Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 294: Can you Trust Supplements? Can alcohol be healthy? Stress and Body Comp + More!

Episode Date: June 6, 2023

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Hey, everybody, welcome in to another episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. I'm your host, Danny Matrenga. And in today's Q&A episode, we will be discussing managing micronutrition, vitamins and minerals, how to optimize this with both diet and supplementation, what you need to keep in mind for staying strong during pregnancy, how to deal with stress while pursuing a fitness goal, specifically a physique-focused fitness goal, can alcohol fit into your deficit or not, and what you need to really look for when purchasing supplements, be it from manufacturers, be it for individual ingredients, what to do to make sure that you're only buying the best. All right, folks, I want you to go ahead

and enjoy today's episode, all of which is made possible thanks to people just like you who have taken the time to go out of their way to leave an amazing written review for the podcast, be that on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. It makes a huge difference when you guys leave reviews to the point that I want to reward those of you who are doing this, who are going out of your way to leave reviews. So I want to share two reviews that came recently. The first review comes from Lara Tika and the review is, I love this podcast because it's short, educative, and to the point. Very good job, information, and lots of tips. Excellent, Danny. So five-star reviews, short little blurbs like that make a huge difference. Help people find the podcast. Another review from nurseello37. Love this podcast and Danny, always learning something new and never bored. Thank you very much to both of you. It can be short. It can be sweet like that.

And I'm going to be sending each of those two reviewers a product from Elementy. All you need to do is send me an email. The cool thing, guys, is this takes about the same amount of time as it does to freaking open your podcast app in the first place. So if at any point during the episode today, you can leave a review, that would be awesome. And let's go ahead and get into the episode. This podcast has some awesome partners. And one of my favorite, of course, is Legion Athletics. Legion is my go to supplement manufacturer for what I like to call my big rock supplements. This would be my protein powder, my pre-training formula, my post-training formula and creatine, and my kind

of ancillary vitamins and micronutrient protection. So why do I like Legion so much? What sets them apart? It's quite simple. Legion uses all natural ingredients. All the formulas include natural coloring and natural sweeteners, no artificial sweeteners, just stevia. And every single formulation, be it a pre-workout or a vitamin contains clinically effective dosages of ingredients shown to work in humans in clinical research supported by robust trials. No filler, just legit ingredients in each and every formulation proven to work. The whey protein isolate is so light. It's fantastic. It mixes in water. It tastes amazing. And I drink it every day, even as somebody who's lactose intolerant. That's just how high quality

this whey protein is. And it's sourced from Irish dairy cows that are raised well, eat their natural diet and packaged in climate friendly packaging. I love their plant protein too. For those of you who like something that's a little on the thicker side and you aren't a fan of animal products. Also, I love Legion's pre-workout, but specifically the pre-workout that does not contain caffeine. That would be their stim free pulse. I'm a huge, huge fan of beta alanine and L-citrulline, but I don't like

taking in wildly high amounts of caffeine. So if you are somebody who likes pre-workout with caffeine, you can try Pulse. Or if you like it without caffeine because you maybe want to enjoy your morning coffee or monitor your caffeine consumption, try the Pulse Stim Free. My favorite flavors there for sure are the New Grape and the amazing, amazing Tropical Punch. As for my creatine, I get that from Legion's Recharge, five grams each and every day. I take it on the days I train as well as the days I do not because Recharge also contains L-carnitine, which can help with promoting muscle recovery and decreasing soreness, as well as some ingredients to help with creatine utilization. And of course, my favorite supplements for my ancillary micronutrient health

are Legion's Multivitamin and Legion's Greens Powder. Not only do these two products contain a ton of high quality vitamins and minerals, they also contain unique adaptogens like KSM-66 ashwagandha and reishi mushroom, which I like to take each and every day to promote my health. If you want to cover all your bases with a high quality protein, creatine post-workout or the ancillary micronutrient health stuff like greens, powders, and multivitamin, I encourage you to go over to legionathletics.com and check out using the promo code Danny. That'll save you 20% on your first order and you'll rack up points that you can use the same way as cash every time you use the code and you'll also be

supporting the show. Okay, first question comes from Shano Fitness. And the question is, why did you choose Legion over other supplements and products? So for those of you who aren't aware, Legion is one of the kind of flagship sponsors of the show. They're a brand that I have been consuming for seven or eight years now, four to five years as a purchaser slash consumer, and the last three to four years as a sponsored athlete. Now I'll jump right out in front and say, I think Legion makes a fabulous product. I think they make a number of high quality individual supplements that rival anything you're going to find on the market, specifically the pre-workout, the whey protein, the vitamin

products. Now, are they the only supplement manufacturer that makes good products? Absolutely not. There are a number of high quality supplement manufacturers. And so that's really what helped me make the choice. I just want to partner with a brand that does a very good job making the base level supplements I take the most, which are protein, creatine, pre-workout, greens, powders, vitamins. I don't take a ton of additional stuff beyond those bases. You guys know I take a probiotic from seed, electrolytes from LMNT. Occasionally, I will take zinc and magnesium in their individual formulations. Now that Legion is going to be offering those, I would take them from Legion, but I've used other brands like Momentus and

Pure Encapsulations because over a 10-year career in the fitness industry, I have purchased many supplements from not-so-great manufacturers. These are companies for whom profit margins are more important than purity, that saving money is more important than potency. And when it comes to supplements, you want transparency, purity, and potency. So what that actually means is this. Transparency is what's on the label verified to be on the label by a third party. Has the product been tested by a third party? So you have third party verification, be that through lab testing. You also have lab entities such as Labdoor, which will kind of sporadically test products that make it to retail, which I think

is cool. You should see batch numbers with supplementation that denote when this batch was produced, when it was tested. If you're not seeing that, that's red flag number one when considering a supplement brand. Are you getting real transparency? And if you don't know how to find all that, folks, there's actually a much simpler way to determine whether or not a supplement company is being transparent. And I want to apologize early in the episode for the way my voice sounds. I am coming back from a pretty intense bout of upper respiratory virus. I don't know if it was RSV or whatever the heck it is that's going around, but an interesting segue from supplementation into just generally taking better care of yourself. This might mean taking supplements,

especially for immune boosting, if there even is such a thing, but holy smokes, guys, it's going around. I was sick all through Memorial Day weekend. Do what you can to take care of yourself. Anyway, a quick hack for determining the, let's call it intentions of a supplement company as it pertains to transparency is to look at the back of their pre-workout, their vitamin, anything that contains a blend of multiple different compounds and see if they actually outline how many grams or milligrams or micrograms of each sub component are actually in the product or do they use proprietary blends? You will see this a lot in pre-workout. The energy and focus blend, five grams with a double asterisk

next to it. And then underneath that double asterisk is a list. Oh, a beta alanine, L-citrulline, caffeine, all the stuff you want to see in a pre-workout, but they used a five gram blend. What that means is all of those ingredients were mixed. They put five grams of the mix in and you get a little bit of each. That's known as pixie dusting. And if you've ever eaten trail mix, you're probably familiar with pixie dusting. You will find that the peanuts and raisins, which are typically slightly less expensive than the cashews and the M&Ms, are the bulk of the trail mix. Now, depending on the trail mix you eat, you might have different ingredients, but suppliers have prices and manufacturers have margins. So they will try to get as much of the

low-cost product in there and really skimp on the high-cost product. Proprietary blends proprietary blends allow supplement companies to take advantage of the same thing. They allow companies to say that they have ingredients on the label that are in fact in the product, but they don't have to disclose the dose, which takes me to the second thing you need to look for when shopping for supplements after transparency. And that's potency. Potency means, am I actually getting enough of the ingredient to actually elicit the response that I want in the body? I'll use L-citrulline, for example. You will typically find L-citrulline included in pre-workouts in the dosage of about three to six grams. That's a dosage that's probably going to work for most people at encouraging vasodilation and performance enhancement, but it's expensive.

So you might see some pre-workouts that only have one gram, and that's not really going to be enough to help anybody because it's not over the dosage that is considered to be clinically significant. So let's give you an example of something like a poison. If you were to take an apple and you were to eat an apple and you were to eat all the seeds, there's a marginal amount of arsenic in those seeds. However, you need to eat a certain number of apple seeds, more than that are in probably one apple, to achieve a dosage of arsenic that would be quote-unquote effective enough to knock you off, to kill you, right? So the dose makes the poison is probably something you've actually heard before. And the

same is true, the dose makes the potency. If you don't get enough, it's not going to work. So you want to make sure that the manufacturer of your supplements has copy on the website. It could be advertising, marketing copy that's designed to entice you to buy it, but there should be some written material outlining the selection criterion for the dosages, and there should be some scientific literature attached outlining why we chose this dose and transparent labeling that shows we have it. The last and probably most important thing at the base level is purity. Are you actually getting the shit that's on the label? This is incredibly common in the supplement industry and people are like shocked

to find out. But every year, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of supplements are tested and more than half of them come back with something in the product that isn't even on the label. Okay. We actually see this a lot. Supplement companies using filler, using crap that doesn't really even matter, doesn't even help, maybe could even be harmful. You know, we've seen some particularly crazy, crazy, crazy stuff. The primary of which being the inclusion of amphetamines in pre-workout, or the inclusion of beta-2 agonists in fat burners. We've seen brands sneak crazy stuff into products.

Products that are designed to increase energy should have energy enhancing agents that are safe for consumption, not stuff that works well and is cheaper than sourcing quality caffeine. So guys, look for third-party testing, look for quality written material on this manufacturer's sales pages,

look for quality reviews from other purchasers. And if you ever have questions, feel free to shoot me a DM, ask me via Instagram, via the question box. I miss a lot of them, but if I find one and I think I can help you out, I'm happy to do that. You got to make smart decisions about what you put in your body with food. And supplements are a little bit more dubious than I think a lot of quote unquote fitness influencers want you to know because they make a good percentage of their income from partnering with brands. And I respect that.

I think that's a fine way to earn your money. You're connecting people with brands that you like, but hopefully as a fitness influencer and as somebody who has influence, we're doing a better job of connecting our brand and our audience with products that are legit, that are no bullshit. Now, you'll always get more money from companies who have better, let's call it profitability. And a lot of the ways to have high profitability is to do the shit that I just said you want to watch out for. So the bigger the company, the bigger the paycheck for the people out there who are looking to acquire influence and maybe get brand partnerships. Think about your integrity. Think about aligning yourself with brands that make a quality product

first and foremost. And I don't think there's a paycheck out there that could make me... And I don't think there's a paycheck out there that could make me, you know, you know, I just recently in full transparency, redid a contract with Legion to work with them for one more year. And in that negotiation process, my number one thing is I want you guys to continue to help me connect my audience with quality product. And I bring that product to the studio, to my facility where we have physical therapy, strength and conditioning, personal training to hundreds of thousands of listeners on the podcast, hundreds of thousands of followers on social. So if you guys make a shitty product, it's going to

look really bad on me. And I know they're not going to make a shitty product. And that's really important. So look for brands you trust, find four or five of them, try to source your stuff from there and really don't pay too much attention to the noise in the marketing because it's usually just that noise in marketing. Okay. Next question. That question, by the way, was from Shanno Fitness. This question is from Lindsay B. Crank.

And the question is, is alcohol still bad if it fits into your deficit and you've hit your daily macros? So the short answer is yes. Any amount of alcohol is bad for you. Period. End of story. Full stop. That could be the end of the question. Alcohol works in the brain similar to the way poison works in the brain, in that as you build up a critical mass of alcohol, you begin to feel a state of delirium and a state of oftentimes euphoria, a reduction of inhibitions. That typical feeling of being tipsy and drunk is actually a reaction to the toxicity of alcohol.

And for most people, a little bit of alcohol allows you to feel this feeling, and you can do it across the lifespan with minimal health impact. However, after just one drink, impact. However, after just one drink, we do see implications and let's call them elevations in markers that would be a clear indicator of a reduction in health status. You drink, we see huge reduction in sleep quality. You drink, we see increases in inflammation. You drink, we see decreases in athletic performance. You do these things long-term, chronically, we see a correlation to the development of multiple different kinds of cancer, to liver problems, to skin problems, to sleep problems, to heart problems. What's going on, guys? Taking a break from this episode to tell you a little bit about my coaching company, Core Coaching Method. More specifically, our app-based training. We

partnered with Train Heroic to bring app-based training to you using the best technology and best user interface possible. You can join either my Home Heroes team, or you can train from home with bands and dumbbells, or Elite Physique, which is a female bodybuilding-focused program where you can train at the gym with equipments designed specifically to help you develop strength as well as the glutes, hamstrings, quads, and back. I have more teams coming planned for a variety of different fitness levels. But what's cool about this is when you join these programs, you get programming that's updated every single week, the sets to do, the reps to do, exercise tutorials filmed by me with me and my team. So you'll get my exact coaching expertise as to how to perform the

movement, whether you're training at home or you're training in the gym. And again, these teams are somewhat specific. So you'll find other members of those communities looking to pursue similar goals at similar fitness levels. You can chat, ask questions, upload form for form review, ask for substitutions. It's a really cool training community and you can try it completely free for seven days. Just click the link in the podcast description below. Can't wait to see you in the core coaching collective, my app-based training community. Back to the show. So does being in a calorie deficit and does maintaining a quality of life that would be aligned with, let's say, a physically fit way of living, does hitting macros and making sure you're

getting enough protein, carbs, and fats have the potential to offset the, let's call it, the denigrating effect of alcohol in the body? I think so. I think it does. But let's not get it twisted. The question is, is alcohol still bad for you? And the answer is alcohol is always bad for you. But in the aggregate, when you look at everything, sometimes you might be an exercise. If you are sicker than hell is bad for you. It's probably going to be a stress that you can't recover from, and it might make you feel sicker longer, right? Eating a ton of broccoli if you have IBS can be bad for you. So there are even like entirely healthy things that in context can have a negative effect. Alcohol is one of those things though, that I think is particularly hard to balance because it doesn't take much for the negative

health implications to sneak in. And the healthier you want to be, the more you're concerned with your body composition. And I'm going to assume you are because you're saying, I want to be in a deficit. I want to hit my macros. That's somebody who's trying to change their physique. Alcohol's indirect effects on sleep alone would make me want to pull it out entirely if I had any goal to look or perform better. Just not worth it. Too many other potential alternatives for unwinding, relaxing, reducing inhibitions. Okay. I will use cannabis as an example. It does not have the same negative effects. There are multiple ways to get it into the body. There are multiple ways to enjoy it. Could it lead to eating more food? The quote unquote munchies? Yes, alcohol does this too, but there doesn't seem to be as clear a line between the consumption of

cannabis and the ravaging effects on your sleep and the development of cancers long-term. And a lot of people drink a lot. Like Canada just released some new guidelines that said like, hey, look, seven drinks a week is like danger zone. That's a drink a night. A lot of the people I work with have at least one drink a night. And these are people who are paying good money to work with a health and fitness coach to take their physique to the next level. And they're able to do some serious damage in the physique department. They're able to make some real progress even while drinking. Because if we're talking specifically about body composition, drinking because if we're talking specifically about body composition, the caloric weight of alcohol can be offset with good dieting, but you can't offset the negative impact on sleep performance and the brain. So it's for that reason, I would implore you that if you are trying to be

healthy and if you can find an alternative for cannabis that allows you to quote unquote have balance, whatever that means, I drop alcohol. Almost every client who I've gotten to try a dry month has reduced their intake for a considerable amount of time because you just feel better. Okay. Question from Rosie2593. When dealing with stressful times, how should one adjust their body recomp goals? So let's include body recomp, which is the loss of body fat and the accumulation of small amounts of muscle, as well as fat loss and muscle growth, which exists kind of on opposite ends of the continuum. If you want to recomp, usually eat around maintenance, getting a ton

of protein. If you want to cut, you eat in a deficit with a good amount of protein. And if you want to gain tissue, you eat in a surplus of calories with a lot of carbs and protein. How does stress affect each one of these? Well, the primary way stress affects these is through the elevation of the allostatic load. When you're training, that's a stressor. When you're working, that's a stressor. When you're in school, that's a stressor. As a parent, that's a stressor. A relationship is a stressor. Those stressors all go into one giant bucket. We call that bucket the allostatic load, the total and cumulative volume of stress that you face day to day, be it biological, psychological,

or sociological stress. Now, we could call that the biopsychosocial model of stress, which would, if we are talking specifically about quote unquote stressful times, probably be things that I'm assuming are psychological and sociological, but your training, for example, is a biological stress. So how do we manage our biological outcomes, our leanness, our composition, when our psychological and sociological stress are high? Well, we need to be sure that we are having inputs that can offset our stress. That can be getting the right amount of sleep, making time for mindfulness, getting outside, going on walks, doing zone two cardio to promote better cardiovascular response, flushing of metabolites to increase our ability to buffer through stress hormones and catecholamines.

Lots of small things you can do. But perhaps the biggest is, and you said it in your question, adjust your goals. If you are extremely stressed, adjusting your goals makes a lot of sense. Maybe you have a 10 to 30% reduction in top-end output on your goals. You're going to be okay with getting there 30% slower or getting 30% less of the outcome because you have a kid running around, a spouse who's sick, you're doing a master's program on your computer. I work with clients like this all the time who have so much on their plate. They're wonderfully productive. They're incredibly thoughtful. They do the best they can, but they just got too much going on. And when you have clients like this,

it's really difficult to just say, hey, just keep working harder because that's not really realistic. And what happens when you do that is you just stack more and more stress and you can eventually lead to burnout. You eventually could lead to some kind of overtraining, more likely through under-recovering. But you understand what I'm saying here, folks. You do not want to make the mistake of pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing to the point where you push a little too far and you end up hurting yourself. This happens a lot and it sucks. And that can be hurting yourself in the gym. It can be, you know, there's, it doesn't necessarily, it's not as simple as like, oh, I got too stressed and then I got injured and then I got back to it.

Absolutely not. You can overdo it in a lot of different ways. And I think the most important thing is to just find a way to monitor that stress, pay attention to it, adjust as you go, do what you can to pivot when shit gets hard. And don't be surprised if going a little slower and not quitting actually gets you there faster than trying to jam through a high period of stress. Work with your body, pay attention, don't be afraid to adjust. Okay. Question from Randijo Glacier. And the question is, most important things for staying strong and healthy during pregnancy. So I think we'll keep this simple in that, you know, you want to stay active, as active as you can, and you should work with your physician throughout your pregnancy to make sure that you're selecting an activity profile and type that works for the trajectory of your

pregnancy. For most people, you should be able to stay active the entire time. You want to be as lean as you reasonably can be while still gaining weight at the, you know, kind of required, if you will, rate of weight gain for pregnancy. If you gain too much body fat, that can be a problem in that increases in body fat during pregnancy are correlated with the development of gestational diabetes in the child. So make sure that you do that, right? Make sure that you take very close care of monitoring your exercise. Make sure you're eating a lot of healthy foods, particularly a good amount of protein and the right amount of calories.

Make sure that you're getting your sleep and work closely with your physician to make sure you're not overdoing it. I think that a lot of people overcomplicate things. I think you could consider taking in certain food types, engaging in supplementation with things like prenatal vitamins, but it really does come down to, hey, get the sleep, get the exercise, reduce the stress. Okay, final question comes from Vishak Hatyadjiji, and the question is, how do you manage micronutrition with supplements? So first, let's define the term micronutrition. You guys have almost assuredly heard me mention macros on the podcast dozens and dozens and

dozens of times. And macros and macronutrients are large molecules in the body. They are large nutrients in the body, meaning they are at a molecular level, substantially larger than things like vitamins and minerals, which are quote unquote micronutrients. You need the right amount of micronutrients and macronutrients to thrive, which means you need the right amount of protein, carbs, and fats, and the right amount of vitamins, minerals, plant compounds to feel good. So check it out. This is what I want you to think about it. You get a lot of the right micronutrition from selecting the right forms of macronutrition. If you eat the right sources of protein, you eat the right sources of fruits and vegetables,

you eat the right sources of whole grain, minimally processed carbohydrate, You eat the right sources of whole grain, minimally processed carbohydrate. You get your fat from relatively good sources. You're going to hit a lot of your micronutrient targets, vitamin A, B, C, D, all of the different minerals that one might need. You'll get a huge swath of those micronutrients from eating a healthy and nutritious diet. But you might have some holes. Common deficiencies are things like vitamin D, which is typically got from the sun, zinc, magnesium, right? These are

very typical things to be deficient in even when eating a relatively well-rounded diet. So you can manage that with supplementation. And we talked about that in the first question, selecting for single and individual ingredients that you believe there might be a deficiency in, whether that be from testing signs on your body or just generally making the inference of like, Hey, I don't eat any foods that contain zinc. So I'm probably zinc deficient. So I'm going to supplement with zinc. That can be a great way to kind of fill the holes, a high quality multivitamin like Legion's triumph that contains a good amount of all of the minerals as well as the vitamins from potent and pure sources, simply taking a serving of that a day

can pretty much eradicate any likelihood of a deficiency. Occasionally making a point to rotate food groups in and out so you get greater exposure to different things can be a really powerful tool for this too. But I think the best way to support micronutrition is through good, high quality food, followed by high quality multivitamin and single ingredient supplementation. All right, folks, that does it for today's episode. Thank you for bearing with me. I've really struggled a lot with this upper respiratory issue. So getting back on my feet feels so nice and getting back into the studio and recording feels so nice. And I have a lot of fun things planned for us as we get closer

and closer to the, what I just can't believe is the release of episode 300. We've really been going, we've done more than 300 episodes, but 300 individual, you know, non-interview style episodes. Just so cool to have each and every one of you with me for this ride. If you haven't yet share this, leave a rating and review. Let's get as many people as fit, healthy, and in shape as possible. And I will catch you on the next one. you