Podcast Episode #59: Should You Stop Exercising In Polluted Areas?

In this podcast episode, exercising in polluted areas, what detoxing is and how it works, how to lose muscle mass safely, staying fit when you can't run, what to do if your legs get tired before your lungs do, what exactly processed sugar is, and much more.

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 podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield. A little bit Unorthodox podcast today for a couple of reasons. The first is that I am on a bit of a vacation right now. I am in Cape May, New Jersey. I'm pretty sure it's in New Jersey, sitting out in the veranda of a hotel called Congress hall, watching the rain fall outside and unfortunately underneath the covered veranda here. But you may hear the sound of children playing outside or people walking past, maybe music in the background every now and again as someone opens a door. So the reason for that is that I am not at my office or sitting at home at my home office like I usually am when I record. I am instead here at Congress hall in Cape May, New Jersey. The other reason that this podcast might be a little bit unorthodox is because I have received a ton of questions this week and I'd like to take this podcast to address your questions. We've got some really great interviews coming down the line that I'll talk about in today's special announcements. But really, this entire podcast is devoted to to a Q and A. We could call this the Cape May Q and A if you will. So we'll move on to this week's special announcements and then dive right into some really thought provoking, interesting listener questions that I think just about anybody could benefit from. Special announcements Like I mentioned, some really interesting interviews coming up in podcasts 60 and 61. Next week I'm going to be releasing an interview with Dr. William Davis and he was the author of Track your Plaque, which is basically a book that talks about the only heart disease prevention program that shows how heart CT scans these are those not a full body CT scan, but literally a heart CT scan could be used to detect, track and control coronary plaque. But we're going to be going way beyond the common heart disease risk factors, way beyond talking to people who are just about to drop dead of a heart attack because of coronary plaque. And instead talk about how these new heart CT scans could really benefit a lot of people and some of the cutting edge technology that's out there that allows you to really, truly see what, what's going on with your cardiovascular system. And the other interview, the interview from episode number 61 should be really interesting, especially for those of you who have been kind of listening to the concern on this show that fruits, vegetables, pretty much anything that's farmed these days, is a lot lower in minerals and nutrients and vitamins than it used to be. I'm getting a biologist on the show, an agricultural researcher and, and farming consultant who has invented a form of organic farming technology that actually increases healthy soil microbial activity. It rehabilitates soil that's been destroyed by commercial farming methods. And he's basically producing really, really nutritious, nutritious food that goes above and beyond what current standards for even organic food is. This Guy's name is Dr. Winston Cow and he's pioneered things like how to neutralize seawater so that you can use seawater to enhance the health and the nutrition of crops without burning them from high salt content. He has pioneered these new methods of soil remineralization to add things like magnesium back into the soil. Done a lot of work in organic hydroponics and we'll wait until episode 61 for him to explain that to you. So some really interesting interviews coming up in podcast episode number 60s and 60. I can't talk today. And 61. A couple of other announcements. If you want to get the full scoop on the brand new Pacific Elite Fitness Triathlon training camp where I'm going to be head coaching leading all activities. I've planned out a really fantastic and fun itinerary for that week, all inclusive camp. I put registration details, food activities, everything up on the show notes to this podcast podcast. So if you go and you check out the special announcements and click on the show notes, you'll be able to go see what that's all about. And then the other thing is I put kind of a sad video, I guess, a little bit catastrophic. Really realistic though. It's a, it's a video about modern medicine. If you remember Dr. Carolyn Dean, one of the top physicians in the U.S. right now, the top natural physicians in the U.S. she came on the show and podcast episode number 54. She was talking about her book the Magnesium Miracle, which was one of the best books that I've read this year. And she has an hour long video that is recorded. It's not me interviewing her, it's another gentleman. But if you found my interview with her to be interesting, you're gonna really get a lot out of this video. So I put it up on the show. Notes of this podcast. It is about 58 minutes long, so you're gonna need to get comfortable when you watch it. But it's worth viewing if you're into things like how alternative medicine or how alternative health could improve your life or maybe some of the downfalls of modern medicine. And trust me, I know there's a lot of doctors that listen to the show, a lot of allopathic physicians I personally work with in my office, an allopathic sports medicine physician. Highly respect modern medicine and what it can do for people. But I also feel that there's not enough of an emphasis on preventive medicine and some of the things that we talk about on this show. And I think that there's not enough of an emphasis when you go visit your doctor on food, on exercise and what those can do to your body positively versus pharmaceuticals or quick fixes, so to speak. So check that video out. It's worth the time that you'll spend watching it. So we're going to go ahead and move on to this week's listener Q and A. And remember, if you have a question, you can email me ben greenfieldfitness.com or you can call toll free to 877-209-9439. That's a toll free number I've set up to take your audio calls and I really would like to see a lot more of those out there. As a matter of fact, I tell you what, if somebody calls up this week and they leave an audio question and it's a good audio question, you're not just messing around. It's legitimate. You leave it on that toll free number. First person to call up and leave an audio question will get in the mail from me. A free copy of the Shape 21 book DVD package. That's a $47 value. It's a complete exercise and nutrition manual that I wrote using all the techniques that I use with my clients to help you lose fat as rapidly as possible with zero guesswork. Okay. I'm going to put that in the mail and send it to the first audio question that I get, but only if I get at least four audio questions. Okay, so you got to call and I got to get enough audio questions too. So I will send that to the first person who calls and I have to get at least four audio questions to 877-209-9439. All right, let's move on.

Listener Q and A.

The first question this week comes from listener Mindy. Mindy asks, by the way, guys, before I get into this, there are a lot of questions. Let me move my, my mic just a little bit closer to my face here because it's a little noisy out on the veranda. Veranda, veranda. A lot of questions this week and we really span the gamut in terms of topics, so should be entertaining. Listener Mindy asks, I'm just coming out of a bout of serious over training to the point of major pathology. I was forgetting things and actually gained fat. Devastating for someone in my position. But you taught me that this happens on your show. I've made some rather dramatic changes to my life to heal myself. Exercise is my passion and my stress release. I have returned to it. I do have a coach helping me to make sure I have guidance. He knows what I did to myself. I understand I need rest and recovery. As a matter of fact, I was feeling tired and took my textbook, lay down and actually ended up sleeping for two hours. I feel like this is the right thing to do. Sort of like sleep when a baby sleeps. Advice when a woman just has a baby. Anyway, anyways, are there any special dietary measures and or supplements that would be beneficial in my recovery? Now, for those of you in the audience who may not understand when you exercise too much, I know some people would love to have that problem. When you exercise too much, your body can actually get chronically elevated levels of something called cortisol, your stress release hormone. It's what's called a catabolic hormone. Breaks down muscle mass, breaks down muscle fiber, lean tissue. It can eat into your organs. We're talking about people who are exercising three, four hours a day, people who have exercise, what's called exercise anorexia or body dysmorphic disorder, where all they're doing is exercising. You can eventually, from these chronically elevated levels of cortisol and some other stress release hormones, become overtrained, the body shuts down, your resting heart rate goes through the roof. You feel incredibly tired all the time. You go into zero motivation to exercise mode, insomnia, all sorts of problems, muscle soreness, lack of ability to recover. And it sounds like this is something that happened to Mindy and she knows this is something that happened to her. It sounds like she has a coach and a physician working with her on it. But when it comes to actually repairing and recovery after doing something like that, to your body. You're on the right track, Mindy. The body needs sleep. That's why athletes who are getting five, six hours of sleep a night are really not in a position to be able to perform adequately. And people who are trying to lose fat, who are only getting five to six hours of sleep a night, are actually building up in their bodies more of the fat storage hormone, more of the cortisol. And so sleep is one of the best ways to put a band aid on over training and also to enhance your ability to see progress from your exercise. Now, in terms of supplements that you could take, things that you could do or put into your body to help, I would reference you to a blog post that I made a couple months ago and I'll put a link to it after your question in the show notes. But it's called 18 Ways to Help your body heal faster and bounce back like Wolverine from X Men. I just had to add that Wolverine part in just to kind of, kind of make it interesting. But essentially there are all sorts of supplements out there, things that you can find in food, but that you can also get in concentrated supplement form that can help your body repair and recover. You take something like glucosamine chondroitin. It assists in the formation of synovial fluid, which is the lubricating fluid around your joints. And if you have a lot of arthritic symptoms from training too much, that can help you recover. Believe it or not, vitamin C is not just an immune system booster. It's also a potent antioxidant that can help with recovery. You'd be looking at about a thousand milligrams per day of that. An apple has about eight milligrams. So you kind of get the idea that you would really have to take kind of a high concentrated vitamin C source to really get the full benefit of vitamin C. You could try something like Zip Fizz or airborne, or you can just take a vitamin C supplement. Zinc is helpful as an anti inflammatory to help you bounce back, repair and recover. There's something called Isocort that a couple of my clients take who have chronically elevated levels of cortisol. It's not something that I personally take. It's something that they were taking when they first came to see me. And I've kept them on because I've looked into it and it is fairly legitimate in terms of what's in it. But it's a cortisol stabilizer. It's called ISO Quart. The other things that I mentioned in this article Vitamin B3. Tuna is a pretty rich source, but again, you only get 15 milligrams from tuna and you need about 250 milligrams in order for it to be really a repair and recovery type of dose. So it's like 17 tuna fillets. So you can get the idea that you would want to take a. Take a supplement probably selenium. Huge. A lot of people have a selenium deficiency. And you actually can get pretty good amounts of selenium from Brazil nuts. Fish. Mushrooms are pretty high in selenium as well. You can get about 40 to 50 milligrams per serving. In those are actually micrograms per serving. And you only need about 200 micrograms for it to be a repair and recovery dose. Vitamin E, really powerful antioxidant. And believe it or not, sunflower seeds are a pretty high natural source of vitamin E. Multivitamin, I personally recommend for people who are coming off of overtraining, a superfood type of multivitamin with a lot of different anti inflammatories, antioxidants in it. The one that I take is Ener Prime. That's the one that I recommend to any of my clients who are coming off really hard training periods and just need to bounce back quickly. Proteolytic enzymes. These are enzymes that help you break down protein, assimilate protein faster and use it for repair and recovery. I use a capsule called Recover Ease which has proteolytic enzymes in it. Believe it or not, pineapple is also a great source of highly concentrated proteolytic enzymes. So if you have, for example, pineapple with chicken breast, that is a great recovery meal to be working into your routine. There's a garbage truck in the background. I don't know if you can hear that thing driving around. Carnitine. Carnitine is present in a lot of glucosamine chondroitin compounds. So that's something that can help. Evening primrose oil is kind of like an omega 3 or an omega 6 fatty acid. It comes in a lot of those type of capsules. The one I take is called nrefa. That's also a great anti inflammatory, good for helping your body with repair and recovery. There's a compound out there that's called msm, which is. It stands for methyl sulfonyl methane. It is essential for connective tissue repair. That's something else you can take. Dhea, that's a testosterone precursor that can help out a little bit. Because a lot of times if your cortisol is high, your testosterone to cortisol ratio is low. It can be dangerous to take a synthetic testosterone supplement or even a natural testosterone replacement. You really have to make sure that you're balanced correctly in order to do that. But DHEA is something that you could take a little bit more safely. Pollen extract actually really helps with DHEA levels and has a kind of a testosterone like healing effect. Vitamin D kind of along the same lines. Great hormone precursor that you should be on to help you bounce back. And then Coenzyme Q10 is also really good for helping improve what's called your mitochondrial density, again enhancing your ability to bounce back. So once you add all that stuff up, it makes a big difference. And I know that sounds like a lot of pills, a lot of supplements, a lot of things that you would have to be popping in order to do that the way that I would do it. If it was just me and I were using the supplements that I personally know and use myself, I would take recoveries about four of those a day. I'd take Nrefa and that's the Omega 3 fatty acid that has the primrose oil in it. I would take NR prime and then I would take the pollen extract which is called Prostylane. And then finally the last and the fifth extract I would take would be glucosamine chondroitin extract with a bunch of natural herbal anti inflammatories called Mount Capra Capra Flex. So you can link to all of those in the actual article that I'll link to in the show notes to this podcast. So check that out, that'll help you out quite a bit. I know it sounds like a lot of stuff that you'd be popping, but in terms of bouncing back, yeah, that stuff could definitely help you out. So great question, Mindy. Okay, the next question comes from listener. Excuse me, Matt. And Matt asks. I've just discovered your website and podcast and absolutely love it. Very relevant and more importantly, very inspiring. I just started getting into triathlons. I've always played competitive sports and spent a lot of time bodybuilding. I weigh 220 pounds and stand at 6:1, although not quite at the 3% body fat you mentioned you were once at at the Malibu Try last year. I was passed and beaten by a Clydesdale 225 plus pounds who looked like a bodybuilder and his final time was 20 minutes better than mine. I started to find as I keep the balance of weights and specific tri training, my knees are starting to suffer on the runs. Can I have the best of both worlds or do I have to put the weights aside and lose some mass to be able to continue to enjoy triathlons? Well, Matt, it takes a lot of energy to cool muscle. It takes a lot of energy to carry muscle. It can put a lot of stress on the joints to have to carry that excess weight around the same as if it were fat. Although you are getting a little bit of extra support from the muscle tissue, I can personally tell you, having been up at 210lbs and done a triathlon and suffered the debilitating effects the next day from having to carry all that extra weight around on the course, comparing that to the way my body feels after doing a triathlon at 175, pretty stark difference. So, yeah, if you really want to eliminate some of that soreness or even increase some of your speed, you are going to have to lose some muscle. The problem is that you have to do it safely and effectively. I don't recommend that you lose more than one pound of muscle mass a week, which would actually put you at a 3,500 calorie deficit per week, which means you need to be at about a 500 calorie deficit per day. Okay, so you got about 3,500 calories in a pound of muscle. Now you can actually get fit while you're losing that muscle. So rather than doing what a sedentary person would do, or say someone who gets cancer would do, to lose muscle and just sit around and let it atrophy, instead, what you can do is increase cardiovascular fitness at the same time that you are shedding just a little bit of muscle mass. You want to retain more muscle in your legs than in your arms and upper body as you are going about this process. So what I would recommend that you do is you use your long bike rides as your chance to reduce your muscle mass for a couple of reasons. First, you can do your long bike rides just a little bit more calorie depleted than you can do your runs at and still be able to get some good training in. It's tough to actually swim for a period of time that you would need to swim in order to be at the type of caloric deficit you'll need to be at to shed muscle. And running can be really difficult when you're calorically depleted. So the way that you would do this is you would take, for example, three of your bike rides throughout the week. Let's say you're doing three bike rides and you're going to minimally fuel those bike rides. So we're going to say that two of the bike rides are going to be an hour, one's going to be about two hours long, and you're going to be burning anywhere from about 600 to 800 calories per hour during those rides. So we'd be looking at about 3200 calories total on those bike rides, plus a slight increase in your post ride metabolic rate. Now, if you fuel each of those bike rides fairly minimally, we're talking about probably during the hour bike rides not fueling at all. And during that two hour bike ride, maybe one gel halfway through, you're well on your way to that 3,500 calorie deficit, still gaining cardiovascular fitness, still maintaining some lean muscle mass in your legs as you're trying to shed a little bit of that muscle and also doing it with the exercise that's most conducive to being able to exercise in a calorically depleted state. I can tell you right now that that is the exact technique that, that I personally used to shed 25 pounds of muscle and get faster in triathlon and experience less soreness afterwards. I did not try to lose weight while I was running. I did not try to lose weight while I was swimming. I did most of my weight loss, calorie depleted type of efforts on the bike and I actually ended up losing a lot more muscle mass in my upper body than my lower body just because the bike once again was not really significantly taxing for my upper body musculature. So that's what I would recommend in terms of losing muscle safely or effectively to get you a little bit lighter for your next race. So great question, Matt. Okay, the next question comes from listener Chuck and He says, hey, Mr. Greenfield. Well, thank you, Chuck. I like it when I'm called Mr. Greenfield. Makes me feel old. I hope all is going well. It seems like every time I read something on endurance training, there's an article by you. I was hoping to get your advice on my training for the next few weeks. This Sunday the 6th, I'm doing the Virginia Beach Rock and Roll half marathon. The next Sunday I'm racing an international distance triathlon. The next week I have a sprint triathlon followed by an international race the week after, then another international race after that. Finally, two weeks from then, I have the Men's Health Urbanethlon in Chicago, which is a 10 mile adventure race. Chuck, you must be single. So the schedule looks like this. September 6th half marathon, September 13th international tri. For those of you who Are listening. International is basically going to be about the same distance as an Olympic September 20th sprint tri. September 27th international tri. October 3rd international tri October 18th 10 mile adventure run. And that 10 mile adventure run is the Men's Health Urbanethlon. I've actually got a few clients that I'm training for that race. How do I train in order that I can still compete at my best, but recover from each race and not burn out? I'd love your advice. Thanks a lot for all the help you've given me. I look forward to hearing from you. That is a long peak if you're going to try to peak in your fitness for all those races, Chuck. And the reason for that is that typically when you're getting ready for a race, you'll usually do about 8 to 12 weeks of fairly intense, fairly focused, fairly difficult training. And then you'll back off that training for about one to two, maybe three weeks. And that would be right before the race that you start to back off. And while your body repairs and recovers from that hard training things happen. Your blood volume goes up. Your ability to store glycogen goes up. There's an increase in something called your citrate synthase activity, which actually affects your aerobic muscle capacity. Your red blood cell volume goes up. So all these really cool things happen that allow you to go faster and go harder. The problem is that those effects will will typically last about two to three weeks before they really start to taper off a little bit. Unless you go back to a little bit more of that harder, higher volume training that you were doing before. So you've usually got about a chance to do two or three races coming off a peak until your body really can't maintain that peak anymore and it starts to drop off. Sometimes if you're a pro triathlete and you're training for 40 hours a week or 35 hours a week, your body has enough volume in it to be able to peak a little bit longer than that. But in your case, Chuck, what I would recommend is that you choose a few of these races that you really want to be your highest priority races, the ones that you really want to do very well in. And then you let the others be races that you'd be okay if you didn't perform at peak capacity. For now, the races that you choose to be your high priority races during the weeks of those races, you would just do very low volume activity, but high intense activity. We're talking about exercising for, you know, literally about 40% of your normal training week volume for the other races, you're going to be bumping up to about six 60 to 80% of your normal training week volume. So still a taper, but kind of a half ass taper, if you will, where you're not really, you're not really decreasing your volume quite as much as you would for a high priority race. So you got kind of your medium priority and then your high priority races through that string of races. So what it might look like is you taper for a couple weeks before that big string of races and for the first race you really back off. You do about 40% volume because you want to do well in the half marathon. You race your half marathon, you go back and you do a week of a little bit bigger training where you don't recover quite as much from the half marathon and you do about 60 to 80% of volume. You lead up to that international try, you race it, your legs might be a little bit tired, but then you recover from that and you race the sprint, tries to triathlon on again, about a 40% volume training week, you bump back up to the international tri, train through that one a little bit and then bump back down to 40%. There's no rule that you would have to say high priority one, medium priority the next and bounce back and forth like that. You could high priority the first three races and medium priority the next three races and high priority the last race. But the whole idea is that you want to adjust your taper for each race race as you go through so that you're not doing a really, really low volume taper for each race. And all the taper weeks, no matter what volume of taper you're doing, would still be very high in terms of intensity. So that you maintain as much fitness as you possibly can as you go through that long period of racing weeks that are strung together. So does sound like a pretty, pretty long season there. A lot of races that's tough to put all those together and do well, but people do it. So the next question is from listener Kevin and he says Ben pulled the calf muscle apart somehow, probably over training and doing this all year. So went and saw a physical therapist yesterday and they told me no running for three weeks. So I'm done for now. Do you have any recommendations to keep running fitness up When I can't run, should I just do water running instead of if so, how long? 15 to 20 minutes. So Kevin, I'm gonna put a link to this in the show notes, but I actually wrote a pretty Extensive blog post on what you need to do aqua jogging and water running, how to do it, what kind of form you should have. And I also posted some sample workouts on there. A lot of the clients that I work with online, we have to pull out all the stops to maintain fitness during an injury sometimes and for the runners especially two of the primary activities that we use or three, I'm sorry, Of the primary activities that we use are water running or aqua jogging, elliptical trainer and bicycling. And depending on the injury, sometimes an athlete cannot even ride a bike, but they're still able to aqua jog pain free. Or they're not able to do the elliptical trainer, but they can aqua jog pain three. So pain free. So of those three, the aqua jogging or the water running seems to be the most effective. 15 to 20 minutes. Only if you're doing really high intensity intervals is that going to be enough to maintain your fitness for something like a half ironman. And Kevin's emailed me before, I happen to know he's training for a half ironman right now. So you're looking at probably wanting to do closer to 30 to 40 minute sessions to really keep your running fitness up where it needs to be for a half marathon. If you're doing the aqua jogging, the aqua jogging things that you need to bear in mind. Just a couple of tidbits from the article that I wrote that are probably the most important. You need to keep your cadence really high. You need to swing your arms vigorously so that your heart rate stays up. You need to lean forward so that you're pushing through the motion using your hamstrings and your glutes, which are going to be more the type of muscles that you're going to use when you're running outdoors. Going to need to do a lot of intervals, which means that you would like sprint 25 meters to one end of the pool and then jog easy back and do something like 10, 10 repeats of those. There are a lot of drills that you can do. High knee drills, heel to butt kicks, straight leg, cross country style, water running, a lot of different things that you can throw at your body in the water. I've actually done 90 minute aqua jogging sessions before and I use an underwater MP3 player. I've also been known to put my regular MP3 player in a Ziploc bag to keep it waterproof and use that as well. A lot of different ways that you can work out though in the water to keep your fitness up for running. They've done Studies that have showed runners who have been able to maintain their VO2 max or their maximum aerobic capacity by doing high intensity intervals in the water. And for those of you listening who are a little bit confused about how water running actually works, definitely read the blog post. But usually you do this in deep water where you cannot touch bottom. And as far as the elliptical trainer and the bicycle goes, you can use those same type of rules, apply slightly longer, 30, 40 minute workouts, even longer on the bike, especially if you're training for a triathlon, but incorporating a lot of high intensity intervals if you can do those pain free. Now, in your case, Kevin, you talk about the fact that it is a calf injury, water running. If I were coaching you, that's about all you'd be doing in terms of your running type of workout. So I'd have you off the bicycle, off the elliptical trainer, and you'd literally be in the water about four to five times a week doing short but highly effective aqua jogging sessions that I write out for you. But you can write out your own intervals and kind of do your intervals the same way as you would outside. Only difference is that with water running, water running, water rotting, sometimes your intervals are a little bit shorter. So, listener Mark asks, I'm going to take your advice on the processed sugar elimination, but where do you think it could be coming from if this is the issue, like yogurt or cereal? And what exactly do you mean by processed sugar? Is that different from then, say, brown sugar that I would add to oatmeal? I don't really eat trail mix, so I can count that out. Obviously you can tell I'm pretty fat phobic, but I'm working on it. Would it be a good idea to try and helpfully raise my body fat some? Honestly, the low body fat has already caused me to have low testosterone like you said. So I think that listener Mark's question was related to a similar question that he had asked earlier on the show about me telling him that his body fat was too low and he needed to bring his testosterone up. And yes, I absolutely still think that. But I want to answer your question on processed sugar and what it is. So basically your, of course your classic processed sugar is going to be white sugar and it's been refined. And I'll explain what that means here in a second. But the alternative to that would be an unprocessed sugar. So we'd be talking about like agave syrup, honey, even stevia would be kind of an unprocessed sweetener. But refined sugar, processed sugar, references the fact that it's prepared in a refinery. So you take the sugar cane, or sometimes they'll start with beets, and you will extract the naturally sweet liquid that's inside of it, the carbohydrate that's inside of it, usually through a pressing method. Once that is completed, the liquid that's formed is dried and made into like a loose crumble. So you can wash that, you can extract some of the impurities, and unfortunately a lot of the fiber and the nutrients, which means that, you know, it is pretty nutrient void. You can pull out the molasses. That's where molasses comes from. When you extract some of the, some of the liquid from that dried crumble that you get from processing the sugar, and what you're left off with, what you're left with is white sugar. You could add some of the molasses back in and that would be brown sugar. But when you add that molasses back in, you're not really getting many of the nutrients back in, or it's very minimal. So an unprocessed sugar, or what would also be called a minimally refined sugar, is sugar that's not taken through every step of the refining process. It usually has a little bit more impurities. It's not quite as fine a crystal. It's a little bit harder to work with for bits baking or cooking. But it does have more vitamins and more minerals than a refined sugar. Usually it's made from what's called the first pressing of the sugar cane. And those would be like the larger type of sugar crystals that you'll see usually in brown bags at the grocery store, versus the smaller white crystals that we're typically used to seeing in the sugar bowl or in cooking and baking. The fact is that once you take that processed sugar, it's actually added to a lot of different products and it's added into water as well to make syrups. And high fructose corn syrup is another type of sugar that you could consider a processed form of sugar. And yeah, it's in a lot of stuff. To answer your question, you asked about yogurt. Yes. Yogurt can have up to about 4 tablespoons of processed sugar in it. What else did you ask about? I just lost your question here for a second. Let me, let me find it again. You asked about cereal. Absolutely. Cereal can have a lot of processed sugar added. And you take the processed sugar that's added to yogurt, added to cereal, plus you add the other things in that are in yogurt and cereal, like a lot of the, the old overly ripened, almost rotten fruits that they'll put in the bottom of a lot of yogurt or a lot of the sweeteners that they'll add to cereal, even a lot of the white, high glycemic index grains, things of that nature. And yeah, you can get a lot of sugar in your diet, eliminating the processed sugar. Absolutely, that's something that you can do. The way that you would do it is you would turn around the food or the turn around the food that you're eating, the package of the food that you're eating because it is found a lot of packaged foods. And what you'd be looking for would be, for example, sucrose, high fructose corn syrup. Sometimes it'll be just labeled sugar. Glucose would be another one that you'd want to look for. Unfortunately, something like maltodextrin, which is found in a lot of sports supplements, would be another one to look for. You want to cross these off, you want to get the things that contain those out of your diet. Now there is still going to be a caloric load. There's still going to be a glycemic response from the other unprocessed sugars I mentioned, like agave, like honey. But technically the products that contain those usually are a little bit higher fiber, usually are a little bit healthier than the products that contain just pure processed sugar or high fructose corn syrup. What it really comes down here, Mark to is you almost have to eliminate most of the eating from packaged food, processed food, food that comes in containers and, and return to more of the type of diet we really talked about a lot in last week's podcast episode, the Paleo Diet. We talked about eating like a caveman, lots of nuts, berries, seeds, meats, vegetables, fruits, things of that nature. So eliminate the packaged foods from your diet and you'll really be a lot more successful at eliminating the processed sugars. So we're going to move on to a question from listener Brad. And Brad says when I train, it's mostly high intensity to type of work. I think because of that, I often feel like my legs are more tired than my lungs or cardiovascular system. So while I feel like I'm in shape enough to keep working out, my legs say no, I can do the elliptical or something, but some days I just can't do a run, even if I feel like I'm in good enough shape to do so. Any advice? Pretty common problem, Brad. Especially in People who do high intensity work. Because when you do high intensity work, you're going to recruit more muscle fibers, you're going to recruit more fast twitch muscle fibers. You're going to do more damage to muscle tissue. You're going to get more inflammation in the muscle, you're going to get more calcium leakage, you're going to basically require that muscle to produce a force that makes little micro tears at the muscle tissue level. And all of those things mean that probably your legs are going to take a longer time to recover than your heart or your lungs. There are some things that you can do to make sure that your legs recover more quickly. We talked about them a few times on this show. But let me review those real quickly with you. Ice baths or ice showers or cold. Can't really do an ice shower. Cold shower is something I do quite a bit of. You can also combine that with cold hot showers where you stand in the shower for 2, 2 minutes at cold water temperature and then bump that up to hot and go back and forth three to four times. You can make sure that you're eating within 20 minutes after a workout and making sure that you mix a protein and a carb so you're getting amino acids and glycogen back into the muscle tissue so it repairs and recovers more quickly. Massage therapy is effective whether self inflicted with a foam roller or with a stick, or performed by a massage therapist. Making sure that you cool down adequately so that the milking action of your muscles is literally pumping some of those metabolites like calcium and inflammation back up out of your muscle after a workout. And then essentially making sure that you're pairing your anaerobic, harder, higher intensity days with your aerobic, lower intensity recovery days in a smart way. So you're not doing two a day hard intervals on the run. Most of the athletes that I coach rarely do subsequent running days at all just because running is such a muscle damaging exercise. So for example, you know after your hard running interval day, the workout the next day is an aerobic, non weight bearing cycling effort. And then after your cycling intervals, he'll work out the workout the next day is a long easy swim. So you want to make sure that you're giving that muscle the opportunity that needs to repair and recover. And then understand that recovery does not mean that you sit sedentary doing nothing at all. You want to move, you want to introduce blood flow into the tissue so that you're actually, you're, you're giving the muscle a chance to get glucose to get oxygen to get nutrients into it for repair and recovery. But you're also giving the muscle a chance to work some of the metabolites from training out of the area for recovery. So that's what I would do. And it all comes down to repair and recovery for the legs, when the legs are stronger than the lungs or when the legs are more sore than the lungs. So another questioner from listener Christine. She says, I read a study that says my body can absorb magnesium through bathing in Epsom salts. This caught my eye as I'm on a very tight budget and this seems to be an economical way of getting magnesium in my system. What are your thoughts? Well, magnesium is going to be present in Epsom salts. Magnesium sulfate is the type of magnesium or the form of magnesium that you're going to find in Epsom salts. And you can easily get, as you say, pretty inexpensively, Epsom salts, just about any drug store or supermarket. And you can put a couple cups of those in a bathtub full of hot water. Actually not too hot a water because that can impair absorption, but about 100 to 103 degrees of water. And that can get absorbed into your muscles, through your skin, and actually introduce minerals into your muscles that they need for repair, for recovery, for stopping some of the things like calcium leakage that I talked about earlier. The issue with the magnesium sulfate versus, say, like the pure magnesium clear chloride that I've talked about before, like the magnesium flakes, is that they aren't absorbed as completely, they're not quite as pure, and, you know, it's essentially just a slightly subpar form of magnesium. It would be like, say, you know, eating a steak to get your amino acids versus having a handful of nuts to get your amino acids. You're just not getting quite as high quality of protein from the nuts versus the steak. But as far as a budget alternative to magnesium chloride, yes, magnesium sulfate would actually help you with repair and recovery. It would still reduce some of your post exercise soreness. You would still get some benefit from it. So absolutely, if you're on a tight budget, the Epsom salts would be a good, economical way of getting magnesium into your system. So what I do is I take the magnesium flakes, the pure magnesium chloride magnesium flakes, and if I want those to last longer, I mix them in a one to one ratio with regular Epsom salts that I get from the supermarket or the grocery store. Okay, next question is from Listener Tommy. And Listener Tommy says, do detox products really work? How does the body get rid of toxins what are toxins? From my understanding, the liver and the kidneys do just finish fine with healthy individuals. Thanks, Ben. So, Tommy. Basically, detox, which stands for detoxification, that's your body's natural process that it does on its own. You know, you don't have to do a detox diet. Your body's naturally always going through the process of neutralizing toxins that are in your body or eliminating toxins that are in your body. When we're talking about toxins, we're talking about anything that could potentially harm your body's tissue. So. So most of the time they're transformed to less harmful compounds by your liver, by your kidney, and they're excreted in your stool or in your urine. But these would be things like ammonia that's produced when your body breaks down the proteins that you're eating. Chemicals that you might be absorbing from pesticides on fruits that you eat, from household cleaners, from food additives or preservatives, pharmaceuticals that you might take, pollution in the air around you, which we'll talk about later, secondhand cigarette smoke, or even heavy metals like lead that you can literally get just from. From swimming in an ocean or a lake. So you have all these toxins coming into your body all the time. And yeah, you do have natural means of filtering those. However, if you have been exposed to a high number of toxins, the idea is that you could expand, accelerate your body's ability to get rid of those, or you could put your body into a more healthy state by not only eliminating the presence of a lot of those toxins by cleaning up your lifestyle and your diet, but also by giving your body things that will help you to remove the toxins more quickly, whether it be from your gut, from your fat cells, from your skin, etc. And that's what a detox diet would be. So you minimize the amount of chemicals that you ingest. You emphasize foods that provide a lot of the vitamins, the nutrients, the antioxidants that your body needs to detox. And then you also add things like high fiber foods or water that actually increase the frequency of your bowel movements or the degree to which you urinate. So you get rid of the toxins even more quickly. And the whole rationale behind doing that is that there's this term called cumulative load or body burden that basically refers to the fact that your body can take on so many toxins before it gets to the point where it begins to break down, which leads to illness, hormonal imbalance, depressed immune Function, nutritional deficiencies, inefficient metabolism. And so you get things like indigestion, bad breath, chronic fatigue, your skin starts to get real dry, or you just get poor skin, muscle pain, increased soreness. And so then you say, okay, I'm gonna go on a detox diet. And a lot of times you will pair eating organic fruits and vegetables with high amounts of water and usually some type of herbal compound if you're gonna do a traditional detox diet that just flushes out your body. Now, what I personally do myself is I utilize an ongoing detox diet that just naturally ensures that I'm not getting a lot of toxins in my body, but that I'm also putting things into my body that help it to flush toxins while not making me have to rush off and use the restroom every 20 or 30 minutes. I call it basically a gentle cleanse or a gentle detox. And the way that I personally do this is I take a potent antiseptic or antifungal. It's an oil of oregano, put about four to five drops under my tongue before I go to bed at night, or mix it into a glass of about 6 to 8 ounces of water and drink that. And that essentially cleans out a lot of the bad bacteria in my mouth and in my gut. And then I referenced this earlier, but I take what's called a green food multivitamin or a superfood multivitamin that has some high fiber extracts in it like inulin or Jerusalem artichoke, artichoke extract. It's got garlic, it's got echinacea. It's got things that are going to detox my body, but they're not going to do it in a way that leaves me feeling drained or leaves me feeling like all the energy has been sucked out of me or that I have to use the bathroom all the time. And I literally do that every single day. I take the enterprime every day and I take the oil of oregano almost every day. So, yes, you can put your body in a state where there's less toxins, less chemicals going into it. And you can also detox without doing a traditional full on detox diet. So, great question, Tommy. And kind of along the same lines, I did get a question from listener Tammy, and that's kind of funny. Tommy asked about detox and Tammy also asked a question similar. Tammy says, ben, I have a suggestion for your podcast. I'm very interested in the benefits of juicing fruits and veggies versus just eating them. I know that by juicing you lose the fiber because you don't get the pulp. But is there anything else? Is juicing better for you or not? So the idea behind juicing is that fruits and vegetables, they're very rich source of a lot of powerful chemicals that help you promote health, that help prevent chronic disease, that give you a lot of the nutrients and the vitamins and the minerals that you need. And generally fruit, fresh fruit and vegetable juices are going to be a little bit easier to digest than eating the whole fruit or the whole vegetable. And sometimes it does taste a little bit better to have a freshly squeezed glass of fruit or vegetable juice more than like a plate of spinach or broccoli. And the only issue that I have with juicing is that you do have to be careful with the number of calories that you can add easily get from an 8 or 12 ounce glass of juice. Whereas the number of fruit and the fiber in the fruit that you take in from eating that amount of solid food would leave you full and satiated. Juicing a food can allow you to literally take in 300, 400, 500 calories and not feel full at all. And so you have to be really careful that you know exactly how much fruit in particular vegetable is not as big of a problem, but how much fruit in particular that you're taking in when you are juicing your foods and you don't take in any more than you would normally take in if you hadn't juiced that product. As far as vegetables go, there are benefits to soluble fiber, there are benefits to insoluble fiber, both in terms of weight loss, in terms of keeping food moving through your intestinal tract. And you are going to miss out on some of that when you juice vegetables. The flip side is that you are going to get very concentrated sources of nutrients and vitamins and minerals when you do juice your vegetables. So what I would recommend is if you are going to use juicing, don't do it too frequently, especially with the fruits, and use your fruit based juices primarily as like a pre workout or pre activity type of nutrition. As far as the vegetables go. Yeah, juice your vegetables if you want to, but also make sure that you're taking in other fiber laden foods throughout the day and that your vegetable juice that you drink, for example, in the morning is now your only serving of vegetables that you're consuming in a day. And then our last question comes from listener Mohammed and he says, I'm an amateur triathlete living in Cairo, Egypt, and if You've ever been here before or heard of it, you'll know that it's ridiculously polluted. It seems like walking in the streets before didn't give me a problem. But now just standing in a place of congestion, I find the pollution really affects me. I have to keep several tissues over my mouth or at least my hand, otherwise I get into a coughing fit. I spent several months in France in the summer and had no trouble with the regular amount of congestion and pollution that exists there. So it's not asthma or anything like that. I'm concerned that this kind of exposure would really affect my lungs and my performance. Keeping in mind that a lot of the cars aren't well maintained and a lot of carbon monoxide is released, as well as unburnt fuel and other exhaust materials, do you think it necessary to fully preserve my lungs to consistently wear products like respro? Any other tips on how to handle living in a place like this? And when he. When he references Respro, Respro, you can check it out, respro.com they're like urban survival equipment. They sell things like masks that you can use for exercising in polluted environments. And of course, this was a big controversy in the Olympics recently when some of the Olympians, I think it was the men's bicycle team for the US that came off the plane, and they were all wearing masks to protect themselves and their lungs from the pollution. So, yes, your concerns are well founded, Mohammed. A lot of athletes and exercise enthusiasts who lives in. Who live in densely populated urban areas are going to be always confronted with the air pollution that you're going to get from traffic, you're going to get from injury. And a lot of times the pollutants reach concentrations that can impede your physical performance. You're going to get everything from carbon monoxide to sulfur oxide aerosols, soot, dust, smoke. And these are, of course, going to be enhanced if you're running or jogging or exercising in smoggy conditions. I personally remember going for a run in Bangkok last year, getting back to my hotel and literally being sick the rest of the day from the number of chemicals that I breathed in during that run. And, yeah, it would have been safer and healthier for me to stay on a treadmill and run indoors or to not exercise at all. Carbon monoxide in particular, which you're going to get from emissions from vehicles, what that does is it actually is able to bind to your body's hemoglobin about 200 times more significantly than oxygen can. It literally kicks oxygen off of the hemoglobin in the red blood cell and makes it so that you cannot transport oxygen to the tissue and you're instead transporting carbon monoxide. That's why it's very easy to kill yourself with carbon monoxide, just because it kicks oxygen off that red blood cell and essentially suffocates you in your bloodstream. Nitric oxide, again, has a, or nitrogen oxide has an extremely dangerous effect. And when that gets to a certain level in your bloodstream, it can be toxic. Not only that, but it also irritates your, your respiratory tract, it can cause your airways to kind of close down a little bit. Do what's called a bronchoconstriction. Ozone is another thing you're going to run into, and that's been associated with eye irritation, with respiratory discomfort, with nausea. And then of course, all the aerosols and all the other toxins and pollutants that you put into your body are potential carcinogens as well. So, yes, your concerns are founded as, you probably know, a few of the things that you could do. Avoid exercising during rush hours, which is when the carbon monoxide levels are going to peak. So, seven, eight o' clock in the morning, five, six o' clock in the evening. I know in a big city even that doesn't make much of a difference, but it's something to consider. You can avoid high cigarette smoking areas prior to exercise and during exercise. Plan your route so you're not running through an area with a lot of restaurants of bars. Avoid exercising when it's humid or when it's hot, both of which are going to concentrate and magnify the effect of those pollutants. Make sure that when you do exercise, you're staying away from the streets and you're running along parks, along rivers when you can. What it comes down to is that ultimately, if you want to, to maintain your fitness, you may have to avoid exercising outdoors in the environment that you're living in in Cairo, and shift more to the type of winter training that we do up here in the Northwest, where we're doing a lot of indoor training rides, we're doing a lot of treadmill runs, a lot of indoor pool swims. You may need to install in your home, what's called a HEPA filter, which can actually be very effective in getting rid of a lot of the pollutants that are going to be floating around your home. I talked about the oil of oregano earlier. I put a few drops of that in a spray bottle and I literally spray in the air around my home. That's a potent antiseptic. It's a potent antifungal that helps to clean up your home's environment a little bit. It is dangerous to exercise in a polluted area like the one that you describe. And you would probably get more benefit from your training and you would probably be exposing your body to a lot less deep damaging situations if you shifted more of your training indoors. As far as wearing a mask that actually filters the air that you're breathing, I don't have a lot of experience utilizing one of those. I would imagine that it's going to be a little bit awkward when you train, but when people come into my lab for testing, they are wearing a mask when they're running on the treadmill and they're able to exercise with one on. And it could be that if you change the filter on that mask frequently and you use it when you're exercising in the polluted environments, that it could make a difference. So that respro mask, again, not something I've seen used a lot, but it could benefit you. And if it were me, and I were living where you're living, it's definitely something I would give strong consideration to. So great question, Mohammed. And that actually wraps up the questions for this week. I know that you as the listener may have some other things you want to throw in, some comments, some thoughts of your own, some other helpful tips, tricks, hints for people. And if you do, just go to the Show Notes for podcast episode number 59 and post them right there as a comment in the in the episode Show Notes. You can also ask follow up questions there or you can email me ben greenfieldfitness.com so that about wraps up our show from Cape May, the Cape May Q and A. And next week we'll return to our traditional interview format with those really interesting interviews on heart CT scans on organic agricultural practices. And that is going to be typically we're now releasing podcasts on Wednesdays or on Thursday, so that's about when you'll be able to check those out. Remember to look into the triathlon training camp link that I have there in the Show Notes as well as checking out the video on Modern Medicine by Dr. Carolyn Dean. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week. Sa.