Barbell Shrugged - Barbell Shrugged  — Metabolic Flexibility and Micronutrients w/ Dr. Mike T Nelson  — 336

Episode Date: September 5, 2018

Dr. Mike T. Nelson has spent 18 years of his life learning how the human body works, specifically focusing on how to properly condition it to burn fat and become stronger, more flexible, and healthier. He’s has a PhD in Exercise Physiology, a BA in Natural Science, and an MS in Biomechanics. He’s an adjunct professor and a member of the American College of Sports Medicine.   Dr. Nelson has been called in to share his techniques with top government agencies. The techniques he’s developed, and the results he gets for his clients have been featured in international magazines, in scientific publications, and on websites across the globe.   In this episode, we talk about heart rate variability, metabolic flexibility, mastering micronutrients, holistic approaches to vitamins and minerals, supplementation needs for health and performance, and more.   Enjoy! - Doug and Anders ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs_nelson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please support our partners! @organifi - www.organifi.com/shrugged to save 20% @thrivemarket - www.thrivemarket.com/shrugged for a free 30 days trial and $60 in free groceries @OMAX - www.tryomax.com/shrugged and get a box FREE with your first purchase @Onnit - www.onnit.com/shrugged for a free 14 pill bottle of the leading nootropic Alpha Brain and 10% savings on all purchases. @foursigmatic - www.foursigmatic.com/shrugged  to save 15% on your first purchase ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Shrugged family, we are back again. I have to tell you how excited I am. Dr. Mike Nelson is on the show today. This interview is like two and a half hours of fire hose to the face, best information I've ever heard in my entire life. We go long, it's good. I can't wait to listen to this one again myself.

I have this idea every time that i go into one of these interviews that i just want to learn everything that this person knows about strength conditioning health wellness nutrition all the things whatever we're interviewing about them about and mike does not disappoint um this guy has more information than we could even cover in two and a half hours. And when we're standing in this circle, like 120 minutes into this interview, I looked over and there's this gigantic statue of information that just was not budging. He could have gone for another four hours if we wanted to. But from metabolic variability to heart rate variability to every single micronutrient that you could ever imagine

with the amounts you should be taking, where you can find them, how you can supplement them, this show crushes. Hold on to your seats because this thing is loaded with information. You're probably going to want to listen three or four times just to be able to take it all in. Want to thank our sponsors this week. Make sure you get over to Organifi.com backslash shrugged forward slash shrugged. Sorry, it's not a backslash. Make sure you're using the coupon code SHRUGGED to save 20% on your order. I'm a huge fan of the green drinks, the red drinks, the gold drinks.

Green, red, gold. Sunrise to sunset, all the micronutrients you could ever imagine. And they created this supplement that tastes delicious. Most of these things do not taste delicious. Organifi tastes delicious. It has the perfect set of micronutrients, minerals, vitamins, all the things. Make sure you get over to Organifi.com forward slash shrug to save 20% using the coupon code shrug. Organifi, O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I dot com forward slash shrugged. Use the coupon code shrugged to save 20% and Thrive Market. Thrive Market is the leading online organic, healthy,

delicious grocery store. When the box shows up to my house every month with all the delicious peanut butters makes me so happy um imagine a peanut butter jar made with one ingredient actual peanuts it doesn't exist if you go to the grocery store it's not like that almond butter there's all kinds of ingredients in the one at the grocery store. The one at Thrive Market, just almonds, just peanuts. It's unbelievable. Make sure you go to thrivemarket.com backslash shrugged. You are going to get $60 in free organic groceries, free shipping and handling, and a free 30-day trial membership. Thrivemarket.com forward slash shrugged. You're going to get $60 in free organic groceries, free shipping and handling, and a free 30-day trial. Get over to their website. Their website's super user-friendly.

I dig it because you can go and search by whatever your dietary restrictions are, and it'll pull up all the delicious products, foods, all the things to get you healthy, and it shows up right to your door. ThriveMarket.com forward slash shrugged. Free $60 in organic groceries, free shipping and handling, and a free 30-day membership. Hope you enjoy the show with Mike T. Nelson. Get ready for a big one. Talk to you guys at the beginning when we cut that off.

Did you notice that? It was like, oh, yeah, for sure. Because all the power shifted or something. Test, test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Test, test, test, test. When you put do test, test. Test, test, test, test. When you put do not disturb, does that mean it won't ring? Check, check.

If I can turn up my headset, that would be great. The headsets are not as loud as normal. They're all the way up right now. Do you know why that would be? I don't know why. Colton. Do you know why that would be? I don't know why. This is its own line. Colton, do you know why the headsets, they're up all the way,

and it's not as loud as normal? Maybe it's louder in this room than normal. Is it going to blow our ear holes out? Yeah. Maybe. Is there a master gain? Master gainer? You're a master gainer.

Oh, all of a sudden it just went up. Hello? I just got louder. You seem louder. Yeah, you seem louder. I'm not blown out. Oh, now I'm really blown out. Jesus, I can't even say hello without being blown out.

Stop talking. Yeah, sorry. That's how it's going to be for the next two hours. Okay. Those are my favorite comments online. They're like, stop. Good. We good enough?

Check, check, check. My laugh is obnoxious too. My laugh is obnoxious. Yeah, when Bledsoe and I were doing the, when Bledsoe was hosting and I was going, Yeah, Bledsoe's got

an obnoxious laugh too. We had like dueling cackles. Mine is like very similar to his. It was just like people getting hit from all over the place I'm not from the south but I have this I don't know why I laugh

Alright alright alright Do you want to walk this thing around? Yes Let's say what we're going to say That way we don't all pick the same one like has happened in the past. Yeah. All like second and third people are like, fuck, I need a new thing to say. Yeah.

My mind was really locked in on that. The format that we've been following lately. Anders will intro the show. He'll say we're here at Paleo FX with Mike T. Nelson. And he wants to learn about whatever. Flexdiet.com. Flexdiet.com. God, got it.

See that? I have to throw that in there. Just keep it going. Maybe just flexible dieting. And we'll save the.com FlexDiet.com God, got it. See that? I have to throw that in there. Just keep it going. Maybe just flexible dieting and we'll save the.com stuff for later. It sounds very pitchy at the very beginning. Cool. And then I'll say that

we haven't had many micronutrient, vitamin, mineral, phytochemical style experts on the show. I would love to learn more about that and dig deep on that topic and then Adam will say something along the lines of what? Understand the difference between

macronutrients and micronutrients. Got it. Is that good? Yeah. And then it will go back to Anders, and he'll say, okay, now Mike, tell us who you are and give us your background and all that. So when I say I want to learn about micronutrients, you just go, okay, cool, because we're just giving the audience context into what we're going to talk about

so they know why they should stick around. But if you just take over, we'll miss these guys' opportunities. So basically wait for the question. Wait for Anders to say, hey, tell us who you are. Until then, you can say stuff, but don't take over with education.

Nothing better than when we just forget the second and third person. No, my question. I'm important. What about me? What about me? What about my question? What about my feelings?

I have feelings. You never listen to me. Should you turn me down? Am I good? You're totally good. Okay, cool. If anything, ha, ha, ha. That's good.

Low here, but good on the screen. Okay, cool. Can you hear? I can hear. Feel good? Good. Look good? Awesome. You look great.

Killer! Welcome to Marble Shrugged. I'm Anders Warner. That's Doug Larson. Adam, Bob, and Rothfeld are in the house. We're at Paleo FX in Austin, Texas. Yo, this is super cool because this is the first time the entire Shrugged collective in the house together. We got this badass stage. We got chairs

down here. Some people are watching. Most people aren't. But it makes us feel good to be surrounded by what's going on. Behind this camera, there's stadium seating, and we sold it out. Millions and millions. It's actually just like five of our friends watching us and talking amongst themselves. But more importantly. If you're listening audio only, check out the video at least.

We're on a stage above the whole fucking expo hall. It's beautiful. It looks dope. Here, check it out. Yeah. That's a lot of people doing a lot of things that are great for themselves that's if you were to feel the energy in here there's just paleo people there's not a single peanut in this joint there's more green drink to be found yeah no lagoons not a single legume everyone would die stuff is toxic Everyone here has autoimmune diseases. They just don't know it.

I haven't seen an astropath to tell them otherwise. Here, gluten would be like a toxic gas released in the air. Everybody just starts running. There's gluten in aisle three. Most importantly, we are joined by Mike Nelson, the creator of Flexible Dieting. Very exciting. I am super excited. We're going to go deep here.

We've got some micronutrients to talk about. And everyone talks about macros. It's kind of like the buy-in, the entry level, the really high-level thing. But once you get into the micros, all of a sudden it gets really quiet. A lot of birds chirping in that space. So I'm very interested to dig into that. Yeah, it'll be fun. Just to eat well and work out,

you don't have to know all the details about all the science behind all the micronutrients and what they're for and how they work and what quantities you need. If you eat real healthy food most of the time, you're getting a lot of the things that you need. But we've never had, in my memory, any expert that really could dig super deep on vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, et cetera. So that's something I would like to do today is really dig deep on micronutrients as opposed to macro. Yeah, and onto that, I think diving into the difference between macronutrients and micronutrients and how they're slightly dependent on each other or if they are or if they aren't. So to kick things off a little bit, where does this journey start for you?

What was kind of the buy-in and what drew you to this field, this flexible dieting lifestyle piece? And, you know, maybe the depth that you take it to is far beyond everyone else that's in this space. So where did this journey begin for you? Yeah, so the short version is I just started exercising like most people in college to look a little better, feel better. I remember the first time I took a college weight training class. The coach came in, and I was all excited. I'm like, yes, I'm going to learn about weight training. I weighed all of the 156 pounds at that time,

so I was a rake-shaped eel-looking person. And the coach comes in. He looks at all the class, and he goes, hey, all right, some of you in here need to lose weight. He looks at me and points. He goes, whoa, and some of you need to need to lose weight. He looks at me and points. He goes, whoa. And some of you need to gain, like, a lot of weight. I was actually always jealous of those people.

Like, you can literally eat anything always and get stronger. This is so cool. Yeah, and then he promptly disappeared, and I learned nothing in the class because he just took enrollment and had his TA take enrollment after that. So I started studying physiology, and then I went on and did a Bachelor of Arts and then did actually a Master's in Mechanical Engineering. So I did a bunch of work in biomechanics. And then I got done, worked in the medical device industry for a while,

but I always kept going to exercise physiology conferences for fun. And then I ended up going back and doing a PhD in exercise physiology. And the topic that I was looking at was some stuff on heart rate variability and then metabolic flexibility. So how well does your body use fat? How well does your body use carbohydrates? And then within that context, looking at also the micronutrients, kind of how do they all kind of support that whole process in there?

You have no idea how stoked I am to talk to you, Justin. Sweet. I know. That was like 12 things that i talked to people about and then the conversation is as shallow as it can get because i don't have that depth that you have um just getting into a couple of things the like the metabolic side of things yeah where does that conversation start with you and maybe add a little bit of the context to where where we can where we can yeah so so the first question is that people come up and they'll mention paleo diet or keto

diets are popular now or whatever diet we have walking around here yeah and they'll ask you what do you think of x diet my first question is always well what what is your goal like what are you trying to do you know if you're trying to say, I want to do a ketogenic diet, but then you're telling me you want to, you know, compete at CrossFit regionals, those aren't really that compatible. But if you said, well, I'm in a ketogenic diet, I don't really like exercise that much. I'll do whatever approach you want. I just want to look and feel better. Maybe that's an option then. So I think it also is very specific to what is your goal and what you're trying to do and then match the sort of dietary approach to fit that not vice versa so

a lot of people come in and they're like i want to do ketogenic diet and then that doesn't match with the goal that they're trying to accomplish so i like doing it the other way what is your goal you're trying to do and then we'll figure out what there's a whole bunch of different approaches what approach is going to be best for you from both the physiology side what's going to match that uh components and bioenergetics things like that and then also what about the psychology side there's some stuff that you're probably going to do that's easy for you and other stuff is going to be very hard for you to do so for example if you're using a ketogenic diet and you don't like fat that's not going to line up so well.

So making sure that those all pieces fit together. Do you get people that tell you that they don't like fat? Not that they think it's bad for them or they have this 1980s high-carb, low-fat mentality still locked in their head. And they think that if they eat fat, it's going to make them fat. But they're just like, oh, fat is gross. I just don't like to eat fat. I've had a couple people say that. It's usually more

carbohydrates so people are they like carbohydrates but they're just super afraid of eating them now i think the pendulum is kind of swings back and forth right so we went through the the 80s and the low fat craze and that type of thing and now we're kind of going really far with super high fat low carbohydrate again but. But it's amazing to me. To your point, I'll tell someone, I'm like, okay, your fat, let's say, is 60 grams per day. I'm like, you can easily bump that up to 80. Would that make your life easier? Is there a food you're not eating now that you want to eat?

If we give you just 20 more grams of fat, which isn't that much, and most of the time people are like, I had a client the other day, she's like, oh, my God, I can eat client the other day. She's like, oh my god, I can eat cashew butter then. I'm like, great, have cashew butter. She's like, I can? I'm like, yes. I love you. She thought that was the greatest thing in the world.

That's awesome. Even going back a little bit to, you said you had a job in medical device, and we're going to these conferences just for fun. That's a weird way to spend your fun time, right? Oh, it's bizarre as hell. But I think it's interesting.

I think that I have a graduate degree, whatever it is, have my MBA. Not maybe I'm in business, but the majority of what I do for a profession has nothing to do with that. It's the thing that I was learning on the side. What was it that drew you to this field? Why are you spending your weekends at these conferences? They're not the most exciting thing for everyone. Oh, no.

And the weird part is the very first conference I went to was in Arizona. And I sit down. I get there bright and early. And there's two people that I'm sitting next to. And I'm like, hey, did you see the study on this, this, or that? And they look at me, and they're like, no. And then they look away. No.

And I'm like, but I'm sure you saw the study on this or that. And they're like, no. And then they look over at me, and they go, well, who are you? What are you doing here? And I'm like, you guys are trainers, right? They're like, yeah. I'm like, you don't read research? They're like,'re like no we don't read research that's why we're here at this conference they're like what are you doing here i said oh this is just fun for me and they're

like what the hell's wrong with you um but if i think back on it i think a lot of it was i was actually born with the atrial septal defect so your heart's got four chambers and the top chamber the atrium uh before you're born the atrium and the ventriclerial septal defect. So your heart's got four chambers, and the top chamber, the atrium. Before you're born, the atrium and the ventricle have holes in them. So when your heart contracts, it's kind of flowing around in a circuit because you're obviously not breathing air. As soon as you're born, those two holes close up. And in my case, the atrial, the top chamber hole, never closed.

So the heart was beating, but the oxygenated and deoxygenated blood are kind of remixing. So I went into just massive heart failure. So when I was four, my heart was the size of someone who was 18 because the heart is so overworked. So at that time I had an open heart surgery in 1978. They went back in and they surgically fixed it. And it was interesting as the guy that I saw was actually a pediatric cardiologist, which is very rare. And there was only three centers around that time that were operating on kids that were that young. So it happens that Children's University of Minnesota was one of them. That's where I was from. So I think that at an early age, kind of, you know, you look back on it and you're like,

oh, no wonder I went into physiology. I worked for a med tech company that did cardiovascular products for about 10 years. And there's learning more about physiology. I just thought, wow, this is just so fascinating. And from the engineering side, looking from a design aspect, almost everything in physiology is designed like as perfectly as it can be, at least to our understanding. We may not understand all of that yet, but I was fascinated by that from a design standpoint of, okay, how does it do this? What are the efficiencies? What are kind of the principles that everything operates on? And it's just never-ending.

You know, like even now there's just tons of research that comes out every day. And so I find just how everything fits together is just to be a very fascinating field. I love that. And going back into the academic setting, were you set on the two P's you talked about as a metabolic? Remind me of the other one. Oh, metabolic flexibility and HRV. Yeah.

No. So I did a master's, and I could do math, but it was definitely not my strong suit. Like if you said, okay, sit down and do some math problems for fun, I would do everything possible not to do them. And I was kind of an idiot because I didn't realize that when you do a master's there's two more advanced math classes you have to take and they're actually beyond

calculus four but i'm like there's stuff that even exists there i didn't even know that was possible i just thought it just ends and that's the field so when i i did a phd work actually in biomedical engineering for five years and then i literally completed almost all the classwork for it, and then I dropped out. Because I said, okay, do I want to do this the rest of my life? No, I'm doing all my stuff, my fun in physiology. So I go to the physiology department that fall, and of course everything starts over again. None of your classes transfer. It took me seven years to finish that.

The first day I sit down in the meeting, the advisor comes in. He goes, hey, we've got two new projects that both involve math. One's on heart rate variability and one's on metabolic flexibility. And he looks around the table and he points to me sitting on the end.

He's like, hey, you, math boy, I don't know, whatever the hell your name is, these are your projects now. So I got nominated because they had some math in it. And if you go through exercise physiology, you don't really take a lot of math per se, especially nonlinear type forms of math. So I just got basically tossed those projects and then fast forward seven years after that. When you look backwards, it all makes sense.

Yeah, it's funny. Now I look back and it's like oh wow that all the stuff i did before put me in a position where those actually worked out yeah and so that was almost 11 years ago now and so now heart rate variability metabolic flexibility looking at metabolism and using different types of math to get more data out of it is becoming kind of more popular as you're getting more crossing over a field. Why were these two, the heart rate variability and the metabolic flexibility, why were those two together for you? Yeah.

Presented to you as the same project. So the overarching theme of my thesis was fine scale variability across physiologic systems, which doesn't make any sense to anyone and usually gives people a good reason to go take a nap for a while. But if we take the average of something, so if you come in and we take your heart rate, we can get an average and say, okay, your resting heart rate average is 55, right? Just making up a number. And now if we apply a variability analysis to that, so each one of those beats, we look at how different in millisecond they are from the next one. We can now say, okay, here's the status of your autonomic nervous system. Here's how much is parasympathetic, you know, rest and digest.

Here's how much is sympathetic, more of the stimulation side or like the gas pedal of your car. Just by taking that exact same data and not doing an average but running a variability analysis, so a different type of math. The thought process... So if it's 60 beats a minute, you would think there would be a beat every second. Right. But some are 0.9, some are 1.1.

Right. And the more variability you have, that's a good thing? Yeah, the more fine-scale variability you have, the better. So that would say at rest, you're more parasympathetic, the rest and digest dominant. Yep. And that's just by doing a variability or different type of math. So what I was trying to figure out was, okay, does the same thing apply to other systems? So if we look and we do a gait analysis on you and we do some fine scale differences, we can kind of get an idea mathematically how well you're moving or walking.

If you kind of stand on a platform and sway, we can do the same analysis there. So the theory is that this fine scale variability should show up in every system so far that we've looked at. So what is the system on the metabolism side that we can use that for? So if you come in and we put you on the metabolic cart where you breathe into this tube, it goes into the cart. and if it's doing analysis every breath, this little number, what's called an RER number, tells us how much fat and how much carbs you're using every time

you exhale and the machine does the analysis. Killer. Did you bring one of those? No. I'd like to be on that right now. Yeah. How's this interview going? Yes. Two tubes stuck in your mouth for an hour. Just passed out on the floor from breathing so hard.

And what you find is two things. You get bored after you do hundreds of these tests. You stand there and the person's exercising low level. And you kind of watch the numbers because you want to make sure it's running correct. And even at steady state exercise, you'll see this RER will just kind of oscillate

and move around. Steady state, so they're on a treadmill running, walking. They're doing the exact same thing, right? What is that test? So they're on a metabolic test, right? So if you go in, let's say you do a max of EO2 test, the warm-up portion, and we just have you do 100 watts, right? I'm just making up numbers, right, for people to understand. And you just do that, let's say, for five minutes. Once you're warmed up, even then, the R rer kind of moves around a little bit and all the textbooks would say this shouldn't happen right you're doing steady state exercise we're not putting more work on your system it should be exactly the same way so by the rer changing basically what

you're saying is like temporarily you know over the course of seconds you're burning more fat right now and then more carbs right now they're more fat right now, and then more carbs right now, and then more fat right now, and then more carbs right now. You're not just consistently burning like an even ratio of like 40% carbs and 60% fat. It's like, why would it be bouncing around? It shouldn't quote unquote happen, but it does. Right. Yep. Just like we were measuring your heart rate at rest, it's moving around a little bit. So we were thinking that this fine scale variability, maybe that's a marker for metabolic flexibility. So the health of your metabolic system. Because what we wanted to get to was a non-invasive test that any gym or hospital who had a metabolic heart could run on people to determine their metabolic health.

That was kind of the goal. What is the rate? I mean, is it an intense rate? I mean, how is the rate of the physical i mean is it an intense rate i mean like how is the rate of like the physical exercise to elicit the the breathing like what what rate are you doing it at and yeah so the study that i ran we did uh they come in they do a max exercise test because you're taking multiple people we wanted okay what can you do on max and then we would do percentages of that so that way if you have people of different levels coming into your lab, you're kind of all making them sort of equivalent to themselves, right? So you're not

giving them the same number, you're kind of taking them relative to themselves. And we did this at a low level of exercise. It's only around 20 to 30 percent of their VO2 max because as you get up to high levels of exercise intensity, pretty much everyone uses carbohydrates pretty well. It's the low end of how well they're using fat that has this massive variation. So the flip side of that is we had one person come in the lab. They're just on the treadmill. They're doing their warm-up. I'm looking at their little number, and it's like 0.95, 0.99,

which is saying they're using almost all carbohydrates, even though they're just barely walking fasted on a treadmill. And I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, oh, you forgot to fast this morning, right? You had two bagels on the way over or something. Like, no, no, I didn't. So I said, okay, come back in a week. We'll redo your test. Maybe there's something wrong with the machine. Comes back in a week later, exact same thing. So what you find is that some people at low levels of exercise are using more carbohydrates than they should. So that was

like the main difference, one thing that we found. And then the other part to answer your question is trying to baseline people into that lower percentage, because that's where you should be using more fat. And that's where that variability is more likely to be present, right? So if you use the heart rate analysis again, if you go out and do max exercise, your variability disappears in your heart rate, and you become very sympathetic. But at rest, we see a lot more variability.

So we're thinking, okay, take that same thing into the metabolic area. Lower levels of exercise is probably where we have this more fine-scale variability. When you get close to a max, that probably goes away. So that's why we did very low percentages. And the last reason was we wanted pretty much everyone to be able to do the test, right? There's some populations, especially disease population, where you can't have them come in and do a max test, but you can have them do a very, very sub max test. And so it's a little bit more applicable to more populations, especially in a disease so when you when you said there was like a variable within her diet i'm assuming it was her i couldn't remember yes but so uh and it was too much

carbohydrates that she was taking in uh presently so was the was was the tests were all their nutrition like subject i mean like were they in like a certain place that they were given a diet Was the tests, were all their nutrition, like, subject? I mean, like, were they in, like, a certain place that they were given a diet that kind of changed those things? So we just did it fasted. Got it. In her case. So the previous diet of, like, two days before or a day before? Just overnight fasted.

But were you guys looking at that effect, like what they ate before? We didn't look at any dietary effects. Okay. And in her case, it was fasted, so we'd expect that she'd be better at using fat, but it appeared like she had taken in a bunch of carbohydrates, which actually she didn't. But you are correct that their baseline dietary will kind of change some of their numbers when they come in. We didn't do that analysis in the study that I ran. We just did it as an overnight fasted just to try to compare them to try to be equal and equal. But you're

correct. You could have done some type of diet intervention and compared different groups and that type of thing. On the other side of that, if someone is trying to become fat adapted, is this a good way to test to see if that's actually the case where you put them on a treadmill and slowly increase the speed on the treadmill and then watch how slowly or how quickly that RER goes from kind of all fat to all carbs. I want to say 0.6, if I remember correctly, to like to one. Yep, yep. So you have what's called the crossover point.

So the crossover point is RER 0.85. So that's where you're burning 50% fat and 50% carbohydrates. So as you do a longer warm-up so what i tell people if they do a metabolic test you can get at the same question you're asking do a longer warm-up to give yourself more time do it fasted and then work up to the higher level intensities and you'll get this nice map of how your body is switching over fuel sources and in some athletes i've seen they're completely missing that low end like their ability to use fat is horrible uh some athletes i've seen they don't even have a

crossover point it literally goes away they're just so tuned at using carbohydrates um sometimes you see the opposite now like if you have someone who's like on a ketogenic type diet you'll see that their ability to use fat is pretty high. But as they go up to start using carbohydrates, it starts falling off pretty fast. So yeah. Is there like an ideal point in which we want to be fat and then burning carbohydrates? And is that standard across all of us or is each person independent on how fat

adapted they are or where they need to kick in their, you know, easy carbohydrate burn fuel burning sources. Yeah, so if you look at the research, right, so I did one study, Helge did one study, Godecki did one study, and the ability of your body to use fat at rest varies from about 30% to 90% difference. So meaning if we grabbed a whole bunch of people in here, had them do fasted, hooked them up in the lab, what you would see is that their ability to use fat at a low level exercise intensity massively different some

people like you said super well using fat other people not so much and in terms of where you would want them to be if they're in more like let's say uh intermediate strength and power like crossfit or strongman medleys or something you want them to be able to use carbs to the highest degree to fuel that exercise intensity. But then during recovery, you want them to still be able to use fat. And for some lower level moderate stuff, you want them to use fat also. So the perfect profile I don't think has been worked out entirely. But what I like to see is people have a super high ability to use fat. And then I actually want to see a pretty hard transition to using carbohydrates. So I want to bump their fat max up as high as possible without compromising their ability to use carbohydrates on the high end. Awesome. So

when, so do you do any work kind of thinking about kind of like timed interval trainings? I assume this test was on some sort of more cardio basis, 20-minute VO2 max test you mentioned earlier. Yeah, it's a VO2 max test. So if we were to do some type of interval training in which we were able to, you know, three-minute work period, two-minute rest period, are you able to track that and see and keep that

for each person in that fat adapted zone? Or are you able to kind of track just where you're at and what fuels you're burning per work interval or independently for each person while they're burning or using that fuel source? Yeah, you can. The downside is you'll need a piece of equipment that's 40 to 60 grand. Eh, no big deal. Hold on a second. You got that?

Yeah. Oh, right there. Yes, right there. And then you've got a big tube and stuff in your mouth. So logistics aside of running the test, in theory, you could do that and see where they're at acutely. The way to get at it more in the real world is to look at exercise performance. Gotcha. So if you come in and say,

okay, we're going to do a max windgate test. We're going to put you on a bike, super high wattage or a rower or whatever, 30 seconds all out. And we look at your performance and then you go away and do, let's say ketogenic diet for four weeks. You repeat that again and your power is down, training aside, you probably need more carbohydrates in order to fuel that so performance can kind of get you a surrogate model when you were testing the heart rate variability and the metabolic variability did you see them follow each other were they mirroring each other in their variability or were they mutually exclusive of each other and seeing different results based on each?

Yeah, it's a good question. So I've done like with my own online clients, HRV measurements daily for about five years now. And I haven't seen a study that's compared them together. So we did some work with an energy drink. So I did measure HRV and we did performance tests and things like that. In general, if HRV gets better and they become more healthy, I believe they have a better capacity to kind of switch fuel sources because it's a marker of metabolic health indirectly,

especially on the autonomic system. There you go. But it's not a direct one-to-one map as I would like. I was just wondering, I imagine you would almost see like a spike in the flexibility or the variability increasing, and it would have to almost correlate to each other because it's just a generally healthier person. Yes, but it depends on what their background is. So if you hold all their things the same,

I think I use HRV as a way to look at how well they're recovering from whatever's going on in their life and for some people that may be more carbohydrates some people may be more protein maybe more sleep other things like that so if we get that where their hrv is good then i think they have a much higher potential to do more training to be able to recover faster and things of those natures so i use hrv as more of a marker for recovery. It's not quite as indicative of exact fuel sources. I wish that it was, but it just doesn't seem to map as directly one-on-one. Because what I really wanted was a non-invasive field measure that would tell me exactly where they're at, right? So you could come into the lab without a 60 grand piece of equipment.

I could give you a really good idea of what fuels you're using and how that's working. There's two other surrogate ways you can get to it. We can give you a crap ton of carbohydrates and see how you feel. We can then fast you for a period of time and see how you perform. So fasting, very high use of fat, doesn't inhibit carbohydrate use either. And then the last way that I just started playing around with is you can put a, it's called a MOXIE device. You can put it on a muscle, and it'll tell you venous oxygen, basically delivery and removal. So it'll tell you directly via how well you're taking away oxygen, and that's a pretty good marker for those.

Because if you get into fuel sources you can see at a muscular level really what's going on so if someone wants to try some of this on their own or is there like a convenient mobile app that you can use to test hrv that'll like like give you a readout and then tell you what the numbers mean or anything like that yeah so the couple that i use the main one i've used for a long time is called iFleet. Instead of athlete, it's just an I. And they've got a, I think it's a iFleet Pro that'll tell you in a little window, the owner's name is Simon.

So it has a little thing that says Simon Says, and it'll tell you a little summary of your training. And that's pretty useful. And then I just started using the Oura Ring. The Oura Ring will actually collect it at night. So the nice part about the Oura Ring is it gets rid of the biggest issue is that I have to put a heart rate strap on in the morning, take about two to three minutes to grab the HRV measurement. So this will do it at night and automatically sync and tell me where I'm at.

So those are probably the two I'd recommend. Yeah. When I was fighting right at the end of my career hrv started i started hearing whispers of it all jameson yeah and i uh i would do the heart rate monitor wake up in the morning see it and i'm like i'm not training today yeah it was that clear it was like yeah a hundred and a hundred like i'm not good like that's uh so it's uh it's it's i'm i'm excited to dive deeper into the idea going on like to the website and being able to yeah yeah access into your services how does somebody you know

begin to work with you yeah so the best part is just go to the website just mike t nelson.com i work with a handful of people online and then online i do all their nutrition their training their lifestyle most of it's monitored using heart rate variability, or you can use fitness watches or rings to look at their sleep and all the other things too. So it's a very much kind of a whole lifestyle picture. I ended up doing that because people would come in and like, oh dude, I just need nutrition help. And you look at the training and go, oh, it's a disaster, you know, or vice versa. Oh, this is good and that's bad. Or then I found, oh, their lifestyle is horrible, right? Training nutrition is good. They're sleeping five hours a night, drinking eight cups of coffee

a day and can't figure out what's going on. That's why I do the whole encompassing with it and warm-ups and everything else too. You were talking about heart rate variability, but what you just mentioned was you were basically just checking your heart rate. How many beats per minute in the morning? Is that what you were mentioning?

There was a program that basically, I forgot who it was at the time, but basically you would wear a heart strap at night. You'd wake up, and based on your heart rate over the course of 30 seconds upon waking up or a minute, it was a certain time period. I can't remember.

It was seven years ago, exactly the specifics. but you would basically know whether or not you should train or if you should just kind of take it easy and just do a very light workout uh based off that we did a little bit of this at the gym uh with some of our higher level athletes just to see how quickly they were able to recover and um there was like a massive deadlift day which would like beat your nervous system down so badly. You may not show up totally sore because it was, you know, one, two, three RM. And you're not in that super sore zone. But they'd show up the next day and you could be like, oh, you slept like shit.

Your body feels good. But we can see that your nervous system is just destroyed right now. And you're able to kind of get them into some more like cyclical work that's a little bit slower um yeah it was like heart rate variability training it was like yeah just based the training off off of that what's going on with their nervous system right yeah um in fighting what did you guys do for that um i mean basically i would go in i would do like a light roll and just kind of keep my nervous system relaxed and do like a breathing session. They would have me like shadow box for 15 minutes just to kind of create natural breathing and just moving very 10% just to kind of get the motor going, but not peak it out at any point. And the next day I would be way, yeah, I'd be back in the game and I would feel that.

Like I would feel the able to be back in the game and I would feel that. I would feel the difference. Are the majority of your clients, are you coming from more the clinical side with obesity, very unhealthy people and building them back or is this high level athlete performance arena

clients that you're working with? It's definitely more on the performance side. So it's usually people, I'd say, that are in the intermediate to kind of advanced area. I don't work with a lot of super advanced or elite people. I have a little bit in the past, and depending on the athlete, it can go well.

Depending on the other athletes, not so much. And it also depends on, a lot of times with those people, in my opinion, there's too many cooks in the kitchen. So I spend more time dealing with this person and their other coach and this person that person so now i just do those kind of as one-off consults so if you want to talk to me we'll set up some i'll tell you whatever i think you should do you go figure out if you if you want to do it or not it's gonna change your life a lot yeah um but the other ones are more i'd say advanced intermediate and then we just work with them from month-to-month basis.

Awesome. We're going to take a little break because we haven't even gotten to any of the nutrition stuff, and we're 35 minutes into this thing. Boom. Yo, this is the beginning of a really awesome conversation, so thank you, and we'll be back in a minute. Shrug family, we are at the break here. See, I told you this guy was loaded with information

make sure you get over to shruggedcollective.com backslash vault we are actually having a huge promo this week for labor day there's a 50 off your very first month using the coupon code 50505050. 11 programs, strength and conditioning, our best-selling results-driven training programs from Olympic lifting, getting your first pull-up, mobility, nutrition, grocery packing list, all the things. Shrugcollective.com. We're having a three-day sale that ends wednesday at

midnight use the coupon code 50 50 to save 50 on your very first month of the program vault we've got 18 plus month long programs we've got eight three month long programs you are going to get everything you could ever imagine when it comes to strength conditioning and programming from the leading minds in the strength and conditioning game shrug collective.com backslash vault use the coupon code 50 50 50 50 to save 50 on your very first month back to the show. of nutrition and not just the macro side, which so many people focus on, but the micro nutrient piece. And first off, I want to just start with kind of your deep dive on the two on a very high level. And then kind of where does the macro side of it play in? And then what are people missing on the micro side that may be jacking the whole thing up yeah so just a quick differentiation so the reason there's macro and

micro it just has to do with the amount right so when we talk about micronutrients we're talking about milligrams or sometimes micrograms when we talk about macronutrients or macros it's almost always in grams so it's grams of protein, carbohydrates. So those are going to be the main three. When I work with someone, I usually look at their macronutrients first. I usually look at protein probably first because it seems like some athletes are either way low on protein or they're just astronomically high. Which if you ever are on a plane coming back from the Arnold, don't. It's just very horrible, bad smelling the whole time.

People with poor digestions eating way too much protein. It's a disaster. I've been there. Lou Ferrigno, no bullshit, got full searched going through the airport checker right behind me. As I was walking by, I'm like, you can't frisk the Hulk. So usually the question then, like one of my talks here is, how much protein do you need? Real simply, probably about 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. Now, that's on the lower end.

So if you're a 200-pound person, that's only about 140 grams. And that's from some chronic studies that were done feeding people protein and then cutting their calories literally by 40% to 60% overnight. And what they saw is in that higher protein group of 0.7 compared to 0.35, they didn't lose any lean mass. So if we put you on severely low calories and we get rid of your protein or we drop it very low, your body is going to then start losing muscle tissue. We were talking to Brad Schoenfeld, and he was saying basically like the compilation of all the studies that have been done on phallus basically say in aggregate

that if you get enough protein, say a gram of protein per pound of body weight, just like what you just said, and you keep your total calorie number where you're in a caloric deficit with that high amount of protein, then you'll lose fat mass and maintain pretty much all your lean body mass. Yep. Yeah. And Brad's the man on that for hypertrophy research and everything too. And there was just, Brad was an author on the study too with Alan Oregon, a whole bunch of people from Stu Phillips' lab. Morton, I think was the primary author where they did exactly that. They did a huge meta-analysis of a whole bunch of training studies, and they found pretty much around the 0.7 grams per pound of body weight again.

So I think it was a little bit maybe less than that, but it's definitely within that range. Did they try more than that, or was it 0.35 compared to 0.7, but they didn't try one, 1.2, or any other amount? Yeah, they had one group, I think, that did try a little more than that. There are some other studies that have gone over that amount. So some really cool studies, if you look at Jose Antonio's work, where he was trying to figure out if we just give you massive amounts of protein, can you convert that to fat, right? Because everyone's like, oh, it's all just calories in, calories out.

And what they found was, I just pulled this study again uh one of the groups they did 4.4 grams per kilo per day so if you were a 220 pound male that's 100 kilograms that's 440 grams of protein a day for a long period of time there's a a massive amount of protein. It's tough to even accomplish. The gains. All you do is eat all day. The gains. Yeah, and that's what he said. He had people that came into his lab, and they're like, you mean you're going to give us a protein supplement for free to be in your study?

They're like, I want to be in your study. And he said the same guys after a couple weeks came in. They're just like, dude, I think I've got to drop out. I can't eat any more protein because it's so filling. Because that can't be just real food. There's no way you can do that. No, they had to use a protein supplement. Were they using like an isolate?

Using like a whey protein. And if you tried to do that with something like steak, you get 440 grams of protein. But then along with that, you get thousands of calories, thousands of extra calories in just fat, let alone everything else that you ate. And what they found was basically that those people didn't really gain any extra fat. So if you overfeed on protein, you won't really gain any fat. They did some kidney analysis in another study. No markers of kidney damage.

Kidneys do more work, so GFR, creatinine, those levels go up a little bit, but no kidney damage. But what's interesting is in that study, once I got over around the 0.7 grams again, muscle mass or muscle gains were not further enhanced. So the one gram per pound, I think I've used that. It's easy math. It's probably a little bit high, but if you've got someone who's trying to cut calories, you know, protein has good satiety, things of that nature. So there are some other benefits to go into that amount. Was there a diminished return? Or was it just like none?

Like after like 0.7, it was like 20% lower? Was that kind of? You could make an argument up to about a gram per pound of body weight. Maybe you see a little bit better. And then you get into stuff with about protein timing and meals. And, you know, maybe if you're three meals is probably good. Four, maybe a little better. Five, maybe a single digit percent better if you really kind of squeeze the data.

But it's definitely a diminishing thing. And then on that end, too, there's a study they did several years ago where they did an IV of amino acids, so essential amino acids. The thought was, all right, if we just give you an amino acid IV all day, dude, that's like the most anabolic thing known to man, right? Right. What they found was that protein synthesis would come up and max out and then dropped. So even though they're giving essential amino acids by IV, so constant level of amino acids, protein basically building up or the metabolic, the anabolic portion of it, that process actually started to slow down again.

So you actually need these periods of time to kind of reset the mechanism where you get a whole bolus or a whole bunch of protein not much for many a few hours and then another bolus of protein not much for a few hours and another bolus of protein so the kind of little bit of the timing and having those periods of lower amino acids kind of resets that mechanism so it's better just to have a normal eating schedule of three or four or five meals a day or whatever it is rather than trying to snack on protein constantly all day long, potentially? Potentially, yeah.

There hasn't been a chronic study that's really looked at that, but there's a fair amount of acute data and mechanistic data now. There's some other work looking at a rat study. Can you reset that by giving them branch chains or maybe even sucrose or something in between meals? Maybe, but that was only one study that looked at rats so far in that. When you see recently, I mean, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, I've heard her talk about this. I've seen a couple of people, but the amount of protein you need at a single time to create the reaction that we're looking for versus just a caloric gain and did you look at that with this yeah so if you want to go to the men what you would need is there's two things right so you have to start the assembly line of let's say you're going to

manufacture muscle protein so if you think about an assembly line you got to turn the assembly line on before you can manufacture anything so you need about 2.5 to 3.5 grams of leucine. So leucine is what kind of flips that switch and turns on your assembly machine. And then you need some form of energy. So being in an energy surplus is definitely beneficial for that, which bodybuilders have figured out over the years and other athletes. And then you need some type of raw material. So you actually need essential amino acids in order to build anything up. So the minimum you can get by in essential amino acids is probably 6 grams. If you look at 20 grams of whey protein, you have more than enough essential amino acids,

you have more than enough leucine for that threshold effect, so that's enough to start that assembly building process. So you could argue that 20 grams of a whey protein may be enough, at least in acute studies, to have that process run really well, where 40 grams is probably not any different. But if you switch the protein source, like if you say you're vegan and you go to a rice protein, now you would need probably 40 grams of that rice protein to get enough leucine and to get enough amino acids to have the same effect. Yeah, it's incredible the differences between vegan-based versus animal-based. Right.

If you are eating enough, in this example, animal-based protein, then there's also no reason to supplement with pure leucine or branched-chain amino acids, which leucine is part of those. That's what, again, Brad Schoenfeld and Alan Aragon were saying. As long as you get enough, then you don't need any special supplementation. Yeah, so if you're eating four ounces of meat or five ounces of meat or you're eating four or five eggs at once, if I add more leucine to that, does it further enhance the effect?

No. So I use the analogy of a light switch if i turn the light switch on boom the light's on if i keep pushing up on the switch more the light doesn't get brighter the light's already on right so you've got it's a threshold effect you've maxed that out already so adding another two three four grams doesn't make any difference so your body doesn't have a dimmer switch some things it does and. And that's, when I teach, that's one of the analogies I use. Right on. There's some things called the threshold effect, right, where you cross this threshold, boom, you see an effect.

But like we talked about earlier, metabolic flexibility, maybe your resting metabolism from a fuel mix is more like a dimmer switch. So depending upon what you're doing or who you are or your background, you can turn it a little bit more to fat. You can turn it a little bit more to carbohydrates. So some things are much more in that kind of dimmer switch range. So let's keep cruising through the macronutrients because I want to get to the micronutrients at some point. So we talked a lot about protein, but touch on carbs and fats and then let's dig into the micros. Yeah, so real quickly, carbohydrates. Most people probably are underf fueling on carbohydrates for their exercise

especially if they're doing like crossfit which is a very glycolytic type sport right so what i do with those people simply is look at where their baseline is and then i just start slowly usually going up on carbohydrates uh usually on a daily allotment and i look for their body comp and i look at their performance so i'm trying to get them as high as I can where they still like their body comp and their performance starts to plateau. So once they get to that point, I go, eh, carbohydrates are probably pretty good at that level. Fat varies a lot. Some athletes really like consuming fat. Some don't care. But getting a minimum of essential fatty acids is good. You put a number on it, how much fat do I want someone to consume per day, assuming they get enough essential fats.

50, 60, 70 grams per day, probably somewhere in there. That's definitely on the lower end. People will definitely go up from there. But if anyone's ever tried to do a super low-fat diet where you're like 30 or 20 grams a day, it's freaking miserable. The only thing you're eating is egg whites and all this other horrible, bland-tasting crap. Yeah, it's freaking miserable. Like the only thing you're eating is like egg whites and all this other horrible, bland-tasting crap. Yeah, it's all dry. Yeah.

Bodybuilding show. It's not very good. It's like 80s-style bodybuilding. Yeah, totally. You start looking like Colt. Chicken breast and rice. He's egg whites only. That's why he's egg whites only, man.

That egg white life. Shredded at 145 pounds. He told me it was 175. Wow. It's pure muscle. No, by the way. That's because he He told me it was 175. Wow. That's pure muscle. No doubt about that. That's because he was just in on it yesterday. Okay.

So what about micronutrients? Let's dig into that. Where are people? What are they doing wrong? What are they doing right? What do you do with someone who seems to be eating well, like their macros seem to be on point, but that something is just off still? Do you dig into their micronutrients and see if they have deficiencies?

Like, how do you attack that problem? Yeah, so I definitely look at their micronutrients. The simplest way you can look at that is just have them do a three-day dietary log. And most athletes tend to eat the same things over and over. A real quick and dirty way to look at it is, do they kind of cover all the different food groups, right? Do they actually eat anything that looks like a vegetable? That's usually a pretty good start.

I also look at their variety. They tend to eat the same thing over and over. And then within that, I actually look at colors, not like do they eat colored M&Ms, but like different colored vegetables and fruits. Because if they're only eating, let's say, all green things, right? We know that some of the micronutrients and polyphenols and stuff, that they're just not showing up in there. Right.

Right. A lot of polyphenols are also pigments, so they make things the colors that they are. Right. Right. So a quick thing you can do, just quick and dirty, is when you look at it, what kind of variety do they have and what kind of colors are they eating? Do they eat anything green? Do they eat any kind of yellows and oranges do you get anything like berries where they're kind of

more purple and red and things like that if they're eating kind of all those colors then they're probably okay there's a couple exceptions which we'll talk about and then i also look at which i got from blood soap is mushrooms so they're a separate fungi group all their own and so for a long time i'm doing all this analysis ah you need all this variety all this stuff and i'm like oh my gosh i forgot like in a whole entire food group yeah whole category yeah so making sure you know some of those are in there which you can use as a supplement that type of thing too totally i think it's a really easy thing to tell someone if you are a trainer or coach or whatever like just eat five different colors of fruits

and vegetables each day. People go, okay, that's like kindergarten level advice. People wouldn't easily follow it because they can easily just be like, okay, strawberries, blueberries, green bell pepper, whatever it is. Do I have five different colors? Set. Maybe not all the way

set, but that's probably progress for a lot of people. Oh, definitely. It's kind of eat from the rainbow. The other thing I'll do to try to get them to have more variety is it sounds weird, but I'm like, okay, go to your store like an actual store that sells real food and walk around the perimeter and just look for something

that you haven't ever remember eating within the last year and then just buy it. They're like, what? Does it matter what it is no i don't care you know like if you want to buy dates that's cool if you want to try some kombucha or whatever just try something different to get them in the habit to kind of go out and to kind of seek those things and it's funny that they'll usually pick something that they like but they've just never really seen it because they tend to be creatures of habit and kind of get the same things all the time.

Well, it's so easy now, too. You can just get on YouTube and type in how to cook or eat kumquats or whatever it is. And then you'll have videos that just teach you how to do it right then and there. You can just watch the video while you're in your kitchen and just make it happen. Yeah, and I'm like, what's the worst thing that happens? You bought something and you didn't like it.

Okay, fine. Buy something different next time. It's not going to be the end of the world on that. The other part is where they're usually low. So the question I get all the time is, well, can I do any fancy analysis? Or what about all these other micronutrient tests and all this other stuff you can do? With a few exceptions, I don't think any of them are really worth the crap. You can look at a vitamin D test. So look at what's called 25-hydroxy.

Most physicians will run that now. For a while, we're doing a 125-hydroxy, which is D2, and you probably want a D3. Outside of that. Most supplements are D3. Yeah. So the only supplement you can buy over the counter is a D3 supplement. So paradoxically, D2 is a d3 supplement so paradoxically d2 is a prescription-based supplement um so a couple years back i saw a lot of people going into their

physician they would get a test and they're like they would do a 25 hydroxy test and then they'd send them to their pharmacist for a prescription and i'm like well wait a minute what prescription did you get and it's a d2 the issue with that is unless you've got kidney issues or other things going on, D2 is a very, very, very short half-life. D3 is a much longer half-life. So you could literally get a D2 supplement. They could go back and retest you, and you're fine. And then like two, three weeks later, you're low again. So unless you've got kidney issues or something else going on, I always ask them is, did they give you a prescription for the supplement or did they tell you to buy something over the counter?

Right. So D3, what level do you want to be in D3? 50 to 70, probably somewhere in there. If you get too high, there's some data to show that you can increase your risk of mortality, things like that. If you're definitely on the lower end, recovery can be a little bit harder. It can affect performance, things of that nature. I almost can't go in the sun at all with anyone in this space without somebody being like, it's a bind of a D in me.

It's like such a mainstream thing now. Everyone knows about it. But what really is the difference in your mind between supplementing with D3 and going out and getting actual exposure to sunlight? Yeah, the short answer i would say is we probably don't know yet so one of the things i have changed is if they have a test and they say i'm low in vitamin d like probably two three years ago i'd be like perfect go take this d3 supplement now i'm like okay well what do you do because in my head i'm thinking well why are you low in d3 and i know

the answer is they're probably never outside so I think the bigger issue is that they're probably not outside. So I'll ask them, how often are you outside? I walk between my car, I go to my desk, I walk to the gym, and then I walk home. I'm like, okay, so you're basically never really outside that long. They're like, well, no. So is D3 being low an issue? Yep. But there's also other benefits to being

outside. There's some cool studies in Japan called forest bathing. Which when I first heard the term I thought was like a bunch of hippies running around the woods like beating themselves at twigs or something. But it's actually just go out and hang out in the forest. And they show autonomic

changes. So heart rate variability gets better just by looking. The theory is that seeing the fractal patterns of the trees and stuff like that. So I'll ask them how often they're outside. Some other stuff I got from a friend, Dan Party, is if they're outside in the morning without sunglasses, the photon sitting in the back of their eye is one of the massive things to kind of help kind of anchor their circadian rhythm. And a lot of times I see if their D3 is low, they're're not outside much a lot of the time they have a really hard time sleeping they're like i just feel tired during the day and then i try to go to bed and i can't sleep so usually their circadian rhythm is kind of all wonky too yeah it's like 10 degrees or something right the sun's at below 10 degrees like you have the ability to then absorb it as over that you can't?

It's just too much information in a sense? A little bit. The photons will still hit the back of your eyes. So I tell people, go for a walk in the morning. Don't use sunglasses. It's enough to kind of reset the photoreceptors. You are correct, though. For vitamin D, there has to be enough intensity of the sunlight and UV for your skin to basically

convert it to vitamin D. So I'm from Minnesota. So in January, if I ran around buck naked all winter, I'm probably not going to get enough UV exposure to do anything for vitamin D. Other times of the year, I can though. So yeah, the angle of the sun for vitamin D does make a difference. So what is the recommendation to supplement? I actually have clients that live in Alaska. This is the first year I've ever met anyone from Alaska. Then all of a sudden, I have three clients up there. Literally walking through the winter with them was one of the strangest things. Oh, it's bizarre if you've ever been there.

You can literally feel a dip in their energy, their training. Everything is just way more depressed. Oh, yeah. Then I had never experienced someone that was really excited for 35 degrees so they could go panning. They would like bathing suit weather was 35 degrees because they had been in minus 50 for so long. And just the ability to feel the sun just changes everything.

So us in SoCal when it's 60 degrees, we're frozen. We're pathetically upset. That's sweater weather. It's miserable. We don't know what to do with ourselves. They're outside sunbathing and it's 35 degrees. Milwaukee. Yeah, Minnesota. Milwaukee, same thing. It was like 30 degrees. Everybody's out in shorts like,

yeah! So is supplementing a is that going to get people to where they need to be? Is that enough? Yeah, I still would recommend that they use a supplement to get into the range, but I won't bypass the other discussion. So three years ago, I'd just say, yeah, just take a supplement. Don't worry about it.

Now I'll figure out more lifestyle stuff of what's going on. And at the end of the day, I probably still will give them a supplement because I do want them to get back to that normal range, but I want them to kind of import some of the other health and lifestyle factors too. So I've been in Alaska. My uncle lives up there. And it's so bizarre. We were there in May a couple of years ago.

And it was still 1130 at night. And the sun was still in the horizon. Finland's the same way if you've ever been there. Finland actually has a super massive suicide suicide and depression rate too one of the theories is because of the way the sun and everything is and especially being here at paleo effects i'm like well wait a minute what did people do back in the day before vitamin d supplements like they didn't have a vitamin d supplement they lived in these cold areas um there's a bunch of things they would do but one of them was they would gather mushrooms

and they would put them out in the sun, and then they would store them for the winter. And it turns out that that's a way of creating D2. So they would do that, and that would be one of their sources in the winter also. It's like light UV activated, right? It is, yeah. You get a UV reaction to it. Yeah, you see some of these mushroom companies saying, like, UV activated, like right on activated like right on the label and you're like what is that yeah it's for d2 and d2 can work as in a pinch hit as long as you have it at a pretty high frequency and then also you can store pretty

high amounts of d3 so you can get by for a fair amount of times i tell clients that if you're going to get tested get tested if you're in like minnesota Alaska. Sometime probably towards the end of your summer. Because if you were ever at a max level, that's going to be your max. And then right as you get done with winter. Because if you're ever going to be at a low level, that's probably where you're going to be. And if you're pretty good in those ends, you're probably okay. And don't be an idiot like I was and take a D3 supplement. And then go on a couple trips in the middle of winter

and then take the same supplement you did the year before without the trips. Because I got tested in spring last year, and I was like 95. And I'm like, holy crap, that's high. I'm like, what the hell? I didn't take any more of the same supplement than I did the year before. And then I'm like, oh, yeah, I took three trips in the winter to where it was nice and warm for a week at a time and just kept taking the same supplement.

Gotcha. Right on. So getting outside is a good thing for the most part. What about other vitamins? We touched heavy on vitamin D, but there's so many other things to touch on. Yeah. So most of the vitamin C. Say again? Vitamin C. Ooh, yes. Love it. Good. What about it?

So I think it was vitamin C. I it. Good. What about it? I think it was vitamin C. The reason I... One, I know nothing about it. I think it was bigger, stronger, faster about steroids. Five people die a year from vitamin C. They go through this laundry list of side effects

which are detrimental to your health. People dying. Then, without telling you, you assume these are the side effects of steroids. And they're like, no, that's vitamin C. Is that right? Kind of. I mean, in general. I just want to know where these people are.

Are they lying to us? I mean, it's a lot of vitamin C. Yeah. The old saying, which has been kind of disproven from Pericles, is that it's the dose that matters. And that part is true, but the theory was that high amounts of anything can kill you. So too much water, you can die of what's called hyponatrenia. You basically just lose all your sodium. But you've got to drink massive gallons of water in a very short period of time.

So mandocrine disruptors actually are the reverse. Super small amounts have a very kind of detrimental effect if you're in the middle of that curve not so much and then as you get higher have more of a detrimental effect so it's not always this linear response vitamin c if you take too much the biggest issue you'll know as you're running to the bathroom to do the wilford brimley two-step in there for a little bit too long you You'll know that right away. That's usually several grams. I've tried that when I've been sick.

I had to take 15 grams at once over the course of a day before that happened. Is vitamin C really that hard to come by? If you're eating pretty dang good, you're eating mostly meat and vegetables, you're hitting your macros, so to speak. Are you likely to be deficient in something like vitamin C?

It doesn't seem like it's that hard to come by. No, we don't really see frank vitamin C deficiencies anymore or scurvy. The bigger issue, especially with lifters, is, well, what is, quote, unquote, the optimal amount of vitamin C? No one really knows, but we do know that over the RDA, you're probably going to be fine. A little bit more than that, if you're under periods of stress, probably good. But then for recovery, we have some mouse studies. There's one or two human studies now showing that if after training we give you a massive doses of vitamin C,

like several grams, that it appears to impair the adaptations that you were seeing from exercise. So we know that if we give you too much and maybe time it after exercise, that can screw up the adaptation that we're trying to get from exercise. Now, a lot of vitamins in isolation will tend to do that. Some other compounds won't. So I tell people if you're going to take like a high amount of quote-unquote antioxidants, which vitamin C is an antioxidant, taking them right after exercise, probably not the best idea. But again, you can make an argument that if you're an in-season NFL player, I'm not as worried about the adaptations per se.

I'm more worried about recovery so you can perform again. Now, if I'm in the offseason, I'm probably going to flip that right I'm more concerned about the adaptations and less concerned about performance because we've got this long time frame we can play with before you have to be back at a high level again so again I think the context for all that is important in general I tell clients yeah take some vitamin c don't worry a lot about it maybe a gram or two a day at the very most away from training. If you really think you need it, you're under high stress. I think that's absolutely important as well because the majority of people are like,

oh, I need to drink my orange juice every day. What you're doing is putting 50 grams of sugar in your body under the guise that you need more vitamin C. Yeah. So vitamin C is a lot of the vitamins, but I don't think we've worked out the exact amount. So then I always look at what's the downside if you take too much, right? And so people who exercise a lot, we do have some pretty good data now showing that it may screw up that adaptation. That would be a downside for that population. Do you see a difference between, like, something like a buffered vitamin C versus a, I forgot the other.

Scorbic acid. Yeah, scorbic acid. Yeah, yeah. No, I've never seen any good data on that. Perhaps maybe someone's got some really weird gastrointestinal issues. Maybe. Can I shout out the next vitamin? Go for it, Adam.

Vitamin E. Oh, you took it. That's awkward. This is what we were talking about last time. Awkward high five. I used to be a more higher dose vitamin E. Now, not so much. Again, the classic study was, I believe it was vitamin C, vitamin E,

and I think beta carotene in smokers. So several years ago. What they found was it actually made their cancer rates worse. Again, that doesn't necessarily apply to this population per se. And they were using pretty high doses in isolation in a group that already is doing something that's promoting cancer. So again, it doesn't mean that directly crosses over. Those are all antioxidants. So they're on the assumption that smoking has a lot of free radical damage associated with it,

they're trying to ameliorate that by taking these antioxidants? Correct. Yeah, and they got the opposite result of what they initially planned. Vitamin E, I do think what's called a mixed tocopherol is going to be better, so you get all the kind of subforms that you find in nature, and then you can go one step

down below that in something that's called tocopherols or tocotrienols actually is what it is. And there's some mixed data on that. I know some supplement companies have tried to use that as a supplement for muscle recovery. Yeah, it's a data on that. It's kind of mixed and a little bit more on the expensive side. TOCO, the TOCO. Yeah, TOCO Trials. Yeah, I've seen that before.

Yeah. I think they're okay, but I don't think it's anything that magical. So I tell people, yeah, if you want to add it once in a while, that's fine. Look for mixed tocopherols, and you're probably going to be okay. Stay in the lower dose, 200 IUs, probably somewhere in there, and that's probably going to be on the higher end, I would say. What about zinc and magnesium? Yeah, so a lot of athletes, in terms of micronutrients, I would say magnesium is probably going to be the lowest, and that's usually because they don't eat a lot of green-looking things, especially natural green things. And chlorophyll? Yeah,

so chlorophyll, you can basically kind of substitute chlorophyll for magnesium they're super similar if you look at the structures right so a lot of people don't get enough magnesium it's a pretty cheap supplement to buy again the form on that definitely makes a huge difference the one to stay away from is magnesium oxide the conversion rate of that's only like eight percent and a quick and dirty way to look at your multivitamin to see if it's worth a crap, I'll look at the vitamin E and what form they use, and then I'll look at magnesium and what form they use. So if they only use like kind of, they're not using a mix of tocopherols for vitamin E

or like the not natural version, and then magnesium, they're using magnesium oxide only. Yeah, it makes me wonder a little bit. Magnesium citrate. So citrate is good. Glycinate is good. Citrate's okay. Pretty much any of the non-oxide forms are pretty good.

How much amount? I don't think the testing is real strong for magnesium. There's some people who say, well, you can do like a red blood cell analysis. Maybe. But again, the downsides of magnesium are not really that profound. Again, it's GI distress. There's some people who say well you can do like a red blood cell analysis Maybe But again the downsides of magnesium Are not really that profound Again it's GI distress So I tell people just take a bunch at night

You're probably going to be okay Zinc is probably the second one People can be low on So people have heard of the supplement ZMA So zinc magnesium aspartate They also throw B6 in there too Yeah actually I've always wondered why they throw b6 in there too yeah actually i've always wondered why they throw b6 in there like what why is that necessary this is like a real question yeah i

know like an interview question yeah yeah this is something i really want to know because i've no i've wondered the same thing so if you go back to zma right so you know victor conte was a guy who developed zma right the belco guy yeah um So you actually filed a patent on it for those particular amounts. They did a follow-up study in basketball players, but the study in basketball players, they were already very zinc deficient and probably borderline overtrained. And they did show that, ooh, it increased their testosterone a little bit, right? So everyone's like, oh, ZMA, testosterone supplement. And then you go to all the forums and they're like, oh, it gives me the weirdest dreams. Oh, it must be working in my head i'm like well why does that happen so i bought the the form

that they use the zinc the magnesium and the b6 all separately i did this on myself and some clients like a long time ago and it appears that the b6 is what gave people the weird dreams and i think it's because of the neurotransmitter conversion um if you take the b6 out they don't seem to have the weird dreams all right and i can't prove this but my guess is that they figured this out and by putting the b6 in there and you get these wacky dreams you're like oh i got weird dreams it must be improving my sleep right right right and the reality is a lot of people are low on magnesium a lot of people are low on zinc So it's good But a lot of times people do too much zinc

So they'll take ZMA and then they'll take Twice the recommended amount of their Normal daily multivitamin And their zinc levels can get too high Biggest thing with that is that zinc Will then start depleting out copper So usually look on your multivitamin To see if they have a small amount of copper

Also And once you're replete in zinc you can take more and it doesn't do anything for your testosterone levels so if you're very low on zinc and you replete that and you get back to a normal baseline yeah your testosterone may go up a little bit but if you're already pretty good on zinc and you add more it's not going to make testosterone go up anymore so the b6 was just in there to make people think that it's working that's my guess like this triggers dreams and you're good that kind of reminds me of like i remember reading about toothpaste where they used to have toothpaste that that works great for actually cleaning teeth just fine but then when they put something in it to make it bubble up oh yeah soap makes bubbles yeah bubbles make things clean so once it was like bubbles in your mouth,

it was like, oh, I'm really cleaning my teeth now. And it didn't work any better, but people felt like it was working better. And so toothpaste sales fucking skyrocketed. Oh, that's interesting. That wouldn't surprise me. It's like putting beta-alanine in something that doesn't need beta-alanine

because it gives you a little tingle and you're like, this thing is fucking powerful, even though you've actually experienced none of the benefits of the thing. Yeah's why they put beta alanine in every pre-workout right right so beta alanine is it's an amino acid it's the rate limiting step in the formation of carnosine so you have beta alanine but you have histamine and you form carnosine so carnosine is an intramuscular buffer of the pH changes. So if you go out and you do a horrible Metcon, you're trying to buffer some of that pH. It's not lactic acid, so it's lactate plus pH that's created, and you're trying to buffer some of that pH.

So beta-alanine helps with that within a single-digit percentage. But it also has this other effect where it hits what's called the DRG in the spine, dorsal ruganglia, and that also gives you that tingly feeling. It's completely unrelated to how the supplement is working. It just happens to have multiple effects. But people feel the kind of itchy tingling, and they're like, oh, my pre-workout's kicking in. So a lot of times I put three grams in pre-workouts. Now I know why.

The first time I remember crawling through your veins. Oh, yeah. It's got to be working. I've never had anyone give me an explanation for that. Like missing the dorsal root ganglia piece. It being the rate limiting step in the production of carnosine, intramuscular buffer, and the whole deal.

I feel like that's really common, but no one ever mentions why you actually tingle. Yeah, that's why. And what's interesting, if I remember correctly, it doesn't happen in Koreans. There's a genetic thing, it doesn't happen in Koreans. There's a genetic thing where Koreans don't have that effect. So what I've tried to do, and if anyone creates a supplement, send me some money or whatever. But I think if you can create a long-acting beta-alanine, I think that would be a pretty good seller.

Because the rate-limiting step right now, it appears to be the total dose that you can take. So if we could give you, say, 100 grams of beta-alanine, you wouldn't feel like you're going to itch your face off or have any other issues. It appears that you may be able to saturate the muscle much faster. Because the hard part now, like beta-alanine, you need about 6 to maybe 9 grams, at least 6 grams per day. But some people get itchies at like one gram. I can get you, yeah, one or two.

Right. My brother, the first time he ever went to take Beta-Alanine, he went and bought it, and then he was like looking at it and couldn't figure out how much to take. They're like, there wasn't a scooper in there. And so if you've ever seen a Beta-Alanine scooper, it's like a one-gram scooper. Yeah, it's very small. It's really tiny.

It's like one gram. One gram. And my brother, not knowing that it was going to be, because what other supplement has a one gram scooper? Yeah. Nothing. Nothing. Everything has like a five gram at like a minimum.

Yeah. And so he just grabs like a teaspoon or a tablespoon spoon, like a kitchen spoon that he fucking eats soup with, and just goes, oh, I think he said two of them. One, two. He probably had 20 grams, which like I have no interest in ever even attempting this to see what it would feel like. It's like a form of torture.

That's like laying in insulation. Jumping into a pile of insulation and asbestos. He said his whole body was on fire. He didn't know what the fuck was happening. I didn't even tell him that he was going to tingle. He didn't even know that was coming.

That was like a trick we would do on our friends when we'd first recommend beta-alanine. It would be like, don't tell them about the tingles. I love that there's like an entire company. Like PSN just made an entire business out of just the itch. Oh, yeah. Or if you've ever taken too much niacin, like the flush. I did that once. I was testing a supplement.

I was an idiot. They sent it to me in the mail. I'm like, flush. I did that once. I was testing a supplement. I was an idiot. They sent it to me in the mail. I'm like, sure, I'll try this. And I'm like, oh, my God. And I turned red. And it feels horrible. And I look at the back, and it went niacin. I don't remember the amount, but it was astronomically high.

And I'm like, oh. I know a guy who was doing a bodybuilding show, and he was taking niacin before it went on stage. Just like someone who's never had a pot cookie before, and they eat it, and then 60 minutes later, they're like, it isn't working. Take more. And then five minutes later, it kicks in, and they're like, oh, shit. As soon as you swallow it. You're like, that was a bad idea.

Same deal for him. He was like, fuck, I didn't take enough niacin. I've got to be on stage in a second or whatever. And then took some more. And then like 10 minutes later was just like overwhelmed. And then just kept getting worse and worse. And he was like the whole time just like trying to hold his shit together. In front of like a big audience.

And those lights are bright. I mean, you're like, I mean, it's like. Like it's awful red. It's going to pop. You start turning purple. There's like those bodybuilders that you can see took too much. And they literally have the purple tone to their skin. You're like, it's a lot of niacin.

It doesn't look so healthy. Can we dig back into vitamin B? There's a whole lot of numbers attached to those and B12 is like a really big one. Yeah. I feel like I've heard B12 as like an answer to a host of problems across the

spectrum and have no real idea of who's telling the truth and who's just feeding me something. It's like coconut oil. It's a big profit center for people. Do we need to be 12 shots? Maybe if you're... And people on steroids are also supplementing with it. You probably don't from what I've seen.

If you're super low... We just shut them all down. They're all lying. If you're super low low is that a way to get you back to being sufficient yeah does it work sure but again with most multivitamins and other types of micronutrients once you're at a sufficient status adding more doesn't add more effects right because people think oh linear if i was to study on deficient rats, it works for them. I'll take three times the amount and I'll get three times the effect. It's like, no, it doesn't work that way at all.

The group that I do see that it works a lot in is people who are vegan because there isn't really any good vegan sources of B12 per se. I mean, it just doesn't show up in their diet because it's primarily from animals. There's a couple studies showing that if they have i think it was heel pain or achilles tendon issues that that may be a hallmark for some b12 issues especially in vegans but what does b12 even really do like why do you why do you need it at all yeah so a lot of the b vitamins are used in pretty much all the energy cycles from your Krebs cycle to energy transport chain to all those different things. And each kind of have their own role.

But they also should be taken as a complex because they all have their own role that if you take way too much of one, you may start depleting out the other ones because they're all being run through these same processes together. So I tell people that if you're going to take just one B vitamin at a super high amount, at least take a good B complex first and then play around with different amounts. At B12 also, the oral absorption rate is usually very poor. So if you start getting into like much higher amounts, you'll look for something that's a lozenge. But the FDA, they can't really tell you to leave it in your mouth and let it dissolve because it enters it's called the buco layer through the mouth because that's a different delivery mechanism which the fda kind of frowns on

so a lot of times you'll see it'll be 12 it'll say leave in your mouth and let dissolve right and that's probably a better way if you are deficient to get uh much higher levels so so why why are b12 shots advertised in so many places it feels very medical and so you can charge a lot of money for it or you actually need any type of like actual injection i think it's probably the first part right and and it's hard because there is so if you take an injection of b12 is that a legitimate way if you were super low in B12 to get you back to being sufficient status? Yes. Then the second part of your question, does that mean all these people wandering around are just like super low levels of B12?

Probably not. There's some theories that if you're really, really high levels in B12, it's going to help your energy and you're going to feel so great. If you're deficient in B12, is it similar to being anemic it's very similar yeah so again if you go back to vegetarians the first thing i'll look for them is low iron and low b12 those are probably like the first two things i'm going to look at and especially if it's a woman so if it's a woman who's a vegan i'm going to think oh may be kind of goofy, and iron's probably going to be low. You're probably going to be very low in B12. How would you, as a fitness person, even know that?

Just look at what they eat, right? I mean, if they're not consuming any type of meat, which by them being vegan would be true, and they're not taking any type of supplement, they're going to be pretty low. So I'm assuming in part you said women because if they're menstruating, they're losing blood. Blood has iron as a part of the hemoglobin that's a part of the blood, so they're losing iron on a regular basis where guys would not be.

Right. And the heme version of iron, which shows up in red meat, is much more absorbable than other forms of iron. So by the virtue of them not consuming that and they've got a monthly blood loss, they're probably going to be low. Guys tend to be, especially lifters who eat a lot of red meat, their iron can actually be too high. So if your iron level gets super high, it starts becoming a pro-oxidant and starts to have almost the opposite effect then. It's not the best analogy, but I call them it's like internal rusting. You have all these pro-oxidant effects going on.

The only way to get rid of that if you go in and find out that you are is donating blood. So donating blood will actually kick your iron levels back down. Is it not just a blood loss but maybe a blood gain? So my wife is pregnant, and clearly there's a lot more blood created. Blood volume is higher. Blood volume, yeah. And they have told her to increase B12 and iron because she's, like, whatever level of anemic thing going on.

Is it any changes in blood flow or blood volume, or is it just a loss? Is there some correlation on either side of that scale? Yeah. I don't know with pregnancy, to be honest. We'd have to look to see if she was low before she was pregnant. We do know that if you're low and pregnant that it's something you would want to fix sooner than later.

We're going to take another break. I want to dig into the first part we talked about. Variability, heart rate variability, metabolic variability. Then the macros and the micros and how all this plays a role together as a bigger system. Cool. Shrug family, we don't usually get into having two breaks,

but this week with Mike Nelson, we do. Make sure you get over to ShrugCollective.com backslash vault. Once again, we are having a 50% off your very first month of the program vault happening today. It actually ends tonight at midnight. So get to shrugcollective.com backslash vault. 11 programs, three long-term programs, 18 plus month, Olympic lifting, mass gain, CrossFit. And then we've got eight short-term programs as well, plus four free gifts in there.

Anything from mobility getting your first pull-up um strongman your first meet crossfit open prep all kinds of fun things in there to guide you on your strength conditioning journey shrug collective.com backslash vault use the coupon code 505050 there's a Labor Day sale going on that ends at midnight tonight. ShruggedCollective.com backslash vault. 50% off your very first month using coupon code 5050. See you guys at the end of the show. Welcome back to Barbell Shrugged.

Break number two down. We're going deep here. Mike T. Nelson at Paleo FX. Doug, you've got a big question here. I didn't even know that we were going to have a second break. I was totally caught off guard. I thought we were about to shut it down. Well, I had to go to the bathroom.

I'm happy that we didn't, though, because I have more questions. So we talked a little bit about vitamins and minerals. What about other phytonutrients, polyphenols, astaxanthin, anthocyanthins, resveratrol, like that whole category? Yeah, so there's some very good research on a lot of them. And we were talking in between the break is some of the ones I wonder about. So like turmeric is very popular now and for very good reason. Oh, yeah, I take turmeric pills.

Yeah, and it works really well if you've got high inflammation. If you also look at some of the better formulations, there's pretty much a lot of them on the market now. They have usually black pepper or something that's going to basically change what's called the cytochrome P450 pathway. It basically makes the turmeric or that compound, whatever they're using, more bioavailable. It actually messes with the liver's ability to detox that pathway. So if you want more bioavailability there, that's actually a really good thing. If you've got super high amounts of inflammation, it works very, very well for that. But I also wonder if you look at nature, if we should be kind of bypassing some of those pathways

all the time. I think it's probably useful for a specific thing, but if you've got super high levels of inflammation inflammation the next step you can use that to try to control them but still try to figure out why your inflammation you know inflammation level is super high resveratrol is kind of similar bioavailability on it's just not really that good the human data i think is kind of hit or miss so some pretty impressive animal data um other polyphenols like some of the things in green tea, very useful. There's a couple. EGCG, is that one?

Yeah, EGCG. There is a rat study showing that EGCG in high levels may not be the best for your liver. I haven't really seen that done in humans yet. But, again, that's not anything you're going to get from drinking green tea. You'd have to take a supplement. And I don't remember the exact dosage, but it was like really, really high. Another one that I find interesting, as you mentioned, is astaxanthine. Astaxanthine is a bright red coloring.

You find it like in crab shells. It's actually made as a supplement from a specific algae-type plant that's red. They extract it from there. And early animal work on it was like super impressive as a natural way of increasing the body's use of fat and what it does is it messes with one of the enzymes in there it's a cpt1 enzyme so carnitine palmitate transferase one it allows that to be more available it doesn't get down regulated as much so your body can then shove more fat uh through the carnitine pathway into the mitochondria.

So in some of the rat studies, they showed huge increases in swimming endurance. They put them in a little thing and they measure how long they could swim. It's probably not really fun if you're a rat because you probably feel like you're trying to drown. But the human studies are not as impressive. One from Van Loon's lab didn't show any change in performance. One or two other human studies, in terms of performance, didn't really show much of an effect. As an antioxidant, it's very effective. It doesn't appear to spin off as many pro-oxidants.

So, for example, like we talked about vitamin C, so each one kind of affects a different pathway. And vitamin C, if you take a huge amount of it, starts acting as a pro-oxidant, right? So, we talked about if your iron levels are super high, it starts acting as a pro-oxidant, so you get kind of the opposite effect of what you wanted. So astaxanthin doesn't appear to have that mechanism happen as readily because of how it actually works. And it appears to work pretty

well to help protect against uv damage from the sun so i'm very light sensitive this is probably the darkest i've been because i've been in south padre for a couple about two weeks so i'll take like 10 milligrams for day for about a week or two ahead of time you know and of one but it appears to help me not burn quite as much i still have you, pretty much covered up if I go in the sun and that type of thing. So that one may be useful. I'd like to see more data on it, but maybe worth playing around with a little bit. You mentioned the red pigment a second ago. That makes me think of red pigments and phytonutrients.

I think of lycopene. Yeah, the old one from tomatoes, tomato sauce. I feel like i used to hear about a lot more than i than i have lately for for some reason i don't know if i'm just like out of that world more than i used to yeah but i have a theory that it was a lot of the supplements were paid for i think it was prostate research and what they found was a lot of sauces were high in it because you actually had to break the cellular wall to get access to it one of the little kind of dirty insider secrets you find is that if you're let's say theoretically a manufacturer of cherries and you get rid of a lot of cherry skins or byproduct it's your

incentive to try to figure out hmm could we sell this to a supplement company and maybe they could find something useful with it totally it's like cheesemakers and whey protein which that's exactly where that came from yep they used to literally throw yeah gallons and thousands of gallons every year of whey protein down the drain because it was a byproduct of the cheese manufacturing it's like a big liquid that comes off you go to if you have to go like i've been to the tillamook cheese factory yes yeah i've been there too yeah it's a dope place to go if you've never been to it before. That's great. And you can see all the way just like running off as a liquid.

They just dry it out and you've got protein powder. Yeah, so a lot of times those things I think can be beneficial, but I'm always a little weary of looking at disclosures on studies and who funded it. And if all the studies are only from the same funding source, it doesn't automatically mean that it's bad, but you have to realize that they have a pretty big incentive to show a positive result. So you may only be seeing legit studies, but you're maybe only seeing the positive ones.

You may not be seeing some of the other ones. And then also, if people are listening, if you do work for a supplement company, let's say you're an academic, the first question I'll ask them is, who owns the data? So if you were to contract me to work for your supplement company many times it'll say that you still own the data so if i do it thinking i'm going to get a publication out of it and you own the data and the study doesn't show positive you're probably going to keep the data and not necessarily publish it right again that doesn't happen all the time and you will find some companies that have research that wasn't

necessarily positive that's still out there. But I always wonder if there's two studies and they're super positive, maybe it's a good thing, but I always like to see that then verified by someone who doesn't have any disclosures in that area. What about something like

anthocyanthins that are in blueberries? Yeah, there's some pretty good data on that Especially with kind of blood sugar regulation And It's These guys are just over here What the fuck is he talking about It's just a blueberry

It's a blueberry I'm not thinking about that I just like the taste of it It's delicious You're going to ruin it for me But there's pretty good data What's your new diet? I just don't eat anything No colors It's all bad

It's all bad It's generally pretty positive Does that mean if you extract that one compound And sell it as a supplement Is that going to fix all your ills? Probably not. But even like broccoli, I think, has like 300 different polyphenols we haven't

even really identified yet. I went to a talk by Monsanto years ago when everyone's like, no GMOs, no GMOs. So Monsanto was trying to figure out a way by kind of sort of doing other things that were not really genetic altering

to get like sulforaphane levels higher in broccoli, but still make it quote unquote natural, right? So they're still trying to modify foods and try to increase one particular compound. Yeah. I don't know. That makes me a little nervous. Again, I don't think it's bad,

but there's probably a reason all those other compounds are in there too, right? If you go back to vitamin C, right? So we isolate vitamin C and give it to you in a super high amount without all the other bioflavonoids and other compounds, you may see some downsides for that. Again, generally safe, but we're not at the point where we even know what all the interactions are yet. So to take a tangent real quick, like speaking of research and GMO, what does the research actually show for GMOs? It seems like most people just kind of feel like it's a bad idea to modify food without really having any understanding of what actually is wrong about it. Is it actually going to give me cancer? Am I going to have liver failure because I was eating genetically modified corn versus regular corn?

I've never really heard a good rationale other than that just doesn't seem like a good idea. Yeah. I don't really know, to be honest. I haven't looked at a lot of that literature in a while, so I don't know the specifics. But if it's been out there long enough and consumed at a high enough rate, which it probably has, especially looking at things like corn and soybeans, I don't think we see anything that's overtly detrimental, right? Again, does that mean something may happen 10, 20 years down the road? Maybe.

But, you know, then you get into whole agricultural processes and you get into, well, is it really that much more efficacious to have GMO products? I've heard some people say yes, some people say no. So I don't know on that, to be honest. It's a good question, though. I don't know if it's prior to GMOs, but in line with GMOs when they decided to take all the gunpowder and everything and pour it into soil after the wars. And now it's like... Oh, yeah. MPK fertilizer. Yeah, MPK fertilizer.

There was a huge decline in our minerals. Yes. Like the overall. So do GMOs have less minerals, less micronutrients? And looking at our deficient soil, is that what's possibly causing us to be, our micros being not where they should be? Yeah, I think you could make an argument for that.

So MPK Fertilizer would basically, they found it was a way of giving a fertilizer to crops that would make them look really nice and they kind of fit all the consumer things but a lot of them were still very poor in different micronutrients right so if you don't have like selenium in the soil it's probably not going to show up in the highest amount in that particular food how much of that does that matter i i don't know right because if i look at most dietary intakes of the average American, it's like, hmm, they're not even eating broccoli. Right. So is the broccoli they're eating not so good?

Is that their problem? Probably not. Now, could you argue that the broccoli we have now versus the broccoli of 20 years ago, is it different? Probably. Is it making a massive difference yeah i i don't know but we're definitely not moving in the correct direction and i think that's especially being on pale effects i think that's changing a little bit you know you find a lot of people that are trying to get from local farmers and you get farmers that are trying to go back to doing more

organic type practices and things of that nature and And I think all that is definitely moving in the right direction. The hard part is, can we say exactly how much of an impact that's having? I don't know on that part. When we think about general or overall qualities or volume of micronutrients that we get, I think about Dr. Terry Wall and her journey through, I believe it was MS that she had. Having like full-blown MS, can't walk, in a chair. Yeah. Really having just a very, very poor quality of life.

If you haven't seen the TED Talk, you should very much go and watch. It's an incredible story. And the diet that she used to get out of there, or to release, I don't even know, heal herself of MS, I guess you could say. Was just so high on these micronutrients and just the amount of kale she's eating the amount of is that really where people need to be is that we're at paleo effects is that where our ancestral uh nutrition was were we really eating that much variety at that high of a quantity or is that just a particular incidence in which she was able to heal herself um how is it is there a degree that we need to be at to hit like a critical mass

or do we actually all need to be for peak health at that high level yeah it's a good question so i've had dinner with her i've hung out with her a little bit super awesome and she's putting the time to actually run complete clinical trials on it. So it wasn't just her end of one experience, which is fascinating. The TED talk is really good. You know, she's actually done a lot of great, super clinical, very stringent work to show that it appears to be making a massive difference. I think the big difference there too, is that you're dealing with a pathology to start with. So if you've got, let's say MS or some other pathology on this end,

you're probably going to need a more extreme approach to kind of get back to, quote, unquote, normal again. Yeah. Right? So you can make an argument for maybe if you have type 2 diabetes, maybe ketogenic type diet may be very useful for that, right? It's a very extreme approach, but you're on the physical extreme end due to the disease that you have or tbi or things of that nature does that mean that if you're a normal quote-unquote athlete do you need those same amounts probably not so i like to have a wider variety and not as super high amounts of

each in particular one then if we go back to talk about metabolic flexibility, I think that the human body is the most adaptable organism we've ever found, right? You can find humans in Alaska. You can find them, you know, South America. Just massive climate differences, massive different things that they eat, from the Inuit to the Catawans that eat mostly carbohydrates. And you can find healthy people in both of those areas, you know, eating kind of the standard diet. So I think the physiology is very adaptable. And there is a minimum within there

that we need to meet. The really messy part that's super hard to answer is where is the optimal range, right? So I have this little joke in almost all my presentations that if you came into my lab and said, hey, I'll give you $2 million to tell me what the optimal protocol is to train for CrossFit. I don't know. It could be this, could be this, could be that. But if you came in and said, hey, I've got protocol A and protocol B, and this subset of athletes, I need you to tell me which one is better. Okay, over a period of time, I can tell you which one is actually better.

So optimal is the one thing we can never really answer, but we can answer, okay, is this better than that? And that's almost a never-ending thing, right? So if you keep doing that, you get closer to this kind of mythical optimal. And to add into that, we're starting to get to the point where we can figure out what's better for each individual. So whether that's genes or some other things, we may find that some people do better, and I've seen this in athletes. Even in the same sport of athlete, I've seen some athletes do better on higher carbohydrates, and I've seen other athletes do a little bit better on higher levels of fat. And we know that those probably vary based on their metabolism and different things of that

nature too is there a is there a thing that happens inside someone's body so you mentioned tbis and i wish i could remember the doctor that's working on this for people that are working with ptsd yeah and they're using hormone replacement therapy to balance what's going on inside so that they can actually process things better as their functioning system. If somebody is suffering from some sort of pathology or a TBI or whatever it is, are they able to process these micronutrients? And is hormone replacement therapy, something that kind of helps these processes along? Or are there other things that can help the system function better? Yeah, so a little bit I know about TBI.

So I'm a faculty member at the Keurig Institute. So they do a lot of functional neurology work. So I'm doing the exercise physiology program for them, which is out now. But I've had a lot of interactions with a lot of neurologists. Dr. Schmo is one of the guys in Minnesota, is probably one of the top functional neurology guys for a lot of TBI stuff. And the little bit that I know, it appears that if the brain has this massive injury, that depending upon what areas of the brain get injured, you'll see all sorts of different effects.

So not every TBI is the same as the next one. So they'll work to try to figure out, okay, what system is not working the same? And maybe if you've got pituitary issues or something like that, maybe for a period of time we need to get your hormones back to a normal level to give your body the capacity to heal, to do some type of therapy. And then maybe you can kind of come off of them at another point. So I think it depends upon what system is not working as well. And we're doing a much better job now of looking at even something like that, that years ago we'd say, oh, that's just a brain issue. Well, now we know that it's a whole body

issue that just happens. The brain is the thing that got injured, right? So treating the whole body to figure out what is the best way to do that. Sometimes maybe using a ketogenic type diet then, because we know that the body, the brain's ability to use glucose at that time, because of the injury that happens, a lot of times that system just gets wrecked. So maybe we give it ketones or another type of fuel source to use to kind of bypass that broken machinery to get everything working better so they can do some of the therapy so they can actually then feel better and then once they're better back to where they

want to be maybe we can then kind of cycle back down and change their diet or maybe pull them off the hormones maybe they have to stay on but i think we're doing a better job of looking at the body as a whole. What do we need to do to get this function back and not necessarily looking at just this one little area, kind of trying to treat everything as a whole system. I have another real question for you. As opposed to a fake question. No more softball questions.

I have a real question I'm actually really curious about. Earlier you mentioned that B vitamins help out with aspects of your metabolism. So if you have many steps in the process of breaking down food and creating physical energy through glycolysis, Krebs cycle, and your electron transport chain, a lot of those steps are mediated by enzymes, and those enzymes are dependent on cofactors. A lot of times those cofactors are vitamins and minerals and other things. So if enzymes really are the key to a, we'll call it for the time being, a fast metabolism, why do more people not sell, potentially sell maybe consumables, maybe not,

depending on how they react in the stomach, but sell enzymes that help with the rate limiting steps of different portions of our metabolism. Yeah, it's a good question and my limited understanding is I don't think they make it into the system. I don't think they make it, even if you could

enterically coat it to get it past the stomach, I don't think they get absorbed through the gut wall intact. That's what I was going to say. Consumables might not be a good thing. Enzymes are proteins. Proteins usually get digested really well in the stomach, of course. What about injectables or anything else?

Possibly. I don't know. There's been some stuff with proteolytic enzymes that maybe help break down food. And the theory is that if you take them in between meals, they can maybe help increase those amount of enzymes that help the protein turnover in soft tissue. There's some data on that. I've taken a little bit of that. It can help with my liver numbers.

Yeah, OUS data. Possibly. What about lipospheric or something? Could that be? Yeah, there's all sorts of delivery mechanisms you can use to get it passed but then even once you get it to the right system does the body just tear it down for raw materials you know let's for example like if we go back to the

beta alanine you could take carnosine and what the body does is it will increase muscular levels of carnosine but how it does that is the carnosine it breaks it down into beta alanine and histamine and then basically reassembles it on the other side so it's the beta alanine and histamine, and then basically reassembles it on the other side. So it's the beta alanine that was the right limiter, and if you just give that, carcin levels go up. The other one they've tried for a long time is similarly related to your question is ATP. Well, shit, your whole body runs on ATP. Well, you've got low energy. Well, don't stop drinking caffeine, bro. We'll just give you more ATP pills, right?

Right. And there is some formulations of ATP, but they don't appear to increase the ATP at a cellular level. It just doesn't seem to make it through that whole process. If they gave you ADP antiphosphate supplement? Possibly, but the only way we've been so far for supplementation being able to get around that is by looking at intermediates, right? The most famous one is creatine monohydrate, right? So creatine then works as a donor to help increase that phosphogain system, right?

So that 10 seconds or less energy system. Beta-alanine, again, is kind of in the middle. They've tried pretty much every other intermediate known to man. Not really that great. pyruvate was a big deal for a while ribose was a big deal for a while i really want someone to create a lactate supplement like for like legitimate like a lactate supplement because i think that will actually make it through the gut and i think that'll actually be used as a fuel but everyone always laughs at me every time i say that so someone's gonna do it i know someone's gonna remember the eas i feel like that's really

a logical thing to say though i've had a chemist run the pka i've had everything done on it yeah the only other rate limiter is uh cytosport if you're listening they own the patent on one version of it but they use it yeah of lactate but they use in such small amounts it probably doesn't have an effect um it has a horrible pr agent because people think lactate you know makes them sore and all these other horrible things it's just not true all right but i think as a sports supplement it in theory it should work really well george brooks's lab uses lactate infusions by iv to get back to post likeBI issues, to use that as an alternate fuel for the brain. We know that muscle

will prefer lactate, cardiac will prefer lactate, because you can give lactate independent of the pH changes, independent of driving the acid level down. So anyway, that's my little tyrant. Keep going. What about something like allicin

you'd find in garlic or even something more obscure like sulfur? Like if protein as a part of the tertiary structure has disulfide bonds, does supplementing with sulfur or eating more onions that have sulfur as a part of them, that's why when sulfur dioxide floats in the air, gets in the water in your eyes and makes sulfuric acid. That's why your eyes burn when you are around onions. So sulfur is a part of onions. Is supplementing with sulfur something that could potentially help you with protein synthesis? Because that's a part of the tertiary structure, even though that's like a super deep problem. Probably, but it doesn't appear to be a rate-limiting step.

Right. So adding more of it probably doesn't seem to have an effect. There is some data on garlic with immune system. So garlic is really good antibacterial, antiviral. And a tip is take the garlic and cut it in very, very small pieces and then leave it sit

for about 10 to 15 minutes. The compound you want, the anisone that you mentioned, has to react with oxygen in order to be formed on the garlic. So you have to cut it, leave it sit exposed to air for about 10 to 15 minutes, and then consume it. Okay, I didn't know that. It keeps everyone away from you, too.

So if you're sick, it works great for that. You mentioned the antiviral thing. So a lot of people have been talking about coconut oils and other MCTs. If you're looking at lauric acid, it converts and makes monolaurin, which is supposed to be an antiviral thing. What does that even really mean? What is an antiviral? That Like, what does that even really mean? Like, what is an antiviral? Like, that's a portion of your immune system?

Yep. Yeah, so your immune system is always constantly. We basically have kind of bacteria and viral, which are kind of two different camps. And your body is always fighting these things off. It's just kind of boosting that system a little bit, right? So, for example, the classic thing is if you get sick, your immune system goes kind of what people consider down, but some parts of your immune system go up, right? So if you have looking at white blood cells and things like that,

your immune system feels down, but your body is upregulating all these other compounds to try to clear out the quote unquote invader. So other things that can help facilitate that process, looking at things that are internal to that. So what does your body use? So glutathione being a main one that's used in a lot of those processes. And to get back to your question about it as a supplement. I want to come back to glutathione in a second too. Yeah, but getting back to it as a supplement, again, it doesn't appear to make it through

the gut. And there's some other stuff where you can put it in like you were saying a different form liposomal form the data on that what i've seen is this kind of mixed and i've tried it and like my hrv scores and everything else would tend to go up but then when i went off of it it went back down again so i in my head i'm thinking okay i'm kind of just placing this band- on it, and it kind of helps for a period of time, but how can I upregulate the more basic functions of that so that my overall function is higher

and not try to put all these little Band-Aids on everything? So the glutathione piece, that's one of your body's most powerful endogenous antioxidants. Correct. Is that something that I don't know if I've seen as a supplement and or is there any value on potentially trying that as a supplement? I've only had people use a liposomal form in periods of super high stress when we're purposely just beating the crap out of them and overtraining them

or if they have a really bad travel schedule. But even then, I've only used that for short periods of time. Recently, I've had better luck with athletes doing that with, like, reishi mushroom extract. Again, it's completely anecdotal, but reishi has got some pretty impressive data in humans. So I've stopped using glutathione and used that about one or two weeks beforehand and then through the period of their intense training and the week after, and then I'll kind of cycle off of it at that point. And that seems to help a little bit better.

I actually used lipospheric glutathione probably for like four years. Oh, okay. It was actually one of the first supplements that a company that I was with actually came out with at the time, and it was so awful, the taste. I think I know which company you're talking about. So they ended up changing it to a pill form at some... Yeah. Don't talk about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like more... The early forms tasted horrible. Yeah, horrible. But I, since, you know, in the last two years, I did switch to reishi, and I felt the same positive effects without the awful taste, and a lot more natural

ones you know so many senses and if you look for a good reishi it's more expensive and without you could do an iodine starch test so take iodine if it turns black it's probably not real reishi and real reishi is very very bitter so if you get real powdered reishi and it's not bitter, probably not legitimate because there's a study in nature showing that the vast majority of reishi supplements on the market are probably not legit. I get it in a tincture form. Yeah, that's a good way too. The tinctures will still be a little bit bitter. Yeah, for sure.

I have another, it's not a nutrient specific question, but I feel like people just talk about trans fats all the time. I feel like lately I haven't really heard much about them. Everyone kind of just accepts them as something you don't want. But a long time ago, like 10 years ago, someone was talking to me about during the formation of trans fats, you take unsaturated fatty acids, you put them through a hydrolysis reaction, so you're adding hydrogen, H2 gas, and you're adding a catalyst, like we were talking about earlier, to help with that reaction speed.

And for those reactions, you need platinum, palladium, or nickel to help catalyze those reactions. But nickel, as an example, and all the other ones too, they're expensive. So they cut it 50-50. They call it Rainey's nickel, where it's half aluminum and half nickel so it's not all nickel they get the reaction out of it but it's cheaper because they're adding aluminum to it but someone also was telling me that high amounts of aluminum found in in you know your your brain tissue and your gray matter is one of the things that's been correlated really high with alzheimer's yeah and so independent of

like the why the fats are bad for you, I don't believe, no, I don't believe, I don't know if there's an extraction process to take the aluminum out of all the processed foods that are using trans fats to help with their long-term storage abilities. So do you know anything about any of that? I don't know what you do. I'm going to start asking you questions.

The next show is Doug Larson. I'm like, I'm going to start asking you questions. The next show is Doug Larson. I'm like, I'm going to ask this guy real questions I've been wondering for a long time instead of softballing interview questions. Yeah, I don't know, to be honest. I've heard the same thing about the correlation with Alzheimer's and aluminum. I don't know. I'd have to look up the studies. Heavy metatoxicity.

I got on PubMed and looked at it. I only found one study that was done in Pakistan. I don't know. I'd have to look up that study. Heavy metal toxicity. I got on PubMed and looked at it. I only found one study that was done in, like, Pakistan. Yeah. And I don't remember exactly what the results were, but they found high amounts of aluminum in this population compared to, you know, decades earlier when trans fats weren't quite as prominent. Yeah, and it's tangentially related, but they did a study on these people who had amazing memories

and lived super long, and they donated their brain to science. And when they dissected them, they found a lot of, like, tau tangles and other amyloid proteins that are associated with Alzheimer's. And they went, what the hell is this? These are people who had an amazing memory, had no dementia that was reported, and they saw these basically what's considered classic markers of alzheimer's and that just came out i think last year so i think we're

still trying to sort out exactly what actually alzheimer's even is in terms of a disease progression just because we see an anatomical change that is showing up all the time is that the cause of it right because again you said they're associated not necessarily causational yeah um yeah in terms of the other like you can do aluminum and other types of heavy metals and things like that you know what is the i recently asked a survey of a couple buddies of mine do a lot of functional med stuff and i'm like hey if someone believes they're toxic what's the best test to do to even determine that right no one really has any any good answers for that either so yeah i feel like every time i

hear someone say they're doing a detox i'm like detoxing what yeah there's no there's no anything besides talks like that's mentioned like there's no like what are you actually getting rid of by doing your detox and i'm not saying that there isn't anything there but i've never heard a good rationale other than toxic is a bad word and i don't want to be toxic and so i'm detoxing and that sounds like something that was good for me and fasting or whatever it is that does have a lot of benefits but yeah you you kind of already said it like what what are you detoxing yeah that was always been my answer up until probably like about four months ago. And I went to, I was in Costa Rica with Dr. Ben House and Dr. Brian Walsh.

And he gave a really great talk on detoxification protocol he has. And showing a lot of the literature showing that the testing, we don't really know the best testing forms, at least at a consumer level. But there's very good research to show that we're probably exposed to more toxins now than we ever have been before the caveat also being that a lot of them are stored in fat tissue so if you have someone who's not really releasing a lot of that fat tissue right so their calories are not low they're not kind of actively dieting it's probably not really going to show up even if you ran a blood test or something like that. But now if you have someone doing a dieting protocol, so his analysis was that everyone he has that he has do more caloric restriction,

he'll have them do some type of, quote, unquote, detox in a very specific way because a lot of those compounds are probably just getting released at that point. So I'd say probably look at his stuff. He's done a lot more work on that than i have but i would say he's the only person so far that kind of changed my mind on that because a lot of the other detox people i would hear i'm like well what toxin is it just toxins man the toxins i'm like i agree we probably live in a very toxic environment but what is the data showing that that is happening at a prevalent rate? And then what are the specific toxins? So we had a whole list of endocrine disruptors and other ones that has been shown in the literature that most likely are present in the environment, are present in tissue to a high degree.

You mentioned a couple times, talked about mushrooms. Yeah. you mentioned a couple times uh talked about mushrooms yeah i feel like the more i learn about mushrooms it's almost like it's you can lump all the vegetables together and then mushrooms kind of yeah their own category in this thing and they they have like a really uh i don't know more more fundamental systemic approach to or not even approach, but result in our body. Is there like a combination of mushrooms or certain types that people should be consuming regularly? Yeah, so initially I never looked at it, like I mentioned. And then Mike Bledsoe, we were together probably a year and a half ago, started mentioning mushrooms.

Not his mushrooms, that's different. Oh, no, yeah. The really crazy ones. Which is funny, because at first when he mentioned it, that's exactly what I thought he was talking about. He's like, no, medicinal mushrooms. I'm like, oh, you mean the other kind. Oh, okay.

The other medicinal mushrooms. The other medicinal ones. And like all things, I'm like, ah, I've got to go look and see what the research is. And the research on them, especially with reishi and some of those is, i mentioned pretty impressive it's it's harder because it goes a little bit against the way that kind of western research is done right so western research is very heavily influenced by pharmaceutical we want x compound to target only y receptor and we only want to target that one receptor but to make those type of

combos is almost I'd say at this point virtually impossible because everything has some type of side effect where mushrooms have I think a lot of different systemic effects that are useful different types of mushrooms have probably different types of effects I've talked to people who are at the booth here Jeff Chiltonilton, who runs Namex. I'm a super knowledgeable guy about mushrooms. I actually was going to do a mushroom supplement probably almost nine months ago now. And I had the supplier, I had everything down, and there was one study that showed that it was effective. But after talking to Jeff and some other experts, you can basically take what's called the fruiting body or the top portion of the mushroom, or you can kind of take the, quote-unquote, the root or the mycelium portion.

And they have two very, very different properties. The fruiting body appears to have probably most of the effect, and the mycelium portion, at this point, probably not nearly as much of an effect. But a lot of times what they'll do is they'll grow it on rice, and'll grow the mycelium portion but they'll call it a mushroom extract which yeah it's kind of true it came from a mushroom and that type of thing so i think the sourcing makes a huge difference and then different types of mushrooms appear to have different types of effects. My favorite ones I like, reishi is probably my favorite. Chaga's pretty good. Chaga's actually a canker that grows on birch trees. And then there's some interesting stuff on cordyceps.

It's not the super effective as people hear, right? You may have heard back in the, God, was it 20-some years ago, like cordyceps mushroom was like the supposedly secret russian herb whatever and yeah those studies were it's not for endurance yeah they talked a lot about the uh people climbing in the himalayas right utilizing cordyceps to increase their overall oxygen yeah and the actual cordyceps that comes off of a fuzzy caterpillar is just ungodly expensive no one can afford it but they do have a subtype it's called cordyceps militaris um just have some studies showing that it may have some positive effects again like all

most supplements even when you say positive effects you're you're still talking in like the single digit uh percentage yeah but i think even just adding more mushrooms to people's diets is probably an area I think I overlooked for a period of time. And we know like the beta glucans, there's a very good response to those, all the different components that go into it. It initially kind of got thrown out by nutritionists, just like, ah, there's almost no calories in them,

there isn't much in them. And if you look at like the vitamin and mineral profile, it's not super impressive. But the more we look at the different compounds, like I mentioned, beta-glucans and other ones, we're finding more and more beneficial effects from them. Well, I've even seen that white button mushrooms assist in estrogen suppression. Potentially. I haven't seen that one, but it wouldn't really surprise me.

Yeah. There's been some studies I've seen that had pretty good evidence. Cool. It's not DIM that's found in vegetables. It's something within a mushroom. Yeah, dim is from broccoli, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right on.

Real quick, to what extent do you feel like we just have not discovered? We can keep going for a long time. Mike, you want to sleep over? Come over to the house. Like you mentioned earlier that there's so many compounds in broccoli or whatever it is. Like someone told me like there's 250 different things in milk or whatever. Yeah. Like to what extent do you feel like we just don't know what the hell is really in our food?

Like do you think there's probably like entire categories of nutrients we haven't even discovered yet? My guess is yeah. You know, because the more I keep studying stuff the more i'm just like oh man i don't i don't even know if i know anything you know because one study agrees one disagrees and then oh it's only on this isolated compound um not to be kind of the debbie downer but doing research on broccoli is just really unsexy and not that novel either you know i mean it's it's hard, I think, more of the basic research. I think a way to get around it may be doing genetics research on top of, like, nutrigenomics research.

That's a little bit more sexy and probably an easier sell also. Yeah. But in terms of, like, basic research, I don't think there's as much going in as there probably should be and then also on the psychological side which is not where i work a lot but how do we take the things that we know are beneficial and get people to eat more of them right eat more vegetables eat other things that we know are beneficial and that's a whole separate uh subtopic itself and then if you add in like you mentioned well broccoli, all the different potential synergies or additive effects. People don't need to eat broccoli alone. They eat different

vegetables, eat different things with it. We know that eating some fat may help some things with absorption, may not help others. Cooking may help some things, may hurt other things, you know, so then you get into all those different discrepancies too. And the last thing related on that, for micronutrients and stress, Julia Rucklidge did some really interesting research where she took, okay, in New Zealand where they had the big earthquake, and then a couple years ago when they had the North Dakota as a big flood, they actually had researchers went out in rowboats and separated the population and gave half the population micronutrient multivitamin that was already mixed and

everything so super high amounts of micronutrients and everything and gave the placebo to the other group i did this after the earthquake also their thought being okay here's a massive stressor that's applying to everybody in this area do people people who get more micronutrients, do they actually do better than the group who didn't? And they've done, I think, like two or three studies now and showed that the micronutrient group does do better. And that's not what you would expect if you looked at the studies done on the single ingredients in it. So if you pull out the single ingredients and only look at like the vitamin E study or just the vitamin d study or other ones

they're not all super positive so i hope that research is getting to the point where we're trying to take all these things together and look at the effects instead of trying to take this one little thing out and looking for the single factor thing of what it's affecting and that's getting us closer back to your question about you know all the different compounds that are actually in food so it's getting us that next step closer to trying to figure that out instead of going this uber uber reductionist route down the rabbit hole of the next single compound that interacts the only one receptor in this subpopulation the subpopulation right it'd be kind of like like isolating one movement in a training program

and giving someone all you're doing is push-ups. Does that make you a better athlete versus a comprehensive training program, which would be like the multivitamin or the combination? Yeah, and I would add to that, if people ask all the time, should I take a multivitamin? I usually tell them yes.

The data... It doesn't hurt in its chief? There was a data that came out a couple of years ago that says, oh, multivitamins are horrible. It's like, yeah, not really. You're really not going to go so far over the edge you're going to have any effects. If anything, it's probably going to be a little bit better and shore up your own diet. It doesn't appear to be a lot of big negative effects with it.

Last thing on that too, Charlie Popper has prevented some stuff. He's at Harvard showing that in his patients, he's a psychologist or psychiatrist, I believe, he'll start giving them a multinutrient blend first before he even touches any other types of meds. And he said a lot of times for depression and even some pretty heavy mental illnesses, he doesn't even use any other pharmaceuticals very rarely anymore. And he found just by giving him super high doses of a combined formula that his use of pharmaceutical drugs has gone down pretty dramatically so that even in a different realm again it's a disease population that more data just suggests

that looking at the whole first seeing how far we can get with that and then going only reductionist if we needed to. Dig it. This has been incredible. Yeah. Yeah, thank you guys for having me. I really appreciate it. This has been fun. There's a few times that we get to go this long and learn so much all with one person.

So really appreciate the time. Oh, thank you guys. Appreciate it. Where can people find you? Yep, so two sites. One is just MikeTNelson.com, M-I-K-E-T-N-E-L-S-O-N. If they go to that forum, most of my content goes out over my newsletter, so they can be able to sign up to that on the top.

The other one is I have a certification on basically mostly nutrients and nutrition approach for primarily coaches. And just go to FLEXDIET.COM, F-L-E-X-D-I-E-T.COM. Von Ra. Yo. Yo, buddy. Yo. Tell us about dot com. Von Ra. Yo. Yo, buddy. Yo. Tell us about the energy.

The energy. Well, I am so glad that I had the energy and the focus. You got a V12 shot during the break, right? No, I did not. No, no, no. I had some strong coffee this morning. Time release. Yeah, time release.

Time release. Yeah, so basically it's an awesome, delicious latte that mixes instantly, and it's 15 grams of collagen full-spectrum protein, 150 milligrams of L-theanine, 500 milligrams of coconut water extract, 50 milligrams of hyaluronic acid, and then we use time-release caffeine and uh to elicit a long-term nootropic effect nice with uh complete with five grams of mct oil is that pure energy like time-release caffeine yeah it's a uh yeah so it's a sustained we you know it's a instant

nutritional energy drink you know the goal is to you know take your morning coffee and give you all the things that you need uh less than you know know, I mean, it mixes five seconds, no clumps, awesome mouthfeel, great taste, and really keeps you focused, and it's really satisfying. Nice. I'll get you some. Delicious. I would love it. I love coffee.

Awesome. Yeah. I got you. Yeah, check me out at Strong Coffee Company or everything at Von Rothfelder. There it is. Doug Larson. He really is solid. Yeah.

Sweet. He really is. He really is solid. Sweet. He really is, buddy. He's going every morning. Right on. You can follow me, everything, on Shrug Collective and Barbell Shrugged, and then on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. Come and find me at Anders Varner on all the things, but more importantly, get into the Shrug Collective.

Monday through Friday, brand-new shows, smartest, coolest people in strength and conditioning. Find us on iTunes, YouTube, like, subscribe, share the show, leave a positive comment. We like hearing from you. I like positive comments because it helps my self-esteem, and that's low until you say something nice to bring it up.

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