Mark Bell's Power Project - Why Exercise Doesn’t Make You Immune to Diabetes

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

On this episode of Mark Bell’s Power Project, Andrew Koutnik joins us to break down why exercise doesn’t automatically make you immune to diabetes, insulin resistance, or blood sugar problems.We get into how fit athletes can still develop prediabetes, why carbohydrates and fats can become a problem when they’re overconsumed together, and why your blood work can tell a very different story than how you look or how hard you train.Follow:  ⁨@andrewkoutnikphd⁩  www.andrewkoutnik.comSpecial perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!

Do you think it's possible to get type 2 diabetes if someone's not consuming that much fat? Wow, Mark, that's actually a way more complicated question. We found that sustaining brain energy metabolism increased performance on both the high carbohydrate diet and the very low carbohydrate diet. What this showed is something that had actually been discovered for 100 years, that it was the maintenance of brain energy metabolism that was the primary determinant of regulating performance. fit middle-aged runners who had high VL2 maxes that were consuming carbohydrates at 30% of them were developing three diabetes. Do you think it's possible to get type 2 diabetes if someone's not consuming that much fat?

Wow, Mark, that's actually a way more complicated question. Do you think it's the combination? I think typically you hear diabetes, especially kind of type 2, you think people clearly have overconsumed sugar because their blood glucose, their sugar levels in their body are high, so they must have overdone carbohydrates, but maybe it's more than just that. Well, I think there's definitely people who,

even if the fat is low enough, if they overconsume any of the nutrients and go into chloric syrup press, gain enough weight, develop insulin resistance from the excess fat tissue, and then go on to develop tidal diabetes, yes, it can. It's certainly a lot easier to do it when carbs and fat are simultaneously,

high. And we know that because those diets are typically, actually that is what we define as the Western diet. So the Western diet is associated with obese is an abysogenic diet, meaning it drives obesity. And it also is the prominent diet that can drive a lot of issues. High carbohydrate isn't necessarily always problematic in every setting. But on top of that with additional fat, now you're trying to process carbohydrates with high levels of instance sensitivity, which you need, but then fat at super high levels may regulate or reduce. insulin sensitivity if it's high enough. And that combination can be problematic, which is why a lot of the research on health tends to show that if you reduce carbohydrates sufficiently low or they're very high,

but fat is very low, those combinations tend to do very well for modulating health. But the in between period is where things get a little problematic, mainly because of what we just mentioned around processing multiple nutrients simultaneously, but more so because they're obesogenic nature of that style of diet. People tend to overconsume them. Because if you go to eat a carbohydrate source, but it had very little fat and all of a sudden eat the same thing but has a ton of fat, you may not necessarily notice the difference. But the calories are way different. And as we know, if you consume an excess amount of calories, yes, for some people, this is somehow controversial. But if you go drink a whole thing of olive oil, like a container

of this olive oil on top of what you're doing every single day, yeah, you're going to gain weight, like, unless you ate nothing but that, right? So calories do matter when it comes to weight regulation. But to your question, it's an interesting scenario because it depends on the other variables involved, but I think it really comes down to if people are going to consume excess amounts or not of the total diet. You want to play this video? Yeah. Let's check it out. Number one reason you can't reach peak performance has nothing to do with carb loading or how much sugar your muscle stores. I'm Dr. Andrew Kudnik, a biomedical research scientist and elite performance coach. Our team just published a landmark scientific paper analyzing over 100 years of

evidence and 600 studies. And what we found directly challenges modern sports nutrition guidelines and the industry behind them. Here are the three biggest findings. First, consuming massive amounts of carbohydrates, gels, sports drinks, and powders is largely misguided. Athletes are pushed to consume 5 to 12 grams of carbohydrates per kilogram of body weight each day and 60 to 90 grams per hour during exercise. That's the equivalent of nine slices of toast every hour, adding up to over 1,000 grams of carbohydrates per day for some athletes, all because they are told they need their muscles full of glucose. But our analysis demonstrates the amount of glucose in the muscle called muscle glycogen was not the most important predictor performance. Second, and this is key,

Performance is limited by brain energy, not muscle fuel. When blood glucose drops, the brain triggers fatigue, the classic hitting the wall. Across 160 studies, when carbs improve performance, 88% of the time they did so by preventing blood glucose drops, not by filling the muscle with sugar. That means you don't need 60 to 90 grams of carbohydrates each hour. You only need around 10 grams per hour to protect the brain. That's one tablespoon of sugar or a third of a banana. Third, and the industry won't tell you this, more carbs can backfire, accelerating muscle glycogen

breakdown, shutting down fat burning, and increasing metabolic risk, with some athletes actually developing pre-diabetes following high-carb sports nutrition guidelines. Athletes, coaches, and dietitians, the bottom line is to stop fueling the muscle and start fueling the brain. Follow for the full breakdown on this pivotal paper and comment below with your questions. Stop scrolling. Before we dive into this too deep, Do any of you guys know where that song comes from?

I don't know where the song goes from. I don't. I think I know, but I could be totally wrong. I'm sometimes way off with it. I have no idea, actually. I think it comes from Interstellar. No. I think that's the music that's in Interstellar.

I wasn't going for that. I was thinking like Matrix, but it's more like sci-fi type thing. Maybe Ryan can try to get to the bottom of it as we talk through some of this. But anyway, that must be really cool to be involved in that kind of research. It's interesting. I never, you know, I was always gotten to research because I, wanted to improve my performance, you know, be bigger, stronger, faster, pun intended there. And so I was always interested in how that worked, but I also have type of diabetes.

So the metabolic part of it, the nutrition part of it, the exercise part of it, were all really interesting to me. And this really led to a merger of a lot of the research we were doing before, which is regulating disease processes or specific tissues like the brain or the muscles with looking at things like exogenous ketone bodies in both animals and human models. and all the way to kind of also looking simultaneously, not just individual metabolites, but also looking at whole diet-based shifts

and how they can regulate performance. And so it's actually been about a little over half of what we've actually done. But in this, you were talking about only having like around 10 grams of carbohydrates? So, yeah. That sounds like bullshit. There we go.

That's what most people think. In fact, if you go to the comment sections, that's probably most of what you're going to see. I mean, aren't most people thinking like they're going to have 100, 200 grams, of carbs before like a hard training session. There's also the old kind of football mentality of like a football team would get together on like a Thursday or Friday night to get ready for the game the next day and they would have

some big pasta dinner or something like that, right? That's still a thing. Like that visual image, if you're watching this, not listening to it, there's a cyclist eating a bowl of pasta on the bike. That was absolutely to do that on purpose because it gets to this point. Like we know sports nutrition guidelines push very high carbohydrate intake. Okay. Now why is that?

So if we were to dial back time, okay, go back to the 1800s, we know that in the Berlin Olympics, we use Olympics because it's a great metric of the best athletes in the entire world. Their diets, based on cafeteria records, food records at that time, was predominantly protein-based, upwards of almost 800 grams of protein sometimes per day, but protein and fat-based.

Carbohydrates were not zero, but they weren't the focus of the diet. It wasn't until the 1960s where a physician named Jonas Bergstrom actually developed what he called the Bergstrom, muscle biopsy where he could actually take a syringe, stick it into the muscle and clip out a piece of muscle and analyze it. What he was finding is that in that tissue, glucose was being stored in chains called glycogen. And when you see in a working muscle tissue or working tissue like muscle that produces output or force, that if you see a nutrient being stored in there must be important for performance,

well, lo and behold, a few years later, they did an analysis looking at, well, if you have more muscle glycogen, it was associated with longer and better performance. So then the shift started to go away towards protein and started to shift more towards carbohydrates. It was in the 1960s that led into the 1970s where researchers started to develop this new technique of looking at how do we know what the body's burning? Because if you know what is burning, maybe we can get more of it. And so Collier, C-O-Y-L-E, a researcher, Edward Collier, on the 1980s published a number of papers that demonstrated that there's new technique where you stick a mask on someone's face and you can

detect the amount of oxygen they're breathing in and the amount of carbon dioxide they're breathing out, that ratio determined the amount of carbohydrates versus fat someone was burning. Okay. And what they're finding is, oh, lo and behold, if someone's burning more carbohydrates, they tend to go longer. They tend to be able to perform better. Then in the 1990s, there was this major model produced called the crossover effect. It was demonstrating that as intensity levels rose in a lot of these studies,

that the reliance on fat would drop and the reliance on carbohydrates would increase, essentially determining that to perform at high intensities, carbohydrates were essential to performance. And this still is a thing and they talk about your heart rate and your breathing. Sometimes people think that when you go, from casual nasal breathing, that you're more in a fat burning zone. You can correct me if I'm wrong on any of this. And your heart rate would be just, I'm just going to throw out a random number, but like

130, 140, depending on the athlete. And then once you kind of cross over that and have to start to breathe in and out of the mouth or in the nose out the mouth, that's when you're kind of burning sugar, burning carbohydrates. Does I have some of that correct? Or glucose, I should say. So what you're describing is two metrics, heart rate and breathing, that are surrogates for the intensity output.

So it's based on intensity. So the higher the intensity, you can't just nasally breathe when you're sprinting. If you do, it's going to be worse than if you were able to mouth breathe, right? So in heart rate, the same thing. So that's a metric of overall intensity, but we know that max heart rate is relative based on age. And just breathing in and out of your nose is not going to ensure that you're burning fat if you're trying to force yourself to do it during sprints. Correct, although I'm sure someone has told someone that before. Right, right.

So yeah, so we know that the intensity level modulates that. And the crossover point was this concept that around 60 to 70% the at rest, let's say we're just standing here talking. Most of what we're burning hypothetically is fat. And very little bit would be carbohydrates. But as we increased intensity, okay, we went for a walk, we go out in the gym, we lift some weights, and Seema challenges me to a grappling match.

Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, oh shit. You're still working that karate chop, huh? Yeah, he said he did grappling, but then I saw karate and I, I was confused. I'm glad you ducked out of the way of that. Yeah. That looked pretty bad.

So people don't see this and maybe it clipped up, but that's actually how your hair got flattened. Yeah, it was so fast. And actually burnt the tips in the center quite effective. Got it colored just perfectly. Yeah, yeah. Bleached and blackened with the fire. Yeah.

So when, so as we get in higher intensity, this crossover point where it's the point at which 50% of carbs or fat crossover. So like, and then as you go higher and higher intensity, carbs become predominant. And I believe here, molecularly or mechanistically or physiology, whatever term you want to use, is that you are more reliant on anaerobic systems. Okay. Aerobic means you have to consume oxygen, requires electron transport chain, which is very efficient, produce ATP.

But when you become a more anaerobic, higher intensities, you are much more reliant on, at higher intensities, that is, much more relying on lower oxygen intake, you're more relying on carbohydrates. And there's also this science that has shown that oxygen appears to be more efficient per unit of oxygen. So all these things are coming together. The 1960s, the muscle biopsy and glycogen levels. 1980s, the amount of carbohydrates being consumed was associated with greater performance. 1990s, we see this crossover point that as you get higher intensity, you're going to burn more carbohydrates less fat deeming if you're going to do high intensity you have to have carbohydrates then we get into the 2017 to 2021 where there's sorry is it okay to interrupt you by saying we're not talking

about carbohydrates talking about glucose so we're talking about carbohydrates here but when your body's burning it it would be glucose right correct that's accurate great great distinction there so when just because sometimes i think people they think these things are synonymous and they're slightly different. Yes. There's reasons to, the reason why they're not named the exact same thing. That's correct.

And the way we describe it scientifically, actually bring up a good point about this, maybe a bit of misguided, maybe we should say, fat versus glucose based or sugar-based metabolism. Because a lot of the way we described in the scientific literature is how many carbs are you oxidizing or burning, how many fat are you burning or oxidizing, even though we're not actually burning,

we're burning parts of fat through fatty acid, oxidation, but the individual molecule of production in carbs, how we're describing is actually glucose or sugar. So we see all these concepts coming about and everything started to shift towards a carbohydrate-based focus. In fact, it also aligned in 1970s after the muscle biopsy technique of the dietary guidelines that came out that really promoted 45 plus percent of carbohydrates complex forms of carbohydrates. So all this is kind of synergistically coming together, the environment of food, the policies of food, but also the studies around novel techniques looking at associations between these metrics and performance, which to this day we still focus

on. We still focus on carb loading and the amount of carbs that you're burning during exercises metric and output that leads to performance. And there was also these studies in 2017 to 2021 that if carbohydrates are since your performance, if we reduce them, you would see a decrease in performance. And there was these studies between one week in duration, slightly less than one week, five to six days. and three weeks in duration that if you did a ketogenic diet, we were seeing elite athletes, race walkers, see a decrease in performance of 2% when they reduce carbohydrates. Now, for most people, 2%, they won't even notice this

or be able to actually accurately detect this in any meaningful way. But for an elite level performance performer, that's 2% is the difference to be first and second place. That's meaningful in that 0.0001% of the population. But that really led to what they described in their page, paper titles is a nail in the coffin for low carbohydrate intake. Now, that also followed by virtually every major organization, Gatorade Sports Science Institute,

although that's kind of a little, maybe a little, there might be a little bias, right? But then you also have Institute for Sports Science Nutrition or ISSN, for the incorrectly, International Society of Sports Nutrition. But they recommend five to 12 grams per KG. So, Mark, how much do you weigh right now? Like 215. Okay, so like 180. And he didn't laugh at my joke.

I thought it was funny. So he's 215. All right, so he's 215. And for average body weight weight will is a buck 80. And let's say you're doing elite level performance volumes of exercise, which would be like three, four plus hours per day on average. You're going to be consuming if you were just a normal body weight, like 80 KGs. You're closer to 100 KGs.

You would consume over 100. you'd be recommended to consume up to over 100,000 grams of carbohydrates per hour, which is kind of a little bit insane. It's hard to imagine how many carbohydrates that actually is, and a lot of athletes struggle to get that in, so they tend to- A thousand grams of carbohydrates per hour? Per day.

Per day. Okay, you said per hour. Yeah. I mean, if you're like giving yourself all sorts of treats all the time, might not be so hard in our today's food environment, but in general, if you eat like any type of healthy food, that's a lot of food. to do that. So all this came together to this belief that carbohydrates were central to performance.

But if you look back at all these studies since the 1960s, 1980s, in the 1990s, where the guidelines or the models were coming out on the cross-door effect, every single one of those studies paid attention to muscle glycogen and carbohydrate oxidation levels in those same studies. If you looked at other metrics like blood glucose levels, we were seeing that blood glucose levels were dropping. in fact, dropping into something called hypoglycemic range. Hypoglycemia is when the brain glucose availability drops below a certain threshold and causes a well-established counter-regulatory neuroindocrine response. It is a fight-or-flight response.

Adrenaline spikes, your body starts to do everything it can to mobilize glycogen, and your brain's now in a deficit. When your brain detects a deficit and you're exercising, and that exercise, that muscle tissue is stealing its glucose, it's going to try to shut that down because it needs to preserve the most important tissue in the body, the brain, or arguably the most important tissue in the body. And we've known since 1925 and 26

two physicians from Harvard called Levin and Gordon were finding in the Boston Marathon race that athletes were coming through the end of the race, pale, lethargic, many would not finish, slurred speech, ataxic, their muscles were shaking, And what they were doing is they're pulling the blood from these athletes and detecting what they call the constituents within the blood, a blood constituents in these athletes. And they found that, lo and behold, everything seems to be relatively reasonable, but glucose was low, low enough to reliably cause these negative consequences on physical function and cognitive performance. Well, in all these studies that shifted the way we think about carbohydrates as a fuel source, these same studies either,

One didn't publish blood glucose changes. We don't know what was happening in blood glucose. But when they did, we were seeing it dropped every single time when carbohydrates were not present. But whenever you give carbohydrates, you also increase the amount you burn. No brainer. You also, if you increase carbohydrates, can store more carbohydrates or have more glycogen. So this was associative, meaning if I give more carbohydrates, glycogen's higher.

If I give more carbohydrates, the amount of carbohydrates I burn is higher. I'm performing better. and that association between glycogen and the amount of carbs you burn was now linked to performance. And all this other synergistic, environmental, political components shifted towards people just accepting the belief that you need carbohydrates to perform, period. But yet there were studies in the 1980s that were demonstrating that when individuals actually reduced the carbohydrates to be less than 50 grams per day, but if they adapted to it for long enough, they were not seeing different drops in performance.

We were also seeing studies from certain groups showing that, hey, look, there's these signals that if you're adapting to this diet long enough, we're not seeing this reliable drop in performance. Because the studies that did show it were often short term. Also had many confounding variables like calories were being changed. Their body weight was changing. They were doing a progressive training volume. You know, all these other variables we know in effect performance. were interacting in those studies. So was it the training volume? Was it the calories? Was the body weight change that affected performance? We don't really know. And so we embark to

really test this question and say, look, we're going to have these athletes adapt for four weeks or more on these diets. It's going to be the same athletes. They're going to do it for four weeks and then they're going to cross over after a break onto the other diet. So we're going to control their genetics and a lot of their environment. Okay. Now we're going to control their calories, their body weight and their activity so that we know that it isn't those variables affecting it. It's actually a macronutrient change alone that would modulate performance. And we sought to prove that carbohydrates were in fact improving performance. What we did is two separate studies, mainly two separate studies, although we've done four to five at this point on this topic, is looked at if we asked individuals, let's say runners, okay, highly fit runners, low body fat, high VO2 maxes so they're doing a lot of endurance exercise. We're going to ask them to adapt to the diet for four weeks,

control all these variables, and we want them to then do what we think would essentially require carbohydrates. We're going to get them to do sprints, six by eight hermeter sprints. Now we're also going to ask them to do a one-mile time trial, okay? Very, very intense, intense enough to push them in the range where carbohydrates would be almost the entire form of fuel that their body is burning during that. athletic endeavor. And we did. We pushed them to 86% of their VO2 max sustained for the sprints and also for the one mile time trial. Okay. Now, what we observed is that to our shock and surprise,

that when athletes were on these very low carbohydrate diets, there was no deterioration in sprint-based performance or a one-mile max effort time trial. Everything we were taught at this point, sports nutrition guidelines would dictate there would be a drop in performance. Now, when we looked at the amount of glucose or we call it carbohydrates that are being burned or oxidized versus fat, we saw that at 86% of their VO2 max, when the amount of fat being burned should be theoretically close to zero, less than 10%, that 1.5 grams of fat were being burned per minute in these athletes. They were being fueled predominantly majority of their fuel was coming from fat. This completely goes against the belief structure and crossover concept that you cannot perform high intense forms of exercise predominantly burning fat.

This study was a randomized controlled trial crossover study and controlled these key variables, unlike a lot of other studies had done before. And yet we saw different outcomes. Weird. What we also did is they're saying, oh, well, that's sprint, performance. Maybe that was important for carbohydrates, but I guess you guys may have showed it's not, but that never will work with long duration performance. Like, okay, that's a good point. Because there is this belief that the more carbohydrates you burn, it's more efficient per unit of oxygen. So if you're more efficient and you're doing long, strenuous, long forms of endurance exercise, then carbohydrates would be better for performance. And you'd have more muscle glycogen and other components. So what we've been do is, okay, that's a really interesting

Let's test that. Okay, because it's what everyone's doing. This is in the guidelines. It must be true, but no one's really asked this question. So let's actually test it. Let's mechanistically, physiologically do a diet that we know reliably drops muscle glycogen levels, very low carbohydrate diet,

also lowers the amount of carbohydrates being oxidized. So we're directly manipulating those two key variables that has been shown to be associated with performance and now is believed to be critical performance. and if we focus on that, we're focusing what we call the large muscle or large glucose pool. The large glucose pool is the muscles and the total body burning of glucose. If that's the key metric of performance, that means, yes, we do need to consume very high levels of glucose to restore those levels of fuel that are being burned from the muscle. But if it's not the large muscle glucose, it's not large glucose pool, it's not that,

then maybe, just maybe, it's not the, we don't maybe need excessive amounts of carbohydrates. So we asked that question in the study. We had Iron Man competitors. Okay, so individuals who had completed successfully in Iron Man, were active, active training, high volumes of training, came in, we said, okay, what we're going to have you do is we're going to have you on this diet for four to six weeks in duration. We're going to control the same variables, but now we're going to get you to go until you hit a wall. We're going to ask you to do strenuous, prolonged exercise until you can't go any longer.

And in theory, if carbohydrate oxidation is more efficient and it's better for performance, you will go longer. So we're going to do both forms of the diet. And crossover, of course. Same person, genetics, environment are controlled. There again, to our shock was no deterioration. and physical performance and Ironman competitors, where it's nearly universally recommended to consume high carbohydrate intake

and huge amounts of carbohydrates during performance. We saw no difference in performance. After four to six weeks on the diet. As long as they adapted for four to six weeks in duration. Why is that important? Well, all these other researchers who were prominent doing really good research were saying, well, look, they're fat burning super high

within five days and elite athletes and up to three weeks and other people. Ketones are high. Like they're adapted. Let's test. Yeah, let's test at that point. But yet we knew since the 1960s from a Harvard physician named George Cahill that when even when individuals fast, which induces way more rapid shifts in these metrics, that blood energy or brain energy metabolites in the blood do not reliably normalize until after three weeks in duration. So there was signals since the 1960s that there were key metrics we know were linked to performance.

glycogen and carbohydrate burning or sugar burning was only associatively linked because we could never causally prove it if you change one thing you change multiple things so the only way we could attempt to even get at whether something was causally linked like a caused b it wasn't a that went to c that affected b you know it was one to one cause two was to do animal studies where you could genetically manipulate animals in such ways that we could say, hey, we're going to artificially load the muscle glycogen level super high. They should perform better. We're genetically manipulate them to have high muscle glycogen. Those studies have been done. They don't improve performance. There have been studies done where they loaded up other tissues

with glycogen and it does modulate performance. So when we did our studies, we were very curious. Well, we're not just going to test the difference between diets because what we're really getting at is, is it the large glucose pool or maybe this other pool, the blood and the liver, what we call the small glucose pool that regulates performance. What's the difference between these two? Well, the liver is a much smaller tissue that houses a smaller amount of glucose in it. Its key role is to store glucose and release glucose when blood glucose gets low, okay? It breaks down its glycogen storage and is able to maintain glucose levels. That is to maintain brain energy metabolism during, so let's say a famine. Okay. And the amount of

glucose circulating circulating in the blood is around five grams, okay? Microscopic amounts insignificant, like a teaspoon, okay, of glucose in the blood. So these is a much smaller pool of glucose that we're talking about here. But all the focus, around how many nutrients, specifically carbohydrates you consume, was based on the large glucose pool. Well, what we did is we, in our study with Iron Man competitors, we said, okay, we're just gonna give enough glucose to prevent the drop in brain energy metabolites, glucose in the blood,

which was 10 grams per hour, or technically 3.3 grams every 20 minutes. But not enough glucose to shift the glycogen levels, or the amount of carbohydrate the body was burning, because we specifically wanted to test by manipulating the diet, whether glycogen and sugar burning was modulating performance, which it appeared it was not,

or was it potentially the amount of maintenance of brain energy metabolism by just giving this extra glucose bolus of 10 grams per hour. We did that. We found that sustaining brain energy metabolism increased performance on both the high carbohydrate diet and the very low carbohydrate diet, 22% across all the Iron Man competitors.

What this showed is something that had actually been discovered for 100 years, that it was the maintenance of brain energy metabolism that was the primary determinant of regulating performance. and that simply trying to prove that the glycogen levels or carbohydrate oxidation levels were the determinants could not result in meaningful performance differences. All the prior studies that showed it only showed it via association. And the animal studies that allowed us to prove causality was unable to prove causality in muscle, but was able to modulate performance, physical performance,

when modulating liver glycogen levels, the small glucose pool. So we conducted an analysis. It took us over five years, and we looked at 600 different studies, 160 different sports performance studies, and what we found is a number of key things. The first thing was, is that, number one,

it did not appear that muscle glycogen are carbohydrate-oxidation levels. Again, the large glucose pool, reliably predicted performance outcomes. In fact, we see individuals with low levels of these, even on very low carbohydrate intake, performing exactly the same. So it's not causally causing a difference.

But number two, we've known since studies, the ones I was talking about from the Boston physicians in the Boston Marathon out of Harvard, that low glucose levels in the blood does reliably, causally change physical performance. I know this very well as someone living with type one diabetes because one of the biggest things

we are concerned about is hypoglycemia or low blood sugar levels. If I get low blood sugar levels, I reliably drop my physical performance and I reliably drop my cognitive performance. What we were showing in this work was that across 160 different studies, every time carbohydrates improve performance, 88% of those studies were it showed an improvement in performance with carbohydrates. the placebo group or non-carbohydrate group was seeing a drop in blood glucose levels.

No other metric was as consistent as focusing on brain energy metabolites during exercise as the primary predictor of performance. When carbohydrates did not improve performance, there was not a reliable change in blood glucose levels. Again, focusing on these brain energy, metabolites. Now, when we ran the study in the very, the Ironman competitors, there was a higher incidence of hypoglycemia in the ketogenic diet arm, but they performed the same. But what I did is when our paper came out and there was all this chatter about, you know, this is this bullshit,

this isn't true, you know, da-da-da-da-da-da. I said, you know what, if this was true, we know there's not just glucose that fuels the brain. It's ketones and lactate, too. In fact, ketone, levels, when present, will be preferentially used by the brain. And so does lactate. In fact, we discussed this in the major review and endocrine reviews on this topic. The receptors for ketones and lactate allow for ketones and lactate to just come in proportional to how high they are. Why would the body do that? The body does that because if you are in a crisis, when would you produce ketones normally without exogenous ketones. When you're deep and a fast.

Exactly. Or prolonged strenuous exercise or low carbohydrate diet. All three of those are very low insulin environments. Our bodies were accustomed to surviving famine when insulin was low. So when lactates high with exercise or ketones levels are high during nutrient deprivation or typically during nutrient deprivation, the body knows that that's a signal, hey, that must mean that we need to take these in because we can't keep burning glucose or we're going to get into a brain energy deficit. So the body preferentially uses these when they're present. And we found in our study in Ironman competitors, when I actually calculated the total calories

of brain energy metabolites from not just glucose because they had more hypoglycemia and the low carb group, but I added ketones and lactate to it, the low. The low carbohydrate and high carbohydrate group had identical levels of circulating brain energy metabolites despite having higher hypoglycemia, demonstrating that it was the maintenance of total brain energy metabolites. Like we've done a number of studies looking at exogenous ketone bodies as a brain modulator as a point in reference. Like we've looked at environments. So we've done a study with, and there's a lot of exogenous ketones out there. This one was specifically with a group called ketone IQ

and it was a special operations command study where we put individuals in a very low oxygen environment, stress environment. And when you apply exogenous ketones in the environment, we were seeing that despite the reliable drop in cognitive performance we see with low oxygen levels, that the application of you and exogenous ketones was able to increase reaction time, 15%,

increase accuracy, 15%, reduce the amount of errors, and increased cognitive efficiency, 19%. Okay, and we know that when you apply these molecules, the amount of glycogen or glucose that's being utilized drops. So the body's just shifting based on what's available to us. But again, the entire point here is that since the shift in the 1970s to now, the guidelines have ubiquitously promoted higher carbohydrate intake,

but when we actually tested to prove that in front, fact was true, we see that that is not inherently true. And then when we reviewed 100 years of evidence, 600 citations, we saw a lot of the focus has been around fueling these large pools of glucose of glycogen and burning as many carbohydrates as possible as predictive of why people carbled with pasta the night before performance ballot. But yet we were seeing that that wasn't the primary predictor. And that's really, really important. And the reason it's so important is because when you have a focus in a large glucose pool, you need to fuel a lot more to fill it. But if you just need to fill up and maintain blood glucose levels, you need marginal or minimal

amounts of carbohydrates to actually accomplish that. And in the advent of one of our studies, we also saw that fit middle-aged runners who had high VO2 maxes that were consuming carbohydrates aligned with the sports nutrition guidelines. The 30% of them were devised. developing pre-diabetes. But when they shifted over to a very low carbohydrate intake, within days the pre-diabetes resolved. Glucose level is normalized, and they had equivalent performance.

And so- Quick question, when you say equivalent performance, I think another curiosity is how about perceived exertion with that performance? Excellent. Similar, okay. Yes, and that's similar. even in the Ironman study,

when they had higher levels of hypoglycemia. So even though their brain was deprived of glucose, if you provided things like ketones or lactate, sufficient to normalize total brain energy metabolites across two different interventions, in this case it was just high carb versus low carb. If they were equivalent, they were seeing the same level of performance.

As long is they adapted to the diet for long enough? Because all the prior studies were doing it less than four weeks in direct. What we also observed on the Ironman competitor or Ironman study with ketogenic diets versus high-carb diets testing the large or small glucose pool, one other part of it that we didn't expect to come out of the study was we were looking at the levels of brain energy metabolites, both glucose and ketones over time. And we were looking at them, particularly with the CGM, so the ability to monitor glucose levels

every five minutes for weeks and weeks in duration. And we would put that on the entire study. And what we found is that not only align what was observed with George Cahill's work in the 1960s, we also saw that in athletes, because the first time this has ever been linked together, that when athletes did these diets, it wasn't until after the three-week mark

at the four-week time point did not only ketone levels normalize, or sorry, glucose levels normalized, because it dropped immediately and normalized. and healthy individuals back to normal. But then ketone levels hit, it took them over three weeks to hit their peak level and then sustain it at a plateau.

So if what we're seeing is true over 100 years of evidence that brain energy metabolites are in fact the primary determinant of performance, it makes total sense why all these studies less than four weeks in duration were seeing a drop in performance when it wasn't sufficiently long

across all the other literature to normalize the brain energy metastews. metabolism. And it really has been an interesting journey talking about this because it has led to quite a bit of controversy because if you focus on elite level athletics, a lot of these people, some of the best coaches in the entire world, some of the best athletes in the world, undeniably at many of these in endurance sports are pushing insane levels of carbohydrates. Okay, 90, 120 grams per hour. Sometimes some cyclists are going to 200 grams per hour. They are claiming that is the reason they're performing better. But in our analysis, we looked at every

single study that has done a dose response. So if this was true in a dose response study where you control all these variables of performance, right? If I say, hey, Mark and CMO, we're going to go perform right now. Well, is it because of my mindset? Is it because of the environment, is the temperature? Is it the food I just ate earlier? In a laboratory environment, we're able to control all that away and just find out if it is simply the amount of the carbohydrate to consume, we're going to find out in this controlled setting. When you look at these controlled settings, across 12 analysis now, there is not a reliable dose response that higher carbohydrate produces better performance outcomes. In fact, it's all over the map.

We see some studies that just simply giving some carbohydrates should all improve performance, just like we did, 10 grams, improved performance. But let's say 30, 60 wasn't better than 30 per se in some studies. Some studies have shown that, okay, even if you go above a certain level of carbohydrates, you start to see a drop in performance, actually specifically a study by Smith at all. This has been observed. In fact, a recent study published this week came out and showed that you compare 30-verse or 40-vers 90 grams that only 40 grams improved sprint-based performance and endurance performance and endurance athletes.

Whereas if you did 90 grams, it didn't improve performance better than 40 grams at all. There was no dose response. In fact, 40 grams in some scenarios was better. And so there's all this evidence, but yet we see these elite level athletes, undeniably pushing super high levels of carbohydrates. And this is where a lot of the controversy has continued to arise because so many people are saying, well, they're doing it. So you're wrong.

You know, like they're doing it. And so this can't be correct because the best people are. in the world are doing this. And so everyone, it disproves your theory. And either way, I can go into a whole ball of wax, but I'll stop there and just say, this is a lot of the work we've done in human performance over the last 10 plus years

has started to look at this phenomenon. Go ahead. I know Mark, you have a lot to say, but like I love the fact that the adaptation period was taken into account here. Because when I started, you know, I started venturing around into low-carb diet. diets back in maybe 2017, 2016, along with Jiu-Jitsu.

And it was the first few weeks that just felt like this makes no sense. I need to go back to eating as much carbohydrates. But then there's after a period of time, I was just like, wait up. I'm even less than 50 carbs a day. And I'm feeling great. Like I'm feeling fine. And then there's all the stuff of my appetite too. But that period is like a period that I don't think any athlete wants to deal with.

And once you see, like I think when any sane athlete sees a performance drop with a nutritional change, it's like, no, fuck that. Go right back to what you're doing. So I think it's just amazing that this was actually able to be done because, you know, I would even assume that there's probably going to be a long-term benefit of, I don't know, this is just my bro science theory. But I'm not purely low-carb all the time. Most of the time I am. Some days I won't eat. Some days I'll have slightly higher carbohydrates that I'm typically used to.

Just because I want to have that level of metabolic flexibility. That's how I look at it for myself. I don't know if research-based, if that actually is going to make sense, but as an athlete, I found that to be a benefit for me. So anyway, that's awesome. I think something that you're alluding to is it sounds like both styles of nutrition are effective.

There could be concern with particular athletes that are consuming large amounts of carbohydrates over a long period of time of then potentially running into pre-diabetes. That's what we're observing and we're not the only people to show this either. And I know some endurance athletes that have become diabetics.

That's maybe sounds super uncommon, but it might be more common And then people realize. And I know some jacked lifters with pre-diabetes currently. I know quite a few. So it just gives you another option, right? So you're not necessarily saying like, hey, you have to do it this way. You just did research and you came up with these outcomes.

And people can kind of take that information and then kind of apply it whatever way they'd like. one thing that I find really interesting I always felt that the body works in like very delayed very delayed like response and somebody will talk about pre-workout and I'm like well pre-workout is anything and post-workout is any and all

because you probably are going to work out today and you're probably going to work out tomorrow and the odds that you're going to eat today and the odds are you're going to eat tomorrow so everything kind of falls into pre-worked. and post workout. I'm not going to say that they don't matter, but what probably matters more is what you do over a long period of time, what you do over weeks, months, years, kind of the

story with something like heart disease. Heart disease, unfortunately, is not anything that you get any real warnings about. A lot of times someone just has a heart attack and that's it. My understanding is that 50% of the people that have a heart attack, that's the only warning they ever have is they just have the heart attack and they die. And so heart disease is a, it's a giant mix, a giant blend of genetics, maybe dietary choices and a bunch of other choices, maybe exercise can lump all those things together,

but it's not something that you really feel. And then someone could say, oh, well, you know, it has to do with this and it has to do with this and it has to do with this. And they could be correct, but you have to be, you have to have those lifestyle choices, choices over a long period of time to probably unwind some of what potentially happened with heart disease.

So I just always think the body, it's kind of works in like a much longer period of time than we think it does. Yeah, and think about this. Do you think that our bodies were adapted to survive years and centuries of famine, feast and famine, feast and famine, having to exercise regularly for no periods of time

to extremely long periods of time? All these different environments, do you think that the only way they could have done that is if they went to the grocery store and got 120 grams of carbohydrates or enough fruit to do that? No, your body is a gel pack. Oh, yeah. A little gel pack every five months. They're growing them out of the ground. They're just picking them out and having them back a thousand years ago. The body is prepared to survive and it does it extremely well. And this is even observed in our analysis because, you know, the second you eat carbohydrates, as an example, the blood glucose rises.

Okay, the second blood glucose rises, the pancreas detect that and says, oh, blood glucose elevating, that means we have fuel coming into the system. Let's release insulin to now store that fuel. Okay, we're going to shut down fat burning. We're going to start the storage of these nutrients. They're coming into the system. That's the signal. When insulin is released, where does it go first?

It doesn't go to the muscle first, okay? It doesn't go to the fat first. It goes to the liver first. goes to the liver first because the liver is the only place where it can release stored glucose back into the bloodstream and ensure you don't get deprivations in glucose and causing hypoglycemia. Then only after that,

because that eats around 60, 60, 75% based on some studies of the insulin that's released. Only the remaining 25 to 33% is now going to make it to a muscle tissue to now store glycogen. But muscles don't release. the store glucose back in the bloodstream. When they take it, they keep it there.

It can't be re-release in the bloodstream. So when it gets to the muscle, it's almost in abundance because it already knows that the liver glycogen has gotten what it's needed to ensure brain energy metabolism. So we know that the body has built its system

to ensure brain energy metabolism is the priority. Okay, this is known. But yet, when we think about it from a performance perspective, we flip the script and say, well, hold on, that can't be it. It must be this other component here that really is dictating performance.

And that just isn't aligned with what the evidence is showing to today. And to your point, Mark, people have gotten so pissed off about this. And whatever, I don't care. But what we're all just saying here is that people, athletes have a choice. Athletes have a choice. I don't get to choose how these outcomes come. Is what it is. I totally expected the higher carbohydrate groups to do better in the sprint performance.

I had her knowledge like, okay, if you're on a keto junk diet, that you won't balk. No, you can bong just like high carb athletes. We're showing this. A lot of what we're seeing was a surprise to us, too. But what we're showing is that athletes have a choice. In fact, what we're also seeing is that on the average, there's no difference in performance. But on an individual level, some people do perform better on high carb and some perform better on keto junk diet. And the problem with that is that in sports nutrition guidelines, there's really only one approach that's recommended.

You'll say, okay, individualize the approach. But all the recommendations are around 5 to 12 grams, carbohydrates per hour per kilogram, and then you need to fuel with 30 to 60 grams if you're a recreational athlete per hour, and 60 to 90 grams if you're a higher level athlete doing high volumes of training up to elite. But that's not aligned with the evidence that has shown that you can, do either diet and that also that the dose response evidence is not actually showing reliably improvements with higher levels of carbohydrates. A lot of this has been based on associative evidence since the 1970s. And anytime you bring evidence that challenges what you were first learned,

it's hard to kind of reevaluate that. And I get it. I'm the same. That one's different. No one's immune to that. But that's what we see. I kind of have a, I'm curious about this. The first thing I'm curious about is I think when a lot of people listen to this right now, there's everyone in the audience probably resistance trains. And when we're talking about the runners, right, who went at 86% of the O2, which means there's a good amount of power output there. And then the triathletes, inherently, when you are an athlete that has locomotion involved in your sport, there's also a level of efficiency with that locomotion. And And if you're more efficient, you're not having as high contractions to do the work,

meaning that compared to someone who's squatting multiple times in a squat rack and purposefully using high contractile forces to move that load, if you're an efficient sport athlete, you might be able to get away with not having to use as much muscle glycogen to fuel what you're currently doing. Does that make sense? It does make sense, but let me say something. there have been analysis that pool all prior studies together called meta-analysis on both aerobic and anaerobic exercise, resistance exercise is anaerobic.

And what they found is that in the meta-analysis, they looked at when do carbohydrates improve performance. They do not reliably improve performance in resistance exercise, weightlifting, unless the exercise is at least 45 minutes in duration and sufficiently strenuous. i.e. leg-based workouts. Otherwise, the carbohydrates don't appear to improve performance. And the same thing has been observed with aerobic exercise or endurance exercise,

things, cycling, running, swimming. Until the exercise is sufficiently long, you don't see carbohydrates reliably improving performance. So the rules apply in both situations. Yeah. And so, and we've, you know, I'll pause there and just say. I'll tell you two places where I've noticed food to matter with my own training as a power lifter.

The food mattered in terms of like maximizing the way my body felt. And I don't mean that in terms of like, oh, I need to dig deep. I need glucose because the workout's so hard. It was more from a perspective of just feeling hydrated. and actually like to some extent in power lifting kind of getting bloated and puffy. Like full. It's yes. It's like an important factor and you could maybe even say the same thing.

It might be important for bodybuilding. A guy to eat like a big old bowl of rice, you know, maybe two hours before he trains legs or something to get, you know, a pump or a certain feel. But that could also have to do with not only the rice. It could have to do with salt and a bunch of other things that are that are involved, water. So to me, my body weight and like just my life. like thickness. It felt like that was important. It felt like food was important to that. That could have been my mind. No, it's real. Playing in there. But that's, that was something that I felt for sure.

And I would imagine in a lot of other sports, you really wouldn't want like a bunch of water and like carbohydrates sloshing around. And the other factor was, okay, yeah, I got done with my hard stuff that was done explosively. And now I, I don't really have much left. So if I would drink on some carbohydrates, some cyclic dextrons or dextrose or something like that, maybe even a gatorade mixed with something else. It did help like it. It gave me like an extra 30 minutes of training for the day after I was kind of zapped. But I would imagine also like nearly any break and some nutrition would probably also also assisted me. But that was my experience. So talk about both those points. The first point,

is that, you know, when you, or we can even do the second one first when you talk about, I called it bench bagels because I used to eat bagels before I'd go on bench press. And they would be salt bagels, which is the guy that broke the marathon record, by the way, he stole my, he stole my pre-workout. Because he had two bagels too, I think. Oh, he had two slices of bread, honey. Oh, two slices of bread, okay. I only know that because everyone tagged me and said, look, you're totally wrong.

But to your point, so when you have carbohydrates, it does bring in, so when you have carbohydrates, glucose elevates and insulin is released. Insulin brings in carbohydrates into tissues like the muscle, but it also brings along with it for every one gram of glucose, three grams of water. So it brings in water weight as well. So water weight in the muscle can change the leverages of muscles. Okay, when they're fuller, the changes that leverages of the muscles, and depending on how that leverage translates to mechanical movement.

It made me. That felt amazing. Yes, it did make a big difference. And the additional weight, we know that people tend to be able to lift more weight, the heavier they are, right? Which is why there are weight classes and power lifting and weight lifting, right? So that's all very, very real. But we know that glycogen levels aren't immediately manipulated at any meaningful quantity,

at least massive quantities, by one single meal. Which is why pre-nutrition right before is, it doesn't seem. seem to make a huge difference as long as you're getting enough for the demand of the exercise. Glycogen is much more determined based on the overall chronic diet. And so we know that a lot of people

when trying to maximize our glycogen levels, whether this is the right thing to do or not, I would challenge it may not be necessary, but when trying to maximize glycogen levels will feed for multiple days at higher carbohydrate quantities. It's not one meal that does this. Glycogen is much more determined based on over time.

And it gets to be tricky because you have the, like the Sean Baker effect where his glycogen is fine and he works out really hard. He also works out really explosively and people are like, how the hell is he doing this? But his, you know, fasted blood glucose might be a little bit almost on the higher side because he's been such a low carb guy for so long. Is that true? Do you know that's true? Yeah.

His like fasted glucose I think is typically like in the 90s. Interesting. Okay. pretty normal. It's within normal range, but. But not for, I mean, for a guy that literally doesn't really eat any carbs,

you would think would be lower. I would assume. Well, so it's a fair point. And I think his glucose used to be lower, but anyway. So yeah, if it relatively changed increased,

it's another thing we could talk about, which is like physiologic insulin, um, changes that occur. There's a guy that has like world records on a rower and stuff. I mean, he's, it's not like he has this little cupcake workout.

You know, he works out. He works out. I've worked out with him before. He's an animal. Yeah. I've seen Dr. Baker deadlift over 500 pounds for maybe like 15 reps or something like that too. I mean, he's maybe even 19 reps.

I don't know. I might be discrediting him. Hopefully I'm not. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it? I got a secret, man. It's called Good Life Protein. Okay.

Tell me about that. I've been doing some Good Life Protein. You know, we've been talking on the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef. And you can get that under the umbrella of Good Life Proteins. which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage, shrimp, scallops, all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of lamb. There's another one that comes in mind.

And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy, kind of depending on the way that I'm eating. So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat and that's where I might get the sausage and I might get their 80-20 grass-fed, grass finish, ground beef. I might get bacon. And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder style, where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified Piedmontese beef.

This is one of the reasons why, like, neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're always enjoying the food we're eating. And protein, you talk about protein leverage at all the time. It's satiating and helps you feel full. I look forward to every meal. And I can surf and turf, you know. I could cook up some, you know, chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it. Or I could have some steak.

I would say, you know, the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorite. So it's hard for me to lock one down. But I really love the bovette steaks. Yeah. And then I also love the rib-eyes as well. You can't go wrong with the rib-ies. So, guys, if you guys want to get your hands on some really good meat pot, you can have to Good Life Proteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the webis.

or you can use code Power Project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world. Well, he's a beast. He's doing jujitsu workouts and now he's working on decathlon and he's doing all kinds of cool stuff. And he's almost 60. Yeah, people will look at 50 pounds. Yeah, the point if anyone's watching this video and you think, oh, wow, I've seen like the Olympic athletes are running faster. This guy is huge.

Running that fast. Running that fast is actually quite insane. He's really a freak of nature and really impressive. But he's not in for the audience who's unfamiliar most would be familiar. He's on a carnivore diet or very low carbohydrate diet and is producing performance outcomes like that. But he will openly acknowledge that it took him time to be able to reestablish his performance after starting it. Because we know like within the first day of dropping carbohydrates that we see reliably this reduction in glucose and insulin levels. and that starts to shift, you know,

some initial metabolize is acute metabolite response. But over the 24 hours of seven days, we see this shift towards kind of glucose and sugar-based metabolism to fat as a more predominant fuel. But also, we know water weight starts to come down as well in this window of time, which is something a lot of people want to see

when they're trying to do this for losing weight. But from seven days to really the three to four-week mark, you have these progressive increase the amount of fat that's being burned, the progressive reduction, the amount of reliance you are on sugar and carbohydrates as a fuel source. And then you get to the point where typically, unless you continue to lose weight and drop insulin levels, that your water weight begins to normalize.

And initially when you do this approach in the first week, people may struggle because there's a reliance and other forms of nutrients and appetite changes. But we know that around seven days to up to around four weeks, we see a shift in metabolism that normalizes around that time point. The four week mark is when typically we see this normalization period where performance begins to normalize. We also see brain energy metabolites reliably normalized across multiple studies, including our own. We also see that the water weight changes as long as you are not attempting to calorically restrict begins to settle out and normalize at this stage.

And a lot of people, you know, even ourselves, we focus on that four-week window for performance and functional outcomes. But there's now emerging evidence that shows that there are changes in Sean Baker's case, he will attest that greater than four weeks in duration, it took him longer than that to normalize its performance. We know that there are now studies that have shown that like the microbiome, when you first shift your diet, you're actually, your microbiome density and richness, so to speak, like the amount of bacterial species in your gut is associated with health, okay, certain ones. And the more diverse tends to be associated with better outcomes. When you shift the diet, you typically often reduce the diversity and start to shift to a new microbiome species.

What happens with high fat diet intake? Initially, it drops in richness, the two-week mark. By the 12-week mark, it normalizes. And by the 24-week mark on the diet, which is six months, the richness is actually higher on these higher-fat diets than it is on the prior, higher-carbohydrate, lower-fat diets. So there's this shift in the microbiome that lasts, to our knowledge, up to six months in duration.

We also see that the type of lipid species within the blood, while we see this wholesale shift from sugar dominance to fat dominance, this individual species themselves also change at least up to six weeks or more on these ketogenic diets. And so they're ketogenic specifically or low carb? That study was ketogenic specifically. The other one was just a shift or higher fat intake. Gotcha.

Now the final piece here is that muscle glycogen levels. We're talking about the predominant predictor performance earlier. in this podcast was that it's around brain energy metabolism. But as you mentioned, muscle glycogen, when you fill them, changes levers, weight for some athletic endeavors like power lifting where you're not necessarily maximizing your power to weight ratio. You're maximizing power, strength, period. What about muscle glycogen? Well, we know that studies that have looked at the ketogenic diet less than three months in duration reliably show an initial drop in muscle glycogen levels. This is why we used it as a model system in our studies for lower glycogen.

And all the way up to around the three-month mark, there's a subtle decrease across studies. This is from Jeff Volux group at Ohio State University, still soda reduction in muscle glycogen up to the three-week, three-month part. But he also ran a study in elite-level athletes, both who are high-carb and very low-carb ketogenic athletes called a faster study. And this is a study published in a journal called metabolism. And what he showed is that these individuals who've been on the diet for nine months to 36 months in duration, had the same exact muscle glycogen levels in the ketogenic diet

and also metabolized and utilized muscle glycine in the same degree as the higher carbohydrate athletes. Now question real quick, sorry. Don't lose your spot, but when you say like the ketogenic diet, I mean, some athletes, because of their expenditure, they're still able to eat a small amount of carbohydrates and stay within ketosis.

Were these athletes no carb ketogenic or were they low, low, low carb, low, carb maintaining ketosis? That's a really important point because what is ketosis This is dependent on the individual. We have diet categories called high carb diet, which is defined based on the percentage of carbohydrates in the diet, and then forms of carbohydrate restriction,

moderate carbohydrate, low carbohydrate, and very low carbohydrate. All are defined based on percentages of carbohydrate intake. It is not until, those are all just objective categories based on amount of carbohydrate and total diet. The ketogenic diet is explicitly and objectively defined based on elevation and ketone bodies. So that is a physiological. state. And that's important because we see that in some studies where they just lower carbohydrates

and they don't see a drop in insulin sufficient to increase ketone bodies. Changes, you don't see major changes. It's not until insulin gets low enough. You see this mash of shift from glucose and insulin towards fat. And the output signal of that is ketone bodies. And ketones have their own unique effects on the body and also brain energy metabolite. Once that happens, that's when a wholesale shift in so many biomarkers occurs, which is why when you look at just type in high fat diets, high fat might just be, okay, you're on a high carb diet and you just increased your fat like you were talking about earlier, which can be problematic. Okay, eating carbs and fat together can be problematic. Yeah, yeah. But high fat diet historically

was a Western diet in the scientific literature. But some people call the ketogenic diet when they study ketogenic diet high fat. And so there's been this confusion around how it is the vocabulary around these diets. And so I'm glad you're going to, clarified that because what we're describing is a diet sufficiently low in carbohydrates, typically less than 50 grams in the diet, but objectively defined by an elevation of ketone bodies. And every study we've ever done will recess the keto joint diet, even in these athletes, that's how we confirm compliance on the diet, is do you objectively have an elevation of ketone bodies above the level that someone who wasn't doing this would see? And typically,

if you're not, if you're doing a high carb diet, either you guys, even if you're fit in an athletic, like if you were to wake up first thing in the morning, most people on a high carb diet after overnight fast would not see a ketone bodies at 0.3 or higher. So typically, you know, we always think like what's the optimal ketone range? People usually say 0.5 or higher, maybe at 0.5 to 5. That's never objectively been defined. So I went and said, okay, well, what is an objective, like objective way of looking at this? Well, what's higher than what anyone would have if they're not on this diet?

will typically less than 0.3. So it seems like 0.3 is really the threshold for most scenarios, outside of some, where you're not going to see a ketone level that higher more, unless you're on that diet. Yeah, my ketones don't usually ever get that high, even being somebody that has experimented and done it for a long time. I might be able to get like 1 or 1.5,

and I think I've had as high as 2, but typically it's 0.3.5, stuff like that. And you see that males, higher muscle mass athletes, all three of those categories make ketone levels harder to get higher. And we're actually doing a Department of Defense study right now trying to look at what predicts higher or lower ketone levels

even when you apply exogenous ketone bodies. And there's a phenomenon even when you go on the ketogenic diet where ketone bodies will initially increase and then all of a sudden they start to decrease in their levels. And aligned with that, we also know that people with obesity tend to run higher ketone levels than people who are lean. It doesn't make any sense.

You'd think, okay, well, if I'm healthy, it should be higher. Because higher has always been associated with better. And that's not always the case, okay? This is what Dr. Dom brought to us. He was like, you know, after researching it forever, he's like more moderate ketones level. Ketone levels seem to be a little bit more optimal.

I definitely align with that because we thought, okay, because all this focus came out of a huge, Department of Defense funded project because the Department of Defense said, hey, look, these ketone bodies, since George Cahill's work in the 1960s, show that it can fuel the brain. Okay. And if you fuel the brain with these molecules, it has effects on the muscle and all these other tissues. And these are really fascinating molecules. Now we're discovering that they can affect inflammation pathways and oxidative stress pathways, reducing inflammation, reducing oxidative stress. Really, really fascinating what they were discovering. But the Department of Defense said, okay,

well, if they're that unique, the problem is that if we have to go deploy someone immediately, we can't ask them to go do a two to four-week diet before we put them out in the field and have to perform. So how do we potentially get some of the benefits that these molecules may provide instantly? And so that was the emergence of something called the metabolic dominance program. They threw tens of millions of dollars through a DARPA-funded research program to not only develop novel ketone formulations, but also then apply them to see how they can change metabolism and ultimately cognitive physical performance.

What we observed is that in these studies is that one, if you apply even just giving ketones in the body, even of themselves can have dramatic impacts on wholesale metabolism. It shifts so many biomarkers, glucose drops, lactate levels, production reduces. And this is largely without any major changes in insulin. Lipid levels changes, fatty acid levels changes.

It's very powerful in what it does. It's really interesting, you said it drops glucose levels, but yet the people that were ketogenic versus the people that weren't ketogenic, they both used glucose the same in that faster study that you mentioned. And this is where there's a distinction between

endogenous versus exogenous ketone bodies. And what I think one of the coolest things about what exogenous ketones have taught us is it provided a tool that allowed us to test what happens just by manipulating ketones alone. Because typically you couldn't do it without fasting, carbohydrate restriction without prolonged exercise, which all in themselves are massive shotgun hammers to changing metabolism, change so many things. So how do you determine like what ketones alone do?

And the emergence of exogenous ketones and we work to develop a ton of novel formulations. I worked with Dom for six years, amazing human beings, one of the most knowledgeable people in this space by far, if not the most. And what we have found when looking at these is like they're just not normal everyday metabolites, these unique molecules that typically were only pretty used endogenously by our own body in extremes, when you just elevate them, even if through exogenous supplementation format change brain function. It increases brain network stability. We know that high sugar and people as they advance in age start to reduce the interactions between key portions of the brain, the way that one brain region connects to the other. We see that that improves not just by reducing

sugar because that's one way to do it, but also by adding ketones on top of sugar to basically erase the negative effects of sugar. This was discovered by some researchers using MRI analysis. That was fascinating, but a lot of our studies have been in the kind of elite performance realm looking at how do we, does it change not just, you know, cyclist performance where they showed a 2% improvement in the 2016 paper from the metabolic dominance DARPA project. But we were looking at cognitive performance because we're like, you know, cognition, when you think of performance, people look at Yusain Bolt and think, muscle movement.

Well, they're not realizing how utterly critical the brain is to that performance. And so we were interested in looking at that because when you think about this project was funded by Special Operations Command, in that category, when you think of special forces, these are guys who are not just physically performing at very high levels. They need to perform cognitively at the same time. Simultaneous, very difficult. And so you want the optimal both. And this is why this is such a key focus

of what we're interested in. But what we were seeing is that when you applied exogenous ketones in under stressful environments, we have done this in low-oxygen hypoxic environments. We've done this after exhaustive exercise. All environments reliably reduce cognitive performance that applying these molecules

can actually improve cognitive performance mostly through the frontal lobe executive function region of the brain. Again, this is what affects reaction times, how accurate responses are, the number of errors you make. And what's also interesting is what you're talking about before is that you felt like when you had carbohydrates during exercise that it would maybe give you an extra 30 minutes

or maybe it was the fact that you rested. Well, we know that with some studies with exogenous ketones, at least one particular molecule, one through butin dial is the molecule. When that was applied pre-exercise, that it improved sprint-based performance. So the peak power was higher, but it sustained it for longer.

And this is, you know, emergent work that's happening in this this realm. And, you know, there's a time and a place, like we've done the longest, highest dose of exogenous ketones ever conducted. It was 31 days at 90 grams per day. So super high levels. And what we're really trying to understand with that study is like, can we push the boundaries here, kind of replicate ketone saturation without the diet. And we found that, look, exogenous ketones, they work when you apply them. You know, they work when you apply them. It's not like the diet where it's a chronic basal change. But we saw the incognitive improvements with it.

We also, what was actually most fascinating is when we stopped giving these molecules. So after we stopped giving them, we retested their sports performance in the amount of oxygen, the VO2, volume of oxygen consumed. And afterwards, we did this graded exercise test and looked at VO2. And we found that athletes who had administered three times a day for up to 90 grams per day, that their VO2 levels were higher, even after they stopped taking the molecule. Now, someone would say, well, you know, that's one study, you know, how do we know it's replicatable? I'm like, it's a good point, except that they have applied exogenous ketones

post-workout. Chale Poff did this at K-Luvin. And what they found is that if you apply it just one time post-workout, that for three weeks straight, that you were able to accumulate higher training volume, 14 or 15% was the exact number. And it also reduced overreaching. But they also found that same study when they looked at the changes in the muscle, they found that those individuals who were using just exogenous seat at one time post exercise, we're seeing higher levels of vascularization in the muscle and higher levels of capitalization of the muscle,

up to 30% higher, at least in the section of the muscle they were assessing. We had a guest on the show, Anthony Nuckel, and he used ketones after workouts. He's an endurance guy, and he also, went into the sauna. And he felt like, for him, he felt like that was a version of like EPO.

So, and so interesting, Marcus, it's almost like, he called like EPO stack. It's interesting you say that. It's almost like you teed this up because that's actually one of the molecular changes that we see with acute and chronic ketone administration is that a single dose of exogenous ketones appears, at least across three studies now,

to elevate EPO levels. Okay. That's crazy. So, and that might be in part why we're seeing these kind of chronic adaptive responses when used over time. So in the short term, the reliable evidence shows like this is a real impressive cognitive enhanced and tool. We know since the 1960s that they can make up for massive glucose deficits in brain energy metabolism. And the emergence now is just applying them on top of a standard approach can actually improve things like brain instability reaction time, executive function and cognitive efficiency.

And it's pretty consistent finding. I mean, even outside of stressful environments, we've even looked at just runners, healthy individuals at young age applying them at rest and we see that it can improve their reaction time. Exogenous ketones. Exogenous ketones, yeah. And this is where you get to Dom's point about, he says, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. We thought more was better. Well, tie back to what we originally saying is that we were seeing that we thought more was

better because we were focusing so much on it being used as a muscle-based tool. instead of focusing it on a tool that might regulate brain energy metabolism and performance from the central to the peripheral. And from that perspective, having just sufficient amounts makes sense that it's able to have these type of effects. But look, they're not just metabolites. They also are signaling molecules. They change the way our genetics are expressed through epigenetic regulation,

have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory effects, and also change how. how the body process is fat and glucose. So they're fascinating molecules. And, you know, we find some areas where it can apply for functional and cognitive enhancing settings. But either way, that's probably hard as a researcher to share the ketone brands that you feel are, you know, like, is there any that you can mention that, or can we push people like a certain direction, or if we can't say that, what should people look for when they're

looking for ketone products? Yeah, I try to be very cautious around this. Let me say what we've studied. That may be the better way we're talking about. So when we did the Special Operations Command project, it was with a company that was HVMMM now called Ketone IQ and using their product for that study. We've also done some studies with like a mono-wester type product. We're We've done things with salts and MCT. We studied everything. I mean, we've really looked at this. I've looked at the acetoacetate-based molecules.

You know, they all elevate ketone bodies, right? Some have very specifically been shown to improve certain performance domains. Like we're talking with the special operations command work. And, you know, those are very, and look, it may or may not translate, right? But I am a big believer that elevating ketone bodies in themselves is an important requirement. And to doing that and then, you know, finding things that also align with research, I think is very important. So I'll be caution to say, like, look, the things we've researched, I can say, we talked about that. But beyond that, people can try it, you know, try this.

Some ketones can relax you and some ketones can almost make you feel like a little drunkish. This is a really interesting point because every, so there's different types of molecules, right? So the first, if you want to categorize it like this, if we think of anything that we consume outside the body that elevates ketone bodies inside the body, then MCTs would be the first exogenous ketone by definition. And they were applied therapeutically back in the 1950s and 60s to help weight regulation for kids who are malnourished. And it worked.

It worked at that time. But MCTs are limiting in that they can cause gastrointestinal distress. And that can also cause a, um, uh, a, And you can't consume a lot of it. Like if anyone is about to go do a colonoscopy, needs to clear things out, just down like a bottle of MCT. It's guaranteed you'll be set.

That was a joke, by the way. Don't take that serious. But it is pretty effective at causing some massive irritation. It converts to ketones very quickly. And yes, at the liver, 100%. And they have health benefits ascribe to them.

But they're limited in how much you can consume in one setting. So that's number one. Then you have these ketone, emergence of ketone salt. So ketone salts are typically an R or an S beta hydroxybeterate, which means basically a form of a ketone body the body can produce. And we also see that they're attached to a mineral because in and of themselves, ketone bodies are unstable without attached to some stabilizing agent like a mineral

or some other form. But the problem with the one limitation is with minerals is that you can only consume so many minerals in one sitting. right so if you want to have 10 grams of ketones from a ketone salt and it's sodium base you're going to have a one gram of salt well there's only so much you can consume with that in one sitting without someone who might be concerned about doing that's actually a limitation why we couldn't include them in some of our inner NIH work mainly because of the limitation and the reviewer saying well what you're going to do to hypertension salt potassium calcium right and they've attempted to normalize that by shifting the ratios away from just pure sodium and more of a balanced ratio so

So that's another category. Then you have the 13B10 dial-based category. This is like the ones we're talking about with the product from the company Ketone IQ we did the study with. But that product specifically, that was studied back by MIT for aerospace use in 1960s. The reason was it was super shelf stable and it was a nutrient. They knew that. But they didn't know at the time is that necessarily increased ketone bodies.

That was discovered later. But that reliably also when consume elevates ketone body. in the liver. So it doesn't have the salt load as well. But then they, in the metabolic dominance program, they had to develop a new novel ketone. So they linked a BHB to a 1-3B10 dial together to give a novel formulation. So I don't know. I'm not saying this is why they did it, but it's very hard to patent a molecule has been around in the 1960s. But if you link something else to it, maybe you can patent it. Maybe that's why they did it. Maybe they did. I don't know. Either way. So they developed that. That was called the ketone monoester. And then you also have a cidicicidicester,

which we did a lot of work with when I was in graduate school, looking at things like cancer and caccia, and it's affecting that domain. That one's supposedly really strong, right? Very strong and disgusting. Both accurate. Both accurate, and this is why it's been hard to translate it into. I think I've actually had the opportunity to try it before and it was gross.

Yeah, I've tried it many, many times. And it is not good. It doesn't taste good and why it's been so hard to translate it into the market as a option. and make it viable because people are so taste dependent than if they try something, it tastes a little off. I'm so used to eating, like, they're drinking pure sugar water, you know? And so they're just adverse to these. But all of them come with their positives and limitations.

And so, you know, everyone's got to figure out their own situation. For me personally, you know, having type 1 diabetes and one of my biggest priorities around like things like you did too and other arenas where I'm, my biggest priority is just maintaining like brain focus and maintain, preventing hypoglycemia. Because when blood sugars go low, which can sometimes happen during exercise

if insulin's not regulated appropriately, there's only so much you can do once that begins to happen if you don't have another brain metabolite on board that isn't necessarily regulated by insulin. If you accidentally overdose with insulin, what else do you have? You're going to go low in glucose.

You have to give a ton of glucose, carbohydrates or glucose in sugar form. But we know that, you know, for a lot of times for myself, and admittedly I do actually use these things. Before I was like, I'm not going to tell me when I do them, but just be honest, like people can't benefit unless you tell them what you do and be honest with them.

Like I actually do this and I specifically do it for myself to ensure that I don't find myself in hypoglycemic moments or an exercise because you can't always guarantee you don't have a hypoglycemic moment during exercise and there's nothing that feels worse if anyone has had type 1 diabetes or what you're talking about before where if you do prolonged stringence endurance exercise, for long enough, you will also get this as well.

Athletes are terrified of this because they describe it like on the roadside, just like the lack of concentration. It's a pretty frightening thing to have happen. But when you have ketones on board, it lowers glucose dependency, not only in the brain but other tissues, but can shift over towards another metabolite that your brain can also use, which is less regulated by the things that can go wrong in a disease like type 1 diabetes, which is maybe too much incidence of little insulin and how it regulates glucose level.

So for me, it's more of a protective. tool and you know that's that's the only reason I utilize them when I can but other than that you know it's it's a it's a pretty interesting space looking at a lot of these you know performance modalities at the end of the day no matter what people are probably going to benefit from eating up exercising eating a healthy whole foods diet trying to eliminate a lot of the trash that's in our food environment and focus and focus on getting at sleep that's like 90% of it we're trying to do is like 10% and for some people that extra 10% makes a big difference especially if you're trying to eke out every little percentage you can get but I think that's

worth noting in the greater context of all this because while we talk about all these cool modalities and strategies and yes they are cool and they are really unique and they can do powerful things for a lot of people especially since so many people are unhealthy today and a lot of things we're describing can be insanely powerful at regulating health maybe more so than anything else is the diet. But also keep in mind that focusing on a healthy overall lifestyle, nothing beats that. And I'm not saying anything anyone here doesn't know. So question because I'm curious for a lot of the athletes, whether they're an athlete who's focused on resistance training for their sport, like a bodybuilder or a power lifter or athletes that obviously resistance trained to benefit their

sport performance. You know, when you were, when you mentioned the, when you, when you mentioned the, you mentioned the idea that like you can be in ketosis and still obviously build muscles still have high performance in the gym a lot of these athletes when they come and maybe they try this for a little bit you know they have that feeling of oh i'm flat i can't per you know i i i can't train as long i can't train as hard when doing these types of this type of work first part of that question is what is the how much time should these athletes potentially maybe give themselves to try to adapt to being able to perform in this state. And then the second thing is, you know, we talked about all the brain benefits, but on the other side of that adaptation, is there a new benefit that they're

going to realize as an athlete in any of these sports? Great question. And I even hate that I'm grouping these sports together because I feel like an athlete that's like a strong man or a bodybuilder is very different from someone who's like a grappler who supple, you know what I mean? So anyway, I think everything you said is very important. Context, sport, type, duration, intensity, own personal considerations. Maybe your wife hates certain types of food. Maybe your kids hate certain types of foods. It limits what you can bring in the house.

Like all these things matter, right? They'll get into the equation. We say four weeks because we were reliably seeing that most major objective performance outcomes seem to normalize at four weeks or greater. But we also know that things like muscle glycogen other components, which Mark, you've talked about how just feeling full and, you know, we talk about the flat phenomenon. It's something that people pay a lot of attention to.

Like we've known that long duration, ketogenic diets, that the weight to power ratio either stays the same or it's higher, but like absolute pure power. If you're just a power lifter and you don't need to, you're just moving weight. You're not necessarily moving your body over multiple reps or sports performance situation. The rules are potentially different in this scenario.

right? So I say four weeks in the context of just objective performance metrics, but a lot of times, a lot of the viewers probably here are not just your average health person. They're probably very at least a large majority are probably going to be very pro exercise, trying to eke out every percentage they can get. And in which case, they need to be a little more precise and pay attention, which they probably do. So one thing to take away here is like, well, you see four weeks, but we also see that carbohydrate supplementation can be beneficial during exercise. This is something actually talked to some elite endurance performance athletes and coaches with, they're like, hey, yeah, we did ketogenic diet and it didn't work. I was like, how long? They're like, well,

a couple months. I'm like, well, adaptation was probably long enough. He's like, I had no idea they were supposed to give them carbs in these long rides. I had no idea. So these little things, these little nuances that do matter. So kind of like using carbohydrates as a supplement in a sense. Yes, as a they work. They are performance ergodogenic or performance benefiting AIDS. really what we're talking about is the dose in question. Do you need a thousand grams of carbohydrates a day? Like, probably not, okay? For most people, probably not.

And is that detrimental? Probably. And if you're a recreational athlete following what anyone does in the elite category, you're making a mistake. I want to say that because all this focus around, so I'll say this and like, here are some counter arguments to these points. Well, like, what about elite athletes?

They're not doing that per se. I'm like, well, actually there are world record. record holders for ketogenic diet athletes. I can name a few of them. But what we also need to consider is that, you know, it doesn't matter if your high carb or low carb, carbs do benefit athletes, depending on the type of exercise duration. I mean, I remember when I first,

when a keto genitalia as a type one, I was very focused on powerlifting and bodybuilding at the time. I would see that less, you know, a little bit of carbohydrates, I mean like 10, 15 grams, pre or post exercise, I could see like, you're talking about those shifts. It's different in type of ibis because a lot of the insulin I'm giving

goes through the peripheral tissue. And so I would see these fill effects, even with minimal amounts. Whereas before I did 10 grams, it was like nothing happened. But when I was super low and I had that little amount, I was like, look in the mirror,

I looked like a totally different human. Yeah. And obviously you look like a different human, you probably did fill those tissues. Your leverages are probably changing a little bit. It didn't take very much. It wouldn't have pushed me out of the category of ketone production by amians.

Either way. I think the true answer is objectively four weeks or more for most individuals they have to test and find out you will never know unless you try everyone's going to assume ah you know this is this is hard prescription this is the way you do it's like that's not actually true almost ever actually like what works for mark um may not work for me may not work for insema you know so um And almost certainly that's the case, right? For almost anything. And you can like literally just looking at us,

we all look different, okay? I'm the best looking here, of course, so that might be genetics, but, you know, Mark at low end, Tildenpola, I don't know what happened there, but, you know, all these things, you know, bad break. That's life.

But all jokes aside, when you just, you look at us, we're all different physically. That came from difference internally, genetically, that manifested that. But that also applies to the molecules within our body and the things that regulate these things

we're talking about like performance, health, other biomarkers. And so yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's all individualized at the end of the day. Yeah. So quickly along with that, though, if, with context of the athletes who, let's say that they're pre-diabetic, right?

And they get a certain amount of carbohydrates into fuel their performance. Right? In my mind, it would seem that like if you're an athlete who eats excessive amounts for carbohydrates for your sport and you're in this situation, it would be a good consideration to try this because you could probably get away with a lot less carbohydrates, right, than you're currently using, get rid of pre-diabetes and still have high levels of performance, right? So what should these athletes think about? Well, I think they should all consider getting blood tests on a regular basis and consider their health.

I think a lot of people just think I'm exercising and I'm normal body weight and I eat relatively healthy. Like what could go wrong? And for the most... And lastly, contextually, something that I've noticed is a bit of a thread with these sites, types of athletes is, well, I'm in good shape, right? I might say I have pre-diabetes, but it's just like having high creatinine levels because you're buff, right? You'll see a lot of that in resistance trait athletes who supplement a lot of creatine. You'll see they have high creatinia levels. So I see athletes making that type of correlation or similarity, right?

So with that context in mind, what should they think about? I think they should all, as we were saying, like all of them should get blood tests and actually make sure that they're not seeing adverse shifts. If they are seeing adverse shifts, I wouldn't ignore it. Actually, what has happened when our work came out, and we're showing up 30% of these athletes could get pre-diabetes, even when they're fit, normal body weight, and exercising a lot. the reaction was, well, they're exercising and they're fit,

like what are the chances this actually is going to affect their health negatively? And the response to that is, how in the hell are you ignoring this? Like, how are you ignoring the fact that they're doing everything right and their biomarkers clearly indicate that they're shifting out of normal ranges? That's a signal that something's not right. No athlete should be sacrificed to the altar performance. Like, that should never happen. You should never be prioritizing performance to such a degree

where your health deteriorates. Yes, for short and bouts of time, this can happen. But it doesn't necessarily, okay, in some sports, it does have to be that way. Your biomarkers, though, and stuff like that, you can probably keep them in reasonable ranges. Absolutely. And if you see your hips or your back

or like certain things might wear out depending on how you do a sport or whatever sport it is you're doing, but your blood work, you should be able to, I think you should be able to keep it in some normal ranges. Absolutely. And if you see that you're not, there's simple strategies, right?

Like if you're an offensive lineman in the NFL, you're heavy. You need to carry that weight to perform well in your sport. You're not going to shrink down like Mark did and get super healthy and perform at that high level if you want your limbs intact. So yeah, you have to do that. But let's say that you were doing that before by eating, I don't know, a thousand grams of carbohydrates. What if you went to like 450, 300?

do you see much of a difference in fullness? It probably wouldn't be that big of a difference once you adapt to it. And maybe your biomarkers will start to shift. There's actually a prime example of this. This is a guy named Lionel Sanders. He was a world champion triathlete in 2017, but was very well known and was very public about his journey as an athlete. And he was like, yeah, I've just been feeling a little tired and lethargic.

You can see him as like abs up and down, super lean, super thick. guy, he's like, I got my blood work, came back and yeah, everything's good, but I have pre-diabetes. And training four hours a day and, you know, lean and huge volumes of exercise. And he's like, you know, so I got to fix this, obviously. So then come to find out, he reduced the amount of sugar, he starts, he processed forms of carbohydrates in his diet. He starts to sleep better. He starts to feel better.

He got a CGM. Almost instantly corrects this issue. Goes on to when the half Iron Man Kona champion. So did him shifting his biomarkers to improve his health deteriorate his performance, at least not relative to everyone in the entire world, you know? So he was still the best. And I think that that, Mark your point is well said, I think that there's a lot of things you can do.

I think there's too much of an attachment to the idea that you have, what you've done is the only way. And a lot of what our research is showing is that, no, there's like multiple paths to the same outcome for many people. And I just want to emphasize that I don't think. anyone sacrificing their health is something they will look back upon later in their life and say, that was a great choice. I'm so glad that I deteriorated my health for multiple years on end and ignored these biomarkers

moving in the wrong direction. That was a really, really good choice. I think most people as the age will reflect and say, shit, man, if I could get a couple more years of function and health, I'll take it, you know? And so, yes, it would always make the best choices when we're younger, but maybe at that time it was the choice. but I think we've all probably done things at one point in our life where it was not focused on health and other things but I think the message is that it doesn't mean

that you can't have both at the same time. What was it like hanging out with Bones-Jones recently? Oh, so cool. This guy is such a great, fun dude. He has a honestly one of the chillest guys I've ever met and makes all sorts of fun. He's a character. And a fun one to hang out with at that.

You can assume these guys might not always be the nicest people on our people. He was genuinely one of the coolest nicest people all the time. Such a joker. And he was there with Gable, who is like a mentee and protege. He was like a freak athlete. Oh, my gosh. Gable's a problem. He's so impressive.

It is really cool to see in person how impressive he is. But I mean, he's Olympic champion. You get to see these guys train at all? Not like get to see the series training. We got to see them kind of spar and do some grappling type work. Looks like John Jones is always like halfway fighting with people all the time. I just see like video after video of him like in some hallway somewhere. I got like a hotel just like jabbing at somebody.

And I'm always like why. And sometimes the other guys are like, you know, high level fighters. But I'm always like, why does anybody even, why don't they just go their way? Like, get the hell away from me. I guess he's the greatest of all time. They're probably like finding like, oh, I'm just going to shadow box here. But it's funny, although I will say like we were in the octagon, it was John, myself, Gable, and Mikey, Mujanechi.

Musa Mechi. Thank you. He's one of the best Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys in the world. It's funny, whenever we got in there, he immediately tacked Mikey, you know, and then Mike immediately put him into a leglong. It was kind of hilarious, actually. And Mikey actually, if people don't know, Mikey was showing me some of his leg lights.

And Jesus, it is terrifying. I've never had a guy in my life where the second he grabs my leg. And I've had a few people do this who were trying to hurt me. I've never in my life had a guy who was literally half my body weight. He's about half my body weight. Hold my leg. And I was like, he's like, all right, I'm going to show you when I actually, when I actually pull it.

I'm like, no, no, don't pull it. Like, that's going to break right now if you move it an inch. It was so powerful. It was amazing how technical, strong, and compact he was. And he's like a spider, man. He was so amazing what he could do. But he was also, all these guys were like super crazy cool and super kind. Did you ask Mikey for some nutrition tips?

It's funny. He's kind of known to like just eat pizza and stuff like that, right? So, yeah. Yeah, so he told him his favorite food is like pasta, he said. But what's fascinating is that Mikey will, say that his best performance of all time was worlds and he was fasted 20 hours into that. So and he said that the reason he performed that way is because it just removed the noise for him. He often describes that in, you know, in his head, it feels like a prison with all the things that are

going on. And he says the things that like exercise and prolonged periods of time like fasting really clears the noise. He actually uses exhaustion, his ketones also and he says it helps him in that way. I want to also add GSP has mentioned on multiple occasions that he wishes that he used some fasting back in his fight career because he notices now that it's something that clears his mind when he spars. So again, it's not just just is fasting useful for you for type 1 diabetes or for you personally? So I have the joke in type 1 diabetes world is that if I never ate or exercised, I don't have type 1 diabetes. Nothing goes wrong. Everything's completely normal and flat. So I try to prioritize the scheduling of my day, obviously. Your luck must run out at a certain point.

A certain amount of time goes by and your blood sugar, I'm sure, would it go low? 18 hours post after overnight post-pranidial fast, yeah. So right at that tipping point, the insulin requirements, glucose drops, the liver, glycogen levels drop sufficiently to cause the insulin to come low. I have to drop my insulin administration 50%. Around the 36 to 48 hour mark, I have to drop it down to 33%. and then it sustains for that period of time until you get pretty far into the fast where precipitably comes slightly lower and lower and lower.

But I don't find that super long periods of fast are really beneficial for me. Like let's say I've done multiple three-day plus fast. And it's just more of an interesting challenge. It helped me kind of think about my food differently. You know, after I ate at first I wasn't even that hungry, which is kind of always surprising, I think, for most people who first do this and make it to that point. But then when I reintroduce food, I'm like, now, I was like just eating to eat sometimes. I didn't realize like I wasn't actually hungry because I know what hunger actually feels like now.

But like I go when I wake up, I'll typically wake up, have coffee and just work. And that's the clearest I am. I don't have to worry about insulin or any of these other factors that could potentially small percentage chance, but throw me off. And so I like to just go as long as I can without having to think about food. And then right before exercise, actually I'll typically then go into exercise fasted. I'll resistance train, do any cardio I need to for that day. Then I'll do it to for an hour. then I'll have my first meal typically after lunch.

My next meal was probably either going to be dinner or a meal in between those two, depending if I'm trying to keep more weight on or not. And so I actually, by default, kind of periodically intermittent fast, just because it makes life so much easier. Before I'm like, I have to get all this nutrients in, this perfect time. I have to get enough protein. I need to split it up evenly. I need to get it like four to five times to stimulate the muscle protein synthesis response.

The irony is where I became a dad. and all I did was just try and show up in the gym consistently and I was down at two meals a day. That was the strongest I had ever been in my entire life. Dad strength. Well, that might be real actually. If you're not a dad, you fix that problem and you get jacked, you know. That's right.

Yeah. So you're at Florida State University? Yep. Florida State University, the Institute for Sports Science and Medicine. It's kind of a merger of my career at this point focusing on health and medicine of nutrition as an intervention to modulate disease or health. The other than things is elite level performance

and just recreational performance outcomes, it merges both of those together. So it's a cool spot. We do a lot of really cool research. Some of my colleagues there, Mike Hormsby is a cool guy. He does a lot of priestly protein work and has been actually a triathlete

and a hockey player, actually. And so most people who get an exercise science, honestly, they'll have exercise or done some type of sports. But it's a cool group there, Kyle, a few other people who do like Brady. We have a really killer team there. And it's a less. You go to some football games?

You run into Dion Sanders at all? Ha. That's funny. Is that going to go viral? So, no, I've never seen Dion Sanders. I think there was an attempt to recruit him to Florida State as a football coach and that left some bad blood. I think he was pissed off about that, went to Colorado. But yeah, Florida State football, man, it's the greatest of all time. Everyone else basically sucks compared to them. They have been pretty amazing. I mean, I don't know, like recently, but I remember like in the early 90s.

Bobby Bowden has won more games than any other football coach in history. I don't care if they stole his games away from him. The NCAA did. I don't know why they had a guy named Charlie Ward who he ended up winning the Heisman trophy. He was a football player, basketball player, baseball player. Yeah, he was a freak athlete. Yeah, he still didn't tell housey, actually.

I think he coaches family basketball, which is a neighboring school. They're super amazing, nice dude, too. But yeah, during Bob Bowden's era with football, he won more games. than the other football coach in this time. I think you won three national championships. And I grew up in Tallahassee and honestly, it's a middle-sized city. But my God, when football games happen,

the whole city is a thing. It's honestly really, really cool. When I went to like professional sports games and like NHL and NFL and all these other things, I'm like, whatever, it's not that exciting. But not the same excitement. It doesn't because the whole city, it's like a thing. It's like a we're all together in this.

And when you're good, it's a lot easier to get that mindset. But they were good for decades, you know. And so it has that kind of establishment. But nowadays, you know, going a totally different direction of the NIL and stuff like that. It's all resource dependent. So you have these schools like Ohio State University and the ones who are like Alabama, whose resources there and a lot of the Texas-based schools because of oil money have so much money to throw at these athletes that like when Jimbo Fisher, so he won a national championship of Florida State, he went to, uh,

Timu, Tammu, Texas, A&M. He went there because he wanted all the resources. He went there and got the best athletes in the entire world and they just left,

year on year, they just left because they were like, okay, new contract, give me my money, new contract, give my money. So it didn't really work very well. So the world of football is rapidly changing.

It's very resource dependent. But it doesn't change the five of four states to the best football team of all time and always will be. So where can people follow you? Where can they learn more about what you got going on?

They can go to Andrew Kudnik.com if they want to reach out to me directly, have a contact page there where I actually do look and see what people reach out to me. I'm also active on Instagram and X at Andrew Kudnik PhD in YouTube as well. Strength is never weakness. Wicked is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.