S3:E7 - Ben Cant: Wolf’s Den

Welcome to the show that educates and entertains. Welcome to The Wolf's Den. My name is Mark Ottobre. Today's guest is both an intellectual and a physical powerhouse with his best deadlift being over 300 kilos or 300 kilos for 4 reps and his understanding of biochemistry second to none. Please welcome to The Wolf's Den, Ben Kanter.

That's right, welcome, sir.

So how's training been?

Training's been not very existent.

No?

No, no, not for the last 12, 18 months. A little bit of a break off, but getting back into it. Yep. Yeah.

Now you've had a few competitors recently in a few different disciplines and a few different sports win a few things.

Yeah, a few wins, but like just competing more so. Yeah, a few powerlifting, strongman, bodybuilding, physique.

So now your day, your time, where do you spend most of your time and what are you doing?

Definitely not on competitors so much anymore. Still a niche that I do like to, you know, coach, but more so probably general health. I work in the education department for result-based training. So still doing that. Yeah, that's about it.

So let's get into your genesis story. 'Cause I mean, you've got a lot of great info. You're very intellectual, the way you approach things. And obviously your understanding of biochemistry and lab markers is very, very impressive. So where did that begin for you?

School. Okay, so university biochemistry, didn't spend much time in labs though. So I got into fitness soon after finishing that degree. And that just kind of led me into, you know, exploring nutrition, you know, nutritional biochemistry and sort of going from there. I worked in health food shops for a while, supplement stores I should say. And then after that got more so into the fitness industry and it's just evolved from there.

So when you say it was at school, so what would you go to school specifically? To study?

Biochemistry.

Biochemistry.

Yeah, I started doing a double in psychology and biochemistry and then silly dropped the psychology in the last year, whereas anyone who's a coach these days probably realizes that you do a lot of psych. So yeah, I just focused on chemistry, biochemistry in the end.

So you did your biochemistry, how many years was that?

It was a 3-year degree that I turned into a 4-year, took an industry-based learning year out in laboratory working in the dental industry. Finished it in 4.

So when you finished that, what was your, like, what were you planning on doing? Were you planning on becoming a coach or?

No, no. So I basically was just having a little bit of time off before going into the industry proper. And in that time I just started training, you know, I started training and then started researching. And then that sort of led me to, you know, looking at the nutrition behind everything. And, you know, I was a dweeb. When I started training and yeah, it just sort of evolved from there.

So in terms of that, how do you integrate the lab side of things now? 'Cause I mean, well actually before we even get into that, so the evolution, where did you start in the industry?

So I started at GNC supplement stores, you know, when they were here in Australia. Okay, so that would have been back in 2000 and, oh, I don't know, 2005 maybe. So just working there, just in retail, a lot of, you know, other qualified staff there at the time. Okay, so I worked in some stores that had some really good staff, not just retail staff. So naturopaths and dietitians and, you know, Chinese medicine and things like that. So that was really cool for me, like having come out of, you know, a straight science in a normal university, you know, I didn't really have any experience with those other modalities, but really opened my eyes up into some of the you know, the alternative health or alternative medicine, you know, that was out there.

So you finished your degree in the biochem. What was the, like, what was the plan? What did you think you would be doing?

Oh, look, a lot of my, you know, my peers went into working in different laboratories or going to things like pharmaceuticals, repping and things like that. I didn't really have an area that I was, I really wanted to go into. If it was gonna be anything, it might've been something along the, environmental sciences. That's what interested me more so at the time. But after sort of getting into the gym and, you know, I sort of got the bug, you know what I mean? And once I sort of started training, got into fitness, that was it. It was game over.

So you got into fitness, loved the fitness, and then that's what led you into coaching?

Yeah, yeah. So I kind of held off coaching for a long time just because I ended up franchising a couple of supplement stores that I was working, you know, as an employee previously at. And so I didn't really have the time to do coaching as well, but it kind of just led sort of organically into doing that with some customers from the store anyway. And then from there, when I got out of, you know, that side of the industry, it just made sense, you know what I mean? To just go a little bit deeper and work one-on-one and that kind of thing.

So when you got into coaching from the forefront, were you looking at labs?

No, I've always been one to have a network, you know, so I've always had a great, easy reach team of, you know, people like naturopaths and that kind of thing. So I probably worked more so with them, okay. So to see what they would take from it and then sort of network with some general practitioners or doctors as well. And, you know, from there I sort of upskilled myself in a lot of that too. And I still think maintaining that network is really important. But initially, like, you know, I wasn't looking at labs or anything though.

No, so it was mainly just programming, training them. So where was the gap for you? Where did you start going into, right? 'Cause I mean, what you would call you do now is more functional medicine. I mean, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but would you say that's more?

I don't say that just because like, as you know, like once you sort of belong to a tribe like that, you know, you're sort of like pigeonholed into, you know, that kind of thing. And you know, my network has, you know, as many GPs and endocrinologists and things like that as I do with, naturopathy and, you know, those kinds of modalities these days. And I think that's important. Like one of the things that I try to really, when I'm coaching or mentoring other coaches and we get talking about, you know, practicing within your scope, like one of the things that I would say is look, there's power in numbers. And if you actually know how to network rather than fighting the system, you can, you know, try and find those best individuals in the system. Okay. And then we'll work together.

[Speaker] So what brought you to then applying skills of reading labs? Like, how did you get to that point?

Oh, look, I think it was just the case of, you know, I've always been someone who's been into research, you know, probably— sorry, I'm tapping the table. Don't tap the table.

Jaden will bash you.

Yeah, look, it's, um, uh, sorry, what was the question?

So, so you started, you started, uh, with your background biochem.

Yeah.

Then you went into the supplement stores and you went into coaching purely as a coach. And then just to understand the story behind you, you had that skillset. When did you start to realize, well, actually I can provide my clients with a better result looking at labs?

Yeah, cool. So I mean, one of the things that when I started doing a lot more research in terms of nutrition, okay, was the fact that a lot of the fitness meal plans that I was seeing when I was taking a history of clients, they were like an A plus B plus C, okay. Like protein plus carb plus fat, okay. Ex-vegetables or whatever. And I was just seeing really big gaps in terms of the hitting minimum nutritional requirements, okay, based on these healthy meal plans and healthy setups. And, you know, that sort of led me to looking at a lot of the nutritional biochemistry and understanding and just teaching about these vitamins and minerals as cofactors and how they make the, you know, the biochemistry work. And from there, you know, obviously you can get some insights into someone's current status. Okay. Looking at these lab markers and seeing which lab markers are actually worthy, you know, so some of them, you know, provide you with useful information and others you sort of have to, you know, read between the lines or you can only make associations between it. But at least that way when you're having discussions with a client or designing meal plans, you can take that into account as well.

So looking at that, when you started looking at all these diets and you thought, wow, there's a lot of things missing, what was missing?

Look, I mean, I suppose, well, let me rephrase the question.

You know, there's people watching this on YouTube and they're on the standard kind of diet of, you know, I'm on my protein, on my fats, on my carbs. And they think they're doing a good job. Like where do they begin to navigate? Because it's kind of a case of what they don't know, they don't know.

Exactly. So I think, you know, we're at a fortunate time period right now where you can, you know, with technology, you can basically evaluate your current nutrition pretty easily. You can plug it into certain apps and you can ensure that you're hitting your macronutrients and you can start to see see how you're hitting your micronutrients as well. So depending on where you live in the world and what governing body does the recommended daily intakes or suggested intakes for vitamins, you can start to see, you know, how well you're hitting them. What I see is, you know, we don't hit a lot of our mineral intake anymore. You know what I mean? So things like magnesium and potassium, they'll often be, you know, and calcium well and truly under when I take a client's history. And other vitamins, you know, it's like certain B vitamins, whilst they may be hitting the suggested recommended daily intakes or adequate intakes suggested by those governing bodies, perhaps still when you go and do some lab work, you're actually seeing that these levels aren't high enough still, which brings into play the, you know, the whole, the whole thought process of like, you know, how much a like hard training individual needs and is, are those RDIs or AIs actually adequate for them in a, you know, in a meal plan or do they need more?

So are there trends that you've seen? 'Cause I mean, you can correct me if I'm wrong at any stage, but you've consulted with pretty high level bodybuilders, figure competitors, bikini competitors, strongmen and powerlifters. And also, you know, the personal trainer who's training fairly hard. And I wanna focus on this demographic to begin with, but you know, obviously there's a comparison of this demographic to say your gen pop demographic. But in this demographic, what are, I mean, are there differences? Like, can you then further go, right, with powerlifters, you actually see this deficiency and this is the labs what you normally see. With bodybuilders, you see this. With figure competitors, you see this. What are some things that you've noted in terms of lab testing with the different demographics?

Yeah, sure. And it's probably worth keeping in mind that, you know, what I see is a niche in that regard. So it wouldn't apply to everyone, but you know, some of the common things that I'll see, like one of the tests I run a lot with athletes is the organic acids test. Acid test. You know, it provides you with—

Just for the podcast, can you just explain what the organic acid test is?

Yeah, so it's like a urine test basically where you're capturing different metabolites released from the body. So those compounds, when you look at them, can be sort of a direct or indirect marker that you can look at, you know, different nutrient status or, you know, there's ones of bacterial or Candida origin in there as well, so.

How does it differ from, before we get into the real good stuff, how does that differ from a blood test?

Obviously it's from urine. Okay, so they're gathered a little bit differently, but you're basically looking at different markers. Okay, so you can use them as an adjunct to some basic blood tests. I think basic blood tests are very valuable in the right hands, especially when you start looking at certain trends over time with a client. But as an adjunct, the organic acids test is quite good. So you can start looking at, specific markers for things like vitamin B6, which is one that I'll see, you know, those particular markers in the organic acids test, such as xanthurenate and kynurenate, they're elevated would suggest that we might have an issue with sufficient vitamin B6. B6 plays a really important role in the synthesis of our neurotransmitters and a whole bunch of other processes in the body as well. So in terms of certain patterns that you'll see with a lot of these competitors, Generally speaking, you've got to remember that you're only really going to run that test on someone who you find it's warranted for. So they're probably complaining of certain things, whether it's fatigue.

What does that mean? Yeah, sorry. So they're complaining of certain things.

Yeah. So the average, so again, just to give a context to the type of person who you might run this test on, maybe it's like extreme fatigue, okay? Maybe it's issues with sleep. Maybe it's things that they've probably sought out medical advice for, or done their own research and just not been able to truly resolve it, but not be, you know, diagnosed with anything that's, you know, clinically, you know, sufficient for them to, for a doctor to take action on. And so they're just in this subclinical realm where it's just like, I don't feel well and I haven't felt well since, you know, X, Y, or Z. So a lot of them it's competing and, you know, some hard dieting and training. And it's basically just led them to a point where they just don't feel good anymore.

So again, I don't want to oversimplify, but I kind of do, 'cause I like to poke the bear a little bit. If you were to pick one test, you'd do the organic acid test over the bloods? No.

No?

No.

Again, so like, I think just doing some basic blood work for a lot of people, just generally speaking, like every 6 months or 12 months is not a bad idea anyway. For someone who's a hard training individual, you'd be looking at that and if anything was to come up, then maybe every 3 to 6 months, you want to be looking at those bloods. But there's still a lot of value to be taken away from getting, you know, the basic chemistry done. I don't run the organic acids test with everyone who walks into my office. That's for sure. Not at all. It's really about if it's warranted, you know, if you see, maybe you see something in the bloods and it's worth investigating a little bit further.

I'll just take a moment to have a quick disclaimer on this. By the way, everything we cover in this interview and podcast or YouTube show, whatever you want to call it, is for information purposes only and for entertainment purposes only. So do not take this advice as what you should do always go see a qualified practitioner. Now that that's out the way.

Yeah.

Done my due diligence. Again, so, all right, I wanna get lean, I wanna get jacked, I wanna get strong. I wanna get as big as I possibly can and as strong as I possibly can. What blood markers are you looking at or what are some commonalities? Let's begin, and are there differences? I know it's a loaded question, but are there differences between bodybuilders and powerlifters first of all, in terms of what you see when you run labs?

No, no, no, not necessarily. Okay. 'Cause again, I think the individual context is more important than trying to treat powerlifters and bodybuilders as completely different. I would have it again, just like to, to lump all powerlifters in one group, which you shouldn't do, but like a lot of them will come to me and their eating is not as standardized or rigorously looked at as with, the bodybuilders because a lot of them don't have the, you know, they have to go through what a bodybuilder does to get on stage. Okay, so perhaps the food quality isn't there. But again, I've got, you know, a great powerlifter, Lauren Green in Sydney, and her food is amazing. You know, she came to me eating, you know, as good as you could ask of any physique athlete, that's for sure. So it's not that I would run different bloods based on them being categorically a bodybuilder or a powerlifter.

Right. But are there trends that you see compared to normal people who are just kind of average training or not training compared to like, I suppose really the question comes from what are the demands that you see from a biochemical point of view that training does that really, if we're wanting to get as big, lean, jacked, and as strong as possible, what are the considerations that we really need to be making? Cause most of the, let's face it, most people are gonna sit down and watch this episode, commit to an hour to go through this content. Content, they're training and they're training hard and they kind of want to know how can I one-up my training?

Yeah. So some of the main things that I'll see come up, okay, would be issues with thyroid. So whether or not the, one of the challenges I suppose, going to a family doctor who perhaps isn't, may not want to look at a full thyroid panel. Okay. So that is just beyond the thyroid stimulating hormone to actually look at the free T3 and free T4. Perhaps go a little bit beyond that and look at some autoantibodies, okay.

Is that male and female, you find thyroid always comes up or is it more specific to females?

So again, like dealing with the type of person that's likely to sit in my office, a lot of the times it will be, okay, challenges with fatigue, challenges with weight loss in regard to the fact that a lot of the other aspects of their nutrition and training are pretty much on point. These people have gotten in shape before and are wondering why perhaps it's a little bit harder this time this time around? Why don't I feel as well? Okay. And a lot of the times it's probably due to like all this hard training, these extra stressors and little downtime or recovery period throughout these, you know, contest preparations or dieting phases and stuff like that. And then it's a case of looking a little bit deeper into some of this blood chemistry. So thyroid, I think is a really important one. Many males that step through my office, you know, they've been consuming like large amounts of protein, that perhaps they're using, you know, various supplements and, you know, medications and things like that, that are putting a burden on their body as well. And perhaps we see some inflammation in there. So, you know, things like their C-reactive protein and their ferritin levels, and we might see elevations through there and have to have a bit of a look at what they're doing and then start talking about what kind of changes they may want to take, take on the nutrition front. To basically look at getting some of these levels back in order.

So, you know, if I was to say, let's work with you and do a whole protocol. Generally speaking, you know, I'm at a reasonable level, you know, I'm sleeping, let's say, okay, not optimal. Let's say I'm eating fairly well, but not optimal. Let's say my training is fairly good, but as you said, in this case, I'm quite tired, I'm fatigued. Where do you begin? So I suppose, sorry, let me direct the question a bit better. 'Cause there are a lot of times in the industry people are talking about, you know, deloading and reducing volume and making sure the training and to a lot of guys who I suppose a bit more hardcore and girls who really want to train and push it. It's like, what do you mean I can't train as much? And what do you mean I've got to cut down the volume? Are you in that camp? Does that have a place or is that overstated?

No, absolutely. So back in 2014, like I was probably doing a little bit more on social media in regards to gut. And thus I was getting a lot of clients, you know, knocking on the door, looking into gut. And what I discovered over sort of 18 months of working through things and testing and conversations was ultimately the clients that I struggled with the most were the ones that sacrificed the most sleep. So then I kind of changed my tune and I realized that, you know, maybe sort of communicating that sleep was really like that important, that—

Sorry. Can you quantify that? As in, what do you mean they were sacrificing sleep? 'Cause I know there's a lot of people who are like, oh, well, I sleep good, but not great. So what is sacrifice?

What does that mean? So I think like when I have a discussion with a client on sleep, one of the things I'll do these days is usually direct them into some of Matthew Walker's work. So he's on the rounds at the moment doing so many podcasts and he's a terrific orator. Like the way he explains things and breaks things down simply for like the general population is absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing. And, you know, directing a client to some of the podcast work that he's done is one of the first steps I do. It saves me, it's just, I'm just leveraging off someone who says it really, really well. But some of the main concepts that I'll talk about with clients is like, look, we really wanna be getting, you know, 7.5 to 8 hours sleep per night, anything less than that. And, you know, our ability to recover and improve the systems of the body is just incapacitated. Okay, it's only gonna work so well. So, you know, whether that is body composition related. So whenever I'm doing a seminar and, you know, I'm talking to a fat loss seminar or a nutrition seminar, I can't help myself. I always interject sleep into the picture because we're an underslept nation and it's just getting worse. And it's a badge of honor to not get enough sleep. So, you know, I simplify the statistics a little bit, you know, I'll say that, but I'll generally say, look, you know, of a kilo of weight lost, okay, between if you sleep 8 hours a night or you just sleep 5 or 6 hours a night, if you sleep 8 hours a night, you might lose 80% fat. So 800 grams of fat, 20% lean muscle. Those figures are flipped, okay, if you're an undersleeper. So you're likely to lose about 80% of lean muscle mass to 20% fat. And that's generally enough to shock people, you know, into like, wow, okay. 'Cause I try so hard with the nutrition front, with the training front, but here I am just, you know, sleeping 5 to 6 hours a night. And this is why it feels like, you know, drawing blood out of a stone. So that's usually enough to get some skin in the game from people to actually understand the sleep. And so the next steps as a coach, I do a lot of work with, is just changing those behaviors. 'Cause that's the hardest thing is that seeing the value of sleep over that, you know, the short term, you don't get it over the short term, you get it over the long term. Yeah. So it's just about finding the right strategies that can work so that you get that payoff. And that's one of the reasons that I talk about tracking sleep. You know, it's, I think that technology can be a good thing used in the right way. And, you know, sometimes we don't know what we don't know. So, someone can say, no, I sleep fine, but then they realize they're sleeping 5.5 hours a night and all these interruptions, or perhaps they're not getting deep sleep or wherever they're cutting it out. Once they start seeing that, then they can start making the changes in the right direction to fix it.

Do you have any go-to sleep hacks, supplements that you like? You like to recommend for clients?

Yeah, so generally don't start off with too many supplements. Like I have done, I used to own supplement stores, right? So like I am—

You're a fan.

Yeah, look, I am a fan. And I suppose these days I really try to unsupplement as often as possible. Okay, so I just like to say, hey, let's use supplements if we need, but like, and I'm sure you've had this situation as well. It's like sometimes you'll have an initial consultation with someone and they come in and they've got two shopping bags full of supplements. Supplements and they go, here's what I take. I don't know what it is. And then you're looking through stuff and half of it's expired. And they go, ah, so my previous coach told me to take that. And then the pharmacist told me to take this. And I got this off the internet 'cause my best friend said, you know, she used it and they don't know what they're taking or why anymore. So I'm someone who likes to peel back on those things first and foremost. And the other thing is, especially when it comes to something like sleep, it's really the behaviors that are, are actually gonna make the biggest difference. Okay, so, you know, avoiding artificial light after dark, avoiding those kinds of activities which get us really worked up into that state of arousal where, you know, where our mind's ticking over and we can't get to sleep. So, you know, I am known to use the blue blocking visors, which will basically, you know, help you relax and fall asleep and, you know, create your melatonin so that you can get all the benefits of sleep throughout the night. Basic stuff first is behaviors.

And any advice for parents who have their kids constantly waking them up?

No, I get asked this. Not really.

Go through that phase of life. Yeah. Getting back into the tests, you know, you've done a fair bit of work with genetic testing. Where does that piece fall for you?

Yeah, I mean, again, so I went through a phase of running a lot of genetic tests, especially 'cause now they're so cheap. Okay, I think when I was first looking into it, when they first came out, they were still around about the $1,000 mark and now they're like $99 or 2 for $100 sometimes when they go on special. And I think they can provide some valuable information, but alone, the problem is, is this, is that people get a genetic test done and then they make decisions based off the genetic test. And I'm like, well, just because, you know, you get a report and it says you have a problem with your MTHFR, okay, you should go and take this form of folate as a supplement at this dose. That's kind of a dangerous territory for me. If the general population is gonna get a freely available genetic test, not see someone who can really help them interpret it and then go and make decisions on what type of supplements/nutrition thing that they're going to do from there. So I think the most valuable way you can use a genetic test is to really look at that, look at your history and nutrient intake and, your general health status and then potentially integrate that up with working with someone who might say, hey, let's go and check your B12 levels or your folate levels or whatever we saw that you may have this vulnerability with based on these polymorphisms or these, you know, our individual alterations in our genes.

So in other words, to make sure I've got it right, is let's say I have a gene where I'm a bad poor methylator, but I might actually through diet, through lifestyle, through nutrition, I might not have known any problems with methylation. But then if I read the genetic test, it says, well, I should be a poor methylator, but in reality I'm actually not and vice versa.

And that distinction is so hard for a normal person to grasp because again, it becomes this emotional tie-in with like, oh, that's my genetics. Okay. And so you can have this conversation with a client and go, hey, this is what we see here, but you know, you're not symptomatic of any of these issues. And during the conversation, it can be okay, but then you may revisit that conversation with that person 4 weeks later, and they're still hooked on the fact that perhaps they're doomed, or they see it as this fatalistic vulnerability that they have. So I can remember cases of, you know, getting these 23andMe reports back of clients where you would see all these, you know, heterozygous and homozygous clinically relevant polymorphism. So these perhaps inability for these enzymes or these proteins to do things well for them in comparison to the norm. But then you look at their blood work, you look at their results they're getting, you look at the way they feel and are and they're perfect. Okay. And so I've probably done less genetic testing just based on my experience that it's hard to keep a client's outlook or mindset around the testing on point. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Yeah.

In other words, it's the environment that loads, what is it? Genetics load the gun, environment pulls the trigger. And that kind of, you know, that's always the quote, I suppose, that gets thrown around anytime you talk about anything genetically. But essentially it is that, like you can have all the markers to let's say a cancer and never get cancer. And then you can have, you know, basically no markers and still get cancer.

Yeah.

It's how you live your life and what's behind it more so. So, and you are using 23andMe, that's the labs, you don't use anyone else in terms of?

Yeah, so 23andMe will provide you with the raw data and then you've got a number of reporting tools, okay, that you can make sense of it. 'Cause the raw data is a huge zip file, okay. So the average person isn't gonna be able to use that and run that through themselves and get anything that, makes sense for them. But there's a host of reporting tools, you know, around about $50 Australian, maybe up to about $100 Australian that you can run that through. And each of them will do their own set of, you know, their genes that they'll look at and give you that information from there. And look, I'm happy I've done mine. Like, you know, I got some insights into things that I wanted to keep an eye on with myself. Okay. So, you know, there's certain genes that I've got like a PEMT gene, which means that I may have issues with phosphatidylcholine, okay. So that is something I look at in my diet, okay, from a nutrient perspective in the way that I choose what I eat. And those are the kinds of things that are beneficial from getting your genetic test done, is you can look at these different nutrients and go, wow, okay, I do wanna focus on that, I like that anyway. If we wanted to look into it there for some of those nutrients, maybe there's a test that could be done, okay. And this is another reason why I do like the organic acids test. There are a few markers in there that make sense in regards to some of that information as well.

I'm not sure if you saw it, but there was a few articles that were released around genetic testing and the efficacy of genetic testing and people then sending some results and then 2 weeks later or the same day, they send another pair of results and they got 2 different tests. What's your take on that?

Yeah, and look, that's, you know, in essence, you know, you're at the whim of this kind of stuff when it comes to these companies, because as a, you know, coach, clinician, practitioner, whoever you are, you're really left at the devices of, you know, the, like you say, the efficacy of the testing that's being done with different laboratories. And like the fact that perhaps, you know, they're sending off samples and getting two different results, it does draw a massive problem with the validity of that data.

So when would you, like, let's say you're working with me as a client again, When would you go, right, Mark, or client, now's the time to get a genetic test? When does that piece fall in for you?

It doesn't look, I don't really do it that much anymore, to be honest with you. So it's, I've seen enough, run enough tests that I feel like if someone's got one, great. Okay. And if someone wants to learn, that's probably the other reason I do it more so at this stage is that I'll have a client or a coach as a client that comes to me and wants to, just make sense of a genetic report. And as we know, one of the best ways that people learn is just to do it on themselves. And so we'll run the report and then we'll just discuss the genes that come up and what type of things may assist with, you know, with that functioning properly. So whether it's a particular vitamin that we could take into account or, you know, staying away from something and that kind of situation. But as a general rule of thumb from a from an optimizing performance perspective or health perspective, I have run less and less of them over time, just because the, the data you can obtain from different labs, for instance, I just find to be a little bit more beneficial.

Yep. And are there any time or any points where you're using an organic acid test to see things inside the gut? I suppose where the real question is, a lot of emphasis gets placed on let's say stool tests, But is it exclusive? Like if you've got a gut issue, you should get a stool test or is there a situation where you would actually use a combination of bloods and organic acids over going straight to the stool test to look at what's happening inside the gut?

No, so I think that the, in terms of gut, the stool test probably gives you some more direct and specific markers. Whereas the organic acids test in which depending on which lab you use somewhere between 50 and, 80 markers that you get back from that where 20 to 30% of those may be useful from a gut. A lot of them are not specific.

Okay.

So it gives you some insights as to whether or not there may be an issue with some dysbiosis or, you know, you've got the extra D-lactate coming up or some arbutinol, which is like a yeast marker. But the stool test from a gut analysis perspective is gonna give you more specificity. The reason you may choose to do an organic acids test is perhaps said individual has a little bit of a gut issue that they think, but you don't really know yet, but perhaps they also are suffering from, you know, all this fatigue and, you know, other symptoms in which you go, you know what, we're gonna, we wanna look into, you know, your functional levels of B12 and folate and B6 and these other nutrient cofactor vitamins. And so you can make the best use of the one test.

So this is where you'd go back to the organic acids?

If it was more than just gut. So if you only wanted to look into gut and you wanted more specific data, you would choose a stool test over the organic acids test.

Right.

In my opinion.

Yeah. Is gut something that's overemphasized?

I think it's, we're going through just an interesting period of time in regards to the research. So again, like in what, 5 years ago now, I was doing mainly gut. Okay, until I realized, oh, this was getting better and better. And the ones that I wasn't getting great results with, those are the ones that I couldn't address the stress and sleep issues. Yeah. And then I sort of changed my focus just in terms of general communication with, you know, my audience and my clients in, you know, I was ruthless on getting good sleep because I was like, look, once we resolve the sleep, a lot of these other things fall into place a lot easier. Okay. So in terms of, You know, one of the things when I did work in the supplement stores is, you know, people would just come in and buy a probiotic. Okay. Just off the shelf, you know, general probiotic. And it would be based on them being advertised on TV or perhaps their friend got it and got some resolution to some gut symptoms. And so they come in and go, don't ask any questions and just go, yep, I'll take that probiotic and come back like 60 days later and go, oh, that did nothing for me. And it's like, well, because we don't know if that will was gonna suit like your issues whatsoever. There's many aspects that you could look at rather than just looking at a probiotic. And so there's some interesting data that came out late last year, just in terms of like the efficacy of using like a probiotic to repopulate the gut bacteria post antibiotics. And so that's made a lot of, you know, practitioners in that naturopathy/functional medicine realm who had been doing the, the post-medication probiotic protocol or regime, kind of step back a bit and go, oh wow, okay, we did not expect to see that we had a worse result of establishing that gut biome back after that.

So what did the research show?

It just showed that, so they had two groups and they gave one a probiotic and one just a placebo. And what it showed was restoring the gut biome actually took longer for those that took a probiotic. And it's just an initial data, like it needs to be, you know, someone else needs to repeat it and we need to look what's going on. But it was enough for some, you know, well-known clinicians to kind of go, whoa, okay, that's like really interesting. Cause we've just been doing that based on the assumption, cause it makes sense, right? You kill the bacteria, let's give them back. And that's not to say that probiotics are useless at all. Like there's a lot of data out there in different, some of it's human data, some of it's like rat studies and things like that, but that probiotics as a transient therapy, so whilst they're actually being used, can modulate parts of the immune system, have effect on our neurotransmitters and our mood and that kind of thing. But in terms of like, do they reestablish the gut biome after that period of therapy has finished? It doesn't look at this stage like it really does.

What would you like from the snippet of data that's been presented in that research? What do you put that down to in terms of like why it's not happening the way theoretically you think that it's supposed to happen?

Yeah, so it could come down to, again, it could come down to like any studies that we set up, you know, it takes time and money and you know, a lot of them are not the duration that we want to see, not the dosage that we want to see that. So again, this is not to say that probiotics don't work. I don't actually think that at all. But when I'm trying to, you know, to teach or just explain to someone, hey, this is the data that we have at this point. At this point in time. And it's not to take away from people's experiences either, because a lot of people when they have a probiotic will have some really positive outcomes in terms of their symptoms disappearing and stuff like that. But it really comes down to more research needed. And I think that a lot of the studies are sort of suggesting that when we take a probiotic in a pill, that it's really just a drop in the ocean. Okay. In terms of really trying to fix that gut biome and perhaps transiently it does, then after we stopped taking, you know, the bottle finishes, you know, we haven't, it's not something that's necessarily gonna stick or hold in terms of that gut balance.

[Speaker] So a friend of ours, David O'Brien, who's gonna be on the next episode, episode 11, he's spoken about, we've spoken about, he's found that there's correlations that no one's necessarily taught him, but through doing stool tests, a lot of stool testing, a lot of clients, getting their bloods as well, he's seen correlations between the stool stool tests and their blood markers. My question is for you, cause you've done a lot of organic acid tests. What unique correlations have you seen that you haven't read anywhere, but you're like, wow, this is interesting between organic acid tests and blood markers, if any?

Yeah, sure. So, again, so a common scenario I'll see is a client will walk through the door and their blood work shows that they're in some state of inflammation. Okay, so they— we might test their highly sensitive C-reactive protein and it's high. So it's greater than 5, which, you know, in the way I view it, you know, greater than 1 is high, but most laboratory reference ranges might have it up to 5 is okay. But maybe that's high and maybe ferritin's high. Okay, so ferritin is a— well, we kind of simplified as like our global storage of iron, but it's something in acute inflammation where we'll see elevations in ferritin as well. So it's not unusual to see that those high, it's not unusual to see GGT, which is in our liver function test high as well. So you can have like a trio of those that might be high. Now in the organic acids test, you might see issues with, there's a marker for oxidative stress in there. Okay. So it where it's looking at basically bits of DNA damage, okay, the metabolites or the compounds that come out when you capture it in the urine test. And so it's not unusual to see the markers of oxidative stress and inflammation high, you know, one in the organic acids test and one in the bloods. So that's a common scenario.

Right, any others that come to mind?

Yeah, I think like, Often, so when we look at things like serum B12, for instance, like in a blood test, now we know that that's a marker which isn't very sensitive. So in other words, you can catching a B12 deficiency in a serum B12 test is like the last place you're going to catch it. Okay. Whereas in an organic acids test, you can catch it with a marker called methylmalonic acid or MMA much quicker than that. So it's always interesting when, you'll see a set of bloods come in and the serum B12 looks okay. And then you catch it on the organic acids test and you go, okay, cool. We might not have caught this for ages if we didn't do the organic acids test.

So can you just explain that with the serum B on the blood test that can be high, but someone can still have low vitamin B?

Yeah. So there's a difference between you capturing it within the blood. Okay. And then it, playing its roles in the body. So in a, what you call like a cellular level, like it doing what it's supposed to do and the metabolite methylmalonic acid that you get on the organic acids test, if that's elevated. And so it has an inverse relationship with B12 that's able to be used, if you like. So it's not just about what you can capture on the bloods. It's, well, is it doing what it's supposed to do? And the fact of the matter is if you, if you have an elevation in methylmalonic acid suggesting that functionally speaking, your B12 is insufficient, then over time, what you'll probably like to see is that serum B12 is probably going to get lower and lower and lower if we keep heading down the same track.

But you're not going to see that for a good long time.

That's right. So it's basically the, you know, it's the third or fourth place that you'll catch it is in that serum B12.

So that blood marker is almost like having cash deposit that you can't actually access on a daily basis. You need to really wait a couple of months to actually pull from that, to use it in anything meaningful in the body.

Yeah, yeah. And again, like when you look at the research and you look at like different countries have different cutoffs for that vitamin B12. So here in Australia, for instance, some of our laboratories, you know, would basically have anything over like, you know, 150, 200, up to 800 might be their reference range, but places like Japan, you know, their cutoff for B12 deficiency would be at 500. That's a pretty big difference, you know, so it really depends on, you know, where you are in the world and as what you're gonna see as, are you okay or not?

Why is there such disparity in lab markers around the world?

I don't know the answer to that. Like this is something that, you know, as I was writing up some content for a course, I had to do some digging around and, you know, I was writing out the RDIs of adequate intakes for a lot of vitamins and minerals and stuff like that. And I remember getting to potassium that we were talking about before. And, you know, Australia here, our governing bodies suggests, I think it's like 2,800 milligrams of potassium per day for females and about 3,800 milligrams for males. Whereas in both the US and the UK, they put that at 4,700 milligrams. And that's a pretty big difference, okay. So 4,700 compared to 2,800 milligrams here for a female, for a very, very important mineral, you know, in our body. And so upon reading that, and then that sort of made me dig a bit deeper into like what I was doing in terms of meal plans. 'Cause of course we're in Australia. So a lot of the time I first and foremost look at our RDIs and our adequate intakes as a minimum, okay. But then after realizing that in the UK and the US, they had, you know, they wanted higher amounts that made me rethink the way, you know, I was writing up meal plans as well.

So you must, I don't know, hate this question, like this question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. Is let's say we put you in charge of all of the meatheads, powerlifters, bodybuilders in Australia. What are some things that you would say, right? You were to write up the code of, I suppose, conduct generalized of things that they need to be taking on a daily basis? We've spoken about sleep. Are there any biohacks, foods, Eugene Teo, you know, and he's pomegranate juice, whatever it may be. Me with my electrolytes, I love them. I recommend to everyone. That's the KTS Solutions from Mark Schaus. There's your free plug. But what are your hacks? What are your supplements? What are your, this is the way you should be training. Is the way to do it.

Yeah, look, I mean, like in general terms, I suppose, like it's interesting 'cause like in our, in the fitness industry, a lot of the time, you know, there's this debate on calories in versus calories out. And we're talking about fat loss. It's the main thing that obviously we talk about in the fitness industry in regard to nutrition versus just clean eating or anything like that. And it's just unfortunate that it always comes back to this. And so, you know, I'm someone who says, look, calories in, calories out, it matters. Like that's a framework. But if that's the only framework you have and you as a coach and educator or someone with a profile in the industry belittles like the other aspects of it, I don't think it's the greatest service you could be doing to your audience either. So, you know, I try to stay out of a lot of those conversations and just bring it back to the basics that don't seem so controversial as such. So no one should be arguing that we need to be getting, hitting these minimum targets, okay. So, you know, I put out basic things on my social media and stuff like that talking about like, let's talk about potassium again. So, you know, in regard to getting potassium into your diet, if you're on a caloric budget, so let's say you're on low calories like 1600 calories, you're gonna have to try very, very hard to hit 4700 milligrams of potassium per day, okay. And what you're going to quickly realize even though meat has potassium potassium in it and avocados have potassium, you're going to want to go and pick a lot of vegetables that are low calorie to go and hit 4,700 milligrams of potassium. It is extremely hard. So if you go filling up your diet, even if it was with a 10 to 20% flexibility of just food that has little nutritive value, but it has the calories, good luck to getting that minimum intake. Some of the, you could call it a hack or, you know, a strategy that I give clients is like, look, in terms of your starch-based foods is that potatoes, sweet potato, pumpkin, the yotubers are clear winners over things like grains. Okay, so, you know, you can easily get 400 milligrams of potassium compared to about 150 milligrams of potassium for the same caloric value between those two things. So if you're not a vegetable eater, then you would damn sure want to be a potato eater, okay? In regards to where you're going to spend your carbohydrates, okay? So fruits and tubers, much better choices than cereals and grains, okay? So it's just like a simple thing that when I work with clients, rice is very big in the bodybuilding, powerlifting industry to get those carbohydrates. And it's not that rice is bad. It's just that what we want to ensure is that we're hitting that potassium intake first. So that would be a basic concept in terms of hitting these minerals. The other thing is—

Sorry, just on that, how much sweet potato would I need to eat on a daily basis to hit my potassium goal?

To hit it?

Yeah, raw weight.

I don't know the math on that. It's gonna be pretty high for you though. Look, I would suppose most of my clients would consume probably 400 to 500 grams of sweet potato potato, sweet potato, pumpkin, something like that to achieve that potassium if they were on anything over 2,000 calories or so.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, but again, it comes along with the vegetables. So you can't beat things like broccoli and cauliflower and spinach in terms of the potassium intake for the caloric intake. They are by far and above the best way to spend your calories to hit your potassium.

So sulfur-rich foods, talking of which, they're a double-edged sword. Explain it because some people are like, yeah, sulfur-rich foods, other people, no, no sulfur-rich foods. What's the deal?

Yeah, I mean, so sulfur-rich foods again, so things like broccoli and cauliflower and things like that, eggs, you know, usually rich in the amino acid cysteine, very important amino acid that we use to build our glutathione, which is our main intracellular antioxidant. And we use it in our detoxification process, very important. But some people have a lot of issues with sulfur-based foods. So it's common to hear things like, oh, I get bloating or gas from broccoli or cauliflower, or perhaps I get reflux, et cetera, from onions and garlic. So a lot of the time when people come to me and they filled out like a questionnaire, perhaps they're saying, oh, I got a fructose problem, but they haven't actually confirmed that because they've looked into onions and garlic and gotten this back from it. So sometimes it's about teasing out what bit is of it, of that said food that's creating the intolerance or allergy or annoying them as such. Okay.

Before we get into the one word game, I did wanna just get into one topic, methylation. I suppose first, can you just explain what methylation is briefly in summary and then why is it important for athletes?

Yeah, so methylation is a process where, Basically taking carbon and 3 hydrogens and we're placing it on another compound so that we can do something with that. So, we use it a lot in gene expression. Okay. So, turning off or on certain genes, but from athlete perspective, and this is, I've talked about methylation with athletes before a lot, is that it's when we wanna make creatine. Okay. So, creatine part of our energy systems, you know, to help us with our ATP. it creates a huge demand on our methylation resources. Okay. So to methylation basically involves the amino acid methionine. Okay. And to resynthesize methionine, we use vitamins like folate and B12. We need a lot of zinc as a cofactor to make these proteins or enzymes work, for instance. And then once we create our main methyl donor, which is S-adenosyl methionine, that can go off and do these methylation reactions for us. So whether it's assisting us with our neurotransmitters, whether it's helping us metabolize our estrogens or whether it's synthesizing things like creatine and phospholipids, that's, I suppose, the understanding of the methylation cycle as such. But for the athlete, again, if you want to ensure optimal creatine synthesis and phospholipids, I mean, these phospholipids is what we create all these cell membranes out of, very important. Important for people that are just breaking down muscle all day long.

And coming back to one of the earlier questions, if you were the head of the meatheads in Australia, I love that term, what supplement would we be giving? Is there a supplement that you think everyone should be taking more of?

Sorry, yeah, so to get back to that, like we got talking about potassium as an instance there, 'cause that's one that I just see being undone all the time. No, but I wouldn't supplement with potassium. So here's the thing, 'cause people ask me, oh, can I just take a supplement supplement and I'm like, look, that's a real like crap way to do it. Like you shouldn't have to take a potassium supplement. It's so easy to get from food. Whereas things like magnesium, for instance, that is one that is so hard to get from food. And this brings me to another sort of thing that we see in the industry is that a lot of experts, you know, influencers don't like to create superfoods, okay. To encourage people to eat this particular food 'cause it's any better than anything else, as long as you're hitting your stuff. But at the end of the day, there's things that you can help clients hit those micronutrient intakes so much easier than anything else. So for me, like eating a dozen oysters per week is something that is so easy to help a client get, you know, the intake of zinc, their omega-3, the selenium, their B12. It's just, it's not something you wouldn't try and eat every day, but you don't wanna get shunned because you're asking clients to go go and eat these types of foods. So, you know, another one would be liver. It's hard to beat liver in terms of its nutrient profile with things like vitamin A, retinol, you know, folate and, you know, some of these minerals as well. But these kinds of things aren't so popular in taste, in taste, but also in the industry, okay. Because doing something once a week, it doesn't fit into like, just give me what I have to do every day. Okay. For me, I'm just trying to change that a little bit. It's the same thing with like collagenous cuts of meat. So, you know, regular lean fillets of meat, very rich in that amino acid methionine, which is great, but we want to sort of balance it with another amino acid called glycine. Now glycine we get from collagen, you know, 30% by weight, but in the fitness industry, cooking up a slow cook is not as easy to measure, track and fit into your app as just doing a lean fillet of grass-fed beef grilled meat. So unfortunately, you know, that's something which has gone by the wayside a lot and something that, you know, when I'm teaching or, you know, trying to show people different cooking methods that I try to get them to reintroduce. I mean, in Australia here right now, we're heading into winter and that's one of the times and also, hey guys, like I'd like us to see more collagenous cuts of meats or slow cooking come in through here. If we can't do that, then we'll go to bone broths. If we can't do that, and we'll go to a collagen-based protein powder. So to come back to a supplement, that's kind of my way of thinking about how we actually get to using standard supplements. Okay. So magnesium would be one of the ones which, you know, it's really hard to get in the diet. I like transdermal magnesium. I like, do like different oral magnesium as well, but getting, you know, once a week of things like liver and oysters, that can be a really great addition to get some of those other minerals minerals too. I think the— I'm not too sure the electrolyte formula is it—

yeah, KCS Solutions.

Yeah. So electrolyte formulas or mineral blends are something that I probably put in more often than not with a client. You know, those, a lot of those minerals support the antioxidant defense system, which ties in with our bioenergetics pathways. And, you know, it just helps us stay away from this oxidative stress and inflammation too. And I do think that soil quality and and nutrition play a role here. Like our food isn't what it used to be, unfortunately. So we do the best we can. Okay. In terms of eating the produce, which is richest in those nutrients, but then supporting it with a supplement. I'm not against that.

Awesome. All right. Now it's time. One word game. So you know how to play. If you haven't watched this episode before or haven't watched in the Wolf's Den, I'm gonna say a word. It could be, let's say superhero and you might say, say Spider-Man. So, ready?

Yeah.

All right, and it can obviously be an extended sentence as well. So, what's something you want to see more of?

Holidays.

Less of?

Less of debating.

Gluten.

Overrated.

If you were an exercise, Ben, what exercise would you be?

I'd be a deadlift.

Injuries.

Lots.

Blood markers.

Exciting.

A good movie.

What's a good movie? You've stumped me on that, man. I can't remember any movies. Comfort food. Comfort food?

Steak. Supplement you can't live without.

Magnesium.

Worst sup— and what form of magnesium?

So transdermal would just be magnesium chloride actually, but I do use a lot of magnesium glycinate for the reason we talked about before that I think most people could do with more glycine.

Worst supplement.

BCAAs.

Really? Almost every guest on this show has said BCAAs. Should tell you something. Go-to breakfast?

Eggs.

A good book?

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.

A respected peer?

Chris Masterjohn.

Someone who has mentored you?

Travis Jones.

A resource all trainers should have?

Uh, Toota Boppa. Any particular book or periodization?

Best recovery tool or process?

Sleep.

Bodybuilding?

Fun.

Powerlifting?

Fun.

A podcast you listen to?

Uh, Peter Attia's The Drive.

What's that about?

Uh, he interviews a lot of researchers actually. Yeah, like in the trench researchers.

Something you're excited about.

Life.

Awesome. Let's give Ben a round of applause. All right, folks, you're watching The Wolf's Den. We'll be back after this short break. Make sure you follow Ben on Instagram. What's your handle, Ben?

BennyLifts.

BennyLifts on Instagram. Anywhere else you want the folks to go?

No.

Just BennyLifts on Instagram. Make sure you check it out. Make sure you subscribe to the show on YouTube and do share this episode with all your friends, get the word out, and we'll see you on the other side of this with audience questions. Hey, hey folks, I hope you're enjoying this great episode with Ben Cant where we're covering all things lab analysis. So while you're watching, make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube. And hey, look, if sitting at your computer and watching long format videos isn't your thing, do subscribe and check out our iTunes at the Enterprise Fitness Podcast and also on SoundCloud. And for the personal trainers watching, check out www.personaltrainermentoring.com. I'll give you my first 5 e-classes to Wolfpack, which is all on structural assessment and screening. So you can head over there and check that out now. So without further ado, let's get back into the interview with Ben. Welcome back to the Wolf's Den. Now we're going to head to audience questions, starting with Matt. Um, I just want to expand on obviously, uh, the gluten kind of topic, which has been been thrown around a lot. You obviously said it was overrated. Is that in terms of kind of, you don't really see it, any benefits for it, or in terms of inflammation or anything like that?

Yeah, so actually going back to my university days, I think my final year project was looking at like, it was in wheat. So, and my mum's a celiac, okay. So I had, pretty heavy bias towards researching it. And then I looked at the changes in gluten over, you know, the last 30, 40, 50 years, probably 60 years now. And I was pretty adamant about like demonizing gluten. Okay. So I thought, yep, cool. I'm on that bandwagon. And it's not to say that I don't think gluten can be an issue for definitely obviously for celiacs, but also for non-celiac gluten gluten-sensitive people. But there's other things associated with like common wheat intake, for instance, that I think adding to the mix here that a lot of people aren't talking about. So one of the things I explain is, you know, we do things like certain sprays that are put on them. Okay. So whether it be things like Roundup or glyphosate or whether it be things like bromide. So I think what you have is a perfect storm, okay, of, wheat-based products, okay? And you combine that with, you know, modern life, chronic stress, and a bunch of factors which can look at an intestinal hyperpermeability, and gluten can add to that, okay, in its effects on zonulin, which will sort of potentially make that permeability of the gut worse. So I think if, people ate truer sources of wheat, okay, that weren't necessarily had so much other stuff in with it as well and could fix their gut with less stress, more sun and that kind of thing that we wouldn't have such an issue. Yeah. Overrated was the one word answer to a one word game.

Very, very good answer. It's kind of similar to what people say about, what was it? European Union outlawed US wheat inside their border. And a lot of people report when they go over to Europe, they don't have any problems with wheat. And that's really because it's the US wheat that they have problems with because the glyphosate, the genetically modified, the percentage of gluten is way higher in US grain than it is in European grain. And the reason why it got rejected by the European market, by the way, was because the chefs and people who, you know, obviously very much a food culture, they're the ones who adamantly rejected it as it, because it offered no consumer benefit. In terms of, you know, there's low fat, there's no sugar, but, you know, wheat with no, you know, being genetically modified, there's no really consumer benefits. So, they didn't see a reason to keep it into the market. So, it was actually the consumer that said, we're not going to buy this crap.

Yeah, I mean, we modified it back when, you know, in the '50s, whenever it was, we were going to solve starvation globally. That's why it got modified so that we could breed it and, you know, aim for that goal. But at the end of the day, I think again, it's a hot topic in terms of a lot of the books and stuff that can come out in terms of gluten-free. And I don't necessarily think it's a bad option. And going back to those things that are added to it, you know, here in Australia and a lot of places around the world, I'm not too sure if it's in the US as well, but they fortify it with, you know, B vitamins. And in actual fact, when, if someone comes off a lot of cereal, grain, wheat-based products and doesn't head towards rich sources of nutrients, some of their main B vitamin intake may be coming from these cereals. Now, unfortunately, you know, I've talked about this previously about folic acid, which is a synthetic form of folate, which we don't really find in natural foods, been added to wheat. And it's very easy to consume, you know, 3 to 5 cereal-based products a day if you're following the food plate or the food pyramid, whatever we have now, and go way beyond even the recommended daily intake of folate or of folic acid, which is 400 micrograms a day. And you know, you can easily get up to 1.2 milligrams. So 3 times that amount and basically unmetabolized folic acid in high amounts has been shown to drop natural killer cells, which are part of our immune system, which go and destroy cancer. So it's very easy to unknowingly get a lot of these chemicals through things like wheat. You add in that to bring back to a fitness population, how many fitness How many guys do you know that are using a multivitamin or a B vitamin? They're using a pre-workout formula. Maybe they're using a superfoods greens formulas. All of those might have 300 or 400 micrograms of folic acid in as well. So you have a guy that bases his carbohydrates on wheat-based products. He's taking 3 supplements and he's taken, you know, 8 times the recommended amount of folic acid of which we already know that that's gonna be quite dangerous to facets of the immune system.

Well, it is interesting. It was, it was, uh, put in to help solve the starvation. But in actual fact, what they found, just on a political note, is introduction of US grain into third world countries is one of the worst things you can do for feeding the population. Because what it does is it essentially keeps the population to rely on US grain rather than— and also it keeps the local market from growing because the local market essentially they can't compete with the free US grain. So anything that would otherwise— people would have to go to that local farmer, they're now getting for free. So then their whole economy is now collapsing because there's no sustainability, which is also from a political point of view something to consider.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Great question, Matt. Yeah.

Hello, Ben. Hello, Mark.

Hi, Ben.

I have a question for you. You've obviously made it very clear that sleep is mission-critical to optimal health. I have a question about non-linear sleep, AKA napping. I myself, I'll, you know, go to sleep around 10:30. I'm often up 4:30, so I'm not getting my 8 hours at that point, but I will throw in a half-hour nap throughout the course of the day. What are your thoughts on whether or not, you know, that still enables me to arrive at a point of optimal health? Versus the negative side effects of not getting a full 8-hour sleep?

[Speaker] Yeah, so, okay. In terms of napping or what they call bimodal sleeping, okay. I used to think that that wasn't a good thing. And obviously I coach a lot of coaches, okay. A lot of them doing split shifts and, you know, these schedules. Then as I looked into research and particularly listening to guys like Matthew Walker, you know, with his research and his ability to speak at so well, I came to completely shift on that. And now still working with a lot of coaches who this is a current issue for, is I more work with them at the start. What I find is, is that they're sleeping, they're napping too late in the day, okay? So they're wiping off this sleep pressure, which is one of the components along with our circadian rhythm, in which helps us optimize our sleep. So if their nap was, you know, common nap for trainers is somewhere between like 3:00 and 4:00 or 2:30 to 3:30, 2:30 before they go and hit up those nighttime clients. What I'll often get them to do is bring that napping forwards, perhaps even before they go and train in the afternoon, which seems a little bit hard to do first off the bat, and it is. But what you can then do is start building up that adenosine, that sleep pressure, by the time you need to go to bed again, that you're not just sitting there staring at the ceiling thinking about what's happening the next day. So it's just about shifting that nap forwards if it was interfering with them actually being able to fall asleep at night. But a caveat to that as well is that I would still be looking at the total amount of hours slept, sleeping. And you know, I deal with a lot of shift workers, whether it be like nurses or police officers. And you know, I'm very transparent with saying to them that like, look, if their total ability for sleep is like 5.5 to 6 hours per night based on their career, I'm telling them, to find another career. Like, I love the service that, like, you know, you think about what nurses do for us in hospitals, you know, it's a job that's, you wouldn't, you know, want to be in hospital without that, their service. But on the same token, I think it is, you know, the World Health Organization has now listed that kind of thing as a probable carcinogen with shift work. And I think that we'll just see more and more literature that really exposes that kind of disruption to our biology.

That's a fantastic answer. Thank you. And I guess a follow-up to that is, I'm sure you can't— potentially you can't put an exact number on it, but at what point, you know, is there a point rather where you can sleep for 7 hours a night or 6.5 hours a night, have really deep REM sleep, and still be functioning at that optimal level that you mentioned earlier?

So the answer to that, I would say is no. Okay, I mean, it depends what you want to term functional, right? 'Cause at the end of the day, like when we're underslept, our perception of our ability to complete a task or do whatever is highly skewed, okay? We have this confirmation bias, which, you know, we think that we're capable, but if you were to go and try and get tested, you know, in a lab, like performing a task, you would quickly find out that you don't, you're not holding up to it as well as you think you are. So, as we age, we have a tendency to have problems falling into deep sleep and getting the benefits of that recuperation anyway. I think that you really wanna get in front of it as early as possible and try and remedy where that sleep deficit is.

Yeah.

Thanks, Nicholas. Tyrone. So, hey, we're saying with just with shift workers, is there anything, obviously not all of them are actually gonna change their career when you, because they wanna get healthier. Is there anything you do to aid them with getting a better sleep or better recovery or nourishing their adrenals so that obviously you can help them still get healthier and a better quality of life?

Yeah, absolutely. So each one, You know, it depends on what you're capable of doing and I suppose what their potential problems are. So, you know, you can just ensure that the timeframe that they do have, they can get the sleep. So, they've got to sleep during the day, you obviously wanna make the room as dark as possible. You wanna make sure that you're controlling the temperature, the things that we know that are gonna help you fall asleep. Whether it's blocking that, you know, blue light spectrum after dark by using some blue light visors. That's another thing I would recommend as well. I do see issues with hydration with clients that are on shift work or don't sleep well. Okay, so I'll ask them about things like their frequency of urination and look out for classical signs of dehydration and having to work probably a little bit harder with them on managing their sodium, potassium, magnesium, and minerals, you know, from that electrolyte balance. That's something I think that they're up against more so because of that style of shift work.

Why does shift work deplete potassium, magnesium, electrolytes?

Yeah, so when you start playing around with, so when you start waking up at various different times, you disrupt the strength of that circadian rhythms and all of our hormones work on these patterns of ebbs and flows. And so some of these hormones like antidiuretic hormone or vasopressin and aldosterone that are involved in our regulation of, you know, our fluids, you start disturbing them. Okay. And so you'll often see, it's the same as, you know, let's take a non-shift worker for instance, but someone who's getting up in the middle of the night to urinate like all the time. So that's a sign that their hormones, you know, aren't optimal in terms of that. Cause during the night we shouldn't have to get up and wake up to go to the toilet. So that's a It's about understanding potentially what's going on, looking at the minerals/electrolyte content that you have in the diet, look at the behaviors about them going to sleep, how can we improve that? And sort of tracking and measuring it. So that's, you know, it's a question in my weekly check-ins and that is talking about going to the toilet and things.

And just in a follow-up on the sleep, with, in regards to people that do wake up once or twice during the night, but still get that 7 to 8 hours or 7 to 9 hours sleep. What's your view on that? Because I think Matthew Walker said that it could be seen that, you know, back in caveman times that we did do 2 4-hour shifts of sleep in that retrospect. What do you think of that?

Yeah, that's right.

So, or is it okay to wake up a couple times a night and still get 7 to 9 hours sleep?

I think it is. Like, again, so if you were to you look into your metrics of your sleep and you were still achieving like enough total sleep, enough deep sleep and REM, I wouldn't really have a problem with it. What I would bring the conversation back to though is the fact that you have to get up to urinate at night just tells me a little bit that perhaps we need to work on, you know, what's going on here, whether it's some dietary or behaviors, some kind of strategies to look at that. So I think what you'll find, well, what I find is that when someone has that history, they're actually not getting the greatest sleep. So more common, so perhaps for yourself, you do just wake up, go to the toilet, go back to bed, bang, you're out. Sleep looks really good. A lot of clients don't. They wake up and then you just see, you'll see their sleep data, you know, get a screenshot of like an app of a piece of tech that they're using, like a Fitbit or an Oura Ring or something. And you'll see tossing, turning and awake, awake, wake awake and that's obviously chewed into the actual amount of time spent sleeping.

Next question.

So just in regards to like clients who suffer binge eating and it's probably heightened a lot more since this whole cheat meal ordeal. What's your approach with that? Do you address like the psychological behaviors first, given that a lot of them do want that fat loss? Or I guess putting them into a deficit could worsen the binge eating cycle. So, what's probably your best approach?

Yeah. So, the first thing is that I, if I was first sitting down with someone with that, and this brings back to your disclaimer that we sort of inserted halfway through the podcast, is that, you know, I have a network with a great psychologist, okay, that I use with some clients. So, if this is an issue that's, needs to have, you know, some support with, the first thing I'll do is ensure that I've got that on my side. And in regards to whether it's uncontrolled eating, you know, this is a little bit of a contentious issue in regard to food because there's some experts that are divided on this in terms of like whether or not food is addictive. But nonetheless, when you look at the research, I think everyone agrees upon addictive addictive-like behaviors associated with food, that being that, you know, we feel a lack of control around certain foods and some of those facets. We don't classify it as a true addiction because there's no withdrawal. Well, apparently there's no withdrawal. I don't know. Some people might have withdrawal over certain things. So, one of the things that I always talk about is Stephen Guinée's work on this, you know, who wrote The Hungry Brain and he is basically talked about controlling the food environment first and foremost. So if we're dealing with, you know, cravings and being able to distinguish with a client what's the difference between a craving and hunger, okay? So like a homeostatic reason to eat versus a reason to eat that's not associated with maintaining a normal, like balance or homeostasis. And, you know, Stefan's work and Schwartz and Hall, some great researchers in this neurobiology field, of obesity research, which look at these certain behaviors that these people display about when they overeat. Okay, so whether it be, you know, when we're stressed or whether it be when, you know, we're unorganized and the day's gotten the better of us and those kinds of things. So, it's really just about, for me, I like to get them to watch some, like something that Stefan's done, okay? Or read the book for instance, so that they can start to realize that probably the most important thing in the first step in the right direction would be to control your environment. Okay? 'Cause that's most of the time what clients will tell us is, you know, I was going through the supermarket and I just grabbed the, you know, the pack of chocolates or the pack of donuts or whatever it is. Or I was, you know, you know, hungry and I went to the pantry and I couldn't, I didn't want to eat anything healthy, but I knew there was something in the freezer. So I went and ate that instead. And again, so if you start to understand that and then take control of your food environment, you can start getting on top of these type of behaviors, I suppose. Yeah.

I'll just add to it as well. I've had a lot of success with this. One of the things that I always note to clients is I don't have a qualm in saying it. There is no such thing as such thing thing as a cheat day. 'Cause the minute you, the minute a client says it's a cheat day, what does the word cheating evoke? It evokes guilt. So you're already behind the 8-ball. So it's not a cheat day, it's a refeed or it's a planned meal or it's an extra meal. It's something that is completely within your plan to get rid of the factor of guilt. Because if they're referring to their food as cheating, then of course, even though it's part of their plan, subconsciously it's not part of their plan. They're doing the wrong thing. So it's gonna, it's applied, it's indirect guilt. So I think in terms of linguistic reframe, that's also a very important point that there is no cheating. It's just everything is planned and everything is on point. The other thing I like to do is there's a, I've got a few videos on this on YouTube, but pyramid of change. And at the top you have your identity, below that beliefs and values, below that skills and skill sets, below that is your behaviors and below that is your environment talking about, but often from what you said, the where they are with their eating is affecting, but you can also scale up. And if what I mean by scaling up is I give all clients a mantra and that is I'm a healthy person who eats healthy foods that build and nourish my body. In that framework, let's say you're gonna go out and eat something McDonald's, let's say in this example, that's fine, but you're still a healthy person who eats healthy foods and builds nourish your body. The reason why you're eating McDonald's is because maybe you wanna connect with friends, maybe it's socialization, maybe, you know, it's that one meal every month, you know, it's not every other day. So that's also a very important, I think, piece to bring back to clients is that the way they're applying a cheat meal is from a framework of I am a healthy person who eats healthy foods that still build and nourish my body rather than like, that's all excluded. Excluded because often I see with clients' behaviors with cheat meals, they exclude everything just to do the treat meal and then they try and come back to that identity of being a healthy person. It doesn't work, doesn't fit. So usually what you find happens is they spend whole day benders and they get really off the beaten path and then it's much harder to develop that momentum. Whereas if you marry the framework of them being a healthy person and then going eating whatever they want, you usually have a lot more success because you're doing it in a framework that is part of the person holistically rather than something separate, which often a cheat meal idea brings in.

Yeah, look, I don't use cheat meals with any clients for basically the same reasons that you've just stated. Like I hate the terminology of it as well. And like, it's always interesting when you have a client or, you know, maybe some consultative work and you know that they eat really well for like 99% of their lives. These guys are in shape and then on their social media, They're like posting pictures with like pizzas and burgers and like, 'cause they'll get like thousands of likes on those types of photos. Like if you're shredded, you have a six-pack and you're flopping around pizzas, like that's what people like wanna see.

It's the lie.

Yeah, exactly. It's the lie.

People are buying the lie.

And it's always interesting when they're like, you don't eat like that.

You don't eat like that.

I know you're eating my meals, but you know, that's part of the industry unfortunately. And I think I have so many conversations with clients clients to go and just clarify with them, that person doesn't eat like that. They don't have a set of values like that. What you're seeing there is, you know, purely for the reasons of, you know, whatever the profile or whatever it is that they're trying to make. And it's about, you know, seeing where your set of values are and seeing where a person like that, their set of values are. And when you start to identify that gap and realize what perhaps kind of changes we want to make internally that you can sort of find peace with that.

Yeah. Awesome. Next question. Another 4?

One more question. Going back to your sleep question actually, what would be the optimal time to, for a sleep duration as to not oversleep or you don't want to undersleep to not have the same effect? So what's like the optimal napping time?

Oh, napping you mean?

Oh, well in between, like especially for coaches, just having that sleep in the middle of the day, what would, yeah, the optimal time?

Yeah, again, so going back to a napping setup, look, I think what I found with most clients is that you want to go through like 1 to 2 full sleep cycles. So, we have a cycle of sleep where we go through the different phases of sleep. And if you can basically wake up, you know, after a cycle rather than interrupting the cycle, you generally speaking feel like you've come out of that. Feeling refreshed. Okay, whereas if you kind of wake up mid-cycle, it can feel a bit like a grogginess. Okay, so just, you know, I've played around with, you know, 90 minutes, okay, as a general rule of thumb of somewhere to start and just see how someone feels coming out of it then. Okay, or you could go for a couple of cycles, you know, it could be like 90 minutes or 3 hours or something. But I think for most coaches or trainers, that 1.5-hour mark is a nice place to start from. Point of departure and you can just go either way from there.

So I just wanted to ask what you were saying before about the, like if someone's done a round of antibiotics or antimicrobials and then the research with the probiotics for reinoculation, what are your thoughts on what we should be doing instead to rebuild the microbiome?

Is it like more prebiotic-based foods, like focusing on lifestyle? What are your thoughts around that? Yeah, so obviously I have clients that will do rounds of antibiotics and I still think that like a probiotic therapy is not a bad place to start with things. I would probably say that I err on the side of using Saccharomyces boulardii, like a friendly yeast, okay. When you look at the literature on that associated with things like not just reinoculating to reestablish the microbiome, but you know, basically colonizing the area, helping with secretory immunoglobulin A, which is very beneficial for, as part of the immune system and looking after the gut integrity as well. So I think that is probably my go-to, okay, in terms of an adjunct to any form of antibiotics. And like I said, most of the research with antibiotics-associated diarrhea is with SB as well. But yeah, like with probiotics, I still think there might be some value warranted in using them. It's just like, I didn't expect for that study to come out and show that, that's for sure. I was like, wow, okay. It was like, I think it was October 2018. I can't remember who published it, but it was when it came out. I know a lot of practitioners had just took a step back and was like, damn, okay. Because many people have been doing that for such a long time. So I think really what needs to happen is we just need more research. We need to see if that is repeated. If it's not, it may not withstand another set of researchers repeating that data.

I do get quite a few vegetarian clients, which are quite hard to deal with, and obviously ethical reasons is hard to influence. What's your best approach in terms of nutrition and supplementation? Obviously, they're not getting the B12, they're not getting glycine. So what's your best guess What's your best approach to make sure they're getting as many micronutrients as possible?

Yeah, so look, I have many vegan and vegetarian clients, have pretty much always had those clients. So again, it's about establishing what exactly they do want to eat and don't want to eat. So for instance, you know, a lot of vegetarians that will eat eggs, I think that's gonna cover a lot of sources of nutrients that we're looking at. In terms of filling in the gaps with other nutrients, it's, it's, I think it's gonna be very hard. Like when I look at the bioavailability and absorption of a lot of nutrients coming from plant-based food, it really doesn't stack up well against the same nutrients coming from, from meat-based foods. Okay, so that's hard because even if you're on paper seemingly hitting these intakes that you wanna get, I think you're very vulnerable in choosing to eat that way about not actually incorporating and being able to utilize some of those nutrients.

Okay.

So fortification with things like B12, absolutely. I think that is gonna be, you know, one of the main ones, you know, when you're coming back to say bloods versus the organic acids test, for instance, with a vegan and vegetarian client. So if you use serum B12, and you're looking at vegetarian vegans with deficiency, you're likely to show up around about a, I think it's under 10% deficiency for vegetarians and around about 30% deficiency for vegans of B12. Now, if you run a methylmalonic acid on an organic acids test, those numbers jump, okay, up to 60% and 70%, okay, done on the same day. So that's a huge variation in potential B12 deficiency. So how many vegans and vegetarians are getting methylmalonic acid done in an organic acids test? It's not happening. What they're getting is serum B12 levels checked and seemingly okay. But what we have is potential, you know, using a lab which doesn't really cut it. I mean, that's 3/4 of vegans and vegetarians, you know, that are showing up with insufficient B12. Okay. So, Yeah, I think that's gonna be very important. I think retinol is a real problem, okay. Plant-based vitamin A that the vegan or vegetarian isn't gonna get that easily. Sorry, vegetarian could get from some egg yolks, but a vegan is not gonna get. And, you know, I stole this from Chris Masterjohn, who's done a lot of work on fat-soluble vitamins. When he gives a seminar or a talk and he'll basically divide the room in two and talk about this This half can use, you know, carotenoids from plant-based foods, which is a precursor to vitamin A well, okay, coming back to our genetics and our polymorphisms. And this half are gonna do it half as well as them, okay. And then this half of you guys are only gonna do it as quarter as well. So, it comes back to talking about individuals and how well they're gonna do with certain food intakes. So, some vegetarians or vegans that have these polymorphisms on these, what they call beta-carotene monooxygenase, enzymes, they are going to do not as well on plant-based carotenoids. Okay. So, and this is whereby I think you'll take into account when you see some vegetarians and vegans seemingly thrive on their choices of food and others seemingly go the other way. And there's a multitude of factors involved in that, but that's just highlighting one. So, yeah.

And a lot of the time, the the ones who turn vegan, you're comparing a standard Australian diet to a vegan diet and a vegan or vegetarian diet is usually better than the standard Australian diet and that's why they've lost the weight. And then they get that false sense of security that, oh, what I'm doing is really good because I've lost X amount of weight. Well, you're comparing a really bad diet with a slightly less, a diet that is better but is still missing lots of foods.

Look, I read an interesting statistic literally yesterday. That like, I think it's 84% of vegans turn back to eating meat. Okay. And of those, when they asked them why, the reason that they did it in the first place was for health reasons. So not for the ethical reasons. Okay. So for those that seemingly do it for health, a lot of them are the ones that don't choose to keep doing that for the long term.

Okay.

Which makes sense because if you're doing it for ethical reasons, perhaps you're willing to do it beyond that marker of health as your, you know, your set point or what are you looking at. So it's hard and you know, when we get involved in this discussion, I'll only really discuss it with rational people because if someone's gonna sit there and talk about it in terms of their belief structure on the issue and not open to any aspect of the discussion on the rational science behind it, but want to cherry-pick data on science, there's no point having a discussion with that person. I'm completely okay with their choice.

But I'll give you a reference. I did an interview 2011. It's evergreen. Like this one was spot on with Lierre Keith. She wrote the book, The Vegetarian Myth, and she went through through political, moral, health. And the reason why she, 'cause she was a vegan activist. Like she was the one out the front throwing paint on people wearing, you know, fur coats and that kind of stuff. She was full on into it. You couldn't be any more full on than Lierre. And then she had to start eating meat again 'cause her health failed and failed catastrophically. So we, I was fortunate enough to have an interview with her. I had a full discussion. It's on our iTunes. So it's Enterprise Fitness Podcast, which you can check out. It's on YouTube as well. Which you can check out. And we do a very good job. She does a very good job of breaking down moral, ethical health, and then some ways that you can start to introduce that further beyond. But she goes for the political thing. She goes for the moral thing. Like she talks about it very, very, very well. So that's another place that you can look. And her book's fantastic too. Thanks for watching The Wolf's Den. This was episode 10 with Ben Cant. Ben, when, where can people check you out?

They can, Wait for a website coming soon, which I'll put up on my social media. Until then, maybe you check it out at Benny Lifts on Instagram. That's where I put a lot of my content up. And so when that website launches, I'll put it there and then you can jump on.

Awesome. So Benny Lifts on Instagram for more great stuff from Ben Cant. So from us, make sure you subscribe to us on YouTube. Do share this podcast and wherever you're listening with your friends, it's on SoundCloud and on iTunes. And as always, folks, till next time, train hard, supple up, I wasn't smart anyway.