Decoding Diet: The Science of Nutrition Beyond Calories with Dr. Dean St. Mart

Is there actually any material impact on being, you know, vegan versus carnivore versus paleo?

We first probably have to go right back to the basics of the three macronutrients: fats, protein, carbohydrates. Keto diet is basically you limit your protein intake to less than— it's around 100 grams per day. You limit your total carbohydrate intake to about 10% of your total calories. and then the rest comes from fatty acids. And then you arrive at vegan, which is probably the most strictest of them all. And we're starting to see this become a, almost like a global fad, if I'm honest, on people falling into trying out veganism as a way towards improving the planet's sustainability. We do have this debate that it's not just a matter of what we call CICO, calories in, calories out. One of the strategies that we can obviously implement in order to improve daily performance would be understanding how our bodies break down carbohydrates. And at the end of the day, it comes back to the basics of providing the body with those macronutrients: fats, carbohydrates, and proteins.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Dr. Dean St. Mark, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. It's great to have you here, sir.

Thanks a million, Ryan. I'm really honored to have been invited. I know it's been a long time trying to align the stars to figure out a time where we're both in the same place, but really looking forward to this conversation.

Yeah, so am I. So my, my personal trainer, who's amazing, Larry Doyle, who I want to give a shout out to huge fan of Larry, recommended that I start watching your content, and I dove in and was just incredibly, incredibly impressed. I, I think of you a little bit like an Irish Dr. Andrew Huberman. I know your topic and focus area is a little bit different to Dr. Huberman's, but, uh, your, your knowledge is just incredible. Um, so I've been, yeah, really excited to chat. I want to just start by reading out your bio here so everyone has a little bit of background context. So you're the product formulator for a UK-based supplement brand called Supplement Needs and a fitness industry renowned pharmacologist that is known for your no-nonsense approach when it comes to PED safety and health management through direct science. And you hold a double first-class honors degree in chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry from the National University of Ireland in Maynooth, where you finished top of the university. And you also hold a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry and fluorescence spectro— spectro— how do you, how do you pronounce that one?

Spectroscopy.

Spectroscopy. There we go. It's a, it's a mouthful. Uh, and then you're also the author for the National Academy of Sports Medicine, uh, recently writing two chapters at the SME for dietary supplements and PEDs, which stands for performance-enhancing drugs, on their bodybuilding and physique, uh, coach qualification. And finally, your interests lie again in PED pharmacology, novel drug design, health supplementation, and applying functional medicine to athletes to improve their health and your love of functional medicine is what led to the creation of a lot of the Dr. Dean supplement range within the Supplement Needs brand in order to provide a one-stop shop for consumers to purchase products that are dosed efficaciously, backed by clinical research, and fully transparent without any hidden proprietary blends. So before we hit record, Dean, I was just mentioning to you that I noticed and have noticed since I moved to the US that people seem to have— and this is a generalization, may not actually be true, this is my observation— a little bit less of a tight truth filter, let's say, here versus in Ireland and England when it comes to nutrition and training as well. And I'd love if you could actually just start us in a really basic place and give folks a little bit of a breakdown on the research that you're aware of around different types of diet and their impact on health and performance. Is is there actually any material impact on being, you know, vegan versus carnivore versus paleo, or is it about other variables like your body fat percentage, you know, sleep, micronutrient quantity, etc.?

I guess you raised a really interesting topic, and you touched on— I obviously wrote the section on dietary supplements for the National Academy of Sports Medicine. And one of the things that I had to delve into was, you know, applying dietary supplements to different populations, whether it's vegan, vegetarian, keto, etc. So when we sort of look at how each of these diets are made up, we first probably have to go right back to the basics of the 3 macronutrients: fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, and how they're utilized by the body. Towards different energy systems. And then if we want to get to another level of complication, our body has different preferences depending on the activity that we're doing, whether it'll burn fats or whether it'll burn carbohydrates and sugars. And each person potentially may have a genetic variability whether they prefer to burn more fat at rest than carbohydrates. And that's when we start to see people who potentially try out some of these new diets that have been probably around for 20 to 30 years now at this point surrounding nutrition research. And they find that it does bring great efficacy. So for example, a keto diet is basically, um, you limit your protein intake to less than— it's around 100 grams per day. You limit your total carbohydrate intake to about 10% of your total calories, and then the rest comes from fatty acids. Basically, that was adopted as a fashion towards potentially the impact that carbohydrates have on insulin secretion and how people potentially develop diabetes. And we often see with those who follow this sort of high-fat, moderate-protein, low-carbohydrate diet that their sensitivity to glucose and to carbohydrates that they ingest improves. And that potentially is an artifact of giving their pancreas, which makes insulin, a break, and their cells get a break from being exposed to glucose. You have probably more so the, the stricter form of keto, which is carnivore. And carnivore is essentially you just eat anything that is from an animal, so from the flesh head to tail. They do not consume any carbohydrates and their fats and proteins are obtained through animal sources alone. So there's, there's no supplementation. They, they believe in sort of that primal instinct of a hunter-gatherer and obtaining your nutrition via meat sources alone, so from animal produce. And you have then different breakouts. You'll have vegetarian, where they will consume some animal products So in terms of their nutrition intake, you probably don't see as much of a deficit where they're able to consume dairy and to some extent eggs. And within vegetarian or pescatarian, where you're eating some level of fish as well. And then you arrive at vegan, which is probably the most strictest of them all. And we're starting to see this become almost like a global fad, if I'm honest, on people falling into trying out veganism as a way towards improving the planet's sustainability. And one of the interesting points surrounding why veganism has become so, I guess, important is that to produce 1 kilo of animal protein, we need to utilize 6 kilos of biomass or 6 kilos of plant produce in order to create 1 kilo of animal produce. So the argument there is that it's an unsustainable method of continuously providing the planet with a source of animals and their impact towards potential global warming. And I don't fall into any sort of tribalism. Everything in my mind has a a relative flaw. And at the end of the day, it comes back to the basics of providing the body with those macronutrients— fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. And I guess one of the more extreme examples that we find within the fitness industry that became very popular over the last 10 to 15 years was If It Fits Your Macros, IIFYFM. And, and it was basically you gave yourself a target. So if you ingested, say, 3,000 calories per day, of that 3,000 calories, you divided it down into particular percentages of each of the macronutrients that you needed to obtain on that day. And it didn't matter what way you obtained that nutrition, whether it's from Pop-Tarts, sugary cereal, um, I guess vegetable oils, whatever way you wanted to obtain those macronutrients depending on your lifestyle your sweet tooth, etc., it sort of overlooks the impact that nutrition has on the body. And when I mean nutrition, we're looking at single food ingredients and minimally processed that are just sources of macronutrients alone without any other additives.

Dean, what I always emphasize to people is that rather than one of the specific diets you mentioned being the most healthy, that it's actually more productive to think about your diet across other dimensions. And the ones that I tend to emphasize are, you know, appropriate macro splits, so the right amount, as you said, of fats, carbs to protein, uh, the appropriate total calorie intake such that ideally it lands you eventually at a healthy body fat, sufficient micronutrient intake, and then as a fourth dimension the removal of things that maybe you individually don't tolerate well, whether it's gluten or dairy or whatever it is. Do you think those 4 pillars are solid, or what are some other, you know, lenses you would emphasize to people to think through their diet?

I, I think you've got it well covered in the aspect that you, you obviously— if it fits your macros mentality is obviously appropriate, that you're setting a target of say 200 grams of protein, 300 grams of carbohydrate, 40 grams of fat. And again, how they sort of differ perhaps from someone who's of a more nutritious standpoint is that they will accept, um, the nutritional intake of fast-acting carbohydrates, you know, sugar-laden foods, um, with 40 grams of fat, probably not as much I guess unhealthy foods, if you even wanted to call it that. But it opens up them then to potentially macro swaps. So sometimes you'll find where someone will subtract 50 grams of carbohydrate to give it to fat so they can fit in their favorite foods. But obviously then, as an athlete, if we're going to come at this through the lens of a progressive athlete who wants to improve their performance, depending on your recovery capabilities, doing this sort of macro swapping might limit your overall recovery if you require more, say, glycogen post-training to be replenished in order to fuel the next training session. If you're doing these macro swaps in order to fit in, you know, Pop-Tarts or slices of pizza, yes, overall you're still obeying potential thermodynamics of calorie intake and fueling the body, but it's probably not appropriate to the energy system that's being required to be fueled, uh, based off that nutrition.

Right, that makes sense. Yeah, there's still a, there's still a cost to eating lower quality foods even if you can fit it into your macros. Um, that makes sense. But another thing that I think people, you know, contend with a lot is whether or not, uh, the, the law of thermodynamics, um, when it comes to, you know, calorie balance is fully true. Um, is it the case that, you know, all you need to lose body fat is to be in a calorie deficit, and that if you are not losing body fat, you are definitely not in a calorie deficit? Uh, because this is one that people, I think, complicate tremendously. You've got, for example, people like Gary Taubes who, you know, emphasize that it's due to insulin sensitivity or, you know, various food types that you're eating, and it confuses people, I think, a ton. So Maybe you could settle the debate on calorie balance for us.

I guess this is a very edgy topic because you're gonna have people who sit on both sides of the fence. In my view, yes, what we're talking about here in terms of law of thermodynamics is basically that energy cannot be destroyed. It's basically changed from one form to another. So within a system, when we when we burn fat for fatty acids, that goes towards generating energy that the liver can harness, and that feeds then into the mitochondria, which are powerhouses that burn our fatty acids. So we, we do have this debate that it's not just a matter of what we call CICO— calories in, calories out. There are hormonal influences here that are often oversought, and, and it can get, you know, quite grimy in, in the nutritional space when people are arguing this point, because they tend to see it as either, you know, you're not, you're not in a deficit, you're not eating less, or you're not moving enough. So therefore, you're lazy. And that's why you're not losing body fat. But we could see issues with hepatic metabolism, so their liver, their bile, sort of bile flow, their bile production, all of that could be compromised. So again, how they utilize fatty acids, how they digest fats could be compromised. And fats in of themselves then feed into— especially saturated fats, who have the cholesterol backbone— feeds into male hormone synthesis. So again, that person could be mildly deficient in testosterone, and testosterone has an impact on how we convert our thyroid hormones. And obviously our thyroid hormones control a level of our metabolic rate. So you can see it does as we sort of peel the layers of the onion back, we can see, yes, we still have to obey this, um, energy law whereby we need to be consuming less food or creating an energy demand where the body is utilizing body fat stores to fuel the body in order to lose body fat. But it becomes a lot more complicated in terms of the hormonal milieu that controls that metabolic process. And also our mitochondrial efficiency, which are the actual cells in our body that burn these fatty acids for energy, how efficient or how many mitochondria we actually have in our body. And that's why we often see people who have a level of mitochondrial dysfunction and have issues with weight gain, a cellular inflammatory process of the body because of they're not providing a body with enough antioxidants to help protect the mitochondria. And whilst mitochondria are really powerful cell houses, they create a lot of free radicals by generating energy for our body. And if we don't support those mitochondria in terms of giving them antioxidants to quench stuff like superoxide and hydrogen peroxide, all these radicals, oxygen radicals that the body makes burning fat inside the mitochondria, you'll start to kill off these cells to a rate that eventually you could potentially be lacking, to an extent, these cells which produce energy for your body, resulting in symptoms of fatigue and cellular dysfunction and all that, etc.

That's interesting. That makes sense. And another topic, just to build on that, that I think would really help to break down for people is Insulin sensitivity, that's another topic I think that people have a lot of confusion around. One of our partners is a company called Levels Health that have a consumer-grade continuous glucose monitor, so you can track, you know, how your blood sugar is being affected by different foods in real time, which is pretty cool. Could you describe doing the basic mechanisms that are at play there when it comes to, you know, insulin sensitivity and, and regulating blood sugar, and then also how that can be optimized for more stable energy and better cognitive performance.

Yeah, yeah. So when we look at when we ingest carbohydrates, they can be simple or complex. So simple, we're looking at simple sugars where our body doesn't have to do much digestion in order to break down that carbohydrate for— to provide glucose to our bloodstream that can get uptaken by our cells. Or we have complex carbohydrates which are made up of, um, polysaccharides and starches, etc., where our body does have to undergo a level of carbohydrate digestion and mechanical digestion in order to free up that, that sugar for the body to utilize. So when we ingest carbohydrate, we break them down to simple sugars like glucose, and that enters our bloodstream. And we basically have our pancreas that sits close to our liver and that produces a hormone known as insulin. Insulin is known as a transport hormone, so basically what it does is it transports glucose inside our cells from our blood. We have a very tight regulatory homeostatic set point for our blood glucose, which means basically that throughout the day our pancreas is continuously sensing where our blood sugar level is and tries to maintain that in an optimal level of, for most individuals, anything less than 5 nanomole, or for US listeners, it's about 90 nanograms per deciliter. So we secrete insulin from the beta cells of our pancreas in a continuous fashion throughout the day, and that would be known as our basal response. And we secrete insulin in response to our meal intakes when blood glucose spikes in response to the digestion of that meal. So while we're sleeping, we're not ingesting any foods, our pancreas is still producing insulin in the background to control how sugar is being released into the system whilst we're sleeping, either from the meal we ate before we went to bed or as a consequence of fasting and our body releasing sugar from the liver glycogen in order to sustain our sleep process undisturbed. So when we look at insulin sensitivity, what exactly do we mean by insulin sensitivity? So insulin is a hormone, and our cells basically have to have a receptor that, that hormone latches onto. Very similar to, if anyone understands about testosterone, you have an androgen receptor where testosterone binds to for our insulin, we have an insulin receptor on the surface of our cells. Now, when insulin binds to our cells, it causes changes to the membrane of our cells. So it's not that insulin grabs the glucose molecule and brings it inside our cell. It effectively binds to the receptor of our cell and tells the cell, okay, you're now cleared to bring glucose inside. And so we have what are known as glucose transporters on the surface of our cells. And they can be sodium-dependent, or they can be non-sodium-dependent. So they operate off either a salt pump where the glucose can only enter the cell following sodium, or we have other receptors in the body where the process is independent of sodium And so the cell doesn't require a level of electrolytes to take the sugar inside itself. So when we lose insulin sensitivity, those receptors on the surface of the cell become less receptive to your insulin. So either it's a consequence of less expression of that receptor, or it's due to overstimulation of that receptor whereby you've chronically been making elevated levels of insulin to try and sensitize the cell to glucose. And eventually the sensitivity of the receptor is lost even though the pancreas is responding, making insulin. The issue with insulin is that it's a finite hormone in that we have a finite concentration of insulin that we make in our lifetime. That's done by the beta cells in the Langerhans islets of our pancreas. And when the beta cells have become dysfunctional, so either they become damaged or they've lost their ability to be stimulated to secrete what would be pro-insulin. So insulin actually is made as a peptide that's cleaved in a sort of pro-hormone fashion. and proinsulin gets broken down into insulin. If it loses that capability, you then start to see issues with type 2 diabetes where you don't make enough insulin. Or if you're lucky and you catch it sort of early, you can start to see this loss of insulin sensitivity whereby we can, I guess, implement strategies through dietary measures in order to help preserve that function of the pancreas, so in other words, we give that pancreas a break. And that's one of the areas where pharmacology has been so useful towards human longevity. If I was to pick one level of medicines, or classification of medicines, that has really improved humanity, aside from certain cardiac medicines, it'd be how we've understood how the body's response to glucose is, and how to intervene and improve lifestyles. Like, for example, type 1 diabetes, where we can use human form injectable insulin in order to manage that person's lifetime. Or with type 2 diabetes, where we can either target what we spoke about a moment ago, and that's your insulin sensitivity, or target the beta cell in order to help support it make more insulin. So it's a very interesting mechanism of the body. It has generated some level of confusion obviously towards fat gain and what causes fat gain in terms of the insulin theory and how that arose is basically when you have elevated levels of insulin because insulin is a storage hormone, it can also tell cells to store fatty acids. So you have a level of what we'd call lipase activity where your body's storing fatty acids alongside glucose. And to further, I guess, make it more impressive, insulin can help transport amino acids inside our cells. So that again is more like the the anabolic side of where we, we feel, you know, ingesting carbohydrates in a recovery point of training helps with muscle protein synthesis alongside protein ingestion. So for insulin sensitivity, we basically want to again support the body's ability to utilize the glucose. And one of the defense mechanisms that we have developed towards offsetting when our body's in a hyperglycemic state, so it's when we're in an elevated glucose state, is glycation. And glycation is basically taking glucose and glycating, so attaching glucose to your cells, and that can be your nerve endings. So again, over time, we can see why diabetics develop neuropathy because of the damage that glucose can have as an oxidant. So it can damage our cells when a amounts. And we can track this glycation process by tracking what's called our hemoglobin A1c marker in bloodwork. Hemoglobin A1c is such an easy marker to track that the incidence of developing type 2 diabetes today should be very low if someone is getting regular bloodwork and seeing how HbA1c is trending. And then responding appropriately to that trend, either through, like I said, dietary intervention or through a level of pharmaceutical intervention if it's really needed.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Thanks for listening to Flow Research Collective Radio. Before we dive back into our conversation, there's something to consider. It may be that today we are under-challenged. We're drowning in comfort. Now, in his book Antifragile, statistician Nassim Taleb pointed out something that's of key importance. Quote, undercompensation from the absence of challenge degrades the best of the best. The best horses lose when they compete with slower ones and win against better rivals. Now, put another way, who we could be, or our highest potential, is squandered by safety, coddled by comfort. If you want to train with us at the Flow Research Collective, it will require boldness. But what's life without a little adventure, right? To learn more about how you can get more flow in your life and achieve your professional and personal goals in less time and with more ease, Go to getmoreflow.com. If you're a good fit, we'd love to train with you. All the best.

So Dean, I wanna ask you a question actually about blood work in a second. Before we switch to that though, could you give us just a quick breakdown of the implications of what you just said for how people should eat or exercise around eating to, to kind of maximize their, their energy and, and focus? Cuz I know a lot of people get the, you know, the lunch brain and whatnot. So I'm curious what, yeah, what the implication is there.

So from an athletic perspective, we know that we've got basically two energy systems in the body. We've got the aerobic system and we've got the anaerobic energy system. And depending on which system is utilized by the body from a genetic standpoint or influenced through activity, you're either going to burn carbohydrates or you're either going to burn fatty acids for it to fuel the body at that moment in time. So we have a level of oxidative phosphorylation, which is basically your body will oxidize glucose, and that is quite a fast process. It tends to be when we're operating at very high intensities. So one thing that we can do to influence how our body oxidizes glucose is by undertaking high-intensity exercise, and that helps to train that, that oxidative system to burn glucose more efficiently. And that's where we see some of the research surrounding Tabata or high-intensity interval training providing great results in reversing levels of metabolic syndrome, because you're basically training the body to swap between the, the oxidative phosphorylative system and your anaerobic energy systems, whereby your body's not getting enough oxygen so as to switch over to an easier, or I guess a more efficient way of burning energy if the system isn't being provided with enough oxygen for oxidative— oxidative being oxygen and phosphorylation being creation of ATP, which is how our bodies utilize energy. So one of the strategies that we can obviously, um, implement in order to improve daily performance would be understanding how our bodies break down carbohydrates. So certain individuals may find cognitive improvement or cognitive benefits from avoiding carbohydrates first thing in the morning time, and this is sort of where the meat and nuts breakfast came about where we're ingesting protein and fats. The, uh, thought process behind this is that when we ingest carbohydrates, we have an elevation in blood glucose, the pancreas responds with insulin, and then we have a fall in blood glucose level. In certain individuals, that elevation of blood glucose, um, can potentially I guess, leads to what we'd consider reactive hypoglycemia, whereby 2 hours following the meal, the blood sugar level crashes, and that can cause obviously a dip in cognitive performance or a dip in energy demand. And that's sort of where we see this energy slump. So potentially, depending on how your body utilizes energy, avoiding carbohydrates for the first 2 to 3 hours in the morning time might suit your body better. Whether you ingest protein or fats again would come down to how your body utilizes energy. Or you can, you know, extend your fast from the night before towards longevity, giving the digestive tract a break, allowing some of the restorative processes like apoptosis and cellular autophagy, which is basically just clearing away dead cells and debris, and helping that along with extended fasts. I mean, I didn't even touch on that at the start, that you have people that follow, again, intermittent fasting or extended fasting protocols as a means of nutrition, whereby they might only eat in a time-restrictive fashion of 8 to 12 hours per day. So they're limiting the time window of when they eat. So overall, the level of calorie intake that you could potentially get in, in 8 hours is going to be a lot lower than a 16 to 18 hour day. So with the question towards improving how we can improve that sort of glucose utilization, high-intensity interval training will be the first instance to implement, especially if someone had type 2 diabetes. Not to make any generalizations, but a lot of people who have type 2 diabetes would be sedentary and wouldn't train this energy system regularly. So again, that would yield a relatively easy improvement, provided that person was compliant with going and doing the training. And obviously lowering total carbohydrate intake and understanding that we have these glucose transporters on our cells, like I said. So the insulin is, is important because the insulin tells the cell, transport glucose inside. But these glucose transporters, which are known as GLUT, so a lot of people who are probably familiar in the fitness industry have been exposed to GLUT4 and the whole anabolic window whereby GLUT4 levels have been upregulated in response to weight training. So therefore, again, another sort of strategy that has become very popular in the last, say, 10 years would have been carb backloading. Whereby you wouldn't have ingested any carbohydrates and you would have implemented it just in that sort of post-workout window when you knew that your cell response to glucose was upregulated. And you see a lot of people who save their carbohydrates or save cheat meals for following training sessions because they, they think that there's some magic upregulation of glu-4 that will stop you storing calories in fat cells, which is sort of false and feeds into the popularity of a certain supplement such as glucose disposal agents, which are designed to help your body oxidize glucose and to, I guess, mimic insulin. And I delved into all this research developing our product called Glucoxx, which is effective glucose oxidation. And it's all This all stemmed from my dad's own genetic development of type 2 diabetes. So it's an area that I hold close to my heart and what I've personally researched.

That's interesting, Dean. Yeah, I'd love to actually touch on supplements as well in a second. And thanks for that breakdown. That's very helpful for folks. You mentioned blood markers and getting regular blood work done, and HA1c is one key metric to check. Something I'm constantly emphasizing to my parents actually is just to get blood work done just continuously. The way I think about it is that people love wearing an Oura Ring to track their HRV and their heart rate. Unfortunately, we don't have an Oura Ring for blood work yet, but the closest thing to it is just getting your blood work done every quarter or so and keeping an eye on the key things. And we teach a lot of behavioral interventions to improve peak performance and help people access flow more. But if you have some basic health marker that's wildly off, you're potentially sabotaging your energy and cognitive function at a foundational level that has to be solved and addressed ideally alongside behavioral interventions. So I'm curious what the key markers are actually for people to keep an eye on and be familiar with. Again, people are familiar with HRV and heart rate, but when it comes to blood, I think we just have much less consumer knowledge.

So, right, this is very interesting. So if we even went from like just a basic person that's gone in and looked for a basic panel, markers that will be quite useful towards longevity and understanding what's happening to the body's metabolic processes, and starting from the top, your thyroid stimulating hormone will give an idea of how the pituitary is sensing what impact your thyroid hormone metabolism is having in the body. Now, from a conventional standpoint, a lot of people die hard and argue that TSH is the only measurement we need for the thyroid. TSH can vary so much week to week, month to month, that if someone has subclinical hypothyroidism, where they're not making enough thyroid hormone, we, we probably won't detect that with TSH unless we see it trending upwards every single month. So another measurement towards the thyroid, or two measurements I believe that would be very important, would be your, your free T3 level, which is triiodothyronine, which is the active thyroid hormone. So your free T3 level will show you how much your body's making of the active thyroid hormone. And again, you can correlate that back to thyroid health, to cellular metabolism, to how you utilize macronutrients. And I guess nutritional deficiencies, if you're not taking in enough micronutrients like selenium, iodine, and macronutrients like protein or tyrosine, which would be the starting block for your thyroid hormone. And then your thyroid antibodies your anti-thyroglobulin. So thyroglobulin transports your thyroid hormone through your body, and your thyroid peroxidase antibodies, which is basically the enzyme that converts T4 to T3. We can learn a lot from those antibodies, even if they're just mildly elevated. And again, this is sort of where, when we view blood work, we have to understand the, the clinical significance of a reference range versus that person's individual biochemistry. The reference range for thyroid antibodies can go anywhere from 0 up to 900, and you're technically, quote unquote, in the normal range. In my mind, when I see thyroid antibodies elevated beyond 10, 15, there's a level of dysfunction. Your body is making antibodies to destroy these vital components of your body. So there's a level of autoimmunity where your body's now starting to attack itself, being influenced probably more than likely through the gut. And we're starting to see how important the gut is towards thyroid. So you can see from the thyroid marker, we could probably make an assumption towards impaired gut function without even going near a stool analysis or further blood work towards histamine levels, etc. So the thyroid will probably be one important marker towards longevity. The lipid panel, in my mind, useful, but unless you're really gathering long-term trends, your familial history towards hypercholesterolemia, so elevated blood cholesterol, I don't think that the lipid panel is going to give you huge value unless you're tracking things like particle loads, particle size, oxidized LDL. So all these tests are very, very specific, and a lot of time there's great resistance by general practitioners towards testing the such, and it can be, you know, an expense. So unless someone was tracking those markers, you know, every single year at, at that high expense, the lipid panel in terms of your LDL and HDL, in my mind, because of the influences that, that diet has in it Of course, we see it trending higher and higher and higher each year. Yes, it can be a red flag that there's, there's problems going on. But it can also indicate there's a problem with the liver. It can indicate there's a problem with your diet. And so from a longevity perspective, yes, important to, to keep an eye on, but I don't see any, from a single measurement, anything being gained from, say, a longevity purpose, unless you're tracking it 4 or 5 times a year over a number of years. The liver probably has 2 important measurements, and people probably see this on their blood work and don't really understand how important the 2 markers are. And that's your alkaline phosphatase level, your ALP. So as we talked about earlier about oxidative phosphorylation, ALP is an enzyme that transports phosphate in and out of your cells. So when ALP is deficient, and when I mean deficient, a sort of functional range for ALP is between 60 and 70. ALP requires magnesium and zinc to operate efficiently as the core cofactors to the enzyme. So when we see ALP low, we can either see there's an issue with the liver not making enough, or we can see that the person's compromised in terms of their serum magnesium magnesium and zinc level without even testing serum magnesium and zinc. Because again, when we measure blood work— I probably should open with this caveat— you're basically looking at a snapshot of what your blood looks like at that moment in time. It doesn't really give you an indication towards a lot of the biochemistry that's happening surrounding cellular metabolism, or excretion. So if we measure, say, your estrogen level in a male in your blood, it doesn't show you how much estrogen is being made inside your cells, which is where it's made, and how much of it is being excreted from the system. So you end up with just this one number, whether it's in range or not, that you might be able to correlate to symptoms or not, but doesn't actually tell you much else without looking at tracking metabolites through your urine. So bloodwork has that caveat that we have to understand at that moment in time. Lifestyle, environment, everything's influencing what's happening in your body at that moment in time that can further influence your bloodwork to skew it. So the ALP is a good marker to keep an eye on, and your GGT, your gamma-glutamyltransferase, and that's an enzyme that recycles glutathione. That can show you how efficient your liver is at detoxification purposes. So ideally, research suggests that for good cardio metabolic efficiency, so for improving the impact to your arteries, to the endothelial cells of your arteries, having a GGT level of between 16 and 20 would be ideal. And again, the reference range for GGT goes right up to 75. So we can see those who have GGT levels of 50, 55 being told everything is fine, but we can clearly see that the optimal level from research is 16 to 20. So whilst their level is in normal range for the normal population, their body's ability to to detoxify itself is being rate-limited by their ability of recycling glutathione.

It's a great breakdown. I just want to actually touch on glutathione and supplements in general because you're definitely one of the leading experts I could possibly think of to ask that question to. And I think in general, people don't necessarily have great knowledge around what supplements are actually worth the money. And also a huge thing is misdosing. Supplements, often underdosing, um, yeah, such that the actual, you know, uh, impact is, is negated. And so I'm curious if you could give us kind of a breakdown of, you know, the 5 to 10 supplements maybe that people are actually less familiar with that have a really positive impact on, on health, energy, and again, just kind of cognitive function and peak performance in your experience and research.

Yeah, so I think, you know, to start, it's going to be very obvious for a lot of people in the fitness space, but creatine monohydrate is the most studied and well-versed supplement from both an ergogenic benefit, so improving your, your athletic performance, but also from a cognitive standpoint because your, your brain requires a level of creatine. And this was one of the reasons why the electrolyte product that I formulated for SupplementAIDS has 1 gram of creatine monohydrate within the electrolyte. It's, it's not from a sports perspective, it's actually to provide creatine hopefully to the brain during hydration in the morning time in order to stimulate the, the cellular processes that require ATP in the brain in order for, um, energy production and obviously cognitive benefits. So creatine, probably the most, um, I guess vilified also, and that a lot of people think creatine is a steroid, uh, when creatine is technically understood to be an amino acid. So it's very safe. We have quite a lot of research data over the last 60 years on creatine metabolism. So it's one of those ones that mothers and parents often have sort of in the past looked at teenagers who have gone and bought creatine as being this horrible thing that destroys kidneys. And the research has, has proven otherwise. So creatine would be one. We touched on it there, glutathione, or this is one supplement that consumer awareness is probably very limited. On one side, you probably have people are familiar with IV glutathione. And IV glutathione was, I guess, introduced because glutathione itself is 3 amino acids stuck together. So when, when glutathione is ingested orally, because it's a peptide, it's a protein, you could say, the peptides are broken down by our stomach acid. So when you take oral glutathione, whether it's oxidized or reduced, it's just a way of saying whether it has activity or not. Your stomach acid more likely just breaks it down into those three, three amino acids, and you don't utilize most of it. IV, because we're introducing the molecule straight into our bloodstream, we're bypassing our digestive tract. That raises our glutathione levels by, you know, 100%, basically, when we introduce it in an IV therapy setting. And the only issue with IV glutathione is that some people can have reactions to it, whether they're local histamine reactions or for cosmetic purposes. Some people utilize it for skin whitening purposes because it can act as a bleach to the skin. And that's where over the last 10 to 15 years, nanoparticle technology has become so fascinating in the supplement industry because we have a means now of generating nanosized phospholipids, which our cell membranes are made of. And what we can do is disperse these ingredients inside these nanosized phospholipids to create liposomal products. And so effectively, you put glutathione inside a liposome, you ingest it orally, it goes into the stomach, doesn't get broken down, passes into the small intestine where it gets absorbed into your bloodstream. And effectively, because your cells are made of this phospholipid membrane of choline, the phospholipid can pass inside your cell where it's broken down by an enzyme inside to release that ingredient. So it's a fantastic way of delivering supplements that would get broken down in your stomach. So for example, glutathione, Vitamin C. You know, a lot of people don't realize vitamin C's bioavailability is about 5%. So when you take in 1000 milligrams of vitamin C, you only utilize about 5 to 10 milligrams of that vitamin C dose, very, very small amount, and then the rest passes into your gut, where it can obviously cause side effects if ingested in too large amounts. CoQ10 is another supplement with very poor bioavailability that gets great benefit from liposomal technology, as would curcumin, which is the active component of the spice turmeric, but its anti-inflammatory properties, and trans-resveratrol. Those would be the main ones that have seen great benefit to the invention of liposomal technology for improving the delivery of these supplements. And so like what you touched on, you'll get companies who, who cut corners in terms of cost and will sell oral CoQ10, oral vitamin C, etc., oral curcumin, without the consumer actually being aware that a lot of what they're taking just isn't achieving therapeutic levels in the body. So they're sort of funding these companies without any benefit back to themselves. So liposomal glutathione will probably be a key one in my mind that a lot of people would benefit from supplementing with, not necessarily every single day, but what they could do is, like we said about the blood work, look at your GGT level, and if it's outside the 16 to 20 range, implement a small dose of glutathione, whether it's every other day, every 3 days, once a week. It'll just depend on what that number is, what their diet is providing their body in order to make glutathione from the 3 amino acids. And most importantly, glutathione requires cysteine as the core amino acid to its production. And obviously sulfur-rich food is probably lacking in a lot of people's diet unless they're eating quite a lot of cruciferous vegetables, tends to be the, the main source where we get sulfur from. You're gonna be quite limited in terms of your endogenous recycling capability of glutathione if you're not ingesting sulfur-rich foods. Whey protein, depending on, um, the composition. There's quite a lot of whey protein isolates that do have a high composition of cysteine. So a lot of, um, fitness individuals who are ingesting a high protein diet with whey supplementation probably are getting enough cysteine through whey supplementation, depending on how many servings they're taking. But so we have a list here of creatine, liposomal glutathione, possibly vitamin E, but vitamin E in the form of the 8 forms. Vitamin E as a supplement has been shown obviously to have deleterious effects when taken in high dose. But a lot of the studies have either been done in gamma-D tocopherol, which is one specific type of vitamin E. Vitamin E exists as two forms, tocopherols and tocotrienols. The trienol form is actually what's active in our body, and they get turned into tocopherols when they're utilized. Vitamin E is basically the scavenger. So similar to glutathione conjugating toxins within the liver to make them more water soluble so you pee them out, Vitamin E is this electron scavenger whereby it will— it's effectively a sacrificial molecule that goes around your body, sacrificed itself to neutralize targets. So it's a really heroic molecule and it basically offsets oxidative processes by quenching when a particle in our body gets unstabilized by a free radical. So free radical is basically any molecule that's lacking an electron. And it can happen obviously as, as a spontaneous reaction within the body, or it can occur as a means of what's happening in terms of our metabolism. But vitamin E will basically donate an electron to a cellular body within, within our system in order to stabilize that particle destabilizing itself But knowing that when it's destabilized, vitamin E doesn't cause great dysfunction to our body. Because basically, when vitamin E becomes depleted of its electron, vitamin C passes its electron to vitamin E. So there's like a symbiotic relationship between vitamin C and vitamin E that our vitamin C level helps our vitamin E function correctly.

That's interesting. Yeah, it's a great way to describe vitamin E as well. I actually wasn't aware of that. I didn't have any context on it. So Dina, thank you so much for just the incredible knowledge you've shared with us today. Hopefully you're up for doing another podcast down the line or multiple others because we could go forever. So yeah, thanks so much. Also, it's a true pleasure to have a fellow Irishman on. Always makes me smile when I'm able to pull that one off. So thanks a ton.

I know I'm very honored. And even a comparison to Dr. Huberman, it makes everything worthwhile with what I do in terms of being receiving of a compliment like that.

No, absolutely, absolutely. And we'd love to have you on again. And, uh, yeah, thanks, thanks a million. And, um, I definitely recommend everyone check out your work online as well on Instagram. You've got a great Instagram with incredible knowledge, and then also obviously Supplement Needs as well. So, yeah, alrighty, take care.

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