Why The Media & Supplement Companies Lie To You About Diets & Supplements (& What You Can Do...

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Merry Christmas. If you're listening to this podcast during the week that comes out, it is Christmas week. As a matter of fact, today, the day that I'm recording this episode for you, it's my birthday. So celebration is in the air. I'm 21 years old. No, I'm just kidding. I'm a little older than that. But you can send me a bottle of your booze of choice if you really are convinced that it's my 21st. I'll take it.

I'll.

I'll take it all. Anyways, though. This is also the time of year when we're stuffing our faces with copious amounts of holiday cookies and chocolate and eggnog and turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy and green bean casserole and whatever else it is that floats your boat and makes your waistline expand on Christmas. So what better thing to talk about than biologically appropriate food? No, I'm seriously. There actually is a company that's bringing you this show today that makes biologically and genetically adapted food. Or I suppose I shouldn't say adapted. I should say customized. That's customized to your body. It's really kind of cool because there's all these meal delivery companies out there, and they send you pretty good meals. But this stuff is actually designed for your weight loss goals or your weight gain goals, your DNA, your genetics. What they do is they look at your biomarkers, your genetic data, and your health and activity levels, and then they deliver individualized, biologically perfect meals to your front door. No prep, no cooking, no cleaning. You just get this perfectly designed meal that you then toss on your. For example, in my case, my cast iron skillet, and cook it up and actually taste good. It doesn't taste like astronaut food as you'd think something like this would, or like the Willy Wonka Thanksgiving turkey meal in a pill meal. It's actually good food. It's no gluten, no preservatives, low glycemic index. They're Paleo friendly, if that's your thing. There's no antibiotics. It's USDA organic.

Company is called Trifuel T R Y Fuel. Very cool concept. I really do dig this. So it's trifuel.com t r y fuel.com and they're giving everybody listens in a 20% discount. And the discount code that you use for this is Ben's gift. Ben's gift. Like, it's coming from me. Actually, it's coming from Trifuel, but it's from me too, I guess. 20% off trifuel.com and use code bensgift if you want an alternative to eggnog, or if you get sick of holiday chocol, or if the new year is approaching and you need some meals that are perhaps a little bit more conducive to slimming your waistline or getting rid of some of that holiday weight gain. Speaking of slimming your waistline, you may have seen these made for TV commercials in which the person is lying on the couch zapping their abs with the electrodes to give themselves six pack abs. Those things actually, they actually do work. Electrical muscle stimulation is something I've talked about before. It does increase localized blood flow to tissue. It does increase heat into tissue. You can spot reduce with it. There are some electrical stimulation devices that will simulate like a 600 pound squat. It sounds like cheating, but a lot of them work. However, the one that I use the most often is not designed for six pack ABS or a 600 pound squat. It's designed for recovery and blood flow and it's got a special form of electrical muscle stimulation. It's not the square waveform that a lot of companies use. It's a patented waveform that they use to deliver blood flow to tissue without harnessing your fast switch muscle fibers too quickly so you don't aggravate an injury. You just take the little electrodes, you surround any area of your body that hurts, right, like your shoulder or your knee or ankle or whatever and then you turn this thing on and it provides therapy to muscles, allows muscles to recover faster, gets rid of soreness and it's a really cool way to biohack. Recovery really is a biohack. It's an electrostimulation device called the MarcPro M A R C Pro. And you can go to marcpro.com and get 5% off of this EMS, this electrical muscle stimulation device which can also be used at cocktail parties to entertain your friends as you make your thighs jiggle with the electrodes on them. No, seriously, you can do that? I've done it. It's dangerous when combined with alcohol, but it can be done. Markpro.com and use promo code BEN for 5% off. They've got the Mark Pro. They've got the Mark Pro plus which allows you to select like high frequency, low frequency intensity. Really cool stuff. It's a fun thing to own, especially if you're an athlete or somebody who exerc. So check it out markpro.com and use code Ben. And now we're going to go talk about how supplement companies and media companies lie to you. Those bastards. They lie to you when it comes to what you're shoving in your gaping maw in the realm of supplements. So prepare to listen in and be entertained by me and Kamal Patel from examine.com let's do this in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

Research studies are very highly controlled and in very specific population at specific doses for specific durations. So making it into general advice for the general public is always a bad idea. If you're a freelance writer or even if you're on staff, like if you're on staff at the New York Times, you can come up with whatever headline you want because it has to be a certain length and it has to be catchy enough so people will click on the article.

He's an expert in human performance and.

Nutrition.

America's top personal trainer, and one.

Of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield. Power.

Speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movements get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

All the information you need in.

One place right here, right now on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And it's probably no secret that I am a relatively voracious consumer of knowledge. I always have been. I used to sit in my bedroom when I was a kid and just read for hours and hours and actually would often get punished by my parents.

Whether that's good or bad. I won't comment on that for not even coming out of my room when we would have very important guests over and old family friends because I had a fantasy novel to finish or I had some encyclopedia I was shoving my nose into and still on an average week I read three to five books. I have a copious number of books on my bookshelf and several Kindles that are completely full. I listen to 15 to 20 podcasts a week. I read several dozen research articles per week. And one of my secrets to this kind of hyper productive digestion of information is that I use services and websites and journals and newsletters and basically digests that disseminate information into readily accessible bite sized pieces that let me cut through the clutter and get to the summaries and the takeaways and the actionable items from the content that I'm consuming. For example, I'm a huge fan of Book reviews produced by guys like Derek Sivers and James Clear. And in addition, I stay up to date with health and medical and science news via these newsletters called the Stone Hearth Newsletters. And I follow exercise and nutrition research on this website called Supversity. And for general life knowledge, I'm a recent subscriber to this blog called the Farnham Street Blog for staying up to date with the best pretty recently published books and articles from around the web. And of all these things, there's one really comprehensive exercise, diet and supplement resource that I access on a weekly basis. And I spend a ton of time on this website, spend a ton of time with the PDFs that they produce and even the monthly digest that they put out. And that is the website examine over@examine.com and it is produced and founded and directed by my podcast guest today, Kamal Patel. And Kamal is the director of Examine, like I just mentioned, and he's also a nutrition researcher. He has an MPH and an MBA from Johns Hopkins University. He is, I think currently on hiatus from a PhD in nutrition in which he's researching the link between diet and chronic pain. He's got a bunch of peer reviewed articles he's published on vitamin D and calcium and a ton of other clinical research topics. So we're gonna be taking a deep dive today into things like why the media and supplement companies lie to you about diets and supplements, how to find really good unbiased information, how to know whether or not the science that you're reading has been manipulated. And also we're going to delve into really good supplements, really good stacks, what are the most proven things that you can shove into your gaping maw if you want to get a better body or brain? So this will be a fun one. And I will keep notes on everything that we talk about in the show, notes for today's episode, which you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com examine podcast, that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com examine Podcast. So Kamal, welcome to the show, dude.

It's my pleasure.

I'm curious how this all came to life, because when I go visit examine.com, there's reams and reams of information on there. And I'm just wondering if it was just like you sitting there one day wanting to write up a nice article on creatine or how this whole thing actually happened.

Well, it was actually sort of born out of Reddit and Reddit Fitness and Reddit Nutrition, the sub forums, right around five years ago, there's always been websites with a lot of information on nutrition and fitness and other health related topics. But there was never really a website that only provided information. So like when I was first getting into lifting weights, I used to read Usenet groups and then luckily the web started and then there was like bodybuilding.com or I don't know what it's called now, but TMAG, T Nation I guess, I don't know.

Yeah, there's t nation.t nation.com plenty of pictures of vascular men and women on those.

Yeah, and they, I remember they used to have motivational pictures that just got more crazy vascular every week and, and that, you know, that motivated my, my 19 year old self. So after a while I figured out that the studies that were cited on those pages were really helpful. You know, you could go back, read the study, if you could understand stats and stuff, you could figure some things out. But anytime that you have a website where you sell stuff, you have to make money and it's not bad nor good. You just have to make money to run a website. So any website that provided information like bodybuilding.com it had a ton of good content but it couldn't be systematic because they didn't have the, the manpower or woman power necessary to do all the research. And then if you sell stuff then you're always going to have particular interests and things and possibly an angle for selling things. So again that's not bad or good, it's just whatever the people are interested in. So Examine started to be sort of a systematic resource and my background was in evidence based medical practice. So we basically just do kind of what research centers do but for supplements and nutrients and we're not affiliated with the government, but other than that we do very similar thing that they would do.

So when you say we, I mean how does it work? Do you guys have like an office where people are getting supplements and trying them and writing about them or do you just have like a team of folks who go to PubMed every day? Like how does it actually work for you guys to put out all the information that's on examine.com so we're a.

Virtual team, like I guess many teams nowadays. I live in San Francisco, we have people in Toronto and Ottawa and France and some other places. Basically we've put out hiring calls in the past that have been moderately successful. But nowadays I just look on the Internet for people who are really, really curious about things and who are really analytical and don't have a set position. I'll talk to Them and I'll see if they're interested, if they have open time. And we contract with people and occasionally hire them full time to, like you said, read through research. So we try to get people from different angles, like people interested in the pharmacokinetics of supplements, or people who have a public health background and know more about epidemiology, or people who have been in clinical practice, or people who haven't been in clinical practice but are just voracious readers. And then we look at research from a bunch of different angles, and then we summarize that stuff on our website.

Okay, got it. Now, you say that you're like an unbiased source on nutrition and supplements. And when I scroll through the typical, like, if I were to go to your website and I would open up the page for, let's say, like, Beta Alanine, it tells you, for example, what it interacts with when you'd want to take it.

Basically a complete summary with literally dozens and dozens of research studies behind Beta Alanine. But when it comes to this website, I guess, like floating itself with that huge team of researchers, there's no links on there for me that I can see at least to actually buy Beta Alanine or to go to some affiliate website like Amazon or something like that and purchase Beta Alanine. How are you guys actually kind of floating this site? Or is it just like a labor of love?

So we do have products. All the information on the website is free. So 99% of what we do is publicly available and will always be. And will always be updated. And then in order to make enough money to, I guess, you know, pay the bills and to pay me, we do sell three products, a supplement reference guide, which has information collected by different outcomes. Like, if you have allergies, then you can click on a type of allergic reaction and see what studies have looked at that reaction. And then we also have a stack guide, a collection of stat guides for different goals like aesthetic skin in here or muscle building or that kind of thing. Just kind of very concise information on what and what doesn't have evidence. And then we have a research digest that comes out each month with some of the latest research papers that are important in different areas. And we tear them apart. So we look at them from every angle possible and try to be extremely critical of them. So with those things combined, we can keep the lights on and have enough staff, at least to get through basically all the micronutrients and, most important, supplements.

Gotcha. And I actually want to delve into Those in a little more detail later on, because I have and use all of those. Like, the supplement reference guide is like a thousand plus pages long, but it lives on my desktop. And whenever people ask me about some fringe supplement, I'll go see if it's actually proven and efficacious or whether it's just something that's going to give them explosive diarrhea. So you've got this idea behind being an unbiased source on nutrition supplements, but we're constantly bombarded, as you know, Kamal, by claims that fish oil is good for you, fish oil is bad for you, or I know you guys do articles on everything from steak to eggs to probiotics. How do we know if a supplement company or if the media is manipulating science for their own benefits? I mean, what are some ways that things like that are actually occurring out there?

Well, the general way that I like to think about that kind of thing is anybody who's really into reading stuff, like, anybody who listens to this podcast likes the idea of science. And the scientific method. Supplement companies, they're not really always trying to pull the wool over our eyes, but they are trying to make money. And then the media also, they don't have perfect information. They're not in the life sciences. They don't have PhDs, so when they write about stuff, there's imperfect information there. So the way I like to think about this stuff is the scientific method is about finding the truth through iteration and through finding out what's false in data. There are some markers of what's false. Like when websites have really crazy fonts and unbelievable transformation stories and stuff, then that's obviously false. But then there's been times when there's.

What do you mean? What do you mean? Fonts?

Oh, so like, for better or for worse, websites that look like they were designed in the 1990s usually either have outdated information. You know, the person isn't like, with it enough to.

You know, to keep up with what's going on in the Internet. So there's a lot of kooky websites out there that people forward to us. And then I, you know, I try to read every message, so I comment back to them in a nice way. This is what to look out for, and this is what to not look out for. But. But we get a lot of emails from people who are in their 70s and 80s and stuff. And eventually I just started saying, you know, look at the website. Does it look believable? You know, like, what?

Do you have any examples of websites that you've been to recently, though, that, that are just like. I mean, I'm not asking to shove anybody under the bus. Oh, yeah, heck, I mean, I don't care if you give examples either.

Yeah, so I'll try to come up with an anonymous one. So there was one where, you know, I'm sure you've done a variety of diets yourself. Diet experiments, ketogenic diets, higher carb diets, whatever, cutting out foods. So you know that elimination diets are something that people commonly use to try to address their medical conditions.

Right.

So there was a website probably three or four years ago about somebody who's doing a nightshade elimination diet, like eggplants.

And potatoes and things like that.

So tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, red peppers, and then a couple other things. So I was interested in that stuff because just a year or two prior I was doing my PhD research on elimination diets for rheumatoid arthritis.

And there was this guy. There's actually not a lot of research on nightshades. There's some mechanistic research and kind of the whole thing got started 1982 or so there was an article about, I think it was cows or something in South America who became lame by eating some nightshade plants. And then they figured out it was arthritis that was induced by a vitamin D type compound in those nightshades.

Right. Well, isn't it like the glycoalkaloids in nightshades, like the solanins and eggplants and the nicotine?

Yeah, nightshades have their own glycoalkaloids, you know, tomatoing or, you know, whatever, and they can have different effects and different effects on different animals. So when that came out, then the sort of anti nightshade, while very minor anti nightshade movement started, I guess. And then it started more in earnest when this guy who was a horticulturalist, who is actually a really smart guy, started doing some survey research saying, like, oh, have you tried cutting out nightshades? What happened? Did your arthritis get better? And then his arthritis got better when he cut out nightshades. So I didn't see much actual research on it. And then I found this website and it actually, it had good stories, but this makes it sound like I'm ageist, but it was by a person who was probably like 7 years old. And then they mentioned all these studies that were done and they're like, oh, these studies show that if you cut out nightshades then your arthritis will get better, your fibromyalgia will get better. And I was skeptical because fibromyalgia is not a discrete condition. Often, you know, it's hard to diagnose.

It can be a conglomeration of different things. It's definitely not like the nightshade condition. So I was like, he's really grouping a lot of things in here. And then I started going through the website and it was on, I think it was transferred over from GeoCities. Do you remember that? Yeah.

So GeoCities was, I don't know, Yahoo's thing or something in the 90s where you could have your own website. And it was one of the first things, so it was transferred from there. And the studies, when I actually tried to find the data, they weren't studies, they were surveys put out by this company that helped you reduce your nightshade intake. So the thing is, I'm not pro or against nightshades. There is a mechanism for nightshade reduction elimination diet for, you know, two, four, six or eight weeks to see noticeable results. But this guy's website mentioned the vague term studies. And if you don't actually look into what the studies are, you can easily be tricked. So just over time I got to think that whenever people put up websites and they didn't care enough to make the information readable, you know, if you're a good writer or to make the website look somewhat good, you know, it doesn't have to be a professional website, but just a decent website, then be skeptical. So these are just heuristics that I recommend basically to older people who don't have the knowledge necessary to tease apart if a P value is important or not.

I have a couple of thoughts on that. The first is that you don't necessarily think that there's zero evidence that glycoalkaloids can be implicated with.

Joint issues or arthritis related diseases, do you?

Oh, no. So from the. I worked with the rheumatologist in Boston on the PhD research. Nightshades were probably like the number four or five association with rheumatoid arthritis. So, okay, so yeah, it's a thing. It's just like I don't have a, I don't have a pro or against stance on almost anything because I just think for some people, they cut out a lot of things, including nightshades, and then they see benefit and they peg it on nightshades.

That's always.

I gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. And then my other thought on that is, I guess just because a website is ugly or has an unattractive font to me, that doesn't necessarily turn me off right away. What I look for is, for example, what's a recent one? I was at SuperMemo. So there's a website called SuperMemo and they've got a section there on sleep. Right. And it's honestly kind of ugly. It's not laid out that well. And it does look like it was made, you know, maybe like kind of late 90s ish or early 2000s. But the number of well cited research studies and the amount of obvious attention paid to citing claims that are made gives me a great deal of confidence in a website like that. So do you think that, you know, a website can be unattractive and, and even made to look like it was created in the 90s and still be a dependable source of information?

Yeah. You know, now that you mentioned that, I'm just going to retract my answer as a pretty bad answer. It's just because I mentioned to one person, look at the website and if the person takes care to write well and if the website looks good, then maybe there's a higher chance that it's credible. But there's a lot of websites like the one you mentioned, like Vitamin D Wiki, it does not look good, but it has, you know, 5,000 citations for vitamin D articles that are very useful. So there are a lot of websites that don't make any attempt to look good but are very useful.

So more so than what the website looks like, if the website provides citations and then provides both the pro and the con side, then those are usually pretty good indications that the website is good. So if a website is all about something, then, you know, be a little bit more skeptical. But if a website says, you know, pros and cons of vitamin D supplementation at higher doses, then that might be an indication that it's useful.

I'm going to interrupt today's show to tell you about something I've actually been eating a copious amount of lately because I had about 25 gentlemen over to my house for like a health mastermind. And we did green juice powders all weekend, which is what healthy people do, healthy men do when they all gather together. We don't do crack cocaine and hookers and crazy amounts of burgers and steaks as you would think. We just sit around stuffing our faces with green juice powder. And in this case we had tons and tons and tons of this stuff called organifi green juice. It's coconut and ashwagandha infused green juice and it's like a superfood powder you can pour into teas, into mugs, into smoothies. It's jam packed with tons of stuff, algae and moringa and spirulina, mint, beets, green tea, wheatgrass, turmeric, lemon, coconut water. It's like this shotgun of nutrients in this teeny, tiny little pack. And it's good. And grown men can sit around and drink it and still be grown men, still be masculine with little green stains around their lips. Women can drink it too, by the way. It's not just for dudes. Not just for cool dudes hanging out drinking green juice. So anyways, it's called organifi green juice. Organifi green juice. And it's a powder, it's not a juice. So there's no cleanup and there's no mess. And you can get it. Not only can you get it, but you can get 20% off on it. Go to, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com fitlife that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com FitLife and use discount code BEN to get 20% off of this organifi green juice. This podcast is also brought to you by something you can use to turbocharge your brain. So basically, if you look into amino acids. Amino acids are typically found in protein rich foods and in many cases, you don't get enough from your diet alone. But what a lot of people don't realize is that amino acids are used as precursors for neurotransmitters for cognitive performance. And there's a form of coffee that has added the specific neurotransmitters necessary for enhancing mental focus and delaying cognitive decline, improving sleep patterns, increasing things like oxygen efficiency and red blood cell function, and preventing cholesterol related damage. They've shoved all this, they've packed all this into one of my favorite things, coffee. So not only have they selected extremely tasty coffee from a very high altitude, so it's mold free and fungus free and isn't going to give you some kind of nasty yeast infection as we know other coffees can do. But they've supercharged it with all these nutrients. Alpha, gpc, Taurine, L Theanine, dmae. And you get it all in one fantastic cup of coffee that does not taste like meat, which is normally where you get these amino acids, it instead tastes like amazing, amazing coffee. It'd actually be a good Christmas present. This might be a little bit too late in the holiday season for you to get it for Christmas, maybe for New Year's, so you can stay up till midnight on New Year's or if you just want more productivity in the new year, switch to this coffee called Kamera Coffee. K I M E R A K O F F E E Kamara Coffee. And you can get it@cameracoffee.com discount code. Ben will get you 10% off@camaracoffee.com so check them out. And now back to today's show.

Now in your guys's Examine Research Digest, which is like your, your monthly publication that you put out, that actually is it twice a month now that that comes out?

Yep. Yeah, twice.

Once a month. Okay, so because I remember it used to be like really big and once a month and it always took me a long time to get through, now it's twice a month. I can get through it a little bit more quickly, which I like. But the research that you go through, sometimes you tell people what you need to know, what to look for. And in some cases you've pointed out studies that seem to appear credible but that are flawed. For example, so when someone is online and on their Facebook news feed or even if they've opened up USA Today or something like that, there's a story about a supplement or a story about a diet or a story about an exercise program. Are there red flags or certain things that people should look for that would allow them to question the legitimacy of the claims being made in, for example, a media headline?

Yeah, so there was a study done a couple years ago and I think the British Medical Journal that looked at how research from the top 10 or 20 highest impact factor journals like New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA and whatnot, how those were translated and media headlines, and the three things that were present in the media headlines that weren't in the original research most often were positioning research as advice. So research studies are very highly controlled and in very specific populations at specific doses for a specific duration. So. So making it into general advice for the general public is always a bad idea. There were also a lot of times when studies were not implying causation either because they were just observational studies or because causation couldn't be implied for statistical reasons or whatnot. But then the media headline said vitamin E causes cancer or whatever. And then there's also times when research was done in animals where the animal parts were very briefly mentioned. And animal research is not bad. Animal research can be very useful, but because occasionally animal physiology can be different. And then also animals get chow, you know, in a lab, they don't have a natural lifestyle like humans do or Rather an unnatural lifestyle.

Right. So when it says like, like a high fat diet is producing unfavorable health parameters in say mice, a lot of times that high fat diet is essentially lard and soy feed, for example.

Yeah. So now that you mentioned that, there's this whole thing about is it bad to eat fat in order to. Because if you feed mice a lot of fat or any rodent, then their intestines will become more permeable. And it's the easiest way to make the intestine permeable through diet. So then there's the question of translation. For people who have gut issues, is it important to watch their fat intake in order to reduce parts of bacterial cells crossing through the intestine? And people don't really, really know the answer yet. And part of the reason is that we don't know a lot about different people's gut linings, but part of the reason is that when you feed mice a diet of high fat, you're feeding them a highly purified diet altogether because they either feed mice a natural type diet or they feed them this chow that is soybean, etc. Oil plus sugar plus whatever stuff. So they have a very dichotomous diet. Whereas humans could eat.

A bunch of purified fat. They could have a salad with olive oil, salad dressing, they could eat a rotisserie chicken, they could eat grass fed beef and then they also eat it in meals often with fiber. And our guts are also different because we have different bacteria that live in our guts. So anytime you try to simplify animal findings for that, which is going to come out a lot in the next few years, there's going to be media headlines about more and more media headlines about gut stuff. It's very hard to do. And especially in media reports, they never talk about previous research. So any one paper, it's just part of an iterative process. And if you don't mention the previous research that's done, then you're not really getting the full picture.

Yeah, exactly. Like for example, I just wrote an article about this on marijuana, about the recent studies that showed that marijuana can increase the risk of a heart attack. And then if you delve in and you look at the study, essentially what they did was they had mice stick their nose in this tiny little chamber filled with marijuana smoke and just breathe in the smoke for a full minute. It and the researchers noted in the study, like they admitted in the study, well, a huge part of the endothelial dysfunction that they say that this marijuana is causing could be caused by the smoke itself, not anything in like the THC or the CBD from the marijuana. And furthermore, the other thing is that when they looked at this huge cohort of patients, this is the other part of this study. They looked at this huge cohort of, of patients who came into the hospital with heart attack type of symptoms. There was the marijuana group that had one form of symptoms like the endothelial dysfunction, and then the non marijuana users had a different kind of heart attack risk. And so the media could just as easily had said, oh, marijuana reduces risk of heart attacks, but in this case they report marijuana increases risk of endothelial dysfunction or vascular dysfunction. And so. So yeah, it's really interesting how you can take the results of scientific research and really spin it one way or the other, depending on what kind of message that you want to portray as the media.

Yeah, I don't think people understand that the media is not allowed to say we don't know. And if you can't say we don't know and you have to take a stance, what do you mean they're not.

Allowed to say we don't know?

So you've written before for websites, right? Like outside of your own. If you're writing an article for major media, then you're not always in charge of the headline.

They'll come up with a headline. And if you're a freelance writer or even if you're on staff, if you're on staff at the New York Times, you can't come up with whatever headline you want because it has to be a certain length and it has to be catchy enough so people will click on the article. So really what a headline would be for that marijuana study or for a vitamin D study or whatever would should be at minimum 10 to 15 words long, which it never is. And it should have some words like might or could or. And some people. So like there was a, you know, the guy who wrote the paper about 90% of medical findings are wrong, whatever, four or five years ago. So there was this study came out by John Ioannidis, who is a methodologist professor in stats and medicine that said 90% of medical findings are wrong. So it was really controversial. And then a lot of people kind of threw it around like, oh, I don't believe studies because there's a 90% chance they're wrong. So it's an extremely complicated issue, but it's probably the most important issue in all of nutrition research. I'm sure you get this because as I understand it, you're a Self experimenter, and I've always been into self experimentation, but also into research and, and people think that they conflict. Something works and then the research shows that it doesn't, so it must not work, or vice versa even. And it's a lot more intricate than that. So that study by John Ioannidis was true because of very statistical reasons and the fact that journals don't really.

Run like you would want them to run. They publish results that are bound to get them attention, for example. And a lot of negative research findings don't get published because of a variety of reasons. A lot of medical research is wrong. If you reproduce a trial, there's a good chance that it won't find significant findings anymore. So.

Like, for example, you know, the P is less than 0.055 is defined as significant. So the minimum that somebody would know about stats is, you know, you go to PubMed, you see that Citrulline or vitamin D or vitamin B12 improves blood pressure. P is less than 0.05. So then you share it on your Facebook, hey, vitamin B12 helps blood pressure. And this study shows it. It's not quite true because if anybody is really into stats who listens to the podcast, there's a bit of an internal war in biostatistics about frequentist statistics versus Bayesian. And I won't get into it at all because it's kind of boring, but also fun. If you like stats. But the end results being the end result is that if you take a study that is, let's say P equals 0.047, so that means it's less than 0.05 and it's deemed statistically significant. And you can go to your friends and say, hey, this study showed that vitamin B12 does help this. If you take that study and you reproduce it exactly, there's something like a 50 or 70% chance or something that it won't be significant anymore. So most people will be surprised because if you reproduce a study, you would think you would probably get close to the same result, but you don't. And the reason is that trials are very rarely large enough to be done again and show the same results. You know, a study will be done on 50 people and show a significant finding of P is less than 0.05, 0.047. But if you reproduce the study, then somewhere on the continuum of possible results, you'll get one of those results. And, you know, like, let's say you have a sugar pill that you test against another sugar pill and you do that 100 times. Well, one out of a hundred times. At least one, you know, 50 out of those hundred times or not 55 out of those 100 times, the sugar pill will be better than the other sugar pill and it'll be P is less than 0.05. And all of those results will get published because journals publish positive results. And the other, you know, however, 10, 20, 30, 40 times it was tested won't be published. But if you reproduce that same exact experiment, it won't be significant and then that result is not likely to be published again, just a very small slice of the total pie of possible research. And that's what people don't really understand.

Yeah, it's really interesting. And not to belabor the point too much about the carbohydrates versus the fat issue, for example, but to be fair to.

The high carbohydrate diets, in many cases, when they say that a high carb diet causes issues, they're feeding rodents or mice a bunch of acellular carbohydrates, refined sugars and grains. Whereas somebody eating whatever sweet potatoes and yams and underground roots and tubers and carrots and maybe quinoa or amaranth or millet or fermented and soaked and sprouted beans, they might have a completely different reaction than what they're reporting in a study on macronutrients. So yeah, it's one of those things where that's why I appreciate what you guys do, is you kind of cut through that clutter and report accordingly. So the other one, and I also want to turn to some of the things that you found to be most efficacious. But the other one that I think is interesting, I'd love to hear your take on this, is this idea, for example, that athletes need a certain number of carbohydrates to perform well during exercise, like a certain mix of fructose and maltodextrin, for example. And when you look at studies in which they will say that a high fat diet, for example, does not benefit athletes, or athletes need a certain amount of carbohydrates to exercise, they always take a sample group, for example, for a high fat diet in which they feed them a high fat diet, they take them in off the streets off a standard American diet, feed them a high fat diet for two weeks, weeks, and then compare that to a group that's eating a normal recommended carbohydrate based endurance athlete diet, and they show that the carbohydrate diet is superior. But what they fail to do is actually have the athletes who follow a high fat diet follow that for a year or two years or enough time to actually get the adaptive response to be able to say, burn a higher number of fats for energy or oxidize more fats during exercise. And so in many cases these research studies, they're short, right? Like they're 6 or they're 12 or they're 18 weeks long or whatever diet they're feeding the participants is just a few weeks long, rather than looking at something that's more lifetime based or more one or two year based just because research has limited time in terms of the scope of research, in many cases, yeah.

So the ideal experimental setup for that kind of thing would be to have a long lead in period, so like you said, months, if not a year, where you're adapted to the diet, and then also have it be a crossover trial where you're both under the high fat diet, high fat, low carb, and the high carb diet, and then have a long washout period in between the times that you're doing those two experiments. So very few if any of the performance trials are like that. And since they're not like that, the scenario that ends up coming up is you do a small study because you have limited funding of like 10 to 20 people, and then you report that you know a certain group did better than the other group and it's usually the higher carb group did better. But you could have it the other way depending on how you design the study. And it's very hard to have those experiments be reliable because. And a very small proportion of the papers is the power calculation done, meaning the calculation that you would do before the study to show how many participants you need in order to find a result. And then if you don't do a.

What's that called? The power calculation.

Yeah, so if you don't do a power calculation, there's one of maybe like there's like 10 to 20 basic things trials should do, or at least in the paper. And very rarely are all those things done. And when you don't do those things, like when I was at my old position, the first project we did was the vitamin D guidelines. So in 2008 or nine, we were contracted by the federal government to do the systematic review for the upcoming guidelines. So for the first time in my life, I had to really, really read deeply into papers and read a lot of papers. And first of all, it's really boring, so I recommend not doing that. But if you do do it. You'll find that papers are not nearly as good as you think they are because this isn't for vitamin D, but for another project we did on fish oil. So in meta analyses, they pool results of different studies. So a researcher will say a randomized controlled trial is the gold standard of research. And then meta analysis is like even more of a gold standard, like a platinum standard, because it pulls together results of a bunch of different randomized trials. I don't actually have that view because we used to do a lot of meta analyses. And the thing that ends up happening is that because researchers have to publish stuff or else they get fired, meta analysis is a good way to publish something without doing a study yourself. So it doesn't mean meta analyses are bad, but what it does mean is that people who do meta analyses are often not experts in that area. So we did have experts in vitamin D because we had a bunch of money that the government threw at us. But I used to read some meta analyses on, like, fish oil, for example, and they would pool together results on fish oil, but they would pull together results from, like, Japan and the US and like Russia or something. But people in Japan eat so much more fish and seafood from the time that they're young, in addition to other differences between people from Japan and people from Western countries, that the studies really possibly shouldn't be pooled at all. And once you start pooling studies that are not similar and populations that aren't similar, then you're no longer getting a more accurate result. By doing a meta analysis, you're probably just muddying the waters. And then when a meta analysis gets reported, then people take it as like a super truth, like, oh, there's 15 studies included in this meta analysis. It has to be true. It's not true. So it's very hard to detect those things, unfortunately. And you have to become familiar with the research to do that. Yeah.

So even these huge studies that come out that are studies of a whole bunch of studies, those are themselves flawed in many cases.

Yeah. And now there's this sort of new thing called an umbrella review, which is a meta analysis of meta analyses.

And it's crazy because on the one hand, there's only been one meta analysis or umbrella review on a nutrition thing, I think, and it was a vitamin D, and coincidentally it was by that guy, John Ioannidis, who did the a study on 90% of medical findings being wrong. But he did this umbrella review of all the vitamin D outcomes because there's been so many different meta analyses. And his conclusion was that vitamin D is basically overhyped, that there's not as much solid research as you would think for vitamin D helping conditions. So, on the one hand, I think it's cool that he did that study, and there are a lot of outcomes that vitamin D may or may not be tied to that we just assume it is. But on the other hand, the meta analysis loses so much granularity of the individual studies that once you do a meta analysis of meta analyses, you're losing any granularity. So, like, if a certain vitamin D study was done on postmenopausal women in Iowa, and then you pulled it together with the study of vitamin D in athletes, then you're already losing some granularity. But when you start pooling together different meta analyses, then you're losing so much granularity that it's like, why are you doing it in the first place? Like, should you do a meta analysis or a meta analysis of all micronutrients so that you can say that a multivitamin is either good or bad? No, because a multivitamin is important because of the different micronutrients within it, not the fact that it's one pill. So I don't know. I'm just ranting at this point. But I think it's just very hard to understand research by a media headline. So you have to get into it.

One last quick question before I delve into asking you some of the most proven supplements and stacks that you found in this research that you've been doing, and that is the whole idea behind abstracts. A lot of times people will tweet an abstract, and I do that. Sometimes I'll place a post to an abstract, not a full article.

Are there any cautionary steps that people should take when they're just just reading the basic abstract, the basic summary of a study, without actually delving into the details of the study itself? Is that dangerous to review an abstract? Are there red flags that you should look for? What do you do when it comes to reviewing an abstract? Or if somebody's listening in, what's the best way for them to get through an abstract that's looking at a supplement or a diet or an exercise program.

Or something like that.

When you look at an abstract? When I look at an abstract, then if it's an issue that's really important to me, either for work or for my personal health or family's health or something, I'll always look at the full text of the paper. If I can't look at the full text. Then there's certain things in the abstract that are red flags.

Right, Because a lot of times you have to click and pay a bunch of money for the full paper.

Yeah, exactly. So if you see an abstract where they conclude that the intervention, let's say vitamin D helped, but, but in the abstract they just say that the vitamin D group had better outcomes than at baseline. So like the vitamin D group had improved blood pressure or the vitamin D group had improved depression. That actually doesn't mean anything because the placebo group also could have had improved depression or improved blood pressure. So really what it has to say explicitly is that vitamin D had a better improvement in blood pressure than the control group did. And that's the easiest trick in the book for researchers who are trying to get something published and of notoriety because the reason you have a control group, a placebo in the first place is so that you can compare that to the intervention. So once you take the control group out of the equation and you start reporting on the intervention group, only then you're not really following science. Because, you know, I could have a sugar pill and I could say, you know, sugar pill, X, Y, Z improved bowel movements and it improved bowel movements by 30%. And then let's say that the placebo group improved bowel movements by 28%. So the difference was not statistically significant. But they don't have to technically report that in the abstract. So there's actually a lot of leeway and abstract writing and it depends on the journal and even some high quality journals sometimes miss things. So like when I've written abstracts, you know, I would always, I was always the little guy on the totem pole. So I would get vetoed, you know, I would say, oh, here's my abstract. And they'd be like, oh, you know, we actually need to change these things. And sometimes the change is to make the abstract better, but sometimes it's to make the abstract more catchy. So you have to watch out for those things. You never take the conclusion of the abstract as truth. You have to look at the results first.

Yeah, that's really good advice because a lot of times when I'm, you know, let's say I'm reading like the journal of strength conditioning research, the abstract will definitely say one thing. And then when you dig into the article itself, the results are far less significant than the abstract may have seemed to imply. Or you find out methodologies used in the study that they don't even talk about in the actual abstracts. For example, they Might say something like.

Power training results in zero improvement in endurance, running economy. And in the abstract outlines, there was a power training group and a non power training group, and no difference between the two. But then you go in and you actually read the methodology. And the power training group was maybe doing one set of 20 box jumps three days a week. And it was nothing like an actual true plyometric or power program that would be used for improving running economy. So a lot of times you really have to delve into the details. And I find that the abstracts can be a bit dangerous, especially if it's like that one, two combo of an abstract. And then what we were alluding to earlier, like a media news article that's reporting what the media says about the abstract. That's like the most potent, dangerous 1, 2 combo combo, in my opinion, for fooling somebody into thinking that something is or is not true. Right. Like the media report on Time magazine website or, you know, or, you know, the Huffington Post. And then they click through to the actual study, so it must be legitimate. And then all they get is the abstract. You don't read the full study and you wind up getting fooled.

Yeah, you should always think about the motivations of the person giving you information. So, you know, if it's a media headline, then it's a media headline. You know, it's something that they're using to sell advertising space or whatever. If it's.

If it's, somebody who's, you know, your friend, then they don't have any, you know, they're not. They don't have devious schemes trying to trick you. So at least you can get rid of that. But if it's somebody, you know who's high carb or low carb or whatever, carb, and they forward you a study, like you mentioned earlier about training and carb levels.

Then you really have to look at the abstract closely because technically an abstract in a perfect world would say the strengths and weaknesses of the study right there. It would say, we looked at a high carb versus low carb diet for triathlon performance and this is what we found. The strength of the study is that we had highly trained athletes which mimicked the population that is reading this article. But the weakness of this is that we looked at 10 different outcomes. We looked at time to completion of the triathlon, we looked at perceived exertion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Those outcomes are all correlated with each other. So if one is significant, there's a high chance that others will be too. So this is actually a flaw of the study, or we had 15 people and one dropped out, so we no longer reach the number of people we needed in the power calculation. You know, those are all important things, but researchers do not have to put that stuff in the abstract. So you'll never find out what's wrong with the study. You'll only find out what's right with it.

Yeah.

It'S a rabbit hole that we could go down for a long time. But I want to delve into some of the fun stuff from your website. So. So let's start here because I think that this might be surprising to folks when it comes to supplements. There's a ton out there, obviously, so I'll cut straight to the chase. What are the top three most proven efficacious supplements in terms of general applicability for just about everyone that you think everyone could benefit from based on the research that you guys have done over there at examine?

So I think there's probably only one that everybody could benefit from, which is vitamin D. And that's because I try not to think of supplements.

You know, as a category, because basically when we research supplements, there's things that you supplement onto your diet because they're missing from your diet or lifestyle, like vitamin D. And then there's things that are like, I don't have a good term for this. At a. At a talk, at a conference, I said compliments because I was trying to think back to like algebra or trigonometry or whatever. In middle school, when you complement an angle, then you're completing it or something, I don't know. But a supplement is something that you're supplementing onto what you already have. A complement to me is sort of like, you know, a treatment for something or prevention or something you tack on. So vitamin D is a supplement and it's a common supplement because the sun is just such an important thing. And if you don't get sun, you know, we're designed around the sun, so you have to at least supplement part of the benefit you get from the sun. You know, it's only part of it because you can't take vitamin D. And all of a sudden you're happy because being in the sun means you're probably more social, you're getting fresh air, there's nitric oxide synthesis, higher endorphin levels and whatnot. So, you know, you're like outsourcing part of the benefit in the form of a vitamin D pill. But there's nothing else that is really a supplement that everybody could benefit from because Other than not being outside.

People differ for a lot of reasons. So like vitamin C or vitamin K2 or certain minerals can be helpful for large chunks of the population, but not for everybody. And for most things, except for, I guess, K2, there is some chance of harm. So that's why there's nothing that I recommend to everybody.

Okay, got it. Now here's what comes to mind for me though, when you say like vitamin D, well, two things come to mind. First of all, it seems like you get down a slippery slope because when you say, oh, vitamin D would be the most recommended supplement that I would encourage everyone to take, then you run into the fact that in nature you very rarely, aside from exposure to sunlight, I suppose, find isolated forms of vitamin D. Right. Usually it's delivered along with, for example, in liver, vitamin A and vitamin E and vitamin K to prevent calcification from excessive vitamin D intake. Or when you look at eggs or the oils from fish, in many cases it's accompanied by a host of other fat soluble vitamins. So when you look at all the research behind vitamin D, can you tell someone, hey, if you're going to take one supplement, just take vitamin D? Or do you get concerned about people getting calcification or something like that if you were to tell them to just take vitamin D?

So I actually don't recommend any supplements when people ask me personally. So on our website we never use the word recommend on purpose because our stance is that you look at what you eat, you look at your lifestyle and then you maybe try something as an adjunct and see if it helps. But when people ask me, or there's been a few times when I've worked in clinical situations. So there was a doctor I worked with in San Francisco who does a quantified self tracking program for his patients and around half his patients are former addicts either of drugs or hard drugs or other things, and then half are kind of metabolic disease, former heart attack sort of patients. And we didn't recommend any supplements. So we always started with very simple self tracking of just like, how do you, how did you feel that day? And you know, like, how hard did you try to be healthy, healthy? And then we did that kind of stuff for a super, super long time. Kind of like, you know, people who are really into weightlifting probably at some point in the past five or 10 or 15 years have gone back to the basics with either the bar or the broomstick or whatever and worked on their squat form until they got it exactly right. And we would do that kind of thing with Diet and lifestyle before we ever thought about taking a supplement. Because like you said, vitamin D is not something that everybody needs to take. And I don't take vitamin D. And you know, I tell my girlfriend she should take vitamin D just because she doesn't get outside much, you know, and we live in, we live near the beach in San Francisco and it's always foggy. But for anybody who can get enough time outside in the sun, you know, I would never recommend vitamin D. So.

Now perhaps I should rephrase that question then when I say the most recommended supplements, let me put it this way, this way. What are the most, the most researched supplements? When you look at, for example, examine the supplements that you think have the most references behind them and then the goals may differ, Right. It might be references for athleticism, it might be references for general health or cognitive performance. But what would be the three top most researched supplements that you have reams of data on at examine that appear to be the darlings of the supplement industry when it comes to things that actually do have a lot of studies behind them?

So this is easier to answer. So creatine is probably one of them. And the reason is simple. It's just because creatine has a fairly high chance of working, you know, working in quotes, providing some increase in some outcome. And that's pretty simple because creatine is a very basic molecule that isn't hard to understand why it would have its effect. And there's been a lot of research on both creatine benefits and on various forms of creatine that basically never work as well as creatine monohydrate. So creatine, let's say every supplement has between a 0 and 100% chance of helping a given person. Creatine has a higher chance than most supplements. So that's one of the most researched supplements.

Yeah. And by the way, if I could throw it in there, a lot of people think creatine. I used to be under this impression it's just for like football players and bodybuilders and stuff, strength and power athletes, but it actually has a lot of really cool neuroprotective and cardio protective properties. I recommend to just about everybody, and especially vegans and vegetarians, to take around 5 grams of creatine a day.

Yeah. So we actually recently or like a year ago or so covered a creatine study for depression. And it was the first study showing that creatine helped major depression. And, you know, I won't get into the methodology, pros and cons but those are important. But it was cool because mechanistically, it makes sense. So there's a couple ways that creatine could help the brain. And one is that in neural pathways in the brain, the brain, like all organs, tries to be efficient in its setup. You know, we. We store energy as fat because it's efficient. You know, it's a lot of calories per gram. That's why we're not like huge bags of glycogen, because then we'd be like, you know, extremely voluminous. But the brain also tries to be efficient. So it's mostly short connections and then connections between those connections. But there are some longer connections, wider connections. So if the brain is a bunch of streets, then these connections would be like, you know, major freeways or highways. And those are called rich club connections. So creatine could increase the prevalence of those rich club connections. So it makes sense that creatine could help major depression. So this isn't like, you know, I'm feeling sad or I'm taking an SSRI sometimes, but this is major depression, where you're thinking, either I get, you know, electroconvulsive therapy or I try some. Some crazy thing like, you know, a ketamine infusion or something. Creatine could help, that kind of thing. And that's where, you know, kind of my faith in supplements is restored, because there's a lot of crap out there. But if something as simple as creatine could help, or something as simple as a ketogenic diet for, you know, epilepsy or whatever, then it's all worth it because that research does do something.

Yeah. And that's what I like about the site, too, is I can. I can go and look at whether or not that fancy, expensive brand of creatine that is, you know, advertised@bodybuilding.com for example, or T Nation has any benefits over and above say, like a creatine monohydrate or something along those lines. So it's useful in that way. And the other thing, of course, is you have a couple of other supplements I've noticed on your most researched supplements line. It appears to be fish oil and marijuana as the next two most researched supplements.

Yeah. So fish oil.

Fish oil is interesting because if anybody's ever looked into the history of fish oil, fish oil as a trend is almost brand new. So fish oil used to be a waste product, and then it was used as maybe fuel for lamps or something. And then fast forward a while and directly as a product of demonizing fat and Then transitioning to, oh, maybe a little bit of polyunsaturated fats. That's mostly Omega 3 is good. And then some early studies about fish oil possibly being useful for some cholesterol outcomes. Fish oil exploded within the span of five years, probably in the late 90s or so. Fish oil went from zero to 100 miles an hour. And then that's right around when Pfizer and some other companies started researching fish oil as a pharmaceutical. So. So probably most listeners know that that's a scam. So Lovaza as a fish oil pill is a scam. There's never going to be a trial of Lovaza versus the fish oil from Costco because it'll be exactly the same. The difference is that the fish oil from Costco will cost 200 bucks for a year's supply and Lovaza is like 1600 bucks or something. So it's draining money from our healthcare system to make fish oil into pharmaceuticals. There is a pharmaceutical that's mostly EPA that's coming out that could be better for certain cardiovascular intermediaries. But the reason people get heart attacks is not because they're missing fish oil in their diet. So fish oil is highly researched because there's money to be made from it and because it's something that's easily gotten from fish, but it's not one of the most useful supplements.

Interesting. So even though there's reams and reams of research behind it, that doesn't necessarily mean that the research has shown it to be extremely efficacious.

Yeah. As far as, like, if you were to make a quotient of.

Amount of research over usefulness, then I think fish oil would be close to number one on there.

Okay, interesting. And I did note that one of the things that seemed to be beneficial for fish oil in terms of your guys kind of like, summary of it, is that it appears to be most beneficial for decreasing triglycerides, which I know are an independent risk factor for heart disease. And I, for example, work with Wellness fx. I do every Thursday I'm poring over people's blood results with them for four to six hours. That's my block of time to do my WellnessFX consults. And a lot of people have extremely high triglycerides and very low hd, which is, you know, that triglyceride HDL ratio is a risk factor for heart disease. So in that case, I would, you know, I often make the recommendation for something like fish oil to decrease high triglyceride levels.

Yeah. So this is where it starts getting a little bit more subtle. So for things like fish oil and even for statins, so they're not in the same category. But you know, some doctors basically think that statins should be in the water supply and then some more progressive doctors think that statins are extremely overused and shouldn't be used by anybody and have more side effects than benefits, then the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. And the same is true for fish oil. So if you have a history of heart disease, if your triglycerides are very high, if you're not eating a great diet and you're not likely to eat a great diet for the foreseeable future and some other factors, then fish oil is not a bad idea as long as you're not taking a ton of, of it. But fish oil is not something that everybody would take. So it's very similar to statins because if you're a 70 year old man who's had a heart attack, then the decision to take a statin is very different than a 40 year old man who hasn't had a heart attack, even if your cholesterol numbers aren't very good. So fish oil is neither bad nor good. It's a complex story somewhere in the middle. And unfortunately that's true with almost every supplement. There's very few that that's not the case with and it's usually sort of either things extracted from food or foods themselves. So.

Right, right. And admittedly I take a fish oil every day. You know, I've seen some of the other research that shows that it could decrease the risk of diabetes, which I by the way have a five times higher than normal risk for based on my genetic testing. And it also significantly decreases risk of, of a lot of different forms of cancer and plaque buildup. And so like I, I take it, I, I suspect that a lot of the research potentially is not all using like good, non oxidized, non rancid forms of fish oil. And you know, so, so I, I use fish oil. I, I really do. I, you know, I use fish oil, a creatine and a multivitamin. Like those are three things that I take just about every day.

And yeah, that's probably a pretty safe group of supplements to take. And like you said, fish oil quality is important. We don't do specific brand names. But if you do take fish oil, then if you're questioning the oxidation or heavy metals or whatever, then there is a database, ifos, International Fish Oil Standards that does voluntary testing of most of the major Brands, so.

Okay, gotcha.

Yeah, it's always good to. I'm sure you're taking good fish oil because you know a lot about supplements, but for some listeners, it's probably good to look at that kind of website.

Yeah, the fish oil, I take it, it's, it's. It is, again, admittedly expensive, but. But yeah, you want to make. What I tell people is taking bad fish oil is. Is much worse than not taking fish oil at all.

One thing I was going to say about fish oil is that everybody has a complex history. So it's always good to, to either hire somebody who's really smart and knowledgeable or have a friend who is, or try to find a primary care doctor. That is because, you know, like you said, you've had genetic testing done, you've looked into research about fish oil and different outcomes. Not everybody does that. So, like, my family's full of thin diabetics. You know, my mom weighs 105 pounds and she's a type 2 diabetic. My grandma is the same, my uncle. I have a high chance for diabetes, so I look into supplements that somebody else wouldn't look into. My family is also vegetarian. So, you know, I grew up not eating a lot of meat except for the pepperoni on my pizza at school and that kind of thing. So, you know, as I got more into ancestral health and thinking outside of just studies, then I started thinking, like, am I different than the people that are being looked at in this research? Because I'm from a region of the world, northwest India, that has probably been vegetarian for longer than almost any other place on earth, you know, several hundred years. So is my iron metabolism different? My fatty acid metabolism is that different. We covered a study a year ago about how people from northern Africa and southern Asia have different fatty acid metabolism because they ate higher plant diets. So in order to convert smaller chain fats to longer chain fats, you know, you had to have a different mechanism for that in your body. So there was a selective advantage to produce different longer chain fats from plants. So now that could be a disadvantage. It could be a reason why some regions in India have higher incidence of heart disease because we're making more harmful long chain fats. So, you know, I think about these kind of things and about how some research could, you know, inform me and some research couldn't. But I know that not everybody has a job like I do where I have to read papers so, you know, outsource it to somebody. Find reputable people, websites, people who are interested in yourself and become friends with them because it's the best thing you can do for your health.

Gotcha. Now, when it comes toto supplements, are there any supplements out there that you think people are very infatuated with or the media researchers are quite infatuated with that have.

Very low credibility? Is there one supplement that you think a lot of people are taking that that has very, very little research behind it, whether it's something that the athletic population is using pre workout or some kind of recovery supplement, or something that you just know is pretty much across the board, something that has very little research or is even potentially damaging.

So for the general public, libido boosters or testosterone boosters are. There's not a lot of research for most of them or almost all of them them. But I would think that your audience is, you know, pretty in tune with that, like not taking a bunch of random supplements because they think it might boost their test levels.

Actually, you know what, I think a lot of my audience, they're popping a lot of pills. I've seen the emails come in, like some folks are taking like 30 different pills in the morning.

So testosterone. And then the two major categories are testosterone boosters and fat loss supplements. So, you know, there are things that could help, but there's just so much bad research compared to the good research research. But.

Less obvious than that, I'd say, is probiotic research. So there's a ton of probiotic research and probiotics have been shown to be helpful for certain things, but I can't count the number of ways that it's been misleading. So if you take a step back from probiotics, even the way that people throw around the term like, oh, try probiotics, what does that even mean? Because you don't say, oh, why don't you try food for your diabetes? Because probiotics are different species of bacteria. They're not at all similar to each other. So, you know, you don't recommend that, oh, hey, go ahead and eat food for that. Because plants are different than animals and fruits are different than vegetables and different fruits are different than other fruits. You know, if you have some gut issues, then some vegetables and some fruits could maybe increase, you know, histamine problems and some could help with them. So, so similarly, some bacteria can help with their issues and some can harm you. So that's why for probiotics, I think you really have to look into the research. And research is extremely overhyped. Plus, people rarely think about dosages much. They only think of dosages in terms of the more the better. Like oh, 10 billion units or 20 billion is better than 10. But you already have a complex ecosystem of, of bacteria and other organisms in your gut, so you don't necessarily want to throw in a ton of stuff in there right away. So if you have a sensitive gut, if you have ibs, especially if you have Crohn's or ulcerative colitis, it's probably smarter to do something like you know, either take the capsule apart and start with a micro dose and then increase it over time or start with like a little bit of sauerkraut juice or something because you don't necessarily want to interrupt what's going on in your gut. Like if you get a colonoscopy, sometimes a colonoscopy will help with your symptoms because you're washing out gut bacteria. But it's a double edged sword because once you start eating crappy again, then there's a lot of kind of, there's like a vacuum and nature aborts a vacuum. So once there's a vacuum in your gut, then you can get a huge buildup of bad bacteria very quickly. So similarly, you don't want to necessarily interrupt what's already going on in your gut. So I think it's good to, good to think about the probiotics that you're taking and not just start with a ton of them all at once.

That's really good advice because a lot of people really will think that probiotics not only more are better, but that using the widest variety and array of probiotics is important. And again, I think it comes down to testing, right? We were talking about genetics and diabetes and fish oil. You can also get a gut biome test or you can get the three day poop panel, it's my favorite, where you poop in a little hot dog tray and send it off with a prepaid FedEx label and you can find out which specific bacteria you're deficient in, which you're high in, which you're low in, and supplement accordingly rather than just painting with a broad brush. I also wanted to point out the fact that, for example, at Examine's website, you guys, have you mentioned testosterone boosters? You have. For example, I see one page on here where you do list four things that actually do have decent research behind them for testosterone. You've got DHEA on here, here, vitamin D, zinc and fenugreek as four things that actually can help with testosterone. And so that's actually what I like about the site and some of Your stat guides is rather than me taking some testosterone supplement that's got 18 different ingredients in it that purportedly assist with testosterone levels, I could just go and pop the few things that actually have, have research behind them. You know, the, the things that, that you guys would call like a stack that actually has good research. That, that leads me to another question that I wanted to ask you, and that is regarding stacks. Now you have this, this enormous stack guide that you guys have produced and, and I, I own it. I'll put a link to it and all this stuff again in the show notes. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com/Salmon podcast and you list a whole bunch of stacks, everything from cognitive performance to enhancing testosterone to fighting inflammation, et cetera. But for you personally, what would you say for the folks listening in when it comes to stacking supplements, putting a bunch of supplements together at once, what would you say is the most beneficial stack that you've come across or one that you use daily or the stack that you, you like the best when it comes to general applicability to folks?

So the thing that's probably most applicable to the highest percentage of people is caffeine related stacks. So do you drink coffee?

I do. I have since I was 13 years old. My dad was a gourmet coffee roaster growing up, so I have copious amounts of coffee in my body from a young age.

So I guess I'm the inverse of you because I had one cup when I was 11 or so and I've never had coffee since then.

And I don't know if it's because I'm a supertaster or just I'm also a slow caffeine metabolizer. But.

The thing that I see most often is supplement wise is caffeine. Because people drink coffee a lot, they often don't think twice about it, whether it's benefits or detriment.

So caffeine related things are very important. When people ask me for advice on stuff, I always say look at the things that are most prevalent in your life. So people drink coffee a lot. People are in bed a lot. People sit at their desk a lot. So because of those things, caffeine related stuff is going to be important. The type of bed you sleep on and your light exposure before bed is going to be important. And your posture or lack thereof while working at a cubicle or at your desk is important. And if you can take care of those things, that's like 80 to 90% of it. So with caffeine, people will drink caffeine and be jittery and not think twice about it. They're just like, oh, I didn't get a lot of sleep so I drank an extra cup of coffee and now I can't function at work and I'm just on Facebook all day because my mind is racing. So. So caffeine and L Theanine is the most basic stack that applies to the most people. L. Theanine is found in green tea, but it's also isolated so you can take it as a supplement. But for a decent chunk of people, L. Theanine counteracts that jitteriness. So you still get some focus from caffeine, but you can think logically and you can function, basically. So I think that's probably the most useful stack for most people.

So it's caffeine, theanine and what?

It's just caffeine and L Theanine. There are other. Yeah, but that's the most basic, I'd say. And then I guess for. If you're not, if you're not looking to like what's happening that day, if you're looking for health, I guess this isn't technically a stack, but nitrate containing vegetables, I think it's good to, I guess stack them together. So. So if you have a history of heart disease or family history or high triglycerides or whatever, the most basic thing you can do is to regularly eat vegetables that contain nitrates. And the reason is that nitrates are good for heart health because they increase dilation in blood vessels and it's also good for performance as well. Nitrates or beet juice or whatever before a workout is usually fairly effective. But, but nitrates have a fairly short half life. So in order to get benefits from nitrates throughout the day, it's good to eat vegetables like maybe twice or even three times throughout the day. Especially if you have some heart health issues, then you're getting the benefits stretched out for longer. So, you know, find vegetables that are higher in nitrates, pick out two or three that you know, taste good to you and buy them at the grocery store a lot. So that's not really a stack. But. But if you find two or three that you like, make it a staple.

That's actually really good advice. I don't think anybody's brought up before on this show to spread your vegetable intake throughout the day specifically so you get the advantages of nitrate. I like that.

Yeah, there's some spread out supplements or spread out foods that people don't think of. So have you ever megadosed vitamin C?

I have, yeah. I actually did that last week when I came back from a. You can hear I'm slightly congested still. I. I got hypothermic while spearfishing in Costa Rica and came back with a bit of a cold. And so I took quite a bit of vitamin D, echinacea, elderberry and oregano. That was my stack.

Okay. That's a pretty solid cold stack, I'd say. So I guess you must be up on the research, but vitamin C?

Well, you know, I have the examine.com supplement stack guide here on my desktop.

Not tumble brag, but you must be looking at. At a good website. So, you know, vitamin C is another thing where. And you know, I'm just going to keep repeating this over and over again until it sinks in with everybody. No supplement is inherently good or bad. So always look at the pros and the cons. And also I try to look into things that I don't know a lot about. So, like at the library I used to go to, there was this big painting of some ancient physician. And it was a quote, teach thy tongue to say, I do not know and thou shall prosper. So I try to really take it to heart now and look into things that I don't know about, because everybody has their pet issues, but I want to know about things that I don't know. So, like with vitamin C, when I first got into nutrition, when I was 18 or 19, then I was like, oh, vitamin C is so good, Linus Pauling and all this stuff. And then I looked into the research and I was like, oh, vitamin C is so overrated. And then now it's sort of in between. Because the more I looked into research and the more I looked into clinical experiences, the more I found that people were often taking, like, you know, five grams of vitamin C at once, and they're like, oh, it's just diarrhea and I don't feel better. And I hate vitamin C. But the bioavailability of vitamin C is such that basically after 500 milligrams, every time you double the dose, the bioavailability goes down by more than half. So that means that one gram won't produce diarrhea in most people. Two grams, possibly not as well, you know, four grams. Yes. So when physicians used to, there's things like vitamin C, iodine, some other nutrients were used, you know, back in the day, like our great grandparents and such. Well, not great grandparents, because they didn't really even know Vitam. Existed. But our grandparents, they would say, oh, if you're sick, then iodine or vitamin C could be the thing that helps. And that's because a lot of people don't eat a lot of seafood or sea vegetables. And iodine is critical for a lot of things. Vitamin C, you need more vitamin C in times of stress. So if you take vitamin C in a rational protocol like 1,000 milligrams, and if you can tolerate that, then 2,000, and then if you can tolerate that 2,000 every two or three hours, then I think taking it in times of stress or before a high stress event, like if you're doing an ultramarathon or I don't know about that because there's the whole adaptation with antioxidants, right, Blunting the hormetic response. But if you're going to be stressed out, let's say what's not physically stressful, a chest turn.

Then megadosing on vitamin C could be a good thing. And it really depends on spreading it out. And then there's other times people don't think about dosages. Like there isn't any research right now on optimal times to take vitamin D. There used to be this anecdote, oh, if I take vitamin D at night, then I can't fall asleep. And it must be because people usually get sun exposure in the daylight hours. Well, that doesn't really make sense because when you take vitamin D, it's not like it's used right away. You know, it's a different pathway than when it gets synthesized through the skin. So researchers don't really know if there's bad or good times to take vitamin D. Researchers don't really know, like if you can wash vitamin D off your skin with soap. So there's things that people don't know about protocols that could be really important. So just because you take a supplement and doesn't have an effect effect doesn't necessarily mean it won't have an effect. You know, look at different dosing schedules at different doses, like with probiotics. Think about what you're taking it with. Like vitamin D. Everybody knows that it's fat soluble, but vitamin D isn't actually absorbed that well. If you take it with a lot of fat, it's absorbed much better if you take it with a small amount of fat. So if you take it with no fat, it's not absorbed well. If you take it with like half a stick of butter, it's not absorbed well. But if you take it with a little bit of fat, it is Absorbed well. So there's just a lot of intricacies that you have to think about before saying a supplement works or doesn't work.

Yeah. And that's why I appreciate what you guys do on the website, because I can't tell you how many times during the week I'll simply visit the stat guide or the Supplement Goals Reference Guide on my desktop and pull up the PDF, go through it, and when somebody asks me a question, I can actually delve into research that is produced by someone who's not not selling supplements, which to me is quite valuable. And for those of you listening in, basically there's three things that I get from examine that in full disclosure, I have purchased each of these. Their Stack guide, which is a whole bunch. I think there's 17 different guides in that stack guide, but it's step by step directions for stacks like Kamal just went into caffeine and L Theanine, how much to take, make, how often you'd take that in which dose, with or without food, et cetera. Then they have their Supplement Goals Reference guide which is, it's big, but it's not meant to be read cover to cover. Right. Like when you have a question about supplement or when one of your friends says, hey, I'm taking the newest form of beta alanine and some type of extreme lipophilic deliverability system. You can go into the Supplement Goals Reference Guide and see, you know, over 5,000 human studies and look at 400 or actually more than 400 different health goals that something like that may or may not be applicable for, you know, whether it be testosterone or power or strength or pooping better or, you know, whatever. And then they've also got their Examine Research digest, which is which, you know, that's how I led into this podcast. You know, one of the things I'm big into are digests or newsletters or ways that I can cut through information quickly, ways that I can more or less biohack my digestion of copious amounts of research and the Examine Research Digest. It's very straightforward. It's six new studies you get into your inbox. They're analyzed every month. They're in audio so you can listen to them, or they're in PDF so you can read them. And they're also printable. So that's a good way to stay on top of the latest research. And it is something that the lay population can, can consume. You don't have to be a propeller hat wearing nerd or a lab coat donning researcher to get benefit out of that one. So I'll put links to each of those in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com examine podcast where I'll also put links to a lot of the things that Kamal and I talked about, like the IFOS website for testing fish oil, the ugly website I mentioned that has good research on sleep, caffeine, theanine blends, the gut panel for testing bacterial balance. I'll put as much as I can on there for you guys to access and then of course, leave your comments, leave your questions, and if you really dig this episode, leave a review over on itunes. Kamal, thanks for coming on and sharing all this stuff with us. I love what you're doing and I'm just super duper stoked that I could get you on the call today and dig into your mind a bit.

It's my pleasure. It's always good to talk shop with somebody who knows stuff.

Awesome. Well, folks, if you're listening in, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Kamal Patel signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com and again, BenGreenfieldFitness.com examine podcast is where the Shownotes reside. Have a healthy week.

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