerned with limiting their estrogen intake, goat milk is definitely a better dietary choice. If you're concerned about things guys for man boobs or women for estrogen dominance, for example, doing dairy on a daily basis from commercial dairy sources is probably not the best idea. And of course this was a study on commercial dairy sources. It did look at things like raw, organic, grass fed cows or anything less than simply the average grocery store milk. But regardless, it's interesting to know for people.

Yeah. So it's still nowhere near the effect that soy milk would have.

I would be interested to see that study because soy milk does have a very profound effect on estrogen levels.

So they didn't have that as part of the study though.

Yeah, I haven't seen a commercial dairy versus soy milk study. But ultimately there's one more point for the goats.

Go goats. So just one, one quick question only. I want to bring this up because it was all over the news here in Canada and I'm assuming it probably because it was actually a British study. It was probably all over the world, but there were like headlines like crazy over the last two days saying that egg yolks were as dangerous as smoking in terms of cardiovascular disease. Yeah. Did you see that?

Well, my Twitter feed was blown up this morning when I woke up, people asking me about it. That study didn't control for dietary factors like sugar consumption, grain consumption, vegetable oil consumption, all the things that are capable of, of oxidizing cholesterol, oxidizing, for example, the cholesterol that you might get from an egg yolk and making it into the small oxidized, low density lipoprotein cholesterol particles that are more likely to dig into your arterial wall and increase risk of atherosclerosis. Didn't look at any of that. And so certainly if you're eating a high fat diet or if you're eating a lot of eggs, especially with yolks intact, it's very, very prudent to limit your vegetable oil intake. You know, to not be cooking those bad boys in canola oil or margarine or something like that. It's also important to be limiting your sugar intake, meaning don't have a glass of orange juice with your eggs and also your grain intake. You know, avoid having eggs with toast. And you know, all these type of things were not controlled for in that study. So, you know, for people out there who are doing like a, like a three egg omelet in the morning with maybe some spinach and some goat cheese and you know, cooking that in some, some butter or some coconut oil or some ghee or something like that, there's, there's really not much to be concerned about here.

Awesome. That's, that's what I thought. But I thought you should get it right from the man and let everybody know because it seemed to be really causing a stir on, like you said on Twitter and Facebook and stuff.

Stuff. Yeah. And I mean, it's one of my favorite things in the morning to stand up in the kitchen poaching my egg and pulling on my cigarette. So, yeah.

Special announcements.

Okay, so on BenGreenfieldFitness.com this week, there was a great post and a little video where you went through all the results of your blood tests and your urine tests and your saliva tests and everything from Wellness fx. That's pretty cool. It's pretty neat the way you can track it over time too.

It's so easy to do. And for those of you who didn't check out that post, it was basically a crash course on finding out what's happening inside your body. The post is still up over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com you can go check it out. I walk you through how to do things like allergy testing for certain proteins that you might be allergic to, how to get a full on blood panel and do it easily without having to guess on the lab results and use something like the Wellness FX Dashboard to really be able to see what's going on and be able to ask an online doctor questions about what you're seeing. And then also went into a little bit about hormones, but also a little bit about blood typing and secretor typing, which is something that I haven't really done myself much, but I did get done just because I wanted to look into as many parameters as possible. And I'm actually there will be a part two because I'm also doing some nutrient analysis, some mineral tests and also genetic testing. And so I'll put all that up in a part two here sometime in the next month or so. But I would definitely go through and read that post that I did. I mean self quantification is very easy to do and it's actually very, very affordable now. So yeah, I would definitely recommend that you check out that post over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com the other thing that I wanted to mention to folks was that for people living in the Spokane or Coeur d' Alene area, my wife and I will be teaching a class on lacto fermentation and making your own probiotic rich foods. That's going to be on August 23rd, which is a Thursday. It's in the evening at 6:30pm over at Pilgrim's Market. So we'll be really geeking out on making yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi and just all the do's and don'ts when it comes to homegrown bacteria. So cool.

Yeah, and it's so much easier and so much better to get your probiotics from fermented sources rather than from pills because you'd have to take so many pills to get the trillions of bacteria you get from really just a serving of a really well made yogurt or kefir or any of those kinds of things.

I'd take a sauerkraut on a nice sausage any day over a probiotic pill. Yeah, absolutely. And then I would like to officially say that this is the last call for you to go to party in Thailand this winter with me, Brock and other folks. I don't know how to say party in Thai, but it's, it's going to be a ton of fun. We're doing two triathlons over there. Don't worry if you try to register for the Laguna Phuket triathlon, I can get you into that, even if it appears to be full. If you're going with our group, it's going to Be a fantastic time. We'll put a link in the Show Notes where you can go check out the full itinerary of everything that we're doing. But you only live once, and this is the opportunity of a lifetime to go have a lot of fun and do it in a very cool place. So this is the last call. We're pretty much shutting this thing down over the next week in terms of letting anybody else in. So there's that. And you can check out the link to that in the Show Notes. And finally, this podcast is brought to you, of course, by audiblepodcast.com Ben?

Yeah, where they.

It's actually brought to you by audiblepodcast.com but if you go to audiblepodcast.com Ben Brock, what. What cool things do people get?

Well, you get a free book when you first sign up, so if you're already a member, you don't get that. But when you sign up, you. You'll get a free download. So you can really pick any book you want. And I'd. I'd just search through for the longest one. You can actually sort by length and get the absolute, like, get like the complete works of William Shakespeare.

So quality does not matter at all to Brock.

It does not matter. Get the 50 shades possible. 50 shades of gray, the extended version.

That would be interesting.

Yeah. I hope that doesn't exist.

Yeah, no. Fifty Shades of Gray. I'm gonna listen to that in the car with my kids. We're gonna go to a fishing trip this weekend. And 50 shade gray, I hear it's really good.

What's a Nipple?

It's the top ranked book in Audible, so you could get 50 shades of gray.

But yeah, there's hundred. I think there's over a hundred thousand audiobooks to choose from. And I noticed that there's actually the. Danny Dreyer, the Key or Chi Running guru, has both the running and the walking book up there, and they're actually read by him, which I thought was pretty cool because he's actually got a very soothing voice. He's a very relaxed fellow.

Yeah, yeah. So you could. You could listen to the Chi Walking, the Chi of Running. Those are both really good books. And Danny's been on this podcast, and if you're interested in kind of getting your biomechanics styled in, that'd be great because you could listen to it while you're running. So very cool. So check out audiblepodcast.com.

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If you or your family want to learn how to achieve the ultimate healthy lifestyle on a budget, then the Ben Greenfield Fitness Inner Circle is for you. Get four free videos to get you started and full access to the inner circle@BenGreenfieldFitness.com inner circle that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com innercircle We'll see you inside.

Listener Q and A okay, everybody, thanks for doing all the awesome questions. As usual, there are tons and tons rolling in and we of course have the big backlog, so don't freak out if you don't hear your question right away. It's in the queue and it'll likely show up in the next few weeks. But let's start with our first audio question from Tony.

Hi Ben and Brock. My name is Tony and I have a question about I recently broke a bone in my foot and I'm looking for your advice, Ben, on both the nutritional side and supplement side to recover from this injury and also any advice you have on ways to stay cardiovascularly fit while I'm on crutches for the next eight weeks. So any advice you have, I'd really appreciate it and really enjoy the podcast and keep up the great work. Alright, thanks guys. Bye.

Yeah, I think the staying fit while on crutches is probably the most difficult part.

Yeah. Have you ever been on crutches?

I have, yeah. It's terrible. Not only do you have trouble moving around, but the armpit pain, I remember being quite upsetting.

Chafing. Chafing in the armpit sucks. Yeah, just the pain. But yeah, there's certainly things that you can do to stay fit when you're on crutches and also touch on that bone healing component too, just to kind of help you speed things up. Because there's some definite things you can do to speed up bone healing as far as staying active and maintaining your cardiovascular fitness when you're on crutches. If you're not going to be able to use the water for fitness, which we've talked about before on the podcast as being a definite option for many soft tissue and bone injuries. You know, kind of depends on if you're casted, you know, whether you're able to perform aquatic therapy or you're just kind of limited to Land based exercises. But let's say you're not able to get in the water and do any swimming or aqua jogging or anything like that. One of the things that I really like and that I used many times when I've been injured in the lower body are those upper arm ergometers at the gym. Have you ever seen those?

Yeah. Yeah. They're like riding a bicycle, but with your hands.

Yep. They're like riding a bicycle with your hands. And you can get a fantastic workout on those. Now they're boring as hell. But if you are able to like just do a quick workout like a Tabata set, meaning go 20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy for about eight times through, that thing can jack your heart rate up through the roof. And I'm a big fan of that. And you can actually put that into a circuit. Like, for example, you can do an upper body training circuit on all the upper body machines, for example, because sometimes free weights are obviously a little hard to deal with when you're on crutches. But you go through an upper body circuit of say like chest press, pull down, shoulder press, seated rows, and you do that minimal rest one exercise to the next and then you go over to the ergometer, you do a Tabata set on the arm ergometer and you go back around to the beginning. That's a really, really great way to get a cardiovascular boost and also really work the upper body at the same time. And of course, you can use your crutches themselves for cardiovascular exercise. It's going to be a little bit strenuous on your shoulders and arms, but I mean, you can walk for 30 seconds or a minute and then you can take a little bit of a break and then you can do it again. And you can certainly use the crutches as part of your aerobic routine as well. Those are some of the ideas that come to mind when it comes to ways that you can stay fit. But yeah, I mean, the arm ergometer is something I swear by when it comes to some of that upper body fitness and cardiovascular capacity.

Tony didn't mention whether he's in a cast or not because that would definitely influence the amount of stuff that you can do. Like not only in the gym, but like you said, staying out of the water. If you've got a cast on, you wouldn't be able to do any aqua jogging. You also wouldn't want to have sweat just pouring down into your cast.

Yep. Yeah. And if you go over to. I did a full on, like podcast on, on all the different things you can do in the water to stay fit. That's over@getfitguy.quickanddirtytips.com so check that out if you are able to get into the water. Tony and then as far as bone healing, some of the better therapeutical modalities for bone healing that I've seen are studies that have been done on the effects effects of ultrasound or ultrasonic waves on bone healing and also low level cold laser therapy. And both of those have been looked at in studies in terms of their ability to show newborn bone formation or to kind of vascularize the connective tissue that helps the bone to heal. And they've both shown pretty good results. You can access like a low level cold laser therapy or ultrasound or ultrasonic waves just about any physical therapist, many alternative medical practitioners have these at their clinics as well. But when used properly, they can certainly help with bone healing. So that's one thing that I would look into for sure, if you want to get into a clinic would be low level laser therapy or like a pulsed ultrasound. In terms of supplements that you could use, the first thing that I would do is of course make sure that you're eating lots of foods that are rich in the minerals that are going to help you to build bone high in calcium or magnesium. As well as doing a trace minerals supplement, you can get liquid trace minerals. Those are important as well. Examples of foods that you would want to include would be if you can tolerate them from a gastrointestinal standpoint, milk and dairy products, preferably in their raw organic versions. Sardines are good. I like any of the kind of the dark leafy green vegetables, bok choy, kale, collard mustard greens, turnip greens, any of those are really, really great for bone health. As far as supplements, best supplement that I've seen in terms of actual research that has shown to be efficacious for bone density and bone healing is lactoferrin. That's a component of Capreflex, which I've talked about before on the show. I'll put a link to Capreflex in the show notes, but it's a bone and joint formula and one of the things that's in it is lactoferrin. And I won't geek out too long on lactoferrin because I've talked about it many times before on the show. But it's basically a protein. It's what's called a glycoprotein. And one of the things that it can do, in addition to having some pretty good antimicrobial activity and affecting your immune system, is to really help with bone turnover, basically decreasing what's called resorption of bone and increasing formation of bone. And so I'm a big, big fan of lactoferrin for any connective tissue or bone injuries. And that be a reason to use something like capreflex. Anywhere from 9 to 12 of those a day can definitely help out. I mean, if my, if I broke a bone, I would be hunting down cold laser and ultrasound, combining that with some cap reflex, and then staying fit using some of the things that I just mentioned.

All right, let's move on to the next audio question from Chuck then.

Hey, Ben, this is Chuck. And first off, thanks for all the help that you've given me over the years. It's been really beneficial. I have a little bit of a different question this time. I have been dealing with an eating disorder for a number of years and took it upon myself to check back into an inpatient facility where I currently am. And I wanted to see. Of course, you know, we're eating all our meals here. Exercise is not allowed and you know, frowned upon at this point until you're more weight restored. But I wanted to see if you had any advice ways that I just feel like all the weight is going directly to my stomach. And whether or not I have a disordered body image or not isn't the point. I would just like to see it distribute more evenly or anything that I could do that wouldn't be risking my success of eating disorder once and for all just to be as healthy as possible and maybe make the weight distribute more evenly and not entirely fat. So just would love any feedback or information you have. And thanks a lot, man. I really appreciate it. Take care, guys.

Okay, so this is a really. When I first listened to Chuck's question, it's a bit of a delicate situation when you've checked yourself into a program like he has. That's an awesome step. That is fantastic, Chuck. I applaud you for taking the big step and you got to stick with it, you know.

Yeah, that's certainly true. And you know, I don't really, from my understanding, think that a lot of eating disorder clinics are taking into account the fact that many people who have eating disorders also, they tend to have some type of an exercise disorder. Meaning that a lot of self definition is done through over involvement in exercise activity or obsession with body image or obsession with simply the amount of exercise that's been done. I mean, There certainly is a clinically defined exercise addiction, whether it be exercise, bulimia, exercise, anorexia, but you know, it's similar to eating disorder, a potentially unhealthy form of weight control. And you tend to see a lot of the similar things that you see in like anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa, which would be like obsessive concerns about being fat and body dissatisfaction and binging on exercise. And unfortunately, some of these things aren't controlled for in eating disorder clinics. In terms of what the features of an activity disorder would be. It'd be, for example, being really, really uncomfortable, ever resting or relaxing, so always having to maintain a high level activity and then depending on that activity to define you, like to stabilize your mood or to make you feel good about yourself. Typically you tend to begin to skip out on important things like, like work and family events, etc. To exercise. And you tend to get a lot of physiologic effects of deprivation, like mood disorders and getting really grumpy and getting really depressed when you're not able to actually do as much exercise as you think that you should do. And I know that many of the things that I'm going over sound like your typical extremely active person, maybe your typical triathlete or something like that. And I do think that many of us, I know that I myself have been guilty of this. We do kind of walk that fine line between exercising to the point that we're staying healthy and we're helping ourselves to live longer and we're maybe fulfilling a need for competition and then exercising because we feel that we have to in order to feel good about ourselves in order to, to define us. And you know, when you get into a position where you don't have control over the foods that you're eating and maybe you don't have access to the type of exercise that you've been doing in the past that can, you know, it can certainly be disturbing. I can understand where Chuck's at, where, you know, he's, I don't know the food that Chuck is eating in the clinic that he's at. But you know, it can kind of be a feeling of a loss of control when you're not able to eat what you want to eat, and you're also maybe not able to do all the exercise that you want to do. And what's really important to understand is that in the same way that kind of being in a position where you don't have control and being in a position where there's people kind of helping you to realize that that food or an obsession with food or anything of that nature doesn't have to define you. Getting into a position where you're cut off from being able to engage in excessive activity can be a really, really good way to break that cycle of being obsessed with exercise or having an activity disorder, feeling like you always have to work out. And so if I were in Chuck's shoes, what I would do is look at this as an opportunity to maybe redefine the way that you think about activity and exercise and maybe experiment with seeing how little you can get away with and still feel okay about the way that you look or the way that your body feels. Because I guarantee you're your worst critic. You know, we all tend to think we're, we're getting fat when we're not able to exercise as much as we want to. But a lot of times we're the only person that sees that. So one of the things that I try, Chuck, is just do something like 10, 15 minutes of just some heavy weightlifting if you're able. I don't know if you have access to a gym or not, but just a little bit, just enough to make you feel good, and then that's it. The other thing you could try if you don't have access to a gym is do 100 push ups, 100 squats at the end of the day, just enough to give you some of that activity, a little bit of those endorphins, and then eat healthy. You know, eat as much as you can. You know, the way that you've learned on this show, eat a high fat, moderate protein, lower carbohydrate appetite, satiating diet, and then, you know, just rest, relax, and every once in a while, lift heavy stuff. And you know, that that'd be, I think, a very, very good way to break the cycle. Because I know that Chuck, having written into the show before, is a triathlete and one of the kind of the chronic endurance folks. And so you do tend to get kind of that rat on a wheel mentality to where you feel cut off if you're not able to walk or run or ride a bike or swim. And so I would use this as an opportunity in the same way that you're breaking the eating disorder cycle, to kind of break the exercise cycle and just let yourself chill out and do a little bit of heavy lifting. I commend you as well for kind of taking action and getting into that clinic.

I want to reassure you too, Chuck, that every man in the world. When we think we've put on weight or if we have put on some weight, we all feel that it went straight to our stomach and every woman in the world feels like it went to their butt and thighs. It's like as far as the distribution of weight goes, all of us feel the same way. It always goes to the stomach because that's where we focus on as a society that we have to have a lean, trim, six pack stomach. Otherwise we're not really fit or we're not really healthy. But it's just the universal feeling. So don't stress out about it and certainly don't stand in front of the mirror and and poke at it or do anything like that because that's what we all do.

That's right, just wear an intelliskin T shirt like me. Keeps everything sucked in. There you go.

So yeah, keep it up Chuck. And definitely like follow the directions of the folks at the clinic. They know what they're doing and there's lots of time to go crazy later. Okay, our next question. Actually, I think our next two questions come from from Ben or multiple Ben's.

That could get confusing.

Have three Ben's on the show.

Hi, what's up Ben and Brock? This is Ben in Brooklyn. Again, I love the podcast. You've answered my questions in the past and as always I appreciate it. This question is about post workout nausea or lightheadedness. I usually train fasted in the morning so I don't eat breakfast and I train around 11 or 1212 noon and then I bring a shake with me right to the gym. So in the locker room pretty much immediately post workout. This is after lifting, squatting, deadlifting, push, pull, etc. Right in the locker room I'll have a coconut water and whey protein shake that I make at home. So it's small, it's only about 12, 13 grams of protein at about 20 to 30 grams of carbs and it's small. And I do only that because I know I'll eat in about an hour. Anyhow, after having the shake, usually about 10 or 15 minutes, I get pretty light headed and almost nauseous. It happens almost every single time it passes. And then I eat lunch and I'm fine, which is why I don't worry too much about it. But I'm wondering why this happens. Some kind of like hypoglycemia or something, I don't know. So that's my question. And thanks a whole lot by the way. If I don't have the Shake. I'm fine. So I don't think it's the workout. I think it's the influx of those carbs and that protein after the workout, maybe. Anyway, thanks a lot, guys. Bye.

Okay, post workout nausea.

There's a few reasons that you could get lightheaded or nauseous after a workout. And especially if you are training fasted, it's likely that you're probably in a somewhat glycogen depleted state. And so the very, very first thing that you may be experiencing is essentially like a rebound hypoglycemia. That means that basically if you're training fasted, your liver is going to step up glycogenolysis to break down some of the storage glycogen in the liver so that you can mobilize that and use some of that blood glucose for energy. Your muscles are going to break down some of their glycogen. I don't know how much you're eating on a daily basis, so I don't know how much storage muscle glycogen you're walking around with. But ultimately, you know, you have all these hormonal effects within your body causing blood glucose to get driven up from your muscles or from your liver. And then when you quit exercising, what happens is a lot of times the blood glucose can pretty rapidly drop and that can lead to a lot of this nausea or lightheadedness. And sometimes it can take a little bit for something like a little bit of coconut water or especially the sugar that you could potentially derive from a whey protein shake to hit your bloodstream. So this might just be some rebound hypoglycemia, in which case there are a few things that you could do. One would kind of be the no brainer, just don't train in a fasted state anymore and have a little bit of a pre workout meal. The other would be to if you are new to working out fasted, or if you're new to perhaps something like ketogenesis or low carb, to kind of get through the first couple of weeks of doing something like that, and eventually you begin to stabilize and you feel less nausea or less lightheadedness when you're working out. As your body becomes more fat adapted. The other thing that can happen, and this goes hand in hand with kind of what I was just about talking, talking about like training in a fasted state, maybe having fewer carbohydrates on board, is that one of the main components of glycogen and storage carbohydrate in your body is that it does tend to hold a lot of sodium as well. And so when you're burning through carbohydrates or when you don't have many on board, your blood pressure can pretty rapidly drop from loss of sodium. And so one of the other things that you could try prior to that workout or during that workout is to use like, like a sodium tablet, like, like electrolyte pills or just make sure you start salting your food and getting more salt into your diet to keep your blood pressure up. And especially for people who again switch to like a, like a low carb, high fat diet or like a ketogenic diet, one of the biggest mistakes that they make is they don't begin to increase their sodium intake and they feel lightheaded, they feel dizzy, they feel nauseous, but it's not due to lack of energy, it's due to a drop in blood pressure from lack of sodium. So Peter Adia, who I actually interviewed on this podcast a few weeks ago, he and I were talking at the Ancestral Health Symposium. He actually does chicken bouillon cubes because he, you know, and he'll do things like fast for 24 hours and go on like a six hour bike ride and, and he's just using like high, high sodium intake and using these 2 to 4 gram chicken bouillon cubes to get enough sodium to keep his blood pressure levels up.

So is he just popping them in his mouth or.

I don't know if he's dissolving them in water or popping it in his mouth. I'm actually, I'm going to interview him next week so we can go over some of the practical things that he's doing and put it out in the podcast. But he's, he's eating a lot of sodium and when you're not taking in many carbohydrates or you're, you're exercising fasted, a lot of times that's something that becomes necessary. And then the other thing is, you know, if, if 10 to 15 minutes after consuming a whey protein shake, you get dizzy or you get nauseous, it's possible that you may simply have a whey protein allergy. And allergies to whey or allergies to casein are both fairly common. I talked about in that recent post I did@BenGreenfieldFitness.com about an immunoglobulin test that I did. It was from US Biotech. I had my doctor write the requisition form. I went in, got a blood Test, it's called an IgA IgE antibody test and it essentially identifies proteins that can trigger the white blood cells in your body to create a histamine in soft tissues. And that histamine can produce inflammation, it can produce swelling, and it can produce symptoms of allergies like nausea or lightheadedness. So you could go get an immunoglobulin test or you could simply try switching to say, let's say like switching to a plant protein. So like use like the living protein mix of that's a pea and rice protein blend for example and just try something like that and see if like a vegan protein blend gives you the same issues. For me personally, I'm fine with it with a goat based whey protein and I don't do well with a cow based whey whey protein. So those are some of the things that you could try. Like I'd look into the protein issue, I'd look into the sodium issue, and then I'd look into the hypoglycemia issue.

The first thing that I thought of when I read this question or heard the question was that when I have aspartame I get lightheaded and nauseous after that. And I was wondering if maybe the whey protein that he's using has some sort of artificial sweetener that could be causing that as as well.

Yeah, or maybe it's got just got like lots of Chinese food mixed into it.

A lot of msg. Yeah, yeah, actually that's possible. As funny as that isn't Chunky General.

Pav's Chicken whey protein powder. Yeah, but seriously, that's a good point too. A lot of those artificial sweeteners and MSG can be mildly neurotoxic. So. Yep.

Now and the other thing when you talk, Ben, when you talk about doing fasted workouts, you generally say that it should be be a light aerobic workout and should be like 20 minutes to an hour long. The other Ben is talking about lifting and squatting and pushing and pulling and stuff. So it definitely sounds like it's more of a resistance training. Could that have any effect on it?

Yeah, and I know that I've said that in the past that you should primarily for your facet workouts engage in lower volume, lower intensity aerobic exercise just because it's a less stressful on your body, has less potential to create some immune system issues and has less potential to create some of these elevated levels of cortisol. But I mean if you look at this from like you know, an ancestral health or an evolutionary standpoint, there were certainly periods of time where the human body has been exposed for the past thousands of years to, for example, having to go out and kill an animal for food or forage and do so in a sense state where the body isn't fed. And so I certainly think that it doesn't go against human nature to roll out of bed unfed and put your body through the rigors of what it may have gone through killing a deer for food. Granted that can be stressful to the body, but yes, I'm not 100% against every once in a while doing a hard weight training session or doing a hard cardio session in a fasted state. As long as you understand that that's stressful to the body and you shouldn't do it all the time. Remember that some stress can have this hormetic effect where you get increased cell turnover, your cells get rid of some garbage and you have a little bit of that lifespan increasing effect. It's just that more is not better. Regardless, I wouldn't be weight training intense every day in a fasted state. And of course this points out one of the reasons why it's massively glycogen depleting. And so you do put yourself at a higher risk of experiencing some kind of blah effects afterwards anytime you do an intense exercise in a fasted state.

All right, well, let's bring another Ben into the mix here.

Hi, what's up? Ben and Brock, Love the podcast. This is Ben out in Brooklyn. I've called before and I always appreciate your input. I have a question about the most fit suspension trainer that you mentioned in a prior podcast. I just got news that I actually have to do a trip across the country. I'm flying up to California from New York and then I'm driving back from San Diego all the way to New York City. And I figured I might buy a Mosfet to keep things tight on the way back on drive. But I was wondering, do you think I'd be able to anchor it using a car door? Like get out on the side of the road, anchor it in the car door, kind of like you would with a house door or a hotel door and then work out from there. I've never used the suspension trainer, so just asking your opinion on a pretty practical question. Thanks a lot. Have a good day.

So the most fit suspension strap is something that you can get@pacificfit.net and I discovered it as a kind of a poor managed version of the TRX Extremely portable. It's extremely versatile and allows you to do all of these things. Suspended exercises, suspended push ups, suspended single leg lunges. Pretty much a full body exercise routine. I've got a little 20 to 30 minute routine that I do with my suspension strap and sometimes I'll even do it super slow so that I take advantage of some of the cardiovascular effects that we were talking about a few weeks ago when we talked about how doing super slow training can really jack up blood pressure and jack up some of the constriction and dilation of vessels as you're exercising. So I like to use the suspension strap, I like to travel with it, and I like to do super slow workouts with it too. But as far as how it works, yeah, you put it into a door, like the strap goes into a door, any door in your house, garage door, whatever, and you close the door and it stays in there really, really well. I've never used it on a car door. And you might be a little bit concerned about the window, you know, in a car door, how the window can kind of, can be a little finicky when. So I'm not 100% sure. It's one of those things where I'd say do it at your own risk. But if it does stick in the car door, okay. The only other issue there, you know, unless you've got one of our jacked up, redneck, ID pickup trucks that we've got up, up here in the Pacific Northwest, is that the car sits fairly low to the ground and it's about, you know, half the height of an actual door in a house. So some of the suspended stuff, like suspended rows, suspended push ups, some of those you might feel as though you're. You're too close to the ground. I guess one of the things that you can do is just kind of like double up the straps so you shorten them a little bit. But I mean, I've used a thing in airports around rails. I've used it around a tree before. I've used it in a post in my backyard. I've just never used it in a car door. So understand that the car may be a little low to the ground and also make sure that the car isn't moving. That'd probably be important too.

Or that would add a whole new. Whole different set of problems there. Yeah, or a whole new workout. You have to keep up to the car while you're doing it.

Get a little plyometric. Anyways, though, the mosfit suspension strap is super cool. I like It, I travel with it, I just shove it into my bag. You never know when you're gonna get a layover in an airport or even if you're gonna have to maybe stay in a hotel that doesn't have a gym. It's just, it's a good, good way to stay fit and to keep yourself very, very jacked and ripped when you're traveling. So I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Jacked and ripped both at the same time or toned and sexy or whatever, whatever floats your boat.

All right, let's move on to the question. Next question from Bill. Bill Sundays, I'm a 60 year old male triathlete and using Ben's advanced half ironman training plan, what adjustments in training, recovery and nutrition would you advise in general for older athletes? I find I'm taking an extra day off, usually an easy recovery training day, while working full time with family responsibilities.

Yeah, there's some things that happen as you get old. And probably the most important thing to remember is that one of the reasons that we've got guys who are 39, 40, 41 kicking butt in track triathlon is because you have.

You're talking about me, aren't you?

I'm talking about you. You were the first guy I thought, of course, you along with Craig Alexander, Chris McCormick and Lance Armstrong. Yeah. These guys have higher proportion of slow twitch fibers. I mean, they're also more experienced in the sport, so they make fewer mistakes nutritionally, et cetera, but they've got higher proportions of slow twitch muscle fiber. And your endurance is, it stays fairly high as you age. You know, this is something that I was listening to Chris McCormick talk about in a podcast. He is a guy who's kind of, he's, I think he's 39 now, 38, 39, something like that. And he's an Australian triathlete and he went out to go up for the Australian Olympic team. Didn't quite make it, but he did fairly well. And then he went and he raced over in Spain where I was racing, and he won that race. And he said it felt easy because of all this fast, explosive training that he was doing. And he said that he had his doubts going into it, that he had the actual endurance. But the fact is that endurance comes pretty easy the older that you are. And speed, power and strength become the things that you tend to have a diminished capacity for and that you have to make sure that you really prioritize. So in terms of training for older athletes, cardiovascular, aerobic and endurance training, should be at the bottom of your list. They should certainly be included. But understand that that's the stuff that you're going to be best at. And more of your time should be spent focusing on things like hill running, like interval training. So training the anaerobic energy system, doing weight training to maintain muscle tone and strength and fast twitch muscle fiber and a lot of the stuff that you tend to lose more quickly and have more difficulty building as you age, plyometric exercises like hops and jumps for your power and basically prioritizing that stuff. So I would say that if anything, if you're going to use one of the triathlon training programs that I've personally written and you're going to get rid of a specific workout or modify a specific workout, I would say skew it away from endurance, skew it more towards prioritizing getting any of the strength workouts or any of the interval training workouts in the program in and sacrificing if you're going to sacrifice anything, any of the longer aerobic training workouts. In terms of some other considerations as far as nutrition goes for older athletes, you may want to consider creatine supplementation because your natural levels of creatine are going to go down a little bit and that can help to improve your performance during some of like the high power output sessions. So that'd be one thing to consider for an older athlete would be creatine supplementation. I'd certainly also look into maybe taking like a whole foods vitamin C to help you with collagen formation and recovery. That's going to be a really, really crucial vitamin.

By whole foods you mean not just a straight vitamin C like capsule or tablet?

Yeah, don't use synthetic vitamin C. Use something like Solar Synergy is really good by Mount Capra. I like that one. It's a powder. If you want a higher calorie version, something you could use as a meal replacement like Living Fuel Superberry is really good. But getting like one of these blends, it's like a really, really potent blend of fruits and vegetables without having to get all the fructose sugars and stuff that you'd get if you were. If you know, if you were eating 10 pieces of fruit to get some really, really good whole food vitamin C, that'd be important. Making sure from an anti inflammatory and a recovery perspective that you're really keeping your omega 3 intake up and your vegetable oil and omega 6 intake fairly controlled. So just getting lots of good high quality Omega 3 from Nuts and seeds like walnuts or pumpkin seeds. Getting fish into your diet, like really good oil fish as much as possible using a cod liver oil and really focusing on staying away from anything that's going to contribute to inflammation like grains, vegetable oils and sugars. Sulfur containing amino acids specifically are gonna be really good for your joint cartilage health. And you're gonna find sulfur containing amino acids primarily in meat, poultry, fish and dairy. And that's, you know, it's why you tend to see some of the older vegan and vegetarian athletes. They tend to look a little bit frail. I personally do not want to have chicken arms and chicken legs when I'm 70. I would like to have decent amounts of muscle. I'd like to be able to hit a golf ball and a tennis ball pretty dang hard and I want to be able to fill out a suit when I'm that age. For me, I don't ever really plan on going vegan vegetarian. Even as I get older. I don't have anything against, against those diets per se. I think they can be done right. We've had guys like Rich roll on the show before talk about how to do it right. But I certainly do think it's very, very difficult to maintain muscle mass, especially as you get old and especially if you're active, if you're, if you're not eating meat, poultry, fish and some type of dairy product. So I would include that stuff and then make sure that along with that whole food vitamin C, you're getting decent amounts of, of some of the antioxidants like selenium and vitamin E. In most cases, if you're going to be using a whole foods vitamin C like Solar Synergy, Living Fuel, Superberry, any of these other ones, you're going to get a pretty decent dose of antioxidants as well. Check out the anti aging post that I did@BenGreenfieldFitness.com how to look. I think it was titled something like how to look sexy as hell as you age or something along those lines. But I go into some of the, some of the better anti aging antioxidants that are out there. Acetyl coa is one that I talk about. L Carnitine is another. There's this stuff called Nutrarev. It's like a liquid anti aging antioxidant compound. That stuff's pretty good. I'd keep that around. That's gonna more be to just keep you from getting nasty skin and stuff out there with your, you know, being exposed to the sun and everything. As you're training but remember, your skin is connective tissue. So the way that your skin looks can be reflective of the way that the underlying connective tissue looks. So good antioxidant intake can help out for sure. Man. Those are some of the main things that I would focus on in terms of nutrition and training for an older athlete. And you know, as I grow older, you know, I would be focusing on all those things personally. So that's what I would do.

In the Future of Health now series that was just out sort of, I guess I was in July. They did a couple of really good episodes about anti aging process and they were really informative. So if you want to look those up, there's some really great information in those too.

Yep. Yeah. And I mean in some cases you can have a little bit of diminished vitamins, nutrient and mineral absorption. As you age, your gut tends to get a little less efficient. You know, it's the same as like kids, my kids do a multivitamin I recommend to folks who are pushing about 70 plus to also do a multivitamin. I prefer liquid form. It's highly absorbable. I'll make sure I put a link in the show notes to the, to the liquid multivitamin that I would recommend. If you do find that you're, that you're having difficulty, I mean really, you could get a micronutrient analysis to find something like this out for sure. But you know, getting on like a good liquid multivitamin would be prudent as well, so.

Excellent. Well, let's move along to another bill. We've got Ben's and Bills coming out the yin yang today. All right, this bill says about eight months ago, before I became a listener, I purchased Ellington Darden's new High Intensity Training. As a result of applying this approach, I've become stronger at 48 years old than at any other time in my life, including when while playing college football. And it's been great. However, I have two concerns. First, I'm still going up with no particular reason to keep getting stronger. I'm a creative director, not an offensive tackle. Should I just pick a plateau and choose to, to stay there forever or what? Also, my lifts are starting to be limited by or possibly being damaged by non target areas. Like for example, I could go higher on dumbbell flies as far as my chest is concerned, but my wrists aren't strong enough. It seems like my body's trying to limit itself. I'm surprised by how strong I've become with no ceiling in sight. Or is there a ceiling and he Wants to know if there's any thoughts on the high intensity training in general in this situation in particular.

I feel so bad for Bill.

Yeah, I just can't stop getting stronger.

All the, all the, all the hard gainer men listening in are like about to jump through the podcast and strangle Bill.

Yeah, I'd punch him in the nose if he was here.

Well, I mean, you know, Bill sounds like a classic, what would be called like a mesomorph body type. He played college football. You know, I talk about this in my book about body typing. The, the Give it guy's guide to achieving your ideal body kind of, you know, the, the propensity that a body type is going to have towards, for example, putting on muscle more quickly or maybe being better at endurance or better at speed. And you know, when it comes to Bill, he's doing a protocol that was designed by a football player slash bodybuilder to get huge, to get really big. I mean, this guy, Ellington Darden, pretty impressive guy if you look him up. He's written this book on high intensity training and he really has found a way to put on decent amounts of muscle. His program is actually pretty similar to the Doug Guff Body by Science protocol that we talked about in that podcast a couple of weeks ago, but with more exercises. So he's got these super slow routines and you do in just one set to failure, and you're doing it in a fairly slow, controlled manner. But rather than doing like the Body by Science protocol, which is like leg press, row, chest press, and what's the last one? It's like a pull down or pull up. I think this Darden protocol for high intensity Training is actually 7 to 10, 12 exercises per routine. So you're doing a lot more exercises. You're doing one single set of each of those exercises to complete failure, and you're going two times a week. And that's, that's the basic protocol. It sounds like Bill has actually modified that a little bit to go three sets a week, but fairly, you know, it's a similar idea. Now, of course, if muscle building is your goal, this is a great protocol. And Bill has experienced that, obviously to the point where like he says, his chest is getting stronger, but he's getting to such a high weight that his wrists aren't strong enough and he's increasing the squat, but his hips are hurting. Well, Bill, you answered your own question. Your body will get to the point where it will try to self limit. Now some of that self limitation is simply going to be Getting to the point where your skeletal structure simply just can't take on the load of what you're doing. Or you just don't have the, you know, you don't have the body type to be able to say, you know, bench press, whatever, £600 if you've got really skinny wrists. But there can be other issues that can cause you to self limit. Like you may have some fascial adhesions. So for example, the fascia, which is this layer of connective tissue that covers all your muscles, maybe it's pretty beat up. I don't know how much soft tissue work you do. I don't know if you foam roll or get massages regularly. But if the fascia is not pliable, then a lot of times that can limit your mobility and it can cause areas of pain as you're getting heavier and heavier or engaging in more intense activity. That's something to think about. There can certainly be a bony abnormality, abnormalities like, you know, sacroiliac joint dysfunction or vertebra that are out of place, or any other number of chiropractic issues that may also be limiting your body. So if you really do want to keep getting stronger, or you want to perhaps be able to lift the, the weights that you're currently lifting and maybe not get some of this discomfort that you're getting, you could start doing more soft tissue work and you could potentially even meet with a chiropractic physician or an osteopathic physician to look at your spine, to look at your sacroiliac joint, to look at your neck. Primarily, those would be the three areas to kind of get checked out to make sure that you're not locked up. Now, the other thing that you could consider doing is taking this program that seems to be making you very, very strong, which is great, there's nothing wrong with that. But maybe consider cycling it throughout the year where you're doing something more along the lines of what I do, where I do more weightlifting in the fall and in the winter. And then I do a lot more outdoor sports and skew things a little bit more towards cardio as the weather gets nice in the spring and in the summer. So, for example, in the warmer months, I'm doing more tennis, more triad triathlon, and more outdoor activities than spending more time indoors, basically playing basketball and lifting weights and doing some more intense stuff as the weather starts to shove me indoors more. So those are some of the thoughts that come up here. But check out your fascia. Check out your neck, your back and your Hips to ensure that your body's self limitations aren't based off of anything orthopedically that's going on. And then you may just want to consider taking this program and mixing it in with some other stuff throughout the year.

Yeah, I don't think you necessarily need to pick a plateau and just sort of stay there forever. That seems kind of, that seems really boring. It seems like you lose interest really quickly in that.

Yeah, that's the thing is, I mean, you want to enjoy life, you want to enjoy whatever training that you're doing. And you will get bored with something like this. You're just doing the same program over and over again for three years. I mean, that's one of the things that it kind of keeps. It keeps books selling in both diet and in exercise as people get bored with stuff. I mean, honestly, I would say that probably 10 years ago you could have taken any routine out of any bookstore diet or exercise and found pretty good success with it. But people get bored with stuff, they like to see new things, new gear, new tools, new training methods, new recipes. And so, you know, that's, that's one of the cool things about having so many options is you can, you can definitely do more than one thing throughout the year. So.

Next question comes from Laurie. Laurie says my partner just completed abdominal radiation therapy for cancer. Needless to say, this pretty much trashed her digestive system. I've been looking into the GAPS diet. The GAPS diet as a potential method to help her along the healing path. However, when I've done a search through PubMed, I've not been able to find any peer reviewed articles on this diet. Are you familiar with any out there that I may not have just searched for correctly?

This is a tough situation. There. There is an approach to cancer that uses the GAPS diet and I really like the approach. And I'll describe it in a minute here in a little bit more detail because it actually is good information for anybody that's kind of trying to beat cancer or deal with something like that. Kind of a more holistic approach to cancer. But as far as this abdominal radiation therapy goes, it's really, really tough. You can get what's called radiation enteritis, which is basically, basically like inflammation of your GI tract after your abdomen has been radiated. What happens is you have all of these rapidly proliferating epithelial cells that line your small and your large intestine. And radiation therapy causes what's called a cytotoxic effect on those. It essentially kills off a ton of those cells. So you're essentially creating leaky gut syndrome and the same type of issues that you might get if you were to, let's say you were completely gluten free and you were eating a really clean diet and then all of a sudden you just went like bread pizza, beer, ice cream, et cetera for a while. Well then take that and multiply it by 10. When you're doing something like radiation therapy on your gut, so you get some extreme damage and you get lots and lots of, of basically like, you know, wearing away of this single cell lining between your small and your small intestine and your bloodstream and some pretty nasty stuff. You can get rectal pain and rectal bleeding and a ton of malabsorption because a lot of the digestive and the absorptive functions of your gastrointestinal tract just get shoved out the window. So in most cases, in kind of a t typical medical management environment, you're going to get prescribed like anti diarrheal agents because your gastric motility goes through the roof. Stuff goes through you really, really fast. And usually you'll get what's called a bile salt sequestering agent, which keeps you actually able to produce enough bile to actually break down some of these things that are going through you or to break down the bile that's getting released into your, into your gut. You usually from the radiation therapy get enough damage to your intestinal villi that they're not able to produce digestive enzymes, one of the main ones being lactase. So you got to stay away from milk, you got to stay away from milk products because you can't break down lactose sugars because lactase is produced by these villi in your intestine and those things just get destroyed. So, you know, it's a tough, tough situation. And you know, you can certainly do some of the things that come to mind logically when I talk about this stuff like take digestive enzymes, avoid dairy foods. And you know, there are even things that can, that can act as natural antidiarrheal agents. Like for example, nutmeg is one of the more common herbs that can really decrease what is called gastric motility. But ultimately these are all band aids. They're not going to heal the gut. And that's where something like the GAPS diet would come in is because it is a gut healing protocol and it will help to provide the nourishment that the cell lining of your gut actually needs in order for it to come along and back, bounce back from something like this. The issue is that there isn't, you know, as, as Laurie says, there isn't really a lot of clinical evidence or a lot of clinical studies that have been done on the GAPS study or the GAPS diet and something like radiation enteritis. But there is, there's a guy named, named Tom Cohen who is an md and he has a really, really cool nutritional approach to cancer in general in terms of healing the body and staving off cancer and uncontrolled growth of tumors. And it does involve the GAPS diet. And so I'll kind of describe this to you. It's good information for anybody who has cancer or is trying to decrease risk of cancer or is maybe trying to bounce back. And I think this would be good information to go over. So basically, Tom Cowan's whole philosophy is based off of the fact that our hunter gatherer ancestors, in many, many situations lived almost completely free of cancer for thousands of years. And what happened was there were several changes that occurred, primarily for example, agriculture and kind of like the leaching of a lot of the nutrients and vitamins and minerals that happens with industrialized agricult removed some of the good things that we were getting from our diet and also introduced some things that could potentially aggravate the GI tract. And I'll get into why that would be an issue for cancer here in a second, but specifically, lots and lots of modern grains that we can't digest all that well in many cases, like the modern agricultural grains, like, like wheat. So if you look at more cancer free hunter gatherer diets, they're typically about 70% animal food, mostly fat, lots of organ meats, lots of bones, especially in the form of bone broth, which is really, really healing for the digestive tract. Plant foods for sure, but not a lot of grains. Mostly some really mineral rich and phytochemical rich plant foods. And in many, many cases, the plant foods were fermented, which we talked about a little bit earlier in the podcast, so that they could serve as food for bacteria in the stomach and that would greatly increase their vitamin content. And so his whole approach to cancer therapy is based off of kind of replicating this diet and throwing some extra things in. So kind of the first loop is he has the GAPS diet as part of this cancer protocol. And so the idea is that in the human gut, people get their gut stripped with antibiotics, with vaccines, with processed foods, with not getting enough of the right gut flora via the birth canal when they're born due to a C section or some type of a gut dysbiosis. In the mom who's having the baby. And so we're getting a lot of folks who have kind of an unhealthy gut ecology or holes in the gut wall. And that can increase risk of cancer because basically what happens is you end up with two different chemicals getting absorbed into the bloodstream. And those chemicals specifically are called gluteomorphine and casomorphin, and they are opiates. And when you're getting a bunch of. If opiates absorb into your bloodstream, they can paralyze your immune response and decrease your ability to do something like fight off cancer. And so in the GAPS diet, what happens is you eliminate all of the primarily what are called the disaccharides, sugar, potatoes and grains, as well as lactose, even if it's from raw milk. And what that does is it keeps a lot of these morphine chemicals from getting absorbed into the bloodstream. So you eliminate disaccharides using what's called the GAPS diet. You can go to thegapsdiet.com to actually see how to do that. And you instead switch to a lot of healthy fats like butter, ghee, coconut oil, grass fed meats, organ meats, seafood, some low starch vegetables, bone broth and cod liver oil. And those are the basic components of the diet. So that is kind of the dietary component. And the other thing that is thrown into that is, number one, lots of enzymes. So doing all the enzymes is actually based off of a. Some work done by a biologist back in the, back in the early 1900s, a biologist named Dr. John Beard, who wrote this book called the enzyme Treatment of Cancer. And the idea is that stem cells and undifferentiated stem cells can cause some of these cancer issues. And so doing like a high dose digestive enzyme is it does a good job at controlling the undifferentiated growth of a lot of these, what are called in his book trophoblastic cells. That's a really, really interesting book. The enzyme treatment of cancer. It'd be one to check out. I know it's old, but it's still interesting information. So GAPS diet is combined with a bunch of different digestive enzymes. The other thing that's introduced is what's called low dose naltrexone. And naltrexone is basically a drug that was originally developed to treat heroin overdose, but it blocks opiate receptors. So essentially what you're doing when you block opiate receptors is you cause the body to make more endorphins when the body makes more endorphins that can actually help to improve your immune function. So low dose nalter is actually something that's also. I've seen it's been recommended for something like thyroid as well, like when the body is attacking its own thyroid tissue. So for something like low thyroid, but also fits into this protocol as well. So you essentially introduce this low dose naltrexone as an alternative drug therapy, and it's much, much safer. And then the last thing is something called Iscador, which is actually the most prescribed cancer medicine in the world. It's very, very popular in Europe. And it's kind of the last leg of this protocol that Tom Cowan uses. But basically what it does is it simulates a bacterial infection. So you get a little bit of inflammation, you get a huge response in what are called your natural killer cells, your T cells, and you get everything that would normally happen if you were infected, except the actual infection or the toxic effect itself. And so this massive inflammatory response can help you to fight off, for example, a tumor. So you put all this stuff together and basically that's kind of like the alternative cancer treatment. The other thing that that is really, really recommended on that diet or that happens naturally on that diet, is that you're primarily using ketones as a fuel. And cancer relies. We've talked about this on the show before. Cancer relies on glucose as a fuel. So you're giving the cancer cells less sugar to burn. And there's actually a drug called wabane. And wabane is a drug that can increases the ability of the body to metabolize fats. And so if you're taking like a cancer cell and trying to cut it off from being able to burn sugar, basically this wobane, it's made out of cholesterol and it catalyzes the metabolism of fats, which basically allows you to fuel the body more reliably on fats. I think it's got some side effects, which is why the average person shouldn't. Shouldn't just go out and start using wabane as a drug. But it's also something that's recommended in this protocol. So that's a ton of information. But if you want to look into this more, the guy's name is Thomas Cowan. C O W A N. And like I said, he uses the GAPS diet as part of his approach to cancer. Doing something like bone broths and staying away from a lot of these dice, polysaccharide rich foods would certainly be something that would be prudent if you're trying to bounce back from like radiation, enteritis, taking a lot of digestive enzymes. But then also look into this guy and some of the other stuff that he's recommending as well. Because from a cancer standpoint, let's put it this way, if I had cancer or I were concerned about it, this would be my approach right there. I'm not a doctor, but I would definitely use his approach. I think his book is called the Fourfold Path to Healing. The Fourfold Path to Healing. So we'll try and put a link to it in the show notes if you want to check that out.

That's great. Well, good luck to you, Laurie, and your partner too. Okay, our next question comes from Andrew. Andrew says I seem to be producing a very high levels of ammonia in my sweat. In fact, if I was working out in a public gym, I'm sure people would think I'd wet myself. This seems to be irrespective of whether it's a low intensity long workout or high intensity intervals. I consider my diet reasonably balanced, though I'm having trouble lowering my body fat levels despite a slow but steady weight loss. I take no supplements, though. I've just purchased a protein powder.

The protein powder kind of gives it away here. Basically what happens is you smell this ammonia in the sweat a lot, especially in endurance athletes, and it comes from the breakdown of amino acids in your body. So what happens is that ammonia is made up of nitrogen and hydrogen. And when the nitrogen, which is basically a waste product that needs to be excreted by the body, it's processed in the kidneys and that forms urea, and that gets excreted in your urine. If there's too much nitrogen, it gets excreted as ammonia in your sweat. And so you get this kind of nitrogenous smell in your sweat. One of the things that causes you to be producing all this nitrogen is burning protein as a fuel, like turning protein into glucose or burning high amounts of amino acids. And you'll typically see this in people who are trying to eat low carbohydrate or trying to limit their calorie intake, but doing so through taking in high amounts of protein, like protein bars, protein powders, et cetera, rather than putting their body into a fatty acid burning state by doing, like, higher fats like coconut milk and almond butter and stuff like that. So I would step back the protein and step up the fat. Another thing to consider is your water intake. If you consume enough fluid, it kind of dilutes that ammonia and you get a lot less potent smell so make sure that you do drink enough fluids to at least kind of just make sure your urine isn't super yellow, for example. That could be another issue too, is just mild dehydration can cause a little bit of that ammonia smell. But especially the fact that Andrew is doing the protein powder and using that, it's more likely that he's just basically burning too much protein, not enough fat as a fuel, and that can cause that excess nitrogen that gets excreted and winds up as ammonia in the sweat. So make sure that if you're doing a low carbohydrate diet or if you're lowering your calorie intake, that you don't go up above about 35% of your daily intake from protein. And that'll help out quite a bit. Very cool.

I didn't know that. Awesome. Well, okay, here's our last question. It comes from Jerry, and Jerry says, I recently watched a Dr. Odd episode.

Doctor Oz.

What's that?

We should get Dr. Oz on the podcast.

Well, yeah, I think you said at one point that you agree with about. Was it 30% of what he says?

Yeah, it kind of depends. I mean, he follows trends a lot. He's got some good stuff to say, but some of it's just, it's taking research and blowing it out of proportion in many cases.

Like eggs and smoking.

Yeah.

Okay, so back to Jerry. Jerry says he recently watched Dr. Oz episode that mentioned chlorogenic acid in the form of pure green coffee bean extract. The info presented stated that the acid slows the release of glucose into the bloodstream and burns glucose and fat. Fat in the liver. I'm trying to drop weight, but I'm very. I'm a very active triathlete who works out six days per week. Would this supplement be beneficial to help me reach my weight loss goals, or would it be detrimental to my training and nutrition by decreasing the amount of glucose available to my body during workouts?

Well, you know, it's the, the green coffee bean extract. Probably the first study, I think it was earlier this year. It was like back in spring. There was a study done that showed that green coffee bean extract could help folks who were obese or overweight lose a little bit more weight than people who didn't take this green coffee bean extract. So they took pretty small group of folks. Sixteen overweight subjects, eight males, eight females, and one group got the green coffee bean extract. One group got a placebo and they did basically like one high dose green coffee bean extract, one low dose green coffee bean extract, and it turned out that the group that was using the green coffee bean extract was able to lose a very, very slight, small and kind of laughably significant amount of extra weight. Like the group that you. The group that didn't use the green coffee bean extract and use a placebo lost something like 0.9% body fat. And the green coffee bean extract group lost 1.2% body fat. And the interesting thing was that the group that used less coffee bean extract loss the 1.2. The group that used more coffee coffee bean extract lost 1.1. So there wasn't even a dose response effect, meaning that the group that was taking more coffee bean extract didn't lose more weight. And the amount of weight lost overall was just barely enough to be significant. But newspaper headlines and magazines headlines kind of took this and ran with it. And green coffee bean extract companies made a lot of money. I was walking through Walmart the other day and there were just like big, like central aisle stacks of these green coffee bean extract.

Yeah, Starbucks has a whole line that's based on the green coffee bean stuff right now.

Stupid, stupid. Anyways, though, they, they did another study earlier, like came out, it was like a couple months ago that found that green coffee bean extract actually does have a pretty cool little ergogenic effect on your exercise potential. And this was in rodents. But basically what they found was that a group given high dose green coffee bean extract was able to run about 60% longer and a little bit faster and definitely go farther and perform nearly twice as much work than rodents who received a placebo. So the interesting thing was that it seemed that the effect was kind of mediated by higher metabolic efficiency, meaning that the rodents appeared to the ones that were given the green coffee bean extract, it didn't appear that the liver or the muscles were burning through their glycogen quite as quickly. They had higher levels of liver glycogen and higher levels of muscle glycogen after having exercised post green coffee bean extract. So it appeared that they were kind of pushed a little bit more in the direction of burning fatty acids as a fuel. But it doesn't appear that that hurt their performance, appears that it helped their performance. So as Jerry was concerned, it would be detrimental to his training and nutrition. It didn't appear to be detrimental to be pushing away from glucose and more towards fatty acids for these mice. The interesting thing is that you don't have to go out and spend money on a green card coffee bean extract to get the amounts of chlorogenic acid, which is the active component that caused this effect. In this study that was done on rodents, you only need about the equivalent of a pretty big cup of black coffee, like about 16 to 20 ounces of just regular black coffee to get enough chlorogenic acid to cause that same effect. So, you know, kind of comes back to what we've talked about on the show before. Coffee is pretty cool. Taken before exercise, like in a, in a fasted state, it can bump up fatty acid utilization, give you a definite ergogenic effect, especially if you are caffeine sensitive, meaning that you, you don't use caffeine for anywhere from 7 to 14 days prior to when you want it to give you that ergogenic effect and then you give yourself caffeine. That's something important to remember. You know, any of these studies in rodents, it's not like these mice were drinking a cup of coffee every morning and then they just gave more cop. These are, these are rodents that were not exposed to caffeine that got the caffeine that got the chlorogenic acid. So it's possible there would be no effect if you just drink coffee every day.

Anyways, so I noticed if I have two cups of coffee before the podcast, I can read a lot better.

Yeah, I just like to imagine these little mice, you know, sitting at their desk drinking their mug of coffee.

I was actually picturing them in little cars, like in the drive through at.

Tim Hortons, eating their eggs, smoking their cigarettes.

Totally.

Yeah.

All right, well, there you go, Jerry. Don't believe Dr. Oz all the time.

Anyways, I guess that wraps up the. The questions.

It does, yeah.

We'll link to everything in the shownotes. I know I talked about that book the Fourfold Path to Healing when I started to drone on about cancer. Go check out that book. I really do recommend it. It's a good little read, so you can grab that off Amazon. I'll link to those liquid multivitamins that I talked about. And also to cap Reflex, the most fit suspension strap and everything else. Be sure if you're in the Spokane Coeur d' Alene area, check out that probiotics class that my wife and I are teaching next Thursday over at Pilgrim's Market if you want in on the Thailand trip. We'll put a link to that in the show notes.

Don't forget to go to audiblepodcast.com Ben and get your free audiobook.

Get your 50 Shades of Grey geek out on that great one to listen to it. We should probably mention that we're joking when we say you should listen to it with your family.

Yes, don't listen well, unless your family is very liberal.

Yeah, it's a giant and kind of creepy like sex novel basically. So it's dirty dirty. So anyways though, yeah, and be sure and leave the podcast a ranking. If you get a chance to leave a donation over@bengreenfieldfitness.com that is always appreciated. I will be publishing a fairly controversial article this Friday over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com However, I'm also going to be escaping up to the mountains of Montana with zero Internet access for a couple days and just eating really good fish, really cold lakes, and camping. So if you guys leave me comments and write me offended letters about my podcast or about my article, then I won't get them. So yeah, just thought I'd mention that out of touch for a little while anyways though.

That's it.

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