Barbell Shrugged - Physiology Friday: [Immune System] Why Optimal Nutrition Starts with the Immune System w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash and Dan Garner Barbell Shrugged

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged: What is the immune system Why the immune system is responsible for building muscle How gut health impacts the immune system Understanding recovery and its impact on the immune system How to optimize your immune system for performance Connect with our guests: Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram

Shrugged Family this week on Barbell Shrugged. We're back. It's Physiology Friday. Today, Dan Garner, our homie, the main homie, the physiology homie, he's gonna be diving into the immune system, really focusing on a couple big things. When we think about the immune system, what is it?

A lot of people wanna think all about getting sick and having a weak one. It's not all the way true. The way that we really want to understand your immune system breaks into two main factors. These are kind of the two things that we think about with the way true. The way that we really want to understand your immune system breaks into two main factors. These are kind of the two things that we think about with the immune system. Resilience, your body's ability to train harder without breaking down. And then number two, adaptability. How do we build a more robust immune system so that we're able to train harder

and get all of the benefits of that training? So the better our immune system, the more resilient we are, and the more adaptable our physiology is. So we are playing defense and offense all at the same time, which gets you the performance goals that you are looking for. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where you can find out

about all the lab lifestyle and performance testing that we do here at Rapid Health Optimization. And if you want to come and hang out with us, come and do it. You can hang out with me, set up a call. We'll make it happen, get you feeling and performing better than you ever have in your entire life. I know it. I see it all the time. You can access all of that over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larsen, Coach Travis Mash, Dan Garner.

Today on Barbell Shrug, we're digging into the immune system. And if there's anything that's like the hottest topic of all of the people around the world for the last two years, it's your immune system. Like this cool new term that I'd never heard until two years ago, immunocompromised, right? That's a real word now. That's a real word. Everybody knows. Everybody has an opinion on it. Nobody knows what the hell they're talking about. You know who does? Dan Garner. Dan Garner knows everything about the immune system. Dude, I'm super stoked on this because when I got my total physiological health score and you gave me a 68 out of 100, it was hard because then I knew for the first time in my life

that I felt immunocompromised. I felt like before you gave me a 68 and I got a D plus on my health score that someone could have coughed COVID right into my nose. And I would have been like, get at me, come at me, COVID come at me right now. And I would have just brushed it off. No big deal. Next thing I know, 68 out of a hundred, now I'm wearing a mask all around town. Oh my gosh. What is the immune system? Like, tell me, tell me what actually goes on in our immune system. This like giant concept of the immune system. Exactly. So it is giant. This was probably going to be the most complex topic we ever tackle on this podcast. So, you know, we'll,

we'll revisit certain concepts as the episodes continue to go on. But from like a super, you know, bird's eye view perspective, the immune system, first and foremost, 75% of the immune system lies within or around the gastrointestinal tract. So the health of your gut plays an enormous role towards the health of your immunity. And immunity is really, I think, a way in which I've separated myself from everybody else, like in this industry with my approach. And really, you know why, like I'm on a podcast like this today, because a lot of people just simply repeat the same things over and over and over again. But immune system, that is going to govern many factors as far as your fat loss goes, as far as stress management goes, as far as muscle

building goes. And the health of the body depends upon the health of the immune system and the adaptability score that you are going to get in my coaching program. Like Anders received a D plus in his total adaptability. By the way, a D plus is very good for people out there wondering like, I thought he was healthy. He has like a podcast. He talks about health. Yeah. Turns out a d plus is very good for people out there wondering like i thought he was healthy he has like a podcast he talks about health yeah turns out a d plus compared to many other people that have been in our program and seen what can happen d plus is pretty good yeah it's not bad it's all right yeah yeah you gotta be really have the highest gpa of immune system i believe you better you gotta you get better be a real good salesman to sell me on d plus but in any in any case a lot of people probably still are they're thinking like okay immune system

i get it like i don't want to be sick like i don't want to die from covid i don't want to you know get a cold i don get it. Like, I don't want to be sick. Like, I don't want to die from COVID. I don't want to, you know, get a cold. I don't get the flu. Like, I don't want to have a disease, but they don't associate the immune system with training and especially not with training results. Like they don't associate the immune system with putting on muscle mass, with being lean, et cetera. Like what's the connection here? Sure. So we've talked about a lot in podcasts before about the health, the body is going to adapt to the degree that it is healthy. That's something I am 100% certain. I know that that is something that is one of the most important factors towards driving world-class performance. The health of the immune system determines the health of the body. The health of the body

determines the degree of adaptability from your training. And the degree of adaptability from your training is determining the results that you can expect to receive from any pursuit that you're currently undertaking. So when you're looking at what's driving stimulus and adaptation from training, you are looking at the immune system. And to kind of keep in theme with the past several episodes we've done with respect to blood chemistry, your immune system, and I'll put super simply, is basically a function of what the white blood cells are doing in the body. And with the white blood cells, you have five categories. You have neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, and basophils.

Those are five white blood cell categories that you'll see in your blood chemistry. Your neutrophils are the most abundant, and they're like pit bulls. They're not very smart. There's the most abundant immune cell in the body and it will go around and I call it like a pit bull because it'll kill certain things, but then also leave a lot of debris, leave a mess, leave some pro-inflammation. They're not too intelligent. And that's the most abundant one. Your second is the lymphocytes. Now, lymphocytes, they'll be elevated typically in response to, say, viral infections. And we'll probably talk more about lymphocytes as episodes go on because they play a huge role in inflammation. So that's where a lot of that conversation will center around. The monocytes, on the other hand,

these are known as early macrophages. Macrophage just means big phage, big eating. These things actually eat certain cells of our own tissue or bacteria in order to get rid of them. So like when I said a neutrophil will kind of grab an issue in the body and shake it like a freaking dog, and then that's what's going to happen to it. A macrophage is a more intelligent in its approach to where it will literally consume something. So let's say a bacteria is trapped in a cell of your body, a bacteria infection. A macrophage will actually consume that entire cell. It will eat your own body in order to destroy that bacteria. So that's what you're going to see on a blood

chemistry with respect to monocytes. And then the last two are eosinophils and basophils. They are made in much less quantity. Both of them react to allergies, but eosinophils will be up in response to parasitic infections in the body. So like super broad overview scope, you've got your neutrophils, which are the pitfalls, respond a lot to bacteria. Lymphocytes, a little bit smarter, connected to inflammation, but definitely connected as well to viral infections in the body.

And then you have your monocytes, which are the eaters of problems. And then we've got our eosinophils connected to allergies and parasites. And then our basophils really just connected to allergies. So that's like your real overview. And I think that's important to care about because when you look at a basic blood chemistry, now, you know, as everybody here is listening to this, if you've got a really high distribution of neutrophils, well, it's an indication of a bacterial infection because that's what neutrophils will be elevated for. So if somebody has a basic

blood chemistry and you've got a really high neutrophils, well, then it's probably a good idea to order a stool test to see what bacterial infectious state is currently happening. Or if you're seeing a big elevation in lymphocytes, well, then you may have a viral issue currently in the body. If eosinophils are just erratically up at the moment, you could have a parasite problem right now. There's a lot of things that a blood chemistry can tell you that a lot of people aren't looking deeper into because your white blood cell count could be normal. But if you've got a big distribution of neutrophils compared to everything else, we know even though total

white blood cell count is fine, you've got a bacterial issue and we need to be looking into that because if we don't, there's a root cause currently going unaddressed that's impacting your ability to burn fat and build muscle period so as an example like i had i had a couple of different opportunistic bacterial overgrowth but my neutrophils were were very low and just like the both of the the percentage and the absolute amount like why would why would something like that happen then so you can have that and you'll see different aspects in the literature on this. If you have a neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio that's greater than three to one, it's associated with a bacterial infection. Or if you have a neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio of one to one, it's associated. Yeah, it's associated with both bacterial and viral. So it's one in the same. You just fell

into that ratio category that you're currently in. So if that's why I said it from a simplistic perspective, lymphocytes will be up in response to viruses. But the one to one ratio of neutrophils and lymphocytes is representative of both viral and bacterial infection. It's screwed. So it's something that's just, that's got to get looked into. And it plays, and this is kind of, I'll actually dip into stress a little bit in this topic because this kind of follows that exact same pathway. And Doug brought up his own labs, but I think Anders is probably a good example for the immune stress connection.

He's already told you about his score. And this is one of the reasons that played into that little bit lower score, despite his, you know, doing tons of things correctly and coming to me very healthy. There's still just hidden stressors that need to be looked at. So again, very big picture, made a lot more simple. There's two branches to the immune system. You have your Th1 branch and your Th2 branch. Now, Th1 and Th2 don't stand for Tony Hawk 1 and Tony Hawk 2. They stand for T Helper 1 and T Helper 2. Your body will activate the Th1 branch of the system in states of infection

because it is going to activate what I talked about previously, macrophage. It's going to activate macrophages so that macrophages can eat this bacteria problem and get rid of it. That is something that the TH1 branch will stimulate. The Th2 branch is only stimulated in response to extracellular things, so allergies or parasites. It's hyper simple. You could think about Th1 like intracellular bacterial problems and Th2 like extracellular parasites or allergies, things that don't actually fit inside of cells. Now, this is something I've come across in my career a million, million times. I've actually got a cool story about this if we've got time. But your Th1 branch will be stimulated in response to get rid of infections. Now, many people are fascinated

with cortisol. Cortisol actually inhibits the Th1 branch of the immune system and stimulates Th2. Now, something I probably should have mentioned is Th1 and Th2 are like a teeter-totter. If you want to maximally support one, the other is suppressed. If you want to maximally support the other, then the other is suppressed. Cortisol stimulates Th2, but inhibits Th1. This is really important to care about because if you go to a lot of practitioners, just make this huge mistake by not understanding the immune system because the body will suppress cortisol secretion in an infectious state. And it does that to maximize the Th1 branch because cortisol stimulates TH2.

You stimulate TH2, then you suppress TH1. We need a lot of TH1 in order to get rid of the bacterial infectious state. But if you go to the average freaking practitioner who runs a salivary cortisol panel and believes in dumb things like adrenal fatigue, well, then they're just going to look at your labs and say, hey, you've got low cortisol. We have to bring up cortisol. That's what you need to do. It's not you have low cortisol, let's bring it up. It's why is cortisol low to begin with? Because low cortisol is actually a protective mechanism of the body to stimulate Th1 as much as possible in a state of infection. So if I was to raise cortisol in this person with a bacterial infection,

then I would actually delay and prolong their infectious state and therefore delay and prolong the root cause of the problem. And the reason I thought about Anders for this podcast is because he had 7 million coffees a day before he started working with me. And then we got, we got lowered the coffee, I believe by like 50%. Anders, am I right? More than that. More. Okay. So two thirds. Okay. So Anders had 20 ounces a day. Right. And he also had an infectious state. He had a gut infection. So his body was purposely going lower in the overall cortisol perspective in order to support the TH1 branch of the immune system because it was dealing with a gut infection. I am getting rid of his gut infection. So therefore his natural energy is going up because his body doesn't need to suppress

cortisol as much as it used to because he's getting rid of the infection. So if he came to me and that's why he had to overcompensate with more coffee, he was drinking tons of coffee. And if I saw, okay, let's just raise your cortisol to give you more energy, your gut infection would still be there. And you would still be having a ton of coffee every day. But now your gut infections being eliminated, eliminated. So now you need 66% less coffee per day to have even more energy than you used to. So you're both a healthier person, and a more energetic person. And that is what's going to freaking get you better results. So stress. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. No, I was gonna say that everything you just said is 100% exactly what happened in the first 30 days of all of it. My sleeping, the other thing that I started to notice, um, and I'm not sure if it's a hundred

percent related, but the, my sleep got significantly deeper. Um, when like, not only when I woke up, did I need less coffee? But when I actually went to sleep, it was like, no, like when one of my kids would cry and I'd wake up, I would just be like, holy crap, I am coming out of like the cave right now. Like I was just knocked out. I have never slept this deep before. Those were like the two things that I immediately noticed. Like waking up, I did, I could literally go to like 1030 these days where it was like without coffee where before, I mean, both these guys have traveled with me multiple times and it's like,

I am like, I was, it's like a lost person in the Sahara looking for water, like crawling to the coffee machine to get some energy rolling for the day. It happened like 30 days. It was the very first thing that I noticed like those, those two things. I was like, Whoa, they happened at the same time. Just like 30 days. It was the very first thing that I noticed. Like those two things, I was like, whoa, they happened at the same time. Just like, wow, things are changing. For sure.

And that's the thing too. A lot of people think this stuff takes forever. When you have a targeted protocol dealing with someone's true root cause issue, it doesn't take that long. Like my people routinely report they feel better within two weeks. And that's because we're getting to the actual root cause of the problem because Andrus cortisol wasn't low because he had some nonsense adrenal fatigue. And his cortisol was low because his immune system wanted to stimulate a branch

that the cortisol would oppose. So his immune system was intentionally lowering cortisol to support TH1 activity to deal with the bacteria. But he was overcompensating by drinking way too much coffee and also sleeping poorly two things that elevate cortisol which essentially just prolonging and delaying his body's ability to get rid of that bacteria infection if that goes on for too long well then that infection is going to lead to two and then two might lead to three or four and then four and then and that's when people start calling

me like hey you, something's wrong. I don't know what it is. And now that gone and you're sleeping better, which means you're sleeping better is going to improve your immune system and your infectious state gone is going to improve your immune system. So you're going to get better fricking results from any program you do now. You know, athletes at the very end of their training,

when they're about to peak, they, you know, their immune systems are systems are tanked. Do you think that if they would pay more attention to the details, that they could avoid that somewhat? Yeah. And I think that that almost goes in right to what we're saying, right?

Because bacteria or viral infections, these things are managed by our Th1 branch of the immune system. But if you're a bacteria in training camp, I almost said that. If you're an athlete in training camp, then you are making tons of cortisol every single day. And then the sooner and sooner and sooner you get to that event, the more nervousness and anxiety you have. So you're making even more cortisol. So you're stimulating the TH2 branch and completely inhibiting the TH1 branch, which is protecting you from getting sick before the event. So recovery becomes important during training camp. Stress management becomes important and sleep quality becomes important.

All of those things are independently important, but they are maximally important for immunity, which is going to allow you to survive training camp and then go kick ass. It'd be a good time to use some of the breathing techniques, I would imagine. Absolutely. Yes, for sure. One more time. Can we dig into the relationship between coffee or caffeine specifically and cortisol? For sure.

One of the ways in which coffee stimulates your ability to have more alertness and more energy is it creates glucocorticoid secretion from the adrenal glands. So glucocorticoids are just a selection of hormones coming out of the adrenals, cortisol being one of them. Cortisol is a hormone of energy. So we are taking in our caffeine, creating an acute release in cortisol, which then increases energy and alertness. So that's essentially how caffeine is giving us energy. But with an enhancement in cortisol in an infectious state, that's also going to decrease

your Th1 branch and therefore potentially prolong that infection. And this kind of makes sense. Like even just think about this, you guys, when you're really sick, is there a natural decrease in energy? There is a major natural decrease in energy. Why? Because it's suppressing cortisol. It is suppressing cortisol to maximize the correct branch to get you over this. Your body is smarter than we give it credit for. Your body is saying, hey, sit in one freaking spot. Let me maximize immune function. And then once we get rid of this problem, I'll give you some more cortisol again to continue on with your day. And that's when you wake up the next day and,

oh man, I'm feeling better. I've got more energy. Well, that's just because the body has done its job and now you're back to homeostasis. Yeah. When you think about, i don't know how anxiety on like maybe a low level or heightened levels of anxiety um when travis was talking about how athletes are peaking towards the like leading up to ramping up to competition is anxiety anxiety's effect on your physiology or on your immune system it's kind of like a low level every single day ramping up to some event that never actually happens. How does anxiety play into the overall stress side of this? Am I tracking that right? Yeah, because stress in any form is going to take a hit on the immune system, but stress in any form. So if it's psychological, emotional, physical, environmental, these are all going to play

into your body's, what I call your total body stress load. And if we're getting multiple of these in per day, that's multiple insults to the immune system, which is slowly and slowly going to whittle away at that immune system leading up to competition day. But anxiety, I mean, I don't know. I feel like there's a difference between nervousness and anxiety because nervousness is when you're just, something, you care about something a lot, but you're prepared, but you're prepared,

but you care about it so much that you're nervous. Whereas people who have anxiety, normally they have anxiety because they're not prepared. It's a different feeling than nervousness. Nervousness means you care. Anxiety means you're not sure if you're prepared for this thing. And that's why you have this anxiety. So I really think the antidote to anxiety is maximal preparation. That would definitely help. I think there's like some, like there's a study out there that would say that

it's the interpretation is the key. So like, if I get the, everyone is going to get butterflies, you know, every fighter, every athlete. Are you interpreting the butterflies as like excitement or do you interpret it as, oh shit, I'm nervous? So it's like that's a big part of that as well. I totally agree. It's everybody's going to get butterflies. So what separates the good from the great?

As the great are allowed to get those butterflies to fly in formation. Sure, right. Yeah, you use those things, exactly. So if you, say you get in an argument with your brother or something like that, and so you have like this psycho-emotional stress that's happening because you're in conflict with somebody, like physiologically, what's happening there and how does that affect your immune system? Well, your immune system, again, it's good, it's going to that cortisol decrease over time,

and any kind of stress is going to lower your immunity over time. And if you take if a lowered immune system is going to impact fat loss, and it's going to impact muscle gain, like, for example, if you're if you're somebody who's chronically stressed, well, then you're going to have a disrupted immune function, that disrupted immune function can lead to inflammation. And that inflammation problem can definitely lead to problems with muscle building without a doubt. And this is kind of a really cool one too, because there's something called IL-6 or interleukin-6. It sounds fancy. It's not. Inter just means between cells. Leukin refers to leukocytes, which is a white blood cell.

And six is the messenger code. So just between, white blood cell, messenger. And IL-6, and it just shows kind of the complexity behind the immune system, which is why I'm so fascinated and curious with it. IL-6, when secreted from a fat cell, is a pro-inflammatory cytokine. But when secreted from a muscle cell, is an anti-inflammatory myokine. So it has dual roles in inflammation. And you actually see in the literature that chronically high elevated IL-6 is negatively correlated with muscle,

whereas acute raises in IL-6 are positively correlated with muscle. So if you're chronically inflamed, you're muscle degrading, but if you're acutely deflamed, you are anabolic. And it's the difference between IL-6 being secreted from fatty tissue or being secreted from muscle tissue. And mechanistically speaking, IL-6 has been demonstrated to recruit satellite cells and signal muscle repair. So IL-6 has been demonstrated to recruit satellite cells and signal muscle repair. So IL-6 plays a huge role in your ability to adapt from exercise after the muscle damage that stimulated that adaptive response.

So when you ask me questions like, hey, what about anxiety? What about stress? What's happening mechanistically? It can go in many different directions. And it kind of depends upon your goal. Because if you have anxiety every day, but your goal is to gain muscle, well, then IL-6 is going to ruin you at the end of the day. But if you have a goal of fat loss, and you're stressed every single day, well, then that chronic inflammation will make your fat loss

a lot worse. And that chronic inflammation can also lead to leptin resistance, which is going to make your fat loss worse as well. So it can go in a lot of different directions. And leptin is kind of a cool one, too. A lot of people know leptin as a metabolic stimulator. It's like it regulates appetite, and it also determines your basal metabolic rate to a large degree. But what many people don't know is leptin is actually immune stimulating. So after a meal, and this is kind of cool, it kind of ties back to the beginning of the podcast, I'm glad we're talking about this. I said at the beginning of the podcast that about 75% of our immune tissue is in and around the gastrointestinal system. And the reason why

it's there is because the way in which we take in potential pathogens is via food. If it's going to be something allergic, well, then our immune system's got to be right there in the gastrointestinal tract, ready to deal with that allergen right away. So it doesn't kill us eventually. Oh, and also if that food has say a fungus or a bacteria or something on it, the immune system's got to be right there right away to deal with that problem before it enters circulation. That's why there's so much immune tissue in and around our gastrointestinal tract. But leptin is secreted after meals to act

as an appetite suppressant to signal that we don't need to eat much anymore because we have received sufficient food. Leptin also is immune stimulatory, which makes sense because when leptin is increased after a meal to suppress appetite, it also means that food just came in. And if food just came in, then we have to activate the immune system to make sure that there is nothing in that food that's possibly going to create a problem for us. And people who are obese become leptin resistant. And if you become leptin resistant, well, then you make a ton of leptin to try and overcome your resistance. But that leptin results in more immune activity and that more immune activity

in the wrong body will result in more inflammation. And it ends up being a terrible cycle that you've got to get yourself out of if you want to fix your health and body composition. You mentioned obesity and I think that, oh, go ahead, Doug, if you got to follow up there. Yeah, I was gonna say it's purely the fact that you have a lot of body fat that somehow produces leptin resistance. Correct. So leptin is secreted from adipocytes or fat cells, put simply. So leptin secreted from fat cells to try and tell the brain, hey, we've got enough body fat storage. You need to stop eating at this point in time. But as people become more and more obese, and even just the way foods are designed, high palatability with high salt, high sugar, high amount of fats, they override a lot of our

regular appetite controlling mechanisms to where our body keeps making a ton of leptin, but then our brain eventually becomes leptin resistant because of the amount of leptin that's in the body from all of the fat cells. In a similar way to where our muscle cells become insulin resistant when there's way too much insulin around, our brain cells will become leptin resistant when there's way too much leptin around. The problem is that leptin, even though it's being resisted from the brain, from an appetite perspective, it's not being resisted from the immune system. The immune system is going to keep activating that immune activity and in an inflamed, overweight person, that ends up being a problem. So that person at that point,

you know, it's important to really get them on an elimination diet, get them back into a calorie deficit, get them resistance training, manage sleep, manage stress, all the things you know, that you know, you would already do with that person. But mechanistically, they're going to stay in that inflammation immune cycle that will keep them obese until you unlock that and kill it. Another word that's like super buzz word of the last two years is comorbidities. And obviously being obese is very taxed into your body. Also having these gut bugs or bacterial infections or viral infections in your gut. How does this whole thing kind of like, I guess, play together? Like is, is when you think about obesity is just being overweight so bad,

or is it this combination of all of it and your immune system is just operate like stressed out and itself that it can't fight all of the things. Like how challenging is being overweight to your immune system? Incredibly challenging. Because being overweight, you have endocrine imbalances. Your hormones are completely thrown off. When you're overweight,

you're also insulin resistant. You're also highly inflamed. You're also leptin resistant. It's also more painful to do exercise because your joints hurt. You may also have sleep apnea, which impacts your sleep quality. Being overweight is also likely a psychological stressor because you don't really want to live that way or be that way. It is an enormous combination of things. But the way in which I've always coach everybody who comes my way, let alone overweight people, is that a lot of people think you need to

lose weight in order to be healthy. But the reality is that if you get healthy, it will be so much easier to lose weight. So what I of putting it, of like how, like the framework of obesity and that you should just get healthy first. By getting healthy, the weight has to come down. Yeah, dude. And that's, that's, and that's actually kind of how I came across this philosophy. I don't know if I've ever talked about this. It's because I'm a, I'm a functional medicine practitioner.

So there would be people who had come my way with just a migraine or just say bloating or just constipation. And then I would say, do a protocol to fix their migraine. And then they lose 10 pounds. Or I do a protocol to fix their digestion. And then this person lost 15 pounds. And I was kind of like, hey, what? I'm not actually focusing on body composition, but I'm getting body composition results as a byproduct of improving this person's health. So it was like this big aha moment where I was like, man, we need to get

healthy. And then weight loss comes naturally because the body's homeostatic where it wants to be is at that healthy set point. But there is a current dysfunction and a root cause issue going unaddressed that's keeping the body out of the set point. It's keeping it dysfunctional. But when you reinstate function, weight loss happens so much more naturally. And that's when I kind of started combining because like, in my earlier career, and I was more of an amateur, like I had fat loss protocols and muscle building protocols, and they worked, but they didn't work at a world class level until I combined them with health promoting protocols. And when I did health plus the body composition stuff, it was game over that that's when my reputation started getting heard. I feel like that the the idea or like the framework of just feeding your lean body is

something that it's like oversimplified, but it really is like the the easiest one, like, let's just eat really well but feed the skinny person like when i look at somebody that's obese or even if they just have like 30 pounds to lose i'm like well inside you is like a normal skeleton with normal muscle and normal organs and normal all of this stuff but on the outside there's all of this extra shit that you're carrying around and if you just feed the the skinny person inside there, you don't have to worry about the perfect number of calories. Obviously, there's a system to doing it, but just get you healthy. And I guess in a way, how do we know, how do people find out

outside? Is there a way to really start to work on their gut health? Because that seems to be like, you're obese, you definitely have some sort of infection or viral infection going bacterial or viral infection going on in your gut, which is also just hammering your immune system. Is there any way that people can just, they may not be able to go take stool tests and go through this entire protocol that we have? Like, how would somebody start to go, man, maybe I have like, yes, I'm obese. I'm guaranteed to have some sort of infection in my gut. Where do we go to start getting healthy? No, that's, if you think you have a gut infection, then I would recommend referring out. That's really how I would open this. Yeah. Because it's not something you can really do part-time. That's something I say a lot is like lab analysis and proper protocol design

is not something you can do part-time. So I would really recommend just seeking out a specialist at that point, because someone who with, with a lot of theoretical knowledge, but also a proven track record of success, they're going to help you more than anybody else is ever going to help you. And you don't want to you don't want to make the you know, make the wrong move. Like so let's just I'm really glad you asked that. So curcumin is one of the most popular supplements, right? Curcumin is th two stimulatory. So if you currently have a major gut infection, your body's trying to maximize th one, but you're pumping way too much curcumin every single day, well, then you're maximizing TH2, which is ultimately going to limit your ability to maximize TH1. Whereas berberine, for example, is TH1 stimulatory. So berberine in this situation, you're looking at, say, anti-inflammatory compounds, right? Okay,

berberine, curcumin, they're both great options. But I possibly, I've got some signs here that I've got a bacterial infection in my body. So I should probably stimulate Th1 while I mitigate inflammation response. So in that specific client, berberine is the way more tailored and targeted supplement for that person, because it's going to act as an anti antimicrobial through activation of th one, but it in and of itself has anti inflammatory properties. So given curcumin, which is everyone just thinks that you can, there's this list of supplements that people just think you can give anybody at any time for whatever reason, it's just not the case. And that's a great example of, hey, maybe talk to a specialist if you've got an

infection, because you might just screw this thing up. Totally. There's some studies that show that, you know, when people are about to do vigorous exercises, like long distance running, or like MMA fighters, by simply supplementing with like carbohydrates, that it actually lowered cortisol and attenuated the IL-6 and IL-1s. So as simple as just taking carbohydrates, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, of course. Carbohydrates, one of their prime mechanisms is they lower cortisol. That's one of the reasons why they're good post-workout. They're good post-workout chemically and structurally, because structurally they replenish

glycogen, but chemically they lower cortisol. So you're getting animalism and anti-catabolism at the same time. And with that protection of animalism and anti-catabolism, you are going to have a mitigated and managed immune response because you are getting help from an exogenous source that's contributing to the positive outcome of your current immune state. So yes, carbohydrates can absolutely help in that respect. I've seen all the people who've said negative about carbohydrates after post-workout. They were only looking at one, like the old Charles Pollock, he would say you needed that to spike insulin or whatever, but there's more than one reason why you would want that then. Yeah. I mean, it's going to

structurally for glycogen, chemically for a reduction in cortisol, which will also create a production of testosterone because the ratio is going to help because cortisol and testosterone have an antagonistic relationship with one another. Furthermore, one of the biggest things that happen during training is dehydration. And it's in the name itself, carbohydrate. Carbs actually draw, carbs draw both water and electrolytes out of the small intestinal tract and deliver it to the muscle cell faster than if you have water and carbohydrates alone. That's why when you look at something like Pedialyte, it's given in hospitals to save people's lives who have diarrhea that won't stop like some crazy infections. People are given Pedialyte for maximum hydration in minimal time. And it includes sugar because

sugar is more effective at uptaking water and electrolytes than water and electrolytes alone. So carbs for glycogen, for insulin, for hydration, for the testosterone and cortisol ratio. There's a lot of reasons. It continues going on. So it's just a very wise thing to do. And I always look at everything as a cost benefit analysis. And in the case of post-workout carbohydrates, the benefits outweigh the costs in almost all physiologic contexts. So is there a rationale then there for not eating carbs right away early in the morning because it'll depress what is supposed to be a rise in cortisol in the morning?

So this is where it kind of gets strange again. There's a, yeah, the body is fascinating. When you have carbs determines the degree of excitatory mechanisms in the body. So having more carbs at nighttime is actually more suppressive, but carbs in the morning aren't as suppressive. Circadian rhythm nutrition is something that's slowly unfolding, and it seems to be very cool in that carbs in the morning aren't nearly as inhibitory as they are later in the day. So carbs in the morning are still a okay. And we're still learning a lot more about that in the data. Cool. So fruit loops are cool. I can, I can still eat fruit loops in the morning,

right when I get out of bed. Okay. Any other questions here? Cool. You're good. You're like, wow, he didn't hear anything I've been saying on any of these shows. Um, how, so, uh, the kind of the third bullet that we wanted to get to is on building muscle. Uh, and I think we laid out in the very first show that we were talking about how, um, actually building muscle is an immune response, which is something I have been lifting weights for 25 years now and never heard somebody present. How does the immune system really get into being the reason for hypertrophy? Sure. So when you are driving hypertrophy, you're really looking at mechanical tension, metabolic stress, or muscle damage. Those are the three main pathways you

want to hit. Mechanical tension, metabolic stress, or muscle damage. Damage being actually damaging the protein structure, forcing an adaptive response. Metabolic stress being pumping the muscle up, just put very simply. And mechanical tension, stretching the heck out of the muscle under a heavy load, does forces of chemical secretion response, inducing an adaptive response. All three of those are stimulated an adaptive response. All three of those are stimulated by immune function. All three of those create localized inflammation via like the IL-6 pathway that I just talked about, which stimulates the adaptive response. So we have the stimulation of hypertrophy coming from mechanical tension, metabolic stress, or muscular damage.

Those are acute inflammation. When the adaptive response is also mediated by the immune system because the cell signalers and messengers that are telling the body, hey, bring amino acids over here, bring electrolytes over here, bring hydration over here, bring glycogen over here. Those are all immune system signalers as well. So in the gym, we create localized purposeful inflammation so that outside of the gym, we have localized purposeful adaptation. The immune system is what governs both of these things. It is the ultimate determiner on whether

or not you are going to maximally stimulate or inhibit training. And this, this actually, there's a, there's a, there's a relationship between chronic and acute inflammation. Like I talked about a bit with the IL-6, that chronic inflammation is associated with suppressing muscle growth, whereas acute inflammation is associated with driving muscle growth. And it's, it's basically creating a signal in the noise. Because if you have normal levels of inflammation throughout the day, when you're in the gym, your high level of inflammation creates a large spike relative to your normal inflammation level. But if you have high inflammation all day, every day, well, then your spike gets lost in the noise of the other

existing inflammation, and therefore a stimulus is never really seen. So chronically high individuals, it's known as anabolic resistance. It's something that people can check out. Your body is resistant to the anabolic adaptation of exercise because there is simply too much inflammation present that the acute stimulus got lost in the chronic noise. Since chronic inflammation, as well as acute inflammation, and all of the adaptive processes are 100% mediated by the immune system, we need to have a healthy immune system to have a healthy stimulus. And if we have a healthy stimulus, we'll have a healthy adaptive response. And what people don't understand is that this chronic inflammation can have nothing to do with your training. It can come from chronic stress, it can come from

chronic emotional trauma, it can also come from a gut bacterial infection or a gut parasitic infection, it can come from so many different things. And that's why I like to look everywhere with my clients to identify, okay, where is there the hiccup in immune function so I can eliminate it at the root causal level so that this person's stimulus and adaptive processes can function optimally rather than just average. And that's what's going to take them past their current plateau. Dude, I feel like I knew so much about lifting weights and like eating well and now i know nothing like it's it's not even like a um like i feel like i still know a lot about getting people really healthy and getting them great results but like to actually really get it you gotta go do the tests like we've i feel

like we've all along the way met somebody that's in the gym, they're trying to eat really well, or they've been in the gym their whole life and they chronically have low testosterone, or they chronically are getting results, but you just look at them and there's just something wrong. And you're like, what? You kind of do all the pieces, but for some reason, none of it seems to be coming together in a picture of any sort. And it comes down to their immune system.

It's so weird to me. Like I really like never understood that those two things correlated to each other at all. For sure. And I mean, just to kind of add some light onto that. Some people will just say, ah, yeah, it's my genetics. I'm just not a muscle builder. Ah, it's just my genetics. I just hold body fat. Really? When was the last time you did lab work?

And it's almost never. It's like, oh, okay. So why did you count yourself out? Because I'm not counting you out. You need to do your lab work. You need to figure out what's currently holding back your ability to maximally adapt and then take action on it because so very one percent of people probably do regular lab work let alone the the amount of lab work that that i do on my clientele to get the results that i get so it's just those those two questions i think really shed a lot of light stop stop blaming yourself until you get all your lab work done you don't know if it's your genetics or not. Yeah. I feel like gut health too went through this like massive popularity, like, I don't know, three years ago, four years, something like that. Like gut health was like this huge thing. And now we don't hear like anything about it, but it, everything that I'm learning from you and through our clients. And when we go and do, everyone has this

thing. Not everyone, but everyone's got something going on because they've just accumulated it over the years. And then all of a sudden you become like a professional and you have kids and your sleep goes to crap. Like I would love to know, like your, even your labs after having a baby in the last, how old is she now? Like three months, four months, three and a half months. I would love to see the difference between what your labs looked like four months ago. And today to know what happened, like what happens to somebody when they have a kid, like this, the amount of stress that builds up in your life that you just assume is normal life. Like I, sometimes I think about like healthy people or like way back in the day before we

had all these stressors in life it's like you know how much time like humans especially dudes just like spent walking with their bros hunting food like that's like all they did they just walked and tried to find some some poor deer struggling to hang out and then they go eat like that's now we have all this other crap. And it's like, that's, that is so brutal on your body. And like, now that I see labs and now that I see results and I see you break it and diagnose them and like, or not diagnose, but break them down. Like, I feel like I I'm exposed to a world that is like, it's, I know people should lift weights. I know people should eat well. I know you should get your vegetables, but now I'm exposed to a world that is like, I know people should lift weights. I know people should eat well. I know you should get your vegetables. But now I'm looking at it and going, holy crap,

we also have to have like a really big conversation about so much other stuff that's going on that like, yeah, you might have all that right. But check this out. This is like a really important piece of this puzzle that you didn't even know existed. No. And I mean, I got a story. I'll tell a kind of a quick, cool story here. Well, I'll begin it with asking you guys a question. How many people wish they had more energy every day? Yeah, totally. Pretty much everybody, right?

Okay. And what we learned in this podcast is that if we have an infectious state, we will suppress cortisol in order to deal with the infectious state, we will suppress cortisol in order to deal with the infectious state. Cortisol is a hormone of energy. Many people are walking around with asymptomatic infectious states, which is suppressing cortisol and therefore lowering their energy on a day-to-day basis. So if somebody simply has low energy, that could absolutely be a symptom of a gut health disturbance. The symptom is energy. The symptom doesn't have to be loose stools and massive bloating. The symptom can be low energy

because you're currently in an asymptomatic infectious state that the Th1 branch of the immune system is trying to work on to eliminate that bacteria. So this actually, and this is where I'm going to tie into the story. I had a girl come to me once and she had chronically low cortisol levels and very, very low energy. And she had worked with a bunch of people, the same old story. She worked with a bunch of people before me. Everyone wanted to give her a bunch of herbs to stimulate her cortisol and give her a bunch of these energy teas and like nonsense, right? B vitamin, nonsense stuff just to try and get her energy up.

And all I did was give her TH1 supporting compounds. And then she came back 60 days later and her cortisol curve completely regulated herself itself. I gave her zero supplements for adrenal glands and zero supplements for her cortisol. And yet her cortisol curve. And for those who aren't familiar, it's the measurement of cortisol throughout the sleep cycle. It completely corrected itself because cortisol wasn't the problem. Cortisol was being suppressed due to the Th1 branch of the immune system's inability to properly dispose of an infectious state in her body. So I gave her immune supporting protocol specific to the Th1 branch, which then allowed cortisol to come back

up to its natural levels because the infectious state had been eradicated so that's just something i think it's a cool kind of send home story for everybody that i think a lot of people can relate to with low energy and stop just blaming everything on the adrenals and i can actually in a this weekend i had to wake up Saturday morning at like 530 so I could go write a presentation and I drank my old amount of coffee because I got five and a half hours of sleep the night before between waking up and doing it and the very first thing I thought was holy shit this is how I used to live my life three months ago.

Like, it was an absolute disaster. I literally had the exact same amount of coffee that I used to have. It was like I was foggy all day. I kept, like, complaining, which is something I try very hard to never do because I know my wife has like, like real being up in the middle of the night all the time with a with a seven month old like I try not to. I'm like, I just feel like dog shit today. And all I could think was this is how I operated for like multiple years. Every single day just felt like this. And it's a massive difference. Once you get that stuff, I haven't even redone the labs, but I know I can tell the difference. Day one was Saturday. It's like, this is how you used to live

today is how you normally live. You don't need the caffeine. Your body just like handles it for you. You don't need all the extra crap. Body just handles it for you. Right? Yeah, you eliminate problems at the root causal level and allow physiology to take it from there. Physiology knows what to do. You just have to get rid of certain dysfunctions that are offsetting its normal function. And once you get rid of that physiology, you'll take the ball from there. Biology is incredibly intelligent and we just got to go there, but there are certain dysfunctions because we add all kinds of crap on top of our life in the form of stress, bad diets or traveling and getting an infection, all those kinds of things. So we got to look under the hood, just like you wait in your

car once a year, you got to look under the hood of the vehicle, your body once a year and make sure there's no dysfunctions. And then once you get rid of those dysfunctions, you're back to normal function. And I think it's cool that that in this podcast, you were actually a perfect case study of this, Anders, of impacting immunity and how that can have a huge impact on your energy. When people think about energy, they want to take nootropics. They want to have coffee. They want pre-workouts. Some people will all like, hey, maybe if I get a great sleep. You'll hear a lot of these things like stimulants, like obviously, you know, take them or leave them. But people will

say like good things about like sleep and stress management. And these will definitely help. But how many people have you talked to who have referred the immune system with respect to restoring daily energy? And yet, and yet it's of primary importance. And I think, I think a lot of people stay away from the immune system and I don't blame them. It's ridiculously, ridiculously complex. And it's, it's an immune system, right? Like if I wanted to cut out your gastrointestinal system, I could, if I wanted to cut out your nervous system, I'd just be cutting out your brain, your spine and the periphery. And we would get it out there. The thyroid system, all those things that can be cut out. You can't cut out the immune system. It's on every single cell of the body

working 24 seven. So if you wanted to remove one's immune system, you can't. So to gain knowledge on it becomes very complex because you're simply learning about the chemical signalers that every organ is secreting. And if it's doing something for one organ at one time, it might be doing something for another organ at a different time with opposing. You have to, you're basically researching chemical signalers and messengers and their relationships from every organ. So it becomes extremely complicated. But then once, once you got it, it's like, it's like the light came down from the heavens and you're like, wait, this is going to be so helpful in helping people.

And it is. I feel like if people understood this too, we could eliminate so many of these ridiculous thoughts about strength training. When I think about it, it's like, am I overtraining? And you go no the problem is your freaking immune system is so whacked out you're fighting bacterial infections you sleep like shit you're chugging coffee you actually are like eating in a caloric deficit so there's zero energy left over and you think doing an extra set of back squats is the problem? You really think that like all those lateral raises you threw in at the end are really the problem?

No, dude. Freaking go to sleep. Figure out how to be healthy. Like get some lab work done so you can just – you can actually like move the ball forward in your overall health. And then you won't have to worry about like, oh, I did 25 working sets today and science says 20 is optimal. So am I over training? No, you're not. You're not at all. You're not even close. It's like a mute point. There's no reason to even talk about it because there's so many other things that people should be worried about so far before over training. I can't even

believe that I thought I ever got there. The problem was, is I wasn't sleeping for 10 or six years while owning a gym and trying to compete in CrossFit and trying to go do all the stuff. It's like, why don't you just get healthy first? And a lot of other problems on reaching your physical potential become a lot easier. For sure. Yeah. I mean, Travis, you've probably come across a million people whose stimulus is just fine. It's just their adaptation is what they need the most work on.

Right. Yeah. I had a girl Saturday and she was, she's beating herself into the ground and her face was dripping. And she's like, you know, what should I do? Should I go do a lot more? I'm like, I was like, how does that make any sense? What you just said? You're a wreck. You can't keep your eyes open. You ever ask me what extra should you do to get you out of this? No logic whatsoever. Go to bed. Get out of here. Eat. Do something, but don't do do more your homeostasis is wrecked

yeah yeah we're all on this one side that's it yeah anyway dan garner tell the people where can they find you you can find me at dan garner nutrition on instagram there he is you actually really should go do that not only does he crush it on this show but he crushes it on the instagram too the new study you put up i'm gonna we're gonna have like a dan garner uh science like most exciting science study that he's read of the day uh the one on negativity if you have not read that negativity is killing you like literally it's killing you you got to go over to dan garner's dan garner nutrition and learn all the uh all the new studies that are super cool coming out yeah travis mash mashley.com you can go to instagram mashley performance or twitter where i really prefer at mashley

if you want to get slaughtered by Travis mash. Dude, you got a new project coming out too. We're going to talk about a kid weightlifting. I want to hear about all this too. It's been going well. Yeah. I love it. Doug Larson. I'm on Instagram.

Doug Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are barbell shrug to barbell underscore shrug. Get over to diesel dad, mentorship.com where all the busy dads are getting strong, lean and athletic, and make sure you get to your local Walmart, 2,200 stores nationwide. If you don't find my, my face on a box in the performance nutrition section next to the pharmacy,

well, you're in the whack Walmart. You need to go to the super cool Walmart next door because we're in over half of them nationwide friends. We'll see you guys next week.