Barbell Shrugged - Physiology Friday: Metabolic Flexibility and Micronutrients w/ Dr. Mike T Nelson

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Dr. Mike T. Nelson has spent 18 years of his life learning how the human body works, specifically focusing on how to properly condition it to burn fat and become stronger, more flexible, and healthier. He’s has a PhD in Exercise Physiology, a BA in Natural Science, and an MS in Biomechanics. He’s an adjunct professor and a member of the American College of Sports Medicine. Dr. Nelson has been called in to share his techniques with top government agencies. The techniques he’s developed, and the results he gets for his clients have been featured in international magazines, in scientific publications, and on websites across the globe. In this episode, we talk about heart rate variability, metabolic flexibility, mastering micronutrients, holistic approaches to vitamins and minerals, supplementation needs for health and performance, and more. Enjoy!

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug Physiology Friday, we're back! And this Friday is the very first time I ever met Dr. Michael T. Nelson. For some of you fitness freaks out there that have been in this game for a long time, you may remember this awesome event that happened in Austin called Paleo FX. And I was scheduled to meet and interview Dr. Michael T. Nelson. And my whole meathead career, I had never met somebody like him. I just could not believe that one single person had this much information in their brain on micronutrients from the optimal amounts you should be having in a day, where to get them, how to supplement them,

the best supplements for them. And this interview literally changed my mind, not changed my mind, but maybe changed my life actually on understanding the depth that some people go into understanding the science behind nutrition, strength, conditioning, and supplementation. And now all these years later, so this show happened in 2018 and we're eight years later, which is also really crazy

because that means this podcast has been a part of my life forever, which I super appreciate all of you guys for paying attention and listening to us. It's so awesome. But the depths that one person can go to, and now we run a program that not only incorporates all of this,

but we're taking this deep of a dive into every single aspect of your health and performance, which is like the coolest thing in the world. And if you wanna go check all that out, make sure you get over to aratelab.com, A-R-A-T-E-L-A-B.com. That is the signature program inside Rapid Health Optimization.

And you can go learn more about the testing, analysis, performance, and how we go coach you through achieving optimal health and performance. And you can access all of that over at rtalab.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Marvel Shrugged. I'm Anders Warner. That's Doug Larson, Adam von Rothfelder in the house. We're at Paleo FX in Austin, Texas. I am super excited. We're going to go deep here.

We've got some micronutrients to talk about. And everyone talks about macros. It's kind of like the buy-in, the entry level, the really high-level thing. But once you get into the micros, all of a sudden it gets really quiet. A lot of birds chirping in that space. So I'm very interested to dig into that. Yeah, just to eat well and work out. You don't have to know all the details about all the science behind all the micronutrients and what they're for and how they work and what quantities you need if you eat real healthy food most of the time you're getting a lot

of the things that you need but we've never had in my memory any expert that like really could dig super deep on vitamins minerals phytochemicals etc so uh that's something i would like to do today is really dig deep on on micronutrients as opposed to macro. Yeah. And onto that, I think diving into the difference between macronutrients and micronutrients and how they're slightly dependent on each other or if they are or if they aren't. Kick things off a little bit. Where does this journey begin for you yeah so the short version is i just started exercising like most people in college to

look a little better feel better i remember the first time i took a college weight training class the coach came in and i was all excited so i'm like yes i'm gonna learn about weight training i weighed all of the 156 pounds at that time so as a rake-shaped eel looking person and the coach comes in he looks at all the class and he goes hey all right some of you in here need to lose weight he looks at me and points he goes whoa and some of you need to gain like a lot of weight i was actually always jealous of those people. Like, you can literally eat anything always and get stronger. This is cool. Yeah, and then he promptly disappeared and I learned nothing in the class

because he just took enrollment and had his TA take enrollment after that. So I started studying physiology and then I went on and did a Bachelor of Arts and then did actually a Master's in Mechanical Engineering. So I did a bunch of work in biomechanics. And then I got done, worked in the medical device industry for a while, but I always kept going to exercise physiology conferences for fun. And then I ended up going back and doing a PhD in exercise physiology. And the topic that I was looking at was some stuff on heart rate variability, and then metabolic flexibility. So how well does your body use fat? How well does your body use carbohydrates?

And then within that context, looking at also the micronutrients, kind of how do they all kind of support that whole process in there? You have no idea how stoked I am to talk to you, Justin. Sweet. And I'm like, that was like 12 things that I talk to people about. And then the conversation is as shallow as it can get because i don't have that depth that you have um just getting into a couple of things the like the the metabolic side of things yeah where does that conversation start

with you and maybe add a little bit of the context to where where we can where we can yeah so so the first question is that people come up and they'll mention paleo diet or keto diets are popular now or whatever diet. We have walking around here. Yeah. And they'll ask you, what do you think of X diet? And my first question is always, well, what, what is your goal? Like, what are you trying to do? You know, if you're trying to say, I want to do a ketogenic diet, but then you're telling me you want to compete at CrossFit regionals, those aren't really that compatible. But if you said, well, I'm doing a ketogenic diet, I don't really like exercise that much. I'll do whatever approach you want. I just want to look and feel better. Maybe that's an option then. So I think it also is very specific to what is your

goal and what you're trying to do, and then match the sort of dietary approach to fit that, not vice versa. So a lot of people come in and they're like, I want to do and then match the sort of dietary approach to fit that not vice versa so a lot of people come in and they're like i want to do ketogenic diet and then that doesn't match with the goal that they're trying to accomplish so i like doing it the other way what is your goal you're trying to do and then we'll figure out what there's a whole bunch of different approaches what approach is going to be best for you from both the physiology side what's going to match that uh components and bioenergetics, things like that. And then also what about the psychology side?

There's some stuff that you're probably going to do that's easy for you. And other stuff is going to be very hard for you to do. So for example, if you're using a ketogenic diet and you don't like fat, that's not going to line up so well, right? So making sure that those all pieces fit together. Awesome. You can get people to tell you that they don't like fat. fat now they think it's bad for them or they have like this like you know 1980s like high carb low fat like mentality still like locked in their head and

they think that if they eat fats could make them fat but they're just like oh fat is gross like i just don't like to eat fat i've had a couple people say that it's usually more carbohydrates so people are they like, but they're just super afraid of eating them. Now I think the pendulum is kind of swings back and forth, right? So we went through the 80s and the low fat craze and that type of thing. And now we're kind of going really far with super high fat, low carbohydrate again. But it's amazing to me, to your point, I'll tell someone, I'm like, okay, your fat, let's say, is 60 grams per day. I'm like, you can easily bump that up to 80.

Would that make your life easier? Is there a food you're not eating now that you want to eat if we give you just 20 more grams of fat, which isn't that much? And most of the time, people are like, I had a client the other day. She's like, oh, my God, I can eat cashew butter then. I'm like, great, have cashew butter. She's like, I can? I'm like great have cashew butter it's like i can i'm like yes i love you that's awesome that was like the greatest thing in the world so that's awesome even going back a little bit to i you said you had a job in medical device yeah and we're going to these conferences just for fun that's a weird way to spend your fun time right

oh it's bizarre as hell. I think it's interesting. I think that I have a graduate degree, whatever it is, have my MBA. Maybe I'm in business, but the majority of what I do for a profession has nothing to do with that. It's the thing that I was learning on the side. What was it that drew you to this field? Why are you spending your weekends

at these comps are not the most exciting thing for everyone oh no and the the weird part is i was like the very first conference i went to was in arizona and i sit down i get there you know bright and early and there's two people i'm sitting next to and i'm like hey you know did you see the study on this this or that and they look at me and and they're like, no. And then they look away, no. And I'm like, oh, but I'm sure you saw the study on this or that. And they're like, no. And then they look over at me, and they go, well, who are you? What are you doing here?

And I'm like, you guys are trainers, right? They're like, yeah. I'm like, you don't read research? They're like, no, we don't read research. That's why we're here at this conference. They're like, what are you doing here? I here i said oh this is just fun for me and they're like the hell's wrong with you um but if i think back on it i think a lot of it was i was actually born at the atrial septal defect so your heart's got four chambers in the top chamber the atrium uh before you're

born the atrium and the ventricle have holes in them so when your heart contracts it's kind of flowing around the circuit because you're obviously not breathing air as soon as you're born the atrium and the ventricle have holes in them so when your heart contracts it's kind of flowing around the circuit because you're obviously not breathing air as soon as you're born those two holes close up and in my case the atrial the top chamber hole never closed so the heart was beating but the oxygenated and deoxygenated blood are kind of remixing so i went into just massive heart failure so when was four, my heart was the size of someone who was 18 because the heart is so overworked. So at that time, I had an open heart surgery in 1978. They went back in and they surgically fixed it. And what was interesting is the guy that I saw was actually a pediatric cardiologist,

which is very rare. And there was only three centers around that time that were operating on kids that were that young. So it happens that Children's University of Minnesota was one of them. That's where I was from. So I think that at an early age, kind of, you know, you look back on it and you're like, oh, no wonder I went into physiology. I worked for a med tech company that did cardiovascular products for about 10 years. And there's learning more about physiology. I just thought, wow, this is just so fascinating. And from the the engineering side looking from a design aspect almost everything in physiology

is designed like as perfectly as it can be at least to our understanding we may not understand all of that yet but i was fascinated by that from a design standpoint of okay how does it do this what are the efficiencies what are kind of the principles that everything operates on and it's just never ending you know like even now there's just tons of research that comes out every day and so i find just how everything fits together is just to be very fascinating field i love that and going back into the academic setting where you set on the the two pieces you talked about as a metabolic remind me the other one oh metabolic flexibility and hrv yeah no so i um so i did a master's and i i could do math but it was definitely not my strong suit like if you said okay sit down do some math problems for fun i

would do everything possible not to do them and i was kind of an idiot because i didn't realize that when you do a master's there's two more advanced math classes you have to take and they're actually beyond calculus four but I'm like there's stuff that even exists there I didn't even know that was possible I just thought it just ends and that's the field so when I did a PhD work actually in biomedical engineering for five years and then I literally completed almost all the classwork for it and then I dropped out because I said okay do I want to do this the rest of my life no I'm doing all my stuff my fun and physiology so I go to the physiology department that fall and of course everything starts over again none of your classes transfer took me seven years to finish that the first day I sit down in

the meeting the advisor comes in he goes hey we got two new projects and they both involve math one's on heart rate variability and one's on metabolic flexibility and he looks around the table and he points to me sitting on the end he's like hey you math boy what i don't know whatever the hell your name is these are your projects now so i got nominated because they had some math in it and if you go through exercise physiology you don't really take a lot of math per se especially you know non-linear type forms of math so i just got basically tossed those projects and then fast forward seven years after that what do you look backwards it all makes sense yeah it's funny now i look back and it's like oh wow that all the stuff i did before put me in a position where those actually worked out.

And so that was almost 11 years ago now. And so now heart rate variability, metabolic flexibility, looking at metabolism, and using different types of math to get more data out of it is becoming kind of more popular as you're getting more crossing over a field. Why were these two, the heart rate variability and the metabolic flexibility, why were those two together for you? Yeah. Presented to you as the same project.

So the overarching theme of my thesis was fine scale variability across physiologic systems, which doesn't make any sense to anyone and usually gives people a good reason to go take a nap for a while. But if we take the average of something, so if you come in and we take your heart rate, we can get an average and say, okay, your resting heart rate average is 55, right? Just making up a number. And now if we apply a variability analysis to that, so each one of those beats, we look at how different in millisecond they are from the next one. We can now say, okay, here's the status of your autonomic nervous system. Here's how much is parasympathetic, you know, rest and digest. Here's how much is parasympathetic you know rest and digest here's how much is sympathetic more of the stimulation side like the gas pedal of your car yeah just by taking that exact same data and not doing an average but running a variability analysis so different type of math the thought process so if it's 60 beats a minute you would

think that would be a beat every second right but it's some are 0.9, some are 1.1. Right. And the more variability you have, that's a good thing? Yeah, the more fine scale variability you have, the better. So that would say at rest, you're more parasympathetic, the rest and digest dominant. Yep. And that's just by doing a variability or different type of math. So what I was trying to figure out was, okay, does the same thing apply to other systems?

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

using every time you exhale and the machine does the analysis. And what you find... Bring one of those. We'll be on that right now. You got this interview going. Two tubes, stay in your mouth for an hour.

And what you find is two things. You get bored after you do hundreds of these tests you stand there and you know the person's exercising low level and you kind of watch the numbers because you want to make sure it's running correct and even at steady state exercise you'll see this rer will just kind of oscillate and move around steady state so they're on a treadmill running we're doing the exact same thing right so they're what is that test um so they're on a metabolic test, right?

So if you go in, let's say you do a max of EO2 test. The warm-up portion, and we just have you do 100 watts, right? I'm just making up numbers, right, for people to understand. And you just do that, let's say, for five minutes. Once you're warmed up, even then, the RER kind of moves around a little bit. And all the textbooks would say this shouldn't happen, right? You're doing steady-state exercise. We're not putting more work on your system.

It should be exactly the same way. So by the RER changing, basically what you're saying is like temporarily, you know, over the course of seconds, you're burning more fat right now and then more carbs right now and then more fat right now. Yes. You're not just consistently burning like an even ratio of like 40% and 60 fat it's like why would it be bouncing around it shouldn't quote unquote happen but it does right yep just like we were measuring your heart rate at rest it's moving around a little bit so we were thinking that this fine scale variability maybe that's a marker for metabolic flexibility so the health of your metabolic system because we wanted to get to was a non-invasive

test that any gym or hospital who had a metabolic heart could run on people to determine their metabolic health that was kind of the goal what is the what is the rate i mean is it an intense rate i mean like how is the rate of like the physical exercise to elicit the the breathing like what what rate are you doing it at? Yeah. So the study that I ran, we did, they come in, they do a max exercise test because you're taking multiple people. We wanted, okay, what can you do on max?

And then we would do percentages of that. So that way if you have people of different levels coming into your lab, you're kind of all making them sort of equivalent to themselves, right? So you're not giving them the same number. You're kind of taking making them sort of equivalent to themselves right so you're not giving them the same number you're kind of taking them relative to themselves and we did this at a low level of exercise it's only around 20 to 30 percent of their vo2 max because as you get up to high levels of exercise intensity pretty much everyone uses carbohydrates pretty well it's the low end how well they're using fat that has this massive variation. So the flip side of that is you had one person come into the lab,

they're just on the treadmill, they're doing their warmup. I'm looking at their little number and it's like 0.95, 0.99, which is saying they're using almost all carbohydrates, even though they're just barely walking fasted on a treadmill. And I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, this doesn't make any sense. And I'm like, oh, you forgot to fast this morning, right? You had two bagels on the way over or something. I'm like, no, no, I didn't. So I said, okay, come back in a week.

We'll redo your test. There's something wrong with the machine. It comes back at the end of the week later, exact same thing. So what you find is that some people at low levels of exercise are using more carbohydrates than they should. So that was like the main difference, one thing that we found. And then the other part to answer your question is trying to baseline people into that lower percentage, because that's where you should be using more fat. And that's where that variability is more likely to be present, right?

So if you use a heart rate analysis, again again if you go on to max exercise your variability disappears in your heart rate and you become very sympathetic but at rest we see a lot more variability so we're thinking okay take that same thing into the metabolic area lower levels of exercise is probably where we have this more fine scale variability when you get close to a max that probably goes away so that's why we did very low percentages. And the last reason was we wanted pretty much everyone to be able to do the test, right? There's some populations, especially disease population, where you can't have them come in and do a max test, but you can have them do a very, very sub-max test. And so it's a little bit more applicable to more populations, especially in a disease model. you when you said there was like a variable within

her diet i'm assuming it was a her i couldn't remember yes but so uh and it was too much carbohydrates that she was taking in uh presently so was the was was the tests were all their nutrition like subject i mean like were they in like a certain place that they were given a diet that kind of changed those things? So we just did it fasted. Got it. In her case. So the previous diet of, like, two days before or a day before.

Just overnight fasted. But were you guys looking at that effect, like what they ate before? We didn't look at any dietary effects. Okay. And in her case, it was fasted, so we'd expect that she'd be better at using fat. But it appeared like she had taken in a bunch of carbohydrates, which actually she didn't. But you are correct that their baseline dietary will kind of change some of their numbers when they come in. We didn't do that analysis in

the study that I ran. We just did it as an overnight fasted, just to try to compare them, try to be equal and equal. But you're correct. You could have done some type of diet intervention and compared different groups and that type of thing. On the other side of that, if someone is trying to become fat adapted, is this a good way to test to see if that's actually the case where you put them on a treadmill and slowly increase the speed on the treadmill and then watch how slowly or how quickly that that rr goes from you know kind of all fat to all carbs i want to say 0.6 if i remember correctly to like to one yep yep so you have what's called the crossover point so the crossover point is rr 0.85 so that's where you're burning 50 fat and 50 carbohydrates so as you do a longer warm-up so what i tell people if

they do a metabolic test you can get out the same question you're asking do a longer warm-up. So what I tell people if they do a metabolic test, you can get at the same question you're asking. Do a longer warm-up, give yourself more time, do it fasted, and then work up to the higher level intensities. And you'll get this nice map of how your body is switching over fuel sources. And in some athletes I've seen, they're completely missing that low end. Like their ability to use fat is horrible uh some athletes i've seen they don't even have a crossover point it literally goes away they're just so tuned at using carbohydrates um sometimes you see the opposite now like if you have someone who's like on a ketogenic type diet you'll see that their ability to use fat is pretty high but as they go up to start using carbohydrates it starts falling off pretty fast so is there like an ideal point in which we want to be fat and then burning carbohydrates?

Yeah. And is that standard across all of us or is each person independent on how fat adapted they are or where they need to kick in their easy carbohydrate fuel burning sources? Yeah. So if you look at the research, right? So I did one study, Helge did one study, Godecki did one study, and the ability of your body to use fat at rest varies from about 30 to 90% difference. So I mean, if we grabbed a whole bunch of people in here, had them do fasted, hooked them up in the lab, what you would see is that their ability to use

fat at a low level exercise intensity massively different some people like you said super well using fat other people not so much and in terms of where you would want them to be if they're in more like let's say uh intermediate strength and power like crossfit or strongman medleys or something you want them to be able to use carbs the highest degree to fuel that exercise intensity but then during recovery you want them to still be able to use fat. And for some lower level, moderate stuff, you want them to use fat also. So the perfect profile, I think, has been worked out entirely. But what I like to see is people have a super high ability to use fat. And then I actually want to see a pretty hard transition to using carbohydrates. So I want to bump their FAD max up as high as possible

without compromising their ability to use carbohydrates on the high end. Awesome. So when, so do you do any work kind of thinking about kind of like timed interval trainings? I assume that this test was on some sort of more cardio basis, 20 minute VO2 max test you mentioned earlier. Yeah, it 20 minute vo2 max test you mentioned earlier yeah it's a vo2 max so is the if we were to do some type of interval training in which we are able to um you know three minute work period two minute rest period are you able to track that and see and keep that for each person in that fat adapted zone or are you able to kind of track just where you're at and what fuels you're burning per work interval

or independently for each person while they're burning or using that fuel source? You can. The downside is you'll need a piece of equipment that's 40 to 60 grand. Eh, no big deal.

And then be able to live on it a second. You got that? Yeah. Oh, right there. Yes, right there. And then you've got a big tube and stuff in your mouth. So logistics aside of running the test, in theory you could do that and see where they're at acutely.

The way to get at it more in the real world is to look at exercise performance. Gotcha. So if you come in and say, okay, we're going to do a max Wingate test. We're going to put you on a bike, super high wattage or a rower or whatever 30 seconds all out when we look at your performance and then you go away and do let's say ketogenic diet for four weeks you repeat that again and your power is down training aside yeah you probably need more carbohydrates in order to fuel that so performance can kind of get you a surrogate model. When you were testing the heart rate variability and the metabolic variability, did you see them follow each other? Were they mirroring each other in their variability or

were they mutually exclusive of each other and seeing different results based on each? Yeah, it's a good question. So I've done like with my own online clients, HRV measurements daily for about five years now. And I haven't seen a study that's compared them together. So we did some work with an energy drink. So I did measure HRV, we did performance tests and things like that. In general, if HRV gets better, and they become more healthy, I believe they have a better capacity to kind of switch fuel sources because it's a marker of metabolic health indirectly, especially on the autonomic system. There you go.

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

their other things the same i think i use hrv as a way to look at how well they're recovering from whatever's going on in their life and for some people that may be may be more carbohydrates. Some people, it may be more protein, maybe more sleep, other things like that. So if we get that where their HRV is good, then I think they have a much higher potential to do more training, to be able to recover faster and things of those natures. So I use HRV as more of a marker for recovery.

It's not quite as indicative of exact fuel sources. I wish that it was, but it just doesn't seem to map as directly one-on-one. Because what I really wanted was a non-invasive field measure that would tell me exactly where they're at. So you could come in the lab without a 60 grand piece of equipment. I could give you a really good idea of what fuels you're using and how that's working. There's two other surrogate ways you can get to it. We can give you a crap ton of carbohydrates and see how you feel. We can then fast you for a period of time and see how you perform, right? So fasting, very high use of fat, doesn't inhibit carbohydrate use either.

And then the last way that I just started playing around with is you can put a it's called a moxie device you can put it on a muscle and it'll tell you venous oxygen basically delivery and removal so it'll tell you directly via how well you're taking away oxygen and that's a pretty good marker for those right because if you get into fuel sources you can see at a muscular level really what's going on so if someone wants to try some of this on their own or is there like a convenient mobile app that you can use to test hrv that'll like like give you a readout and then tell you what the numbers mean or anything like that yeah so the couple that i use the main one i've used for a long time is called i fleet instead of athlete it's just an i and they've got, I think it's a iFleet Pro

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

When I was fighting right at the end of my career, HRV started, I started hearing whispers of it. Yeah, Joel Jameson. Yeah, and I would do the heart rate monitor, wake up in the morning, see it, and I'm like, I'm not training today. It was that clear. It was like, yeah, 100, like I'm not good. So I'm excited to dive deeper into the idea

going on to the website and being able to access it to your services. How does somebody begin to work with you? Yeah, so the best part is just go to the website. This is MikeTNelson.com. I work with a handful of people online and then online I do all their nutrition, their training, their lifestyle. Most of it's monitored using heart rate variability, or you can use fitness watches or rings to look at their, their sleep and all the other things too. So it's a pretty much kind of a whole lifestyle picture. I ended up doing that because people would come in and like, Oh dude, I just need nutrition help. When you look at the training and go,

it's a disaster, you know, or vice versa. Oh, this is good. And that's bad. Or then I found, Oh, their lifestyle is horrible. Right? Training nutrition is good. They're sleeping five hours a night, you know, drinking eight cups of coffee a day and can't figure out what's going on. So that's why I kind of do like the whole encompassing with it and warm-ups and everything else too so you were talking about heart rate variability but what you just mentioned was just you were basically checking your heart rate like how do it beats per minute in the morning is that what you're mentioning you would yeah i mean so there was a there was a program that basically uh i forgot who it was at the time, but basically you would wear a heart strap at night. You'd wake up and based on your heart rate over like the course of 30 seconds upon like waking up or like a minute, it was like a certain time period.

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

now and you're able to kind of get them into some more like cyclical work that's a little bit slower um yeah it was like heart rate variability training. It was like... Yeah, you have to base the training off of that. What's going on with their nervous system for that? Right, yeah. In fighting, what did you guys do for that? I mean, basically, I would go in, I would do like a light roll

and just kind of keep my nervous system relaxed and do like a breathing session. They would have me like shadow box for 15 minutes just to kind of create natural breathing and just moving very 10% just to kind of get the motor going, but not peak it out at any point. And the next day I would, I would be way back in the game and I would feel that, like I would feel the difference. Yeah. You know, are the majority of your clients, are you coming from more the uh i guess you could say a clinical side with obesity very unhealthy people and building them

back or is this high level athlete performance arena um clients that you're working with yeah it's definitely more on the performance side so it's usually people i'd say that are in the intermediate to kind of advanced area. I don't work with a lot of super advanced or elite people. I have a little bit in the past and depending on the athlete, it can go well. Depending on the other athletes, not so much. Yeah. And it also depends on a lot of times with those people, in my opinion, there's too many cooks in the kitchen.

So I spend more time dealing with this person and their other coach and this person and that person. So now I just do those kind of as one-off consults. But if you want to talk to me, we'll set up some, I'll tell you whatever I think you should do. You go figure out if you want to do it or not. It's going to take your life a lot. Yeah. But the other ones are more, I'd say advanced intermediate. And then we just work with them from month to month basis. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garner and I have learned over more than two decades of working

with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. RTA is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre and post pictures. Arte is something completely different. Arte is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover

your unique molecular signature, find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person, but rather a full team of elite professionals, each with their own special expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. Arate isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best physically and mentally when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit aretelab.com. That's A-R-E-T-E lab.com. Now, back to the show. Welcome back to More About Strong. We are here with Mike Nelson at Paleo FX. We're on a stage. We're deep here. This is awesome i've spent the first break talking about heart

rate variability metabolic variability getting a little deep on that but that's kind of led into e.g. size a little a very deep understanding of nutrition and not just the macro side which so many people focus on but the micro uh nutrition or micronutrient piece. And first off, I want to just start with kind of your deep dive on the two on a very high level. And then kind of where does the macro side of it play in? And then what are people missing on the micro side that may be jacking the whole thing up? Yeah, so just a quick differentiation. So the reason there's's macro and micro it just has to do with the amount right so when we talk about micronutrients we're talking about milligrams or sometimes micrograms when we talk about macronutrients or macros it's almost always in grams so it's grams

of protein fat carbohydrates all right so those are going to be the main three so when i work with someone i usually look at their macronutrients first. I usually look at protein probably first. It seems like some athletes are either way low on protein or they're just astronomically high. If you ever are on a plane coming back

from the Arnold, don't. It's just a very horrible smelling the whole time. People with poor digestions eating ordinary fruit. I got full searched going through the airport check right behind me. As I was walking by, I'm like, you can't frisk the Hulk. So usually the question then, like one of my talks here is uh how much protein do you need real simply probably about 0.7 grams per pound of body weight now that's on the lower end so

if you're 200 pound person that's only about 140 grams and that's from some chronic studies that were done feeding people protein and then cutting their calories literally by 40 to 60 percent overnight and what they saw is in that higher protein group of 0.7 compared to 0.35 they didn't lose any lean mass so if we put you on severely low calories and we get rid of your protein or we drop it very low your body is going to then start losing the muscle tissue. Yeah. Yeah. Alice Fidgety says, get some booze. Mm-hmm.

You mentioned the red pigment a second ago. That makes me think of red pigments and phytonutrients I think are likeable. Yeah, and Brad's the man I had for hypertrophy research and everything, too. And there was just, Brad was an author on the study, too, with Alan Oregon, a whole bunch of people from Stu Phillips, Laz, and I think it was the primary author, where they did exactly that. They did a huge meta-analysis of a whole bunch of training studies,

and they found pretty much around the 0.7 grams per pound of body weight again. So I think it was a little bit maybe less than that, but it's definitely within that range. They had one group, I think, that did try a little more than that. There are some other studies that have gone over that amount. So some really cool studies, if you look at Jose Antonio's work, where he was trying to figure out if we just give you massive amounts of protein,

can you convert that to fat? Because everyone's like, oh, it's all just calories in, calories out. And what they found was, I just pulled this study again, one of the groups, they did four grams per kilo per deal's a go if you never do you were a 220 male hey just like 100 kilograms they just dried out 440 grams of protein a day

for a long period of time there's a massive amount of protein yes yeah and that's what he said he had people that came into his lab, and they're like, you mean you're going to give us a protein supplement for free to be in your study? They're like, I want to be in your study. And he said the same guys after a couple weeks that came in, they're just like, dude, I think I got to drop out. I can't eat any more protein because it's a silly feeling. It's real food.

There's no way you can eat it. Yeah, wow. Were they using? No, they had like a silly feeling. It's real. There's no way you can eat that today. Were they using? No, they had to use the protein. Stop saying it. Just drinking it. They were using like a whey protein. Oof. A thousand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, a thousand grams of fat. Yeah.

Yeah. And what they found was basically that those people didn't really gain any extra fat. So if you overfeed on protein, you won't really get any fat. They did some kidney analysis in another study. No markers of kidney damage. The kidneys do more work, so GFR, creatinine, those levels go up a little bit. But no kidney damage. But what's interesting is in that study,

once I got over around the 0.7 grams again, muscle mass or muscle gains were not further enhanced. So one gram per pound, I think I've used that. It's easy math. It's probably a little bit high, but if you've got someone who's trying to cut calories, protein

has good satiety, things of that nature. So there are some other benefits. Or is it just like, after like, it was like 20% lower. Was that kind of... Yeah. You could make an argument up to about

a gram per pound of body weight. Maybe you see a little bit better. And then you get into stuff with about protein timing and meals and you know maybe if you're three meals is probably good or maybe a little better five yeah maybe a single digit percent better if you really kind of squeeze the data but it's definitely a diminishing thing and on that end too there's a study they did several years ago where they did an IV of amino acids, so essential amino acids.

The thought was, all right, if we just give you an amino acid IV all day, dude, that's like the most anabolic thing known to man, right? What they found was that protein synthesis would come up and max out and then dropped. So even though they're giving essential amino acids by IV, so constant level of amino acids, protein basically building up the metabolic, the anabolic portion of it, that process actually started to slow down again. So you actually need these periods of time to kind of reset the mechanism where you get a whole bolus or a whole bunch of protein.

Not much for many, a few hours, and then another bolus of protein a quick not much for many a few hours and another bolus of protein not much for a few hours and another bolus of protein so the kind of little bit of the timing and having those periods of lower like it's amino acids kind of resets that mechanism without really having any understanding of what actually is wrong about it like what is it actually gonna give me cancer is it gonna like am i gonna look bad potentially yeah there hasn't been a chronic study that's really looked at that. There's a fair amount of acute data and mechanistic data now.

There's some other work looking at a rat study. Can you reset that by giving them branch chains or maybe even sucrose or something in between meals? Maybe, but that was only one study. Dr. Gabrielle Lyons, I've heard her talk about this. I've seen a couple people, but the amount of protein you need at a single time to create the

reaction that we're looking for versus just a caloric gain. Did you look at that with this? Yeah, so if you want to go to the min, what you would need is, there's two things, right? So you have to start the assembly line of, let's say you're going to manufacture muscle protein. So if you think about an assembly line, you've got to turn the assembly line on before you can manufacture anything. So you need about 2.5 to 3.5 grams of leucine. So leucine is what kind of flips that switch and turns on your assembly machine. And then you need some 2.5 to 3.5 grams of leucine. So leucine is what kind of flips that switch and turns on your assembly machine.

And then you need some form of energy. So being in an energy surplus is definitely beneficial for that, which bodybuilders have figured out over the years and other athletes. And then you need some type of raw material. So you actually need essential amino acids in order to build anything up.

So the minimum you can get by an essential amino acids is probably six grams. If you look at 20 grams of whey protein, you have more than enough essential amino acids, you have more than enough leucine for that threshold effect. So that's enough to start that assembly building process. So you could argue that 20 grams of a whey protein may be enough to at least in acute studies to have that process run really well, where 40 grams, probably not any different. But if you switch the protein source, like if you go, if you say you're a vegan and you go to a rice protein, now you would need probably 40 grams of that rice protein to get enough leucine and to get enough amino acid. Yeah, it's incredible the difference. To have the same effect. Vegan-based versus animal-based yeah so if you're eating you know four ounces of meat

or five ounces of meat or you're eating you know four or five eggs at once if i add more leucine to that does it further enhance the effect and no so i use the analogy of a light switch if i turn the light switch on boom the light's on if i keep pushing up on the switch of a light switch. If I turn the light switch on, boom, the light's on. If I keep pushing up on the switch more, the light doesn't get brighter. The light's already on, right? So you've got, it's a threshold effect. You've maxed that out already. So adding another two, three, or more ground doesn't make any difference. Some things it does.

And that's, when I teach, that's one of the analogies I use. There's some things called the threshold effect, right? Where you cross this threshold, boom, you see an effect. But like we talked about earlier, metabolic flexibility, maybe arresting metabolism from a fuel mix is more like a dimmer switch. So depending upon what you're doing or who you are or your background, you can turn it a little bit more to fat. You can turn a little bit more to carbohydrates. So some things are much more in that kind of dimmer switch range yeah so real quickly carbohydrates most people probably are under fueling on carbohydrates for their exercise especially if they're doing like

crossfit which is a very glycolytic type sport right so what i do those people simply is look at where their baseline is and then i just start slowly usually going up on carbohydrates usually on a daily allotment and I look for their body comp and I look at their performance so I'm trying to get them as high as I can where they still like their body comp and their performance starts to plateau so once they get to that point I go yeah carbohydrates are probably pretty good at that that level fat varies a lot some athletes really like consuming fat some don't care but getting a minimum of essential fatty acids is good you put a number on it how much fat they want someone to consume per day assuming they get enough essential fats 50 60 70 grams per

day probably somewhere in there you know that's definitely on the lower end people will definitely go up from there but if anyone's ever tried to do a super low fat diet where you're like 30 or 20 grams a day it's freaking miserable like the only thing you're eating is like egg whites and all this other horrible bodybuilding show crap so yeah it's not very good i totally like lady style bodybuilding so it's egg whites yeah definitely look at their micronutrients the simplest way you can look at that is just have them do a three-day dietary log and most athletes tend to eat the same things over and over a real quick and dirty way to look at it is do they kind of cover all the different food groups right do they actually eat anything that looks like a

vegetable that's usually a pretty good start um i also look at their variety they tend to eat the same thing over and over and then within that i actually look at uh colors not like to the colored m&ms but like different colored uh vegetables and fruits because if they're only eating let's say all green things right we know that some of the micronutrients and polyphenols and stuff that they're just not showing up in there right so yes right right so a quick thing you can do just quick and dirty is when you look at it what kind of variety they have and what kind of colors are they eating do they eat anything green do they eat any kind of yellows and oranges do you get anything like berries where they're

kind of more purple and red and things like that if they're eating kind of all those colors then they're probably okay there's a couple exceptions which we'll talk about and then i also look at uh which i got from blood soap is mushrooms so they're a separate fungi group all their own and so for a long time i'm doing all this analysis oh you need all this variety, all this stuff. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I forgot like in a whole entire food group. Yeah. So making sure, you know, some of those are in there, which you can use as a supplement, that type of thing too. The other thing I'll do to try to get them to have more variety is it sounds weird, but I'm like, okay, go to your store, like an actual store that sells real food and walk around the perimeter

and just look for something that you haven't ever remember eating within the last year, and then just buy it. They're like, what? Does it matter what it is? No, I don't care. You know, like if you want to buy dates, that's cool. If you want to try some kombucha or whatever, just try something different to get them in the habit to kind of go out and to kind of seek those things. And it's funny that they'll usually pick something that they like, but they've just never really seen it because they tend to be creatures of habit and kind of get the same things all the time. Like, what's the worst thing that happens? You bought something and you didn't like it. Okay, fine. Buy something different next time.

You know, it's not going to be the end of the world on that. The other part is uh where they're usually low so the question i get all the time is well can i do any fancy analysis or what about all these other micronutrient tests and all this other stuff you can do with a few exceptions i don't think any of them are really worth the crap um you can look at a vitamin d test right so look at uh it's called 25 hydroxy most physicians will run that now they for a while we're doing a 125 hydroxy which is d2 and you probably want a d3 um outside of that yeah so the only supplement you can buy over the counter is a d3 supplement so paradoxically

d2 is a prescription-based supplement um so a couple of years back, I saw a lot of people going into their physician. They would get a test and they're like, they would do a 25-hydroxy test. And then they'd send them to their pharmacist for a prescription. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. What prescription did you get? And it's a D2. The issue with that is unless you've got kidney issues or other things going on, D2 is a very, very, very short half-life. D3 is a much longer half-life.

So you could literally get a D2 supplement. They could go back and retest you, and you're fine. And then like two, three weeks later, you're low again. So unless you've got kidney issues or something else going on, I always ask them is, did they give you a prescription for the supplement, or did they tell you to buy something that will be a counter? No more softball questions. I'm actually really curious.

What level do you want to be in D3? 50 to 70, probably somewhere in there. If you get too high, there's some data that shows that you increase your risk of mortality, things like that. If you're definitely in the lower end, recovery can be a little bit harder. Enzymes, and those enzymes are dependent on cofactors. A lot of times those cofactors and minerals and other things. So enzymes really are the key to a,

we'll call it for time being, a fast metabolism. Why do more people not sell, potentially sell? Yeah, the short answer I would say is we probably don't know yet. So one of the things I have changed is if they

have a test and they say i'm low in vitamin d like probably two or three years ago i'd be like perfect go take this d3 supplement now i'm like okay well what do you do because in my head i'm thinking well why are you low in d3 and i know the answer is they're probably never outside so i think the bigger issue is right that they're not outside So I'll ask them, how often are you outside? I walk between my car I go to my desk, I walk to the gym And then I walk home So you're basically never really outside that long

Well, no So is D3 being low an issue? Yep, but there's also Other benefits to being outside There's some cool studies in Japan Called forest bathing, which when I first heard the term, I thought was like a bunch of hippies running around the woods,

like beating themselves at twigs or something. A little bit of that helps my liver. But it's actually just go out and hang out in the forest, and they show autonomic changes, so heart rate variability gets better just by looking. The theory is that seeing the fractal patterns of the trees and stuff like that. So I'll ask them how often they're outside. Some other stuff I got from a friend, Dan Party, is if they're outside in the morning without sunglasses,

the photon sitting in the back of their eye is one of a massive thing to kind of help kind of anchor their circadian rhythm. And a lot of times I see if their D3 is low, they're not outside much. A lot of the time they have a really hard time sleeping. They're like, I just feel tired during the day, and then I try to go to bed, and I can't sleep. So usually their circadian rhythm is kind of all one. Is that below 10 degrees? Do you have the ability to then absorb it as over that you can't? It's like just too much information in a sense? A little bit.

The photons will still hit the back of your eyes. So I tell people go for a walk in the morning. Don't use sunglasses. It's enough to kind of reset the photoreceptors. You are correct, though. For vitamin D, there has to be enough intensity of the sunlight and UV for your skin to basically convert it to vitamin D. So I'm from Minnesota. So in January, if I ran around buck naked all winter, I'm probably not going to get enough UV exposure to do anything for vitamin D.

Other times of the year, I can, though. So, yeah, the angle of the sun for vitamin D does make a difference. I have clients that live in Alaska, and this is the first year I've ever met anyone from Alaska, and then all of a sudden I have three clients up there, and literally walking through the winter with them was one of the strangest things because you talk to them and you can literally feel Oh, it's bizarre if you've ever been there.

They're training. Everything is just like way more depressed. And then I had never experienced one that was really excited for 35 degrees so they could go tanning. They would like, they bathing suit weather was 35 degrees because they had been in my 50 for so long.

I do. That's really awesome. This changes everything. I feel like in SoCal when it's 60 degrees, we're frozen. Yeah. We're pathetically upset, like, miserable. We don't want to treat ourselves. They're outside sunbathinghing and it's 35 degrees.

Milwaukee. Same. Yeah. Milwaukee. Same thing. It was like 30 degrees. It was on a sword. It's like,

so funny. So is supplementing a, is that going to get people to where they need to be? Is that enough? Yeah. I just still would recommend that they use a supplement to get into the range. But I won't bypass the other discussion.

So three years ago, I'd just say, yeah, just take a supplement, don't worry about it. Now I'll figure out more lifestyle stuff of what's going on. At the end of the day, I probably still will give them a supplement because I do want them to get back to that normal range, but I want them to kind of import

some of the other health and lifestyle factors too. So I've been in Alaska. My uncle lives up there, and it's so bizarre. We were there in L.ey a couple years ago. And it was still 1130 at night. And the sun was still in the horizon. Finland's the same way, if you've ever been there. Finland actually has a super massive suicide and depression rate, too.

One of the theories here is because of the way the sun and everything is. And especially being near a paleo effect. Wait a minute, what did people do back in the day before vitamin d health supplements like they didn't have a vitamin d supplement they lived in these squirreled areas very structurally um there's a bunch of things they would do but one of them was they would gather mushrooms and they would put them out in the sun and then they would store them for the winter and it turns out that that's a way of creating d2 so they would do that and that would be one of their lower so in uh in the winter also the idea behind it yeah you did somebody uh

uv you know uv activated like right on the label and you're like oh what is that yeah yep yeah it's for d2 and d2 can work as in a pinch hit as long as you have it at a pretty high frequency and then also you can store pretty high amounts of D3 so you can get by for a fair amount of times I tell clients that if you're going to get tested so get tested if you're in like Minnesota or Alaska another and sometime probably towards the end of your summer because if you were ever at a max level that's going to be your max and then right as you get done with winter because if you're ever going to be at a low level that's probably where you're going to be and if you're pretty good in those ends you're

probably okay and don't be an idiot like i was and take a d3 supplement and then go on a couple trips in the middle of winter and then take the same supplement you did the year before without the trips because i got tested in spring last year and i was like 95 and i'm like holy crap that's high i'm like what the hell i didn't take any more of the same supplement than i did the year before and i'm like oh yeah i took three trips in the winter to where it was nice and warm for a week at a time and just kept taking the same supplement so can we go into vitamin c yeah so vitamin c must love it say again oh yes so what about it see the reason the reason i uh yeah i want to know nothing about it uh but i think it was bigger stronger faster

about steroids right five five people die a year from uh the vitamin c and they go through this like laundry list of uh side effects which are like just detrimental to your health people dying yeah yeah and then without telling you you assume like oh these are the side effects which are like just detrimental to your health people dying yeah yeah and then without telling you you assume like oh these are the side effects of steroids and they're like no that's vitamin c i just want to know what are you doing are they lying to us in general vitamin c the old saying which has been kind of disproven from paraclete is that so you know it's the dose that matters and that part is true but like the theory was that high amounts of anything can kill you, right? So too much water, you can die of what's called hyponatrenia.

This could just lose all your sodium. So you've got to drink massive gallons of water in a very short period of time. So mandocrine disruptors actually are the reverse. Super small amounts have a very kind of detrimental effect. If you're in the middle of that curve not so much and then as you get higher have more of a detrimental effect so it's not always this linear response vitamin c if you take too much the biggest issue you'll know is you're running to the bathroom to use a wilford brimley two-step in there for a little bit too long

and you'll you'll know that right away but that's usually like a gram, several grams. Like I've tried that when I've been sick. I had to take, I think it was like 15 grams at once over the course of a day before that happened. We don't really see frank vitamin C deficiencies anymore or scurvy. The bigger issue, especially with lifters is, well, what is quote unquote the optimal amount of vitamin C? No one really knows. But we do know that, you know, over the RDA, you're probably going to be fine. A little bit more than that, if you're under periods of stress, probably good. But then for recovery, we have some mouse studies. There's one or two human

studies now showing that if after training, we give you a massive doses of vitamin C, like several grams, that it appears to impair the adaptations that you were seeing from exercise so we know that if we give you too much and maybe time it after exercise that can screw up the adaptation that we're trying to get from exercise now a lot of vitamins in isolation will tend to do that some other compounds won't so i tell, if you're going to take a high amount of quote-unquote antioxidants, which vitamin C is an antioxidant, taking them right after exercise is probably

not the best idea. But again, you could make an argument that if you're an in-season NFL player, I'm not as worried about the adaptations per se. I'm more worried about recovery so you can perform again. Now, if I'm in the off-season, I'm probably going to flip that. I'm more concerned about the adaptations per se and more worried about recovery so you can perform again a long time ago now if i'm in the off season i'm probably gonna flip that right i'm more concerned about the adaptations you take and less concerned about performance because we've got this long time

frame we can play with action before you have to be back at a high level again so again i think the context for all that is important listen we're talking about earlier i don't know i talked take some vitamin c those reactions worry a lot about it. Maybe a gram or two a day at the very most. A way full training. If you really think you need it, run around in your eye dress.

What you're doing is putting 50 grams of vulgar in your body. Then the guy out of bed would eat more vitamins. But also, high amounts of aluminum. So vitamin C is... A lot of the vitamins

I don't think we've worked out the exact amount. So then I always look at what's the downside if you take too much. So people who exercise a lot, we do have some

pretty good data now showing that it may screw up that adaptation. Do you see a difference between a acid revolving about vitamin C versus all the process

that you forgot to bring up? Yes, ascorbic acid. Yeah, yeah. Ascorbic acid, just in general? No. I've never seen

any good data on that. Perhaps maybe someone's got some really weird gastrointestinal. I get somewhere and I'm like, I'm going to ask

this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy.

I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy.

I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy.

I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I'm going to ask this guy. I used to be a more higher dose vitamin E

No, not so much The classic study was Vitamin C, vitamin E And I think beta carotene smokers So several years ago What they found was it actually made their cancer rates worse again that doesn't necessarily apply to this population per se and they were using pretty high doses in isolation in a group that already is doing something that's promoting cancer so again

doesn't mean that directly crosses over vitamin e i do think like a what's called a mixed tocopherol is going to be better so you get all the kind of subforms that you find in nature and then you can go one step down below that and something that's called tocopherols or tocotrienols actually is what it is and there's some mixed data on that I know some supplement companies have tried to use that as a supplement for muscle recovery yeah it's the data on that's kind of yeah they're a little bit more on the expensive side yeah yeah i've seen that before yeah yeah toco triannuls yeah i i think they're okay but yeah i don't think it's anything that magical so i tell people yeah if you want to add it once in a while that's fine look for mixed tocopherols and you're probably gonna be okay or someone say that

in the lower dose i need 200 i use probably somewhere in there and you're probably going to be okay or someone say that in the lower dose i need 200 iu's probably somewhere in there and that's probably going to be on the higher end talks like that's mentioned like there's no like yeah so a lot of athletes in terms of micronutrients i would say magnesium is probably going to be the lowest and that's usually because they don't need a lot of green looking things especially natural green things that was good for me and but yeah with chlorophyll you can have a lot of basically kind things especially natural green things that was good for me and but yeah with chlorophyll you can have a lot of basically kind of substitute chlorophyll for magnesium super similar if you look at the structures so a lot of people don't get enough magnesium it's a pretty cheap supplement to buy again the form on that definitely makes a huge difference

the one to stay away from is magnesium oxide. The conversion rate of that's only like 8%. And a quick and dirty way to look at your multivitamin to see if it's worth a crap, I'll look at the vitamin E and what form they use. And then I'll look at magnesium and what form they use. So if they only use like kind of, they're not using a mix to cough rolls for vitamin E or like the not natural version and then magnesium they're using magnesium oxide only yeah that makes me wonder a little bit uh so citrate is good glycinate is good citrate's okay pretty much any of the non-oxide forms are pretty good how much amount i don't think the testing is real strong for uh magnesium there's some people who say, well, you can do like a red blood cell analysis.

Maybe. But again, the downsides of magnesium are not really that profound. Again, it's GI distress. I tell people, just take a bunch at night. You're probably going to be okay. Zinc is probably the second one people can be low on. So people are into the supplement ZMA. So zinc, magnesium, aspartate. They also throw B6 in there too so if you go back to zma right so you know

victor conte was a guy who developed zma right the balco guy um so you actually filed a patent on it for those particular amounts they did a follow-up study in basketball players but the study in basketball players they were already very zinc deficient and probably borderline overtrained. And they did show that, ooh, it increased their testosterone a little bit, right? So everyone's like, oh, ZMA, testosterone supplement. And then you go to all the forums, they're like, oh, it gives me the weirdest dreams. Oh, it must be working. And so in my head, I'm like, well, why does that happen? So I bought the form that they use, the zinc, the magnesium, and the B6 all separately i did this on myself and some clients like a long time ago and it appears that the b6 is what gave

people the weird dreams and i think it's because of the neurotransmitter conversion um if you take the b6 out they don't seem to have the weird dreams and i can't prove this but my guess is that they figured this out and by putting the b6 in there and you get these wacky dreams you're like oh I got weird dreams it must be improving my sleep and the reality is a lot of people are low in magnesium a lot of people are low in zinc so it's good but a lot of times people do too much zinc so they'll take zma and then they'll take a like twice the recommended amount of their normal daily multivitamin. And their zinc levels can get too high. Biggest thing with that is that zinc will then start depleting out copper. So usually look on your multivitamin to see if they have a small

amount of copper also. And once you're replete in zinc, you can take more and it doesn't do anything for your testosterone levels. So if you're very low on zinc and you replete that and you get back to a normal baseline, your testosterone may go up a little bit. But if you're already pretty good on zinc and you add more, it's not going to make testosterone go up anymore. Yeah, that's why they put beta-alanine in every pre-workout, right? So beta-alanine is an amino acid. It's the rate limiting step in the formation of carnosine.

So you have beta alanine, plus you have histamine, and you form carnosine. So carnosine is an intramuscular buffer of the pH changes. So if you go out and you do a horrible net con, you're trying to buffer some of that pH. It's not lactic acid. So it's lactate plus pH that's created and you're trying to buffer some of that ph so beta alanine helps with that within the single digit percentage but it also has this other effect where it hits what's called the drg in the spine dorsal root ganglia and also gives you that tingly feeling it's completely unrelated to how the supplement is working it just happens

to have multiple effects but people feel the kind of itchy tingling and they're like, oh, my pre-workout's kicking in. I know about that. So a lot of times I put three grams of memory work on. Pulling through your vein. Like it's gotta be working. Oh yeah. And what's interesting if I remember correctly,

it doesn't happen in Koreans. There's a genetic thing where Koreans don't have that effect. So what I've tried to do, and if anyone creates a supplement, send me some money or whatever. But I think if you can create a long-acting beta-alanine, I think that would be a pretty good seller. Because the rate-limiting step right now, it appears to be the total dose that you can take. So if we could give you, say, 100 grams of beta-alanine, you wouldn't feel like you're going to itch your face off or have any other issues.

It appears that you may be able to saturate the muscle much faster. Because the hard part now, like beta-alanine, you need about 6 to maybe 9 grams, at least 6 grams per day. But some people get itchies at like 1 gram. You feel like we just have not discovered we can uh i'm really enjoying this uh yeah you mentioned earlier that nothing there's so many compounds of broccoli or whatever it is like something yeah like there's 250 different things in milk or whatever like to what extent do you feel like oh don't know what the hell is really for you like it's like you think there's probably like entire categories of nuisance we haven't even

discovered yes moral that's like laying in insulate uh like uh insulation like jumping into a pile of insulation and asbestos like that was like a trick we would do on our friends when we'd first recommend beta alanine they'd be like don't tell them about the tingles i love this there's's an entire company. Like, see a sip. I just made an entire business out of just the itch. Oh, yeah. Or if you've ever taken too much niacin, like the flush.

I did that once. I was testing a supplement. I was an idiot. They sent it to me in the mail. I'm like, sure, I'll try this. And I'm like, my God. I'm like itching. And it turned red.

And it feels horrible. And I look at the back,, I'm like it. And it turned red and it feels horrible. And I look at the back and I went nice. And I don't remember the amount, but it was astronomically high. And I'm like, can we dig back into vitamin B? Because there's a whole lot of numbers. It has a B12. It's like a really big one. I feel B12 as like an answer to a host of problems.

A crowd of gentlemen have no real idea of who's telling the truth and who's just feeding me something. It's like coconut oil. Yeah. And people on steroids are all feeling stuff weird with it. Yeah, you probably know your own from what I've seen. We just shut them all down. If you're super low, yeah. Yeah, if you're super low, is that a way to get you back to being sufficient?

Yeah. Does it work? Sure. But again, with most multivitamins and other types of micronutrients, once you're at a sufficient status, adding more doesn't add more effects, right? Because people think, oh, linear. If I was to study on deficient rats, it works for them. I'll take three times the amount and I'll get three times the effect. It's like, no, it doesn't work that way at all. The group that I do see that it works a lot in is people who are vegan because there isn't really any good vegan

sources of B12 per se. It just doesn't show up in their diet because it's primarily from animals. There's a couple studies showing that if they have, I think it was heel pain or Achilles type of issues, but that may be a hallmark for some B12 issues, especially in vegans. It's push-ups.

It'll make you a better athlete versus like a comprehensive training program, which would be like the multivitamin or the complex. Yeah, so a lot of the B vitamins are used in pretty much all the energy cycles from your Krebs cycle to energy transport chain to all those different things. And each kind of has their own role, but they also should be taken as a complex because they all have their own role that if you take way too much of one, you may start depleting out the other ones because they're all being run through these same processes together. So I tell people that if you're going to take just one B vitamin at a super high amount,

at least take a good B complex first and then play around with different amounts on a b12 also the oral absorption rate is usually very poor so if you start getting into like much higher amounts you'll look for something that's a lozenge but the the fda they can't really tell you to leave it in your mouth and let it dissolve because it enters it's called the buco layer through the mouth because that's a different delivery mechanism which the fda kind of frowns on so a lot of times you'll see it'll be 12 it'll say leave in your mouth and let dissolve right and that's probably a better way if you are deficient to get much higher levels i think it's probably the first part, right? And it's hard because there is,

so if you take an injection of B12, is that a legitimate way if you were super low in B12 to get you back to being sufficient status? Yes. Then the second part of your question, does that mean all these people wandering around are just like super low levels of B12? Probably not, right?

And then there's some theories that if you're really really high levels in b12 it's going to help your energy and you're going to feel so great but it's very similar yeah so again if you go back to vegetarians the first thing i'll look for them is low iron and low b12 those are probably like the first two things i'm going to look at and especially if it's a woman so it's a woman who's a vegan I'm going to think oh thyroid may be kind of goofy and iron's probably going to be low you're probably going to be very low in b12 how would you you know as a fitness person even know that just look at what they eat right I mean if they're not consuming any type of meat which by them being vegan would be true and they're not taking any type of supplement. They're going to be pretty low.

And the heme version of iron, which shows up in like red meat, is much more absorbable than other forms of iron. So by the virtue of them not consuming that and they've got a monthly blood loss, they're probably going to be low. Guys tend to be, especially lifters who eat a lot of red meat, their iron can actually be too high. So if your iron level gets super high, it starts becoming a

pro-oxidant and starts to have almost the opposite effect then. It's not the best analogy, but I call them internal rusting. You have all these pro-oxidant effects going on. The only way to get rid of that if you go in and find out that you are is donating blood.

So donating blood will actually take care of you. I really lose. Maybe a blood date so my wife is pregnant. Right on. Follow me on everything. On truck, and then on Instagram. Whatever it is.

Less volume. Yeah. And they have told her to increase B12 and iron because she's like whatever level of anemic thing going on. Is it any changes in blood flow or blood volume, or is it just the loss? Is there some correlation on either side of that scale? Yeah, I don't know with pregnancy, to be honest. We'd have to look to see if she was low before she was pregnant.

We do know that if you're low and pregnant, that, yeah, it's something you would want to look into. Right on. We're going to take another break, and when we get back, I want to kind of dig into, so the the first part we talked about variability heart rate variability metabolic variability and then the macros and the micros and how all this kind of plays plays a role together as a bigger system yeah so there's some very good research on a lot of them and we were talking in between the break is some of the ones I wonder about.

Tumerica is very popular now. It's a very good reason. Yeah, and it works really well if you've got high inflammation. If you also look at some of the better formulations, there's pretty much a lot of them on the market now. They have used a black hopper or something that's going to basically change. It's called the Cytochrome P450 pathway. It basically makes the tumor or the fake compound, whatever they're using, more bioavailable. It actually messes with the liver's ability to detox that pathway.

So if you want more bioavailability there, that's actually a really good thing. If you've got super high amounts of inflammation, it works very, very well for that. But I also wonder if you look at nature, if we should be kind of bypassing some of those pathways all the time. I think it's probably useful for a specific thing, but if you've got super high levels of inflammation, the next step, you can use that to try to control them, but still try to figure out why your inflammation level is super high.

Ritual is kind of similar. Bioavailability on it is just not really that good. The human data I think is kind of hit or miss. Some pretty impressive animal data. Other polyphenols like some of the things in green tea. Very useful. There's a couple. Yeah, EGCG. There is a rat study showing that EGCG in high levels may not be the best for your liver i haven't really seen that done in humans yet but again that's not anything you're going to get from drinking green tea you'd have to take a supplement and i don't remember the exact

dosage but it was like really really high um another one that i find interesting as you mentioned is astaxanthine astaxanthine is a bright red coloring. You find it like in crab shells. It's actually made as a supplement from a specific algae type plant that's red. They extract it from there. And the early animal work on it was like super impressive as a natural way of increasing the body's use of fat. And what it does is it messes with one of the enzymes in there. It's the CPT1 enzyme. So carnitine palmitate transferase 1. It allows that to be more available.

It doesn't get downregulated as much. So your body can then shove more fat through the carnitine pathway into the mitochondria. So in some of the rat studies, they showed huge increases in swimming endurance. They put them in a little thing and they measure how long they could swim. It's probably So in some of the rat studies they showed Huge increases in swimming endurance They put them in a little thing And they measure how long they could swim It's probably not really fun if you're a rat Because you probably feel like you're trying to drown But the human studies are

Not as impressive One from Van Loon's lab Didn't show any change in performance One or two other human studies In terms of performance Didn't really show much of an effect. As an antioxidant, it's very effective. It doesn't appear to spin off as many pro-oxidants. So for example, like we talked about vitamin C, so each one kind of affects a

different pathway. And vitamin C, if you take a huge amount of it, starts acting as a pro-oxidant, right? So we talked about if your iron levels are super high, it starts acting as a pro-oxidant right so we talked about if your iron levels are super high starts acting as a pro-oxidant so you get kind of the opposite effect of what you want it so astaxanthin doesn't appear to have that mechanism happen as readily because of how it actually works and it appears to work pretty well to help protect against uv damage from the sun so i'm very light sensitive this is probably the darkest I've been in South Padre for about two weeks. So I'll take like 10 milligrams for about a week or two ahead of time.

And of one, but it appears to help me not quite as much. I still have it pretty much covered up. All the studies have been done. So it may be useful. I'd like to see more data on it. Maybe we'll just plan around with that. And you keep your total calorie number that's basically said maybe useful that you would like to see more data on it but maybe we're

just playing around with that. And you keep your total calorie number where you're in a caloric deficit with that high amount of protein

then you'll lose fat mass. Yeah, the old one from tomatoes, tomato sauce. I have a theory that it was

a lot of the supplements were paid for. I think it was prostate research and what they found was a lot of sauces were high in it because you actually had to break the cellular wall to get access to it.

One of the little dirty insider secrets you find is that if you're theoretically a manufacturer of cherries and we get rid of a lot of cherry skins or byproduct, it's your incentive to try to figure out, hmm hmm could we sell

this to a supplement company and maybe they could find something useful with it that's exactly where that came from yep they used to literally throw gallons and thousands of gallons every year of whey protein down the drain because it was a byproduct of the cheese manufacturing yeah so a lot of times those things i think can be beneficial, but I'm always a little weary of looking at disclosures on studies and who funded it. And if all the studies are only from the same funding source, it doesn't automatically mean that it's bad stuff to accomplish, but you have to realize that they have a pretty big incentive to show a positive result. So you may only be seeing the legit studies, but you're maybe only seeing the positive ones.

You may not be seeing some of the other ones. And then also if people are listening, but you're maybe only seeing the positive ones. You may not be seeing some of the other ones. And then also, if people are listening, if you do work for a supplement company, let's say you're an academic, the first question I'll ask them is, who owns the data? So if you were to contract me to work for your supplement company, many times it'll say that you still own the data. So if I do it thinking I'm going to get a publication out of it and you own the data and the if I do it thinking I'm going to get a publication out of it and you own the data and the study doesn't show positive,

probably we keep the data and not necessarily publish it. That doesn't happen all the time. You will find some companies that wasn't necessarily positive that's still out there. I always wonder if there's two studies and they're super positive.

Maybe it's a good thing, but I always like to see that then verified by someone who doesn't have any disclosures in that area yeah there's some pretty good data on now that's actually figure regulation it's

what the fuck is he talking about it's just it's a blueberry. Whatever, man. Ain't about that, I just... But there's pretty good data. Once you do diet, I just don't eat anything. No colors.

It's all bad. I'd say generally pretty positive. Does that mean if you extract that one compound and sell it as a supplement, is that going to fix all your ills? Probably not. But even like broccoli, I think has like 300 different polyphenols we haven't even really identified yet. I went to a talk by Monsanto years ago, when everyone's like, no GMOs, no GMOs. So Monsanto was trying to figure out a way

by kind of sort of doing other things that were not really genetic altering to get like sulforaphane levels higher in broccoli, but still make it quote unquote natural, right? So they're still trying to modify foods and try to increase one particular compound. I don't know, that makes me a little nervous. Again, I don't think it's bad, but there's probably a reason all those other compounds are in there too, right? If you go back to vitamin c right so we isolate vitamin c and give it to you in a super high amount without all the other bioflavonoids and other compounds you may see some downsides for that again generally safe but we're not at the point

where we even know what all the interactions are yet so it's better just to have a normal eating schedule of three or four or five meals a day or whatever it is rather than trying to fucking snack on protein constantly all day long potentially yeah i don't really know to be honest i haven't looked at a lot of that literature in a while so i don't i don't know the specifics but if it's been out there long enough and consumed at a high enough rate which it probably has especially looking at things like corn and soybeans i don't think we see anything that's overtly detrimental, right? Again, does that mean something may happen 10, 20 years down the road? Maybe, but then you get into whole agricultural processes and you get into, well, is it really that much more efficacious to have GMO products?

I've heard some people say yes, some people say no. I mean, with that- I don't know on that, to be honest. GMOs... It's a good question. I don't know if it's prior to GMOs, but in line with GMOs, when they decided to take all the gunpowder and everything and pour it into soil after the wars, and now it's like... Yeah, MPK fertilizer, there was a huge... There's a huge... Oh, yeah, MPK fertilizer.

Are minerals. Yeah yeah and just like the overall so do gmos uh do gmos have less minerals less micronutrients and uh looking looking at our deficient soil is that what's you know possibly causing us to be might you know our micros being you know not where they should be, I think you could make an argument for that, right? So MPK fertilizer would basically, they found it was a way of giving a fertilizer to crops that would make them look really nice and they kind of fit all the consumer things. But a lot of them were still very poor in different micronutrients, right? So if you don't have like selenium in the soil, it's probably not going to show up in

the highest amount in that particular food. How much of that does that matter? I don't know. Because if I look at most dietary intakes of the average American, it's like, hmm, they're not even eating broccoli. So is the broccoli they're eating not so good? Is that their problem? Could you argue that the broccoli we have now versus broccoli uh 20 years ago is it different uh probably is it making a massive difference that as long as you get enough then you don't need i don't know though we're definitely not moving in the correct direction and i think that's

especially being a pale effects i think that's changing a little bit you know you find a lot of people that are trying to get from local farmers and you get farmers that are trying to go back to doing more organic type practices and things of that nature and i think all that is definitely moving in the right direction the hard part is can we say exactly how much of an impact that's having i don't know on that part when we think about general or overall qualities or volume of micronutrients that we get i so about uh dr Terry Wall, her journey through, I believe it was MS. It was. Having like full-blown MS, can't walk, in a chair.

Yeah. Really having just a very, very poor quality of life. If you haven't seen the TED Talk, you should very much go and watch. It's an incredible story. And the diet that she used to get out of there or to really i don't even know heal herself of ms i guess you could say um was just so high on these micronutrients so the fruit is a macronutrient now i don't want to get to the memory frizz at some point though talk a lot about protein effects uh nutrition was was were we Nutrition was?

Were we really eating that much variety at that high of a quantity? Or is that just a particular incidence in which she was able to heal herself? Is there a degree that we need to be at to hit a critical mass? Or do we actually all need to be for peak health at that high level? Yeah, that's a good question. So I've had dinner with her, I've hung out with her a little bit, super awesome. And she's put in the time to actually run complete clinical trials on it. So it wasn't just her end of one experience, which is fascinating. The TED talk is really good. You know, she's actually done a lot of great, super clinical, very stringent work to show that it appears to be making a massive difference.

I think the big difference there too is that you're dealing with a pathology to start with. So if you've got, let's say MS or some other pathology on this end, you're probably going to need a more extreme approach to kind of get back to quote unquote normal again. Right. So you can make an argument for maybe if you have type 2 diabetes, maybe ketogenic type diet may be very useful for that, right? It's a very extreme approach, but you're on the physical extreme end due to the disease that you have or TBI or things of that nature. Does that mean that if you're a normal, quote unquote, athlete, do you need those shred amounts? Probably not. So I like to have a wider variety and not as

super high amounts of each particular one. And if we go back to... Okay, what about microability?

Let's dig into that. I think that the human body is the most adaptable organism we've ever found, right?

You've signed humans in Alaska, you can find them to be on South America. Just massive climate differences. Massive differences that they eat from the Inuit to the Katavans

that eat mostly carbohydrates. And you can find healthy people in both of those areas, you know, eating kind of the standard diet. So I think the physiology is very adaptable. And there is a minimum within there that we need to meet. The really messy part that's super hard to answer is, well, where is the optimal range? So I have this little joke in almost all my presentations that if you came into my lab and said,

hey, I'll give you $2 million to tell me what the optimal protocol is to train for CrossFit. I don't know. It could be this, could be this, could be that. But if you came in and said, hey, I've got protocol A and protocol B, and this subset of athletes, I need you to tell me which one is better. Okay, over a period of time, I can tell you which one is actually better. So optimal is the one thing we can never really answer. But we can answer, okay, is this better than that? And that's almost a never-ending thing right

so if you keep doing that you get closer to this kind of mythical optimal and to add into that we're starting to get to the point where we can figure out what's better for each individual right so that's you know genes or some other things uh we may find that some people do better and i've seen this in athletes even in the same sport of athlete I've seen some athletes do better on higher carbohydrates and I've seen other athletes do a little bit better on higher levels of fat we know that those probably vary based on their

metabolism and different things of that nature too is there a gold cap inside someone's body so you mentioned TBIs and I wish I could remember the doctor that's working on it I think it's a really easy thing to tell someone if you are a trainer or a guest or whatever. Just eat five different dairy products. You've written about hormone replacement.

People go, oh, yeah, my kids. That's what's going on. Hit the art level and vice. People would easily follow it because it's an easily inspired bouquet. Strawberries and blueberries and stuff. Green bell pepper. Whatever it is. Somebody was going to have five dollars.

Some source of anthology. Or an all-the-way site or whatever itology? That's probably progress for a lot of people. Are they unable to process these micronutrients? Is hormone replacement therapy something that helps these processes along? Or are there other things that can help the system

function better? Yeah, so a little bit I know about TBI. So I'm a faculty member at the Keurig Institute. So they do a lot of functional neurology work. So I'm doing the exercise physiology program for them, which is out now. But I've had a lot of interactions with a lot of neurologists. Dr. Schmo is one of the guys in Minnesota, is probably one of the top functional neurology guys for a lot of TBI stuff. And the little bit that

I know, it appears that the brain has this massive injury. Depending upon what areas of the brain get injured, they'll see all sorts of different effects. So not every 2D eye is the same as the next one. So they'll work to try to figure out, okay, what system

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

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

cycle back down and change their diet or maybe pull them off the hormones. Maybe they have to stay on. But I think we're doing a better job of looking at the body as a whole. What do we need to do to get this function back and not necessarily looking at just this one little area, kind of trying to treat everything as a whole. I almost can't go in the sun at all with anyone in this space without somebody being like it's a bind of a d and me like and like it's like it's like such like a mainstream thing now everyone knows about it but like what really is the difference in your mind between supplementing with d3 and going out and getting like actual exposure to sunlight yeah it's a good question and my limited understanding is i don't think they make it into the system right i don't

think they make it even if you could enterically coat it to get it past the stomach i don't think they get absorbed through the gut wall intact uh possibly i don't know um there's been some stuff with uh proteolytic enzymes that maybe help break down food and the theory is if you take them between meals they can maybe help uh increase those amount of enzymes that maybe help break down food and the theory is if you take them between meals they can maybe help uh increase those amount of enzymes that help the protein turnover and soft tissue there's some data on that what about like lipospheric or something yeah ous data possibly yeah there's all sorts of delivery mechanisms you can use to get it past but then even once you get it to the right system does the body just tear

it down for raw materials you know let's for example like if we go back to the beta alanine you could take a carnosine and what the body does is it will increase muscular levels of carnosine but how it does that is the carnosine it breaks it down into beta alanine and histamine and then basically reassembles it on the other side so it's the beta alanine that was the right limiter, and if you just give that, carcin levels go up. The other one they've tried for a long time is similarly related to your question is ATP. Right, well shit, your whole body runs on ATP. Well, you got low energy, well, stop drinking caffeine, bro, we'll just give you more ATP pills, right? And there is some formulations of ATP, but they don't appear to increase the ATP at a cellular level. It just

doesn't seem to make it through that whole process. Possibly, but the only way we've been so far for supplementation being able to get around that is by looking at intermediates, right? The most famous one is creatine monohydrate, right? So creatine then works as a donor to help increase that phosphate gain system, right? So that 10 seconds or less energy system. Beta alanine, again, is kind of in the middle. They've tried pretty much every other intermediate known to man. Not really that great. Pyruvate was a big deal for a while. Ribose was a big deal for a while. I really want someone to create a lactate supplement, like for like legitimate, like a lactate supplement. Cause I think that will actually make it through the gut. And I think that'll actually be used as a fuel. Do you remember the EAS? Everyone always laughs at me every time

I say that. So someone's going to do it. I know someone's going to do it. I've had a chemist run the PKA. I've had everything done on it. The only other rate limiter is Cytosport, if you're listening. They own the patent on one version of it. But they use it, yeah, of lactate. But they use it in such small amounts, it probably doesn't have an effect. It has a horrible PR agent because people think lactate you know makes them sore

and all these other horrible things it's just not true but i think as a support supplement it in theory it should work really well george brooks's lab uses lactate infusions by iv to get back to posts like tbi issues to use that as an alternate fuel for the brain we know that muscle will prefer lactate cardiac will prefer lactate, cardiac will prefer lactate, because you can give lactate independent of the pH changes, independent of driving the acid level down. There is some data on garlic with immune system. So garlic is really good antibacterial, antiviral. And a tip is take the garlic and cut it in very, very small pieces and then leave it sit for about 10 to 15 minutes. The compound you want, the anisone that you mentioned, has to react with

oxygen in order to be formed on the garlic. So you have to cut it, leave it sit exposed to air for about 10 to 15 minutes and then consume it. It keeps everyone away from you too. So if you're sick, it works great for that. So your immune system is always constantly, we basically have kind of bacteria and viral, which are kind of two different camps. And your body's always fighting these things off. It's just kind of boosting that system a little bit, right? So for example, the classic thing is if you get sick, your immune system goes kind of what people consider down, but some parts of your immune system go up, right? So if you have, looking at white blood cells and things like that, your immune system feels down, but some parts of your immune system go up. So if you have looking at white blood cells and things like that,

your immune system feels down, but your body is upregulating all these other compounds to try to clear out the quote-unquote invader. So other things that can help facilitate that process. Looking at things that are internal to that. So what does your body use? You have eutepion.

There's so many. A main one that's used in a lot of those processes. And to get back to your question about it, I mean, as a supplement. How do? Yeah. I was just getting back to it as a supplement. I know another. Again, it doesn't appear to make it through the gut.

And there's some other stuff where you can put it in, like you were saying, a different form, liposomal form. But data on that, what I've seen is this kind of mixed. And I've tried it and like my hrv scores and everything else would tend to go up but then when i went off of it it went back down again so i in my head i'm thinking okay i'm kind of just placing this band-aid on it and it kind of helps for a period of time but how can i upregulate the more basic functions of that so that my overall function is higher and not try to put

all these little band-aids on everything. I've only had people use a liposomal form in periods of super high stress when we're purposely just beating the crap out of them and overtraining them or if they have a really bad travel schedule. But even then I've only used that for short periods of time um recently i've had better luck with athletes doing that with like uh reishi mushroom extract um again it's completely anecdotal but reishi has got some pretty impressive data in humans um so i've stopped using glutathione and used that about one or two weeks uh beforehand and then through the period of their enticed training and the way our chapter is, I like to kind of

cycle that, but it'll be kind of quiet. And that seems to help say a little bit better. And if you look for a good reishi, it's more expensive. And without, you could do an iodine starch test. So take iodine and if it turns black, it's probably not real reishi. And real reishi is very, very bitter.

So if you get real powdered reishi and it's not bitter, probably not legitimate because there's a study in Nature showing that. I get it. The vast majority of reishi supplements on the market are probably not legit. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's a good way too. The tinctures will still be a little bit bitter. That's tangentially related but they did a study on these people who had amazing memories

and lived super long and they donated their brain to science and when they dissected them they found a lot of tau tangles and other amyloid proteins that are associated with Alzheimer's. Those are all I had. What the hell is this? These are people

who had an amazing memory. They had no dementia that was reported. It's considered classic markers of Alzheimer's. And that is showing up all the time, is that the cause of it, right? Because again, you said they're associated, not necessarily causational. Yeah, in terms of the other, like you can do aluminum and other types of heavy metals and things like that, you know, what is the, I recently asked, I did a survey, a couple of buddies of mine do a lot of functional med stuff, And I'm like, hey, if someone believes they're toxic, what's the best test to do to even determine that, right? No one really has any good answers for that either. So what about Zinco Magnesium?

I went to, I was in Costa Rica with Dr. Ben House and Dr. Brian Walsh. And he gave a really great talk on detoxification protocol he has. And showing a lot of the literature showing that the testing, we don't really know the best testing forms, at least at a consumer level, but there's very good research to show that we're probably exposed to more toxins now than we ever have been before. The caveat also being that a lot of them are stored in fat tissue. So if you have someone who's not really releasing a lot of that fat tissue, right, so their calories are not low, they're not kind of actively dieting,

well, probably not really going to show up even if you ran a blood test or something like that. But now if you have someone doing a dieting protocol, so his analysis was that everyone he has that he has do more caloric restriction, he'll have them do some type of quote unquote detox in a very specific way because a lot of those compounds are probably just getting released at that point. So I'd say probably look at his stuff. He's done a lot more work on that than I have. But I would say he's the only person so far that kind of changed my mind on that because a lot of the other detox people I would hear, I'm like, well, what toxin is it?

Just toxins, man, the toxins. I'm like, I agree we probably live in a very toxic environment, but what is the data showing that that is a prevalent rate? Not that I'm like, this is something I really got a whole list of. I've been watching for a long time, and other ones that has been shown in the literature that most likely are present in environment, are present in tissue to a high degree. You mentioned a couple of times talking about mushrooms. Yeah.

I feel like the more I learn about mushrooms, it's almost like you can lump all the vegetables together and then mushrooms kind of their own category in this thing and they have like a really is there like a combination of mushrooms or certain types that people should be consuming regularly yeah so initially I never looked at it like I mentioned and then Mike Butts over at Together probably a year and a half ago started mentioning mushrooms that's different oh no yeah the really crazy

ones which is funny because at first when he mentioned it that's exactly what I was like wait I was trying to make this an other mushroom it'll be this little mushrooms really crazy ones um which is funny because at first when he mentioned that's exactly what i will be this little muckrums i'm like oh you mean the other kind oh okay like all things i'm like i go look at see what the research is and the research time especially with like rishi and some of those is like i mentioned pretty impressive it's it's harder because it it goes a little bit against the way that kind of western research is done right so western research is very heavily influenced by pharmaceutical we want x compound to target only

y receptor and we only want to target that one receptor but to make those type of combos is almost i'd say at this point virtually impossible because everything has some type of side effect. Where mushrooms have I think a lot of different systemic effects that are useful. Different types of mushrooms have probably different types of effects. I've talked to a few people who are at the booth here, Jeff Tilton,

who runs Dynamics. He's a super knowledgeable guy about mushrooms. I actually was going to do a mushroom supplement paste almost nine months ago now. And I had this to fire. I had everything down. And there was one study that showed that it was effective

on bugs. After talking to another expert, you can basically take what's called the fruit in body or the top portion of the mud trap, or you can kind of take what's called the root or the mycelium portion. And they have two very, very different properties. The fruiting body appears to have,

it gives you probably most of the effect, this mycelium portion, even though at this point, probably not nearly as much of an effect. But a lot of times what they'll do is they'll grow it on rice, and they'll grow the mycelium portion, but they'll call it a mushroom extract. Which, yeah, it's kind of true. It came from a mushroom and that type of thing.

So I think the sourcing makes a huge difference. And then different types of mushrooms appear to have different types of effects. My favorite ones I like, reishi is probably my favorite. Chaga's pretty good. Chaga is actually a canker that grows on birch trees and then there's some interesting stuff on cordyceps it's not

super effective as people hear you may have heard back in the 20 some years ago like cordyceps mushroom was like the supposed secret russian herb whatever a lot about the other studies where people were claiming it that positive for endurance. Yeah. The steps to

increase their overall edge and use. Right. I hacked. Yeah. The actual cordyceps that comes off the caterpillar is just ungodly expensive. I agree for it. But they do have a subtype called cordyceps militaris.

That's a tough study showing that they have positive effects. Again, like all most supplements, even when you say positive effects, you're still talking in like the single-digit percentage. But I think even just adding more mushrooms to people's diets is probably an area I think I overlooked for a period of time. And we know like the baby brood counts there's a yeah very good response to those all the different components that go into it and initially kind of got thrown out by nutritionists just like ah there's almost no

calories in and there's a much in them yeah right if you look at like the vitamin and mineral profile it's not super impressive but the more we look at the different compounds like i mentioned seeing as another one we're finding more and more beneficial effects from that pressure yeah there's been some studies potentially, I haven't seen that one but I'm not really surprised

it's not dim, like that's not like vegetables but it's something my brother, the first time he ever went to take beta-alanine he bought it and it was most likely he couldn't figure out how much to take they're like there was a talc mice we want to sleep here we're being a one grand he'd be over for a cool it's like one gram what other supplement has a one gram scoop of like fuck nothing right and everything has like a five gram at like a minimum and uh and so he just yeah i'm just like

a you know a teaspoon or a tablespoon spoon like a like a kitchen spoon like he fucking eats soup with and just goes oh yeah i think he said two of them one two he probably he probably had 20 my guess is he's uh you know because the more i keep studying stuff the more runs it would like you're like oh man i don't i don't even know if i knew anything you know because one study agrees, one disagrees. And then when he's laying on this isolate, his whole body was on fire. And he had not to kind of know what to do, be down or tell him that he was doing research on broccoli. This was really unsexy and not that novel either. You know, I mean, it's hard to do, I think, more of the basic research. I think a way to get around it, maybe doing genetics research on top of like nutrigenomics research.

That's a little bit more sexy and probably an easier sell also. But in terms of like basic research, I don't think there's as much going in as there probably should be. And then also on the psychological side, which is not where I work a lot, but how do we take the things that we know are beneficial and get people to eat more of them, right? Eat more vegetables, eat other things that we know are beneficial. That's a whole separate subtopic itself. And then what you add is like, you've had a shot and cookie before,

broccoli alone, all the different potential synergies are added at the third. Might as well eat it. You as well, we'll eat broccoli alone, eat deflated vegetables, eat different things with you. We know that eating some fat may help some

things with absorption may not help others same deal cookies may help some things may hurt others or whatever you know so

took some more and all those differences later which is why I described her list too it just kept getting worse

the last thing related on that I had to hold a microagutrient in front of like a cigarette house Julia Rucklidge did some really

interesting research where she took New Zealand Where they had the big earthquake And then a couple years ago when they had The North Dakota as a big flood They actually had researchers who went out In rowboats

And separated the population And gave half the population Micronutrient multivitamin That was already mixed and everything So super high amounts of micronutrients and everything and gave the placebo to the other group. I did this after the earthquake also. Their thought being, okay, here's a massive stressor

that's applying to everybody in this area. Do people who get more micronutrients do they actually do better than the group who did it? And they've done, I think, like two or three studies now and showed that the micronutrient does better. And that's not what you would expect if you looked at the studies done on the single ingredients in it. So if you pull out the single ingredients and only look at like the vitamin E study or just the vitamin D study or other ones, they're not all super positive. So I hope that research is getting to the point where we're trying to take all these things together and look at the effects instead of trying to take this one little thing out and looking for the single factor thing of what it's affecting.

And that's getting us closer back to your question about, you know, all the different compounds that are actually in food. So it's getting us that next step closer to trying to figure that out instead of going this uber uber reductionist route down the rabbit hole of the next single compound that interacts the only one receptor in the subpopulation of the subpopulation what does b12 even really do like why do you yeah and i would add to that if people ask all the time should i take a multivitamin i usually tell them yes data came out a couple years ago it says oh multivitamins are horrible it's like yeah not really you know you're really not going to go so far over the edge you're going to have any effects if anything it's probably going to be a little bit better and shore up

your own diet doesn't appear to be a lot of big negative effects with it uh last thing on that too charlie popper is presenting some stuff he's at harvard showing that in his patients he's a psychologist or psychiatrist i believe he'll start giving them a multinutrient blend first before he even touches any other types of meds. He said a lot of times for depression and even some pretty heavy mental illnesses, he doesn't even use any other pharmaceuticals very rarely anymore. And he found just by giving him super high doses of a combined formula that his use of pharmaceutical drugs

has gone down pretty dramatically. So that, even in a different realm, again, it's a diseased population, but that more data just suggests that looking at the whole first, seeing how far we can get with that, and then it's like, it's not advertised.

It's incredible. Yeah, thank you guys for having me. I really appreciate it. This has been fun. I am Anders Varner at Anders Varner, and we are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. And make sure you get over to ArateLab.com. That is the signature program inside rapid health optimization, where you can go and experience all the lab lifestyle performance testing analysis and coaching to help you optimize your health and performance. And you can access all of that over at aretelab.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.