Is MCT Oil A Scam?, How to Measure Your Neurotransmitters, Downhill Running Tips And More!

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, is MCT oil a scam? How to measure your neurotransmitters, Downhill running tips is Kratom a healthy sleep aid? Why weightlifting shoes have an elevated heel, what it means if just one of your armpits smell and much more.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. We provide you with everything you need to know for total performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, sleep train and hormone optim. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you just want to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

So Ben, are your arms tired?

Are my arms tired?

Yeah, because you just flew in from Dubai.

Ahah.

You're fine. Yeah, it's a dad joke, isn't it?

I'm picking lemongrass out of my teeth right now. I was in a rush. I literally did just fly in from Dubai, well, I guess about 14 hours ago, late last night. And I'll talk about some of the things that I do to manage jet.

Lag, one of them being jamming lemongrass in your teeth.

That was a 14 and a half hour flight. I'm drinking this tea though, that's got a lot of. It's basically a turmeric based tea, but it's got other things in it like cinnamon and lemongrass and gotu kola and it's called Ultimate Endurance Tea. One of my buddies gave it to me. It comes out of Hawaii in Kauai Pharmacy, Hawaii Kailua. I'm so horrible with my pronunciations, I.

Think that's how it's said.

Well, that's how it's. Anyways, it's an herbal tea and it's really, really good after you fly to get natural anti inflammatories like that into your system. Because after a 14 and a half hour flight, not only do you, and this is the equation for every hour of flying, it is a good day to reorient your body in terms of circadian rhythm and time zone. So it's literally two weeks after a 14 hour flight that it takes your body to completely bounce back. It's crazy really.

I thought it was a day per hour of time zone shift.

Well, what I heard from Dr. Kirk Parsley at the Unbeatable Mind. I don't know if you were, if you were listening to this.

Apparently I wasn't paying attention because I.

Was there when you saw it. And I could have, or he could have, or I could have been mistaken. But what I understand is that it's an hour for every day and it might be an hour for every time zone, which means that it'd be closer to 12 hours instead of, or 12 days instead of 14 days in this case.

Yeah. In that case it's not much different.

Yeah, yeah. Anyways though, so I do a lot of little things to mitigate jet lag. I tried out some, some new things and some old standbys. On this particular trip, for example, one of the things that I tried was not eating for the last 10 hours of the flight. You know, normally I will at least have some, you know, like some Brazil nuts or like a, a good fat based energy bar, something other than airplane food. But this time I just didn't eat. And what I instead did was I walked to the back of the airplane and asked the flight attendant for two. And she takes out the little cups of water. And I'm like, no, I'd like two waters, like the giant liter sized bottles of water that they have in the back. And she said, well, technically I can't give those to you. And I'm like, I won't tell anybody, I promise. So she gave me the two giant bottles of water and I just went back and I tucked those under my seat and went through a couple of those and then several other waters during the flight. So I fasted. So I didn't generate a lot of free radicals from digestion because your body's already, you know, jammed with free radicals from the flight itself. Another few things that I tried was when I got home, just like I'm drinking the turmeric based tea now. I had a high sulfur and turmeric based meal afterwards like, like sulfur, like stinky vegetables, garlic and broccoli and cauliflower, turmeric, cumin, you know, curry, stuff like that. That's really, really good after you fly. So I had this like Mediterranean chicken, you know, which was basically chicken with curry, garlic, ginger, they made that with some coconut oil. But basically, you know, a very, a very sulfurous, rich meal. And that was in addition to using some of the glutathione. You know that glutathione that you put underneath your tongue that tastes like.

Yeah, the stuff that tastes like liquid dog farts solution from the 1980s.

Perm solution slash. Liquid dog farts. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's not tasty. But that also is very high sulfurous. And you are not kissable after you use that stuff, I should add. So I am actually a fan. So oxytocin Jack Cruz talked about this when I interviewed Jack Cruise for one of the summits that I did. My Rev Yourself Summit. It's at BenGreenfieldFitness.com RevYourself we did an hour on jet lag and one of the things that he talked about was oxytocin. And so I don't want to turn this into an R rated podcast but sex after you fly is actually a good idea because you get a huge surge of oxytocin and that has some really good anti inflammatory effects.

However, you get that just from snuggling too. You don't have to be down and dirty.

You can. But I like the latter. So just make sure if you use the glutathione that you have a strong breath mint afterwards is what I'm getting at. So fasted on the plane, did that, did a lot of the like the sulfur and turmeric based antioxidants along with the turmeric tea this morning. Then a couple other things that I did was I smoked melatonin. So I use one of the E cigarettes with the vapor melatonin that you can get from it's vapor boost. And I use this stuff called Sweet dreams. And you put a few drops in the E cigarette and you, you vaporize melatonin just like you would, you know, weed or something like that. And it's, it's like mainlining melatonin to which is really good for resetting the circadian rhythm. So I did that serving the heck of it.

Your. Your mouth, skin.

Yep. So smoked melatonin after sex was great. And then an earth pulse. So this, this is getting into like the more expensive kind of biohacky nerdy kind of stuff. But earth pulse is a. It's a pulsed electromagnetic frequency device. P E M F and what it does is it dumps a bu negative ions into your body. So you build a bunch of positive ions when you're on the flight. And just like grounding or like being outside in your bare feet would build up a bunch of negative ions. So can this pulse electromagnetic field therapy. So you basically just put it underneath your mattress. And I don't use it every night, but I'll use it for the first two to three nights after I travel. And I put it in. It's got a few different modes like sleep mode, recovery mode, etc. And recovery mode is the most powerful. So I just jack that thing up in recovery mode and did that. And then the last thing I just, just walked in the door and made my tea and came. Came down here in my office to podcast with you. Brock is. I did a little bit of yoga outside. And that is for the same reason that I, that I use the earth pulse. Right. To get the grounding or the earthing effect, but because it's very cold outside and there's like snow and ice. The problem is if you wear shoes, the rubber soles stop a lot of the. The transmission of the electrons from the earth. I know that our listeners are slowly fading as we're delving deeper and deeper into the biohacking geekiness, but all you do is if it's called that you wear wool socks. Those transmit really, really well. So. So I just did some yoga outside and wool socks and tossed those bad boys in the laundry and here I am.

Nice. You know, I used to travel like twice a week when I was a web developer. I'd be flying all over the place. It was a ridiculous amount of time. And I used to. My protocol was before I got on the plane, I drink several beers, eat a really gross meal. Like in the, in the airport.

Yes.

And then anytime the stewardess came by and offered me anything, the answer was yes.

Especially free booze.

Yeah. And that worked horribly. As usual. Twitter.com BenGreenfield is ripping up the joint with all kinds of cool studies and news flashes and fun stuff. News flashes and fun stuff.

Yeah. So I have of course been. Been tweeting studies while I've been gallivanting about Dubai. And a few things that I put out this week is the first is something I've been doing for a long time with the hunch that it would probably help somehow with my. My dry land performance. And that would be swimming with limited breathing. Right. Like doing underwater breathing or doing freestyle swimming, where instead of breathing every stroke or every two strokes, you're breathing every seven strokes every 10 strokes, basically teaching yourself how to move and conserve oxygen simultaneously. And they just came out with a really interesting study. This one was in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science. Of course it was in Scandinavia. And I'm sure that they were swimming in cold water with sharks or something like they do. They're totally. Anyways, what they looked at was limited breath frequency during swimming and whether the way that that kind of stresses and causes the respiratory system to become stronger would actually make the subjects in their study better runners, like improve their running economy. And sure enough, when they compared a swimming group that took two breaths per stroke, what they called a controlled frequency breathing versus a group that took. They took every seven strokes they took a breath, right, like every two strokes versus every second, every seven strok. What they found was that the limited breathing subjects improved their running economy significantly and also improved what's called their forced vital capacity or their oxygen capacity. So what this means is that if you're a runner and you want to do like a cross training session or even a triathlete or something like that, and you want to do a cross training session, it would behoove you to actually do some limited frequency breathing, some hypoxic type of swim sets. You know, I've written about that in my book before and it was a little bit like blue sky. Like, yeah, this is gonna, this is gonna help with your tolerance to hypoxia. It's probably gonna help you mentally. But up until this point, there was no research that actually improves running economy. And it turns out that it does. So kind of a cool thing to know.

Hormesis in action.

Hormesis in action, kids. The next thing. And I promised when I tweeted this, I'd talk about on the show, so I'm going to. It is a post about MCT oil. It's called MCT Oil versus Coconut Oil. The truth Exposed. And somebody.

What is the truth?

Somebody wrote me an email about this article. They're like, is this really true? Because obviously the world's health is imbalanced based off of the answer to this question.

Yes, we cannot continue with eating anything.

Until we know what this article gets into. Is that there are all these different. What are called medium chain fatty acids that you're going to find in nature? C6, which is called caproic acid, and C8, caprylic acid, and C10, which is capric acid, and C12, which is lauric acid. And most of the names of these are, especially the C6 through the C10. The names are taken from the word capra, which means goat, incidentally. So I think that's. I didn't know that they're goat fatty acids. So anyways, the most predominant MCT that you're going to find in coconut oil, a point that this article makes, is lauric acid. Coconut oil is about 50% Lauric acid. And lauric acid is the part of the coconut oil that is a really powerful antimicrobial agent. Right. It's the thing that you do everything from like in Ayurvedic medicine, you do like teeth swishing with coconut oil to clean your teeth and then you spit out the coconut oil. Or you'd use it as like, we're going to talk about armpit smelling in this episode. And coconut oil is really, really good as like a natural anti deodorant because of that antimicrobial action in the arms. And what they say in the article is that MCT oils generally only contain the capra fatty acids. Right. The caprylic acid or the caproic acid or the capric acid. And that they don't really contain the lauric acid, which is kind of like the star component in coconut oil. And so the conclusion of the article was that even though MCT oil has been marketed as liquid coconut oil and this really potent, healthy extract of coconut oil, the fact is that you don't get any of the antimicrobial benefits of coconut oil, period. Point made. MCT oil no good compared to coconut oil. Yeah. But what they fail to take into account in the article is that most of the time, when you're looking at everything from bulletproof coffee to the use of mcts for sports performance enhancement, when you add them to your sports performance beverage, the idea is that the reason that you use these is because they are readily converted into ketone bodies. Then they get you into this state of ketosis, which results in an improvement in cognitive function and focus. And sure, I'll admit that when you take in MCT oil, you don't get some of the side health benefits of coconut oil, but you do get a more targeted and concentrated delivery of these C8 and C10 fatty acids, which help you out from the cognitive standpoint. So it's all in balance. And of course, the article itself was written by some folks who own a coconut farm and produce virgin coconut oil. Shocking. Yeah. So just just goes to show that, you know, be careful. Just because a food component does not contain, you know, like a liquid food component derived in the factory like MCT oil, just because it doesn't contain a lot of the benefits of its original food source does not mean it doesn't have side benefits because it's concentrated. So.

And it really depends on what you're after in this case, like when I have MCT oil, I'm definitely after that cognitive function. When I put it in my breakfast, I just feel like my brain is just humming along for hours afterwards. And I'm not worried about getting a whole bunch of antimicrobials.

Yeah. So the question is, do you want to enhance cognitive performance or do you want to avoid smelly armpits? Choose your poison wisely or shall I?

Why must I choose?

Pick your poison. I think it goes. Anyways, the last Thing that I wanted to mention the last couple of things. The first was a really interesting re examination of data from what's called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the NANES survey. And what this looked at was what proportion of the adult population has inadequate intake of things like vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, calcium, magnesium. I'm going to guess all of them. Shockingly high proportions. More than two thirds of the US population is deficient in most of the micronutrients and the vitamins that I just mentioned and almost all of them are deficient in A, C, D, E, calcium and magnesium. I'm surprised.

By calcium.

That's the only one in that list.

I'm surprised.

Yeah. And we've talked about this on the show before. Calcium was about 50% deficiencies.

Wow.

We've talked about this on the show before and by the way, vitamin D and vitamin E, the fat soluble vitamins in our food pyramid esque culture up to 90% deficiencies in those among the population.

I'm not surprised by that.

And that's just below the estimated average requirement for the absence of disease. You know we're not necessarily talking about going from good to great. We're talking about going from some non.

Disease minimum performance is not dying.

Yeah. So obviously a big part of this is that you know, our soil sucks because we, we aren't turning over the soil the way that we would have in like a more ancestral farming environment. Part of it is pesticides and herbicides, part of it is unhealthy, leaky gut, so lack of absorption. But ultimately what this comes down to is it could be important to go out of your way to add these via like a vitamin or supplement based source. And this just goes to show you that sometimes you can't get everything that you need from food, especially if you're eating a crappy diet. Now the way that I say things is if you eat a really healthy whole foods ancestral based diet and you're the average Joe, right. You're lifting a little bit, moving, sprinting, you're probably good to go. But if you are doing things like Spartan races and ironman triathlons and asking your body to go above and beyond what would be considered like normal ancestral activity, you're probably going to be in that boat where you need some extra nutrient support. So the data from that study though was just shocking in terms of how many people are deficient in these things. Yeah. Wow. So, oh, and then the last thing speaking of nutrient dense foods is hummus. I just posted a 20 minute video that my wife shot when we were in Israel of what the inside of a hummus factory looks like. And I thought it'd just be like this nasty type of thing where they were taking chickpeas and, you know, taking chickpeas, which are a legume that can, you know, wreak havoc on the digestive system early and, you know, blending them up and turning them into hummus. But actually they have these enormous like soaking chambers and rinsing chambers and they're heating and boiling and deactivating all the digestive enzyme inhibitors. And they understood all this at the factory. And then it was a very, very clean, pristine, mechanical like environment. But at the same time they were using a lot of ancestral food preparation methods when it came to chickpeas. And this was the Strauss hummus factory, which is kind of a big, big hummus brand. So apparently not all big food companies are evil. So anyways though, it actually is an interesting video. It's like a big Dr. Seuss factory for hummus. So check it out if you're interested in hummus or hummus or however you want to say it. I certainly ate plenty this week in Dubai and so it's tasty stuff. I certainly do like me a little bit of hummus.

I make hummus the old fashioned way. Put it in a big vat and then stomp on it with bare feet.

Mmm. Yeah, just like wine. I like it. It's a good workout too. Anyways though, BenGreenfieldFitness.com 307 is where you can get access to everything that we just talked about, including that video listener Q and A. Hi, how do you feel about the pharmacy labs urinalysis kit for testing neurotransmitters? I've heard it's a scam and I've ordered it from my naturopath. Just wondering. I have some low serotonin and other things and trying to find natural ways to relieve this anxiety. Thanks.

Yeah, I did a quick little Google search when this question first came in and I gotta say, it doesn't look promising.

Uh oh, the nerves there seemed to.

Be the first things that popped up. They were like, scam, scam, beware, do not do this.

Well, just so you know what it is, I mean, you're, you're peeing and you're collecting an overnight urine. And I believe this one also involves a saliva sample. Right. And the idea is that you can find neurotransmitters in the urine just like you can find hormones in the urine. And actually saliva and urine can be good for some stuff like an adrenal stress index, for example, where you're taking a salivary measurement four times in the day to measure the amount of cortisol and DHEA you're producing. That's a really, really good way to find out if you're like in a state of adrenal fatigue or not. Maybe you have something else going on, like, I don't know, Lyme disease, like our last podcast. Or another thing that is pretty decent would be like a 24 hour urine sex steroid test. It's a wonderful test. You walk around with this orange jug the whole day. Every time you pee, you pee into the jug. And you know, this is good for seeing like a 24 hour running cycle of your hormone levels, which is actually a little bit better than a single snapshot of your hormone levels. So it actually is. It's pretty decent for measuring hormones. It's pretty decent for measuring, you know, again, things like cortisol and DHEA when it comes to neurotransmitters, though. Now, the deal with urinary testing and neurotransmitters is that theoretically you can get a view of neurotransmitters when you do a urine test. Because neurotransmitters are not just going to hang around in your brain. They're not unique to your brain. And as a matter of fact, like serotonin, for example, a very abundant neurotransmitter in most folks, 95% of serotonin production occurs in the gut. This is why a lot of times people who deal with depression and insomnia and stuff like that, you don't start with the brain, you start with the gut and the gut bacteria and presence of leaky gut and stuff like that. But when you look at the amounts of any given neurotransmitter in the urine, all you're seeing is basically what you're peeing out when it comes to neurotransmitters. And you're not necessarily seeing levels that are actually available to the brain or levels that are being produced in the gut.

It's sort of like doing those ketone strips. You're not getting an accurate measurement of what's being used. You're getting a measurement of what's coming out.

Yeah, exactly. And Nora Good Goudis talks about this. She's got a book called Primal Body, Primal Mind and like on page 279 up to 284, she's got like these, these quizzes and questionnaires that she uses to identify neurotransmitter issues. That, and she's a pretty good biofeedback practitioner. She finds those along with amino acid supplementation, the use of amino acids to restore proper neurotransmitter levels, to be far more reliable than say, like a urinary neurotransmitter evaluation combined with neurotransmitter repletion therapy based off of the specific neurotransmitters that are shown to be deficient or imbalanced in your urine. So what that would mean would be like, for example, you would take one of these questionnaires, if you were deficient neurotransmitters, you could start using something like essential amino acids or something like a blend of 5 HTP and Tyrosine is another really, really common example of an amino acid blend that tends to restore neurotransmitter activity and just a full spectrum of amino acids. A lot of times that's what people need. Like they just, they either have, since gut and brain issues are intertwined a lot of times inadequate protein digestion, right? Inadequate hydrochloric acid or inadequate digestive enzymes resulting in inadequate protein digestion, resulting in amino acid deficiencies, resulting in neurotransmitter deficiencies, or a lot of people sometimes just have too much serotonin or not enough dopamine or things along those lines. So the use of digestive enzymes and hcl to help with protein breakdown, the use of a full spectrum amino acid supplement like Thorn makes one called Aminos. You've got master amino pattern, which is a capsule that has a bunch of amino acids in it. Those kind of things can help with neurotransmitter repletion. But ultimately, testing neurotransmitters through the urine is not something that most of the better docs and medical practitioners out there are saying or that they have found to be accurate. You're only getting basically what your body is peeing out. And it doesn't really reflect what's going on specifically in the brain, which is really what you're going after fixing when you're testing for neurotransmitters.

Now, Karen, since you actually already purchased this, and since it's not exactly going to work the way that you hope. I know when I was having anxiety problems, I did do one of the urinalysis things that Ben was talking about where he carry around a jug for 24 hours. I didn't actually carry it around, I kept it in the fridge.

But they what they tested for, carry mine around, just keep IT on your.

Yes, but what they did test for was adrenaline and, and things like that to make sure that my body wasn't. The anxiety I was having wasn't getting triggered by just a like something misfiring and shooting out adrenaline all the time.

So.

So maybe your money isn't totally wasted if you can convince your naturopath to sort of switch what they're looking for.

I actually hung mine around my neck with a chain.

Oh sexy.

Hey Ben and Brock. I have a training related question hoping that will help me out with my 2015 spring race season. I'm a runner primarily and experienced my first injury last fall, an IT band issue. Did some strength training and bike work and started running in mid December. So far, so good. I have a couple of spring races coming up which are known for being really hilly. I do hills, but my question is, do you have any tips or suggestions or training advice on how to get super strong for hills without potentially damaging my IT band Again, thanks so much.

IT band issues are a bummer.

See, my whole philosophy on this is find as many stairs as possible. Find as many hills as possible. Just tackle stairs like crazy, tackle downhills like crazy. Eventually your IT band will just kind of, kind of rupture and after that you don't have to worry about it anymore because it's not there.

You're not going to be running. Yeah, it's like there goes your marathon training.

I actually tried that approach once with a medial meniscus issue and I read on the Internet, which is a great place to do research on your injuries, by the way. Is Dr. Or Google that you could like grind down a meniscal tear. And I was like three weeks out from a race. This was a few years ago when I was kind of in just like macho man mode. And so I did hill repeats, just like limping through these hill repeats, slamming my leg into the ground, thinking, okay, I'm just going to grind out this medial meniscus tear, whatever it is. It's kind of like rubbing on the inside of my knee. And I did like four sessions a week for a couple of weeks and woke up one morning and my pain was like completely gone.

Yeah, and so was your meniscus.

I don't know. But I'm just. That's just. That's a total anecdote. I do not recommend that, especially for IT man, because I've had IT band issues before and holy cow, like going downhill or walking downstairs is like teeth grittingly painful. It really sucks. So. So, yeah. And especially if you have a race coming up, right, where there's going to be lots of downhills or lots of hills in general, you got to get your body ready to run downhill whether or not you have an IT band issue. This can be an issue because downhill running, there's a huge braking component, right? Like a huge eccentric contraction that takes place that can put a lot of stress on the joints, that can result in a lot of muscle tearing and longer recovery implications for anybody who's done a lot of downhill running. I mean, like, it is hard on your joints. So the deal is, though, training your body to run downhill or running downhill in general requires things like a high cadence, because your feet are moving very quickly underneath your body because gravity is pushing you down that hill. A high ability to kind of be able to lean forward and swing your arms properly, to be able to support you as you go downhill, but also to be able to use gravity to push you down that hill bit faster.

And then kind of, you're not resisting gravity the entire time. You're using it to your advantage a little bit.

Yeah. And also just staying on your toes. Right. Like avoiding a heel strike. So some of the things you can do. Here's a really simple one. Deep water running. And when you deep water run, whether you're training to run downhill or not, correct form. And I actually didn't used to think that. I thought deep water running, you lean back, you get your knees nice and high, so you're jacking your heart rate up. But all that does is kind of teach you how to heel strike. Instead, you want to lean forward and drive your feet forward, so you're driving your knees kind of like forward at almost like a 30 to 45 degree angle instead of straight up and down. But deep water running with like an aqua jogging belt, like an underwater MP3 player, makes time go by way faster, trust me.

So you're putting yourself in more of a position like a sprinter, huh?

Yeah.

Okay.

And then.

So that knee drive, follow through, like the really, like, long kick behind. And then knee drive is the most important, important part.

Yeah. And a really high cadence. Right. Like, water running is really good for developing a high cadence even if you don't have access to deep water. Like, like at my house, I have a shallow pool. I have one of these aqua fitness pools where I can run against a current, and that's only like four and a half, five feet deep. But I can still focus on cadence. Right. I can focus on picking up my feet really quickly, and there's far less Impact even when I'm doing that compared to, to, you know, doing like a sprint outside on flat ground. So water running is one thing. Treadmill running, a treadmill that's set at like a 0.0% incline is not flat. That technically simulates running downhill because you have no wind resistance. You got very little friction resistance because the belt is moving. And that's a good way to work on cadence. It's a little bit lower impact than running downhill. Still, with an IT band, you might have to stick to deep water running. But for other people who want to get the overspeed benefits of running downhill with less of the impact. So just doing treadmill running at a high speed at a 0.0% incline. And some of the treadmills will go lower, right? Some will go to like a negative one or negative two.

So Seen those?

Yeah, yeah. They basically go up on an incline, but then the front of the treadmill will actually dip down a little bit. I think they're the. The pre cores are a couple at our winding MCA that does that. They'll go down to negative one or negative two. So treadmill running is another one. So cycling, overspeed cycling that trains your nerves to turn over just as fast as your nerves are trained to turn over. When you're doing, like, downhill running sprints on, like, you know, downhill running sprints, for example, on a golf course are really, really good, right? Because you're just like. It's kind of a soft surface. It's usually controlled. There's usually just a few golf balls here to dodge, a few angry golfers shaking their clubs at you and cursing at you as you run past them in your track shorts. Now go out there after the club closes or before it opens. But anyways, that's going to aggravate an IT band either way. But overspeed cycling, right, where you're getting that same overspeed effect and you're cycling at 100 plus RPM, you can still get really, really good training of your nerves. The big mistake a lot of people make when they're doing like, high cadence repeats on an elliptical trainer or on a bicycle is they use too high of a resistance, right? And so it's more like a metabolic training effect than a nervous system or a neuromuscular training effect. The idea with overspeed repeats on a bike is you use a really, like, embarrassingly low gear, but you get up to a spinning cadence that's so fast that your brain freaking hurts. Like, that's, that's a proper overspeed training session on a bike.

So you're totally, totally in granny gear.

Yeah. And you shouldn't be able to do it for any longer than 60 seconds maximum. And for really, really high speed, like 20 to 30 seconds and your nervous system is cooked. Right. And then you take a break and then you go and repeat again after a full recovery. But overspeed with the bicycle is really good. And then finally the elliptical trainer. I think I've talked about this on the show before, how I have one of these outdoor elliptical trainers called an elliptigo out in my garage. That's. And that's really cool. That's a spending machine. That's like a fifteen hundred dollar machine. But it's a, it's an elliptical trainer on wheels. You can like ride up and down the street with your helmet and your glasses waving at your neighbors and like.

You'Re riding a coach in a parade.

And the funny thing is when I take this out on the trail, this elliptigo out on the trail, I get like, yo, what's up? Nods from like the guys on the dorky recumbent bicycles, like the guys in the rollerblades with the ski poles. It's like you fit in with the people who are on all the non conventional ambulatory modes of transportation out there. Yeah. Anyways, though, indoor elliptical trainer is fine if you don't want to embarrass yourself outdoors if you don't have one of these ellipticals. But the crossover between elliptical training and running, there's a few really interesting studies that show that you incorporate all the same muscles, you get the same cardiovascular stimulus, you get a good maintenance of things like VO2, max running, economy running efficiency, but you of course don't get the same impact as you'd get when running. So all sorts of things that you can do. I mean if I had it band, I'd start with the water running and the cycling, provided that is pain free. And then move into like some elliptical training, eventually some treadmill and some golf course running. And you should be able to progressively get yourself to the point where you can, you can maintain a high cadence running downhill, pain free. And again, if that doesn't work, just run the hell out of your IT bands and you won't have to worry about them after a while. Oh, and we should, we should also mention, by the way, @Bulletproofnee.com it's kind of an older program that I wrote, but that doesn't mean it's not good. Bulletproofnee.com I have an entire program designed to fix it band friction syndrome. And it's one that I wrote when I was training for the Half Ironman World championships about five years ago and had it. Band spent like six months researching everything that you could possibly do to get rid of it. Band Friction Syndrome. And I put it all in that program at Bulletproof Knee. And that was before Dave Asprey came up with Bulletproof Coffee. I'll just say you can look at the server records or whatever they are.

So Bulletproof Knee involves a lot of rubbing of butter onto your knee.

Yeah, exactly. So bulletproofnee.com I don't think I can trademark it or it would probably upset the Bulletproof Coffee folks. But it is there and it has nothing to do with Bulletproof Coffee.

Hi Ben, I wanted to know if you could give me any information that you have on the plant Kratom K R A T. A friend of mine recommended it to me for sleep. I've tried pretty much everything out there in regards to sleep and insomnia and this is something that actually works really well for me. But looking at some of the stuff online, it looks a little scary. So can you tell me what the benefits and any potential side effects of using this would be? Thank you so much. So much. Bye.

So Kratom is illegal, isn't it?

Well, so in Thailand it is illegal. Also in Australia, Myanmar, Malaysia, a lot of these Indonesian countries where it does tend to be overused or else mixed with fun things. Like, you know, in Thailand you mix it with cough syrup for example, and you get these amazing psychoactive properties.

It's an opiate, right?

Yeah. And. And some people mix it with like Modafinil, right? The, the, the smart drug and get this crazy like pain killing and dumb.

At the same time.

Have you seen the movie? Oh, what's it called? It's about this pharmacist who just starts. He's like this really clean living, small town pharmacist who just starts mixing up these crazy blends and going out and like doing the local cycling races and that. Just going way off the deep end. It's called I'm blanking on it. It's got. We'll look it up and put a link to it in the show notes. It's actually now really, it's, it's really funny and I. You know how when you, when you're trying to remember movie and it's on the tip of your tongue and you can't remember it anyways though, I'll. It's. It's brand new too. It just came out but, yeah, so this pharmacist mixes things like. Like opioids and painkillers with central nervous system stimulants, cocaine, like, central nervous system stimulants and cough syrup. And he goes out and just wins races and stuff like that because his legs are numb and he can't feel pain. But he's extremely hyper. Like, he drank 10 cups of coffee. And that's kind of sort of what this Kratom stuff is like when it comes to its painkilling effect. It has what's called opioid receptor activity in it. So it binds to your opioid receptors. It kills pain. They'll use it sometimes to wean addicts from stronger drugs like heroin, cocaine, stuff like that. And it comes from a plant. It comes from an herb, no surprise here in Southeast Asia. And the herb is actually in the coffee family. So it's in the coffee family. But rather than acting as a direct central nervous system stimulant, like caffeine would, it is a little bit more like a. It acts more like a methamphetamine. It's basically an alternative to methadone. And then, of course, when you mix it with other things, it can have all sorts of interesting effects. Unfortunately, the pharmacology of it, the toxicology of it, has been studied very, very little. Surprisingly few studies on this stuff. And what happens when it does things like bind to serotonin receptors and what happens when it binds to these opioid receptors? We do know that it has some pretty high addictive potential, and they've proven that in animals. And it's definitely not all that hot for your liver when you combine it with stuff like cough syrup, which I really don't think that Abby is necessarily doing what she's probably getting. Rather than the methamphetamine, the heroin, the cocaine, like, effects of it is all the. The painkilling effects of it. Right. And that's why it helps with sleep. It's like, you know, morphine. It's like pain killing yourself into sleep. Well, just like anything. Like Valium, like a Diazepam, like Ambien. Ambien. What are some other ones out there? Lunesta. Even, like a really strong antihistamine, like a, you know, Benadryl or Zyquil or something like that. Most of these are not only acting as a band aid to cover up an underlying issue that is keeping you from sleeping, but they're also. We talked about Dr. Kirk Parsley earlier and what he was saying about the circadian rhythm and the Effects of the circadian rhythm with airline travel. He also talked in that particular talk about how you have a very, very difficult time getting into your deep sleep phases like your rapid eye movement sleep and to a certain extent your non rapid eye movement sleep. And so it's kind of like knocking yourself out with a hammer to get to sleep and then expecting your nervous system and your neurons to regenerate the same way they would during normal sleep. And frankly that just doesn't happen. And so when you sacrifice sleep like that, or when you get sleep from a drug like that that's used as a band aid, you get inadequate learning ability the next day, less of an ability to form memories, less repair of the nervous system, which has some really interesting long term effects in terms of things like risk for Alzheimer's and the effect on nerves, which could eventually implicate things like reaction speed, risk for ms, all sorts of issues when it comes to not allowing your nervous system to recover properly. So I would personally be pretty careful with this stuff. I would set it aside, get some cough syrup the next time you get invited to a party, maybe use it in that way, but bounce it around. Yeah. There are other things that you could do for sleep. Like I talked about smoking melatonin. I mean, you could also use a melatonin patch. You can use like a sublingual or a melatonin liquid. And that usually works really well, especially when you blend it with something like passion flower. Like melatonin and passion flower blended together is like a really nice anti anxiolytic, which if a painkiller or a morphine like substance is working for you, for sleep might be the issue here. Right. Is anxiety, which a lot of people don't have, a parasite, which can cause insomnia, or they don't have low blood sugar, which can keep you up at night, or they don't have too much screen time staring at phones before bed or something like that. They just freaking are anxious. And so a lot of times something like that can help. Another thing that really, really helps and just the fact that it sounds like Valium kind of gives you some clues. Even though it's a sedative and an anti anxiolytic that does not knock you out deleteriously in the same way that Valium does. And that's a valerian root using anywhere from 500 to 1,000 milligrams of valerian root, like that vapor boost sweet dreams blend that I talked about vaporizing. That's actually melatonin passionflower valerian root. L Theanine. And, you know, I know some of you out there may have reservations about smoking something and the effect of propylene glycol and lung tissue and that type of thing, but you don't inhale it, right. You just kind of breathe a little bit into your mouth, and it's the important thing through the mucous membranes in your mouth.

When you say smoking it, I think people think, like, really smoking it, but.

It'S more like puffing on it. I don't even know why they add the propylene glycol, frankly. I think it's just to produce the smoke, like, effect, honestly.

So you look cool.

So you look cool. So that's@BenGreenfieldFitness.com VaporBoost I actually have a link to the stuff, and I think that knocks it into free shipping with some kind of a discount or something like that. But you can check that stuff out. You can try the valerian route. Obviously, there are a bunch of other things you can use for sleep, but those are two that you could try. So ultimately, this Kratom I'd be kind of careful with. Interestingly, it's not illegal in the U.S. it's marked by the FDA as something that is kind of like the raised eyebrow drug, right? Something that is. It's not illegal. It's not banned by the World Anti Doping association or USADA or anything like that. But it's also just one of those things that is so kind of unknown in terms of its health effects that you just have to be super duper careful of it. The. The searches for it on Google, by the way, have skyrocketed it. People who, like, chew it or brew it or snort it or smoke it or inject it or ingest it, like, it's. It's all over the place now, interestingly.

So it's probably a week away from getting banned then.

Probably. And some people will say it would, like, turn you into a sex God. Some people will say completely saps your libido. So it's. It's kind of interesting stuff all over the place. For Tom K R A T O M if you want to check it out for yourself, if you want to experiment with a little bit with your bit of cough syrup. Hope there are no children listening right now. And so do not try this.

Children.

Yes.

Hey, Ben. This is Corey Edwards from the Spokane Valley. I wanted to know why powerlifting shoes have an elevated heel. To me, it seems like that would promote Achilles tightness and change a lot of biomechanical form in one, in people's lifting. And I also would like to know if, when you squat, do you squat with no shoes on for increased foot strength and balance?

Personally, I do all my weightlifting barefoot, which is probably a bad idea in terms of I'm going to crush my toe one day, but it just feels good. It's.

If you're, if you're doing heavy weightlifting and Olympic style weightlifting, going barefoot is not necessarily the best idea. And if you look at photos of a lot of Olympic weightlifters or powerlifters or anybody doing like a heavy clean, a heavy split, which is where your legs are split into a really low lunge, you know, which is sometimes, you know, followed by like a jerk up into like a push press type of position. People doing like getting into a really, really low squat after doing a power clean where you're, you, you literally like a power clean is, you're, you're exploding the bar from the floor and then you're falling underneath the bar. Not really falling underneath the bar, but, but rapidly sitting underneath the bar, shooting yourself under there. Yeah. You know what would be another example? Even the death, even like getting into a deadlift position where you really, truly are using your leg muscles efficiently, that requires you to get into a very low position with your butt and your hips, or at least a relatively low position. A snatch would be another example. Right. Like a squat style snatch where you've got a vertical trunk and you've got fully flexed knees at the bottom and your hips and your ankles and your shins are really tilted forward. The amount of what's called dorsiflexion required for any of those positions that I just talked about is tremendous. And the problem is that even in somebody with pretty decent ankle mobility, once you get into the really heavy weights, it's difficult to fall under a weight and get into either a deep squat or a deep split with your shins either slightly vertical or your shins very far forward without having your ankles hold you back significantly from a mobility standpoint. And so if you look at the biomechanics of this, a very, very easy fix for that, a way to introduce the ability to get into those deep positions without your ankles holding you back. Specifically the ability of your ankles to dorsiflex, right, to flex forward holding you back is to somehow get your heels higher. And so if you look at Russian weightlifting, for example, they used to, or they're the first people to get into these weightlifting shoes and they would basically attach things to the bottom of their shoes, attach wood with nails to the bottom of the heels to get that correctly elevated heel. And you'll get people like Katie Bowman, for example, talking about high heels can be deleterious to your low back because they're basically shifting your biomechanics rearward, they're shortening the hip flexors, and walking around in them all day is, is not a great idea. And I would certainly say that walking around in, in shoes with raised heels could produce some of the other deleterious effects of like, keeping you in hip flexion or even inhibiting the ability to develop full hip extension the way that you would if you were in like a, a barefoot shoe or a minimalist style shoe. And of course, they also limit your ability to build up all your tiny foot muscles and your ability to have to like, you know, as we talked about in our last podcast, to get strong arches to eliminate things like flat feet. But if you are lifting heavy weights that you have to get low for either getting low to get underneath or getting low to lift them off the ground using your legs rather than your low back. Elevated heels are a really good idea. And if I were doing a lot of powerlifting and I, let's say I decided I wanted to go compete in the CrossFit games and, you know, really work on, on my ability to get some of these heavier weights overhead or, or, you know, be able to lift something really heavy off the ground, I would certainly use footwear with, with an elevated heel, a weightlifting shoe. So, yeah, and it does change your biomechanics. As Corey notes, it does promote Achilles tightness. And that is kind of why you use them, is to be able to get yourself into, into more ankle dorsiflexion. The problem is that a lot of people get the powerlifting shoes with the elevated heel and then walk around the gym doing curls because they've got their weightlifting shoes on, and that's just ridiculous. So don't be that person. Especially if you're wearing your Ben Greenfield Fitness T shirt at the gym. Do not either take off the T shirt or take off the shoes. For the love of God, don't wear weightlifting shoes unless you're really, truly weightlifting.

Hi, Ben and Brock. I know you like to answer poop questions, but here's a pit. Why would one armpit smell worse than the other armpit? I generally don't wear deodorant and certainly never antiperspirant, and usually it's not a problem. But when I get nervous or stressed, I noticed that my left armpit smells a lot worse. Than my right armpit. And I was wondering why this would be. Thanks for all the help. And it's great to know there's a person or people I can ask about these exciting pit questions. Thanks. Bye.

We do like a good poop question. It's true. We also enjoy the pit question.

Yeah, yeah.

Anything stinky, really.

That's right.

Bring it on.

That's right. We love sulfur here on the show. The fact that this is happening when she gets fearful or stressed or anxious, that's actually something that's really interesting because you produce a scent when you're anxious or when you have fear that is a signal to other humans that you're anxious or that you're experiencing fear. And they've done brain scans in people, and when sniffing what they call panic sweat, the regions of the brain that handle emotional and social signals become far more active in the people smelling that smell and the parts of the brain involved in empathy. This is really interesting also light up. So you're sending this signal to people that you are in distress. And technically, it's a signal for other people to empathize with you, to help people to be able to socially be there for you when you stink. So, you know, by wearing deodorant, you may be inhibiting your ability to be helped out by others. So there you have it. We just put Axe body spray out of business, baby.

Awesome. Finally.

Or, of course, on the flip side, by wearing deodorant antiperspirants, you're sending the world a message that you fear nothing. I mean, you're not stinky, but you're fearless. Not stinky.

I don't even fear aluminum chloride on my. My most vascular part of my body.

Well, it turns out that the studies that they've done on armpits do indeed show that not all pits are created equal, including all pits on one single person. So you can actually take the microbes from an armpit using like a Q tip. And they've done this in studies where they'll put the microbes on a nutrient rich plate. It's called an agar plate. And when they put it on there, they wait for the bacterial colonies to grow, and you'll get more or less growth of bacterial colonies even in the same person, when you compare the left pit to the right pit. And one of the studies that they've done is called the armpit microbe study. If you follow pitstart on Twitter pitstart, you could see some of the tweets that are coming out about this study. And the theory here is, is very simple. What they suspect is that it might have to do with arm dominance. Meaning that with the dominant arm, you tend to hold that arm out and away from your body more frequently and that results in like a lower temperature in that arm, a little bit more aeration of that arm and less propensity of bacterial colonies to grow versus the non dominant arm that's kind of tucked up against your body, letting all that bacteria thrive. And that I bet that's gotten even.

Even more so now that we use mice all day. Like the mouse hand would be away from your body.

Yeah, exactly. The hand that's on the computer. Yeah. Even while we're podcasting. Right. So I've got my right hand, my dominant hand is kind of resting on my desk and my left hand is kind of, you know, that arm is tucked against my side.

So I actually have both arms straight up in the air right now.

Yeah, well, you do that up in Canada. Pits are equal in Canada. So anyways, that's probably what's going on here. You know, really, really simple answer. Ultimately, it's not something to worry about. Like we talked about earlier, you know, just slapping some coconut oil in either armpit. You know, that's a great antibacterial versus MCT oil, which would completely suck for that.

Just make you slippery.

Yeah. So just slap some coconut oil in there. Don't get too stressed or excited about it. But know that if you do get stressed or excited, people are going to empathize with you. As long as you just let it stank, baby.

So just waft it in their face.

That's right. That's right. So speaking of wafting things in people's faces, let's go ahead and look at this week's review. And remember, if you leave a review for the Ben Greenfield Fitness show on itunes and you hear us read your review as we're about to do on the show, then you just email ben greenfieldfitness.com and we actually will send you, we'll send you a T shirt, a beanie, and a cool BPA free water bottle. Now you do that over in itunes. Just go to search for Ben Greenfield Fitness over there. The other thing is that of course, if you want access to any of the links that we talked about, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com 307 and we do a really good kick butt job getting all the show notes up for you. So today's review is, is from Wellness Jen. Wellness Jen. Congratulations, Brock. You wanna, you wanna read this one?

I sure do. The title is how in the he double hockey sticks does he know all that? Ish.

Ish.

All this ish.

All this ish. Yeah, yeah.

And it goes like this. Ben is the Rain man savant version in the healthy living realm.

Wow.

I don't know if that's a compliment. Judge Wapner. Judge Wapner. No underpants. Definitely no underpants. When it comes to knowledge about health, natural living, exercise, pooping, and probably any other topic you want to know about. His brain knows no limit.

Cough syrup and drugs, too.

Yeah, I need those two.

Yeah.

I am in the fitness industry myself and could never retain all the facts, names, tips, recipes, and other tidbits he dumps out every week.

It's a good, good descriptive.

That's a very good. Perhaps it's a smart. Smart drugs. But regardless, I am in awe of his knowledge and inspired by his vast proficiencies.

I don't use smart drugs. Don't you? Rarely. If I use. I use the tea on cheese stuff sometimes, but actually, my smart drug is my cupo coffee.

I took some alpha brain this morning.

Yeah, I haven't even been using that. Like, I just. Yeah, like, occasionally if I'm sleep deprived, I use smart drugs, but I haven't even been using them for, like, talks or workshops or anything like that. Just, just, just.

You're just dumping it out everywhere you go.

It's coffee. I actually did have about eight cups of coffee a day when I was teaching my workshop in Dubai just because I. I got in and I was so sleep deprived. I got five hours of sleep, rolled out of bed, like, taught for 12 hours, slept for five hours, got up the next morning and did it again, and I was literally like every hour having a cup of coffee. That was. That was a little much. So. Yeah. Anyways.

Anyway, back to wellness. Jen, where did you. Where did I left off? Furthermore, Ben and Brock can take totally geeky topics and make them funny, so the podcast easily holds. Holds my interest all the way through. These podcasts act as entertainment and education for me. I'm always going back and listening to previous episodes over again as I wait with bated breath for the next release.

Baited breath.

That was my baited breath.

Baited breath, to me, always just seems like a horrible term because I, for some reason, I think of the word bait. Like, I think of like a mouth with like, bait in it. Like, is that weird that I think that way?

That is a little bit weird.

Yeah. So bated breath to me is like a fishy, foully mouth. It's horrible, but you can still wait with your own bated breath for the next release. So awesome review Wellness Jen. And you can write ben greenfieldfitness.com Let us know your mailing address and your T shirt size and we'll get a handy dandy snack pack out to you. Snack Pack out. Check out BenGradfulFitness.com 307 for all of the show notes, all the tweets that we tweeted about, the conferences that I'll be speaking at, the calendar, all the resources from the questions that we answered, and oh, so much more. And stay tuned this weekend for a fantastic yet controversial interview on I believe this weekend is vaccinations.

No, this week.

That's next weekend.

You have to wait 10 days for that one. I don't remember, but I know it's not the vaccination one because I promise I'm going on vacation for that one.

Let me see if I can find my notes so I can let all of our listeners know. This is great radio, by the way.

Yeah, it's great listening to us struggle.

To try to remember what we're doing. This weekend's podcast is called why Strong People Are Harder to Kill.

Oh, yes, of course.

That'll be a good one. So listen in. And until next time, I'm Ben. He's Brock.

I'm Brock.

Thanks for listening.

Visit BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition and performance advice.

Sam.