Podcast Episode #72: Double Interview Super Special – Barefoot Running & Esssential Fatty Acids!

In this podcast episode, barefoot Running, Essential Fatty Acids, more on amino acids, ankle injuries and the Genotype diet.

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 new non run of the mill, cutting edge content from BenGreenfield Fitness.com.

That's right, podcast listeners. Today's episode is a double interview super special. My first featured topic is going to be on barefoot running with a fellow named Telman Knudsen, who I mentioned last week is currently running barefoot across the country. And I called him up and interviewed him live while he was running through Ohio. And you're going to get to listen to that. We also have an interview with Dr. Cohen from Bioletics. This will be Dr. Cohen's third appearance on the show and he's going to be talking about the powerful potential of essential fatty acids and how you can actually get those tested, what to do if you're deficient, and much more. So you're not going to want to miss those featured topics. We have just a few brief special announcements today and then we also have a listener Q and A. But before we go on to any of that, I do need to make you aware of a few small changes to the podcast over the next five to six weeks. Basically, I am putting together for any of you triathlon listeners out there, a huge side project that's going to bring you a bunch of free teleseminars phone conferences with triathlon coaches, with triathlon pros, with authors. Not just conferences where you sit there and twiddle your thumbs and listen, but live Q and A where you're going to be asking questions and a huge amount of interaction there. It's going to be over at a website called rockstartriathlete.com I'll put a link to that in the show notes, but I want to warn you listeners that based off of the amount of energy that I'm having to put into bringing those audios to you, this podcast is going to be limited just for the next few weeks to primarily Q and A to answering your questions on fitness, fat loss, nutrition or human performance. So make sure that you follow that link in the show notes to see why the podcast is going to be changing so much over the next six weeks. I thank you all for the support that you give for the rank and itunes and for you just listening in. And I promise that this podcast is not going anywhere. Don't worry, it's just going to be a little bit shorter over the next few weeks. So with that being said, let's go ahead and move on to this week's special announcements.

Special Announcements.

I am going to keep the special announcements pretty brief today. Just a few things to go over. The first is that so many of you wrote in and liked that Get Fit or get fat 70 minute audio seminar that I put out last week and made available to you on the Show Notes. I'm going to keep that up there and it's available for $4. It's a professional seminar that I put on and the recording is available to you on the Show Notes. I'm going to leave that up for another week so you can go download that. If you would like a couple other special announcements, this is probably the last week that you'll get an opportunity to go check this out, but my quintessential healthy holiday gift guide is still up on the Show Notes. For those of you who are last minute shoppers like me, another thing is that last week I got a few comments on the pictures of the gal that I put up who had just an amazing amount of fat loss over about a 63 day program that she went through with me. I went ahead and made a video of her that you can watch and again, it's pretty amazing to see the progress that she made in that video. And then finally another special announcement for you triathletes out there. That golden ticket to the official 2010 Triathlon Training Camp is still available to anybody who gets their hands on the Triathlon Dominator package over@triathlon dominator.com now remember, I am throwing together an all inclusive triathlon training camp from January 18th through the 25th down in Austin, Texas. I've got full details on that in the Show Notes. There is still opportunity and room for you to snag a ticket to Austin and get into that camp. It is going to be a blast and far more all inclusive than any camp experience you've ever had. So check that out. And you do get $97 towards that camp when you go over to triathlon dominator.com now we're going to move on to this week's listener Q and A. And remember, as you're listening in to the Q and A, if you have a question that you want to ask, just email ben greenfieldfitness.com or call toll free. And actually this week I made that toll free number Even more to call in. It's the first option that you have is to leave me a question. Toll free number. Get your pen out or your pencil or your crayon. It's 877-209-9439. If you have a question for the BenGreenfieldFitness.com podcast, again, that's 877209.

Nine.

Listener Q&A.

So this week's first question comes to me from listener Joe. And Joe says, this is a funny question. One question that I have not been able to get a straight answer on is what exactly do bodybuilders do and exactly how do their diet and workouts change to get that paper thin skin? I would like to at least one time in my life experience walking around the earth tan and, and in high definition. Will you please help me with this? Well, Joe, I did bodybuilding for a couple of years and that was actually one thing I was really concerned about was that paper thin skin or lines or wrinkles or age spots. Because as most of you are probably aware, bodybuilders have to spend a lot of time in tanning booths. And that causes a premature aging in the skin. It literally speeds up the aging process, your skin. So it not only causes your skin to dry out, but it makes your skin lack moisture. You start to flake, you peel, you wrinkle a lot more. Even little things like you start to see more wrinkles around your eyes when you smile, the skin loses a lot of its collagen and it kind of becomes looser. Whereas those of us who are hydrated and not really dried out all the time, you're going to notice some more kind of moist, supple, not a stretched out, but a non wrinkled appearance to the skin. So tanning beds, long periods of time spent in the sun, all of that will do that to your skin. Now, Joe, I've been backstage at bodybuilding shows and when you get close up to these people, it's just horrible. Tiny, tiny little collagen, damaged wrinkles everywhere. Okay? And it's because of the amount of tanning. Now some bodybuilders and I tried to do this when I was bodybuilding, use just a heavy, heavy amount of tanning lotion. A lot of times there's little gold flakes in that so that the light shimmer off you and make you look even more muscular when you get under the lights or onto stage. But do not, do not crave that paper thin skin when you get close. It's just, you know, it's like a Thin, thin ice full of wrinkles. And you don't want that on your skin. I would recommend, if anything, if you want to get that look and just see what it looks like, go pick yourself up some bodybuilding tanning lotion and put it on your body and you'll see how easy it is to actually achieve that same look with a little bit of a topical application. So we're gonna move on to a question from listener Scott. Listener Scott says after watching the video you posted on the master amino pattern, wondering how sold you were on the product. There is a mention of over 40 tests or clinical trials, yet no links to the information are on their website. I would think if there was scientific evidence of effectiveness, it would be plastered on there. If you do believe in it, would you recommend substituting MAP for whey protein or even your recipes that include Mount Capra protein powder? That's a great question, Scott. And as far as the scientific effectiveness or the research studies, there are links over there on their website and I'll also put some links in the show. Notes to podcast number 71 on the studies that were done in terms of the nitrogen utilization rate of this map. And for those of you who didn't hear that podcast last week, it's a capsule that's full of all the essential amino acids that you need. Now, in terms of substituting MAP for something like whey protein or protein powder, Scott, what you need to understand is that this is amino acids, okay? It's not. It's not calories, it's not sustenance, so to speak, that's going to stick to your ribs or give you energy to work out. Consider it more along the lines of an amino acid, not an amino acid, but an essential fatty acid or another type of supplement that you would take, but not as food. So whey protein, I would consider food. The Mount Kappa protein powder that you mentioned, I would consider food. This is a supplement. Okay? So for example, when I finish a workout, I'll take 10 of these and an apple. So the apple is giving me the carbohydrate and this is giving me the amino acids that aren't in the apple. But continue to use regular recipes, continue to eat whole food and real food. I'm not endorsing switching to capsules or supplements for all of your intake. This just ensures that your body is getting everything that it needs. Because if you have a bowl of rice or if you have an apple, or if you have anything that doesn't have that complete amino acid profile in it, you're going to miss out on the amino acids. And then also every single food on the face of the planet has a lower nitrogen utilization rate than this stuff. And so it gets absorbed a lot better. And it's just kind of that extra secret weapon that you can have for recovery, for muscle building or for enhancing sports performance or decreasing soreness. Now Scott goes on, he's got a second part to his question. He says, I recently injured my calf just above the ankle. I believe it's a muscle injury since it feels like a charley horse type of discomfort or spasm that occurs when I walk on or with plantar flexion. And for those of you who hear that term, that's pointing the toes. I bought an ankle Ace wrap which made the spasm sensation go away and felt like it allowed my ankle to relax. I was able to perform a sprint interval session on the treadmill with minimal discomfort when the ankle began hurting. Ensuring I would use proper form seemed to alleviate the pain. I like to be able to continue exercising but do not want to injure my ankle further. Do you have any recommendations? It's kind of tough to say, Scott. Ankle sprains go in three different grades and grade one is just kind of that slight amount of tearing or damage to the tendon or to the ligament. Grade 2 and 3 are more serious. It sounds like if you were able to run on the treadmill, this is just kind of a slight amount of inflammation. And if that is the case, just control your inflammation with one of nature's best anti inflammatories and that's ice. Highly encourage you to stay away from ibuprofen and what are called non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs that can cause kidney damage, GI bleeding, and they actually end up limiting the amount of healing that occurs because they affect inflammation in a different way than something like ice does. So I'd recommend ice. I'd also recommend that you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com and do a search for Wolverine. I wrote an article a few months back called how to make your body heal like Wolverine from X Men. Rather than going through that on the podcast, I'd like you to just go do a search for Wolverine at the Ben Greenfield fitness website and that will give you even more recommendations. And then I move on to a question from listener Dave who says that was kind of a funny way to put it, huh? Like I'm narrating my own activities. How about this? I'm going to move on to a question from listener Dave who asks after listening to John Kenny's high stroke rate per minute in your swimming podcast, I realized I have a very poor stroke rate per minute in comparison. I think my low spm, which stands for stroke rate per minute, correlates to my slow ironman swim times. My stroke is a stroke and glide routine. I'm beginning to realize that I am losing momentum with each glide, resulting in a slow swim, particularly in open. My question is, what would be a good course of action in order to train and develop a faster arm turnover in freestyle swimming? That's a great question, Dave. And it is true that a higher arm turnover is necessary to go faster in the open water. You can get away with gliding in a pool, but once you start to glide in the open water, a lot of the turbulent flow slows down that glide a lot more than what you're experiencing in the pool now. Developing quicker arm turnover is based on training your neuromuscular system, meaning your nerve endings right there in the muscle to actually fire faster. So it's not about getting stronger, it's not about making yourself more tired. It's about getting your mind muscle connection to actually think faster. So a few different ways you can do that one, and this is something I have. It's called a wetronome. There's also something called a swimming metronome. You could Google wetronome or you could go to swimsmooth.com and the guys over at swimsmooth.com do have that wetronome. You put it in your swim cap and it makes a little beeping noise. You can set it for a turnover and it actually has a chart that shows you the optimum rate of arm turnover based on how fast of a swimmer you are. So the wetronome is a good way to keep yourself honest, and that beep drives you to naturally improve your turnover. You're going to have to practice with it for a while, though. It takes a little while to get used to going with that beep and getting that rhythm and regularity. The next thing I would recommend is a bungee cord, a swimming bungee cord. And the way that you use these is you'll tie one end to the diving block on one end of the pool and then you'll swim away from it. And it's pretty hard. You're going to be really working force and strength in the water when you swim away from it, but as soon as it starts to pull you back, you actually have to have a very fast arm turnover going back the other way now to get your hands on one of those. If you go to my website. On the right side of the page there's a link to swimoutlet.com and if you click on that link, it'll take you to Swim Outlet and you can find bungee cords under the training aids link option over there. And then the final recommendation, in addition to the metronome and swimming resistant cord would be actual sprint 50, 75, even 25 meter repeats put into your program on a weekly basis. I know a lot of Ironman and distance triathletes get real stuck on the 200s and the 300s and the 500s and maybe swimming for a half hour during lunch without stopping. The very fast sprint style repeats are not only going to give you a better bang for your bucket buck in terms of the time that you spend in the water, but they'll also teach you how to turn over more quickly. So I highly recommend doing that as well. Hopefully that helps. Dave and great question. Then my last question this week is from listener Matt and he says, I saw a naturopathic doc yesterday and they recommended I start the genotype diet as it may help my stomach issues. I'm not sure about this and know nothing about it. I was curious if you came across it. It is by the same guy who started the blood type diet, the genotype diet. And I went over to the website because I actually wasn't familiar with this diet. But what it does is it's based off the fact that, you know, America is one big genetic melting pot and what works well for one person might not work well for the other person. So what it does is the book teaches you things like how to take your thumbprint, your blood type, your torso length, your leg length. All of these help you build kind of an idea of what your genetic code is. And then there are diets in that book based on your genetic code. So anything that's customized like that is probably going to give you a meal plan that maybe causes a little bit less GI distress if you're a person who has food sensitivities or food allergies. And it can work quite well. The problem with a diet like this is that, and this is something I run into a lot as a nutritional consultant, you sometimes end up eating a diet that is. That is so strange or so different than anyone else around you that it gets tough, especially on family and especially in social situations, to actually eat the way that your genotype is supposed to eat. I mean, imagine if you had a bunch of your friends over for dinner and you know your Japanese friend, they just had to have sushi, and your friend who was of Norwegian descent, just had to have fish. And, you know, the Pacific Islander insisted that you use a coconut oil for your cooking. You know, and, you know, you just have to be careful if you start onto a diet like this to realize that it could limit you quite a bit socially or, you know, if you're, if you're married, sometimes your wife doesn't want to eat because her genetic type is different than your genetic type. And I would say for medical management, it may be something that you could look into. But just from a social perspective, you have to be careful with these kind of diets. I like a diet and use a diet for my clients that tends to be a little bit more flexible than something like this. But great question, Matt. Now we're going to go ahead and move into the featured topics for today. First interview is going to be with Telman Knudsen on barefoot running. And then we're going to move on to essential fatty acids with Dr. Rick Cohen. And remember, if you have a question, just email Ben greenfieldfitness.com or call 877-209-9439.

This is Helman.

Hi, Telman. This is Ben Greenfield calling. Are you running right now?

Hold on, hold on.

One second.

Come on.

All right, Ben, are you there?

I'm here.

Tellman, where are you running right now?

Yeah, baby. I'm in. I'm in Fly. F. F. Yep, I said it. I'm in Fly, Ohio, on the road. It's snowing.

It's snowing.

And you're running in your bare feet right now?

Sure am.

Wow.

Tell me.

I get tons of questions from my listeners about what barefoot running is actually like, and you are probably one of the most knowledgeable guys on what it actually feels like. So right now, running in the snow, what do your feet feel like?

Well, let me clarify. I'm not running in the snow. It is spilling on and off, but there's no accumulation here yet.

No.

However, how does it feel? Well, at the moment, everyone always gets worried about the cold. And the reality is that.

Your feet.

Get pretty warm when you run in shoes. Anyway. When you run barefoot, you get really great circulation, and the, you know, the soles of your feet definitely get much denser and tougher. So really, you know, when you get cold and you just start to get a little numb so it's not really uncomfortable, that's kind of how, you know, kind of like if you're in the middle of a snowball fight with bare hands so you can Totally do it, but it's not, you know, most of everybody can imagine themselves reaching down into a snow, into a pile of snow, making a snowball and throwing at somebody a few times.

Uh huh.

So that's kind of what it feels like. Except because your circulation isn't so good and because your feet actually constantly are coming off the ground anyway. No, it doesn't really soak up the, doesn't soak your body heat out of you and so you don't really get.

Cold in your journey so far. Telman, what's the longest that you've run in your bare feet.

At a shot? So far, full marathon.

Wow.

And in terms of the surfaces, are there any particular surfaces that you think are best for bare feet or that feel most natural?

Well, I mean, if you're talking about. What I would prefer to run on, if I have the choice, I would say I really like a nice dirt trail without a lot of rocks. That certainly feels the most natural. I like a dirt trail where I can see everything in the trail, you know, versus one that has a lot of leaf coverage or something like that. But running across the country barefoot, you don't get the opportunities to run on a lot of nice, awesome trails. It's mostly all on the white line. And when you're running on the, when you're running a lot of distance every day, the white line is a, is a very useful tool. So right now I'm riding the white line like a freaking Tron bike. I feel like I'm in Tron running barefoot. But.

And, and are you, are you on a highway right now?

Right now I'm on a. You can't run on interstates legally and you can't run on divided highways. So I'm on a road that has, you know, two lanes, you know, one inch down, one westbound.

Now.

And you know, and yeah, not too much traffic, just kind of ruins it goes for town, you know.

Have you ever, have you ever worn Tellman the barefoot running shoes or any type of real minimalist running shoes? And are those different than running barefoot?

Totally different than running barefoot. I know that a lot of people consider themselves barefoot runners who run in bbrim five fingers and I appreciate that it is a much, much better, better to run in something like b rim five fingers than in traditional running shoes. And I will applaud anyone who's using minimalist footwear because you have to completely learn how to run all over again. However, running across the United States of America while wearing Vibram five fingers would not be nearly as difficult as running with nothing on your feet. Biblam five fingers don't wear through like skin does.

Now, what type of injuries have you sustained on your feet since you began?

Tellman?

So far only one to speak of. And it was an overuse injury because I scaled up to a marathon a day a little bit faster than the internal guts of my heel were prepared for. So I ended up getting deep heel contusions. Deep heel contusions are basically for me anyway, they were inside my heel. So think about getting blisters inside of your feet, not on the outside. And those blisters just kind of hanging out and getting worse and worse as they slowly rise to the surface. Whereas the closer they get to the surface, the softer your heel becomes. Versus normally when you get a blister, you get it and that's when it's the softest. Was the ones that I got were because they were inside and they slowly rose to the surface. They weren't so bad when they were deep and they got worse as they got as they moved out further. Because every time I would hit a rock in the dead center of my heel, it basically sink into my foot, which was very, very pleasant. So I just came off that, taking two weeks off to let that heal up at doctor's orders. And now at the moment I'm running three miles today because I have to run three miles every day for a week. Then. Then I'm allowed to ramp it up to 4 miles and assuming my heels don't break down again, I'll be able to begin the ramp up process again, up a little bit higher and hopefully get back up to a marathon. Plus every day here in short order. That's what I'm hoping for.

Amazing.

Now, Tellman, what's your top piece of advice to the listener who wants to start barefoot running?

Start today, run five minutes barefoot. Just do it as a warm up, slow down to 10 to 12 minute miles. Even if you could run faster, just slow down to 10 to 12 minute miles because. And don't do any more than five minutes a day for the first week because first thing is you're going to put a lot more load on your lower calf muscle. And if you overdo that, it'll take you out of running for a couple of weeks. A lot of people go out the first time and do three or five miles because they can and it puts them out for two weeks and then they never want to try it again. So five minutes at a time for the first week, then bump it up to about 10 minutes, assuming you're feeling good and it's not chewing through your feet too bad, and then slowly bump it up to 15 minutes. So I did it in about five minute increments as I started building up and I was running five, six days a week.

Wow.

Well, Telman, for people who want to learn more, Your website is runtelmanrun.com yeah.

If you want to learn more about the Red Cross America, runkelmanrun.com if you want to learn more about running barefoot, you can go to howtorunbarefoot.com fantastic.

All right, well, I'll put a link to both those in the show notes and I'll let you get back to your run. Thanks for joining us today, Tillman.

Thank you, guys. We'll talk to you soon.

All right, bye.

It.

Hey, podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and I have back on the line by popular request, Dr. Rick Cohen from Bioetics. And in the past, Dr. Cohen has talked to us about the six key internal performance factors. And we had an initial interview with him where he went into great detail about how you could enhance your health and performance using those factors. And then I personally ended up going through that full range of testing with bio letics for everything from hormones to vitamin D to minerals. Now I've got Dr. Cohen back on the line because he has added to his recommendations for people to actually look at something called an EFA test. And so without further ado, Dr. Cohen, I'm going to thank you for coming on the line and just have you jump right into it and tell me what this EFA test is all about, what EFAs are and why you've added them to your recommendations for internal performance factors.

Great. Thanks, Ben. Yeah, as essential fats are actually sort of one of my favorite subjects, perhaps when I was in the low fat era, I guess that was then. Was that the 90s when low fat.

Yeah, I think it was big.

Late 80s.

Yeah, 90s. 80s, yeah.

Well, probably, yeah, early 90s. You know, it was just such a misconstrued idea of eliminating fats. And when you really start how important fats are to our body and fats in their natural state, there's some neat stories which I'll share with you which give you a better understanding of fats and their structure and how metabolically active they are in your system, you'll wonder thought that fats were harmful to us. And the upshot is this is all people can take from our chat here is fats are extremely important for our body. They have a Variety of different metabolic activity. They control hormones, they control our cellular function, they control our genetic code. It's not the fats in and of themselves which are damaging. And just like it's the processing of the fats which have led to problems, it's eating unnatural trans fats, eating too.

Many.

Mixed fats, which we'll discuss as well. That's where the problem comes into being. We could talk a little bit about natural fats. And so getting back to your first question is with this other factor. Initially when we came out with the six factor in the biologic assessment, there wasn't a practical, inexpensive at home collection, which has been our gold standard, is trying to find probably inexpensive assessments that can be done and collected at home. Because we're trying to give power back to the athlete to take control of your health and understand what you're training, how what you're eating is affecting you and then be able to tweak it. So now there is a finger stick test that's available similar to the D and the amino acids which red blood cell determined and these ratios, and there's some key ratios of understanding the types of fats in your body. The percentage of omega 3 fats, which is a critical component. And some recent research has shown that you really need. It's called an omega 3 index. And this omega 3 index was shown actually in the Framingham Heart Study, sort of one of traditional medicine's gold standards of cardiovascular but assessment of risk. When this omega 3 index, meaning the percentage of omega 3 fats in your body is 8 to 10%, which is sort of an ideal, you really probably want to be over 10%. The risk of cardiovascular disease is less than 90% of what its standard would be. So this index is probably one of the more powerful. I'd probably throw it in with vitamin D as well. But gosh, if you had a normal vitamin D and this omega 3 index over 10, the risk factors of cardiovascular disease and inflammatory diseases, which is also something we can touch on, is virtually eliminated.

That's how powerful this bloodstick test for the listeners, it's literally or the finger stick test is literally just a few drops of blood. And that measures the omega 3 fatty acid level or does it measure the omega 6 fatty acid?

Actually, how about this? It's one drop of blood. How cool is that? One drop of blood. One drop of blood. It measures all the. So actually measure the omega 6 fats, the omega 3 fats, the monounsaturated, the saturated, and then you can start looking at some ratios and these ratios each have some significance and how you want to address that. So perhaps, I guess you want to just take a couple minutes and just discuss omega 3 insertive fats a little bit for people who might. A little primer on that.

So what are the reasons that someone would actually be concerned enough about essential fatty acid levels to actually want to, you know, do it, do a bloodstick, give a drop of blood and find out what their levels are. What function do these fatty acids serve within the body? And why should someone be concerned about it?

Got it. So it's actually real important for people to understand one, the importance and the different types of fat, because it can get sort of confusing. And two, to directly answer that question is how these fats then play a role into essential fats. Now, essential fatty acids, as the name implies and as we spoke before, are similar to essential amino acids. These are fats that our bodies really can't produce, or they're critical for life and function and generally are needed to be obtained through the diet. Essential fats are critical because they actually control substances in the body called prostaglandins. Now, these prostaglandins are, I think, best thought of as little intracellular hormones. And what's a hormone? A hormone is just a communicator, the same way we have endocrine hormones, which means these are communicators basically from the brain to organ systems. Testosterone, estrogen, progesterone. These prostaglandins actually control the cellular function. And there are a variety of these prostaglandins. Some people there's. But in essence, there are good prostaglandins. Actually, let me rephrase that. There are prostaglandins which have generally positive function, and then there are prostaglandins, which would have negative function. Now, in the truest sense of the word, they're all beneficial. Just like we need yin and yang. Prostaglandins can affect the way the blood clots, they can affect the vessel tension, they can affect blood pressure, they can affect immune response. They can affect how your brain processes information, neural activity. You get it? Prostaglandin, basically, they control everything within our body. Now, when I said good, bad. Now, is it bad that your body clots when you're cut? Absolutely not. Is it bad that we get a fever when we need to kill a virus? Absolutely not. Is it bad that we have a response to an injury, inflammation, by sending in all these immune cells to create healing? Absolutely not. The problem with good and bad is they're all Necessary. It's a question of balance. When our system goes out of balance, these so called bad end quotation mark. The these prostaglandins which control reparative or restorative or protective mechanisms begin to dominate or basically they'll be on or be in a higher presence. So that blood clotting, that inflammation, the pain begins to take control and be there in a much higher amount. And that's not good. And that would be why it would be harmful to the system. So it is a very.

If someone's low on NREFA or I'm sorry, not NRE essential fatty acids, what type of symptoms would they be experiencing or what type of things would they actually be concerned about happening to their bodies?

Right, okay. So we talked about prostaglandins and that's the ultimate sort of response from these essential fats. Okay. So now the creation of these prostaglandins and it's sort of a fun pathway from a chemistry point of view. We could spend a lot of time on this. But the essential creation of these pathways are dependent on these essential fats. And these essential fats are these omega 3 and omega 6 fats. And the omega 3 fats, basically that's just a chemical term that is a nomenclature based on how long the carbon is and where that first double bond is within the carbon fat. So omega 3, it's in the 3 position and omega 6 is in the 6 position.

And so for the people who are listening, if fat is just a really long chain of carbons. Right?

Correct. It's a long chain of carbons. Exactly. And the chain of carbons has particular amount of double bonds. The omega 3 fats has a carbon in the 3, 6 and 9 position, 3 double bonds. The omega 6 has it in its 6 carbon and it has 2, 6 and 9. The omega 3 has an additional one. Through chemical processes, the omega 3 is broken down and added onto actually and becomes a 20 and a 22 chain carbon. And that's EPA and DHEA. And those are specifically then converted into the sort of more beneficial prostaglandins where.

The omega turning over the label to your fish oil, your flax oil, and you see things like EPA and DHEA that actually DHA, that actually indicates the presence of the omega 3 fatty acids.

Right, okay. All that chemistry, EPA is icosapentaenoic acid. ICOSA means 20. Pentanoic is 5. Basically it's a 20 chain carbon with 5 double bonds. That's where that comes from. Pretty straightforward. But it's got a Nice little branding. Now, EPA sounds good. And dha, they're just shirts for the chemical constituents of it. But these five carbonate fats are essential to creating these beneficial prostaglandins. That's why the omega 3s are so critical for our health. So getting back to what are the benefits? As we said, you're creating these prostaglandins which promote oxygenation of the tissues that, that are involved with a proper immune response, that are involved with brain function, that are involved in proper blood clotting, et cetera. The list goes on and on. Basically, every function in your body, when you're looking at a beneficial activity, relies on the direction of the cell genetic code on these healthier prostaglandins in its most simplistic terms. Now, the Omega 6, which have two double bonds, the problem with the Omega 6 is they have a split. They're sort of like a chemical funnel. And the Omega 6s require conversion to something called GLA, which is gamma linoleic acid, which is found large amount in primrose oil and barrage oil. That's why people may supplement those and those two go to a healthy prostaglandin. It's the prostaglandin 3 series, not really majorly important, but there's a funnel there. And that conversion doesn't occur due to stress, diet, trans fats, nutritional deficiency. So we don't readily convert these Omega 6s very well into further down the chain. The other problem is the Omega 6s will be converted to something called arachidonic acid. Arachidonic acid is further down the fatty chain, and that goes to the Prostaglandin 2 series, which has the negative effects. Again, it's all a balance. But the issue is when we throw that balance off or when there are deficiencies or blocks into these enzymes which convert that, we start running into difficulty.

The Omega 6s aren't necessarily bad. You just wouldn't want them in a ratio that was too high compared to the Omega 3s. Is that what you say?

Exactly. Omega 3, that's the main point. None of it is bad. We need arachidonic acid, we need prostaglandin 2 series. They're critical for life. But we don't get those now or we don't have the balance that our body evolved to exist. If you look at paleolithic hunter gatherer societies, we ate a ratio of about 1 to 1 omega 6 fats. If you look at grass, planktons, algae, they're 1 to 1, 1 to 2 to 1. If you look at grass fed beef, buffalo, wild range chickens, although there's not a lot of fat in chicken per se, or has been bred out with white breast, the ratios are 2 to 1 somewhere in that range. That's what we need to exist on. That's how these complicated chemical pathways have sort of evolved to process fats in that range. Maybe you know the answer to this. What do you think that the ratio of Omega 3 to Omega 6 or Omega 6 to Omega 3 is today in America?

You mean like in our typical diets?

Typical American diet, You know, I think.

I've heard something like, I believe it was either 50 to 1 or 100 to 1 or something like that.

Not that bad, but it's 20, 20 plus to 1, you know, and it's probably for some. Well, it's worse because if you think about how much omega 3, okay, where's omega 3 found? Omega 3 is in fish, cold water fish. Omega 3 is found in wild grass fed game. Omega 3 small amounts in walnuts, it's a higher amount in chia seeds. How many people other than are really eating chia seeds? I think it's a growing, become aware of chia seeds, flaxseeds, but not in the typical American diet. Right. Some Pumpkin seeds have omega 3 and a higher percentage, that's walnuts, I said, but that's about it. Some soy, omega 3 prevalence. Unless you're eating wild fish and meat, which is where we predominately got these, and some of these nuts and seeds, the majority of people don't get any. Whereas modern industrial food is reliant on grains. We didn't have grains, so we're getting corn, safflower, soy. Those are canola.

Those would be higher in the Omega 6s then, right?

They're virtually all Omega 6. Right. A small percentage in canola, small percentage in soy, but the ratios are extremely high. And that's what's in all the processed foods, that's what's in the grains. So the ratio, sometimes I'm surprised at the average person who's not supplementing with fish oil. They're not getting any Omega 3s at all. So that ratio that just causes these prostaglandins to go out of control in a negative way. It's one of the cores of the illness of today's society. So it's not, as I said at the beginning, it's not the types, it's not fat, it's the balance of fat and it's the processing of fat. So if we look at where do we go wrong? It's too many, way too many of these omega 6 oils. That's the problem. The other thing is the processing of the oils, which at least my favorite understanding or point to understand of fats. The first point is fats are converted into these prostaglandins. And the omega 3 omega 6 ratio is critical for a healthy balance of prostaglandins. The second thing to understand about fats is they're extremely susceptible to damage, especially these so called healthier fats, the omega 3 fats. Nature evolved to exist that way in order for these healthier omega 3 fats with all these double bonds. And why have double bonds? Well, double bonds make fats more flexible. They need to be in your cellular membrane. So the more flexible your membrane is, the better tissues, better nutrients are able to get into these cells. Also in colder climates, you need a fat that would be liquid or flexible and not solid. The colder the climate, the more unsaturated the fat you find. If you think about food supply, the further north, cold water fish, salmon, cod, they have lots of Omega 3. Makes sense. Working your way down the chain. Grasses. Northern. Where's flax growing? Canada. Lots of Omega 3 working your way down grasses. Again, northern. Plainly it starts to balance out a little bit more. And working down into the southern temperate. Corn, peanut, canola, those are all southern. They require a little warmer climate. Generally they start to push more of the Omega 6s. As you go further down into Mediterranean, you get these monounsaturated fats, olive oil, peanut even has some monofat saturated. And these monounsaturated. We'll talk about that in a second. And then where do you go to the. What type of fats you find in the islands? Coconut, palm kernel. Right, they're all saturated. What fats are present in the body, in the most part in meat and animals? Saturated. So the bodies have evolved that the higher the temperature, the more the fats are saturated. Because temperature, light and oxygen damage fats and they cause free radicals. And the body has a way, and animals have a way of using these saturated fats to actually protect the unsaturated fats from 98 degrees consistently. If you took a fat, take fish oil, anyone, and put it at 98 degrees in a day, it would be awful. So it's this potential damaging to fats. And that's where the problem occurs, is not only the Omega 6, but the Omega 6 that are processed in high temperatures. Trans fats are created from these fats. And if you think of crisco which is really where this all started. Crisco stands for crystallized cottonseed oil. It was created by, and here's a name we all know, Procter and Gamble. Procter and Gamble in the late 1800s were candle makers. And where Procter and Gamble started running into a problem. If they couldn't get adequate lard, animal fat to make the candles, it was getting too expensive. So they hired a German chemist to say, how can we take oil and make it more like lard so we can use it for candles? It would be cheaper. They came upon this process of hydrogenation where you throw an extra hydrogen into these double bonded fats to make them stable so you could burn them and they wouldn't be solid again. You needed a fat, which is lots of energy to be solid at room temperature. They could have a candle. Well, that worked really well. You took a natural fat, a natural oil and you sort of plasticized it and you could burn it. Well, when electricity came in, people said their market for candles just fell apart. So they said, wow, really, in essence, what do we have here? It sort of looks like fat. Why don't we sell it as a food? That's exactly what happened. They took their butter, I'm sorry, their candle as a food, as an oil. Initially it didn't go. And it took some really creative marketing and changing of the colors. But in essence, Crisco, which was a candle, became a food source. Now initially they had no idea the problems. They didn't know the molecular changes that were occurring. But later on they did understand it, but they kept selling it because it was cheap. That's why trans hydrogenated fats are present in all processed foods. They don't go bad and they're really, really cheap. It's this trans fat, the oxygenation, the hydrogenation, the changing of the molecular structure is extremely unnatural and damaging to our body. Those are the two cruxes of the fat problem. It's not fat, it's not low fat is good. There's no societies that exist with low fat. There is a. In this month's December National Geographic, there's an article about the Hadzas, which are one of the few remaining hunter gatherer societies in the world. At this point. The journalists went in and lived with them for a few weeks. And the delicacy or the thing that they strive for, they're fats. When they kill a baboon, it's like it's the eyes, it's the brain. It doesn't sound real great, but that's what they needed because that was the energy source. It was rich, it was natural. There's no carbohydrates and cheap calories. It was all very valuable. Fat was the energy source. Fat was the thing that drove the metabolism in the body. This whole anti fat, low fat, saturated fat is just honestly a bunch of crap. Sorry for that, if we can edit that out, I guess. But it's just absolutely wrong and we really need to understand. Healthy fats are beneficial to the body and they provide. There's all sorts of others. There's short chain fats that have benefits to the immune system and they're critical for the intestinal tract. There's medium chain fats which are medium chain triglycerides which are found in coconut, which are used for energy very effectively. This understanding of fats being extremely powerful for the body is really important. You could go from there.

Yeah, I completely agree with what you're saying. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't edit that part out. As a matter of fact, I give most of my clients that I work with a T shirt that says my personal trainer told me to eat more fat. And I'm sure that people. I've written a few articles on it and there's multiple articles out there that talk about what you just touched on and go into even greater detail about how one of the issues with health in America and especially cardiovascular disease and things of that nature is not an increased consumption of fat, especially like animal based fats that you were talking about, because that consumption has actually gone down as cardiovascular disease has gone up. But the problem is more along the lines of some of the other stuff you touched on, the trans fats and the processed fats and even, you know, the sugars and the starches and things of that nature. Now what I found intriguing was I didn't know that you could actually find out what your essential fatty acid levels were. That's what I found was really interesting, that you've actually figured out a way to allow people to test their essential fatty acid levels. Can you talk about how that works and what somebody does? And then if they're found to be, I guess it'd be deficient, not necessarily high. I don't know if you can have omega 3 fatty acid levels that are too high. I guess that's, that's another question for you. But how do you do the test and then what do you do once you find out the results of the test? Can you walk me through the process?

Absolutely right. All this understanding is wonderful, but at the end of the day, how does that affect me? And then how can I monitor my fatty acids? As we know it's such a critical foundation of health. And by monitoring these and getting these balanced and getting it right, you're going to do a lot for your performance as well as your well being. So the test is a single one blood finger stick. It just gets, you drop your blood, you prick it with a sort of a spring loaded lancet, you really don't feel it at all. And you drop that one drop on a sort of a gauze like card and let it dry for about an hour or so and just pop it in the mail to the lab and the lab sends back a full report of these essential fats or all fats, let's call it all fats that are present within the body. And then you can break down those fats into the omega 3, the omega 6, some of these omega 9 fats and the saturated fats. The key things that we're looking at are one the percent of omega 3s that are present in your body, that's sort of critical, at least from a cardiovascular immune perspective. And you want about 10% because that's what we're looking at people, hunter gatherers, the highest protective level. If that's deficient, you need more Omega 3s right off the bat. So either you need to supplement more and we can talk about sources. The other thing we look at is that omega 6 to omega 3 ratio. Typically you want it 2 to 3 to 1. That's sort of again what we're seeing. If that omega 6 to omega 3 ratio is too high, we need to look at your diet and say whoa, too many nuts, too many oils, too many grains. Where are you? Because I've seen people a little too high in omega 6s and they're just eating too many nuts, which necessarily isn't, I don't have a problem with, but it just may not be a balance that their body is optimal with. You can sort of gauge that maybe a shift to more seed base, add more chia, add more flax and fish oil and so forth. So that's another critical. And that omega 6, omega 3 ratio is also a very strong marker of the inflammatory status of the body. It's probably a whole other talk, but inflammation is probably at the root cause of most illnesses. And when the omega 6 to omega 3 ratio is, is right on, the likelihood of inflammatory diseases which range from cardiovascular to diabetes to over frequency of injury, all increase significantly. So that's also important. And the Other key ratio, and you can look at many of them, but this is the third key is that arachidonic acid to epa, while arachidonic acid has beneficial properties or you need tends to flow more to the inflammatory pathway. So when someone has a high arachidonic acid, it also suggests that there's an imbalance in the processing of fats and they may do well with some primrose or barrage oil to sort of bypass that block in the omega 3 or the prostaglandin 3 formation. You can actually see the percent of trans fats. So if someone is high in trans fats, you're busted. You know you're eating processed foods, fast foods at a high amount. There's naturally found trans fats in dairy. So if you do eat some yogurts, that and dairy products that will show up. But if someone's running over one and a half to 2%, it's not, they're not doing their body good. And you're incorporating too many of these molecularly changed fats into your system. So once you get this balance, you can start to specifically make some subtle changes in your diet or sometimes drastic changes. You can start adding in more omega 3 base fats, reducing omega 6 base fats and eliminating other fats in your diets as well. What are the fats that I guess sort of the corollary to that, what are the fats that people really want to focus on are as we talked about grass fed game as much as possible, the majority, and that's the one other point that's sort of overlooked, is the meats that we eat. Well, meat, game, animal, the fats in them are not harmful. In fact there's a lot of benefit to them. The commercial fed meat do not have the natural fatty acid patterns that they always did. What do we feed cattle? Go watch Food Inc. It's corn and grain. We're fattening up the cattle with insulin producing grain with different fats. The fats as we talked about in corn is highly omega 6. The fats in grass, which cattle were made to cows, buffalo, they ate grass. That's more of a balance. So grass fed natural beef has the higher omega 3 and the saturated fats are different. The commercially farmed, basically cattle or commercially farmed salmon do not have the healthier fatty acid pathway. So you start pushing that Omega 6 balance in the wrong way. So grass fed wild game type are always going to be far, far superior. Same thing, wild salmon. Unfortunately today with all the chemicals and pollutants, it's not ideal, but wild periodically is still probably okay, at least in my mind. Then what other grain omega 3. We talked chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp has some omega 3 pumpkin seeds. Whether you make a blender, I'll typically grind up chia or flax or hemp in the blender drink. Those are going to be your best sources of pure omega 3 fats with obviously some fish oil supplements if you can get those and epa, DHEA obviously are beneficial.

Now, I'm not a big fan of calorie counting and necessarily trying to quantify everything in your diet because I think it can be a little non conducive to adherence. But when somebody does something like this test, can you actually, based on the results of the test, figure out about how much of the omega 33 fatty acids or any of these other sources that you're talking about, you would actually need to bring yourself into a proper balance? I mean, can you quantify it if you wanted to so that you're not shooting in the dark?

Not directly, but you can certainly. You can certainly get a baseline of how much Omega 3s they may need initially. Again, depending on what they're experiencing. Everyone's pathway to these prostaglandins are different. Someone has some inflammatory conditions or injuries or performance issues, you might push more omega 3 type fat initially and then cut back, especially if they were deficient. So that's sort of the beauty of it. If they were running a 6%, I certainly would say they might want to take a couple tablespoons of a a pharmaceutical grade fish oil off the top of my head. Generally 800mg EPA, 600mg DHEA per dose. Initially pushing that pathway and trying to move it in the other direction, then you could taper down as time goes. It's a little bit science, but it's also a little bit art. If you put halfway too much to this prostaglandin 1, 3 series, too much of a good thing is also a problem. Generally it's starting out in a certain way. It's adding in things and then eliminating and just pay attention to your body with that. Getting rid of the processed fats, dramatically reducing or eliminating some of the omega 6 oils. You do need some, but you can get all you need from nuts and natural grains. Anything else added in is just throwing you in the wrong direction in essence because you're just not going to avoid it all in a realistic sense. Don't count. You're going to go crazy. That's not a realistic way to live. What we also, and I'm sure you do, is when people need more calories, especially if they're trying to limit grains. Some of the more neutral fats, some of the saturated fats, such as the coconut, are really a wonderful addition to add in or to cook in or coconut or ghee, and that's the other sort of real life component is what's good to cook with. And actually saturated fats are better to cook with because they're not going to become damaged. Clarified butter or ghee, which has been around for thousands of years, is probably one of the more resilient types of fats because it doesn't have as many of the proteins to become denatured and is very resilient to heat damage. So coconut, butter, ghee, olive oil obviously is wonderful to cook in. Not as high of a temperature because some still has some polyunsaturated in it, but that's really it. You don't want to cook in anything else because otherwise you're just damaging them.

Interesting. Well, in the limited amount of time that we have available because we're actually running a little bit short on time for the interview. As far as people doing this test, is all the information about it on your website. If I were going to put that link in the show notes, can people go there and find out more about the EFA test?

Yeah, there is. We've added that on. We'll be adding more specific information, but you can order that. That test is either individually or as part of the performance profile.

Okay.

We're going to be doing some shifting actually. I can talk to you more specifically, sort of breaking down some of the tests and making them available in some different ways as well. But that is available in and of itself along with. I'd probably put that the amino acids and vitamin D is probably your three most critical as a baseline.

The essential fatty acids, the amino acids.

And the vitamin D. Absolutely. The reason they weren't in the profile initially is twofold. It runs a little bit more than a D. It's a more expensive test than D or ferritin, which actually just sort of mentioned is now available by fingerstick. You can check your iron stores by fingerstick, not by going to the lab. That's first time available anywhere in this country commercially. So we're excited to have that one. But with regards to amino acids and essential fats, the majority of people are either deficient in some amino acids or out of balance with essential fats. So generally if you look at someone I'm sure you see Ben, in consulting with people, if you look at the diet off the bat, you almost 98% know they're not going to be right on. So generally what we'll sometimes do is have people make the shift first and then, okay, I've made my changes, I'm adding more essential fats, I'm getting rid of the processed fats and I'm not eating as many of the omega 6 oils. Now we'll check it to see what fine tuning I need because so unless someone really needs to know the information, it's certainly great to know and that's a motivation for a lot of people. When you really sit down and look at someone's diet, even three, four, five day general survey, it's pretty clear that unless they're supplementing, unless they're very cognizant of these things that we've talked about, it's unlikely to be imbalanced to begin with.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you're saying get it dialed in and then, and then look at getting a test to find out truly if you, if you're going to need to make even more changes.

Right. You know, so you could go two ways. You know, if you think you're dialing, that's the other thing. You know, a lot of people maybe, you know, listening, have a lot of this information and you know, then you, okay, let me see where I am and how do I fine tune it versus, you know, if you're way out of whack, pretty clear, you know, make the changes first and then retest it. There's no major benefit other than, you know, just giving you motivation. Seeing a number, a lot of people go, whoa, if you see a 5% omega 3 index, that's not good. So that would be, you know, you'd be extreme risk for inflammation and your performance is going to suffer. I mean we haven't specifically spoken about that. But these prostaglandins stimulate hormone production, oxygenation recovery, reduce inflammation. So you're going to have these balances correct. You're just going to recover quicker, you're going to have a better hormonal response.

Interesting. Well, what I'll do is I'll put a link to that in the show notes where people can go find out more about the test. And as far as some of the things that you went over, I know there's a lot of resources out there, but are there any books that you're aware of that really go into if people wanted to find out more about the issue with fat, especially in our typical Western diet and the fact that we've a lot of times got the wrong perspective on it. Are there any books that you would point people to or resources?

Gosh, there's. There's so many. Artemis, I think it's Artemis Semopolis has written a lot on essential fatty acids. You know, Dan Eads writes on protein power, a lot on essential fats. And, you know, if someone's concerned about some of the cardiovascular risk, he's right on. And he has a wonderful blog and just insightful information.

Yeah, I'd heard of that book Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill. That's one that I know.

I think written by Udo Rasmus is another. Donald Rudin. These are some of the classic educators with fats. Michael Harradin, Barry Sears. The whole zone was based on this. 30, 40, 30. Well, the ratio exactly is not perfect, but the whole principle behind the zone was this dietary manipulation of the essential fatty acid pathway. So, again, well, that 30, 30, 40, 30 is not exactly right on the philosophy and the idea and what using diet to balance these prostaglandins was the whole concept behind its own.

Interesting. Well, if you're listening, you're in the audience and you have other books or resources that you'd recommend, definitely leave a comment in the show notes to this podcast. Dr. Cohen, thank you for coming on today and for giving us more useful information as usual.

My pleasure. Fats are fun.

Facts are fun. All right, we'll end on that. Maybe that'll be the title of this podcast, Fats are Fun. Yeah, I'll talk to you later.

Thanks, Ben.

Well, folks, that is going to wrap up our podcast. A couple of final announcements is, remember, go to itunes and leave us a ranking or even say something about the show. You know, what do you think could change constructive criticism, what you like about it. Be nice, but make sure that you give us some acknowledgement on itunes. That helps out the show quite a bit. And then the other thing, remember, is that we're primarily going to be focusing on listener Q and A over the next six weeks. And my apologies for having to shorten the show just a little bit. But any of you out there who are triathletes or who are thinking about a triathlon or who have a mild interest at all in triathlon, you are going to be very, very, very happy with me. And you can go over to rockstartriathlete.com or follow that link in the show notes to learn why. So until next time, this is Ben Greenfield signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.