Which Supplements Can You Replace With Real Food?, How To Grow More Facial Hair, Can Healthy Foods Be Inflammatory?, and Much More!

In today's episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, which supplements can you replace with real food? How to grow more facial hair Calories in protein versus amino acids. Are energy drinks acidic? Can healthy foods be inflammatory? And how. Yo, yo. Dieting destroys your metabolism.

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.

I kind of want to scream something in a guttural voice like, this is Sparta.

This is Sparta. Yeah, I'm. I'm officially a. I'm officially Spartan now. That is madness. Which I think means I'm actually not supposed to say anything or I'm supposed to speak in a. In like a kind of like a guttural Scottish accent because I think that's what they use in the movie 300. Everybody knows that the Spartans were actually Scottish. No, actually, dude did a super Spartan race on Saturday and did a Spartan sprint race on Sunday. And I gotta tell you and the listeners, I'm hooked. Those things are fun. Yeah, it's like I'm covered in scrapes and wounds and barbed wire punctures, but yeah, and I learned that I need to learn how to climb a rope with muddy hands. But, yeah, super fun. You just redline for the super Spartan was like an hour and a half of just like full on, you know, mud crawls and fire jumps and rope climbs and wall climbs and Atlas Rock carries. And the sprint was very similar but extremely fun. I would encourage everyone to go out and try out a Spartan event because I had a blast. I'm hooked. I'm already signed up for four more, so. And plus, there was no bike packing required, which was nice for a change.

Well, and you only had to wear a loincloth, right?

So, you know, I actually wore a loincloth and a headband. It's a great look. Just add some compression socks and that'll round things out.

New splashes.

Okay, this is the time when Ben tells you about some interesting studies that he has come across in the last little while. And I think you've got, what, three or four of them on tap for us here?

Absolutely. And you know what, Brock? We're. We're so into drugs on this show that I figured, why not start off talking about coffee, smoking, drinking and pot.

I am so high right now.

That's fantastic. And considering it's 8 o' clock in the morning. So while Brock goes and grabs some more Doritos, the effects of caffeine, nicotine, ethanol and tetrahydrocannabinol. My favorite weed. For those of you who want the monosyllabic version on exercise performance, this was a study that came out in nutrition and metabolism. And Are you ready for the drum rolls, bro? I'll give you the overview of each one.

Okay, here's the drum roll.

Coffee. So here is the takeaway on coffee. Coffee, at about 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, which is the equivalent of about a good four to six cups of coffee, is a proven ergogenic aid for exercise, especially in endurance exercise, more than strength. And the reason for that is it targets skeletal muscle metabolism, enhances fatty acid utilization, so it might spare some carbohydrates as well. And it has a really big bada boom boost for your central nervous system.

Kick in the butt.

I'm not necessarily saying that I recommend that you use caffeine to that extent all the time, but should you need to pull out caffeine as an ergogenic aid, it certainly helps. And post exercise, caffeine intake seems to benefit recovery by by increasing your rate of glycogen resynthesis. So if you work out and you've got another workout coming up quick, and you combine a cup of coffee with your post workout meal, it'll help you restore your carbohydrate levels even more.

Now, of course, what can't coffee do?

I don't know, which may be why it has been banned by the wada, by the World Anti Doping Association. And I'll fill you in on each of these different drugs that we talk about and whether or not it's banned. But from 1962 to 1972 and then from 1984 to 2003, caffeine was on the WADA's banned list. And according to WADA, one of the reasons they removed it from the banned list recently was that it's so ubiquitous in beverages and foods that it would be very, very tough to sanction athletes just because there's so much kind of social and dietary consumption of caffeine going on.

That's very understanding of them.

And apparently that's not happening with weed and alcohol. So let's move on to smoking nicotine. So here's the summary on smoking nicotine, which I know all of our listeners love and use quite frequently.

Yes, I'm sure we've got a very large portion of the audiences chain smoking while they're listening.

That's right. While they're riding their bicycle. Nicotine seems to have ergogenic potential. So what it can do is it can activate what's called your sympathoadrenal system. So it can cause increased catecholamine release, which is kind of similar to what you'd get from, like, high dose caffeine. But you also get increase in muscle blood flow and also an increase in lipolysis, which is essentially the breakdown and utilization of fatty acids. And one reason that smoking can also make you skinny and sexy. And one of the components of nicotine action acts on the dopamine pathway as well, which of course means that it is a little bit addictive. So as far as nicotine goes, of course there are some negative effects of cigarettes in terms of lung capacity and, you know, your, your potential for a lot of the carcinogens and the toxins that you inhale when you use cigarettes. But nicotine can be used as a supplement. You can use nicotine patches, you can use nicotine gums. And the World Anti Doping association for that has included nicotine categorized as a stimulant and put it on its 2013 monitoring program. So it's not on the prohibited list. But what that means is that the World Anti Doping association wants to monitor it to detect whether or not athletes might be misusing nicotine to gain an illegal performance advantage in sports, however, like.

Tucking some gum in the corner of their cheek or slapping a patch on.

Their arm before they do their race, gum, patch, etc. Etc. Research shows that it's actually kind of worth trying for a workout. So there you go. Or maybe an E cigarette.

That would be actually incorrect.

No, but I'm actually going to try one. During my next Spartan race, I'm just going to have have an E cigarette hanging out the corner of my mouth.

I was at a party just before Christmas and there's a fellow smoking one of those, or I guess breathing through one of those. And it was cookie dough scented. It was really disgusting.

Wow. Cookie dough scented e cigarette. Sounds fantastic.

Like, at first I was standing there just sort of sniffing the air, going, what is that? And then when I realized what it was, I started talking to him. And by the end of the conversation, I couldn't get away from him fast enough. And it wasn't his personality, it was just the cookie dough smell was driving me.

Someone is gonna strike gold when they do the cinnabon E. Cigarette. So I don't know if we lost our drum roll, but let's go back to our drumroll.

Bring it back.

Yeah.

Alcohol. Alcohol, in terms of its ergogenic effect on exercise performance is kind of nil. You get a significant impairment in cardiac and skeletal muscle. It slows post exercise recovery because it inhibits protein synthesis, so your muscles don't repair quite as quickly. You get a decrease in testosterone and often that's accompanied by an increase in cortisol. Cortisol and alcohol has pretty much, across the board, fairly significant detrimental effects on exercise performance. And it is also prohibited by the World Anti Doping association for the following sports. Aeronautics, archery. I guess they don't want any stray arrows. Automobile racing, karate. You wouldn't want a misplaced kick by someone who had a few too many shots of vodka prior to the karate competition. Motorcycling and powerboating. I'm surprised skiing and snowboarding and things like that aren't also listed. And until recently, they actually had pentathlon also included on that list of events for which having any levels of alcohol in your bloodstream would get you banned. So I don't know why someone would want to do that anyways. But it turns out that if you actually do want to perform at your very, very best, alcohol is prob. Not going to be your best choice.

I noticed in the study itself, they actually specifically say ethanol. Now, isn't that. That's grain alcohol?

Well, it's basically alcohol, when you consume it, is going to wind up, whether it's from wine or beer or whatever, metabolize producing ethanol. So you're going to get that as an end product either way. All right, there you go. So finally, and we will link to this study in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 269 we get to cannabis. DRUMROLL so, cannabis, can it help out with sports? And it turns out that cannabis has no ergogenic potential in sports. And there's actually quite a raised eyebrow in the research community about why cannabis would actually appear on the World Anti Doping association list, when in fact it is completely useless. And it actually impairs exercise performance and impairs psychomotor performance. It has a sedative effect. It slows your reaction time and it.

Slows the time from getting off the couch.

Yeah. It can also decrease cardiac output. So there is absolutely no way that weed helps at all with sports or exercise performance in the form of marijuana or hashish or caramels or brownies or any Other form of edible smokable or. I don't think you can actually inject weed. I'm sure you could probably figure out how to inject endocannabinoids. Yeah. So there you go, Brock. I would not go for a run after recording this podcast.

Okay, good thing I got that over with.

All right, so we'll link to that one in the show notes. But with all this talk about drugs, I should mention another study that came out on coffee and dehydration. Now, this was kind of interesting because it's often suggested that coffee causes dehydration, and so you're supposed to avoid consuming it so that you can maintain good fluid balance. But what they did was they took a bunch of coffee drinkers, habitual coffee drinkers who consume three to six cups of coffee per day. And what they did was they had them consume this coffee, and then they looked at common markers of adequate hydration. So they looked at creatinine, osmolality, another component called USG in the kidneys. And these are all common ways that you would measure to see what your hydration status is. And they compared this group to a group that ate or drank pretty much the equivalent amount of water. And it turns out that the coffee hydrated these guys just as well as water does. And the researchers came to the conclusion, and this is quote from their abstract. These data suggest that coffee, when consumed in moderation by caffeine habituated males, provides similar hydrating qualities to water. So there you have it.

So that's the significant part of that sentence, the habituated. So if you weren't habituated, it may have a different effect on you.

It's possible that what happens is your body gets used to the diuretic effect of caffeine and you eventually quit losing that much water. So, yeah, that's certainly possible. But for folks who are frequent coffee drinkers, you don't really need to worry, it seems, about coffee dehydrating you.

So there are other things to worry about, but you don't have to worry about getting dehydrated.

And while you are drinking all that coffee, you may want to consider adding a little beet juice to it. Because.

Wait, adding beet juice to the coffee or adding it alongside?

Well, I would just put it in there. Kind of like a bulletproof coffee. Like a really horrible, horrible version of bulletproof coffee.

Bulletproof coffee gone completely sideways.

Bastardized bulletproof. This is based on a study that beetroot juice that was co ingested with caffeine had an enormous effect on exercise performance compared with drinking beetroot juice or using caffeine by itself. And in this study, what they gave people was about 5 milligrams per kilograms of caffeine. So around the equivalent of about four cups of coffee. You may want to achieve that with something like NoDoz tabs, if you try this one out. And then they combined it with beetroot juice to get that nitric oxide effect. And it turned out that you got the ergogenic effect of beetroot juice. That increase in blood flow and increased ability to have a lower rating of perceived exertion and an increased time to exhaustion. But that that increased time to exhaustion was about 18% higher than just drinking beetroot juice and 27% higher than just drinking coffee or using caffeine. When you combined beetroot juice or you could use beetroot powder with coffee or with again like a caffeine pill. So there you go. I know it's very significant. There's a lot of companies out there producing beetroot powders and stuff. And I would imagine based on the results of this, they're probably going to start to add caffeine, caffeine into it as well.

So, yeah, I've got a whole bunch of the neogenis beet elite packs around. I'll try dumping one of those into a cup of coffee and see.

There you go.

See what happens.

Yummy. Okay, so so far we've got thumbs up on caffeine, we've got thumbs up on beetroot juice, we've got a potential thumbs up on a nicotine patch or nicotine guy.

That was a thumbs up.

That was an odd thumbs up and a thumbs up on the Cinnabon E cigarettes for sure. And we've got a thumbs down on weed and we've got a thumbs down on alcohol. So finally we'll finish with a big thumbs up for exercise because this last study actually looked at the neuronal response in food reward brain regions when folks engaged in aerobic exercise. And I thought this was interesting because a lot of times we hear that when you exercise, you engage in this compensatory effect, meaning that you know that you exercise so you go out and you eat more food. But with this study shows was that exercise actually reduces the reward response to food in the brain regions that are responsible for giving you pleasure when you eat. And so if you get food cravings, carbohydrate cravings, if you're really wanting a meal, if you're feeling hungry, et cetera, you may actually be able to shut that down by engaging in exercise. And in this case, the exercise that was used was 60 minutes of aerobic exercise on a bicycle. But I personally experiment with this a little bit when I get hungry, and I'll do something a lot shorter than that, like you can do 100 or 200 jumping jacks, for example. And what you'll find is that just that bit of dopamine release that you get from the exercise and the natural endocannabinoids and endorphins that are released from just a brief bout of exercise can actually cause pleasure from the exercise and also reduce the neuronal response to food reward. And so that that Snickers bar might actually look less appealing after doing a little bit of exercise versus what we would all kind of intuitively think, which would be that it might be more appealing because you'd be hungry from exercising. But this, you know, if you get food cravings, you may want to actually try this out as a strategy. Just go exercise, you know, go for a walk, go for a little bike ride, do some, do some burpees, you know, something. So this study was interesting as well. And again, I'll link to that over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com 260 but a cup of coffee, some beetroot juice, some nicotine and exercise while avoiding weed and alcohol is the takeaway from today's news flashes.

Special announcements.

So how did your Paleocon little seminar thing go the other day?

Paleo con Paleo con. It went well. Even though I'm not paleo. I eat lots of tasty dairy. But it went well. For those of you who didn't get a chance to check it out. I did a big seminar on raising primal kids. And that does go above and beyond dressing up your children as saber tooth tigers. But you can.

Bones in their noses or putting bones in their noses.

You could check all that out@BenGreenfieldFitness.com PaleoCon for a bunch of pretty cool presentations by Mark Sisson and Rob Wolf and all these other folks in the kind of like the Paleo primal community. Some really good talks over there. And it is free to watch the talks live. And then if you wanted to go back and see the replay of my talk, et cetera. Do you know how much it is, Brock?

I don't actually. It's not much. I think it was like 50 bucks or less.

Pretty, pretty good event. I mean, these type of online summits and events in the health space now are happening about every week. Or so I'd say. But there's a few that I actually jump into and endorse after seeing who's talking, what they're talking about. And this is one that I like. So it's@BenGreenfieldFitness.com PaleoCon and you've got another.

One of those coming up too. The Entheos thing.

Yes, actually, for people listening to this podcast on the day that it comes out, for those of you who are really on the ball and just, just basically live your life with your finger poised over the mouse button. Clicking on iTunes. Entheos. I'm teaching my second class at Entheos this week. That's going to be on Friday, January 31st at noon. So you can skip lunch and go listen to how to rev the human machine. Listen to and watch. Actually, this one's on recovery. I'm going over 10 different ways to push the reboot button on your body and kind of what your first four to eight weeks of pushing that reboot button should look like. So this is part of a three part series that I'm doing with entheos. The first part is this part this Friday on rebooting and recovering your body. And then the next two parts will go into kind of like building your body and elevating your body to prepare it for more advanced human performance. And then we're going to end by talking about how to really take things to the next level. The class is about an hour long and you can register for free in the link that we'll put in the show notes. So that should be a fun little live video class. So we'll put the link over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com 269 along with the link to go join Brock and I in Mexico. I'm so excited.

Escaping the winter cold in March is going to be so awesome.

Quick trip. It's five days long. It's called Primal con Vacation, Tulum, Mexico. It's put on by Mark Sisson and I'm gonna be there. Like I mentioned, Brock will be there. Jessa is gonna come. We're gonna be doing classes, clinics, Mark Sisson, Rob Wolfe, Kate Shanahan, Darrell Edwards, a lot of leaders in the paleo and the primal and the ancestral health community. We're all going to be there drinking tequila on the beach and maybe doing some bodyweight squats or something. So check that out. We'll link to in the show. It's called primalcon. I know that's coming up soon. It's only a Month and a half away. But if you want to toss in a quick little vacation to Mexico, that's gonna be the way to do it. So.

And if you do, make sure to put Ben's name in the referred by little slot when you're signing up because that just means you'll get treated extra special.

That's right. And they put a few nickels in our hat when you do that, so. So check that out. In our hat. In our, I don't know, Uncomfortable. Yes. I won't be bringing my hat to Mexico. Just my Speedo and maybe my spartan headband.

Yes.

Did you know that Ben Greenfield personally mentors trainers, coaches, physicians and nutritionists from around the globe? From business building tips to advanced human performance and health concepts. It's all part of a private mastermind called the Superhuman Coach Network. When you join, you get instant access to monthly workshops with Ben, a Q and a forum, over 40 hours of cutting edge audio and video education, and much more. Check it out today and become one of the world's leading health and fitness experts@superhumancoach.com podcast. That's superhumancoach.com podcast. Listener Q1.

Hello.

Hi sir, myself Anil. I'm from India. So I want to ask a question that right now my weight is 72 kg and I want, I want of six pack and normal body like biceps and triceps. The problem is that I don't want to take these proteins. I want to make my body on the basis of this natural fruits or my meals and everything. I don't want an additional proteins like that. So can, can I do this without using the proteins since can I make the six apps? And another question is, sir, how much time? I will. How much time will it take to my six abs? Okay, sir, thank you.

Now, I have a feeling some people out there probably may have had a little bit of trouble understanding or even hearing this question. So maybe I'll just give a quick little recap. He wanted to know how he can get six pack abs, good shoulders, biceps and triceps without taking any protein powders or supplements. Basically is what it comes down to. It was a little hard to understand them. I had to listen to it a few times myself.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean the short answer is yeah. I mean you can eat real food as a replacement for supplements. And I think that it's good that I get into this just because the past couple of weeks in episodes 267 and 268, we talked a lot about multivitamins and supplements and I don't want to give anybody the impression that I think that that stuff blows real food out of the water because. Because it doesn't. And it all comes down to something called food synergy. So this idea of food synergy is that there's a lot of nutrients in food that affect each other's absorption. So like, you know, vitamin C can actually be enhanced by the presence of iron, or the lycopene in a tomato is actually enhanced by other elements in the tomato itself versus like taking lycopene as an isolated supplement. Now the other thing is that a lot of times when we're consuming foods in their whole synergistic format, like say like the trans fat from an animal, it's a lot different than the food processed trans fat that we get from, like the hydrogenation of vegetable oils. So when you consume naturally occurring trans fats, those are actually really healthy. And they've been shown to upregul your body's ability to fight inflammation. They've been found to help you form proper cell walls and cell membranes and even like the tiny little cell bodies that help you to fight off infections like liposomes. So when you look at foods and the synergy of foods, eating foods in their real form gives you a lot of this synergistic effect. And there has to be certain conditions met in order for that food synergy. The first thing that kind of needs to be present if you're going to take advantage of food synergy is that there has to be some balance in terms of all the constituents, constituents, constituents, constituents of the food. What that means is that when you look at like proteins and you're consuming proteins, they have to be accompanied by things like proteases and carbohydrates have to be accompanied by, by the digestive enzymes that would break down carbohydrates like maltase and lactase and sucrase and you know, a lot of fats and molecules similar to fats need, for example, like phenolic acids and flavonoids and antioxidants consumed along with them in order for them to be absorbed and utilized to their highest extent. And that's only happening. All those constituents are only present when you're eating food in its entire form. And so what I mean by that is like eating a steak versus eating like whey protein isolate is going to give you all of that food synergy. And it may not be convenient. And we'll get into that in a second to cook up a steak right.

After, carry a steak in your pocket.

But you're getting more of the enzymes and even some of the phenols and the flavonoids and other components in terms of the antioxidants. Assuming that that cow, let's say, was like a pasture raised, grass fed cow. So you're getting a lot of that food synergy that you're just not getting if you were to take an isolated powdered protein. Now coffee is another example. Coffee has what's called hydroxycinnamic acids in it and those can actually help you to essentially deaminate and methylate coffee. Meaning that there's certain elements in coffee that in order for it to be digested and to pass through your system properly, you have to have certain acids present in that coffee for it to actually occur. And these hydroxycinnamic acids are found in coffee, but you're not going to find them in the no dose pills I was talking about earlier, essential oils, essential acids. That's also really important for food synergy to occur in the right way. And it actually turns out that coffee, like in its whole form versus say like caffeine pills actually has a much, much better effect on cholesterol and especially the lowering of oxidized cholesterol levels. So there's that as well. A lot of vegetables that you look at. You know, I mentioned lycopene as being an element of tomatoes that has a greater effect on decreasing risk of prostate cancer when it's consumed along with the tomato versus when it' swhen it's in isolated form. Vitamin C is another example. So isolated vitamin C is less effective than like an apple along with the skin. When you look at the actual absorption, if you're trying to get it in its whole food format, you know, you can use the example of like breast milk versus you know, infant formula as well. Breast milk has a lot more bioactive compounds in it. It's got what are called lactoferrins in it, it's got colostrum in it. And it's got a lot of these other whole, these elements of whole food that you aren't going to find in an isolated powder or formula or supplement. So whole food should really form the staple of your diet. And so when you're trying to build muscle or get a nice body, you can certainly get by without supplements. Now this whole synergistic effect of whole food is why if you were going to take a supplement, I recommend you use whole food nutrients versus synthetic isolated nutrients. So when I'm talking about that, what I'm referring to are these Supplements that are whole food supplements made from concentrated whole foods. So the vitamins that you find in those supplements aren't isolated. They include all the enzymes and the coenzymes and the antioxidants and the trace elements and the activators and the minerals and everything else that you would need. Like I've talked before about how I use like the protein powder that I use is living protein, protein powder made by Living Fuel. That stuff is not just isolated protein powder. It comes packaged with the enzymes and the probiotics and the antioxidants and everything that you'd find in that case. It's a rice and a pea based blend, but it's everything that you'd need. Same thing with the whey protein that I use. It actually includes all the minerals and the antioxidants and everything else that you'd get. It's more expensive to get whole food supplements like that, but it's way, way different than the isolated version. Same thing with multivitamins. Whole foods based multivitamins. You usually have to take an annoying crapload of capsules because they are the powdered whole food. But they include that synergy that I just got done talking about. They aren't separating the vitamin complex from the actual activating micronutrients. It actually is packaged along with everything else. So that's why when you're looking at supplements, you want to get whole food supplements if you are going to use them as kind of something that you use along with just real raw whole food. So that's really important as well. Now when we look at why you might want to use supplements, there are some considerations. So for example, there's the whole convenience scenario. And that's one of the primary advantages when you're trying to build muscle. You know, pulling out like a whole foods based protein bar, protein powder or amino acids capsules after a muscle building workout is going to be way more convenient than going home and making chicken or fish or steak or something like that. There's also the digestive component. And a lot of times food can take three to four hours to digest, and in some cases it can take over eight hours. And going after something that's more easily absorbed, especially when we're talking about building muscle, can come in handy when you're trying to build muscle. If you're skinny, you got to eat a lot of food. And sometimes the amount of effort that you put into preparing all that food and the amount of time that it takes, that can also kind of be an impetus to include, you know, like powders or supplements or capsules along with consumption of real food. So there's kind of that convenience aspect of, of using a lot of these powders and stuff as well if you want to accelerate your rate of muscle formation. So as far as some supplements that you could potentially replace with real food, they're certainly out there. So there's the whole fish versus fish oil thing. So when you look at fish about a filet of fish, like the standard size chunk of fish that you'd eat for dinner, that has about a gram of fish oil in it. And for muscle gain, I usually recommend 4 to 6 grams of fish oil, which means that you'd have to eat a huge, huge chunk of fish every day to get some of the muscle building and hormonal stabilizing and joint protection effects of fish oil when you're an extremely active athlete. And so that's why I recommend, recommend that you not just eat fish for your fish oil, but that you include something like a good triglyceride based natural fish oil if you don't want to spend all your time catching and cooking fish or purchasing and cooking fish.

Every single meal is fish.

That's right. So there's that aspect of fish oil. Vitamin D is another one. Eggs are an excellent source of vitamin D and there are some other good sources of vitamin D as well. If you look at like you have a lot of foods that are fortified with vitamin D, fish is a really good source of vitamin D. You're still looking though, if you're just using whole foods, anywhere from 400 to 1,000 international units of vitamin D that you might be getting. But if you're a hard charging athlete who is getting a lot of hormonal turnover, who's trying to replace testosterone, progesterone, DHEA with vitamin D, which is a steroid and a hormone precursor, sometimes the amount of food that you have to eat to get your vitamin D levels up above about 40 in terms of your 25 hydroxy vitamin D blood levels. You have to eat a lot of eggs and a lot of these fat soluble kind of foods in, in order to achieve that.

And it makes it even worse this time of year when if you live in the northern climate like we do, we're not getting a lot of sunlight either. So you need to sort of make up for that shortfall as well.

Yep, exactly. Vitamin B12, you can get that in steak. Clams are a really good source. Fish, eggs, poultry, like raw dairy, you could pretty much get away with not using a vitamin B supplement. Like a vitamin B12 supplement if you were to be consuming those foods in their real. So you could get enough vitamin B12, whereas like vitamin D, fish oil, those two you'd probably need to supplement with if you were like a hard charging athlete. Coenzyme Q10. Coenzyme Q10, you can find that again in red meat, you can find it in sardines, you can find it in a lot of your cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, spinach, et cetera. Usually you don't need to take a coenzyme Q10 supplement if you're getting enough of that stuff in your diet and you're not exposed to a lot of toxins, pollutants, et cetera. So coenzyme Q10 is one that you could get from food sources.

Jack Cruz uses tons of that stuff when he flies.

Yeah, exactly. And that's a situation where there's certain times when you may have to use extra antioxidants. Like I double up on my intake of that antioxidant powder that I take the life shots when I'm flying. Just because there's so much oxidation that your body gets exposed to when you fly. What else? As far as other considerations here.

You.

Can certainly get a lot of what you need for real food, but there are other reasons to supplement as well. For me, part of it comes down to better living through science. To a certain extent, I want to increase my longevity and I want to dump as many micronutrients into my body as possible to allow that to happen, happen. And for me it just makes sense for me at the end of the day to maybe throw down some chlorella tablets or something like that. And it's just again, pretty convenient if I have that stuff around to just take as far as building muscle, if you want to completely do it without taking any protein powders or supplements, you can do it. But just use whole, whole real food and understand that the synergistic effect of that real food is going to blow supplements out of the water. But there's still some isolated nutrients like vitamin D, like omega 3 fatty acids that you're going to really go through pretty quickly if you're exercising to a high extent and it makes sense to supplement with some stuff when you dig yourself into that hole.

So now earlier you hit on something that I thought was really interesting. When you were talking about eating an apple, you specifically mentioned leaving the skin on. Eating the skin. Is that something you would suggest for pretty much all fruit and vegetables to ingest the skins?

Yep, in most cases Assuming that it's organic or that you've like washed it in vinegar to get rid of some of the herbicides and pesticides that would be present on the skin, you got to be careful with the stuff that appears on what's called the dirty dozen list, because that tends to. To even when you wash it, still contain a lot of pesticides and herbicides. If you haven't purchased the organic version, you know, like strawberries and peaches and celery and stuff like that. Any of those vegetables and fruits of which you'd normally eat the skin. But if. Let's assume the skin is clean and it's like from an organic source. Yes. Skin of a fruit or vegetable typically has a lot of components in it that assist with absorption of some of the nutrients and vitamins. Vitamins within the actual fruit itself. So consumption of the skin is something that I do encourage. And there are certain cases where that might come back to bite you. Like a lot of people who have autoimmune issues or joint pain or rheumatoid arthritis, they don't do well with a lot of what are called the alkaloids that you would find on like potatoes with the skin or eggplants with the skin. Whereas they can usually do a little bit better when they eat the. Those items in their skin version, like a skinned tomato, skinned eggplant skin potato, things of that nature. So there are certain populations that may want to avoid the skins of certain, like nightshades and roots and tubers and things of that nature. But in most cases, eating the skin is helpful. And that's where I disagree with the guy having the show, Konstantin Monasty, who's the anti fiber guy who actually, actually skins every piece of fruit that he eats. I don't think that that's necessarily helpful. The only reason I would see to do that would be if you were just eating like bushels and bushels of fruit per day, in which case that skin might be a little bit irritated to the digestive tract. But you've got other issues going on if you're eating a bushel of apples a day.

Hey, Ben and Brock, love the show. We're just calling in with kind of an off the wall, offbeat question for you. I want to grow a badass beard, right? And unfortunately I'm Irish and English descent. And you think that might be good for some beard genes, but it's not. And I have a very patchy, you know, patchy face as far as facial hair goes, including like under my chin. There's A little bald spot under my chin as well as my cheeks. Okay, so it's kind of a weird question, but is there any way to grow facial hair or grow better facial hair? I'm not sure if it'd be supplementation or some kind of a, some kind of an ointment or cream or something like that. Who knows? I just thought you might be able to help me out there. Have a good one. Love the podcast.

Yeah, I just shaved my winter beard off. I know it's premature. Winter's not over. But I was getting just a little too homeless looking.

You were getting pretty beardy looking.

Yeah.

Yeah. You had a big beard going on. You should, you should put a picture of your beard in the show notes for folks. Sure. Underneath this question from, from Mr. Beard, why don't you show off your beard? So if you want to see Brock's beard, go to, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com269 and prepare to be horrified by the tiny birds flying out of Brock's beard.

That is where I kept all my birds.

That's right. Yeah. You could certainly do some things to enable, enhance the growth of the hair on your face. Really? I was sure you were gonna say no.

There's nothing you can do.

Yep, you can, you can, number one, exfoliate your face. So if you are just getting started on your beard, removing dead skin cells is gonna help promote hair growth and exfoliation with just like a loofah. And you know, you can certainly get more fancy exfoliating compounds you can keep in your shower. You know, anything that's grainy, sandy, that type of thing that works for exfoliation. So exfoliate your skin. Facial massage to increase blood circulation to your face. That also stimulates new hair growth. So that's also an option is self massage of your face or if you can convince a loved one or significant other or you know, anyone else that, that you, that you pay to massage your face. I believe, I believe that's legal in all 50 states. Facial massage, moisturized skin really creates a really good environment for facial hair to grow more quickly. And that can help you create a beard more quickly. You can use a cream or a moisturizer to really improve the moisture of your skin. But one of the types of oils that's very, very close to the natural type of fats that you'd find in human skin and the natural oils normally produce in our skin is emu oil. Emu oil is really fantastic. That's one of my favorite face based moisturizers I use emu oil and I use extra virgin olive oil. Quite a bit on my face.

What part of the emu are they getting the oil out of?

I don't want to know.

Yeah, I mean, either.

Why do you think? Sorry. Yes, it's a creamy, milky looking kind of oil. So it's kind of insane. Interesting, but let's not talk about that. Anyways, though, emu oil, there's also another kind of oil that's used in kind of like natural medicine to increase the growth of hair. And this is one that I haven't used, but that a lot of people swear by, and that's called amia oil. It's made from a type of fruit from a tree that grows in India. It's really high in vitamin C and it's one of the world's oldest hair conditioning oils. And it's also known as Indian gooseberry oil. I'll put a link to both emu oil as well as amia oil in the show notes, but you can actually get both of those off of a site like Amazon, for example, and you can use those as facial moisturizers to enhance hair growth. So that's another way that you can do it in addition to exfoliation and massage. Now, one of the noted side effects of smoking and the nicotine use that we talked about earlier is hair loss. So if you are trying to grow a beard, you may not want to chew the nicotine gum or use the patches or smoke the E cigarettes that we were talking about.

Beard looks so good with a cigar.

It does, it does. But cigars don't have a lot of nicotine in them.

Oh, okay.

So yes, you're safe there.

Or.

That's right. Or a pipe. So you could look like a captain of a ship. So another thing that you could do as far as growing a beard is to pay attention to dht, which is dihydrotestosterone, and that's a very powerful male sex hormone. And a lot of times, if you're using a lot of these like herbal testosterone type of supplements, or God forbid you're using a testosterone cream or patch or injection or something like that, what can happen is you can get male pattern baldness because hair follicles tend to be very, very sensitive to this dihydrotestosterone or dht. And it's one of the reasons that big macho men with lots of testosterone tend to also go balder or have less hair. It's kind of an interesting phenomenon. You know, usually I always thought that.

Was just something that bald guys told themselves to make themselves feel better. No, I'm bald because I'm so manly.

They actually can have more testosterone. And so if you're trying to blast up your testosterone levels using one of these testosterone kind of supplements that can actually come back to bite you when it comes to male pattern baldness and the growth of hair on your head or your face or anywhere else. Now it's different if you were to simply upregulate your body's own natural production of testosterone versus like dumping exogenous testosterone into your body. For example. One way that you could increase testosterone without actually taking any of these herbal testosterone supplements or like a natural hormone replacement therapy would be a 1, 2, 3 combo of number one using like a really good mineral, like sea salt, liquid minerals, any of the things that are going to, to enhance the enzymes that are responsible for forming testosterone in the Leydig cells of your testes. So minerals number two would be a really good fish oil, like I mentioned earlier, a really good triglyceride based fish oil. I'm a big fan of guys who want to naturally increase testosterone levels of taking about 4 to 6 grams of a good fish oil on a daily basis and then Chinese adapted to herbs which are going to naturally decrease cortisol a little bit and decrease stress and again upregulate your body's own production to produce its own testosterone that can help out quite a bit as well. So you kind of do a 1, 2, 3 combo of fish oil, minerals and adaptogenic herbs. And that's actually the hormone pack that I recommend that folks take if they don't want to touch any of these herbal testosterone type of formulas or they're concerned about potentially if you're doing triathlons and stuff and you're concerned about blood testing and just wanting to stay super clean. That's what you would do if you just didn't want to play with fire at all. So I'll link to that in the show notes. But you could use a hormone pack that's basically a mix of mineral, Chinese adaptogens and fish oil. And it's safe and effective for pumping up testosterone without producing all this DHT that can result in more hair loss. So, so that's what I would do. And yeah, within, within a few weeks you should have some bird's nests going on in your face.

You know, it's kind of interesting. I was going to. The only thing that popped into my head when I heard this question was I had a fencing instructor back in college, Jean Paul Fournier, he had a massive beard. And all of us, we were like.

Great name for a fencing instructor, by the way.

It was perfect. He was kind of. He was like, you walked right out of a cartoon or comic book or something. It was awesome. But anyway, he had a great beard and we were all like 19, 20 years old, trying to grow our first beards to be like him. And we asked him how he got such a good beard and he said that he put mayonnaise on his face every night.

Interesting.

Which I always thought was a joke.

Yeah, it's the moisturizing effect. So you could do better when it comes to not smearing as your body absorbs the oils that you put on it. So if you've got like a high omega 6 fatty acid containing oil, like a canola based mayonnaise, it's going to be super tasty. But less effective than using one of these more natural oils like an amia oil or an emu oil or something like that.

Maybe if you can find an olive oil mayonnaise, then you could use that.

You could use an olive oil based mayonnaise. There you go. So, yeah, smear some mayonnaise on your face and take some fish oil. There's your beard right there. Recipe.

En garde.

Hey, Ben, this is Connor Young. I've got a question about the digestion of protein because I've asked several experts and there seems to be some contention around how we actually get calories from protein. My question came because I looked on the back of a protein supplement and I saw that There were about 4 calories per gram of protein in there. But if I looked on a similar package of amino acids, there's actually zero calories. Now, to me, that doesn't make sense if when there's the building blocks there for amino acids, that should be the same as the protein itself, itself. Especially because the protein in your stomach is going to be broken down into di and tripeptide amino acids even before it gets to your small intestine. So that has some ramifications in maintaining ketosis. I wanted to know whether amino acids actually do have any caloric value. And in which case does that influence influence me staying in ketosis if I take amino acid supplements during the morning during an intermittent fast? And then of course, the question of how high the quality of the protein actually has to be came up as well, because if a protein is processed very high heat or low heat, either way it's going to be broken down into these small amino acid peptides. So why does it even matter? Is it a marketing gimmick? Any information about this would be really appreciated.

This actually confuses a lot of people because technically, amino acids, they've got calories in them. But what happens happens is that when you consume a protein, that protein has a lot of constituents in it. There I go, using that word again. That actually have to be broken down by your body. And if you eat a steak or a piece of chicken or fish, the body will break down the proteins in that meat, for example, into amino acids during digestion. And then once those amino acids are in your body, they get reassembled into the proteins that your body would use for muscle repair and recovery. And in the case of like a piece of steak or chicken or fish, usually it's about 30 to 40% of the amino acids that are usable in that reassembly process. So they become body proteins like hair or skin or muscle or enzymes or bone or, or immune cells or anything else. So we're not just talking about muscle, we're talking about a huge range of things that these amino acids are used for. And they aren't burnt as fuel because they're incorporated into the body structure itself. So they aren't used as calories. Technically, a calorie is something that's burnt to generate heat in a bomb calorimeter in a lab. These amino acids, acids aren't being burnt in that sense. They're just being incorporated into the body structure itself. So technically they have no calories. When you're looking at the amino acid components of a protein or a protein powder, now there's about 60% of those amino acids in a protein powder that actually are not able to become your body's protein. And the body does break those down for use as a fuel. And that comes out to about 4 calories per gram of protein. In terms of the amount of the amino acids that are used as a fuel, in many cases, those are the branched chain amino acids components like the leucine and the isoleucine and the valine. Those are going to be used more for calories than some of the other amino acids. But this is what the net nitrogen utilization of a protein stands for. The NN you. And it's a scientific term used to describe how much of a protein is actually burnt as, or you know, is considered a calorie by your body versus how much is used for reassembly processes in your body. So the NNU for most meats is between 30 and 40%. So what that means is 30 to 40% of that meat is not recognized by your body at all as calories. It's simply utilized for that reassembly process and then the rest is actually burnt or used for gluconeogenesis, the formation of glucose from proteins, etc. So when you look at like an egg, interestingly, an egg has a net nitrogen utilization of 50%. So you're technically getting fewer calories from an egg based protein than you're are from like a steak or chicken or fish based protein. If you're looking at an amino acid supplement, you know, like I've talked about the master amino pattern before, for example, that's got an NNU of between 95 and 100%, meaning that there's almost no amino acids left for calories because 95 to 100% of it is used to build body protein. And that's why, you know, for example, if you finished up a workout and, and you've say had a big meal before that workout, you know you've got enough calories on board, but you just simply want to dump extra amino acids into your body for added repair, recovery, muscle growth, et cetera. That's where taking like an amino acid supplement comes in pretty handy. Because those amino acids are simply used to rebuild the body, they're not used as calories, for example. Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of the deal with a protein powder versus an amino acid that's already been pre digested and is very, very bioavailable to your body. Now, as far as that relates to staying in ketosis, what that means is that technically if you didn't want to risk the insulin spike and the potential for proteins to be converted into glucose that would take you out of keto ketosis, you would want to get the majority of your protein and your muscle rebuilding compounds. If you're trying to stay in a state of ketosis from amino acids. The unfortunate thing is that amino acids are expensive, like amino acids, powders, amino acids, capsules. Like a bottle of that map stuff is like 50 bucks. It's not necessarily inexpensive, but if you're looking for every win possible possible, you'd just use like a pre digested amino acid like that. And then your next best choice would be an egg based protein. Even though you need to be careful because egg based proteins tend to be heated and oxidized egg based powders, which creates some real issues when it comes to oxidized cholesterol that you could be consuming. And then kind of your next best choice would be like a protein Powder, like a whey protein isolate or what's called a hydrosylated whey protein. Protein, also like that, that living protein stuff that I talked about that comes packaged with the digestive enzymes that are going to allow it to be a little bit more broken down. And then also like a chicken or a steak or a fish, it definitely provides calories, but you do get about a, you know, like I mentioned, 30 to 40% net nitrogen utilization, which means 60% of that meat is actually, actually used as, as calories at that 4 calorie per gram rate of, of protein energy. So hopefully that clears things up a little bit. But it just comes down to how kind of like pre broken down the protein is.

I think Dr. Minkoff, Dr. David Minkoff did a big explanation over@the EndurancePlanet.com about how the master amino pattern works. And I know I learned so much from, from that whole talk about the difference between protein and amino acid and how it's digested and used by the body. So Connor, if you're still interested, I'd suggest going over and listening to that.

Do you remember how long ago he did that episode, bro?

Oh, it's probably, I bet it's close to a year ago.

Okay, so yeah, just go to, if you go to enduranceplanet.com, they've got a really good search function over there. They do an ask the doctor about once every one to two weeks and actually we can link to. Yeah, you're right. I actually, I just found it. It was January 18, 2013. It says your guide to understanding amino acids. So I'll put that one in the show notes for you.

And it is a real deep dive. So for any of you out there who are interested in finding out more, that's the place to go.

Okay, cool. So it is now in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com hello. My grandson is 21 years old and he is consuming about 6 to 8 monster energy drinks per day. He's complaining of bad stomach cramps and coughing up blood. I want to find out if the monster drinks could be causing this problem.

You know, if you're coughing up blood, I don't know if you should have waited for, for a podcast to answer your question. Yeah, that's really alarming.

So believe it or not, they've actually looked at the effects of energy drinks and whether or not they're more acidic than even things like caffeine and alcohol and stuff like that. And it turns out that the high amounts of caffeine in These energy drinks aggravates the amount of citric acid that are already in, in them. And there's a huge amount of damage that occurs not only in your tooth enamel but also on the lining of your stomach. And I'll link to this study, but there was one study where research looked at the fluoride levels, the ph and what's called the titratable acidity of 13 different sports drinks and nine different energy drinks. And the energy drinks were more acidic and more damaging to, in this case, teeth than even the sports drinks like the Gatorade and the Powerade and stuff like that. All of the compounds had a high amount of acidity, but the energy drinks in particular had a much, much greater effect in terms of the damage and the potential for damage in the stomach lining and the actual damage that was shown to the teeth enamel and the erosion of the teeth enamel animal. So yes, absolutely, if you were going to, to compare like a, like a Gatorade to, to like a monster energy drink to like a Coca Cola, the Gatorade is going to do the least damage to the tooth enamel and the stomach lining even though it is acidic. And then next in line would be like a Coca Cola or maybe like a decaffeinated diet soda or something like that. And then then the next in line would be like an energy drink just because the combination of caffeine and citric acid can cause some serious issues. So I used to do about four to five energy drinks a day. I'm sure it did some damage to my stomach. I can't dish out medical advice here, but like I've said before on this show, if you need to heal up the stomach lining, bone broth is magical for that in terms of like fixing damage that's been done to the stomach, stomach from a poor diet. And if you're, if you don't know how to make bone broth or it's just very difficult for you to get, you can order bone broth from TheBrothery.com you can also do like a high dose L glutamine. You can get an L glutamine powder and do about 1 to 2 grams of that per day. Colostrum is really good. Using like a colostrum supplement. Aloe vera juice can be very, very soothing to the stomach lining as well. Licorice root is another that's really, really good at healing up the lining of the, the stomach. So there's like some stuff that you can do to mitigate the damage. But ultimately that combinator like Anytime that you're taking in like a soda with like phosphoric acid and citric acid and stuff like that, and it's also got caffeine in it, it's going to do a number to your. To your stomach lining. So I'd be super careful there. And hopefully by the time this podcast has come out, you have convinced your grandson to stop drinking six to eight monster energy drinks drinks per day.

Yeah. The thing that scares me about that as well is those things are big. Those are like 500, 750 milliliters. So one's gotta think that if you're having six or eight of those, you're probably not drinking anything else.

Yeah, it's. It's like. It's like drinking a six pack of Red Bull.

Yeah.

So actually not quite that, but yeah, they're. They're big. So yeah.

Gotta get some water in there, too.

My kids actually know about the dangers of energy drinks because I've talked to them about this stuff before, and when, when they see the, the monster energy truck go by, they just freak out. They tell me how that, how the stuff in that truck is gonna kill people and.

And it's not because of the claw.

That's right.

Hi, Ben and Brock. This is Glenn from Ames, Iowa. Over the past couple years, a book called the Plan has been popular by Lynn Ganett Resitas, but it's had some criticism as well. What do you think of the Plan strategy for finding foods that may be inflammatory to your system? And what are the. What are your criticisms or praises for the system set forth in this book? Question mark? Oh, sorry. Thank you very much. Bye bye.

Well, I haven't actually read the Plan.

Have you read the Secret?

I have read the Secret.

Oh, really?

That's not a diet book, though. No, that's like a personal productivity enhancement book.

The Plan.

The Plan is actually. The subtitle is eliminate the surprising healthy foods that are making you fat and lose weight fast. And I think that's kind of the catchphrase here is that some foods that are kind of like, considered to be traditional healthy foods like turkey and eggs and cauliflower and beans and tomatoes might be healthy. What they say, in a vacuum, they might be healthy, but when combined with your own unique chemistry, that might cause some kind of a toxic reaction that could trigger weight gain or inflammation or, you know, constipation or migraines or whatever. So, you know, I think that you could certainly make a case that, that some foods that we would traditionally consider healthy may in fact be mildly Inflammatory, for example. So if you go to one of my favorite websites, website's actually inflammationfactor.com I spent many a Friday and Saturday night just whittling. Of course that's your favorite website, whittling away time on that website. Now when it comes to food research, I should say it's a great website. So if you go to inflammationfactor.com, you'll notice that there are many healthy foods that actually are quote, unquote inflammatory. And inflammation can be a healthy and necessary part of the human immune response. And mild inflammation from a food is not that big of a deal. So like blueberries. It's often said that blueberries are anti inflammatory and that's because they contain compounds that when extracted from the blueberries have anti inflammatory effects. But when you eat a whole blueberry, it actually is mildly inflammatory because you know, a little bit of fructose and stuff in the blueberry. But that's, that's not necessarily a bad thing from a health standpoint. Whereas there are some things like the nightshades that I talked about, like tomatoes and peppers, et cetera, which are high in antioxidants which reduce inflammation. But there are certain people that have a really, really strong reaction to the alkaloids and what are called the solanins in those compounds. And so yeah, you could certainly make a case that there are people that shouldn't be eating that stuff. A of lot, a lot of organic grass fed meats and eggs and things of that nature are less inflammatory than their conventionally raised counterparts. But some people have trouble digesting those. And that's another case where things that are considered to be healthy may in some cases be harder for some people than others. The inflammation factor website shows that almonds are a better choice than walnuts when it comes to inflam inflammation. Strawberries might be better for you than apples. Tuna might be preferable to salmon. But for example, that tuna salmon scenario, let's say you have heavy metal toxicity and you're eating a fish that's higher up in the food chain, then that might not be doing you and your specific body any favors when it comes to a health food that would be traditionally considered a health food, but that might not be healthy for you. So the whole idea behind this plan, again, even though I haven't read the book, but the synopsis of it, is that they start off by doing like a detox cleanse where you're essentially just like eliminating certain foods from your diet. Very, very similar to the autoimmune diet. That I've recommended many times in the past. And then phase two, you start to introduce foods back in like wine and cheese and chocolate and stuff like that. And I should mention that phase one is only three days long, which I do not consider to be long enough. It takes a good four to eight weeks for your stomach lining to reinvent and your gut to heal and inflammation to get shut down. And that's why I recommend like a paleo autoimmune protocol. That's a really, really good ebook. I'll link to it in the show notes. But that's the one that I recommend. Recommend doing three days. I don't think it's long enough. And then on the fourth day of the plan, they start you into introducing these new foods to see which ones you're reactive to and which ones you're okay with. And then finally after that, that phase two, which I believe is 20 days in or it's not 20 days in, it's. What is it? Phase two? Actually, it doesn't specify. I'm not quite sure how long because the whole plan itself is only like 20 days long. But phase three, you continue to test foods on your own until you get 20 days into the program. So I think it's about 20 days worth of kind of like priming your body via a quick elimination diet for three days and then beginning to introduce foods on the fourth day, continuing to introduce foods for the next 16 days till you get up to date day 20. And so it seems kind of, kind of fatty, kind of hypey a little bit. But when I say fatty, I mean F, A, D D Y fad, D faddish. But ultimately, let's say you want to really truly figure out whether or not certain foods are going to be healthy for you or unhealthy for you. You got to do so much more than this. Like, if you really want to want to dig in, I would recommend recommend that you do a gut panel. You know, you go to like directlabs.com for example, and you get yourself like a comprehensive gut panel to see what your bacterial balances are like, what your fatty acid balances are like, you know, whether you have yeast, fungus, overgrowth, things of that nature. I recommend that you look into doing a genetic test through 23andMe.com to find out what your specific ancestry looks like and what your diet might need to look like based on what your ancestors were eating and what specific what are called methylation patterns that you have. And then also do a blood test, like use wellness FX and Look at your lipid panel and your thyroid and your metabolic health, your kidney health, your liver health, so that you can determine what kind of foods might be good for you and what kind of foods might not not be good for you. So for example, what I mean by that is like if you've got, let's say you've got high levels of hemoglobin A1C and high levels of fasting blood glucose, hemoglobin A1C being like a three month snapshot of your blood glucose levels for the past three months, then you might be somebody for whom anything that's going to bump up blood sugar, like dark chocolate, red wine, sweet potatoes, any of those foods that we might consider to be healthy for you, you might need to back off of those until you have a restored insulin sensitivity and you're able to burn fatty acids more efficiently and bump down blood glucose levels. Another example of this would be like, if you do 23andMe test and you find out that your genetic ancestry is more of like a northern European population, then you would want to stick closer to fish eggs, dairy, stuff like that. And doing a coconut and citrus fruits based diet may not be the best thing for your particular body. If you get a gut test and you find out that you, you have, for example, let's say a yeast or a fungus overgrowth or something along those lines, then it may turn out that there are certain high amounts of fermented foods that can aggravate that condition. And if you're one of those, kombucha, kefir, kimchi, sauerkraut, till probiotics are coming out your eyeballs type of person that might actually aggravate, in some cases a yeast and fungus overgrowth and issue until you've knocked out that yeast or fungus with something like an oil of oregano protocol and then returned to more intensive probiotic use after that. So I mean, like, there's all sorts of considerations here and I think that the hypothesis behind this book, the plan, is good, but that just like 20 days of a basic elimination diet might not cut it versus kind of doing a lot of this other stuff. And I mean this is what I do as a nutritionist and a consultant, as I kind of walk people through this process in many cases. But just understand that it may go above and beyond just using a book when it comes to figuring out which foods are right for you and which foods aren't. If you want to really create a true customized diet, some of the stuff.

That you mentioned there, like those tests, can Be quite expensive. What would you say about using something like the food center app that the Sweet Beat people put out?

Yeah, so that's a case where you can monitor your nervous system response to food by tracking how much your heart rate rises in response to certain meals. And that can give you some clues as well. I think that there are some cases where you may not get an increase in heart rate or research hasn't been done to show whether or not you get an increase in heart rate. Know, let's say you have a yeast or a fungus overgrowth issue and you eat a bunch of fermented food. You know, could be that even though that may contribute to yeast and fungus overgrowth, especially in combination with carbohydrate intake, I'm not sure that your heart rate is necessarily going to rise. You know, the forward at eight beats or actually, I think it's higher than that. I think it's 15 plus beats on a coca pulse test. Off the top of my head, I don't remember, but the code Coca pulse test is what that particular app is based on. And it's based off the fact that your heart rate goes up x number of beats in response to a certain meal. And if that happens, that would be a meal you'd avoid in the future. But yeah, I mean, that can certainly give you clues, as can taking your heart rate variability and seeing whether or not your heart rate variability, a picture of the health of your nervous system drops when you consume certain meals or certain food. Dudes, like, I can tell you the one thing that shoves my heart rate variability down to rock bottom is antihistamines. Like, if I ever take like a Benadryl or something like that destroys my nervous system health for a good 48 hours. And it's crazy. But yeah, you can, you can certainly use apps and stuff like that to quantify as well, but it doesn't give you quite as much insight as blood in saliva testing or poo testing or things like that. But yeah, that's a good point, is you could use an app like that for sure.

Hi, Ben. I'm 22 years old, a female. I'm a former Division 1 tennis player and I've been struggling a little bit with kind of just the yo yo dieting and kind of following the wrong information that's out there about fitness and nutrition. So I. My body fat has really fluctuated. I was at 18% then I was down to about 12. And I recently got a bod pod test and I was about 23% body fat. So I can't really seem right now to lose the fat. I'm worried that I've sort of hurt my metabolism through kind of yo yo dieting and restricting as far as calories. I work out about six days a week at least, so I definitely, I definitely work out a lot. So cortisol and the stresses of that is also another concern that I have, that maybe my cortisol levels are a bit too high and I haven't had my period in probably six to seven months. So I was just wondering if you could give me some suggestions about how to go about fat loss and addressing some of my other issues. My goal is to be around 15 to 16% body fat. Thank you.

Jessica emailed us earlier today. I think she was getting impatient. We better do a good job of answering this one.

Yeah, well, I mean, when you ask a podcast question, sometimes it takes like, you know, four weeks for it to get into the queue, so patience. Yeah, don't write us when your stomach is bleeding and expect it to make it onto the podcast the next day. But yo yo dieting dead by the.

Time we talk about it.

You know, you need to understand how yo yo dieting can affect your metabolism. So, you know, you need to first understand leptin. Now, leptin is a hormone that is going to send satiety signals to your brain. And one function of leptin is to set the long term energy spending policy of your body based on your available food supply. So what that means is that your subconscious brain will take huge amounts of leptin that are being released and eventually become insensitive to that huge amount of leptin that could get released to, for example, tell your body that you that you're full. And in many cases, leptin resistance can signal to your brain that a famine is going on, even though you're often eating too much on a regular basis. And it's kind of this faulty perception of starvation that can occur. And what happens is in this situation, leptin is going to send a signal that will tell your hypothalamus to set thyroid hormone to a low level so that energy is consumption served so your body doesn't perish from starvation or from caloric restriction. So what happens is you down regulate your thyroid production and in many cases you down regulate the amount of TSH or thyroid stimulating hormone that your pituitary will produce. And so you're basically turning down the volume on your metabolism so you can survive a famine, even though that famine might not actually exist. It's just simply you engaging in calorie restriction. Now what happens is when you're in that case of a low thyroid and basically leptin resistance or the inability to be able to sense when your body is full because your body simply wants you to eat as much as possible, when you actually do get access to food, and then take that food and store it away as fat as much as possible by down regulating your metabolism, what happens is once you actually get off that calorie restriction and you start to eat more, you get fat much more easily. And so the amount of time that it takes to really develop this leptin resistance combined with a downregulation in metabolism and drop in thyroid stimulating hormone is about four weeks or so. And you know if you're engaging in heavy caloric restriction for that long, you're going to create some of these issues that are going to cause you to have that, that leptin and thyroid issue pretty significantly once you do start to eat a lot of food again, or once you even start to eat perhaps even a normal amount of food again. And this issue can be made even worse if you have any type of kind of like toxins, like chemicals like chlorine and fluoride, those can bind your thyroid gland, they can reduce iodine uptake. So that can aggravate this issue. There are a lot of fat soluble chemicals, particularly fat soluble chemicals you'd get from personal care products, shampoos, soaps, stuff like that. Those can cross your blood brain barrier. They can affect the hypothalamus gland specifically, so that can't sense the thyroid or leptin messages accurately. And so that can cause an issue. There are some endotoxins from food that can not only elevate your stomach's hunger, signal your levels of what's called ghrelin, but they can also directly interact with thyroid releasing hormone or that thyroid releasing hormone region in your hypothalamus gland and turn that down. And endotoxins from food you would often find in like non organic meats, commercial dairy, things of that nature. T4 is converted to T3 on the cell membranes of your liver. So if you have a lot of liver stress from pharmaceutical or alcohol use or anything like that, that can aggravate this issue as well. So there's a lot of kind of complex stuff going on here, but ultimately what it comes down to is, is high amounts of dieting combined with use of fragrances, perfumes, personal care products, things of that nature combined with not eating clean organic foods and then Combined with shifting from one diet to another, which a ton of specifically, you see a lot of women engaging in this type of pattern, really sets you up for this thunder thyroid leptin issue and kind of a sluggish metabolism and a real, real propensity to just struggle more and more with weight gain the older that you get. And so the fix for this would be to simply eat a real healthy diet with moderate calorie restriction, like simply not eating more calories than your body actually needs on any given day and just being very, very consistent. Consistent. Combined with detoxing your home, detoxing your body, living a low stress lifestyle and kind of looking at food and at dieting, et cetera, as more of a lifestyle than a fad. But I thought it'd be helpful to explain what's going on here from a chemical perspective. And it's a combination of leptin resistance and downregulation of your thyroid. And if this is a, a situation that you fall into, you can fix it. I mean, you can do things like go through a detox. So, you know, go, go to like the Ben Recommends page over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com if you just actually, if you go to BenGreenFitness.com Ben recommends, it's right there. But we can link to it in the show notes too. It's like everything I've ever recommended for digestion, fat loss and performance and sleep and brain health and everything. There's a whole section in there that goes into like, how to detox your liver, things that naturally help to support your thyroid, all the stuff that you'd want to do in conjunction with beginning to eat a whole real diet on a daily basis. My favorite diet that I always recommend to people, I use the word diet, even though it's just a lifestyle style, is like the perfect health diet book by Paul Geminet. I mean, that's really consistent with most people's metabolism and dietary needs. So you do something like that. Go check out the Ben Recommends page to kind of reboot your body and reboot your metabolism. And that's what I would start off with.

There's actually a new book by Jonathan Baylor that just came out that really goes into a lot of this as well, called Calorie Myth.

Yep, that's a good book. So we'll put a link to Calorie Myth. We'll put a link to the perfect health diet in the show notes, and I'll put a link to my recommendations page as well. And those would be three Places to kind of start is read those two books, do a little bit of a detox and start into the information that you find in those books.

And you know what else we'll put a link to.

What's that? BenGreenfieldFitness.com and@BenGrugelFitness.com Love, you can see a really cool video from Brock and I where we show you five ways to make yourself healthier using a common household tennis ball. So is that video?

I thought that was when you signed up for the email list.

No, that's when you go to BenGreenHoldFitness.com actually, you know what? When you go to Ben Greenfield Fitness. Okay, now I'm getting confused. If you go to Free.

Yeah, free. No gift from Ben.

If you go to giftfromben.com you get the video from Brock and me.

Yeah.

If you go to BenGruthFitness.com love you simply get to spread the wealth. And then also if you leave a review, we will actually send you a brand spanking new set of Ben Greenfield Fitness swag, an awesome tech T shirt, a BPA free water bottle, and a killer beanie. So how you call it a beanie?

It's a toque.

Beanie. A beanie. Or as they say in Canada, a toque.

It's a 2K.

So what do we get this week for a review?

Brock, we got a Review from Silent Bob222 and he says, like the title of it is complex science presented in a way knuckle draggers can understand.

Nice. We do have a lot of knuckle draggers that listen into the show so.

Well, being knuckle draggers ourselves, yes, we.

Identify knuckle draggers and Spartans.

So Silent Bob says, even though I am a Green Beret and not a beloved Navy Seal, I still love this podcast. Haha. And mushroom. Is he joking about that?

I'm not sure. Is that, is that how a knuckle dragger says? Haha.

Perhaps. Ha. Anyone who. Anyone working in SOF is expected to push themselves beyond what you think your limits are. And I think the nutrition and fitness knowledge that Ben and Brock share on this podcast have helped me extend those limits and feel better at 33 years old than I did at 27. Not only do they have great information, but also present it so the average person can understand it. Ben Greenfield Fitness is my go to for health and nutrition as well as finding other resources and experts as his guests often have a ton of info to offer too. Nice.

Well, Silent Bob, if you heard us read your review. Just write an email to Ben greenfieldfitness.com and we'll get some gear out to you. If you you would like, you can leave your review over at itunes. We'll put a link in the show notes for you to do that. And I think we should probably end this podcast, Brock by giving our best knuckle dragger impersonations, which I think just involves just lots of grunting. Podcast over podcast done. Eat breakfast Podcast my microphone Microphone tastes good.

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

Sam.

It.