Barbell Shrugged - Maximize Testosterone Without Steroids w/ Dr. Ben House  — Barbell Shrugged #343

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

Dr. Ben House, PhD, CN, FDN, fNMT, NCSF, USAW LI SPC is owner and founder of Functional Medicine Costa Rica, and has worked as a strength and conditioning coach and nutritionist since 2006.   Dr. House House was accepted to medical school without an undergraduate degree, but elected to finish his degree and pursue a career in the health and fitness sector. He is currently practicing Functional Medicine after finishing his PhD and a multi-year metabolic health study within the Nutritional Sciences Department at UT-Austin.   House has numerous publications in peer reviewed scientific journals such as The International Journal of Obesity, has presented his work at multiple international conferences, and lectures regularly on health and nutrition at The University of Texas.   In this episode, we talk about health problems associated with low testosterone, using nutrition to increase testosterone, how much sleep do you need to maximize testosterone, why steroids may not be the answer, how you can maximize testosterone without steroids, and more.   Enjoy! - Doug and Anders ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs_drhouse ------------------------------------------------------------------------------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 @foursigmatic - www.foursigmatic.com/shrugged  to save 15% on your first purchase @vuori - www.vuoriclothing.com “SHRUGGED25” to save 25% storewide ► 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

Shrug family, we're back! Doug and I just rolled in from the Spartan World Championships in Lake Tahoe. I was able to get out there earlier in the week. Last week, my wife and the little one and I did a little vacationing at Lake Tahoe. Did some cruising. Place is absolutely gorgeous. I felt cold for the first time in many, many months. Even though it was only like 60 degrees. That's what happens when you're from San Diego. The cold starts at anything below 70. Doug and I met up. I did the Spartan Up podcast on Thursday. Did a bunch of street team interviews with them on Thursday afternoon.

Their whole crew is so cool. Even Sephra the Seed Huntress. What a crazy, crazy lady she is. But what an awesome... The number of laughs that came out of that girl's mouth. Man, unbelievable. We had five killer interviews from Evan DeMarco,

The Spaniard. Check out his podcast. All kinds of good shows. One of the guys running the Sahara Desert. Hold on, Charlie Engel. You guys are about to meet a monster in the next couple weeks once we get that show posted. But the dude ran across the Sahara Desert. And now he's going on one of the most epic adventures ever.

We also hung out on Saturday night with the Mind Pump guys. Anytime Justin, Adam, Doug, and Sal get together, those guys throw epic parties, and I'm always grateful for the hospitality, the high fives. Just an awesome group of guys, and I'm really happy that I get to run in the same circles with them every once in a while when we get to these events. This week coming up we have Dr. Ben House. We met Dr. Ben House at the Granite Games and I had honestly never heard of him before in my entire life and sometimes when that happens you don't know what to expect in the interview. And since we did this interview, I have literally mentioned his name to every single person I've ever met or talked to since that time. This guy is so smart. We left the granite. We all did a roundtable podium.

Not podium. That would mean we won something. A roundtable panel on Friday night before the event started, which is where we met Dr. Benthaus. And he was speaking at a retreat, a health and wellness retreat with Mike Nelson about two hours north of the Granite Games. I didn't even know that you could be more north than St. Cloud, Minnesota, but let me tell you, it goes way up there. We're basically in the Antarctic. He put on a presentation that literally has changed the way that I view obesity in America and the difficulties that people struggle with when it comes to weight

weight loss specifically females and males as well but we get a little bit more wiggle room just because of the sheer size of our bodies and some testosterone stuff but man it was an incredible presentation. And we drove two, two and a half hours to get up to this retreat just to turn the microphones on and pick his brain even more in depth. We go into a ton on testosterone and weight loss and muscle building.

And man, this interview is really incredible. I want to thank our sponsors. Get over to Thrive Market. I love Thrive Market. Home to all of the most delicious, freshest, organicist. It's not a word, but organicist ingredients. Get over to their website. Make sure you are able to scroll by your dietary needs, restrictions, whatever it is.

You can get in there. All their ingredients are delivered right to your door, which is super awesome. And if you go to thrivemarket.com forward slash shrug, you will save 25% off your entire first order to Thrive Market. You're going to get all the delicious organic fruits and veggies and packaged goods and peanut butters and almond butters. Get over to thrivemarket.com forward slash shrug to save 25% off your entire first order. I hope that you love this show. This show crushes. Dr. Ben House, make sure you go follow him.

Make sure you learn a lot. Make sure you stay in touch with this man because he is kind of the future of where nutrition and doctors and really, really, really smart people are headed. We're getting out of the doctor thinking you have to go to an office in the white coat and all that jazz. This guy lives in Costa Rica, and he's changing the way people are viewing health and wellness and nutrition. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged.

See you guys at the break. We are on. Let's do it. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. My name is Anders Varner. We are at the Points Retreats. I wish I knew what town this was. Pull up your notes here.

I have this. I don't even know how to say it. It's like Pagoy Lakes. Pagoy Lakes. Pequot Lakes. Pequot? There's 10,000 lakes in this beautiful state, and we're near one of them. Correct.

There it is. Yeah. Mr. Doug Larson is in the house. We're here, man. We bailed on the Granite Games for the afternoon. We totally bailed. we're in a real log cabin right now it's the most gorgeous house um literally on the lake and we have a a new co-host to the show today yeah dr michael t nelson which is good that we're bringing you on for this show because your show on wednesday smashed thank you you. It was funny about when your show was on, we were talking the night before

we did your show down at Paleo FX and I was like, we need to start going longer with people. We need longer conversations. I'm tired of one hour long podcasts where people show up, they already know all the answers, they've already been asked all the same questions. We need longer shows. We need to learn everything

that these people know. And then Mike just came in like fire hose to the face i was like shorter shows shorter shows somewhere two and a half hour shows um but exactly um all the way from costa rica i'm gonna act like you came up here just to talk to us um dr ben house thank you for having me This is really cool I never really met or heard or seen Or anything of you You were speaking on the round tables With us and reached out And I'm glad that we get to Hang out here at this beautiful spot

To make this thing happen We all went out to dinner last night And had super elevated conversation And shepherd's pie Very small shepherd's pie. And shepherd's pie. Very small shepherd's pie. Doug was definitely hoping. Everyone had huge portions.

Then my shepherd's pie came out, and it was like in a cup. I was like, oh, no. Doug was the only person that didn't have like 2,500 calories in front of him. He was like, well, how am I supposed to be huge? Are they trying to starve me? But you own a functional medicine practice down in Costa Rica. No, I own

a retreat center. Retreat center. It's a place where people can just kind of live the life. You can call it the Pura Vida lifestyle. See? Yeah. I live in Costa Rica the majority of the year for tax purposes, 330 days.

And if you want to learn more about that, it's called a foreign income tax exemption. And I talk to people on the internet about health, and I try to stay in my lane because I have a PhD in nutrition, and I've been a meathead since as far back as I can remember. As soon as I saw a barbell, for sure. We did meet you by walking in on you lifting weights. Yeah, and I tried to leave. I tried to leave, and then I was like, damn, I know these guys. Oh, shit.

Yeah. And then we kind of did a podcast while we were training together. You were like, oh, I guess I'll just keep doing curls. We should just turn the microphones on and do this right now. But this functional medicine thing has kind of become a little bit of a buzzword. Yeah, for sure. And even myself, what the hell does it all mean? That's the problem.

The definition of functional medicine, I think, is like finding problems before they start. And we've, I think, maybe lost our way a little bit. And I've kind of toyed with the idea of rebranding a lot because one of the things that bothers me about functional medicine, there's a lot of things I love about functional medicine. So we're going to try to find the root cause of what's going on with someone. That's kind of the baseline definition of we're looking for the root, why things are happening versus just treating the things. Exactly.

So if you have the most common analogy, you have this tree, right? So instead of painting the leaves green, we're going to figure out why is the tree dying. And that's kind of where function, is this a gut disorder? Is this early life trauma? And that's where functional medicine really shines is because you have a lot of problems that people could have in our current climate. That's not a secret, right? But what model I kind of follow is more of a resilience, maybe an anti-fragile model. And so maybe we don't necessarily worry about what the root cause of the problem is.

That's important. But why don't we just try to make this organism as resilient and as bulletproof as possible? Maybe not even bulletproof is the wrong word because if you think about the gym, we don't want to just be bulletproof. We want to be able to adapt. We want to take a stressor and we want to be better, right? And I think there's plenty of evidence from the gut side. Like, hey, maybe you have this gut infection. you get rid of it and your immune system is stronger. Um, and I think the problem is we just have a lot of, a lot of weak humans in the world. And so that's a, that's a problem. And so if your immune system's down, you're going to catch this thing.

And then that's going to, that's just going to start spinning a lot of loops for you. And then how do we untangle that mess? Uh, and that's what I do is I just try to start spinning a lot of loops for you. And then how do we untangle that mess? And that's what I do is I just try to see the biggest picture that I can and know when it's something I can fix and know when it's probably something I can't fix. Yeah, something that comes up when you say all that stuff, our friend Andy Galpin talks a lot about how removing individual variables to get you to a place of health and then getting into adding those variables back in to create the resiliency so that you can adapt to things that aren't going to be in a perfect scenario.

What is kind of the process that you are walking people through? Assessments? Is it much more on kind of like a, I don't want to say like standard medical practice, but are you coming at this from a bit of a more medical side when people are coming to you with problems? I tell people that there's a difference between directing and guiding. People come to me, like the Outback Steakhouse analogy. You go to Outback Steakhouse, you want a steak. Someone brings you a tofu salad, you're going to be pissed off.

People come to me to be directed they want that experience um and so we grab lab work and that's the first step and then if it's in my scope of practice i will mess with it if it's not i'm like all right this is i need to refer this out if it is a if it is a medical pathology and that's that's something we can talk about um in regards to the the maybe perhaps the main topic of the show um but that's the first thing. So I'm going to intake them with a bunch of intake forms. And that's also pretty tricky. A lot of people are like, why don't you put your intake forms online?

And I'm like, well, I want to see if they're actually going to do them. I want to see how committed they are. I want to look at how detailed do they fill this thing out? Do they tell me everything that happened to them since they were three years old? And then I know, okay, this person is going to be super, they're super invested, but also they could be an overthinker. They could be overanalyzing things. So I got intake forms.

I'm going to grab a pretty broad lab panel. I try to keep my lab panels about at $300 because there seems to be this number, about $300, where people just don't want to spend a lot of money. And that's the difference between kind of the functional medicine practitioners, if you will, the crisscrossers of the world who are amazing at what they do. Like if you've seen 10 doctors and no one's been able to figure out what's going on, you probably should see him. Because he's going to grab $4,000 worth of testing. Maybe, I don't know how much it is, but it's a lot of testing. You can grab gut testing, salivary testing, everything on the book because he's trying to find that thing that maybe

it's Lyme disease or maybe it's mold in your house. He's trying to pick that up. And you're a chronic disease patient. I don't see people like that. I see people like you guys. I see people that are athletes. That's my target demographic because those people generally get in trouble when they they don't there's no way that they should have to pay four thousand dollars a lot they don't need that they're not they're not sick um and then if you're in a model where you all of a sudden they think they're sick and i think mike's seen this a ton too is like oh my god i got heavy metal toxicity and you know what maybe all of us have some level of heavy metal toxicity, but it wasn't a problem until you got this sheet of paper that said this.

And now they're freaking out over that, and that's the only thing they can think of, and they're convinced that it was a problem. Yeah, and people just tend, especially our population of athletes, they tend to perseverate on things. And so I think the worst thing that you can give them is a mental weakness. Like, why am I going to put this weakness on you? Cause then you're just going to make it reality. Yeah. One of the, you spoke about the main topic of what we wanted to get into, um, and a massive hormone that drives

a lot of just general health, um, being testosterone. Um, before we get into all the ways that testosterone can be affected in the body and different conditions. What is just kind of a high level, the role of testosterone outside of like, I'm going to get yoked, I need more of it. But like what is kind of the general role of testosterone in the body? And then we can dig into a lot of the pieces that you're going to be speaking about this weekend. Yeah. So testosterone has two kind of avenues. So you have the anabolic route, which is the let's get yoked. Yeah. So testosterone has two kind of avenues. So you have the anabolic route, which is the let's get yoked.

Yeah. And then you have the androgenic route, like let's be a guy, like let's get body hair, let's let's have our testicles drop, like that kind of stuff. And so if you get into the pharmacological route of this, there's different drugs that are, you maybe solely anabolic like a sarm is solely anabolic or you have drugs that are you know somewhat androgenic and somewhat anabolic uh like trt is both right because it's just replacing what's already there um and so testosterone the one thing i will say is everyone thinks that is going to immediately make you jacked like we have this very very misconstrurued idea of steroids. And I think it's because we don't talk about them.

And so they have this 1990s baseball-type situation with testosterone. And so when I think about testosterone, I think about inside of a physiologic range. Those sunglasses look good. That just threw me off. This beautiful sunset is coming right into my eyes right now. So go ahead.

Sorry. No, no. Inside of physiologic ranges, yes, it's a problem if you're hypogonadal. But say you go from 500 nanograms per deciliter, which is the value for testosterone in the United States. Say you go from five, the lab reference range is like 300 to 1,100. That's the window, right? And so a lot of, it becomes, for guys especially, it becomes a bench press number.

Women have about maybe a 15th to the 20th of the testosterone that guys have. And so it becomes a bench press number. Like it comes back at 550 and they're all worried. I'm like, dude, you know how variable this hormone is daily? Like it's variable based on the time of day. It's variable based on the season. It's variable based on yesterday. Like there's no reason to get worked up about this.

The only thing we're checking really is that you're not hypogonadal and you don't have a bunch of symptoms of hypogonadal. And so if you're inside of physiologic ranges, you could. So say I take somebody, the best example, this is what we have from the research. Say you're hypogonadal. Could you just explain what that is first? Yeah, so you have primary hypogonadalism, which would be you're not producing testosterone at the level of testicles.

And then you have secondary hypogonadalism, which would be there's something with the brain. So in that HPT axis, the hypothalamus pituitary, like maybe it's LH or GNRH, something went wrong. And so there's a problem. And there's ways to differentially diagnose this from the ND side, which should be done. But if you have this hypogonadalism, all of a sudden, okay, you're at 250. You haven't been sleep deprived for the last week and so This you you would get put in that box So you're hyper gurnett al and you have a lot of symptoms of that you maybe you have erectile dysfunction low libido

You just feel like shit. You're not recovering can't put on muscle mass These are all gonna be maybe they'll have you fill out like an atom questionnaire And so if you pop for those plus this lab value, which would have to be done twice consecutively, then you would be put in that bucket. And so say we take someone that has this, and then you put them on TRT. So these studies are from Basin et al in the early 2000s. And what we see is guys they did this really cool study with actually a pretty solid exercise arm like it was just a pretty pretty good pretty swole program like not a bad like upper lower split with a solid amount of volume and what they found was it seems to be additive so you get so say you put someone on 600 mg of testosterone which is which is which seems a

lot like a trt dose is 125 mg per week. So it's a lot. But bodybuilding doses is like, we're talking like 1,100 is like the average. Load them up. Like a lot. And so they put these guys on like 600 mg of testosterone, and they gained a lot of muscle mass. You're talking like 10 pounds of muscle in 10 weeks, which is maybe even more. And they lost fat at the same time. So that's pretty amazing from a

hormonal standpoint. Um, and then, but they had the guys exercise too. So they had, they had multiple arms, so they had a control group, but it didn't do anything. Then they have a placebo group that got injected with sunflower oil and then they exercise. So they thought they were getting injected. The big thing is like when you think you're getting injected by steroids, like you, you fucking think you're getting injected by steroids like you you fucking think you get strong like they're like we're talking hundreds of percent like all of a sudden you take like elite power lifters you tell them that they're on steroids they're not on steroids they start lifting like 40 to 50 pounds more just from a placebo effect right awesome it's pretty cool and then and then you tell the crazy

thing is in that they have these studies and then you tell them like you, dude, you were on Dianabol, and now you're not. And the whole time they're taking a sugar pill. I want you to tell me that on the way home tonight. Anders, you're currently on drugs. Awesome. I can tell while I'm driving. Sprinkle some Clomid in your La Croix over there. You're good.

That's the seltzer. The seltzer water. And so Clomid would be, that's inside the differential diagnosis. Clomid is a CIRM. It's a selective estrogen receptor modulator. It's going to block estrogen at the level of the brain. And if you block, it's essentially a negative on a negative. If you block a break, you're going to turn that axis on.

So say, inside of that differential diagnosis, say I send you to an MD. And I'm like, hey, I know this MD is going to do their job. They're going to work. They're going to do their job the right way. And so they would maybe put you on Clomid and they would see if your testicular axis will turn back on. And if it turns back on, then you know that it's a secondary problem. It's brain-based. If it doesn't turn back on, then you're like, shit, this might be a testicular problem. Um, which could be like a varicocele where you're having problems getting testosterone out of the

testicle and it could just be trauma right um and that's something that we would they even have to put you on it and then see if those things change couldn't you just measure lh and follicle simulating hormones directly see if they're low and then and then as a consequence of them being low you you could say well clobin might be a viable way to bump your free and total testosterone for sure and and then the the consensus on clomid versus testosterone is like yes you will get and this is nelson virgil he'd be a great guy to have on the show he's like literally the godfather of testosterone uh and his story's stupid cool and so if you put people on clomid generally their values will come back up like maybe six 600, 700, 800, depending on the person.

But it doesn't have necessarily the same effect that TRT would. And I think that if we're talking about testosterone replacement therapy, because that seems to be – it's a hammer right now. And so that's – It will give you that too. Everything is a nail. Yeah. It's a $6 billion industry.

And it's brand new and it just instantly went to $6 billion or whatever. Yeah, over the last 10 years. There's a TRT clinic on every corner. It was like steroids are bad, but TRT is a new category. That's actual legal steroids. The smart people are doing it. Oh, my God. People like it.

Yeah. It makes you feel so good. Yeah. Until it doesn't. Until it doesn't. For sure. It's a short term sure it's a short term It's a short-term fix if you don't fix the underline

But that said if you've had a TBI and it hasn't come back on like it's unethical to not give you that yeah Yeah, the first time I heard about that. I was really caught off guard I did I didn't suspect intuitively before the whole concussion like wave has come through now like where what people come out and Expose the fact that that trauma like you know football you know and any any boxing anything where you can hit in the head you're getting concussions is affecting your hormones at such a deep level i didn't know that until recently yeah we're talking like 100 of people with a tbi going in the first 10 days are gonna

they're gonna be hypogonadal like your thyroid axis all your axes are going to be hypogonadal. Like your thyroid axis, all your axes are going to be chopped. And so the brain, this pituitary stalk is very, and Mike can probably talk about this better than I, it's very sensitive. So you basically got a gel-like structure just floating around in your head. And when you get hit, that shit is not meant to be just knocked against a sidewalk. So instantly from the moment of the concussion you just drop inside 24 hours yeah you're gonna i mean even say that's pretty instant but yeah yeah it's gonna be a very noticeable difference right away hey yeah and

your gi track opens up like there's a lot of things that happen inside of that blood brain barrier opens so you've got massive influx of inflammation into the brain that you've never had before and stuff there that shouldn't be there and the energy crisis for the production of energy and just a mess i mean i know a lot of guys in mma now they're they're they're moving toward training that's more specific to like how like tie fighters train like where they don't fight they kind of just like touch and tap each other they spar a lot but they don't beat each other up so much and then and then they save the actual beating up for the fight itself yeah especially like once you're once you know how to fight then it becomes just like you know drilling your technique and just staying in really really really good shape

and not being injured for your fight rather than going into it with a tbi correct yeah i think that's the thing for a lot of sports like if you're an mlb second baseman do you really need to practice your double plays anymore like no you that motor pattern is pretty ingrained in you. You just need to let it unfold. So I'm a big fan of that. The TBI thing to me is super scary. I think on every level. I mean, I love football for sure. It's hard to watch now.

It's hard. Dude, it's hard. I love football. You watch it. I don't watch football. But maybe like one day a year I'll watch a game, and it is terrifying to see the speed at which their heads collide, and you know what's happening.

You could watch it if you didn't know what was actually going on. But they even say that it's the small – I mean, it's not small. It's like incredibly powerful punches to the head over and over and over again that you may not get knocked out. Is that leaving like the lasting damage in there and see testosterone is like buried in these people basically their their entire season and it never kind of clears and comes back yeah that i don't like that's something that you would have to take on an individual basis yeah um the the data that we do have is that if you get a concussion and if it if your testosterone does not come back in six weeks

it's probably not going to come back within the year oh wow and so like and this is not a small number of tbis this is like 40 percent yeah tbis and so you're the odds that an nfl player has low testosterone are probably pretty high are these every m MMA fighter, like pro MMA fighter that I've ever heard that got blood tests? Every one of them comes back and says, I have the testosterone of a 75-year-old man. It's all like 350, 400. It's never 800, which isn't even that extreme. That's just like middle of the road. So you have a population that severely undereats generally.

Over trains. Over trains and gets hit in the head. Like, what do you expect? And then you make it sound so simple. And then they, and then they make TRT legal and then they take it away. Oh yeah.

That was the worst. Cause, because they, they just like, they didn't let people like cycle down or like do anything. It was just like, you have to stop today. And then that causes its own set of problems.

That's so if we think about the negatives of TRT and it's good to talk about this, like TRT is not this panacea. So TRT, what are the negatives of TRT? Well, the first one that we have is that you are taking over your own production. You're giving something exogenously. And the body's not stupid. This is the most adaptable thing ever to walk the earth, right? And so it's going to turn down its own production. You give it to it. It's not going to make it. It's not stupid it's this is the most adaptable thing ever to walk the earth right and so it's going to turn down its own production you give it to it it's not going to make it it's not stupid and so then your your testicles are going to atrophy that that axis is going to turn back on

and if you do that and you're over 30 or 35 the odds that it turns back on are not high so we're talking about from uh from a medical model that's why it's scary to me. Cause like you, you're on an EFT payment perhaps for 40 years. And this is like $150 to $250 a month forever. And like that is fueling maybe somebody's Maserati. Um, and that's what I can't get down with. Cause if that's your hammer and you're, you know,

it's out there, right? Every guy, you know, maybe 50% of the population who's, who's obese, they come into your clinic, they're going to have low testosterone.

And, and that's a hammer that you could use. Take a break real quick. We're taking a break. We'll be right back. And we're back. Welcome back to Wild Nose Shrug. Right back to whatever you were saying.

I said to pick something on the computer, and I wanted to save it before I messed it up. Yeah. See, this thing isn't always super smooth. It's not always silky smooth every time. I needed to delete something. I didn't want to delete what we just talked about. We're sitting in the

middle of a sunset that's just beautiful, but it also is... We've got a lot of things going on over here. I kept looking over at Doug, and he's got his hand up to try and see the screen. They don't make these things perfect for podcasting. Testosterone is plummeting.

That's actually a really good question. Like is that, I know people used to say like, you know, holding phones up your head and doing things like that, like riding in the car, putting your phone right there, like right underneath my nutsack.

Cause we're usually storing my phone if I'm driving. Like is there, is there any downside to doing that? I would avoid it. I mean, I don't, I would avoid it. There's no,

there's no benefit. I mean, that's the big thing is like a lot of these things. So that's a great segue into, let's get back. Environmental toxins are kind of the same thing, right? So we have these studies in the worst of the worst situations. Like you got these people in the U.S. like, oh, my God, like if you give me my leftovers in plastic, I'm going to lose my shit.

But you got these Thai farmers who literally like spray this shit with no mass, no nothing. And they measure their testosterone levels and they're the same as not in their fertility is not like sperms all jacked up. But the human body is so amazing what it can deal with. And I, that's the big thing that pisses me off is this, this level of fragility that we're building in people in this space. And, and that's, that's, that's

unfortunate. And so to get back to the TRT thing, so what are the potential negatives of TRT? Well, it could be forever. It might, might be forever. And that's not ethical if you're making a ton of money, in my, my opinion, um, like do the right thing. And that's kind of the model from concussion, right? Tell the truth. Um, And so what are the negatives of this long-term? Well, you have heart attacks. And so when we think about heart attacks, Maryland just happened, right? We got a heart that blew up. And so that happens generally when a heart is over 500 grams. So when a heart is over 500 grams, when it weighs more than that, all of a sudden you're going to get left ventricle hypertrophy. So their pump is too big.

And then you combine that with testosterone, which upregulates EPO, which is erythropoietin, and that's going to make your blood more sludgy or more yogurt-y. And so now you have this pump that's too big, and you have this blood that is sludgy, which sounds like a bad recipe for disaster, right? But if you're doing TRT doses, the odds that your heart becomes that big are low like these are we're talking about bodybuilders just just meat monsters right and that's where that happens um or genetics or genetics um and you're gonna obviously football is the biggest pull for that which is cool i mean the the left ventricle hypertrophy pieces is a normal consequence of of being an athlete especially an endurance athlete but you're

talking about if it goes too far because you're supplementing with testosterone? Because testosterone is not going to discriminate. All muscle is going to grow. It doesn't matter. So cardiac muscle is going to grow. Skeletal muscle is going to grow. And BP, you're going to have benign.

Your prostate is going to grow, things like that. And so that brings us. So cardiovascular disease, is this a thing with TRT? Well, if you control for hematocrit, if you control for how sludgy the blood is, and then you get ECGs, probably not a big deal. Probably not going to up your, and we know that low testosterone is related to every bad thing ever. Like from a canary standpoint, I think it's just an early signal. Like, okay, yeah, it's going to really relate to diabetes, depression, all these things.

Cross-sectionally or even prospectively observationally. And so that's one of the big things that people worry about. The next one is liver damage. Yeah, if you're taking orals like candy, you're going to get liver damage. But if you're taking injectables, probably not a thing. Like the liver is a horse. You can deal with a ton of – you can drink Jack Daniels probably until you're 75 and maybe not have cirrhosis

um so i'm not i'm not necessarily i'm not telling you to do that give it a shot i'm gonna test it out what if you do jack daniels and roids together i mean that's yeah that's a perfect i'm sure there's a lot of case study based uh things on that and so you that's that's a thing right so you have the liver you want to watch that. And then the last one really is prostate cancer. So when you get prostate cancer, one of the therapies is, and one of the big labs at UT when I was there is they were a huge prostate cancer research lab. And so one of the first things they do is they basically medically castrate someone.

So they take away their testosterone. And that works. It's a viable strategy if you have prostate cancer um and then you have to then in that model they're working on sarcopenia from other things and that's where SARMs are probably pretty cool because SARMs are selective androgen receptor modules modulators so they they don't have that androgenic effect so they would just have that effect on muscle um and that but they're that's kind of the they're not giving you a hairy back and acne and all that shit correct yeah so that all like the negative like the stereotypical negative sides of steroids which are dht driven which is a um most anything like that is going acne and um hair growth or hair loss um that

seems to be if you have the genetic proponent for hair loss and you take TRT, it's going to accentuate that. It's going to make that very quickly. So, I want to just give you Propecia or another drug then to block that? That's the problem. So, once you get in that. Side effects, and then you need drugs to block those side effects. You get in that loop. Where were you guys when I lost all this?

Yeah. We could have given you roids. God, I should have done it. It's too late now ways that people can do this without having to take the trt though there's ways that they can control this before they get into this whole thing right um there's like a big nutrition component to just being able to regulate this stuff on your own and feel healthy? For sure.

I think even the Journal of Endocrinology says, you know what, the first thing we have to do when we see this is lifestyle changes. That is the first thing. We can't jump to TRT. We need to try, like, what's going on with your sleep? What's going on with your nutrition? I think a ton of people do just jump to the TRT right off the bat. That's the $6 billion. If you were going to make that much money, why would you not do it you know you got to see this guy every three months you

know he's gonna feel good you know he's getting jacked even if he's not training that well i've actually we shared a clinic with somebody and it would be wild to me what these people would come in for and i would like hear their symptoms and then hear the shots that they were getting and i'd just be like, oh no, no, no, no, no, you don't need that. You don't need the drug. Just you're not sleeping. You're not eating. But I mean, where, how do people get into this thing? Is it, is it purely a sleep and eating thing? Like where, I guess, and while you rebuild somebody, you're, you're filling in the gaps of where they're letting themselves down. So is it more of a nutrition?

Is it more of a sleep? Or the type of nutrition? How much meat should a human be eating to ensure that they're staying healthy? Oh, that's a big – that's not a good question. A lot of robots. That was a terrible question. Just way too big. No.

Just Chipotle twice a day. Yeah. You're fine. You're good. Just get the fajita veggies big. No. Just Chipotle twice a day. Yeah. You're fine. You're good. Just get the fajita veggies, though. Yeah. In this sense, do we want, like, bullets or cannonballs? I think that's your question.

And so I'm a big fan of cannonballs in this situation. Like, if you are, you know, you have a ton of psychological stress. You can't sleep. Your sleep efficiency is terrible. And, you know, maybe you're either eating too little or you're eating too much. Those are the things that we know are going to knock down testosterone. Pretty, like, on a cut protocol, bodybuilders will generally be hyper now. Like, inside, like, the last few weeks before a show.

Like, so if you get super, super cut, I'm a big fan of, like of living inside of a body fat percentage where you feel really good. For me, it seems to be like 12 to 14, somewhere in there. I mean, if you're naturally pretty lean, maybe it's 10%. Everybody's going to be a little bit different. But finding that body fat percentage where you feel good, where your hormones are, you can adapt to exercise and you can do that. So that's probably square one. And then if you're over fat, which, you know, 92% of the population is over fat, that's our first thing to work on.

And that, Mike and I, that is not an easy thing to do. Like long-term weight loss is not something that is easy. It's definitely possible. And that's where we get into the nutrition piece because most of the people that are coming into this TRT realm are going to be obese or overweight just because of just a probability standpoint. And so how are you going to increase mitochondrial function? Because that is what makes testosterone in the testicles. Like that is the regulatory step of making testosterone in the latex cells. And so how are you going to

work on this over fatness? And I'm okay calling it that because obesity and overweight are based on BMI and that's not necessarily the best marker because you could be skinny fat and that's just as deleterious and so how are we gonna work on that well then you get into what are you gonna you have to create a deficit from it there's no way around that you got to create an energy deficit and then how are you do that well you have these ad libitum diets that is like keto vegan whatever it's just a blunt hammer right you can eat however much you want but you can't eat this this and this right and whenever you do that whenever you restrict like that you're you're

going to uh lower calories until you don't until the because appetite is all subconsciously regulated and so you see this keto thing and somehow they subvert it. They put coconut oil in everything. They put butter in everything. And all of a sudden they subvert the deficit. And people become very tribal with those ad libitum techniques. And that's not bad or good. It's a tool.

It's just a blunt tool. And then you kind of have the opposite level of that spectrum, which is probably just as hammered, which is the macro side. Yeah. All right? And so you have this is kind of the ad libitum is we're not going to track anything. You just eat whatever the hell you want. You just can't eat candy.

Right? And then you have the macro side where you're going to track everything that goes in your mouth. And that's very almost like disordered eating type tendencies right but if you want to make the crossfit games if you want to do something if you want to get to six percent body fat because for a bodybuilding show you have to be there there's no insight but you know betty down the block who's 50 pounds overweight who has who doesn't even know what cucumbers are or where they come from like she probably doesn't need that's a huge that's way too big of a step for her so what do we need to do with her we probably like what do all these her. So what do we need to do with her?

We probably, like what do all these dietary strategies agree on? Well, you need to eat less processed food. You probably need to eat more vegetables. That's going to be an asterisk because can you handle fiber? Can you handle from edible sources of fiber? And so. Hold on a second. Why wouldn't somebody be able to handle fiber?

If you have IBD, if you have an overgrowth of bacteria so bacteria eat fiber it's primarily your large intestine has about a bacterial population of about 10 to the 15th and then your small intestine has a bacterial population about 10 to the 4th so we're talking like we can't even fathom the difference in this bacterial population and then you have this ileocecal valve which is the gate between the large intestine and small intestine and so if if you just if anything happens to that gate or you don't have hydrochloric acid you could get over a lot of things could lead to some kind of bacterial overgrowth um maybe just eating sugar for 25 years that could do it too um just having a bad diet bad circadian rhythms and so when you have this overgrowth of bacteria or any kind of dysbiosis, whenever you feed them

fiber, this comes back to Andy Galpin's thing, that's going to feed the bugs. And then the bugs are either going to produce hydrogen sulfide, methane, or just hydrogen gas. And so, you know, do your farts smell like, you know, rotting dead things? Then it's probably methane. If your farts smell like

rotten eggs, that's probably hydrogen sulfide. Do you just blow up the room? Like, that that's probably it doesn't smell like it's just loud that's probably just hydrogen um and so a lot of people in our current climate have some type of bacterial overgrowth and so the worst thing that they could probably do is like try to replicate the hadza diet like let's just go eat a bunch of roots like that's going to be terrible for you so we have to we can't just just look backwards from an ancestral health standpoint. We have to have, and that's where you want to lower these fiber sources. Initially, maybe for eight weeks, I think that's the research behind like FODMAPs and digestive health.

Maybe you want to lower those FODMAPs, which are fermentable carbohydrates. Think about like kombucha is a fermentable. Kefir, all that stuff is fermented. And so that's what happens inside your gut. And so you want to lower those. That's going to lower the bacterial population. And then maybe you can put those back in after a period of time. Maybe you can slowly reintroduce them.

What I've found, it's generally a dose issue. Like maybe somebody can eat 35 grams of fiber. But if you bring them up to 45 or 60 they're gonna be they're gonna be a world hurt like i over the last five years i eat about 70 grams of fiber a day which is crazy um and i've tracked everything i love tracking things is i don't i don't wish my relationship on food with anybody else i love it um it's i love running myself as an experiment i don't ask anyone else to do something that i haven't done um but i also don't think that that course of action is appropriate for every human out there i want to get i'm a big fan of resiliency so i want people to have be able to eat as much stuff as they can as they want to inside of now if you have a gluten

a legit gluten sensitivity you can't have gluten how many. Now, if you have a gluten, a legit gluten sensitivity, you can't have gluten. How many people do you think actually have the gluten problem? So the gluten thing, think about wheat. Wheat is an insane, it's an insanely high FODMAP food. So is it the gluten or is it the fiber? And so a lot of people will go gluten-free and they feel better initially, but why do they feel better? Is it just because they're limiting processed food? And it used to be like you would go gluten-free and you would feel amazing. But now you can just eat everything that you were eating before just gluten-free. So it doesn't have the same effect as it did 10 years ago when my dad did it.

I feel like it's really skating around the problem. When you're eating paleo cookies or gluten-free bread or whatever it is, you should just be eating vegetables and meat and other natural sources, not just subtracting out the one thing that you think is the problem but then taking in the rest of the thing that it normally comes with. Which gets us to kind of this idea of hyperpalatable foods. So yes, for the majority of the population, you want them to stop eating hyperpalatable foods, which let's just clarify real quick that everyone that does not

eat mcdonald's and hyper palatable foods you're not normal like the people that are you're not normal like if you if you are at the granite games and you're eating paleo inside of the current environment you're not normal so the fact that you think you're normal is your first mistake the people from an optimal foraging strategy, you would not have made it. The person that's running up the hill for fun and not eating buckets of honey, they didn't survive. So your brain is wired to find things for the least amount of cost energetically and that are the most dense. That's how your brain is wired. So everybody that's going through the dollar menu, they're doing exactly what they probably should be doing

from a subconscious level. What we're asking people to do with this macro stuff, mostly with this cognitive oversight of the system, we're asking them to regulate this system cognitively. And we know that's going to be very difficult long term. I have a question

for you. So I smash sauerkraut every day i eat basically for dessert and a lot of kefir but every time i drink kombucha i'm always wondering at some level like am i really just drinking carbonated sugar water that has like some maybe potential health health benefits but i would have to drink like 15 gallons of it to actually like don't answer that question this is the after the break question yeah don't answer that question. This is the after the break question. Don't answer that question because I love kombucha and it's going to be ruined. Kombucha has got like six grams of sugar.

Like both of you guys train. I wouldn't be worried about – It's super low. I wouldn't be worried about like – I wouldn't even be worried if you drank like five of them a day to be completely honest. It's high in something called Saccharomyces biarte, which is actually not a – it's a yeast. It's not a bacteria. called Saccharomyces biarte, which is actually not a – it's a yeast. It's not a bacteria.

And Saccharomyces biarte is really cool. It's an outcrowder, so it tends to get rid of dysbiosis all by itself. It's a very cool supplement. I don't know – you'd have to drink a lot of kombucha. I don't think that the amount of Saccharomyces biarte is going to be consistent kombucha to kombucha. I could be wrong on that. Yeah. Um,

but I, I use generally 250 milligrams, like three to four times a day of Espelier. It's a great first thing to do with someone. Um, not too many,

not too many people are going to have bad ill effects from that. Yeah. I think like, where would they find that? Uh,

just supplement. Yeah. Like I use, I think Mike and I both use like pharmaceutical-grade supplements because the supplement industry is just like the wild west. And so we just do that because we know that when they get it, that's actually what's going to be in the product. And I'm a big – I hate supplements probably as much as Mike does.

I'm a big fan of like trying to use food first. I have all these tools, right, which is cool. And we talked about these diets. And so it's very easy to find the hole in your diet now. Just put in what you normally eat where most of us who are ever going to try that

are pretty habitual. Like, oh, you probably eat very similar things, right? So figure out in your normal week at your normal house, like what are you deficient in? Maybe it's magnesium.

Maybe it's zinc. Maybe, I don't know what it is. If you're vegan, it's probably, it could be could be b vitamins could be all kinds of stuff it could be and so paleo might be calcium right um and so figure out and then we can have the argument of if you the you know the carnivore diet argument of if you need these things if but let's not have and those evil vegetables yeah i don't know that there's something that's more like we have tried to bash a couple things and we've tried to find out what's wrong with creatine for a really long time we can't find it uh we've we've tried to figure out you know what vegetables like what's going on there. And they just come out positive for the vast majority of people all the time. So like the evidence of these things reducing chronic disease risk is very high.

But on the flip side, say you want to get jacked, which is like the vast majority, maybe like a lot of your population listens to this show, right? Sure. They're here to get jacked for sure. This is how they get jacked on their commute to work yeah and so if you're an advanced athlete or like past it you know past your newbie gains like you're no longer like doing thrusters and getting stronger training yeah like you're strong like let's just say you have a double body weight squat and you can you know maybe you can you can bench 275 or something like something legit um and so you're strong you've put in the work um and now you can't it's not as easy anymore it's not gonna be as easy uh and so you can't necessarily i don't want to say you can't

but you probably are not going to be able to put on muscle as effectively if you are in maintenance or a deficit. Yeah. And so you want to be in a caloric excess. So if I got, we can take me because I'm kind of, you know, I'm just, I'm like an average dude. And I really, like I used to hate that. Like I'm 5'10", like 185. Like I'm just, but it's fun because when they do studies of these populations,

like it's basically me. I'm like, dude, this is like, he's 85 kilos. He's 12% body fat. I of these populations, it's basically me. I'm like, dude, he's 85 kilos. He's 12% body fat. I'm like, this is like me search. Awesome. And so when we think about that person, I need about 3,500 calories to maintain my weight. That's a lot of calories. That's pounds and pounds of sweet potatoes.

So if you're a big male human, you probably need a lot of food of food and so that is the hammer that is the biggest downside of paleo is that you're you're gonna clean the shit out of their diet like the worst thing i see is pro athletes whose wives clean up their diet and all of a sudden they are fucked like i'm like what happened she's like well my wife she read this book and now i'm now i'm eating 1300 calories a day and i'm 220 what happened she's like well my wife she read this book and now I'm eating 1300 calories a day and I'm 220 that happened that happened

in the CrossFit world with the zone like instantly and that was like a massive thing that happened you got like 210 pound dudes

that are in great shape counting out 12 almonds that's not resiliency and you're like and Rich Froney's just pounding peanut butter he's like what are you guys doing he was smashing subway yeah like but i i remember that and everybody just like shrunk it was like what's going on it's like oh well barry sears said i need to do this i read the book i need to live i need to have all my blocks yeah and then they started doing

yeah and then they started doing it was like well i'm, I'm on 24 blocks, but 75x fat. You're like, huh? What? Well, what's the difference there between, like, the short-term versus the long-term? Like, if you're smashing 5,000 calories a day, in the long-term, are you more likely to die, you know, any amount of time earlier than if you would have had 2,500 calories. I heard a while back centenarians systematically around the world, very often the culture that they're from has just, like Okinawa is an easy example, they just don't eat as much food as we do here.

They're also tiny. The tiny people, totally. That is such a good question, and that is so important right now because the longevity thing is so hot um and putting on muscle is going to be directly oppositional to fasting obviously like you're like you're not eating you're not doing anything versus you're eating a bunch of protein you're stoking mtor and you're trying to get bigger like uh so yes, maybe being a giant meat stick is not the best thing for you longterm. Maybe that's a giant,

maybe. Right. But being a, you know, being a overweight meat stick is definitely not good longterm. So I'm not, I'm not necessarily, I want to be that experiment. Oh, that's, that's the, we don't have prospective trials on and you know what like all of that caloric restriction data is in mice it's a lot of it's an animal models of stuff in humans like doesn't really pan out and it's excessive man like the caloric restrictions are like 25 like you're telling me yeah you're telling me you want to live for the rest of your life eating you know eating 500 less calories than you could otherwise like that sounds terrible to me how many more days you're going to get out of that on the back end?

How many suffering days of not eating enough and not gains? Well, you've seen pictures of those people that are doing like a 50% caloric restriction for years on end. They just look like a rake. And their food. They look unhappy too. Their brain is so food motivated. They have these people in the Minnesota starvation trials.

They were literally drawing pictures of food. Their mind could not draw food. Collecting cookbooks. Yeah. Cutting out the pictures. Just like weird shit, man. Is that real? Yeah.

It's 100% real. Interesting. Your brain has so many stopgaps to prevent that. And you look at a lot of these caloric restriction researchers, and I don't want to look like that like i don't why are we so scared of death like that's that's our ultimate that's our last job is just clear the herd so that the next people can move in um and so like if i go out like at 80 deadlifting i'm gonna be fucking happy like how much you're gonna pull at 80 i mean, I'm hoping at least over 400 pounds. 405 is a good number. Four wheels. The moment I can't

pull four wheels and bench three wheels is going to be... I've never done that. I'm going to do it at 80. I'm going to do it never. I'm curious to see how long I'll be able to keep that up.

That's something I'm actually really interested in is the ability to stay strong for a very long time based off just making quality decisions. You talk about, like, I want to be able to pull 405 forever, bench 315. Like, I truly believe that, like, one of my lifetime, I mean, I know it's one of my lifetime goals, but I believe that at 80 I'll be able to squat 315 as long as I just keep telling my body this is something you have to do in order to be able to survive and have to do it every single week. Like if we just have maintenance calories,

is that something that we can actually do is maintain the muscle mass? The research on that is we don't have that study yet. We haven't had meatheads. We haven't studied them for long enough yet. But I think the research is there that you don't, a lot of these, like your basal metabolic rate drops as you age. But a lot of that is, maybe all of it, is lean body mass dependent. And that's the goal for me.

So we talked about longevity. What are the biggest indicators of longevity? It's grip strength, muscle mass, VO2 max, like all of these functional parameters so if you're going to lose that at the at the expense of caloric restriction not i'm not buying it but and those are the markers we know we have good data on that already from trials so yeah continue we were talking with uh with julian pinot and he was talking about his who's a well-known strength coach and he was talking about his mentor who's like a 75-year-old power lifter or something like that.

He was 75 years old, and he squats like 500 pounds. And on the show, I was like, that guy's not going to be in a nursing home anytime soon. He was like, no way. He can jump onto a four-foot box. Yeah. Like, there are benefits to cardiovascular fitness and all these other ways to get in shape, but, like, maintaining that strength and that muscle mass as you get older, like, it keeps you young, so to speak.

Yeah. The whole goal of training as you age, if you really want to think about it, is not fall down. Yeah. Fall risk is the thing. Yeah. They normally just fall backwards. Like if you work at the nursing home videos,

you just break a hip and then you're fucked. Earlier you were talking about the battle between the people that are all about food quality, like the paleo types and the food quantity, like the macros types. It seems to me at this point that for a diet to get really popular, it has to silo one of the big three categories of quality, quantity, or nutrient timing. It's got to be just one of those. Because if you try to educate people on all three and they all work together and it depends and all that, you're not going to get enough traction with a hundred thousand people. But if you say, Oh, don't worry

about it. Just hit your macros, eat whatever you want, but just make sure these numbers don't go over these other numbers. Then you're good. Or, you know, just eat these foods. Don't know if there's other foods, eat as much as you want. It's simple enough where people can go okay i can follow that but those those things will lead to some level of results but they're those truths are partial so to speak like in in your mind when you're dealing with clients like how do you get them to to attack all three of those problems and any other in any other level that you think is necessary yeah that makes sense to me that people, that that would happen. Like from a belief structure standpoint inside of humans, like we love that stuff. Like we want a flag to fly and we want it to be simple and we want things to be black and white. Like that's

how humans like to think. And so diets that have that are going to naturally be popular. Like the whole like context, it depends thing is never going to go viral. Um, and I'm okay with that. I'm 100% fine with that. And I don't get mad at, you know, I don't get mad at the keto crowd. Like I don't get mad at the vegan crowd. Like I understand that you have created an identity inside of that religion that is, that is food. Um, and, and I'm okay with that. If that gets you results results you're just really annoying to me I don't want to talk to you for more than five minutes and so how do we deal with this as someone who gets paid to talk to people about food and diets how do we deal with this and so to me it comes to it comes down to this hierarchy so we have this low rung which is the ad libitum diet like you're not gonna eat

this and then we have the high rung which is the macro counting and then as far as like how much effort it takes to like weigh and measure and count everything all day long it's like it's a big effort to do macros but like it doesn't really take a whole lot of like extra time to just make sure that you only eat these foods not these other foods correct from a cognitive standpoint as much the level of rigidity is is heavier i think from a keto side like then if it fits your macros definitely the level of rigidity is heavier but it's probably easier inside of our it's way easier to this is this is a cool point it's way easier to not moderate something than to moderate it in our current environment like you think about the alcohol the alcohol research uh when you pick out people who can only have one or two drinks a night, you're naturally picking out a segment of the population that are moderators

inside of an environment where that is super helpful. So is it the alcohol or is it just they're a moderator? And I'm not a moderator. I've been addicted to everything. CrossFit was – I'm an ex-CrossFitter. That was the most addictive substance known to man. I see people doing Diane. I'm like, damn, I'm in. I'm in i'm like let's go you want to race me i'll race you i'll fitness race you right now let's let's let's exercise for time um and there's three thousand of them a couple

hours away right now but being serious like that crossFit almost broke up my marriage. Right. And I've been addicted to alcohol bad. I was an alcoholic and CrossFit was the thing that almost did it for me. And so addictions are super cool. And I think a lot of people get addicted to diets. They get addicted to dieting, which is a fucking terrible thing. Like, why would you want to be addicted to trying to lose weight?

That is the worst model to try to live in forever. I'm going to live in this restrictive model forever? That's terrible. But it's also not just about losing weight. You get addicted to the model because you believe that the performance gains too. It kind of goes, I remember I've been in arguments and made people cry thinking that we should be in this only hunter-gatherer, like these poor girls that I would talk to and be like,

why am I yelling at this girl telling her not eat the bread? Now it seems ridiculous when it was in the gym and I was so driven by performance. That is a real addiction as well. There's a real problem when your social life and the way you talk to people is like very very aggressive and like chasing performance yeah tricks like that i have the truth thing like that that i don't even talk to people about food like unless unless unless i'm in a position where they're i i don't even tell people what i do i'm because unless i'm in a position to where i can guide or direct where they think of me as that person, I own a retreat center in Costa Rica.

Like, I don't tell people what I do. Because, like, that conversation is not going to be beneficial. Yeah. Because all I'm going to, like, cognitive dissonance. So I give, I have to give, and I don't have to. I'm honored to be able to give a talk with my wife, who is obviously a very well-known yoga instructor, and she has these teacher trainings, and so she allows me to talk about nutrition.

She wants me to talk about nutrition. Because in that crowd, veganism is very heavy. And I'm okay with ethical, moral veganism. I get it 100%. I'm behind you. Yes, for the planet. I'm all behind it. But don't try to convince me from a nutritional standpoint

that this is the best strategy. It's a perfectly viable strategy, but it's definitely not the best. Well, those people shouldn't be anti-meat. They should be like anti-CAFOs. Correct, correct. But I don't think we can tell them what they should be. They just don't want to kill things.

That's your own thing. Humans have been killing a lot of shit for a lot of years. Poor Evita. Blanket term. It works for everything. She allows me to talk at this event. It's really, really fun. I come at it at the angle of how am I going to talk to these people from a cognitive dissonance standpoint?

Because if I attack their way of life, they would rightfully shell out, right? They would not like that, and they would get defensive, and they would not listen to anything that I had to say. So what do I do at the beginning of that talk? For 30 minutes, I just bash the shit out of paleo. Everything, I just just bash it because it's easy to bash any of these adalimum diets. Is it very easy? Cause they all have holes. And so I'm like, and then, and then at this 30 minute mark, I start to transition and I'm like, Hey, let's talk about, let's talk about the holes in a vegan diet. We can't just, if we're, if we're being really inclusive here and we're trying to think about just from the science standpoint, what is this lacking?

It's lacking magnesium. It's lacking zinc. These are things that you can only get, B vitamins. These are things that you can generally only get from meat products that we have been eating for thousands and thousands of years. And then they're like, shit. Because they can't now. I was on their side. Now it's like, okay, this is a real point.

Yes, if I'm a female and I bleed every month and I don't eat iron, I could not be able to carry oxygen and now I'm anemic. And I'm like, how many of you guys in this room have been diagnosed with anemia? Invariably, five to ten hands go up. I'm like, you are choking from the inside out. Does that sound like a good idea? Terrible. you want to activate your sympathetic nervous system don't have enough oxygen and so then they're like holy shit what

should i do and then all of a sudden this light bulb turns on i'm like well you should get a you should check your ferritin um you should check your you know you should check your hemoglobin and your hematocrit and these are very this is like a it's like a 15 test man yeah and so and then it's not it's not you. It's not your problem. It's just like, hey, I want you to do this better. I want you to be the best vegan you can be. I want you to be the best paleo person you can be.

And when I do that, generally, those people become more accepting of other nutrition religions. And I think that's very common too with even religions like the best like if you're the best christian you can be you probably don't care about what you're you're very inclusive right and and so i think when we get hold out and we think that we have the way and then we we have this anecdotal it worked for me and then you get this chorus of all these people it worked for me it gets real dangerous real fast we're gonna take a real break i'm gonna get some more seltzer water little la croix um oh look at this oh nice and chilly that one doesn't have the diana ball in it though but i kind of want to dig into each of the the diets and the big religions almost that you that you talk about and and what is wrong with all of them um the paleo one i think i've i've been through that one.

That one's pretty easy. But the keto one is like super new. And the macro thing is super, super intense to me as well. Like you find people that are just so deep on the macro level right now or macro thing right now. That is the thing. That is the hammer. It's hot right now. And I think it's really hot because people, it's like they can't just have the macros.

It's like, oh, now we get to eat all of the carbohydrates and leave all the fat out. That's a problem. And, yeah, we're going to take a break. We'll be back. Short family, I told you. I told you he's wicked smart. I want to thank our sponsors over at Organifi. Man, we've been with them so long.

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And then Mike T. Nelson over here is going to try and stump you with something. You think of something. There's so many ways that that guy can stump you. He's like the smartest man in the nutrition and fitness sector. We tasked him to do that, so it's good. Yeah, I can feel your guard just went up. He was so nice earlier. Let's get into the macro thing.

This seems to be the hottest thing that's happening right now, specifically in the CrossFit space. And like I said before the break, I think it's because a lot of people just look at this. They realize that maybe they were on the paleo thing, their hormones got jacked up, and they're like, macros, And then let's start smashing carbohydrates, lowering the fat content of everything we eat. And all of a sudden we're just going to lean out and it's going to be great. And our performance is going to be amazing. I don't think that's, that's necessarily true. And I think people take it a long ways, but like, what is it? What is a little bit more in-depth of why that's happening?

Or what are your problems with it? Well, it's a natural pendulum swing to me. Like, the problems with paleo are you put this limitation on yourself, and you train hard. You're probably not going to get enough calories. So now, if it's your macro, obviously you're getting enough calories, but you're forgetting about this, perhaps forgetting about this food quality aspect, which is fucking important yeah and so it's it's it's this you have to have both you can't have you can't just have if it's your macros you can get body comp results with that now what are the

bumpers we talk a lot about like that's why this field is so hard because there's so much gray area there's so much there's the the area of neulous. And so you have your bumper for fat is probably like one gram per kilo, maybe a little bit less that you can pull off. So like for me as an 85-kilo guy, I probably wouldn't want to go under 80 grams of fat a day. And so then for protein, it's actually less than we think we need. It's probably like 1.8 grams per kilo. You can get by with just fine, which isn't really that much protein.

That's that ribeye that you ate last night. That's the whole day. Are you talking about body mass or lean body mass? You could do it off both. Eric Helms has the lean body mass is like 2.3 times 3.1 if you're dieting. If you're in maintenance or you are at a caloric excess, you probably do not need to worry about your protein intake. Like one point, one gram per pound is going to be super

excessive. You're not going to win any awards for that. Um, the big thing with protein is you want to stoke muscle protein synthesis probably, you know, four times a day with a, which is like a 30 to 40 gram. Uh, if you're older, it's going to get more because you need to hit that leucine threshold, have anabolic resistance. But if you're just a normal person, probably three to four occasions of a good protein. And even that research isn't super solid. Three to five is what the research says right now. So it's a range.

Times per day that you're getting some protein in? Yeah. Like 30 to 40 grams of protein. You want to hit your leucine threshold with enough essential amino acids on top of that so that the essential amino acids don't restrict muscle protein synthesis. That's right around like 0.7 per gram of body weight. It's real easy.

If you're eating 1.8 grams per kilo, you eat 0.4 grams per kilo at four meals. You think our audience knows what a kilo is? Hey, I moved to Costa Rica and this is the thing that that like they just think it's super not counterintuitive but i'll be like hey uh let's we need two by fours like i was like how long are these two by fours are like three meters i'm like what the fuck they're like that's not you're working at both um and so from uh getting back what are the negatives of macros well it's the

same negatives you're attached to this model and what do you what do you see with people they can't let go of macros like they go on vacation they're like oh my god they freak the fuck out dude you didn't you were probably most of the people that are well that's not true like if you're an athlete you're doing it if it fits your macros you probably were never overweight right so your body was regulating this shit just fine and your homeostatic below conscious level of control it was regulating just fine and then you cognitively took it over which makes sense if you're trying to gain muscle and you have to be in an excess your subconscious is going to subvert you constantly it's just the same thing with weight loss your subconscious is

like oh this is a tablespoon of peanut butter and you just go no longer guilty no longer yeah this is a tablespoon it's like it's like ice cream small cup you said four times a day didn't you yeah four times a day uh actually so on the on the protein piece you you said twice now that you you want to hit your leucine threshold so that was a detail that probably like went right over the heads of a lot of people. On that note, we were talking about, about veganism, things like that. And a lot of the people that talk about being vegetarian and veganism, they always come up with the,

you know, talking about beans and rice and complimentary protein, protein and steak. I love that one. We can talk about that. So, so one time I went in and like ran the numbers, like,

you know, how much, how much steak would you have to get eat to get 200 grams? Like whatever, whatever amount, you know, compare that, like how many calories of steak is that versus how many, and ran the numbers, how much steak would you have to eat to get 200 grams? Whatever amount. Compare that. How many calories of steak is that versus how many calories of beans and rice would you have to get to get 200 grams of protein? And then once you've got 200 grams of protein, and it's like 3,500 calories,

by the way, if you're going to get 3,500 calories of beans and rice, get those complementary proteins every day, of course you're going to eat other things. But what is the amino acid breakdown of the beans and rice to get those complementary proteins every day. Of course, you're going to eat other things. But what is the amino acid breakdown of the beans and rice specifically compared to the steak? And leucine was like a third of what it would have been if you were eating steak. That's the problem with collagen

too. Collagen protein doesn't have any leucine either. And so the leucine threshold is going to go up as you age. You get anabolic resistance. And so the research on branched chain aminos is terrible. You just take just by themselves. Branched chain aminos aren't going to do up as you age you get anabolic resistance um and so the the research on branch chain aminos is terrible like you just take just by themselves by themselves branch chain aminos aren't going to do shit uh but you because you need those other amino acids because it's a it's a rate limiting step and i think the the we do know if you are vegan or vegetarian you are you're going to need more protein in that bolus because the proteins that you're eating are not as

digestible they're not complete um so in my opinion if you're an athlete that you're eating are not as digestible. They're not complete. So in my opinion, if you're an athlete and you're vegan or vegetarian, vegetarian is a lot easier because you can eat eggs and dairy. It's very easy for a guy to, being completely honest, it's very easy for a guy to be vegetarian and just knock it out of the park. And eggs out of all the proteins as far as bioavailability is concerned are one of the highest quality proteins available. So that's really good for them. And if you're not allergic to eggs, and they're also a top eight allergen, right?

And so is dairy. So those are both allergen type things, which can get people into problems. And that's like autoimmune paleo now we're getting into, which is a whole other animal. That's the new paleo diet. All day. Well, what do you do when paleo is not restrictive enough? Well, we're going to make it keto and AIP. Like we're just going to stack. Oh, I don't even know what AIP is. Autoimmune paleo. Oh, what do you do when paleo is not restrictive enough? Well, we're going to make it keto and AIP. We're just going to stack autoimmune paleo.

I don't even know what AIP is. Oh, I got you. I didn't know we had a thing for that yet. Yeah, it's no nightshade. Have you written that book? No, that's by Dr. Sarah Ballantyne. It's actually a very good book. I can get behind the ideology of AIP.

And so what were we talking about, dude? Autoimmune paleo. So AIP is just another level of dietary restriction. And if you have an autoimmune disease and you have MS and you are attacking your own myelin, yeah, you probably want to not stoke your immune system with everything that could possibly stoke your immune system. Right? But if you're, you know, everyone around this table, like that's not something that we likely need to do. If you're a very fragile human or say you were a C-section baby and you got antibiotics in the NICU when you were two days old, your immune system is going to be jacked forever. Maybe that's something that you use. So contextually, that might be a thing. But when we

stack all these rigidities on each other, what we know is we are going to potentially have micronutrient deficiencies. Our diet is going to be less good. And with vegan vegetarians, I think that was the initial thing was the protein in vegan diets. So if you're vegan, I don't see how you make that work as an athlete without powders. I don't see it working because of exactly the point, especially for women. Especially for women that want to be vegan for weight loss, I don't see it working. You're not going to be able to hit your protein requirements inside of the K-cal requirements. And I'll show them that. I show them, hey, if you want, you have to eat like, you know,

2,000 calories in beans. Like it's not going to work, right? And so they're like, okay, I'll eat this pre-protein and that's okay. I'll have like, you know, three or four shakes a day. Because that's the only way they can get enough protein in their system. And that's a very modern shift. Are they still needing to supplement with zinc and magnesium and iron and whatever else? Depends.

Yes. Zinc is primarily found in meat and oysters. Even paleo can be low in zinc. If you eat enough meat, you're probably going to be fine. Iodine, if they don't eat, that's everybody. If you don't eat seafood, you can be low in iodine. Vitamin D, no one gets enough vitamin D for their diet. It's very difficult um so those are all and then uh the b vitamins the b vitamins are huge so most if you're there's no the iom which is the institute of medicine uh they are

you talk about it and uh just a an acronym that is is very like, they're going to restrict something if there's something to be restricted, right? And so they're overzealous. And they have no restriction on most of the B vitamins. So, like, no one's going to OD on B vitamins. You're going to be okay. And so that's something that I think every vegan can just do with very little risk. Like, you can supplement these things. Like, yeah, you don't want to supplement too much zinc because then you can push a copper deficiency.

But you can just put your stuff in chronometer and track this for it's worth it. Just track it for a week and see what you're low in. There's a great paper in JSSN about the practicality of vegan diets, and we can probably link that out. Something that if you're going to do that, you should definitely read. And complete proteins are going to be a huge portion of that that's one of the big holes um and from a micronutrient standpoint if you're the biggest one with paleo is calcium and that's what so you think about who was the popular who's who was the population that got hit with that the most well it was like the post-model post-menopausal females right like this 40 to 50 age range, which is maybe the primary clientele of most gyms, right?

And so what are they at risk of with post-menopause? They're at risk of osteoporosis. And so, man, that's maybe not a hammer we want to be banging if they don't have enough calcium. And that's very easy to track. You get a bone mineral density scan. These are all things that people should be doing. And so just have enough calcium. And that's very easy to track. You get a bone mineral density scan. These are all things that people should be doing. And so just track your calcium.

And maybe you use like a Chris Masterjohn thing. You don't take calcium. You actually eat bone or you mash it in your food. But like not that many people are going to eat fucking liver and bone. If you supplement with calcium when you're deficient and you're on your way to osteopenia or osteoporosis or whatever it is, you do it without some type of mechanical loading. You know, you're lifting weights.

It's not useful. It doesn't really do much, right? No. You have to have stress on the bones, on the system for them to adapt, right? This anti-fragile model, you have to have the stressor tuned for the bones. Bones are like the perfect anti-fragile model. I've actually worked with somebody that went from extreme osteoporosis to the bone density of a 24 year old um it was a very very interesting four years of watching her

like just transform her entire life and and get healthy um from lifting weights doing the things that you're talking about. What are, as we kind of wrap this thing up, if somebody's going to kind of start this process, what are some just very baseline numbers? We talked about kind of the protein intake, but what should they kind of look like in the fat department, the carbohydrate side of it, just as take this away.

Here's your starting point. Is it a 40-40-20 model? Is that something that um we should kind of aspire to as we want to start this process and then um maybe add take away um like where where do you start people just to give them a baseline who is the person who am i talking to well generally our audience is going to be someone that's in 25 to 35 that works out. You would almost call them, I would call them all relatively healthy elite in comparison to very sick people on the strength side of things. I'm going to start saying that about myself. I'm totally elite compared to sick people.

Well, I think that anybody that is doing CrossFit and has been doing crossfit for like just two years is already in the one percent of health maybe not health maybe not health but fitness like they're already committed to and they're yeah they're not they've already made a lot of life conscious life choices that put them in the top one percent of health and then inside of there we we like live in a bubble where we think because everyone else is doing this weird thing. But somebody that's working out four or five days a week generally eats well. I personally don't think that an 80-20 thing is that healthy.

But an 80-20 for the majority of people is a very healthy thing. So just your average Joe that's at the gym who's decently healthy but probably has some things that they're trying to make better. 100%. The first thing that I would do with that person, the bumpers would be 1.8 grams per kilo, which is about 0.75 grams per pound of protein. Then I would be at about 0.4 grams per pound of fat

if we're talking in these macro ranges. I don't like percentages because it doesn't have scales of calories yeah um it can get pretty like 40 of like 4 000 is a lot for protein so you run into problems with that and that is the problem with eating too much protein a lot of guys like because if you eat protein fills you up right so if you eat usually people will eat too much protein at the expense of carbohydrates and fat and that's one of the big things that macros teaches people is like hey you've been eating way too much fucking protein i ate a lot of protein uh and that's not gonna hurt you uh it's just your body can convert that to glucose you can convert that it's just not a very efficient pattern yeah um and so for

an athlete it's better to get to those and once you hit your protein threshold it's probably better to get those nutrients from, because protein doesn't necessarily have a lot of nutrients with it, whereas vegetables do. Fats don't have that. Maybe avocados have some. Maybe if you're eating actual coconuts, that has some too. But the majority of our vitamins and minerals are going to come in the form of vegetables. So I'd be like, hey, here's one of my things.

I want you to get a pound and a half of vegetables if you don't have a problem with fiber in a day. I want you to eat a pound and a half of vegetables, and I want you to eat this amount of protein and this amount of fat. And then if you're not worried about body count, if you're not trying to cut or you're not trying to do any of those things, if you look at the Ponser research, which is very, very cool, it's the energy outside of this equation, which seems to be just as regulated as the energy in. I want you to find the maximum amount of calories that you can consume and stay weight stable.

And so that, I'm going to rev your metabolism. I want to expand the model. I want neat. I want, hey, how many calories can I put in this system? And if I'm an athlete, that's what I'm doing. I'm thinking, hey, you got to sleep eight hours a night. If you don't sleep eight to nine hours a night and you are not eating enough calories- Look, you can't bring up sleep right now. You have to go talk to people. You have an actual talk to do tonight. You just tapped sleep. We're just going to spend another hour and a half talking about it. So let's end on this note from a functional medicine side. If you're an athlete and you are not sleeping eight to nine hours a week and you do not know.

Yeah, eight to nine hours a night. And you are not eating enough calories. You haven't done this thing where you know you're eating enough calories. Stop doing everything else. Stop paying money for all this testing and just do those two things. Those things are so important in such big rocks. Like all this whole adrenal fatigue thing is probably just sleep debt and people not eating enough.

And so let's fix those big rocks before we start worrying about all this other stuff. I like big rocks. Where can people find you? Functional Medicine Costa Rica. But the real way to find me is the Costa Rica Center for Bro Research. For Bro Research. That's a true thing. It's a true thing.

It's legit. We have two underground bro weeks a year, and we just train, and we just live the life. We talk about new stuff. Is that at Flow? There's one coming up in Texas. These are,

they're generally, like these things are sold out pretty quickly um and and so there's one in texas in november and then there's one at flow in uh in probably in the summer and so those are those are kind of my passion projects i don't even make any money on them it's just like hey let's just meet out and just lift and just just eat really good food and then the big kind of hoorah event, which Mike has come to, and I guess you guys might come too, is two weeks in March. We're definitely going.

Yeah, two weeks in March where we have the nutrition week. So we have five days of Mike, me, and Dr. Brian Walsh talking about nutrition and blood chemistry and everything. And all of us, like, you you're gonna have pub med sightings on pretty much every slide like that's just how we operate um and then the next the next five days we have the snc retreat which is the lineup is just stacked we got pat davidson we got a guy that a lot of people don't know about which is like dr seth ober's who's me talking about some really weird shit um like early life trauma and how that impacts everything.

And so this is a conversation that we, as practitioners, we probably need to start acknowledging. And you need to get them help because it is everywhere. And so there's a – who else is in that? Zach Couples. Zach Couples is amazing. He's a PT out of Nevada. Lucy Hendricks is going to be there out of Lexington, kentucky she's a pri kind of to the nines yeah uh just just and then also the people coming i think

that's the biggest thing like yeah you have the speakers who you're eating with who you're just living the life with um and nobody nobody really fangirls out or fanboys out it's just like it's just like it's just fun you just live together and and do the things that we talk about i think that's that's what the con ed what's con ed is lacking and that's that's one of the things that's that's cool about where we're at right now at the point retreat center is they're doing that too is let's not just talk about this stuff let's put a cgm in our in our arm and let's look at it and let's talk about like is this a valuable tool for you um and let's live the life and so i if the if the con ed model can can move to this um this kind

of retreat mindset it's it's going to be cool because you know immersion seems to be like a really you can go and take a weekend course but if you could spend two weeks living the life there's going to be a lot more that sinks in because then you can take those pieces back and you have to re-enter your poor matrix once you've entered into the new one that's healthy for two straight weeks and you start to recognize

in your real life, like, oh, I have to leave this thing. And then you start to recognize the bad pieces when you get back to your normal gig. That's a massive level of awareness in a short period of time. Yeah. Mike Nelson, where can people find you? Cool.

Probably the best place is just the website, www.miketnelson.com, or if they want information on certification, just flexdiet.com, F-L-E-X-D-I-E-T.com. Five days a week. How do they get on your mailing list? They're either at the top of the website. You write a lot. I like it.

Yeah, I usually write daily. Ben does too. But yeah, just go to the website, MikeTNelson.com. There'll be a little banner up at the top, and they'll get in there for free, and we'll send them some cool stuff too. Killer. I think if everybody was living, the reason I created these retreats in Costa Rica is because strength coaches suck at fucking taking vacations.

Like, we suck at it. So it's really a way to trick people. created these retreats in Costa Rica is because strength coaches suck at fucking taking vacations. We suck at it. It's really a way to trick people. We oddly talk about getting people healthy, yet we're a really stressed out group of people. We're always in the gym listening to fucking DMX for 12 straight hours. I'm about to die.

Uh-huh. Why are you stressed out? They don't hear me though. It fucking kills you. I do my best work with Eminem in the background. There's research to support that. I hope so. There's 100% research to support that. That's why I'm so smart.

Deanna Ball in your seltzer water and Eminem on the mic. At least 70%. You never benched 315? That's got to be today. Trust me, it's not because of a lack of M&M. It might be the D-ball in the La Croix. I'll try that in the garage here next hour. The D-ball sounds more effective.

Yeah, no spotter, though. No spotter. Doug Larson. Yeah, yeah. I'm really bummed we're ending this right now. I have so many questions. We could do this for another hour, no problem. Maybe we'll do session two after he's done talking.

We'll get him straight talking. Where do we have to? We'll do it in Costa Rica. The next time we'll have video. I think you just saying that, the brain and the microphones, we're going to figure something out to make that really cool down there. For sure. You can follow me on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson, or go to my new site douglarsonfitness.com

all kinds of cool things on that site that i'm really excited to launch here very soon uh we have barbell shrug every wednesday for me and andrews show plus we have shows every single day on the shrug collective uh then technique quad is my show that i post every every sunday at the moment just teaching people how to lift weights. I'm excited for your site to launch as well. Yeah. You can find me at Anders Varner. And as Doug said, get in the short collective.

Six shows a week. Technique WOD on Sunday. I guess that's seven. Yeah. Look at that. Six plus. Every day. Oh, yeah.

Seven. Every day. That's a lot. And, yeah, over a million downloads a month. Somehow we got there. I love saying it. That's a lot of comments. It's very, very cool. Two is downloads a month. Somehow we got there. I love saying it. That's a lot of comments. It's very, very cool.

Two is better than one. It's way better. It's like twice as better. Yeah. Or a thousand X better. Exactly. At Shrug Collective, make sure you get into iTunes, YouTube, leave a comment. Five-star review.

See you next Wednesday. What a killer episode, team. Can't wait to come back next week. Actually, we're going to be back on Saturday, which is going to be awesome. Get over to our sponsors, thrivemarket.com. Save 25% on all

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