Barbell Shrugged - [Hormone Dysfunction] Birth Control, TRT, HRT, and Toxicity w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash and Dan Garner Barbell Shrugged #645

Episode Date: June 8, 2022

In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   How Birth Control can reduce testosterone by 70% Birth controls affects on your physique How to pick the right birth control What are drug induced nutrient depletions  How to best handle menopause and andropause What happens when you do not have a cycle for 5+ years What is wrong with TRT and HRT How heavy metal and toxicity affect your hormones   Connect with our guests:   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   Dan Garner on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Mentorship Application: https://bit.ly/DDMentorshipApp   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   Please Support Our Sponsors   Eight Sleep - Save $150 on the Pod Pro and Pod Pro Cover   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, we're giving a little nod to you ladies this week. I know like 70% of our audience is male, but this week it's for you 30%. We're also dipping into a little bit of TRT, HRT talk, so we're not forgetting about you guys. But this week we're talking a lot about birth control. We've got a ton of clients that actually come through, and when you start reading labs on people that have been on birth control for a very long time and you start hearing about the side effects of it, I think there's a real conversation to be had about what happens to your physiology by being on hormonal birth control for so long,

what your best options are, how to get off of it, how to get on it, what the best ones could be for you. I think it's just a subject that we on this show don't talk about a ton, but now that we're coaching many more females, I think it's really important for us to dig in and actually have the conversation about female hormones, testosterone, why you guys need it, how birth control helps with that stuff, how it can also be very harmful and have many side effects, as well as on the other side of things, people that are kind of heading towards menopause. We have many clients as well that are coming in and looking for ways to best manage what

they know is going to be a life-changing time. And menopause is no joke. So it's a very real conversation and hopefully you find a ton of value in it. Before we get into the show, I wanna thank our sponsors. The coolest of all time sponsors has just joined the show. Sleep Eight. If you know who they are, check it out.

I'm a dad, I own a business. I got all kinds of crap going on. When my head hits the pillow at night, the only thing that I want in the world is to actually just go to sleep quickly. The last thing I need is my brain spinning in circles, being uncomfortable, my room's too hot, my room's too cold.

Do I have one leg out of the sheets or how do I find the perfect temperature? Guess what, there's an answer. Perfect temperature comes because they ate sleep, have this cool thing called the Sleep Pod Pro Cover. And in that, it's the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking.

You can add the cover to any mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110. The temperature on the cover will adjust side to side so your spouse can have one temperature and you have your own. And based on your sleep stages, biometrics, bedroom temperature reacting intelligently to create the optimal sleeping environment. Eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster. That's me. Reduce sleep interruptions by 40%. That's's me and get overall more restful sleep that's me you're going to be the same with 30 more deep sleep i can be confident that my mind and body are moving through the restorative sleep stages that are vital for physical recovery hormone regulation

and mental clarity when i am empowered by eight sleep i can show up as the best partner parent and or version of myself so for you get over 8sleep.com forward slash shrugged. There is a $150 coupon code waiting for you by using the code shrugged at checkout. That is 8sleep.com forward slash shrugged. Organifi, the apples have arrived introducing the refreshing taste of new Organifi green juice crisp apple all the benefits you've come to love in the classic reset green juice with a new juicy twist enjoy the same fan favorite nourishing ingredients ashwagandha moringa spirulina and corella designed to hydrate energize and support cortisol balance the new Green Juice Crisp Apple is made with organic, wholesome, hand-picked apples and tastes like a fresh, juicy slice in every sip. If mint just isn't for you, the refreshing new recipe certainly is, making it the first of its kind, the whole family will love. Apple juice as you've never

tasted it before. Now, for a limited time only, take the meh out of mornings with green juice apple crisp from Organifi. Friends, you can head over to Organifi.com forward slash shrug, save 20% on the brand new flavors. We're bringing you all the hot coolness. We're super excited. I love this. I have it in the mail coming to me right now. I'm trying it out same day as you. So get over to Organifi.com forward slash Shrugged.

The brand new apple crisp flavor is out. It's going to be delicious. Organifi.com forward slash Shrugged, save 20%. Buy optimizers. If there's one thing you should be worried about, you are not getting enough of, it's enzymes. Enzymes are the workhorses of digestion. They break down your food into usable macro and micronutrients. Nearly everyone lacks digestive enzymes,

and that's why we suffer from digestive issues like bloating and digestion and gas. You are not what you eat. You are what you digest. We lose enzymes as we age. So if you don't have enough enzymes, you might only be absorbing 40% of the foods you're eating. What a waste. There are two big problems here. Most digestive enzymes are cheap and ineffective, and most do not have enough protease for digesting healthy, high-protein diets. That's why I'm excited to tell you about a new enzyme product called

Masszymes. Masszymes is the most complete, most potent digestive enzyme I've ever seen or experienced with over 102% more protease than the nearest competitor and 300 to 500% more per serving than most popular brands. That's crucial because protein is the most complex macronutrient to break down. Left undigested, protein putrefies in the gut and creates a variety of problems from bloating to inflammation and beyond. Shrugged listeners, you are able to experience the lowest pricing for our audience guaranteed and it's the best deal available on this product. Seriously, with volume discounts combined with our 10% coupon code shrug, you can save up to 28% off select packages of mass times. That's an amazing value. And I promise you that deal is only available on this specific website, mass times.com forward slash shrug M A S S Z Y M E S.com forward slash shrug. You won't find

that deal on Amazon or even the company's own website. This deal is exclusively for podcast listeners and it's legitimately for a limited time while supplies last. The best part is if you don't feel how mass times transforms your digestion, you can get a no questions asked money back guarantee the fastest shipping, go to mass times.com forward slash shrug and use the coupon code shrug to save up to 48% off select packages to get the most full spectrum and effective digestive enzymes ever. That's masszymes.com forward slash shrug and use the coupon code shrug to save up to 48%. Let's get into the show.

Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson. Dan Garner. Travis Mast. What's he doing today? You think Mast is doing Murph? He didn't want to wake up? He's probably out there doing 100 pull-ups, running a couple miles. I see 300 air squats in Mast's game

right now. I'm not sure when the last time Mast did 100 kipping pull-ups was. I'm thinking never. Never? No chance. I would love to see Mast's face when CrossFit came out, and he was like, what are they doing? It's like they did 100 reps of what? His face still looks like that when he sees CrossFit. For sure.

Today on Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about hormone dysfunction. We're going to kick this thing off by digging into... So I have a lot of conversations with people about their health. And one of the things that always kind of tips off and why we want to start the show with this is because when females call me and things start to get a little screwy in their health, one of the very first places that, well, there's two places really, but one of the places is their menstrual cycle. And I wanted to dig into birth control a little bit to kick this thing off because there's crazy questions. And I feel like, as you mentioned pre-show, Dan,

there isn't a person on this planet that has not had an encounter with some female that has a odd menstrual cycle. And I think birth control is one of the craziest subjects to me, especially when we start seeing people's labs. What does birth control is one of the craziest subjects to me, especially when we start seeing people's labs. What does birth control actually do? Like besides the no babies thing, which is super important for a very long period of time, no babies. What does it do hormonally to people?

It's crazy. Yeah. So like you're typically taking, sorry, birth control mainly for like, there's a lot of reasons actually why you can take it. You can take it for no babies. That is the most popular reason for sure. For me, the most important. Another reason is estrogen-based birth controls can obviously keep estrogen more elevated in the

body. Estrogen is very good for bone density in females. So that's another common use of it. Even if you're not worried about having a kid or something like that, people will take it just strictly for the purposes of bone density. But something that's more relevant to the listeners of this show, birth control actually severely decreases women's testosterone levels. So you'll hear women report reduced libido on birth control, which is like a cruel trip because you're taking birth control. So that whole process could be a whole lot. They're getting them both ways. They're getting them both ways. See that? Yeah. It's no fair.

Presumably they're taking it so they can go have fun without having babies, but then it kills their sex drive. Yeah, absolutely. And it's not small either. So like the girls listening to this show, I'm sure, of course, they're interested in strength, muscle mass, fat loss, these types of things. Birth control regularly decreases women's testosterone up to 70%. 7-0. It's absolutely huge. And one thing you'll actually see in research as well is that when you give women DHEA, it's like close to an anabolic steroid for women on birth control, because you give them the DHEA, you can completely restore total and free testosterone without impacting one's ability or the protection effects from preventing birth. So you can actually kind of

have the best of both worlds having DHEA alongside birth control, because it's going to restore testosterone status, which will help libido, which will help muscle mass, which will help fat loss, which will help even mental clarity and a lot of other things that testosterone brings without derailing the whole reason you're taking birth control in the first place. So birth control as a whole, it's taken for a lot of different things, but the questions we probably get the most here revolve purely around physique. And in this world, I mean, I've seen basically two different lanes. There's your strength and muscle mass, but then there's also your weight control. Strength and muscle mass, there's actually

a paper in 2018, one of the best papers I've seen on this, and it had two different groups of women. Both groups had regular menstrual cycles, but one group was already on birth control for a minimum of a year, whereas the other group was not. So both groups have regular menstrual cycles, but one group was already on birth control for a minimum of a year, whereas the other group was not. So both groups have regular menstrual cycles, but one was on chronic use of birth control. And it actually seemed after the training program design, 10-week training program design, that there wasn't much of a difference on strength and muscle mass. So that was kind of good to be pointed out because I've had bikini competitors in the past. I've had figure competitors that I've worked with back when I used to do fitness competition stuff and they would do shows on birth control the entire way through. So I think a real

key to that is finding the one that works for you because on the other side of the spectrum, and a lot of people don't know this, you guys, but the stats are absolutely fricking insane. So there's a progesterone based birth control pill and the study, the study, it basically revolved around 12 months of birth control and what your weight, weight, body weight response was to that on the exact same birth control one girl lost 36 pounds in 12 months on this progesterone based birth control another girl exact same prescription gained 72 pounds seven two it absolutely. And the numbers are this big. How, how, yeah, hold on. How does it, how, what is the thing in play that is going to make you lose that much? And then what would make it gain that much? That makes no sense to me. You think hormonally it's the same

pill. It would do the same thing. Ah, exactly. And that's why I say it's so important to find the one that's going to work for you because just from genetic predispositions, your body fat percentage going into it seems to play an absolutely huge role in whether how much you will gain or lose. And beyond this, there's a major water retentive factor as well. So progesterone only seems to have the minimal effect on water retention and overall weight status. But if you have combination estrogen and progesterone birth controls, that seems to historically in the literature create a lot more weight variance.

So due to hormone, genetic, and current body composition factors, the variance is absolutely huge. So it's so important for the purposes of reducing your testosterone free and total by up to 70% because of these weight gain and weight loss variants, all of these for the different reasons of taking birth control. It's really important to take the right one. Now I speak from a bias of physique, from strength, from athletic performance. So I'm usually more prone towards making the recommendation of utilizing something like a copper IUD, because a copper IUD simply acts as a spermicide. So it will kill sperm, but it will not impact the

endocrine system. So that in a lot of ways, you're not going to have the highs and lows of mood. You're going to have a menstrual cycle. These things are all going to take place the way they should from an athletic and physique perspective. The only thing is if like you took it for the purposes of bone density, well, then you're not going to have that benefit anymore because it's not going to impact the endocrine system or birth control is also commonly used in PCOS. PCOS males have very high testosterone already. And birth control is so effective at suppressing testosterone,

that people will actually utilize birth control as a prescription for PCOS female to suppress their testosterone levels to try and get it back down to a normal range. But yeah, I think that that's something where I can, I tend to kind of lean more on the side of if you are in the world of performance, not messing with the endocrine system, um, as probably the way to go in, in this, in this, in this type of conversation. One of the things that I hear a lot from females is the heavy flow. And I know that that's like a symptom of something else going on, but how, if I were to like get into some of the symptoms, is there something in people's lab work when they, when you see it, that you can go, oh, there's a reason you have heavy flow. Or is that just like an imbalance in the body's kind

of like natural reaction to some sort of symptom down the line of having gut health or having issues with their gut health? Like that one specifically pops up a lot to me because people are on birth control. And then when they get something getting off, but they have their like down week or their IUD stops their cycle for like three, four, five months in a row. And then all of a sudden it's like crazy heavy flow. Is there anything that you can see in people's lab work where it kind of points to that? How do they avoid it? Or do you look at it more on like a systemic side of things? And it's just, we need to fix the root problem and then we don't have to worry about specifics and symptoms.

Yeah. So there's a massive amount of inter individual variation there. Cause some are just going to have a heavy flow and some aren't, and it's not always known exactly why. One thing I can tell you is that, um, spotting is absolutely associated with estrogen spikes. So when you track a female's, say her full 28 day cycle, you have her do a urine and spit analysis every single day for 28 days. If she suffers from spotting, you will actually see estrogen spikes on those days. So a very high flow may be a surge

of estrogen coming in to the body. I think that that's a very, very reasonable way in which you could look at that. But I think there's also just a ton of inter individual variation there as well. But in either case, there's like a transition period. And that's kind of the flaw of the study I talked about in 2018, where birth control females as well as non birth control females gained the same amount of strength and muscle mass after 10 weeks, It didn't really include that transition period, transitioning on the pill. That has like two to four weeks of discomfort and chaos. And when transitioning off the pill has like another two to four weeks of metabolic disruptions that aren't really taken account for because the body will find homeostasis or in that case, allostasis.

It's adapting to an incoming stressor and doing the best it can in order to deal with the stressors that are currently being imposed upon it. But that transition process, sometimes it doesn't go away. Like people kind of just feel like crap for a long time. And then it's best to really just talk with your doc and figure out the one that's going to be best for you. Because your performance, mental health, sex drive, weight control, all of these things can be dramatically thrown off. And it's not surprising. I mean, you're giving yourself hormones. They create a massive response. I want to say it's like on that note, like, aren't there games that can be played with like the timing of coming on and off of various birth controls to, to potentially spike

hormones at the right time like if you're if you're an olympic competitor and like you've been prepping for this uh this competition for you know essentially your whole life and like you you want to go in in the most optimum state possible like aren't there games that people play with various birth controls to kind of quote unquote legally spike hormones like right at the optimum time to be at peak performance on a specific day? I mean, you certainly could, because like we talked about in the previous podcast on what benefits come with progesterone

and what benefits come with estrogen, both of those have their cost benefit analysis. So if you want to play with a more estrogen dominant birth control or play with a progesterone dominant birth control, depending upon your physiology and the context of the situation, you can actually make that work in your favor in a legal way. But it's also comes with the, a bit of an unknown because it's not always controlled and female physiology is constantly changing.

Like men are a lot easier to deal with, with respect to endocrinology than females, because across a 28 day cycle, we have the same thing across the 28 day cycle for them. They go through massive differences and complete alterations, uh, from the inside out is what's going on. Um, as far as though, like preparing for an Olympics and stuff like that, uh, a lot of people don't know that birth control depletes magnesium and B vitamins over time. So this is something we've talked about on the podcast before as well. It's called drug induced nutrient depletions. And you can have a depletion of magnesium and B vitamins over time from birth control, but unfortunately not attributed to birth control. Because it's

not like you take something and then you become deficient overnight. That absolutely never happens. You might start birth control and then a year later, you might start feeling worse, but then you do not contribute it to that pharmaceutical at all because it's been a year and it's not even in your mind. You start looking at things in your diet. You start worrying about your sleep. You start worrying about your training, you start worrying about all these other factors. But it's just been a very slow degradation of internal micronutrient status that's brought you to this level. So over the course of say, an Olympic prep of four years, that's a long enough time in order to induce some nutrient depletions. If you're only playing the if it fits your macros game and not accounting for the micronutrients that you're depleting through Olympic level training, but then also the

micronutrients you're depleting through the type of prescription medications that you're taking as well. So all this needs to be supported if you're taking a true approach to high performance. I do want to dig in because I have many people as well, many females that have called and had questions about kind of like the transition into men many people as well, many females that have called and had questions about kind of like the transition into menopause as well. And how can you go about making that process easier by just kind of like focusing on actual, you know, really good nutrition based on your specific physiology, like that many of the women that are calling us are kind of at that stage of life wondering how to best enter and deal with their, the menopause time

of life. Is there a better, best way to kind of begin that transition and how do people kind of handle it while they're in there? Yeah. I mean, then that transition is going to take place and it's not going to be fun or easy. Just like a guy, they have menopause. We have andropause. At some point, we, all three of us here will lose our testosterone and that's not going to be fun. And there's no easy way to kind of transition into that or no optimal way to transition. Every time I see a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger with his shirt off, I'm like, fuck, even he went down? No way. I know.

Oh, that's Arnold. He can't. I know. He still even lost his chest. It's like, dude, that guy's got genetics that are 100 times better than mine. So what am I going to look like? I'm going to look like a crippled old man just hobbling through the streets. If Arnold looks like that, he's still going to look like the Crypt Keeper.

He's got a thick belly. He's still strong. But you can just see in his chest, you're like, dude, what happened? Oh, you got old? Oh, how do I prevent that? You can't. It comes. It happens. Yeah. And I think that that's honestly the approach. It's just a holistic approach.

Because if something is going to happen, we might as well not have other things happening at the same time. With respect to immunology, the adrenals, micronutrient status, inflammation and management, sleep quality um your microbiome all of this because most people deal with menopause plus five other things because of their lifestyle the way they've treated themselves over the past 20 years all of that stuff so then they get absolutely smashed with things but somebody who takes control of everything else their level of symptoms are going to be dramatically lower.

Like for example, when you're looking at like hot flashes, when you have the hypothalamus to pituitary to ovaries, in that sense, your hypothalamus is going to secrete gonadotropin releasing hormone. The pituitary is going to secrete LH and FSH. And what happens is LH is going to secrete LH and FSH. And what happens is LH is going to stimulate estrogen, but then that basically just stops at that point. That's what menopause is, is that just the absence of estrogen. And that's why they're so at risk for things like osteoporosis because they don't have estrogen anymore. And that's what's protecting bone density. But FSH will keep going. And FSH will actually start pumping quite a bit because it's sensing the absence of

estrogen. And your body's trying to overcompensate for something that's naturally happening before it adapts to this new way of being. And what will happen is there's initially kind of a surge of FSH to try and drive more hormone production from the ovaries. But FSH also dilates blood vessels. It's a vasodilator. And that major dilation of your vessels from a huge surge perspective, because that's what's taking place, that's what actually creates hot flashes. Because more of your core temperature is being released out into the extremities of the body due to a massive vasodilation. And then you have this, this major amount of hot flashes, which is really just a, a core temperature, you know, leaking out

kind of a thing. But when you combine that with shitty neurotransmitters, a bad microbiome, bad sleep, that's a, that's when things can become very overwhelming. So my answer is kind of like what my answer always is. Get labs because you have individual issues and those issues are going to be the main drivers of the quality of your life, especially during something like that. Yeah. What are the specific connections between the gut health or specifically a microbiome and, and hormones? Like how does, how does the, do those things play together? Yeah, they play together in a huge way. So basically when you have any type of hormone

dysfunction problem, you kind of like from a, from a coaching perspective, you put it into two buckets. It's either a lack of synthesis or a lack of excretion. So you're either not creating something or you're not getting rid of it. The gut is the prime excretion organ of hormones. So a lot of people think that hormones are basically just stagnant. You're going to have testosterone in the body and then that's it. But that's not true. We're going to be making new testosterone every single day. Testosterone is going to be created from the latex cells in the testes, and then that testosterone is going to be delivered to anywhere in the body. If it's going to be delivered to your heart tissue or to your biceps, wherever it's going to go, it is going to be delivered to a testosterone receptor site. And then once bound to that

receptor, it's able to exert its action on that specific tissue. But then there are still metabolic end products left over. And those metabolic end products, after testosterone's exerted its action, are supposed to then be excreted by the gut, be it a combination of the microbiome as well as the liver and then ultimately the kidneys to get things out of there. And if you don't have any excretion, you end up shutting off synthesis. It's like this weird thing. So what we look at in labs is you can actually see somebody's excretion status as well as their free hormone status.

So take cortisol, for example. If you have salivary measures of cortisol, then you are looking at free cortisol. If you have urinary measures of cortisol, then you're looking at metabolized cortisol. So in this example, if somebody has very high salivary cortisol, that's free bioavailable stress hormone in the body. But if they have very low metabolized cortisol, that means they have almost no excretion. So that means there's free cortisol just hanging around in physiology, doing the things that we don't want it to do. We don't want chronically high cortisol. It'll upset the immune system. It'll disrupt circadian rhythm function. It will create a lot of glycogen breakdown.

It will do a lot of things in the world of catabolism that aren't necessarily favorable to any physiology, regardless of any physiological context for that matter. So then we have high free and low metabolized. So then when you start thinking diagnostically, okay, this isn't a lack of synthesis at this point. This is a lack of excretion. Where is excretion supposed to take place? Well, it's supposed to take place in the gut. So does this person have a hormone problem? Not really, because it's not the hormone's fault

that it's high. It's not being excreted. Okay. Is there a problem with the adrenals? No, it's not the adrenals fault. They created a hormone that they were asked to create from the hypothalamus pituitary access. So where's the problem? The problem is within the gut because we're not excreting the hormone that should be excreted. And that offsets something known as a, this, this takes us down a real rabbit hole here that offsets a negative feedback loop. Because if your hypothalamus, your hypothalamus basically has tentacles all over the body, it's measuring immune status, it's measuring neurotransmitter status, it's measuring hormone status. And the reason why it's doing that is because based upon the current hormone concentration of the body, it's either going to activate that hypothalamus pituitary gonadal

access to make more hormones, or it's not. If we have way too much cortisol already circulating in circulation due to a lack of excretion, well, then our hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis will not take place because there's simply too much free hormone already excretion. It'll shut that off like a negative feedback loop because it's not going to add more fuel to the fire. It instead is going to decrease its own production of the hormones associated with activating the adrenal cascade to take place until the excretion problem gets figured out. And that's a huge problem that people have when they only do salivary testing. Because if you only do salivary testing, then I identify that you have high cortisol. What am I going to do? I'm going to try and give you a bunch of herbs to lower cortisol. But it was actually never cortisol's problem to begin with.

It was a lack of excretions problem. And that's why cortisol was too high. So if I've got high cortisol, and this is where like dumb things like adrenal fatigue come into play, because then I'm going to say do meditation, do deep breathing, take ashwagandha, do all of this stuff. None of those things are necessarily bad, but holy shit, have I not done my job as a coach? Because all I'm trying to do is suppress cortisol when it wasn't even cortisol's fault. It wasn't the HPE axis's fault. It wasn't the adrenal's fault. It was the gut's fault for a lack of excretion. And you're only going to pick that up in urinary excretion markers. You can do that for neurotransmitters. You can do that for hormones. You can do that for a lot of things. And only a comprehensive approach to coaching will identify that. Because if you treat one marker as God, then your coaching process is

very limited. And gut health will excrete all hormones. That was just one example of it. So if excretion is the problem, what are the common ways to fix that problem? Is it really just one problem or is it like a whole host of problems in the same category? Well, it ends up usually being one problem that created a whole host of problems. So for example, if the gut is lacking excretion, it is likely due to a disruption in that phasic elimination process we've discussed before, phase zero to three. There can be an inhibition happening there. There can be dysbiosis happening within the gut flora.

There could be a current infectious state. There could be any one of these things that will result in a lack of excretion. And then that lack of excretion is what can create a lot of other problems. Because if we have chronically high cortisol, well, that person's probably going to have anxiety. They're probably going to have poor sleep. They're probably going to have an overactive immune system. The problem might actually make itself worse because cortisol can create intestinal permeability. So then it was a lack of excretion that resulted in chronically high cortisol to begin with,

but then chronically high cortisol resulted in more intestinal permeability, which means that something like, say, for example, we talked about it on a previous podcast on testosterone, lipopolysaccharides can enter circulation and suppress testosterone. So somebody could take like, this is this is why we've got to take a complete approach to this. Because if you have low testosterone, and you inject testosterone, well, that low testosterone may have actually been to to elevated lipopolysaccharides from intestinal permeability due to a lack of excretion of cortisol. So like you injected testosterone, um, you know, if you are on normal TRT, that's going to be like half a milligram to one milligram

per kilo of body weight. So a 200, uh, a hundred kilo, which would be 220 pound male. They're going to take about a hundred, a hundred milligrams of testosterone per week. If you're someone who is more athletic, you're probably going to bump that up to three to 400. That's a two to three milligrams per kilo of body weight. But in any sense, you got your testosterone level up. Sure. But there is an absolute ripple effect of other things that are still taking

place in physiology. So, you know, when you ask me the question, is that one problem? It started with one problem, but now it's probably five or so. And until you take a complete approach to your self-care and truly looking under the hood of your physiology, you're never going to find those answers. So for most people without comprehensive labs, it's just a whole lot of guessing. It's just endless trial and error. Yeah. And that is the truth. And then some people might not always like that answer, but it's absolutely the truth because unless you have objective data, how can you create an objective answer? It's like, cause if I have low testosterone, should I take ashwagandha? Maybe like it's,

it's not going to hurt you, but are you actually believing that that's going to solve the root cause of your problem? Like my brain just doesn't work like that. My, why is testosterone low to begin with? Let's identify that first. And then we'll solve it at the root causal level because you don't have a deficiency of ashwagandha. Nobody has a deficiency of Tongkat Ali. Nobody has a deficiency of these things that we use basically as a shitty way to manipulate our physiology based upon the high, low recipe book approach we've taken to coaching. Like I'm quite confident. Um, I could teach any primates. Uh, if I see low testosterone on the lab, then let's take testosterone or testosterone herb.

I'm quite confident we could get a chimpanzee to be a coach that way and probably have a good Instagram following because of it. That chimpanzee would be able to figure it. The whole fitness industry was just put on blast right there. Every social media account, the larger, the better. It just got put on blast right there. Go ahead. But it's true. If somebody has low testosterone, take TRT or take this herb. If somebody has low vitamin D, take vitamin D. If somebody, nobody actually thinks, you know how much deeper a biochemistry goes? You know how much deeper your unique biochemistry goes and how these, those pathways that I come up, like that I come up with there

for the example of low testosterone having nothing to do with testosterone itself. Those are things that I'm coming up with just for the purpose of ease of communication and what I feel the audience will be most interested in but these pathways there's a there's tons of these pathways they there's so many of these pathways that exist that are unique to people's physiology so you can absolutely and there's great evidence-based ways to troubleshoot in the absence of labs but I don't know when I lay my head down on my pillow at night, I want to know I've done my job. I want to be confident that, okay, I did not just manage symptoms. In that situation, I truly identified root cause and help that person. And at this point in time,

labs after working with all the pro athletes that I've done, that's just the undoubtedly most objective way we can truly get to the bottom of, of, of a problem as fricking complicated as hormones. Like we talked about on the previous podcast, we just discovered leptin in 94. So like, you're telling me you want to troubleshoot with supplements? Like, dude, if we know so little about something, then we better have to, let's get a grip on what's actually happening. And the only grip that we have is to run a hormone panel on you in that case. You just had your talk to a room filled with gigantic human beings. Is this really where like kind of the physique slash bodybuilder world kind of gets into a lot of trouble where they see, I have to grow, but you're growing on this like very unstable base of health. And you go and start putting all these

drugs into your body. And all of a sudden, you're just magnifying the problem that's going on inside you because like, the drugs don't know they just want to make you big, they want to make you a much larger human being. But that also includes growing the cells that are very bad or magnify or making whatever hormone problems even worse than they already are. Am I drawing that connection properly? Yeah, absolutely, man. And it's funny to be there.

Like I'm used to not being like in my family and my friend circles. I'm used to being one of the bigger guys there. And when I went to this place, was I ever put in my place? It was such a contrast because four weeks ago yesterday, I ran a full marathon at the runner's hotel. I was freaking Ronnie Coleman. I was fricking Ronnie Coleman. I was the biggest dude there. Like no way that guy,

there's not enough oxygen in the world to get to that guy's muscles. No, dude, if you ever want to feel jacked, go to a marathon. It was the best ego boost for me until a month later when I went to this bodybuilding show. And then,

and then I got reminded that there are mutants that just come out from under their rocks everybody there was like who's the runner yeah we have we have such a tangent but the uh when i first met ben pokulski we were at an event in san diego and i didn't know he was ben pokulski i just knew that he looked like a total freak show amongst normal people. And he had like the blue power Mark Bell shirt on. And I was like, that guy knows a lot about lifts and weights. I can't wait. But I like kind of recognized him. And then he started talking. And I was like, I totally know you. I spent a lot of time with you. And that's really creepy because it's been through a documentary. And nice to meet you. Like in the middle of the show, it like hit me. But there's a part in those pumping iron movies where they talk about like,

even when, when they put the people on stage, like if you put them in a big room, they all look like these giant, giant human beings. When you put them on stage and all the lights are shining on them and they have their perfect hands. And one of the judges talking about Mr. Olympia is like, well, what's beautiful about doing side-by-side posing? They were talking about Phil Heath and Kai Greene. And they were like, when you put them side-by-side, it's so obvious who the best in the world is.

Like when you're standing in front of all these people, it just looks like a sea of gigantic humans. Like they're all the most shredded people. But when you put Kai Greene and Phil Heath together and they do their back pose, the dumbest person in the world can just look at him and go, oh, Phil Heath, he's the good, that other guy, he sucks. Like that's how freaky those humans are. It's really crazy to me.

Ben McCall finished like ninth, which means in like bodybuilding worlds, child's play. Sorry, Ben. Way to be super jack. Yeah, it's like try racing the guy who got second to Usain Bolt. Yeah. I raced him. I raced him.

I know. I know how fast Johan Blake is. I raced that guy. Dude, absolutely. You can find that one on the internet, friends. Go after it. It looks like a cheetah chasing a wounded baby deer they're getting swallowed i know what it sounds like right before a cheetah

eats the deer because that's did you actually race him yeah i'll send you the video yeah i ran 60 meters against him i literally got smoked so shocking well well he ran 60 meters you ran 45 he gave you a 15 meter head start on a yeah hold on i haven't told you this story yet this is like the best so we went to run uh do shows and hang out at this uh like four day long seminar in jamaica and i knew that johan blake was going to be there so like six weeks before we were supposed to leave i was getting on instagram and going johan blake i'm gonna come eat your I'm going to come eat your lunch money. I'm going to take your lunch money, buddy. I'm coming for you. And I was just talking crap to Johan Blake for six straight weeks until he couldn't ignore me. And then

he started writing back and I was like, ah, I got you. You're going down now, buddy. You totally, totally gave in. You bit. So as soon as we show up, he starts talking smack to me. I'm like, oh, it's game on. We're going to have a race. This is about to be a foot race. Let's do this. He is so insanely fast. When you watch that man move, it is like, dude,

when you pull into the driveway and Johan Blake is getting out of his car, you go, I don't know who that guy is, but he definitely wins gold medals doing anything he wants. The freakiest looking human being of all time. Dude, it is terrifying how fast that man is after the first he gave me a we ran 60 meters on the first one he gave me a 10 meter head start within three steps he was past me i literally looked at him at the end i go hey dude i'm here for instagram can you slow down a little bit and make it look

like it's kind of close so he gave me 15 meters and the whole time he's just barking at me while while i was like sprinting my barking at me while while i was like sprinting my face i was like and i was like oh my gosh this is insanity but it literally i know what it sounds like right before it's like that's how it looks when you get eaten by a cheetah i was there that's literally what it felt like i couldn't believe how fast that man was he also said he wasn't allowed to run full speed at that practice yeah it was like a back off week he was supposed to just like run like 80 he's jogging past you yeah and then after all the all the tension on who was the fastest man in the world settled down because he won um he's sitting on the bench changing his shoes because he was actually trying out new shoes when

we were racing his new race shoes. And, uh, and he, and somebody was like, asked him about me talking crap to him on Instagram. And he was like, yeah, I would just sit there on my couch. And who is this guy? My phone. It just keeps going. Ding, a ding, a ding, a ding. And it's this, this dude in Raleigh, North Carolina, just talking crap to me. So there was way funnier than that, because he's fucking Jamaican.

So he's like, I just sit down on my couch, watch a TV. He's got the whole thing going. We're all laughing our asses off. That's amazing. I raised Johan. It was great. I'll send you the video after this. Incredible.

That's the greatest thing I've ever heard. Yeah. I feel like I'm a pretty decent runner. What's that? Why would I start talking shit to the fastest man in the world? Why not? He has to hang out. I can think of a lot of reasons to hang out with me.

He's coming to this event. I don't know. It's what I do. Wait till I start talking smack to Bezos. When we know that we're going to be an event with him, he'll definitely answer. Can you not? Can you not? I can can't i know the root cause

of your problem is ignorance and insanity he's different um but to go back i have not forgot your question despite that epic when we load all the bodybuilders up and they have this foundation of being very unhealthy and then we load them with all of the gear that they're on i mean it's it's an infinite amount of gear that they could be on um how the the downstream effects of just not focusing on your health at first and then pouring all the drugs in on top of it which wouldn't i mean it could even go down to like the, the layman that is doing TRT on an unhealthy base. How do those problems can like manifest even worse without, because they're not going to get healthy first and, and figure out kind of the root causes of the problem.

So a problem, and we already went through this example, so I'm glad that we discussed it, is that protein, the, you're taking certain compounds for the purpose of protein synthesis. So we are taking it for the purpose to build muscle mass, gain strength, and or retain mass in a caloric deficit during a contest. So you're, you are doing this for the purpose of ensuring protein synthesis overcomes protein breakdown. That's why we're taking it. Okay. Now we already went through on this podcast about how something such as intestinal permeability can lead to lipopolysaccharide elevations, which can result in lower testosterone. So if somebody saw they had lower testosterone, so then they wanted to

get on drugs in order to maximize their testosterone and maximize their strength and muscle mass development. Well, now they have the testosterone to support maximum protein synthesis, but aren't we going to need optimal protein digestion and assimilation for that protein to even get to where we want it to get to? Yet our root cause problem was within the gut. And if we have terrible gut health, then we're not going to be able to use those resources in the best way possible to support our goals. So that's an example that we've already gone through. Testosterone will absolutely be a strong messenger. It does not need to bind to something on the phospholipid bilayer in a cell. It will pass the layer and it will bind directly to DNA to initiate protein synthesis. That is what

testosterone will do. However, protein synthesis requires amino acids in optimal quantity in order to create optimal growth and or optimal anti-catabolism. That comes from our diet and that comes from having a healthy gut. You aren't what you eat. You only are what you eat and actually absorb. Because if you're not properly absorbing and assimilating your nutrients, then they're not going to get to where they're supposed to go. So in this kind of scenario, someone actually may be totally unaware that they have a gut issue. So then they become more reliant on drugs.

So if 250 milligrams isn't getting me to where I want to be, maybe I should do 500. Maybe I should do 750. Let's bump this up to a gram. And you actually become more reliant on drugs, because you are unaware about the root cause as currently holding back your protein synthetic rates to begin with. And you will oversee a certain saturation rate. This is something I talked about this past weekend, is that you can become saturated. So let's just for each example, let's say your testosterone receptors are fully saturated in physiology at 500 milligrams of testosterone per week. But then a lot of people will go up to 600, 700, 750, 800. And what happens is a

spillover effect. You're pouring water into a glass that's already full, and that non-receptor bound, that oversaturation of hormone, that's now in physiology not being down to receptors, and it's going to create a ton of side effects. So that's typically when you start seeing people get like moon face. They get this big red face. They're retaining water, their blood pressure is going up, they start feeling like crap, they start getting fatter, that excessive testosterone not being bound to receptors is simply going to get converted over into estrogen because of the aromatase activity and that testosterone having nowhere to go. And you end up in this very, very big loop where you're taking extremely effective drugs.

Nobody is saying that they're not wildly effective. They obviously are. But you're not utilizing them to even a fraction of their potential due to the health of your physiology. So the health of your physiology will actually allow you to utilize compounds, even if you need them. It'll allow you to utilize compounds, even if you need them, it'll allow you to utilize compounds more effectively because of things like receptor sensitivity, because of the many other

factors involved in protein synthesis, because all of these other things, there's so much to consider when it's reaching one end point. Like if somebody was to try and say, this is how you build muscle in one sentence, there's so many things underneath that leads to that one thing. And you can say that for speed, for conditioning, for endurance, for muscle development, for strength, for all of this stuff. There is a massive host of factors that lead to that one thing. And the health of your physiology determines your ability to adapt to all incoming stressors. So when you have a very low health, you can imagine it as your adaptive reserve is that much lower, which means you'll rely that much more on drugs, not get a better result and also be a lot less healthy for it.

I was actually telling Anders before we hopped on this show today about a girl who reached out to me because I did my presentation this past weekend was how to keep bodybuilders healthy, because it's a sport that I love. And it's a sport that unfortunately, people don't have access to the right information. So they're kind of just doing what they saw in forums, doing what they've heard on podcasts, doing what the guy said at the gym, you know, three of the, of these, uh, resources that can sometimes be extremely detrimental to one's physiology, um, let alone the source at which they get what they get. And, uh, the, the, all the other lifestyle factors combined, I was talking to Anders

about a girl who approached me after, who wants to speak at some point because of the insane stuff that she was on. Like I work with men's open bodybuilders. I'm familiar with men's open bodybuilders, even at the Olympia level. And they weren't taking as many compounds

as this figure girl was at the regional level. It's absolutely insane the misguidance that some people are being exposed to, whether it's from their coach or from someone at the gym, or even in this particular case, her boyfriend. And it was just a super, super sad situation. Five years later, she's still suffering the consequences of that. But if she had the right coaching and guidance, none of that stuff would have ever taken place. Yeah. When you see in that world, this is a little bit off of the dysfunction side of things, but how do people, like when you're coming up, that world is so dirty to begin with. Like we've all trained in the gym i hope everybody has because they're kind of awesome gyms at the same time um but it's like you can

go into those like the we we used to train in one in civic beach where you like you like go in there and you're like everyone in here is on a lot of stuff and you can usually tell because that was the best i'm trying to yeah that's like the most place. And you can usually tell because they have – That was the best gym I've tried out. Yeah, that's like the most fun. That was my favorite place to go. Everybody's on the gas. And they have like 64 back machines. You're like, how many different angles can you hit your lat?

This is crazy. But they do them all. Are there any places outside of like going and getting comprehensive labs to figure out kind of like where your health's at that people can actually learn how to do that the right way. I'm not really like pushing people, but it is terrifying to me when, um, you see, uh, especially on the female side of things, I feel like they're like their physiology gets so whacked out when they start taking all that stuff. You can's like immediately detectable uh when you see people like one doing it wrong and and just their bodies change so much or is there a

place where they can get decent information um yeah i mean but coming up in the world and saying there's dirty spots that's in anything you'll get that power lifting you'll get that in olympic lifting you'll get that in football there's high school football kids on entire cycles um so like this and it's from their coach and no one's telling the parents anywhere people want to be good at something it's going to be somewhere lurking in the shadows yeah so it's it's just all about um finding somebody who cares about your longevity as much as you know because there's a local guy here um who cared more about his reputation than the health of his athletes so he basically just put on his athletes on absolutely everything so that they would win and then he would look good and then it's kind of

like hey bye see ya whenever they they needed to re rebuild their freaking life after they got this and that's one of the reasons why i did this talk this past weekend and why I'm going to continue to spread the message here is because, um, like the sport of bodybuilding, I, I, I love it. Um, but there's just some people who, uh, who just don't do it correctly and aren't considering longevity and they don't realize that you can kind of do these things, um, and, and not have to, uh, absolutely destroy your physiology at the same time. We know so much more now than we did decades ago. And, you know, when you started that question, you said this is kind of getting off the topic of dysfunction. It's not.

This is part of the process. Speaking to the right people and doing the right things and educating yourself. I think that, you know, like a course like mine, Ultimate Nutrition Mentorship will teach you a ton about hormones, going to insidetracker.com slash Garner and actually getting your labs done to begin with. That's something that I think is super important. And then, of course, rapidhealthreport.com because we look at everything like that's if you have no stones unturned, then at least nothing is up to chance. Like that's a, when,

when nothing is left up to chance and you truly looking at everything in physiology, you know exactly what to do and how you're going to do it. I think that's actually real quick. You just, you just mentioned a rapid health report. If you do go to that site, you can see like a full breakdown of Anders's labs. Like Dan, Anders did all the blood work, samples urine sweat saliva etc so we get all the data points and then and then dan you get to hear about my testosterone solid like 90 minutes like running through all of his labs just like you know talking through each thing that was

that was good he's saying that was bad what to do about it what the what the supplement protocol looks like what the diet protocol looks like it's like the pure raw unedited uh video that that dan gave to anders way before we even had this site we that was just anders's results when we were like dude we should just put this on the web page so people can see it and so if you want to check that out it's it's there it's totally free go look at it yeah i think another thing that uh dan when you were saying that this like immediately popped in into my mind is there almost are no excuses. Um, in that if you want to pay somebody like you to do all of your labs, that's, that's really expensive. But if you want to go

learn the process and take your actual course, that's not that expensive at all. The expensive part is that you have to actually give a shit, open your mind up and go learn. And that's really the investment is your time and energy. If you want to jump to the end and just have it right for you, and someone to help you kind of like walk through it, coach you on how to do it the best, that exists. But also if you don't have the money, it's not that expensive to go learn. All the information is there. It's not like you were born with the knowledge of understanding labs. If you want to go learn and do the work, it's very, very cheap. You pay for it in time and energy, but it also arms you with skills so that you don't have to pay people for the rest of your life to figure it out for

you. It's really just two different approaches and how fast you want the actual results and the perfect protocol for yourself. Because you're going to have to go learning that comes with trial and error versus going to the guy that already knows. But you should absolutely invest in yourself. And that's why we make all of our coaches go through those programs is because once you put the work in and you pay for it with the time and energy, you have the skill for life. And I think that's really important. For sure. Like just dysfunction in the world of like this podcast rolling out hormone dysfunction could involve many things like sunlight can offset hormonal function, your access to or non-access to sunlight, toxic exposure, your immunology, your sleep cycle, your stress, your current diet, if you're on birth

control or not, if you're on performance enhancing drugs or not, all of these things play huge factors in your overall ability to balance your hormones, maximize your health and maximize your performance. So there's a lot of other things to learn in this world. And I'm sure we'll do many more podcasts on it in the future. But like I mentioned, all of those things that can be a root cause of dysfunction, gut health, of course, being another one. Sometimes the root cause of dysfunction is education, though. That's what I'm getting at.

If you refuse to educate yourself or refuse to outsource your education to a coach, then you're always going to be stuck in a gray world of non-action. I have two kind of questions that are kind of on the top of my brain. One of them kind of goes back to the beginning of the show talking about menstrual cycles. What are the long-term effects of not having a period? Like I talked to somebody the other day that has not had a menstrual cycle in five years. That's like taking yourself out of the breeding game or even practicing for five years. It's an insanely long time to be, I would consider that to be like chronically unhealthy when you're taking yourself like completely out of that, uh, that process as a human,

which is like so fundamental to what life in general. Um, what, what happens over five years of not having a menstrual cycle? What can happen over five years of not having a menstrual cycle? Well, first off it is you taking yourself out of the breeding game. Um, with the three of us here on this podcast today, we all have family and we all know how much that means to us. Like, yeah, I just got a man, you guys, um, like if you were to ask my 18 year old self, like, um, you know, how important is having kids to you? I might be like, not at all. I want to be a bodybuilder. I'm gonna be the best power lifter in the world. Like you, you, you really think this way and you're old enough to think that you're sure about it until you, until you become 30. And you're

like, man, I was so stupid when I was 20. Like the single thing that I think about when I see my friends, uh, not that they don't make all the money and do fantastic in business, but I'm like, there is another piece to this. Totally, man. Totally. So like that considering, um, cause some, like, uh, I've worked with a lot of females and, and it happens a lot actually in the world of endurance sports where they'll, where they'll lose their, uh, their cycles. I've worked with, um, Olympic level track runners, cross country

runners. Um, and they'll lose their menstrual cycle a lot because there's just so much training volume taking place. And they also have to be at a very low body weight. And then that combination will take away menstrual cycles. So you it will be very difficult to, of course, conceive at that point. But for the people who don't want to hear that and don't care about that, it'll massively, massively increase your risk for stress fractures. So that's actually why I normally get called is I'll be like, Hey, Dan, I'm an she'd be like, Hey Dan, um, I'm an endurance, uh, female. I'm on the national level. I'm looking to qualify for the Olympics this year. I keep getting stress fractures in my shins and lower body. What can I do? And that's due to no menstrual cycle because of a suppression of estrogen. So getting that process working again, while not inhibiting performance, um, will ultimately allow that

girl to have a greater career longevity. Cause you're not going to make it to the Olympics if you have stress fractures anyways. So like, that's something that'll ultimately always hold you back. Like that's something I talked about this past weekend. Um, it's very popular in bodybuilding right now to almost go zero fat. Um, it was just extremely high carb, extremely high protein. And the methodology behind it is basically in a test tube. It's like, okay, well, if I'm purely after animalism, that's all I want. Okay, well, then I want to stimulate animalism and anti catabolism. The carbohydrates are going to provide me tons of insulin for maximum animalism and

anti catabolism. And the protein is going to provide animal tons of insulin for maximum anabolism and anti-catabolism. And the protein is going to provide anabolism while also providing the raw materials for protein synthesis and fighting protein breakdown. So if I only care about anabolism and anti-catabolism, I'm going to go as high protein and carb as I can, and I'm going to have almost zero fats. That makes sense in a test tube until you realize that that's a pretty good way to develop gallstones. So when you introduce healthy fats into the diet, that's going to stimulate cholecystokinin or CCK in the stomach. CCK is what stimulates the gallbladder to release bile into the small intestine. If you do not create a

lot of CCK, then you will not stimulate the gallbladder to release bile. If you do not create a lot of CCK, then you will not stimulate the gallbladder to release bile. If you do not release bile on a regular basis, that bile becomes stagnant and becomes gallstones over time. So in your pursuit of maximum anabolism, you accomplish that in the short term until you're going to have to take a lot of time off training and totally revamp your entire life when you need gallbladder surgery. So you have to look at the long game as well as the short game. Because a girl might say, man, screw my menstrual cycle. I'm ready to rock and roll until you get a stress fracture and you're out of the Olympics anyways. Or a guy might say, I want maximum anabolism. So I'm going to go low fat until you need gallbladder surgery and

you're out of the game anyways. There is gotta, there is a balance of short and long-term that you need to consider because nobody becomes a world champion overnight. And because of that, you need to consider longevity in your world of periodization. Yeah. Beautiful. The last question I had, you mentioned toxicity. If anybody's been listening to the show, I came back super high on my plastic toxicity. We've also seen like heavy metals, mercury, things like that. How does that play into the hormone conversation? Is like a plastic toxicity different than a heavy metal or the specific heavy metal. I know plastic has gotten like tons of bad rap. And I mentioned even on the last show that we talked about this

when it comes to like sexual dysfunction, really testosterone levels are really crazy with plastic, but just toxicity in general, unless we have to break it down into each individual one. But how does that affect your hormone levels if for some reason you've been exposed to heavy metals or plastic? Which everybody has. Yeah. Yeah. So again, I keep saying this all the time, so it's probably getting annoying, but we'll have to do a whole podcast. We'll probably have to do a whole podcast just on pollutants because the world needs an evidence-based update on that. Um, because they've

heard a bunch of stuff from quacks. That's maybe true 25% of the time, but I really want to give an evidence-based update to that stuff. Um, in the vacuum of this conversation in a short sense, um, certain plastics and other pollutants have beenants have been in that world, let's just say non-metals, they've been demonstrated to both reduce testosterone and increase estrogen. So they can be their own root cause, you know, as you found out, they can be their own root cause all by themselves. So it may not even be a problem anywhere in your endocrinology. It's the fact that a certain pollutant is offsetting endocrinology through disrupting, say, receptor status or enzyme status, which leads me kind of right in perfectly into the

heavy metal component of things. We talked on a previous podcast, I don't know if it was one or two, about one or two podcasts ago, about how certain heavy metals can offset three beta hydroxy steroid dehydrogenase, that enzyme that's going to be able to convert DHA to DHEA to testosterone. Many heavy metals do that, but I actually just work with IFBB Pro, who won't be named, who had mercury toxicity. And mercury toxicity,

everybody can go look this up. Mercury toxicity down regulates testosterone receptor activity. So an IFBB Pro struggling getting pumps in the gym, struggling for muscle mass growth, struggling just to be his old self. The guy's an absolute phenom, but was kind of felt in bodybuilders are some of the most intuitive people. They know their bodies inside and out, and they know when something's wrong. And then I was able to go in there and identify how receptor activity is absolutely thrown off by this mercury toxicity that he had. And that was confirmed by hospitalization. That wasn't just a guess because he had cantoon or whatever.

That was confirmed with hospitalization. And then that offset his testosterone receptor activity dramatically to the point where even if you take testosterone, it still needs a home. It still needs a receptor to get there. And a heavy metal can not only offset for natural athletes that conversion of DHGA to testosterone, but even for unnatural athletes, that receptor activity is going to be dysregulated as well so that's a that's another situation where a heavy metal can affect receptor activity and uh non-heavy metals can affect um both estrogen and testosterone in that lens and um these are like environmental factors these aren't things that you can just like outgrow. You have to like actually go in, change your environment,

and then detox yourself through whatever sauna, mainly sweating this stuff out. But it's an environmental thing where you have to kind of go find out what the root cause is, not just you see it in your body, but then you got to go find it in your actual environment. Where is it in your house? What are you eating? That's bringing the stuff in. This isn't like you just kind of like take the pill and it, and it goes away or you just outgrow, you don't outgrow mercury toxicity. Like these things, these heavy metals are around.

For sure. Yeah. And it's like, and then you got to consider other things too. Like, yes, it's environmental, but is it also just a lack of excretion or both? Yeah. Because if you have optimal excretion activity, then you can maintain a degree of homeostasis if your environmental exposure isn't crazy. I actually had a client years ago, like 2014 or something like that. He worked in a slaughterhouse and he actually was handling hormones because they would apply it to animals there. His estrogen was unmeasurable. So it would just said plus. It was completely unmeasurable on his labs. And it was because that's like, we talk about environmental exposure being plastics and heavy

metals. His environmental exposure was hormones. So his work just had crappy regulations on what you needed to wear to apply hormones to the animals that you're working with. And hormones, like people take testosterone gel instead of injections. That's because hormones can get absorbed right through the skin. He was getting exposed to veterinary hormones all the time at work and have massive estrogen levels because of it. And identifying that was his prime root cause to start having a way better life he felt like complete crap when he came to me and it was that alone like yeah i you know i gave him calories and macros yeah i put him on a killer training

program and stuff but like that alone it completely changed his life yeah Garner, where can people find you? At Dan Garner Nutrition on Instagram. There it is. Doug Larson. Wait, where can they find your ultimate nutrition mentorship? Yeah, yes. That's at coachgarner.com. I got the ultimate nutrition mentorship, the ultimate training mentorship, and the cutting edge strategies for physique transformation. And if you want to get your lab work done, go to insidetracker.com slash Garner. There it is. Doug Larson. You bet.

On Instagram, Doug C. Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are barbell shrugged at barbell underscore shrug. Make sure you get over and follow Travis Mash over at Mash Elite, Mash Elite Performance. And then if you want to go and watch the video, my lab's getting read. It's mind-blowing stuff

honestly it's been very very cool when people get on the phone with me and like I need that I know you do everybody needs that you just can't understand how all this stuff is linked together I almost feel like we do we do a great job on the show explaining a lot of depth of this but you really can't understand it until you just see the entire profile laid out. Um, and it's truly world-class. Uh, I believe in this program wholeheartedly. It's really incredible. Rapidhealthreport.com and, uh, friends, we'll see you guys next week.