Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 115 - Charles Brooke

Episode Date: September 19, 2018

Charles Brooke used to train with the team at the old old ST. He currently works at the UC Davis Hess Laboratory where they study microbial systems and how they affect and respond to environmental changes. He obtained his BS in Microbiology and his MS in Biological Science at California State University, Chico. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

my daughter's 11 uh quinn uh she just had her 11th birthday not too long ago kids have been back in school and so everything's been everything's been good i've been cooking up breakfast for these guys every morning um it's funny you know like at first i was like maybe they're gonna be resistant to it because they got their own routine where they were just grabbing you know cereal or a piece of toast with honey on it or whatever. And I was like, this just ain't cutting. This ain't working. So I started cooking for them and, um, they not only love it, but they, they helped me

cook. Nice. Yeah. So it's great. Yeah. They, they helped me, uh, scramble the eggs and they help, you know, they, they help with whatever they can help with. So my son loves to cook bacon.

He's a big bacon fan. That's what's up. I mean, that's going to stick with him for the rest of his life. So my daughter just found this spice cabinet. That's her favorite thing is to pull all the spices out of the spice cabinet and just. My son, when he was about your daughter's age,

you said your daughter was like 11 months. Yeah. My son used to do what we called the perimeter walk and he did it every morning. And he did it as this like a apartment complex duplex thing that we were living in Davis when he first moved to the area. He couldn't walk, but he could shuffle along. He could shuffle his way along the wall. And so he'd shuffle his way along the wall and he'd walk in this kind of like perimeter. He'd walk in this kind of circle and he would always pass by our television.

And then we passed by our television, all my like video games, all my DVDs and stuff were in the bottom shelf. And he would just take them out and just boom, right behind his head. Boom, right behind his head. Boom, right behind his head. Boom, right. And then he would walk to the other side. He shuffled his way around the other side and he'd pick them back up and he'd toss them

the other way. He did it every morning and so after a while like my dvds my video games they're all like smashed and the covers were all jacked up and everything i was just like there's no point even having these covers anymore so i got rid of those and all my games were scratched anytime you try to play a game and get stuck midway that was the worst every single time he's just frozen there the worst now it's just obsolete. Now everything's on the gaming cloud. You just play your fucking games

and download them. Dude, are you smart enough to know about that stuff or no? That's totally out of your pay... Can you set up my iPhone cloud thing? Is that off your pay grade? I could probably set up... So I did work for Apple for a little bit. So I could probably set up your iPhone, but I don't fucking want to.

It's not your. I don't know what's on your iPhone. It's not your forte. No. Yeah. Not anymore. I just keep it to microorganisms. They're much easier.

So I ran into Charles at Phil's Coffee, and we've known each other for a little while, or he's known me. I didn't even kind of realize he was training at the gym until he told me he was training at the gym. But I think you were training on some different hours or something like that, super training back in the day. Yeah, well, so from Midtown and then West Sac, usually pop in with Tyler Shelgren. Right. So when the Big Sac strongman Tyler Shelgren was in here training. Big Sac. Big Sac. You like saying that don't you? Team Big Sac. I ain't got to represent. I owe those guys a lot. They got me into this shit. Yeah.

But yeah, I still hit up with him every once in a while. He's a big boy. He is a big boy. So you were doing some strongman training? Yes. Yeah, definitely. We originally started training out of a guy named Fred Larson's house up in Galt. But before that, I was just doing absolutely nothing. Literally nothing. I mean, playing video games on my couch. What got you intrigued about strongman?

Tyler Shelgren sent me a text message one day. He just said you're no it was his birthday it was like his 20th birthday or something he was like dude you want you want to come hang out like sure he's like i'm right across town and this time so he uh we grew up in marysville um and he was i was living in gulf and he was training in gulf i'm like why are you in fucking town uh he's like yeah just come over and i i got there trained strongman once and i was like holy shit like this is it like this i can do this right so uh pretty much after everything after that's pretty much history that set me up how'd you make time for that were you at the time were you going to school to be uh you're a microbiologist that correct right now time for that? Were you, at the time, were you going to school to be a, you're a microbiologist,

is that correct? Right, now I'm a microbiologist. So, at the time, I started school studying audio engineering. And,

Sounds similar, yeah. Right, right. So, to do this kind of stuff, you know, record music,

stuff like that. There you go. And then about a year into it, Watch out over there, Andrew. Yeah. I got a degree um and i know how to use it now um so uh about a year into it economy took a real dump um

and so during the day i was working construction uh out of sacramento and they were down to a skeleton crew they had no room for any extra guys. So I was remodeling houses, trying to pick up everything I could to live. And then I started actually, so when I started working at Apple, things were a little bit more steady. And then I needed something to kind of fill my time. What'd you do for Apple? So I was an iPhone engineer.

So I used to fix iPhones and pads and pods and all that kind of stuff. It's nice because I can fix my phone for like $10. And then where did you go to school? Did you go to school at UC Davis? No. So originally I bounced around a bunch of community colleges. The Los Rios Community College District. So ARC, CRC, Sac City. And then went to Butte College and then Chico State and then did my undergrad and graduate degree in Chico State and then came to Davis to manage this lab. Were you always a good student?

No. Oh, goodness gracious, no. So after that first year, I crushed it. Like I was super good, but also the classes were amazingly easy. And then I took like some accounting courses and just bombed out hard. I took a weight. So I took a strength training class there and I was like, fuck it.

I'm not going. I bombed that too, which is hilarious. That's great. And then, you know, by the time I found strong man, it was like,

Oh man, like everyone I'm training with has their life together and I'm just here fucking tourist. Uh, so I started applying like the mindset of training to like, maybe I should just like work hard and get a degree and let's start pulling my head out of my ass. Uh, yeah, we show up on time. We work hard. Uh, the entire group gets stronger stronger take that concept into something else and right and so i didn't you know i didn't play sports when i was a kid um so it was the first time i had ever had anything like that you know you train with a group of guys who all have a

common goal they all have you know the stuff they're striving for professionally outside of uh you know training um and then you all eat together afterwards you bullshit you get, you know, training. Um, and then you all eat together afterwards, you bullshit, you get to, you know, a great group of guys. It's a team. And, uh, so learning how to train was like, I can apply this. I can literally apply this to anything. And from that point on, it was like, okay, well I'm going to do school. The competitive side of it too. You know, it's like, especially strong man, when you're training in that kind of environment you're like oh man like once you learn this form and technique then everything's competition but then when you look outside the gym you're like

oh yeah everything's competition outside the gym too whoops almost almost didn't realize that and before you know it a lot of times you're getting your ass kicked on a lot of things what was it like to be around people that would give you a pat on the back? I mean, you know, a lot of people go through a lot of their life. If they didn't really play a sport, they don't really get a pat on the back from other people. Maybe you got some from your parents or your uncle or whatever, grandfather or something like that. Congratulating on building something or doing something together. Right.

But a lot of times you don't really get that. And you get a lot of that when you're lifting, Hey man, nice. That was sick. And no one really cares about the actual weight. Yeah. They just care that they see improvement because last time they know you did two 75 and this time they saw you do two 95. Right. Um, it was actually, and that's, and that's, you know, where the mindset came. I mean, how it changed is cause I was, when I first started training strongman, I was about a buck 55, 160 pounds. mean, how it changed is, because I was, when I first started training strongmen, I was about a buck 55,

160 pounds. And, you know, and I was soft. I was working construction, but man, I was soft. Because I ate like fast food

like every day. Right. In and out? No. So in Sacramento. It's high quality. It's high quality fast food. I should have known better.

Yeah. Except for the cheese. I don't get the cheese. It has like a fucking gram of trans fats in it. So I just get it without the cheese. I should have known better. Except for the cheese. I don't get the cheese. It has like a fucking gram of trans fats in it. So I just get it without the cheese. I know, right? It's trans fatty acids.

You got to look at them. Fuck. Ruins the whole cheese. Well, the burger doesn't have any trans fats? No, not the burger. Did you study it? I just looked in the nutrition. Shit's available online.

Oh, there we go. I thought you put it in a microscope or something. No, no. I don't know how to. I mean, I guess you could So, um. I thought you put it in a microscope or something. No, no. I don't know how to, I mean, I guess you could, I could figure out how to analyze it. Light it on fire and

see how many seconds it takes to burn up or whatever. You could reverse analyze it. I could reverse analyze it. Like if it ended up

in a toilet, you can analyze it. Right? I don't know. Then your body would have absorbed it by then, I imagine. Tricky.

Got to be part of your body. That's a lot of math. In minus out, physics, you know, a closed system. Yeah, don't forget to carry the one. That's what everybody makes. Everybody makes their mistake. Get to carry that number and changes everything, right?

Right. Well, everyone's carrying the two now. I know. You got to hit the number two hard. How did you end up where you ended up now? Because now you're a professor, got to hit the number two hard. How did you, uh, how'd you end up, uh, where you at, where you ended up now? Cause now you're, you're a professor. Is that right? No, no. So, um, I'm a lab manager. So I manage the systems microbiology and natural products group at UC Davis. Um, we're in the animal science department. Um, so really it was just a combination of my

experience for undergraduate degree. So during my undergraduate degree, I was training with a group of guys. I got a new group of guys. When I moved to Chico, um, I had met up with a couple of guys who were interested in strongman, but never trained before. And those guys are like all fucking stronger than me now. So that's pissed me off a little bit. But, um, uh, there was a guy there who was running the, uh, so the Chico state meats laboratory. Um, that's where they teach kids how to cut meat and, you know, knock beef. So he mentioned what he's like, what would it take to do all, because you got to do pathogen testing on all your meat, make sure there's no contaminating microorganisms, stuff like that.

And he knew I was a microbiologist. Like, what would it take to do that? Like, I don't fucking know. We figured out though. So I spent like, I don't know, three months just like hanging out in his lab, trying to figure out what it would take. And then eventually it was like, oh, okay, well let's make this happen. Like, you don't, you can save a little money.

You don't have to send it out. We can do it in house, you know? And we just started rocking and rolling on it. And, but during that time it was like, if I'm going to learn about the process and do these, uh, figure out what the best way to do this, I'm going to need to be a part of, you know, what's going on here. So learn how to, uh, cut meat and, uh, butcher. Um, not as good as he is. He still does it. Um, but now he's a, so do you know how to like age the meat and all that stuff? Did you learn all those different things? Um, yeah did a little bit of aging, but other processing, like making bacon, smoking, stuff like that, for sure.

And then there was a meat scientist there who, it's just a fucking guy, he's a meat scientist. It's like a whole realm of. Well, where's he? Should have brought him with you. Where is this guy? I think he moved to Kansas. Oh, shit. But, yeah, you know, you'm with you. Where is this guy? I think he moved to Kansas. Oh, shit. But, yeah, you know, you would do experiments, you know, and you would test, you know, like if I wet age, you know, this, if I vacuum seal it and then age it or if I dry age it, you know, if I put this preservative on it or it's this sort of agent, acetic acid.

Aging is just basically dry, like hanging it in a certain temperature and then it grows mold on it. Is that correct? Right. So the general idea is that you're going to get a mold growth on it, preferably mold. You don't want bacteria growing there. And fungi are really good at producing enzymes that breaks it down. So they go through proteolysis and break down some fats and proteins and you get that more tender cut of meat. Oh, so it kind of softens it up. Right.

But you got to scrape the fungi before you do anything with it. Because it'll have a little bit of a twang to it probably. Yeah. Yeah. A little sour. I mean, it's making acetic acid when it's producing lactic acid, something like that. So this is how Charles and I got chatting at Phil's Coffee one day. We started kind of jumping right into a heavy conversation like this,

and we ended up kind of knee-deep talking about poop. We ended up talking quite a bit about poop. What other types of tests are you running in this lab? So we're mainly focused on animal nutrition, which I guess you can apply to most powerlifters. But we're really interested in the host-microbe interactions. So what does the microbe do for the host, and what does it reciprocate? So we're really interested in understanding, can we modulate the microbiome and make this animal more efficient? Can we make it gain more mass in a shorter amount of time?

Can we make it utilize its feed more efficiently to get bigger, have leaner meat, fatter meat? What's going on? How do we, how do we, can we even do it? But we have a couple of different systems in the lab. One is what we call the Roussitech, or the rumen simulation technique. So cattle are ruminants. So we can simulate that system in the lab. And really what that consists of is we go out to the, they have, you ever seen a fistulated cow?

No. So it's a cow with. I don't think so. It's got a little hole in it, on the side of it. And you can undo the plug and you can get inside its rumen. So you can suck fluid out of it. Get inside its stomach? Yeah.

Well, yeah. So the rumen is one compartment of the stomach. Is it a matter of the male or female that you guys study? Not generally. So they're mainly females. Okay. Just because. Well, what's going to happen to male beef?

It's going to become beef. Right. And it's in a short amount of beef? It's going to become beef. Right. And it's in a short amount of time, usually between 16, 18 months. So to get a research animal established, it's better to do a female like a dairy cow. Right. Because then you have that animal who's going to be there year after year. You make the investment to do the surgery of the animal and implant the small window in there. There you go.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's fucking crazy. So the inside of there, you can just kind of push that in, and we can extract rumen fluid out, take it to the lab, put it in our anaerobic digesters, and we can test different compounds. That is insane. It looks like there's a UFO landed on the side of that thing.

Right. I can't remember which documentary. I think it was the one where they did a research thing on corn and how it's a part of everything and feeding it to the cows and stuff. And they had a farmer literally just like an elbow-deep glove just kind of getting in there and pulling stuff out. Right. It looked awful. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't really, I hardly notice it anymore, honestly.

It just, that's the smell of our lab. But we've also, what we're doing. It smells wonderful. It smells like the gym. You know, what's really bad is, because we do do these types of studies with beef cattle as well. They don't have that. So the only way you're getting in there is through the mouth.

And that's a different game. You know, so you got a couple of guys, or in this case, a couple of gal. I've been working with a gal. She's a beast. You got to hold the head. There you go, yeah. You got to get a little deeper.

Usually what you got to do is you got to kind of push your hand. There's a mat of like fiber that sits in the, on the fluid. You got to go up underneath and then grab some of the fiber from underneath. It's a really wild thing. So explain to me why there's a hole inside of the cow again. Well, so A for- Or on the side of the cow, right? So for A, for research purposes, right? So we can, we can investigate the microbiome of the rumen fluid, but cows are really dependent on their microbiome.

That's where they get 60%, 70% of their energy is from the microorganism producing like short-chain fatty acids by breaking down fiber. So if an animal is sick and their microbiome is unstable or has undergone some sort of, maybe they had antibiotics and it kind of off-kiltered their microbiome, you can take rumen fluid from that cow and put it into a new cow and you can re-establish their microbiome and help them, you know, establish a new community and make them healthy again. So they've discovered a little bit of this in human beings too, right? I would have done some studies where they've, I think they've done transplants with like fecal matter, right? Yeah. So this is my. I thought you were going to put a piece of poop on the table.

No. So this is actually my certified fecal donor card. Oh, there you go. So if you want to be treated like a king when you're taking a poop, there's a place in Rancho Cordova called Advancing Bio. And it's actually run by BloodSource. It's a branch of BloodSource. And you go in there and it's actually run by BloodSource. It's a branch of BloodSource. And you go in there and it's amazing. It's a really nice coffee bar.

Donate your poo? Donate your poo, yeah. Well, it goes to treat people with C. diff, so Clostridium difficile. Right now, the treatment for C. diff is pretty terrible. People have to fail three courses of antibiotics before they're even eligible to get a transplant. Yes. And anyone who's had C. diff knows it's like, that sucks. Like not only because you're on some of the heaviest antibiotics you can find, which is destroying your gut, but the way it makes you feel that microorganism that's overgrowing in your large intestine, in your colon, is just wreaking havoc.

So if we can put healthy fecal matter where that organism is, outgrow it, out-compete it, that's the best way they've found to approach it. And it's over 90% effective. Whereas antibiotics right now, I think, for for C diff are down around 35, 40%. So, um, but you have a really large, um, discrepancy with, you know, like the F how's, how are you going to regulate that? You know what I mean? So when you, when you donate now, they take blood and they take a, uh, you know, a diet history. Have you eaten any like nuts, peanuts? Um, you know, have you had antibiotics in the past?

I don't know, 60 days, something like that. Anything that could harm another human being. And then they screen it for potential pathogens, things like that. With the cows, this is something I always wondered. I don't know if you're going to uh the cow to be like butchered and like end up on your plate at home when you like purchase at a grocery store so it depends on it depends on the um grade of beef so everyone's shooting for prime in order to be prime i think it's uh 16 months 16 18 months um anything beyond that can't be considered prime grade. I believe that's right.

So the guy I was with at Phil's Coffee, James. The fat guy. The fat guy. Fat James. Where's Fat James? He's not here today. Sorry, James. He's actually working at a law office down in Dixon.

Oh, okay. You didn't sue me for calling him fat. So while he was working at the meat lab, or he was running the meat lab, he was going to law school at night. So always hustling. Every, let's think everyone is strong. Man's fucking hustling. Um, so, uh, yeah, he'd know a little bit more about that than I would, but generally 18 months.

Oh, okay. Um, I've always wondered, I'm like, you know, how, how, how fresh does it end up, you know, really being, but I guess it's, I mean, it always tastes good. Yeah. Well, yeah. What we get, you know, you could eat a dairy cow, be disgusting. Right.

Oh, I mean, it's not great beef. It's real tough. I mean, it's old. You know what I mean? What happened to this cow? There you go. So that, so I think it's from Bigger, Stronger, Faster. Yeah.

So that thing has a myostatin gene mutation. So it's kind of like unregulated muscle growth. I don't know about the quality of beef, though. That's a Belgian blue bull. I just brought it up because Mrs. Rosemary Bell asked about it right now. It's a Belgian blue bull. My brother posted that picture actually just like a week ago because he was like, maybe the answer all along was right in front of me, you know, because he went on a carnivore

style diet. What are some parallels that you've noticed between, are there parallels between humans and cows? I know that cows have multiple stomachs or multiple chambers or something like that. So are there some different, are there some similarities? Uh, it's, that's tough because, you know, cows are herbivores, um, strict, pretty much strict herbivore. Well, if, if a rat gets his way in there, they'll probably eat it. But, um, as far as, uh, fiber breakdown, sure. Right. With the, the main tenants of fiber breakdown in the microbiome

still are still going to apply, right? You're still going to get a microorganism that's going to get a hold of some fiber. For us, it needs to be an indigestible fiber, right? Something that's going to make it to our large intestine or our colon. And then they're going to produce short chain fatty acids for us, right? In the form of butyrate, acetate, propionate, things like that. Right. In the form of butyrate, acetate, propionate, things like that. And it's going to help nourish the colonocytes. So the cells, the epithelial cells in your colon that are really the only barrier between your colon, you know, the good stuff in there and your bloodstream. So they really make it play a critical role in keeping that balance healthy. really make it play a critical role in keeping that balance healthy.

Beyond that, without the gut microbiome, your immune system would not develop at all. They've tried this with germ-free mice and they keep running into the problem like, oh, but it's got autoimmune diseases and it ends up easily dying. So now they have a standard mix of microorganisms. They have to give even germ-free mice, uh, to make sure that their immune system develops properly and they can actually be used for their life. So, um, fiber breakdown is the same. Um, but we, us having a higher quality protein source than, um, cows. So cows still get their protein from, uh, forage, right. Um, or, uh, there's some additives usually in additives usually in their feeds that make up for the protein.

But that occurs in the, what we call the foregut. So in the ruminant, they're foregut fermenters, as we are hindgut fermenters. So after our stomach, things are fermented in our large intestine, our colon. That's why you fart. That's why I fart, everybody. That's why everyone farts. That's why you fart. That's why I fart or everybody. That's why everyone farts. But farting is good. Gas production is a great sign

of microbial fermentation. Yeah, so I asked that before. Remember we asked Joel Green. And Joel, he has a lot of long-winded answers to go along with my fart humor, I humor, I guess, but he, uh, it was hard to get a easy answer out of him. But what he did say is that, you know, he was,

he's basically said that pooping is healthy. You know, he's like, if you poop a couple of times a day, he's like, that's not necessarily bad. That's, that's your schedule and that's okay. And then, so that was kind of the followup because I've always wondered that, like I've been on diets before. We don't really fart at all because you're just not really producing any of that gas. But I've also been kind of curious, like, okay, these are disgusting smells that are coming out of my body. But is some dosage of this, some level of this reasonable? And you're saying, yeah. Yeah.

Well, so I love Sour love sour patch can't wait to tell my wife i love i love sour patch kids but amazing by my wife bought me like one of those giant like five pound bags not a sugar-free not a snow oh i'm gonna say sugar-free really blow you out no no you can't do that um and but these are just as bad. It's inverted sugar, which is a little bit different, but, uh, I ate like a pound of them and it just, it pretty much ruined my life for like 48 hours. Was there sugar alcohol in it or something? Uh, no. Um, so the, the sugar free ones would be sugar alcohols.

Okay. Um, this one was just, it was a, I, there was too much. Yeah. There was your mind. If you give, if you give your colon microbiomes a little too much, they're going to use it. So anytime you kind of deviate and that's when you're going to see the most gas production. It's like you're eating a food you don't usually eat a whole lot. And you eat a nice amount of it.

What happens is. It's on. Like gas production as microorganisms are get, get used to a food. They become more and more efficient. So they're able to break it down with less gas production. Right. So when you introduce a new food, you don't have the microbiome that's adapted to break that food down. So it needs to adapt and then break that food down.

But in the process, it makes a lot of gas. Right. It's got to adapt to it. So that's what's going on with the FODMAP stuff. Right. Right. So, um, I think the most important part of the FODMAP diet is what happens after, after you remove all that stuff, you have to add that stuff back in, right? That's kind of the key point. And you, and the adding it back in takes two weeks. That would be the same thing with any form of, uh, well, not maybe any form, but most forms of elimination diets.

When you remove stuff, you're going to have to probably even have small dosages of it back in. For myself, I recently introduced some lactose, introduced some milk, small amounts, real small amounts, and I've been totally fine. And it's helped my stomach digest a lot of things. Because sometimes when you go off your diet and you eat like pizza or ice cream or sometimes even without a lot of the normal offenders, it's kind of the combination and the dosage all together that really starts to rip you apart. And if you get used to some of these foods, then you have less problems. Right. No, that's 100% right.

For me, I've always struggled too with vegetables. Sometimes vegetables will just kill my stomach. And it's like, well, I just got to get used to eating more of them. I got to chew them up a little bit better, things like that. Yeah. But you know what? There is, you might say, it's a necessary evil. Like if you're going to deal with it,

but if you make them a part of your daily diet, you know, it's not that bad. That's what I, everyone's like, everyone's like oh i can't eat cabbage well if you eat fucking cabbage every day you know you wouldn't have this problem right but you eat like once around saint patrick's day and you blame cabbage right yeah so um damn saint patrick's day and your corned beef pastrami bastard so what is oh go ahead no i was just gonna ask because you had said so something about the cow's stomach is the reverse of our stomach and that's how we produce gas um well um the the cow's stomach so the cow has multiple chambers in its stomach um and it's what we call a foregut fermenter right so it's a ruminant before yeah right so all in so in the rumen of one section of the cow's stomach that's pretty much where it So it's a ruminant. Before. In the rumen, one section of the cow's

stomach, that's pretty much where it's like a giant anaerobic digester. So you have a huge vat of incredibly concentrated microorganisms that are breaking down fiber. The fiber gets broken down before it reaches the small intestine

and the large intestine, right? Where they're ultimately going to get absorbed. For us, fiber gets broken down in the large intestine and the colon for the most part by microorganisms. And it's pretty much absorbed directly through the large intestine and the colon. But with that cow still definitely fart, right? Yes. So that brings up an important point.

still definitely fart, right? Yes. So that brings up an important point. Everyone asks like, everyone asks like, well, because we're doing a lot of stuff with methane mitigation. Everyone always says like,

oh, so you're trying to make methane, like less methanogenic farts. Like that's not true. So actually, if you look at it, like the rumen, where all the methane is actually produced, is very far from the back end.

That has to travel a long way. So actually, most of the methane... Build it up a lot of power. Right. Yes. So all the methane actually comes out from the mouth. Most of it. More than 80% of it.

And what that is is because ruminants, what they do is called they re-chew the cut. What we're doing right now, we're cutting the cut. So they eat, and then they spit it back up, and they chew it some more, and they swallow it back down again. So they're breaking it down into smaller and smaller bits, so microorganisms can get in deeper, enzymes can get in deeper, they can more completely break down that fiber. So in the process of belching that back up, they call it eructation. The methane leaves through the mouth and the nostrils. I mean, it was very crudely

put, but like cow farts are like tearing up the ozone layer. And that's the opposite. It's the cow burps. Well, that clarifies a lot. Because I was curious. I'm like, well, one, it sounds pretty damn funny. It's like farts are literally destroying the universe. Right.

Or the planet. And that's been the headline for a long time. Yeah. But no, that's definitely not the case right now. Is there much truth to that? Is it a problem, what the cows are producing, whether it's from their ass or their mouth? Yeah. Yeah.

So methane is about 30 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2. And so the way greenhouse gases work, they go into the atmosphere, they trap heat, radiant heat, which is effectively increasing the global climate on Earth. But really what our lab is trying to do is we're trying to find ways, how can we mitigate that? But how can we, I mean, solving one problem isn't a solution, right? Right. So if you have one problem, then there's another issue. There's another issue. Call up a guy named Elon Musk. Right. Right. So you solve all the problems. Yeah. He's got to know what's going on. He's like, him and Jeff Bezos, they make robots and stuff. Right. And rockets. Yeah. So most recently, so you might've seen in the UC Davis news, things like that, people were coming out.

Most recently, so you might have seen in the UC Davis news, things like that, people were coming out. So what we've been able to do is add a little bit of seaweed to cattle feed, or so dairy cattle feed in this case. And we're able to pretty much reduce the methane production by about 65% in actual animal trials. So we first did this in our artificial gut system in the lab using a little bit higher dose. And we were able to pretty much eliminate methane. So the problem there is, is we do things in trial format in the lab first, because then we can measure like volatile fatty acids. Like I could, I can eliminate methane production from any animal,

right? I can pour bleach down it and it would die. And then it wouldn't make any methane. No more methane. But so the volatile fatty acids are such an important part of the animal's diet that if you inhibit methane production, but you're also inhibiting short-chain fatty acid production, you're not doing any good. The animal's not going to grow as well. It's not going to be as healthy.

It might have other health problems. So you need to find a way that you can keep that short-chain fatty acid production up, but also kind of directly inhibit methane. so short chain fatty acid protection up, but also kind of directly inhibit methane. Do you think sustainability of, uh, especially things like cattle is, is an issue? Um, you know, there's, there's a lot of talk about like fake meat being made and stuff like that. Do you, do you kind of foresee 20 years from now, 50 years from now that we don't have, we don't have regular meat anymore? No, we're going to have meat. Thank God. Well, I mean, isn't it kind of like already started with like McDonald's and fast food?

Yeah. I mean, a lot of fillers. Yeah. Right? A lot of that stuff is fillers. I try to stray away from ground beef for the most part, unless, you know, you can find it ground yourself or grinding yourself from a whole muscle cut. They ground up small children in there, I heard. Just here in California. It's outside of Davis, though.

They don't let you do it there. So I think we're going to start exploring different protein sources for sure, but it's all going to be about efficiency. Can we increase efficiency? So that's the other part of methane production is methane is actually a waste process in the animal. It actually takes a lot of energy away from the animal that could be used to build mass or to produce milk, things like that.

And it's about 7 to 12% of the total energy consumption. So if we can inhibit methanogenesis, then potentially that energy can be redirected into short-chain fatty acid production for use in the animal's energy and larger mass, right? More milk, things like that. Don't they sometimes, some of the farms, don't they somehow use the methane to... You can. Right? Yeah. As an energy source, right?

Right. So you burn it, right? So you can burn that methane down into CO2 and release energy. It's a natural gas. You start your car with that. Cow farts. Cow burps. I'm just thinking of Dumb and Dumber when he farts into the lighter. Yeah, right. It's similar. So most humans actually don't have methanogens. Mostly what you're seeing is just force. I just got an image of everybody running out to their in the morning, farting into the gas tank. Everyone's eating cabbage like, oh, fuck, got to pull up.

Yeah. Oh, man, I can't get the car to start. More broccoli. Raw broccoli. Raw broccoli. But yeah, it's, I think, a multifaceted approach. You know, making more efficient animals, you know, decreasing the methane, making bigger animals on less feed. in animals, you know, decreasing the methane, making bigger animals on less feed. I think that's most great, um, you know, solutions are going to have, are going to

be multifaceted. Now our cows somewhat, uh, this is going to sound weird, but cows are somewhat like man made. Nowadays. Anyway. Right. Because they came from other, they came from other animals at some point and then were bred to kind of be the way they are today.

So the domestic. I don't know, I'm going to be way off. I mean, there's always been a cow. Yeah. They came from other animals at some point and then were bred to kind of be the way they are today. So the domestic. I'm going to be way off. I mean, there's always been a cow. Yeah. But there's been a significant, just like dogs. There's been a significant breeding effort to get animals to be more efficient. Right. Right.

We would, a wild cow looks a lot different if you could find a wild cow than what you see in past see in, uh, uh, pastures today. Uh, you know, people who are raising, uh, beef for production. So genetics has a large part to do it. Just like you saw with the, uh, I've seen, uh, and I don't, you know, it's the internet, so I don't know. I've seen, uh, images before of what people would say were like, you know, cows from thousands and thousands of years ago where they had these big ass antlers and they were kind of jacked and they were a lot thinner looking.

You know, they weren't, they weren't what you typically see today. But I don't know. You know, and that's, I could get, I couldn't personally get much deeper into the animal science portion of it because I'm a microbiologist. Right.

I know what animals do when they're dead. And I can analyze their room of microbiome. Right. But that's why we're in the animal science department. We have people for that. Tell me about some of this studying of iron that you did. And was that in humans? Was that in cows?

So mostly just lifting weights. No, I'm joking. So, no. Yeah, Andrew tried to take a big bite of iron about a about a week ago he was bench pressing the weight went over his teeth um so the the iron studies um i was uh doing my thesis in chico and uh we were trying to understand so there's a what we know about microorganisms and microbiology is ridiculously small. Um, so we're able to culture, so grow on like a Petri dish or in broth media, about 1% of the organisms we know that are out there. And I mean, some of these are extreme organisms.

We're talking about organisms that grow, you know, pH two, they can grow in your battery acid, Organisms that grow at, you know, pH two, they can grow in your battery acid, um, or, you know, in boiling hot springs and sulfur springs. Um, but they have a whole host of physiologies. So we studied organisms that, um, were able to breathe iron and, uh, but in the process of breathing iron, they may help liberate, uh, another heavy metal, which is mercury. So I did my thesis in Tamales Bay, downstream from what's called the Gambonini Mercury Mine. It's an old abandoned mine. They used to mine cinnabar ore, which is where you get mercury. And so they mined mercury on the coast of California,

and then they brought it down to the Sierra Nevadas to extract the gold from the mountains. But then they just abandoned it. And then all the mercury just kind of washed down shore in the estuary. So it contaminated a lot of the wetland there. And my thesis was about the oxidation and reduction of iron, so the breathing of iron by different organisms, does it liberate mercury?

And does it aid it in becoming a more potent neurotoxin like we see today? So not all mercury is terrible for you. Like my grandpa used to have like a big cup of mercury and he'd stick his finger in it, right? Nothing happened, but you could die. But it's when it gets transformed by microorganisms. So there's like sulfate-reducing bacteria, so organisms that breathe sulfur. They can add a methyl group. So once it has a methyl group on it it's an organic i mean it's an organic molecule now it can pass a blood brain barrier the placental barrier and that's when it

really starts to do damage and its absorption rate it skyrockets so it goes from absorption rate as elemental mercury about two percent to an absorption rate about 99 percent wow so were to, you know, take a little bit of methylmercury, it would go straight to your brain, your bloodstream, wherever else it needs to go. So that was my work with there, and that was my first taste of metagenomics. So that's where I learned about how to use metagenomics and the bioinformatics behind it.

And that kind of was a precursor to the lab I joined today because we use a lot of metagenomics to study the rumen microbiome, things like that. Right. What are some things that you've learned that you're able to maybe apply to yourself a little bit or to apply to general nutrition? Has there been anything? Because obviously what the cow eats has got to be so different,

but in learning all this stuff about the gut microbiome and different things, I'm sure you've come across some things that have been helpful to yourself and maybe to some other athletes. Right. So a lot of what I learned is that a lot of what you see out there is garbage as far as research is concerned, because, you know, we're just we're scratching the surface of microbiome. And so you see a lot of studies that are like, here's what the organisms are. Everyone gets so excited right away. They're like, oh my God, this could be our way of doing this or whatever. And what we're seeing now is that even a lot of those beginning studies that a ratio of this bacteria to this bacteria means you're fat.

Or fat people tend to have more of this bacteria. And there is some validity to that. They've done that in germ-free mice, you know, transplanted a lean mouse's microbiome into a fat mouse and that fat mouse loses weight and vice versa. Yeah. Those things are hard to, they're hard to tell sometimes like, uh, somebody's like, uh, palate and food choices was probably, uh, was probably generated, created for a long time. And then their stomach is now sending the message of like, Hey, we need more of this junk. We need more of these, like, um, uh, trying to think of an example. So if you were to eat a chicken breast and some broccoli, but you're used to

eating seven 11, your, your stomach is literally telling you like, hey, this doesn't have what we normally are used to having. And it will for a lot of people. That's what makes a diet so hard. And those cravings are so strong. We don't have like a physiological need necessarily for the things that you might get at 7-Eleven or Doritos. But once we get the taste for it and now it's encoded into our brain, now we have our brain and our stomach kind of having different conversations going on. Stomach saying, hey man, like we need some nutrients here.

But your brain's probably saying, hey, it'd be great if we went back to those. What were those red, like whatever that red bag was, just grab that red bag and then that orange drink, grab that from that 7-Eleven and like get out of there. It'd be great if we went back to those, what were those red, like whatever that red bag was, just grab that red bag. And then that orange drink, grab that from that seven 11 and like, get out of there. It'd be perfect. Pour the chips in the drink and just drink it. Crush it. Yeah. Um, cause I mean, we've had some people on here kind of saying that the stomach can almost override the brain in some way, almost in a way of like, in a sense, making you a little

bit crazy. Like I'm going for this, even though you don't really want to make that choice. Right. Oh, and we know, I mean, uh, the addiction mechanisms of, you know, uh, sugar are very strong. Um, and there is a little bit of a role, um, just recently there's a role has been shown in the microbiome and modulating that, um, dampening some of those, uh, reward processes. Um, so we can get into that if you want, but, um, that's going to be a tangent. Yeah. But, uh, so I like that kind of stuff. Yeah. Um, it was one of the articles I, I, I shot to you. I don't know if I had time to read it, but I barely have time to read it. I'll have to check it out.

That's like the hardest part of my job is trying to keep current on literature. Yeah. Because there's so much every day. You program that iPhone to read it to you. Right? Yeah. If only.

It kind of can, but kind of can't. Kind of can't. So what I need is. I put it in my notes and I have it read me stuff, but it doesn't always do it. So what I need is just like someone dedicated, like this setup right here, where you just like, people who publish, they just dictate what they did and just like speak it to me. And then I could listen to it on my way to work. Like, awesome.

Digested a paper on my way to work. Perfect. But you don't see that. You get like short snippets of what people do. Right. Cliff notes. Right. And that doesn't tell me what I want to know.

Like for me, like I want to know, like I want to get in the methods and know everything about it and make fun of you or, you know, tear it apart. So, but we do have a model now that we've been using as an analog for the human gut. And that's using the intestinal content from pigs. And so we're able to screen a lot of compounds in that model to see their viability. Things like, you know, what... So in humans, the main volatile fatty acids are going to be butyrate and let's see, I think it's acetate or propionate, all three,

but mostly butyrate. Butyrate's the most important one. And so we can test different compounds and we can see, okay, how does the microbiome change? But how does the short-chain fatty acid profile change? You know, if I add this one. And so recently we were able to corroborate some results that we'd seen before in our model. And that's why Shajin was like, make sure you throw that inulin in there when you're getting your fiber out. So inulin seems to work pretty well, increase in butyrate

production. And this is one of the reasons why. Is that naturally in some foods as well, maybe? Butyrate's in butter. Okay. That's why it's called butter. There you go. Yeah.

But when you think about it. Oh, that's the whole bulletproof coffee. Right. Quote, yeah. Uh, but when you think about it, Oh, that's the whole bulletproof coffee. Right. Quote unquote. But when you think about it, um, when you're ingesting butter, it's getting absorbed in your small intestine. Um, so and then it's going to your bloodstream and going everywhere else. I understand. So everything's just going to like a lot of the way that things work outside your body. Once they, once you ingest them and they get kind of torn apart and right

well it's just 70 different pathways so where you really need that butyrate and why fiber fermentation is so important you need it intact well you need it produced in your colon so um there's a idea called the warburg hypothesis so it's called the warburg theory of cancer or cancer metabolomics or something like that. Really what it says is like cancer cells have jacked up mitochondria. Side fact, mitochondria used to be free living bacteria. Another option. So what does the mitochondria do?

It's beta oxidation of fatty acids. That's what it does. That's its main job. But if it can't do that, if the cell's mitochondria isn't functioning optimally, it's going to increase fermentation. It's going to start utilizing sugar and operating predominantly on sugar, and it's a much less efficient pathway. You're only getting like 2 ATP as opposed to when you run it through the mitochondria, you're getting like 32 ATP. So, um, what happens is if you can starve those cancerous cells, if you can eliminate sugars and, uh, you know, simple, simple carbohydrates, and you can predominantly

fuel those colonocytes with butyrate, so a short-chain fatty acid that can only be metabolized by the mitochondria, then you're giving your healthy cells a competitive advantage, right? Because they have to, you know, the cancer cells have to work twice as hard to get, you know, the energy. Whereas in these, this butyrate's only produced via the fermentation of carbohydrates, right? Of these complex carbohydrates, these ingestible fibers. So, and you're not going to get that anywhere else. Right. So what happens is your cells, so that you have like a one cell layer deep. And in between two cells is what we call a tight junction. And that tight junction regulates things like sodium, potassium, salts, water flow from the colon, be it reabsorbed back into the bloodstream.

But if you're not fueling your colonocytes properly, right, they're not getting their short-chain fatty acids and they're not healthy enough, their tight junctions start to degrade. And then those tight junctions aren't holding everything back. and then those tight junctions aren't holding everything back. So there is a direct link between gut permeability and what we call LPS, so a compound called lipopolysaccharide, which is actually a piece of bacteria. When bacteria get in the blood, it's like bad news, bad news bears. So signals, all kinds of inflammation cascades, right? Is that kind of like leaky gut? It's the premise of leaky gut, but it's evolved.

We understand it a lot better now. I think like in the early 2000s, like leaky gut was hot. It's like a thing, yeah. I got it. I have leaky gut. I'm eating Olean potato chips. Oh, God, yeah. It's disgusting.

But it goes beyond that now and we understand like protein so protein shouldn't make it to your colon right so it's one of the one of the largest concerns i have with like the carnivore diet is i think you should eat as much protein as you can as long as it's digested and absorbed before it gets to your colon because when amino acids and proteins are fermented by microorganisms they produce a lot of weird crap um phenols and amines and things that are we know are cytotoxic so they're toxic to cells um and that's has been associated before with uh like colorectal cancer and distal colorectal cancer so yeah eat as much meat as want. So you might be somewhat like backed up in a sense, I guess you would say, right? Well, it's, it's not going to back you up. It's just going to, I mean,

you're going to be producing toxic metabolism. You're feeding your microbiome, um, compounds that it's going to break down into toxic metabolites. Um, and everyone's going to be like, well, they're not toxic. There is really strong evidence to show that a lot of these compounds are not great. So if you can, I wish there was a way to screen for that. Like, am I eating too much protein?

Like, analyze my poop. So eat as much protein as you want as long as it's absorbed. And then fiber's not for you. Fiber's for your microbes. And then just recognizing that there's that relationship there, I mean, I think a lot of people would do really well. When you keep saying butyrate, is that similar to, like, I realize the ketones that people are selling, it wouldn't be the same thing, but is it similar in some way? Are you talking about a

ketone? Is butyrate a ketone? It is not. So it's a short chain fatty acid. A ketone has a very specific structure. So even what we call, what's the hot one? Beta-hydroxybutyrate. That's not even a ketone. So that's technically a carboxylic acid. So that's why they call it a ketone body is because it came from a ketone your body only makes it produces one ketone and that's acetoacetate and then that acetoacetate gets broken down into acetone which is a ketone but it predominantly only produced that acetoacetate so it makes acetone which is kind of a natural degradation product. So it naturally, spontaneously becomes acetone. But there's an enzyme that actively converts acetoacetate into beta-hydroxybutyrate.

And that's the goal. I mean, that's the whole goal of keto. Right. And then, excuse me, some of these fibers that you're talking about eating, uh, or, or providing for your stomach. Um, what does that look like? Like, I know that, uh, uh, people have talked about, uh, prebiotics and things like that. And, um, sometimes the heating and cooling of some of these starchy carbohydrates can result in, uh, feeding your gut, um, what it needs. Is that, is that about right? Uh, you can. So you can modulate foods for sure.

So prebiotics are exactly that. They are for your gut microbiome. That's why, you know, technically lactose is a prebiotic, right? Pretty much any indigestible fiber is a prebiotic. So we talk about fermented foods. Like you have a better time with fermented foods, right? So if I, what is it, like oats? You know, you leave and put some water in there,

warm it up and let it go overnight. That's because that fermentation isn't happening in your gut or in your colon. So you don't get that indigestion or that, you know, build up a gas. But at the same time, the butyrate that's produced from that is getting absorbed in your stomach and not in your colon. Right. So you're kind of already breaking a lot of it down, which may be give you a better time with it, but you're not getting those nutrients down where you need them. Right. So, um. So what's the solution?

What do you eat? Um, luckily my wife is very intelligent and she, you know, does most, most of the meal prep in the house. Um, honestly, right now it's been as simple as adding uh i just get straight inulin um inulin is a great uh prebiotic and we have um just a powder of some sort it's just a powder it comes from the so the one i get comes from the root of tequiliana agave so the tequila plant um and i dissolve it in my coffee in the morning and you can't taste it it's actually so how much of that i do like i

do like uh three grams and it comes a little measuring scoop gotcha you can get it on amazon for like five bucks um and honestly i reduced my bathroom time like half wow just really nice um what do you think it does you think it just kind of like uh kind of holds everything together a little bit better like well well that i mean I know from experimental data that inulin is going to increase my butyrate production. So I'm going to have a healthier colon, potentially. Shits will be tapered. Right, right. Less wiping, less cleanup, maybe.

Does it get rid of the endless crayon? The endless crayon. Just keep wiping and it's still there. You know, I haven't had that problem so maybe. But at the same, so I have a little bit

of confounding errors. So my daughter has a dairy protein allergy. So we've like removed dairy from my house and soy. So dairy, the cow's milk protein

and soy protein are very similar and they react similarly. So I've removed that from our household. So I haven't had soy in like almost a year. Well, since January. So I've removed that from our household. So I haven't had soy in like almost a year. Well, since January. Yeah. So is it a little bit of both? Probably. Yeah.

Could be. Cause soy isn't everything. You can't even buy a can of tuna. That's true. So it ends up being in a lot of stuff. Did you have a chance to listen to the podcast we did with Joel Green? If you didn't have a chance you should you'd really like it a lot i mean he talked a lot about uh these things that you're talking about and he talked about um he's got all kinds of weird you know methods and foods that he eats he's just he studied a lot of these things and he knows like you know strawberries do this cucumbers do that and he knows very specifically to the point where you're like, and it really, it's really cool to hear somebody talk that way because most of the time someone's like,

well, strawberries, you know, it's a fruit and it's got sugar, but they don't tell you, you know, there's other facts that he was, uh,

he was given us. And it was really, it was really interesting because he's using, he kind of called, refers to it as functional food. Yeah. And he's utilizing these foods. He's kind of giving them a little bit more of a purpose.

And if you think about some of the stuff that you've seen the bodybuilding crowd do for a long time, maybe some of that even makes sense. Like a lot of these guys have been pounding down rice for years. Maybe that's a prebiotic that they're eating. They're heating and cooling the starches, sweet potatoes and things like that. Maybe they're onto some things. There's definitely some of the FODMAPs

in the sweet potatoes for sure, and I'm pretty sure that's why it's in the Monster Mash. It's a smaller amount. I think it's mannitol, but it's still there. There's a lot of things in these peppers and stuff in small doses. I think that was Stan's goal's goal is reduce them to a point where they're not going to be like, yeah, insulting your body basically. Exactly. Um, do you think that there's some foods that we should really avoid? I mean, it's, you know, um, when, when I think about like, uh,

food, I think of, I equate it to training because that's the easiest thing for me to equate anything to. And so sometimes in training, for a long time people were talking about sports-specific movement and functional movement. And I was like, I've never seen a movement that's not functional. It's all okay to do. One movement's safer than the other and it's not a great idea to use large amounts of weight, maybe while jam while jamming your knees together and trying to do a squat however could you make a case for can that make you a lot stronger in a squat if you use light weights yeah it certainly could like your knees in knees out uh knees straight knees forward knees back i mean attacking it from

all angles is a lot of times the, uh, the kind of best way to do it. And when it comes to food, you know, obviously like if something's going to be like real problematic for, if it sends you to the hospital, then there's, you wouldn't want to eat that. Right. Uh, but other than that, I mean, it seems like even kind of what you're saying is like, uh, even if something makes you gassy or bloated or whatever, maybe that's something that you need to get rid of for a period of time

and bring it back in slowly and see how you can have it be somewhat part of your diet. Right. So when you take a 3,000-foot look at what's going on, what does it come down to? If you start merging all the information you've gathered over your training life, looking at diets and looking at what's good and what's bad. And really, I think the best success we've seen with people getting on the ketogenic diet, even now the carnivore diet, the paleo diet, what is the common denominator? It's the removal of simple sugars. what is the common denominator? It's the removal of simple sugars.

And I think that in itself has done so much for, I mean, for health. Yeah. Especially, you know, in the U.S. But at the same time, so what does an optimal diet look like? You know, what does the optimal human diet look like? And it's variety, right? You have a core base of, we're omnivores, right? You have a core base of animal proteins and you have a ton of vegetables involved. Yeah.

Like, I don't think the definition of omnivore gets any more clear. And also too, I mean, if you think about, you know, if you were to go back, you know, 50 years, 100 years, 200, 200 you know start to go back in time and it becomes very obvious to me that if you saw an orange on a tree you probably flip out you're probably like what is like oh my god whatever that is that looks really good i'm going to investigate that you take a bite of the outside you're like oh that was gross you open it up and see there's all this juice inside and you eat that and you probably just pass out you're like holy shit this is really good or a pineapple or an apple i mean it's very obvious these things are kind of designed uh they were put here by a greater

power of some sort right for us to uh for us to eat one thing with the simple sugars i always like to point out because people get so crazy about it and like, well, what about flexible diet? And, uh, we, we, we all have to deal with this coming up. Uh, our buddy Lane Norton is going to be on Joe Rogan soon. So that's going to cause a cascade of problems too. But this, the simple sugars, they're problematic because people are eating them in a crazy abundance. Fructose is not really a big problem. Fruit is not really a big problem. But then there's something called high fructose corn syrup that has ruined the United States in a lot of ways. I personally think obesity is our number one enemy.

There's a lot of problems in the United States. There's, there's plenty of them. And some people are probably disagreeing with me right now. Look at the burden on the healthcare system. Yeah. Like, I mean, but our children, our children are being threatened and that's what I don't like because, um, if we think about like terrorism and you think about like war and we think about these things, it's like, I don't, the school shootings are, that's horrific. And that puts our children at great danger, but I don't see anything that puts the number of people and the number of children in danger more so than sugar and corn syrup and all these different things. And again, I'm not blaming

just sugar because it's the overabundance of all food, but sugar is the predominant thing that we are enjoying the most. If you leave a child with a choice between, you know, you cooking them a nice healthy dinner and then having something sugary, like even just to even say, hey, you want four granola bars or do you want a chicken, potato, and some broccoli? Right. They're going to have a glass of milk, and they're going to gnaw down those granola bars, because they taste delicious, right? Yeah, of course, because they got peanut butter all over them, and they're... Oh, man. You know how to do it. Yeah.

Damn. One of those Nature Valley bars, dude. The crumbs all over there? Oh, yeah. Those are really good. They are good. Those are really dry. So dry.

They're really dry, but somehow they're really amazing. Right. We need to get some of those. Yeah. You can get them at like Winco, like $1.89. Just, well, that's the thing. How cheap is that? Yeah.

And like how, and now the problem is like how, what do you got to, what do you got to pay to eat healthy? Yeah. Luckily my wife's a nutritionist, so. Really? Yeah. Oh, that's great. My wife's a nutritionist for the California Department of Public Health, women, infants, and children. So.

Shit. We should have had her on the meat scientist line. We shouldn't even have you here. I'm just like this middle guy. Yeah. Microbes are tight. You're just regurgitating all the info from the people around you. Right.

There's these cows. They got holes in them. You guys got to check them out. My lab's awesome. It stinks really bad. Pretty much. But now, so we've recently been going to,

there's this little spot north of Yuba City. It's called the Yupik Farm. So you can go pick your own vegetables. Wow. It's all seasonal. It's really good. Where is it at?

It's cheap. It's called Johnson's Yupik. So it's north of Yuba City, right outside of Gridley. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and you just show up. It gives you some baskets. And we're talking like 80 cents a pound.

Really? Yeah, eggplants and whatever the hell you want. That's great. Definitely going there. We shelled my own almonds the other day. Yeah, that's got to be a pain in the ass. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass. But it's a great grip strength.

So you have to take the holes off, then you gotta like break the shells open. See, things like that are great examples. You know, um, if you were to, you know, live, you know, a few hundred years ago and you had to, you know, get some almonds, how many almonds would you eat? Right. Six. I'm sitting there like half an hour. My wife's like, no, we need more than that. You're under a tree

maybe like eight or something but you'd be like screw this and it's cheap it's like it was like a dollar fifty a pound for almonds yeah so um you know and we take my my daughter so she's like in my wife's like backpack thing um carrier deal yeah and my daughter's just like this this oh nice give me that so um i picked her own apple own apple and she was crazy cause she picked the apple and it immediately went in her mouth. Like she just knew, like she has two teeth, you know what I mean? Yeah. But she knew that thing was like a little savage.

Give me that thing. Then she bites me. Like she bit my finger the other day. It's like, you're not ready for that yet. Yeah. I know that's the kind of stuff, uh, you know, when they're, when they're young, it's like, you almost got to like bite them back or you got to do something crazy. Like they're dogs.

Yeah. Bite them on the ear. Bite their ear. Yeah. Yeah. They got to know like, Hey, you can't, you can't be doing that shit. What about, uh, probiotics? Somebody was asking about, uh, drinking kombucha.

Is that, um, anything beneficial there? Um. about drinking kombucha. Is that anything beneficial there? We'll start with kombucha and then go into actual probiotics. Yeah, so there are live cells, you know, in kombucha. Really what it comes down to is

a lot of these probiotics at our stage of development, there's a huge role for probiotics in infants. What we're seeing now is that infants, there's actually a startup in Davis called Evolved Biosystems, and they study the gut microbiome of infants, right? Because if you don't have that proper gut microbiome, your immune system is not going to develop correctly.

We're starting to learn more and more about that. And they're starting to formulate probiotics with prebiotics, right, to make sure that they take hold. But for us, our microbiome's established. So what you're trying to do is you're giving, you know, most times a freeze-dried or spore form of an organism, and you're saying, survive. You know, and you're throwing it in the ring with, if its food's there, it might survive for a minute, and then it's going to be gone. It's going to be out-competed because it can't take a hold. It doesn't have its nutrient source there, and everything else, everything there is soaking up all the nutrients.

So I'm yet to find one that I'm like, I'm going to take that. As a microbiologist, if there was a probiotic out there that I was like, this, I'd probably be taking it. Yeah, and they tried it. I mean, they try to have healthier versions that are more stable. They try to do all kinds of things. What about when people actually make some of the stuff themselves? Does that have maybe a little bit more merit to it? Like yogurt?

Yeah. So I think the great thing about yogurt is you're going to eat that every day, right? And you're going to get it. So it's a probiotic and a prebiotic, right? It has its food source there because that's what it grew in. And it has the organisms there. And they're usually in pretty significant abundance. And the organisms that produce-

So yogurt maybe is surviving pretty well. Right. And the organisms that are in yogurt are actually really hardy. So like lactobacillus bulgaricus, that thing, that's why, you know, it's pretty well. Right. And the organisms that are in yogurt are actually really hardy. So like lactobacillus bulgaricus, that thing, that's why, you know, it's really sour, you know, like your Greek yogurts is because that thing can survive at really low pHs, right? It can tolerate a lot of acid. So if anything's going to have a easier time, you know, taking root, it's going to be one of those.

Right. But even then, if your diet doesn't complement that organism, it's, it's no way it's going to be one of those. But even then, if your diet doesn't complement that organism, it's no way it's going to survive. Which is the case with the American public. And they're just seeing constant yogurt commercials and they think they're doing themselves something great. Right. Dannon.

You know, like, what is Dannon? Yeah. I don't want them to sue me. Don't sue me. Yeah. Also, disclaimer, anything I say is not representative of the University of California. There we go. Slide that in there. That's all of California. You know, you think about it, it's almost the equivalent

of like you go in, you exercise real hard and you go outside and you smoke a cigarette and you drink beer, right? It's like you're not doing other things that are conducive towards your health. So this probiotic concept is probably I would just say it's probably a waste of time. In a lot of cases, yeah. Yeah. Because if you don't follow up, there's no point. If you have a stomach problem and you like it and it seems like it's helping.

Awesome. And you have a diet that's conducive towards fixing other things, then maybe stick with it. Really? I mean, when I find a great study that shows like, here's the organism, here's the person before they started taking the probiotic, here's their stool now, and how many

cells are in there? Has it taken root? How long after they stop taking that probiotic is that organism going to be in there? When I see something like that, I'll be on board. And there's probably like some internet warriors on there that are like, well, it's the one I take is the best.

Yeah. Yeah. Send it to me. I make my own yogurt, bro. I make my own beer. Um, that's not probiotic.

That's the anti-gain. So, I mean, the other thing too about yogurt, uh, let's not forget, uh, it has calcium.

Yeah. And let's not forget it's got protein. So it's not like, it's not like you, it's not like you're doing anything bad to yourself, especially if you're not getting ones that are loaded with a lot of sugar. Oh, yeah, 100%. And you can make, so it's so easy to make your own yogurt. So just take some milk, take some powdered milk. Leave it on the counter for a couple days. No, it's not hot enough.

leave it on the counter for a couple of days. No, it's not hot enough. So take the yogurt you like, put a dollop of that into your milk plus milk powder, you know, powdered milk mixture. And it needs to be about 37 degrees. Let it sit for like a day and you got more yogurt. Really?

Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. I mean, the same thing. That's what's happening with your oatmeal, right? You put the water in there, if you have yeast in there, whatever organisms are there, they're just going to ferment a little bit. Yeah, I think I usually dump like a little bit of, well, I sometimes put lemon juice in there or sometimes I put like apple cider vinegar.

Really? That was mainly to break it down. I don't think it was to cause more growth. But I could put yogurt in it. Yeah. I mean, so you're not really, you're not really fermenting it. No. You're just using the acid to. Yeah. I mean, so you're not really, you're not really fermenting it. No. You're just, you're just using the acid to break down. The oats. Yeah.

Right. Cause I have like, you know, the oats that take like 20 minutes to cook. Right. They take forever. I've rolled oats. Yeah. It's crazy. I can, uh, I can leave on the stove for so long and it's amazing.

I never understand like how big they get. Like I. What is an oat yeah yeah it's huge it's like this huge amount of food every single time like it's like an entire pot worth of oatmeal i'm like how did that happen you get one of those insta pots and people get all excited about like the quick oats but i'm like man you're really missing out because like the quick oats you could have you could have four little things like of quick oats and it wouldn't equate to the half cup that i'm

having of these regular oats because they end up swelling up so much right so my that's like that's my daughter's go-to breakfast food right now steel cut oats and uh peaches yeah that's what she wants for breakfast you know and anybody out there listening that that's checking this out anybody that's got kids kids love fruit get them some them some fruit. Or find fruits that they like. I think the important part is... Even a little bit of fruit juice, as long as it doesn't have, you know, a bunch of extra shit in it. Yeah.

It's totally fine. It just, it doesn't have to be, you know, this size. It doesn't have to be a 24 ounce cup of juice. Six ounces, eight ounces. They're going to be usually plenty satisfied with that. And here's the, like the, the horrible part is like, my daughter's at that age where like she's investigating stuff now. So part of me is like,

you want to try this Sour Patch Kid? Like what if I, what are you going to do if I put this Sour Patch Kid in my life? Zing. Yeah.

Oh my God. And my wife's just like, get off. You know, like fuck out of here. Like you can't do that. It's going to mess them up. I think that's,

that's what people should try to do the most with their children because it's like, look, you got a whole life ahead of you of being unhealthy.

A whole life ahead of you of making really dumb decisions for now. We're going to make, I'm going to try not to get up for you. We're going to make the dumb decisions for you right now. Yeah. You try to, try to control it the best you can. You know, we were talking, uh, yesterday, um, and the last time on this podcast too, about even just the very act of having like a kid's menu, it's kind of absurd. You're like, well, kids don't need different food.

It's not like, it's not like you're sitting there with a fricking giraffe or something, or you're sitting there with a fucking snake and it needs to eat mice and everybody else is eating spaghetti and meatballs or whatever. It's just a kid, right? And they can eat. They're a small human.

Yeah. There's just a small. Human menu. Yeah. Just a smaller version of you. Right. And obviously like, yeah, maybe a kid wants something less complicated to eat. Maybe, you know, maybe them sitting there trying to chop up a filet mignon is a little bit.

I'm not going to give a kid a filet mignon anyway. They're not going to appreciate it. Yeah. Give me that. Give me that back. You get top sirloin because you can tell the difference. That's right. And that's, I think that's a huge problem is like, yeah, you see these, all these people

like buying steaks on steaks, you know, like I'm going to buy six tri-tips today. Like that's three cows worth of tri-tips. There's only two tri-tips on a cow. Really? Yeah. So, uh, you know, your TFL muscle, that's the tri-tip on a cow. Right. So.

That was, uh, the thing that was all striated on Sean Roden. Oh yeah. He would have a delicious, he would have a delicious, uh, tri-tip on a cow right so that was uh the thing that was all striated on sean rodent oh yeah he would have a delicious he would have a delicious uh tri-tip i don't know if you saw the mr olympia contest this year but sean rodent beat um uh phil heath and uh you know these guys they look oh they look amazing you know the striations and the quads and, and, uh, the hamstrings, but like he had like this side thing that was just hanging off the side of his hip flexor. A big triangle. Yeah. That was just striated.

It's like, whoa. Oh yeah. Yeah. And it's like, I mean, I've seen that before on some bodybuilders, but this guy's probably 250, you know, 260 pounds. Look at this, the thickness of that leg. It's insane. And how does the waist so small?

What's going on? Seriously. 43 years old. Good. Well, I got, what do I got? I got some years. I got some years to go. I'll get there.

I'll get there. How many years? How old are you? I'm 28. 28. A youngster. Yeah. A youngster.

Young guy. Do you have time to train? You've been at, you've been. Yeah. 28. A youngster. Yeah. A youngster. Young guy. Do you have time to train? You've been, you've been. Yeah. So I hit the gym this morning. You set any world records or anything? No.

Nothing big happened? Not this morning. No. Not a lot happens at fucking 3 a.m. But are you training at 3 a.m. at your house? No. So I train at Ironborn Strength in Yuba City.

Ron Strahan's gym. Yeah. Yeah. Just key card access. Ron Strahan's gym. Yeah, yeah. Just key card access. Yeah. It's great because, oh. It's an awesome facility that he's got.

It's pretty intense. It's awesome, man. He got everything. A little dirty. It's a little, it's a little, it's a little dirty, but he,

I love all the old shit that he's got. Oh, yeah. Those York dumbbells. And he loves showing you that shit. He's like, check this out.

He's like a savant when it comes to that stuff.'s a hoarder yeah just bad so all that i was telling mark like all that shit used to be in his garage like all of it and it was like spilling out into like his front yard and then they had to call like the homeowners association they got a fine for it it's awesome yeah we used to train out of his garage. It was a great time. 3 a.m., huh? 3 a.m. I go to bed at like 8. I put my daughter down at 8 o'clock, get up at 2.30, get my shit together, get a pot of coffee.

Eat anything? Usually not before training. Just drink a whole pot of coffee. Yeah. It's at least whole pot of coffee. Yeah. It's a pot of coffee. It's at least a pot of coffee a day. Yeah. Um, which probably isn't great for me, but, um, it's actually done a lot for me, not the coffee, but training at 3am. Yeah.

Um, so I put my daughter to bed and my wife gets up, um, at five to get ready for work. So I've got like this two hour window where I can go train. She's so lazy. I know. Breaking up at five. So right now she's staying up late because she's working on her master's. So she's got to do her homework and shit.

Damn. I know. She's a hustler. I don't know what the fuck she's doing with me. But I got her. Trapped. You keep her locked in, right? Right. She fucking hated me when we first met. That happens a lot.

It really, like she thought I was a complete douche. She was like, this guy's... And then she fell in love with it. She's like, this guy's so arrogant,

I love him. Yeah. The way I first met her, like we went hiking. Did she think you were arrogant or cocky or something? Pretty much, yeah. Or just thought you were

standoffish or something? The first minute I could, I took my shirt off. Like, this is how I'm gonna get... I got... It was like programmed human nature. Like, this is how I'm going to get, I got, it's like, it was like programmed human nature.

Like, I got to show her because otherwise I'm not going to see her again. She's not going to know what she's missing out on. And at that time, I was still like 100, I was probably 175 pounds.

So it's like, I didn't have nothing to show. It's great. Just setting the bait out there. And so I just kept, you know, hounding her. And then here we are.

It was just like. Where were you that you took your shirt off? I was, uh, so we went hiking this place called, uh, I think it's, uh, Ferry Falls up in Wheatland. Um, nice little waterfall up there. Cool. I didn't go swimming. There was no reason for me to take my shirt off. Awesome.

But I had to. You're like, whew, isn't it hot up here? And people are like, no, it's 65 degrees. She was so wrong about you. Yeah. That's right. But then, you know, here't it hot up here? And people are like, no, it's 65 degrees. She was so wrong about you. Yeah. That's right. But then, you know, here we are, like seven years later. I'm like, fuck.

Yeah. So I tell her that. I'm like, you don't know. You don't even know what you did, what happened. She probably every day is regretting it. Yeah. Like, I should have trusted my intuition. Right.

Like, just cut this guy out. So are there, I don't know, we probably don't have a lot to talk about this, but are there human beings with holes in their side too somewhere? So there are. Oh no. There are. And I think a lot of it isn't for research purposes. I think a lot of it's like medical intervention. But I think they can use them. Like you've got a hole in you. Hey, let's try this out. Let's see what's going on.

Can I get some of that? Let me see your gut microbiome. Right. But that's what, you know, that's why we're using pigs because pigs are a lot, there's a lot of great validity to the mice models that we have now. They've been studied very in depth and they're, I think they're a pretty great standard model. But if we can try to make a better model, we will. So that's what we, you know, we're utilizing the pig gut because they're monogastric.

They're pretty much omnivores. Their digestive system is similar to ours. So, you know, give it a shot, see if it's any closer. What's something that you're real excited about that you've been kind of poking around with? what's something that you're real excited about that you've been kind of poking around with anything kind of new or the last couple years that like maybe something even just surprised you where you ran a study early i'm gonna work and freaking just total opposite of what you thought or or has there been any research or science that has been just quite a bit different than what you expected man Man, that's heavy.

You know, I haven't taken a step back and looked at it like that. I will say that the expansion of metagenomics as we see it now is just, it's unreal. What are metagenomics? So metagenomics is... Sounds like a rap or something. A way of rapping, metagenomics is... Sounds like a rap or something. A way of rapping, metagenomics. Yeah, so it's the genomics, the genetic content of a community. So if you have your whole microbiome, I can extract and sequence all the DNA in it. And then I can go on the back end in what we call in silico on a computer,

and I can try to reassemble it and map it to what we know right the genes that we know their functions things like that so i can understand who's there like what microorganisms are there but what do they have the genetic capacity to do you know what enzymes they produce things like that um and now we're oh man because honestly it was probably like 15 years ago we were at we were pretty much at the base. We were amplify one gene at a time, maybe. And that was a feat. It was like, you got a whole gene out.

That's dope. And now we're generating millions and millions of reads and assembling entire genomes of organisms all in one shot. So we have this uncultured 99%. And when you look at where we've gotten with this 1%, so the 1% we do know about. Like everything we rely on comes from that 1%. Like all the biotechnology that we utilize today is that 1%. Pretty much everything about medicine wouldn't have been possible without antibiotics, right? Our understanding of germ theory, clean water.

What makes clean water clean? The absence of microorganisms, right? And that 1% has led to the largest increase in the human lifespan as we've seen it to date. Yeah. And so what that 99% holds is really, I mean, that's why I'm in it because there's something there. Yeah.

That and I want to name an organism. It's like naming a planet, huh? Right. But there's like, I guess there's billions of planets too. Do you think there's like maybe some sort of technology coming our way where we could, or is there any technology where you could rid yourself of disease by, by something in the stomach, you know,

like, uh, could you, could you, uh, possibly like get like inoculated for like common cold or something that you need where you never get a common cold because there's something in your stomach where you never,

you're never get a flu. You never have fucking diarrhea or like, you know, I, I don't know. What you, what you mentioned is so influenza virus. So H1N, like things like H1N1, swine flu, things like that. They change every year. They mutate. Right. And the way we keep up with the way we target them, um, right now is pretty, pretty, it's kind of old school.

We're targeting a specific region of this virus. And a lot of times we fail. You know, you hear every year like, oh, we weren't very good on the vaccine this year. Yeah, and it still gets through and it still gets tons of people sick, right? That kind of thing. The original influenza virus, right, correct. But even getting some vaccine, even if it doesn't have total coverage, what we call coverage, it still gives you some immunity, right?

You can still partially identify an organism, but they mutate at such an incredible rate. So you can't nail it, and that's the problem with the common cold, mutates. There's many things that give you colds. It's not just like, that's the cold virus, right? And there's many things that give you like traveler's diarrhea, right? That's what we typically assign to what we call rhinoviruses. So it's called Stan Everdeen viruses.

Yeah, I was going to say, he's had that before. He told me about it one time in Panama. Yeah, I'm sure he has. And then, you know, these things, they're so small. There's nothing that before. He told me about it one time in Panama. Yeah, I'm sure he has. And then these things, they're so small. There's nothing to them. It's a couple of genes. They encode for themselves, and that's it. They get in there, they put themselves in your DNA, and they're like, make me.

But when you look at our DNA as humans, there's viruses in our DNA that are just dormant, you know, millennia. They've just been there as long as we've been evolving. So I think they're an incredible part of our gene pool. So to say like, we can't, what would happen if we eliminated that genetic diversity that's being added by these things? And to think like the mitochondria, That was a free-living organism. And we were like, that's pretty dope. Like, you do cool stuff. You want to come be a part of me?

Like, you can burn fats and make tons of energy. Like, you can make me run. What about, you know, sometimes people refer to the stomach as the second brain. the second brain. And is there any hope to be able to do anything with like mental health illness, depression, anxiety kind of through the stomach? Have you seen any research with people eating certain types of diets that

help them maybe kind of steer themselves out of anxiety, depression? I just keep hearing that over and over again. There's so many people that are suffering from this. So I actually just read it. I sent this one to you too. Read it right now. It was the first case of looking at the,

in this case, the role of the ketogenic diet in alcohol. And then there was another study on the microbiome on the reward circuitry of the brain. And so like cocaine addicts, so people who are addicted to cocaine. So for that study, what they do is they wipe out the microbiome of these mice. They just dose them with antibiotics,

like what we call bazooka mycin or Godzilla cellin. Just wipe them out. And then you give them a bunch of Coke. Here you go, mouse. Check this out, bro. Yeah. But you can measure the transcripts in the brain that encode for your reward circuitry. And what they found is, so if your gut microbiome is wiped out, your reward circuitry is jacked up.

You're overproducing these transcripts that lead to, um, this reward system. Like, yeah, maybe this is why, uh, this makes sense. Um, once I got done with my bodybuilding show and I was like depleted of everything and I was, uh, you know, feeling like shit, basically, uh, this guy, Joel green that came on the podcast, he had me, uh, really hit the reward circuits hard, basically just eating a lot and nailing. He kind of had me eat certain types of food so it wasn't too much of an influx of bloating and hurting my stomach and making me sit on the toilet all day long. eventually hitting those rewards in a way that was, I guess, causing such release of other hormones like dopamine and some of these other things that it was causing a lot of positive effects. Normally people would say, well, overeating and eating junk is going to be primarily all negative.

There's a reason why we do it. But in this case, it was very positive in a bunch of different ways. So I think the key part of that cocaine key part of that, uh, the cocaine study is when they, they took these mice that they, you know, they were given Coke, um, and then they wiped out their microbiome, when they wiped out their microbiome, they added back in short chain fatty acids and that stopped that, that promotion of the, uh, reward circuitry. Wow. So you have this interplay between the gut microbiome and this, I mean, rewards. And you're seeing the same thing with sugar. I believe, so sugar also, you know, inhibits that reward circuitry. Like, oh, that was great. Let's do it again. What's a, I know you've said this a bunch, but what's a short chain fatty acid? A short chain fatty acid is like acetate and propionate. So they're very

similar to like beta hydroxybutyrate. They're short, like four carbons long. Little, what you similar to like beta-hydroxybutyrate. They're like four carbons long, little, what you assimilate, like a carboxylic acid in. Right. But you can kind of only make those through the digestion of carbohydrates. Right.

So predominantly, the fermentation of carbohydrates is how those are produced. So they added back in the short-chain fatty acids and you don't have that reward circuitry amped up like you do with that, with your wiped out microbiome. Um, so as an aside, the, uh, the alcohol thing, when you, when you're ingesting a ton of alcohol, your body's making a ton of, uh, acetate, right? So your body, your brain is getting used to metabolizing acetate as well. So what happens is if you get on a ketogenic diet while you're detoxing from alcohol, then you're supplying

your brain with the same type of fuel source as it would have had if it was on, you know, if it was producing alcohol or if you were ingesting alcohol. So if that transition period, if you're going to have someone come off of alcohol, I don't know how cooperative they're going to be, but if you can get them to switch to a ketogenic diet, it looks like there's pretty good promise in utilizing that. And it's been shown to decrease its irritability and rigidity. You're not going to calm it down but it's not a cure right but it can mitigate it does seem like it can cure right mitigate some of this it worked for my brother doing the ketogenic diet coming off alcohol yeah yeah it worked for my brother

my brother my brother went to a place called cliffside malibu where they um it's a beautiful place it's in malibu california which is unbelievable it doesn't get much better than that right um the facility is really nice and you know they could probably do better with their food but they have they got fruit they got vegetables they got meat occasionally i have like pizza and different things like that but as he started to go through uh treatment he started to just eat healthier and healthier. He's like, this just makes sense. They want me to go for a walk.

They want me to exercise. I'm going to all these meetings. I got all this extra shit that I have to do every day to make myself better. I might as well just eat better as well. And this is what I always try to preach is addition by subtraction. If I keep adding and adding to your life, then you're not going to have a choice but to start to subtract things out.

If I tell you, hey, man, you know, on top of waking up at 3 a.m., I need you to start going on two 10-minute walks every day. I need you to have two servings of vegetables every day, two servings of fruit every day. I need you to drink more water. I need you to get more sleep. And you're like, shit, man. By the time I do that, hanging out with my wife and kids and go to work, I ain't got time for a bowl of ice cream, right? I don't have time for this. And if you do have time for something, maybe it's just not as, uh, not as bad as, as what you would normally do.

But yeah, my brother started to eat better and better. And, uh, he got on a, uh, kind of war on carbs diet, a ketogenic diet. And, uh able to kick alcohol, and that was probably almost five years ago. And then he's just kind of gotten deeper and deeper into the keto diet, going all the way into the carnivore diet. Something that I noticed, which is really weird, was going through that bodybuilding program, which it was only eight weeks. So I never want to sit here and claim I'm a bodybuilder. I did a, uh, a bodybuilding diet for eight weeks.

Um, and, and that's all I know of it, but, uh, it completely killed cravings. It crushed them. I mean, now it's like, now I kind of just understand like right now for me to weigh 240, 245, which is about where my weight's at. I have to, I don't have to. I choose to eat a little bit of junk because I know I'm going to be on some bullshit diet any minute now to cut back down and stuff again anyway. So I'm just kind of, I'm taking my time with it a little bit. But it really killed a lot of cravings that i had before but the weird weird thing is is and i was never a big drinker anyway but it totally killed alcohol i just don't even i just fuck that yeah i know it's not weird isn't that weird but it's um it's probably similar to what you're saying with the ketogenic diet and alcohol.

There's something there that like, and even the bodybuilding itself, getting so involved in one thing and going so far one way, you think that you would swing back harder the other way. Right. But you really don't. You're like, no, man, this is the path I'm going on. When I was doing the bodybuilding stuff, I've never had a feeling like that before. You don't care about anything else. I don't even like body going on you don't when when i was doing the bodybuilding stuff i've never had a feeling like that before you don't care about anything else i don't even like bodybuilding i don't really i like i like the training i like getting a pump i love you know i love doing some chest and some biceps and some back and that kind of i mean who doesn't we all love to like bro out

it's fun right exercise fun it's hard to breathe heavy it's fun to sweat it's fun to work hard but i don't really love it the way I love like powerlifting, you know, but it was the one time in my life where I was like, this is what I'm doing. I'm like going, going dead on into this. And, and each week it got more intense. It was crazy. Yeah. The deeper I got in, the deeper I was in it.

Crazy. So, so I was going to ask you, so what's, what's, what's next? What's next is, uh, still just, you know, training hard and, and, uh, you know, trying to move around some big weights and get stronger, get a little bit bigger and just kind of see from here. I'm not really sure exactly what it will, what it will end up looking like. Um, I feel good. I feel really good. I feel strong. Um, staying in good shape. I think know put very simply uh jesse burdick uh always has really good advice for me and he just said yesterday i was like i don't really

have a goal which you know i don't really care but i almost always have some sort of goal in mind and almost always start to shoot toward something and he goes well just eat until you don't really have abs anymore and he goes and then when that eat until you don't really have abs anymore. And he goes, and then when that time comes, just eat and get your abs back. And I was like, all right, fair enough. You have to stray away from the goal so you can retrain for it again. That's right. Yeah. So what's next for Slingshot?

We're doing a lot of stuff here. We got a lot of projects we're working on. It's a great facility, by the way. Thank you. Steve showed me around. Yeah. It's pretty dope here. Yeah.

It's pretty awesome, man. You're going to have to come by more often and get some training sessions in. But, um, we've got some new stuff going on with power magazine, which I'm really excited about. We're, we're taking power magazine more, uh, more digital or just completely digital. We've had the magazine for about eight or nine years. Yeah. And, uh, and, uh, you know, it's not a, you know, some people might think, oh, it's, you know, dead cause it's, you know, print or whatever.

It's that's part of it. Um, but it's, it's more of a positive thing. It's gonna, we're going to add to it. We're not gonna, it's not like, it's not like it's going away and you're not going to see it again. You're going to see it more and people are going to, uh, know about it a lot more. It just became kind of the thing where it didn't seem like there was a huge need for it in the marketplace anymore. And, uh, you know, over a period of time, uh, the internet people,

social media, those, that's how people are getting, you know, that's how people are seeing Larry wheels, his big lifts and some of these other freaks out there, right? that's how people are getting, you know, that's how people are seeing Larry wheels, his big lifts and some of these other freaks out there, right? That's how people are learning about the vertical diet. They're watching Stan Efferding's, uh, Instagram and they're checking out different people's YouTube channels and stuff. And so we're going to provide a, uh, a digital platform, um, that's going to allow people to gather and extract information from a lot of places. And I think one thing that I think, uh,

that we'll be able to execute well on is we'll be able to get a lot of, uh, information to people, be able to get a lot of entertainment to people. But I also think that, um, a lot of these kind of younger people, uh, need to be like mentored a little bit. It's not going to be, it's not going to be me. That's going to like mentor everybody. everybody. But it's going to be through this publication and through this online thing that you're going to get that will have diet, will have programming, and will have all this kind of stuff. And so I'm really excited about that. As we were laying it out yesterday and as we were coming up with more concepts and ideas, I was like, people are going to really dig this because it's going to provide you with a lot. Are you going to expand to more than powerlifting? to really dig this because it's going to provide you with a lot. Are you going to expand to more than powerlifting? Um, in the beginning, it's going to, it's going to primarily, uh, stick to

strength sports. So it could be, it could be powerlifting. That's, that's what, that's what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It could be powerlifting could be, uh, you know, some strong man and, you know, some representation of some, uh, bodybuilding and maybe a little CrossFit or something, but probably primarily, uh, powerlifting, a strong man. Weightlifting is a little, um, it's been a tough one to crack. Yeah. I don't know how much we'll do with weightlifting. I don't know.

Serious. I don't know why it's so weird, but it is. It's very. I don't think those guys laugh. No. I've never seen one laugh before. No. Or smile.

No, they don't. They're just having a fucking terrible time. It's because it's sports so hard you ever try one of those lips you're impossible no i don't because they're terrible knee or ankle or something you like rip you like rip something off like the only time i get in the snatch position is like stretch my shoulders out to go do something else like with a stick stick. So. And then, uh, with slingshot, like we're just always making new stuff. We made a new pair of wraps the other day.

Uh, new pair of just wrist wraps. I mean, it's just as if you needed to wrap your wrist any harder than you already do, but, uh, that's the tightest I ever wrapped my wrist before. And I was like,

holy shit. I was like, I don't even know if this is necessary, but what I need, what I need is, so I want to be able to hold a farmer's handle and then wrap my fucking arm, my wrist so tight that I can't open my hand. Yeah. So I don't have to worry about dropping farmers anymore.

Yeah. That's what will happen. You wrap your wrist so hard that you, yeah, you're, you're just making a fist the whole time, you know? That's the goal. But, uh, you know, it's really awesome to have like the team that we have, cause we can sit down to some of these meetings and we can chat about a couple ideas and you know, it's not me every day pushing it along, which it was before, which was like, just, I was just like, yeah, I just don't even want to talk about it. It was, uh, it was a pain in the balls.

It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun doing it all. But, uh, man, is it nice to have other people? And then also too, they, they give input and then products become better you know and so that's something i had to kind of learn over a period of time like hey you know don't hoard all this shit like let other people have input on it and uh they'll be more vested in in wanting to see the product come to life too because they'll be like oh shit that, that was awesome because that was kind of part of my idea, you know?

And now a whole team becomes part of it ends up being a way different thing. So super excited about all that. It's crazy. Yeah.

You just kind of like mention it to someone like, oh fuck, I know how to fix that. Yeah. We could totally do this. I'm like,

oh, this just solved like six months worth of work. Well, it's awesome. Like I'm sure it's the same being in your lab, you know,

if somebody will say, oh man, that'd be kind of neat if we could do that. And someone else would be like, yeah, we could do that. Yeah. And you're like, what? No, we could, yeah, no, we could actually do that. We could study that tomorrow. Like we could start doing that.

And somebody would be like, oh my God. Okay, cool. And next thing you know, you're off and running and you're doing it, right? Yeah. And sometimes it's pain in the ass because you have a lot of great ideas and you know, we're, you know, we're, we're definitely a growing lab, but, uh, it's, I'm, I'm, I'm definitely learning a lot about like, uh, management delegation, um, and then learning how to just look forward. So from my boss, I mean, dude's got ideas and sometimes he's like, Hey, we're going to do this next.

I'm like, fuck, how? Like what? He's like, we're gonna do this next i'm like fuck how like what he's like you know we just figured out like okay but you know it's a it's a great place to be right now um especially i mean in my career just learning all the time i mean we're the cutting edge of a lot of this stuff so i think a lot of people that are uh that are young um i think they kind of enjoy like somebody saying hey like this is what we're going to do. And they might think, Oh shit, like, how are we going to do that? But I think, uh, somebody kind of put in their lap and say, Hey, Andrew, like I want, I want

to do this. And then him going, Oh shit, I don't know how, uh, I'm not going to say anything. I'm going to go try to Google it or figure it out. And then you go try to figure it out and, and you, shit, you figure it out, right? You figure it out. And sometimes, well, not sometimes, all the time, it should work out that the person that is doing the job that you ask them to do, they should be able to do a way better job than you could ever do it, you know?

Right. And that's why you hire people. And that's what, that's what will happen over time. And I always tell people, you have to understand. people and that's what that's what will happen over time and i always tell people you have to understand and i was trying to tell this to a family member he owns a a company that djs like weddings and things like that and he does a lot of it hands-on and he's the guy you know putting everything together and breaking everything down at night and i was like man you got to get other people to do like that's cool that you like that he said it's one of his favorite parts of the job i said well shit that's great um but you know you're leaving some of these places at 12 o'clock

you're getting home at one o'clock and then to try to start your next day and he likes to work out in the morning i'm like man that's just too much you know as you get to be 40 and so on it's just it's a lot right so uh i was coaching him through it and i said hey you have to understand when you pass something off to somebody you have to understand they could do a better job than you. Like, like understand that as a possibility. He's like, wait, I have to understand and accept this possibility that they'll do a worse job than me. No, no, no. You have to understand that they could do it. They might do it different and you might look at it and go, oh, I don't know about that. But give it some time.

Maybe that different way that they're doing it, maybe it's going to be better. Right. And that was a major. I wouldn't do it that way. What's he doing? Stop it. Just relax. Watch it happen.

This is the way you do. No. And that was definitely a major transition I had to make from doing everything on my own. My whole thesis was just like, I was picturing it with a beaker and just a bunch of smoke going off. I've got the glasses on. Definitely don't want any smoke going on when there's mercury around. That'd be the death. Um, but just, you know, the whole project.

Mercury and methane. Yeah. That's my whole life right now. Uh, iron, um, just everything by myself. And now, now you know i have a great team you know um phd students undergrad kids that are just like willing and ready to rock and roll and it's like okay you can have this but yeah and then just kind of like sit back and watch and then and a lot of the times it's just like go fail at at this a couple of times. Yeah. Talk about it. But after that, it's like,

man, I don't have to do that anymore. Like I can have this person do this and they can be like the boss of that. Like they can totally take control of this. How great is that? Right. 23, 24 or whatever,

25 years old. Right. Yeah. And just like, and, and it makes me feel good because I'm setting them up in their career, you know, giving them a specialty, um them a specialty, something that they're going to specialize in and be able to take that to another lab and do another job. They have a skill set to be a leader, which you can put anywhere.

Right. If you have a skill set to just do A, B, and C that somebody else tells you to do every single time, it might not be a skillset that is, uh, uh, going to lead you to be more successful. Right. I mean, it's kind of be in the same spot.

There's a, there's a role for people. You know, if I just ask you to do something, no, your role, shut your mouth, like do this for me.

Like in some things I just need done, like pretty terrible at organization. My lab notebook is, uh, it's empty. It's empty. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, well. Oh, okay.

But as far as a team, I don't want to just say, do it this way, this way, this way, this way. I need you to be a free thinker. I need you to come up with ideas. Otherwise, you're just kind of bringing us down. What about last question, unless Andrew has a couple more.

But Andrew and I have been talking a lot on the podcast lately about sleep. Yeah. Seen anything with sleep affecting the gut, affecting the stomach, and things like that? As far as research is concerned, I haven't got into the sleep microbiome stuff. You're knee deep in cows. Yeah, or elbow at least. I was going to say shoulder, elbow. Yeah, elbow is about as far as I can go.

The cannula is not, I mean, it's. I need to use the restroom real quick. Be right back. You can keep talking. Sure. The cannula is not big enough to get too much far. I was watching it on YouTube right now and I genuinely, my stomach was like, ooh, I should probably not watch this right now.

So usually what we do is we get a big PVC pipe. Oh, geez. And you drill holes in it. So it's called a transformation tube. And then you put it down into that hole and you just use a big syringe. I'm sorry. That's all right. And you can just suck the room fluid out of it.

Do you lube up the PVC pipe at least? No, there's plenty of space in there. Just raw. Yeah, just ram it on in there. Yeah. The reason why we've been talking a lot about sleep, I'm balls deep in the sleep book. And basically he was just kind of saying that like without adequate sleep, it kind of puts our body into like after you smoke weed and you get the munchies. Like you tend to be hungrier and you want to reach for like crappier foods.

Yeah. So I'd imagine that would, you know be something if you could change your gut microbiome to kind of reverse that or maybe avoid that. That might be something that is possible. So there's definitely some studies on delayed effects of microbial fermentation. So if you eat a dinner with a lot of carbohydrates or a lot of complex carbohydrates,

so a lot of leafy greens and things like that, what we consider prebiotics, right? What happens is the fermentation of those takes a long time. Well, not a long time, but several hours. So what's going to happen is you're going to get the production of short chain fatty acids over time. And then they're finally going to be absorbed. But that's going to be like six, seven hours later. Right. So around the time you're getting up for breakfast.

So there's definitely a correlation between eating a dinner full of complex carbohydrates and indigestible carbohydrates and how you feel that morning, the choices you're going to be making that morning. How hungry are you? Right. So if you're, you know, if you're ravenous hungry, you're like, yeah, you're probably going to make shitty decisions. But if you have just that little bit of offset edge because you have that delayed nutrient availability, then you might be able to make

a better decision for breakfast at least. Kind of like what Joel Green was saying, the meal is affected by the meal you had previously, the one you're having and the one you're going to have. Yeah. That's crazy. What are some things we can do to better utilize the proteins we're ingesting? Since power lifters, we're trying to get jacked. Yeah.

That's tough. Don't let them get to your colon. There's a lot of stuff when it comes to like, um, digestive enzymes and stuff. Yeah. You hear people talk about these things and most bodybuilders, uh, they seem to like them. And I think, I think sometimes the case is that it's people that are just wishing that supplements work.

Right. Whether they're actually really doing anything or not, it's, it's, I think it's really hard to tell. And I think that, uh, most of the time when you go to look at science of it, if there was really true science behind it and it was like digestive enzymes helped you digest 20 grams more protein per day, I think that everyone would take them all the time. And it would be this big part of everybody's nutrition plan, you know, but I don't think a lot of the things really stack up and work all that well. Right. So I know you're trying to cut it off here, but what was your caloric deficit when you were? um, I know how many calories I took in, but I didn't really know what my demand was. But, uh, I would say that I was probably at like around 2,600 calories and it probably started going down towards around 2000 calories. Cause that was one of the dynamics I was, I really wasn't insane.

It wasn't an insane drop, you know? Cause if you have, I mean, the micro, these microorganisms are going to be liberating calories for you, right? You're going to be getting calories from them. So depending on your composition, what it's geared towards, you know, a 100-calorie deficit for you might be only a 50-calorie deficit for someone else. They might be getting more calories for something. So I was, I mean, with the pretty strict diets that people are on, I don't think it's going to matter because it's consistent right same thing day in and day out consistent don't be fancy that's what jay cutler kind of shared with us on here he knows the thing um i do think that uh people playing around with the amount of protein they take in uh could possibly be effective but i don don't know. Sometimes when you see like, uh, somebody will

share that there's like Dave Asprey has shared, uh, some information about, um, these like low protein diets that you specifically go on for a period of time. Maybe you only have a hundred grams a day or 50 grams a day, like something really, a really low amount. Just come, just trace proteins almost, um, that when you go back to eating more protein, supposedly the theory is that, uh, your body tends to, uh, kind of uptake that a little bit better than had you just plowed through and always had 300 grams. But I, you know, I don't know if they're doing this on active people that are really

training hard. They're probably not. So. Right. They call it a hypothesis at this point. I can't, I don't think we can establish a theory on that yet, but I mean, I mean, I train it hard. They're probably not. Right. They call it a hypothesis at this point. I don't think we can establish a theory on that yet. But, I mean, I have seen some stuff about, like, pancreatin.

So that's a pancreatic enzyme mixture from pigs going to utilize those to help break down that stuff faster to get it out of her body, you know, so she can return to breastfeeding faster. So they, and there has been some studies for that. So clearing proteins out. So there's some validity there. Actually, I think that study was actually done at UC Davis here. Yeah. So they, we know they work. I mean, they're enzymes, they break down proteins. Um, but what benefit are you getting from that? And a lot of these guys, like, these studies aren't, these studies aren't built for people, you know, like Brian Shaw,

who are taking in this, this amount of food. Like, it's like the event horizon. Like, well, it looks like it goes this way. Right. But once you get past, like, I don't know, like seven pounds of food a day, like, we don't really know what happens. I like some of the theories, too, that, like, with some of the guys, when they're very simple, you know, again, going back to that theory of Jay Cutler saying, saying you know don't be fancy just be consistent um i remember ronnie coleman somebody asked him like when you take the 200 pound dumbbells uh and you press them like that how come you don't lock them out and he said hurts my elbows you know what i mean like uh simplicity is really a beautiful thing and if you're

eating and you're trying to gain size and trying to gain muscle, and it appears that you're heading in the right direction, and it looks like the scale is trending upward, then you maybe don't have much to worry about. Stomach feels okay. Your, your energy levels feel, uh, on par. Sometimes your energy levels can be a little compromised when you start to eat more. Um, and then same thing with you're trying to eat less scale, trending downward, feel okay. Um, getting lightheaded during the workouts or you dehydrate, you know, like you've got to kind of track some of these things. And if some things start to feel way off, well, then you got to kind of reevaluate, Oh, maybe I need more water. Maybe I need more sleep or. And that's the hardest part

is, I mean, you're, you're making, especially if you're making radical changes, like if you're trying to change your life around, like I'm going to do everything healthy and everything you change, well, everything healthy. You're just going to change everything about what you're doing is you don't know what's contributing to what. So making these small incremental changes over time, like that was good. Like that, that makes me feel good. I'm going to keep doing more than that.

Like, ah, I changed this. Didn't really like it. I'm going to come back. Right. And the problem is, you know, you change too many things at one time. You really don't know. I'm going to keep doing more than that. I changed this. I didn't really like it. I'm going to come back. And the problem is you change too many things at one time. You really don't know. It's like squat form. I see guys go in there and they're like, oh, I'm going to get my feet wider, point my toes out, make my knees out, and try to be upright at the same time.

I'm like, fuck. You're just going to fucking learn how to squat again? Yeah, one thing at a time. Right. You're just going to fucking learn how to squat again? Yeah, one thing at a time. Right. So as a scientist, it's like, what do we know what's working if we're changing all these things at the same time?

So small, incremental progress. Yeah. For sure. When you were talking earlier about studying iron and stuff, there's some theories that uh uh women live longer than men uh do the fact they have their period and do the fact that they are releasing blood you know men can go and like give blood they can donate blood and that can help drive down your uh your iron i guess or maybe a red blood cell count well the he the heme. So the iron in your red blood cells, right? So the heme molecule is just a little iron inside the hemoglobin. So actually, the lineage of my, the men in my family have hemochromatosis, which is the body is very good at extracting iron from food, from red meat.

So that's where most of the iron is going to be. And so what happens is over time is it starts to build up in the organs. Um, so my dad, for instance, uh, gives blood like once a month. Right. And he has a fricking stack of like, they give him this like free ice cream pints, like a pint for a pint. And I thought it was hilarious. Like how, how drug dealer is that? You know, like what's up? You want some ice cream? Give me some of your blood. Yeah. That's hilarious.

But, uh, that's interesting. You know, I haven't, I haven't, I haven't seen any direct link, um, with that, but it definitely goes to show the body. Iron is so important in the body because everything needs it. Microorganisms need iron. And so your body, as a part of its immune system, scavenges iron from the blood.

Any free iron, it's gone. Because if, like you can do this in the ocean too. If you put a drop of iron out in the ocean, boom, algal bloom. Because it's a limiting nutrient. If you add that nutrient back in, you're going to have,

you're going to allow microorganisms to grow and can't have that. Right? Not us. Algal blooms blooms, whatever on the ocean. Um, so keeping that iron like nice and safe and bound up in hemoglobin is very important. Um, so the body's just too good. We're just too good at it. So, um, you end up with an overabundance of iron in some cases. Exactly. So you get heavy metal toxicity in um some of your organs um can cause you know liver failure and things like that um so luckily um you know my dad found out about it pretty early right he's able to control it

well he got some blood ran down like iron's out of control i have uh my blood's b negative so i'm a mutant you're. They call me all the time. They're like, we need your blood. No. Yeah. A pint of ice cream. I'm like,

you can't tell that my blood's just full of Trin. You guys aren't, that's not registering over there? Like it's mostly Trin. Yeah. Oh yeah. Whoever's getting it's just like,

wow. Like I need another. I need another one. That's like what rich people do is like get blood transfusion from young, healthy people. Yeah. This is like, this is good shit. Anything over there, Andrew?

We're all good? Yeah, we're all good. Wonderful. All right, my man. Hey, it was awesome having you here on the Poopcast. Thanks for sharing all those, all those, all that information with us.

Of course. Tell us if you want to, tell us where people can find you or reach you or if you don't want to, you can leave that off. Um, so you can, uh, find us on the internet, the Hess lab.com. Um, see our research, uh, what we've got going on there. Um, also on Twitter now at the Hess lab. If you want to reach out to me, I guess you can, um, strongmanbrook at gmail.com.

Uh, you can find me on Instagram at strongmanmicro. Um, but other than that kind of leave me alone I'm not very good at the social media the Instagrams you can tell them my terrible posts

follow my posts they're really bad people hate them it's just me fucking delirious at like 3am like getting ready to do shit

so you ever train at any normal hours uh so yeah during the weekend and shit like if i want to get you know if our crew wants to get together yeah so we have original team big sack right but then we have big chico as well because when i when i moved to chico fights with big sack like we started like a nucleation site up there a bunch of guys um so we get together try to like maybe once a month, try to get everyone in the same spot. And then I'll train at like 8 a.m., 9 a.m., something like that.

Tyler's still around? Yeah, well, he's in Vacaville or something like that. I know he's coaching some kids for a while, stuff like that, right? He's pretty deep in his, he was doing corrections. I think he might be at the sheriff's department now. Oh, cool. But yeah, he just finished a show, Northern Nevada's Strongest Man. Awesome.

I'm going to probably see him on Friday. Yeah, well, come on in, man. I don't know, we don't have all the strongman toys, but we got some. Some strongman toys. Everything's a strongman toy, if you're brave enough. Yeah. I mean, just pick up the monolift and walk with that. That's a strongman toy yeah brave enough yeah i mean just pick up the monolift and walk with that so that's a hilarious story um so james and i drove up because tyler asked us to we took that fucking monolift and that forza bench down to jesse burdick's gym in dublin

yeah and that piece of shit ford f-150 just like loading the both we're like we'll take the monolift like throw this bench in there too and we're just like oh shit and we're like we had like one strap on it yeah and the whole there too and we're just like oh shit and we're like we had like we had like one strap on it yeah and the whole way down there we're just like it might not get there might not might not hold steady yeah you actually helped move the gym too which was awesome so thank you yeah the chico crew came up there too we just that's what power lifters ask strongman to help move oh yeah yeah somebody somebody's got to move. Because we're stupid. We're just like, oh, you want to fucking, you want to lift some weights?

Oh, you want to see how fast I can lift all these 45s into your gym? And set it all up? So fast. And make it nice and neat and clean? I'll do it. Right. And you had pizza, so. Oh, yeah, that's true.

All right. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.