Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Kurtis Frank on the Best Functional Foods for Improving Health and Wellbeing

Episode Date: February 8, 2019

Typically, “functional foods” are those that can provide additional health benefits beyond fulfilling basic nutritional needs. For example, fatty, cold-water fish like salmon, mackerel, and sardines contain omega-3 fats, which can positively impact your health and wellbeing in a number of ways. Colorful fruits and vegetables like broccoli, berries, and Brussels sprouts are another good example. They contain plenty of vitamins, minerals, and fiber, but also other goodies like sulforaphane, anthocyanins, and carotenoids that can reduce the risk of disease, support brain, eye, and heart health, and more. And even much-maligned foods like beef, pork, and lamb contain a special type of fat, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), that’s associated with a reduced the risk of type 2 diabetes and cancer (and grass-finished/fed meat are particularly rich in CLA). All this is why food and supplement marketers have seized on these types of foods and molecules and spent who-knows-how-many millions of dollars over the last decades promoting their purported wonders. For example, several well-known wellness gurus are trying to make sulforaphane out to be the natural cure for cancer, when it’s far from a magic bullet. Omega-3 fats are important, but they can’t bulletproof you against heart disease as some people claim. And while CLA has some health properties, it’s hard to quantify how helpful it really is for the average healthy person. So, my point is while some foods are more nutritionally “special” than others and deserve consideration in your meal planning, most aren’t as helpful or vital as many self-styled diet experts would have you believe. And that’s why I wanted to get Kurtis Frank, the director of Research and Development for my supplement company Legion Athletics, onto the show to break down the real science of functional foods. Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll learn in this episode: - What a “functional food” is and isn’t - The best functional foods you can eat - The most popular foods marketed as “functional” that really aren’t - And more. Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Improvements to cognition among functional foods is quite rare. And the fact that they do extend beyond blueberries to like blackberries, cloudberries, wolfberries, anything in the blue-black spectrum. Blueberries are simply the most well-researched ones, but any dark berry will do. Hey, Mike Matthews here from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics, and welcome to another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. This one is about functional foods. What is a functional food? Well, most people, when they refer to functional food, what they mean is a food that has additional health benefits other than just providing basic nutritional

needs for the body. For example, fatty cold water fish like salmon, mackerel, and sardines contain omega-3 fatty acids, which offer a number of unique health benefits. Colorful fruits and vegetables are another example, like berries and brussels sprouts brussels sprouts i think we actually go either way on that i think it can be plural and not anyway these contain many vitamins minerals and fiber but they also contain goodies like sulforaphane anthocyanins andotenoids. And those interesting molecules can help reduce the risk of various types of disease, support brain, eye, and heart health, and more. And even much maligned foods like beef, pork, and lamb contain a special type of fat called

conjugated linoleic acid, CLA, that is associated with a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes and cancer. And all of that is why food and supplement marketers have seized on these types of foods and molecules and have spent who knows how many millions of dollars over the last decades promoting their purported wonders. For example, these days, several well-known wellness gurus are trying to make sulforaphane out to be the natural cure for cancer when that is far from the truth. It is far from a magic bullet of any kind. And as far as omega-3 fatty acids go, yes, they are important. And you do need to make sure that you are getting enough in your diet, whether it's through eating the right foods or taking the right supplements. But they cannot bulletproof you against heart disease, like many people claim.

And while CLA does seem to have some health properties, it is hard to quantify how helpful it really is for the average healthy person. So my point is, while some foods are more nutritionally special than others and definitely deserve consideration in your meal planning, most of them are not as helpful or vital as self-styled diet experts would have you believe. And that's why I wanted to have a discussion about this. I wanted to get Curtis Frank, who is the director of research and development for my supplement company, Legion Athletics, and the co-founder of examine.com onto the show to break down the real science of functional foods. And here's a little sneak peek of what you're going

to learn in this episode. You're going to learn what a functional food really is and what it really isn't. You're going to learn the best functional foods you can eat, the most popular foods that are marketed as functional that really aren't, and more. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm just going to quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my 100% natural Legion protein bar. Now, unlike many protein bars, mine are not chalky, crumbly, hard to get down lumps made with low quality and undesirable forms

of protein like milk protein, calcium caseinate, and soy protein, and chock full of artificial sweeteners, flavors, dyes, and other chemical junk. Instead, my protein bars contain 20 grams of high quality protein from a blend of whey isolate, whey hydrolysate, whey concentrate, and pea protein isolate are naturally sweetened and flavored and do not sit on shelves for months on end. And so every bite is savory, moist, and pleasantly chewable. My goal was to create an all natural protein bar that tastes like high protein candy. protein bar that tastes like high protein candy. And many of my customers say that I have done just that. So if you want a clean, all natural, low calorie and low sugar protein bar that has 20 grams of five-star protein that tastes as good as it looks, and that is easy on your stomach, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and try my protein bars today. And just to show how much I appreciate

all of my podcast peoples, use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order. I also have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. No having to return the products, fill out forms or jump through any other hoops. So you really can't lose here. Head over to www.legionathletics.com. Now place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet. All righty. That is enough shameless plugging for now, at least.

Let's get to the show. curtis frank welcome back to my podcast what's up man uh not much not much at all it is 2019 the year of the beast oh yeah the year chinese calendar right year of the boar i think sure i like your interpretation a bit better though mine's more fun oh yeah definitely more marketable as well you're the gorgeous things of like troughs filled with macaroni not very good for the fitness field beast has that armageddon flavor to it which makes it easy to you can use that fear to sell people stuff you know there won't be a 2020 might as well get jacked now just go down huge once the nuclear holocaust uh comes you before you're evaporated you're gonna you're gonna look pretty damn good yeah leave a pretty corpse and if it's evaporated at least

make the nuke like take some time to chew through you um all right well that's not what we're here to talk about we're here to talk about functional foods, which you had suggested this as a topic. And I am excited for it myself, actually, because this is an area that is not spoken about much. And I feel like a fair amount of the information out there on it is kind of quacky and gets too much into, puts too much emphasis on things that don't really matter or too little emphasis on things that do matter. So I'm excited to dive into it with you. I think we should just start with a definition of terms. So what are functional foods? The general idea of functional foods, like in the most basic definition are foods that also have a function, hence the name. But basically speaking, a lot of foods, just you eat them because they're nourishment and you don't give a second thought about it. But sometimes there are some certain foods that you do give an extra thought about. The best example would be if you're sick, you have some chicken noodle soup or ginger ale. Where, sure, they're just nourishment, but they also provide an extra function of helping you while

you're sick this idea then extended to how functional foods or foods that have these unique components within them are the bridge between diet and supplementation so very often you hear about people quacks if you, talking about how eat this food, and then they just claim all the benefits of supplementation of a particular molecule of the food. So anytime you hear about just hype, where it's like eat broccoli to get jacked, or like eat eggs to lose body weight or stuff like that, you always talk about functional foods, which is just buy the stuff in the grocery store and you could have an extra benefit like there's a lot of detox kind of claims are often at least i see that pretty often

in the context of functional food oh yeah it's the whole like detox weight loss you know yeah eat this certain food you get these goodies eat these foods they have the like negative effects or whatever yeah or detox your liver or detox some other organ yeah and a lot of the times the claims are just they're pretty much made just so you focus on the diet and think you're doing something useful whereas in actuality a lot of these detox diets are just like the detox ones in particular they're mostly just laxatives and they usually recommend eggs because they're chock full of fatty acids. They help lubricate the intestines a bit, help the laxatives work better.

But the more you focus on the diet, the less you focus on the supplements. And the supplements are the actual scam part of these detox things. So in that way, the functional foods, despite them technically being something worth looking into, can also be used as red herrings when it comes to overall dietary regimens. Right, right. So that is what a functional food is. Where do you want to take this from here? I mean, ultimately, we want to get to some practical, what are some functional foods that are worth working into your diet and why. But I'm just going to defer to, I know you have kind of an outline of how you want to go through this. So that's what functional foods are.

Where are we going next? I think the best place to start would be with fish, just fish products in general, because fish oil is a dietary supplement and it's just straight up taken from fish. And fish is a great functional food in this essence because not only is it nutritive, but it contains within it the fish oil dietary supplement. So if you're to have the food, you get the benefits of just the proteins within the, like say salmon itself, but you also get the benefits of dietary supplementation. Now, some fish are better than others for that, though, right?

Like when it comes to fish, the general rules are, if you want the omega-3 fatty acids, you go for cold water fish, the ones that are just more fattier. Because if the fish exists in cold water, it needs to have some fat just to protect itself. Whereas warm water fish can be leaner because they don't need that temperature coating. And you also want fish that are not necessarily predatory, but you don't want them to be like crustacean bottom feeders as well.

So you want fish lower on the food chain because then they have like the lowest level of mercury buildup. Makes sense. What are some specifics? I'm sure some people are listening like, so what should I be looking for? So basically, any sort of bottom feeding crustacean, in particular mollusks, oysters, crabs and all that, you don't really know what you're getting into unless you know the location that they're from because they literally eat anything that's on the seafloor. eat anything that's on the seafloor and it could just be a regular bottom feeding fish or it could just be a shark they're just eating it all up and they're storing everything in their body when it comes to more predatory species the most problematic ones even though they're not common in the diet would be whale and shark i can't even remember the last time i heard someone saying that they had a

shark steak but shark is perhaps the highest in these toxins same with whale meat i think i think shark steak i feel like i have heard i think it's kind of fancy thing so it's probably mostly going to affect the pedophile elites so who cares eat all the shark you guys want to eat yeah except shark fins shoot soup because that's just like that one's stupid and we're talking about thick juicy shark steak that you might find at like a three michelin star restaurant or something yeah and anyways like the reason i wanted to start off with uh i should also mention that most of the uh fish on the market is pretty okay the only ones that are a problem would be i think catfish the species of tuna known as albacore is uh pretty up there skipjack and yellowfin should be okay but that's more of a

like once you're trying to decipher the differences between different species of tuna that's pregnant women territory when it comes to mercury levels for like just day-to-day health reasons don't worry about it too too much it's just a general theme but the main reason i wanted to bring up fish in particular is because on the topic of functional foods food with a function we can measure the fish oil within the food and this is important because we just get a sort of an idea that there are indeed molecules within this food. And they're there at a certain level. And they could actually be taken out of the food if need be.

The main problem when it comes to functional foods is that sometimes people say, eat broccoli because it's good for you. And then you ask why. And then they respond with, well, because it's good for you, obviously. They always will be traced back to a molecule or class of molecules. You will be able to measure them. And there should be supplemental alternatives for a lot of these things. The only thing is we eat the functional foods because they're cheaper than actually taking the stuff out of the food product and putting it into a pill. So in the case of broccoli, what does that look like?

That would be the isothiocyanate class. It's a class of a lot of different molecules. But the ones we focus most on are I3C, endothelial carbonyl, and diendoil methane or DIM. I3C and DIM aren't too popular these days. Sulforaphane. They're still fairly popular. I mean, I still get people asking about them because they're sold usually as estrogen blockers. Yeah, like anti-estrogens and all that. And then there's the sulforaphane, which has the anti-cancer side of things. But these are the isolated molecules within broccoli that people start measuring out and just calculating.

And you can actually see that within these plants exist the good molecules. And as long as we can get that basis of like figuring out what the good molecules are in the plant, then we can start measuring how much of them are out what the good molecules are in the plant, then we can start measuring how much of them are actually in the plant. And I like bringing up broccoli because you're not going to be getting much sulforaphane in and of itself. You're probably not going to be getting much indole-3-carbinol nor diindole-methane. And you're saying that that is true regardless of how much broccoli you're eating? Like what if you eat two servings of broccoli every day which is actually what i do i'm asking for myself for example yeah the entire class the isothiocyanates there's a decent amount of broccoli so you're going to be getting some

health benefits and two servings a day is more than enough you can have one serving broccoli and still be good it's just when you have studies on isolated DIM and you try to compare that to eating the food in and of itself, that's where the problems may arise because the doses are a bit off. You're basically taking the equivalent of two kilograms of broccoli and assuming that one serving has just as much DIM. Yeah, sure. That makes sense. And functionally speaking or practically speaking, do you think that there would be a significant difference between the amount that you can get from eating broccoli regularly versus supplementing? Like obviously you can get a lot

more of the individual molecules, but do you think it's gonna make a big difference physiologically? When it comes to sulforaphane potentially uh but when it comes to the other ones i don't really think so i think you can just have like two servings broccoli a day and get most of the isothiocyanates out of the way but you could potentially micromanage a higher dose of sulforaphane if you just have broccoli maybe some like broccoli sprouts or whatever the heck ronda Patrick's talking about this month because that's like that's just her thing to talk about sulforaphane but yeah like just having one to two servings of broccoli may not be enough to get the ideal amount of sulforaphane but it is enough to get some benefits of the broccoli and

it won't be enough to claim that it would is a functional food just beyond healthy in a way okay and going back to fish for a minute is it practical to get i mean i guess for for basic health reasons you probably could get enough omega-3 fatty acids if you just ate fish semi-regularly right don't you have to wait against the amount of pollutants in fish because if there is a point where it becomes unhealthy, correct me if I'm wrong, but becomes unhealthy to be eating more and more fish. And so if you have basic health needs for omega-3, you probably could get there. Just if you regularly eat fatty fish, I'd be curious as your thoughts like on that and how many servings a week of let's say something like salmon or mackerels another good

source right anchovies are a good source and then you have the higher doses though that people that are more concerned with performance or let's say someone who lifts a lot of weights and they want maximum joint benefits for example that now becomes kind of impractical to achieve through diet alone no i would agree with you on that one it's when it comes to basic health reasons uh the general recommendation is around one to two servings of fish a week but in actuality you just kind of want to balance out the omega-3 animal sourced fatty acids like not plant omega-3 just animal omega-3 against animal omega-6. The ideal ratio, it's somewhere between 2 to 1 to 1 to 2.

In that range, no one really knows. They just argue about it. But as long as you try to balance them out, you should be good. So 2 to 1 to 1 to 2, those are, so you're saying some people are saying that you should be 2 to 1 omega-6 to omega-3 and other people are saying it's the other way around? Yeah, but they both agree that a 20 to 1 ratio in either way is horrible. Well, sure. Yeah. And isn't there some evidence that the absolute amount of omega-3 is more important than the ratio or no?

It really depends on what you're talking about. The absolute amount is a bit more relevant when it comes to immunology, particularly when it comes to omega-3's ability to, I guess, be an immunosuppressant. So you could have, let's say, one gram of omega-6 and one gram of omega-3 each day for a week. And then you just happen to eat more omega-6, and then you want to take more omega-3 to balance it out. If you uphold the ratio, most of the problems will just evaporate because the ratio is upheld. But some of them will persist and maybe even get worsened

just because you're eating more. And a lot of those do pertain to just how fish oil could suppress the immune system. But at the same time, it's not really something that the average person needs to worry about. It's more if you are in an immunocompromised state and you're like 70 years old and you're easily sickened, don't take like 10 grams of fish oil. It will not benefit you there. Okay. So if your average person went

for, let's just go down the middle and say a one-to-one ratio, they have nothing to worry about. Yeah, pretty much. Like that's just, if you want fish oil for health, just aim for a one-to-one ratio. Don't care too much if you're a bit on the left or on the right and you should be good. And what would that look like with just food? You're going to have to obviously expound a little bit on the diet there. So obviously the average Western eater, their omega-6 intake is out the roof. So what would a more sensible approach look like dietarily? I would probably aim for a one-to-one ratio. Every time you have a cut of pork or beef, basically the fatty, I'm not even sure if pork is considered a red meat, but every time you have a cut of that, at some other point in the week, have a cut of fatty fish.

Okay. And specifically what type of fish? I usually recommend sardines just because they're cheap. But also herring like if you go to a grocery store you look for tins of herring they're even for people who don't really like the taste of fish smoked or kippered herring is pretty damn palatable like a lot of people can get that down okay and what about salmon salmon's popular as well oh yeah but it's a bit more expensive so no i know it's popular it's popular, especially if you're only going to be eating a couple servings a week. Yeah.

Well, think about it this way. If the fish does have a fatty acid content, it's going to be omega-3 fatty acids. There's no fish that has omega-6 fatty acids predominantly. But anyways, back to the recommendations. but like anyways back to the recommendations every time we have a fatty cut of pork or beef at some other point in the week have a fatty cut of fish and then when it comes to warm water fish like tilapia or cod that don't have a high fat content and when it comes to chicken don't worry too much about balancing those ones out unless you deep fry them. Deep frying may require a bit more offsetting. Yeah, simply because they're just lean cuts of meat, so there's very little fat content, period.

And what about people who don't eat much in the way of meat? I hear from people regularly who have maybe a serving of leanish red meat once every other week. And otherwise, it's really just kind of chicken or turkey breast or plant-based sources of protein. Eggs, dairy. They may not even need to worry about the omega-3s. They may already be in a good enough position. I mean, there would be a benefit to getting some though, right? Because again, this is where there are quite a few people. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, a little bit. That's what I'm saying, where they're getting very little, not even really any LA, nothing really from plants or animals. However, their omega-6 intake is not too high either. Yeah, so they could quite literally have one cut of not even super fatty fish, like moderately fatty fish, like once a week, and they'd be good.

Cool. And then the higher dosages now that is where it becomes impractical with food right oh yes if you want to try to use fish oils to reduce any delayed onset muscle soreness then trying that with food is just i mean you can eat a few kilograms of salmon if you want but financially it's not advisable and beyond that uh reducing triglycerides definitely you want the supplement for that because just pounding down so many calories from fish will be counterproductive beyond that like yeah you could just pretty much get away with having fish itself without needing to supplement with it unless you want to get rid of some muscle

soreness or reduce your triglycerides. And for the purpose of reducing muscle soreness, what is the daily dosage? What's the recommendation of omega-3s? Scientifically speaking, I don't really know because all the studies that I've seen on this topic tend to use like university aged barely adapted weight lifters and yet whenever i go out in the real world and see people who swear by fish oil to reduce soreness they're always like just over the top power lifter types and the power lifter types tend to start at around four grams combined epa dha and sometimes they just like pop them like candy as well which at that point it's just damn near impossible to calculate a dose so yeah like if you are going

to use it to uh alleviate joint pain and you hear that four grams combined epa plus dha and think that's pretty high dose is that a typo? It's not. It does start that high, which is usually why we recommend other things to start with joint pain. Only moving up to fish oil if it's like the only option and even like ibuprofen doesn't work. And are there any other significant benefits that there's good scientific evidence for or enough anecdotal evidence that you get behind it for a higher, let's say it's four to six grams of combined EPA, DHA per day? Potentially for brain boosting. I'm talking about both the elderly and the youth,

but the scientific studies of that are very back and forth, so I can't 100% get behind it. that are very back and forth, so I can't 100% get behind it. But if you want to experiment with fish oil boosting cognition, particularly if you are a youth, you may want to experiment with dietary supplements rather than just having fish. Okay, and anything else? Nothing major that I can think of. Triglycerides, cognition, and joint health

are the ones that food just simply cannot replicate. Makes sense. So we were talking about broccoli. So I think I think that's pretty much anything else to say with broccoli and its special properties. Is there anything else you wanted to add on that before moving on to the next? I'd be curious to hear next a functional food that is well a food that is maybe heavily promoted as a functional food that you are not excited about and you don't agree with the mainstream hype on oh we can just go straight into that one because i totally have a topic on hand let's do it because i guess broccoli is really what you said, right? If you eat it, eat it. Yeah, like broccoli is healthy, but broccoli is never going to cure a disease state. It's never going to prevent a disease state. What if you don't like broccoli? Do you have

another option, like another cruciferous vegetable that you could substitute? All cruciferous vegetables can be substituted with one another. Broccoli is the most common because it tends to be the highest i forget if watercress is even a cruciferous but like watercress spinach bok choy can also be substitutes kale has become popular in the past few years although i'm not particularly a fan of it and then beyond that just cabbage is always a good option because how cheap and versatile it is and what about yeah like cauliflower brussels sprouts yeah i think well brussels definitely they're on the higher end but i think cauliflower and cabbage are both like on a per gram basis

lower in the beneficial stuff than broccoli is but even then like if you're getting it in your mouth who cares yeah i mean it's better than lucky charms yeah it's also better than just eating the same thing every day like day after day after day just like more and more and more broccoli eventually you're going to lose your mind just not eat it anymore do you personally have a lot of variety in your diet you just tend to eat the same stuff until you get sick of something and then you just change it? I'd say about 70% of my diet is consistent, but a lot of the stuff I have in my diet, it's very minor changes. Like let's say I want to have some sort of fry-like entity. And I say that because I usually have yams, but sometimes I'll switch it out for rutabaga fries because first and foremost, they taste different.

And rutabagas have a lot less calories than yams. So sometimes I do that when I'm cutting. Other times I'll just switch out the rice source. For the most part, my diet is the same, but there are going to be substitutes here and there just so i have some leeway i'm similar i just kind of stick to stuff and maybe i'll make little substitutions here and there less so when i'm cutting and then i'm just very robotic yeah you shut the stuff in your face and get on with your day because the more you think about it the more you want more and if you are eating stuff like root vegetables it's hard to overeat yeah there's

like on to the uh topic of functional foods that should never have that title chlorella and that's trendy these days as well kind of goes hand in hand with spirulina although i know i know um you're a big fan of spirulina but not so much of its uh cousin yeah because like when it comes to a functional food like you have your food, obviously. Then you have to ask, what is its function? And this always traces back to either a class of molecules or one particular molecule. And you just say, this is what the molecule's function is. For spirulina, it's very simple.

Spirulina is a source of C-phycocyanin. simple spirulina is a source of c-phycocyanin fico c-phycocyanin if i could pronounce it right helps uh suppress the immune system not in a necessarily negative way but prevents the immune system from damaging your own tissues resulting in significantly less oxidative stress and has a few other benefits that you can trace back to the actual molecule at hand. But spirulina is a source for this functional benefit. If you were to talk about chlorella, however, then people just start just running around in circles saying, oh, it has a source of magnesium. Oh, it's a source of vitamin C, vitamin A. It's like the moment that somebody who is asked about a functional food has to defer to vitamins and minerals, it's not a functional food. It's just a food.

Yeah, that's a good distinction to make. Yeah, like you can just take magnesium. Because you walk that back even further and it's like, oh, well, it has calories. Yeah. Yeah, so do any other foods. Why should I have chlorella? Oh, it's a great source of vitamin A. Why should I just take capsule vitamin A? Because this is chlorella. Yeah, or get vitamin A from something

else, some other food that I like more. Yeah, the foods need to have something relatively unique to make you go out of your way to consume the food. And chlorella just does not have that. It's a decent source of a lot of different things, and that's fine. And so if you want to just eat it in your diet, go right ahead. But to sell it as a supplement or to call it a functional food is just, in my mind, disingenuous. And I guess a lot of the hype surrounding it, actually, I'm not sure how popular it is now. It might have had its 15 minutes and it might be on the decline now but a lot of that hype was um mostly just marketing huh yeah it was basically saying how is a great source of whatever and whenever they're called out on what it was a

great source of they change whatever the great source was like they'd say it's a great source of like vegan zinc and then when people say no it's not they switch over to like an iron content which probably doesn't even exist to a high degree then when they're called out on that they just move on to the next target until they're eventually out of targets and hopefully they bought enough time to sell their entire stock because now they're on to the next product such is the supplement industry that's i mean that's yes that's how it works or or there'll be some preliminary research right that maybe it's animal research or in vitro or something that says hey this looks kind of interesting and then that they just take

that and run with it yeah like we saw a similar thing with uh two recent foods that i wrote about in articles one of the articles was more recent jackfruit, and the one before that was moringa oleifera. Now, both these foods, they're cool foods, I have to admit, because you can grow them in pretty much areas that are stricken by drought. You can have soil that is essentially depleted of its nutrients. There's barely any rain and yet these foods still grow and amass a lot of calories so when it comes to topics of reducing starvation rates in the world they're both so they're like they're going to be here after the the armageddon yeah pretty much just jackfruit moringa everywhere and cockroaches oh yeah the

cockroaches can't reach the food no they can reach everything my bad that's an interesting that's an interesting world imagine when the aliens come and it's just cockroaches and moringa jackfruit what the fuck is this but with uh those uh the foods there they're wonderful to research they're wonderful to grow in third world countries and if I had to sass the foods themselves I wouldn't because they're pretty great the problem is that there became a surplus to them at certain areas and what do you do with anything that has a surplus but could also go bad in a week or so after it's been harvested you dehydrate it you it in pills, and you find any excuse to sell it to people. And when it comes to moringa in particular,

it's also a cruciferous vegetable. It's not as good as broccoli, but it does have the same compounds we were talking about earlier, including sulforaphane. And because of that, it was sold as dietary supplements for a long time, and we actually include it in Genesis just because of how bloody cheap it was for us to add just an extra source of cruciferous. There was nothing special about it. It was just cheap.

But a lot of other companies decided to sell it at a horrendously high markup because it was some fancy sounding tropical fruit. And they just made off like bandits yeah i've heard the seeds are particularly incredible yeah like it's weird from the position we're in because we can actually see the cost of these ingredients behind the scenes but when someone tries to sell you like one gram of moringa a day and like a month supplies 50 bucks and then we're just looking over the price for genesis like it costs us two cents to add this thing how are they charging that much money it's weird you gotta you gotta pay for lambo somehow dude i know right and jackfruit's in a similar position where it's probably going to be

just heavily marketed and manipulated in the next few months where people are going to say here are all the benefits of jackfruit and they're probably just going to use the actual article i wrote to find out this like one particular interesting molecule that hasn't actually been proven in anything but technically it's in jackfruit and we're probably going to use that to sell it as an immuno booster just to earn some money. Buy low, sell high, after all. Therefore, making you guilty by association. And incredibly bitter. You should be punished.

You should just be punished preemptively because that's what's going to happen. Oh, yeah, totally. Just throw me right under the jackfruit bus. right under the jackfruit bus. Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural,

evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check everything out, just head over to legionathletics.com

and just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That's essentially 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics.com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. So you mentioned kale, that you're not a fan of kale.

Oh, it's just for a taste perspective. Oh, okay. I thought there was some other reason because that's one of those, I don't know if it's generally considered a functional food, but it definitely gets lumped into a super special food that you should be eating above everything else. Yeah, I'd consider it similar to broccoli, to be honest. I'm not going to say you have to go out there and eat kale. If you want to, that's great. say you have to you have to go out there and eat kale if you want to that's great but it's just like i can eat salads with lettuce or spinach but when people serve me a kale salad just way too bitter and then people just like oh wow you just like batter up kale and fry it and i'm like deep frying kale it's like wow i'd rather deep fry bloody cod at this point i've had kale chips that

were good it's just like dehydrated kale with some nutritional yeast and some salt it was actually pretty good yeah i've tried to do that but i'm not known for being good cook after all my most famous recipe that people still remember me is just a failure that somehow like did i tell you about that meat slop yeah you might as well go through it again okay uh so anyone who's uh new here i'm well known for something called the meat slop and it's called meat slop because it's meat mixed with cabbage and tomato paste and it just looks like a slop you look at it and you think but there aren't any pigs around here why do I have pig feed on my kitchen counter but you know I was a starving university student at the time and if you have five pounds

cabbage and one pound of meat mix them together you get six pounds of something that sort of kind of tastes like meat works out in the end but I was trying to make borscht. Like, I failed that hard. That's like trying to make a hot dog and coming up with a salad. I don't know how I could have screwed up the recipe so much. And so I posted it online with the intention of, ha ha, look how much I suck at cooking. And apparently everyone thinks that I'm actually good at cooking now because I made something so delicious. And now whenever I hear the talk about meat slop, I'm reminded of my failures in the kitchen.

No, man, that's like the start of it's like the beginning of of a breakthrough, innovative product story. Now you need to trademark it and bring it to the masses. Meat slop. It's like sloppy Joe's. It's the next thing. It's just the masses meat slop it's like sloppy joe it's the next thing you know it's just the caption meat slop eat it you dirty pigs oh how could that go wrong all right so what is another tier one let's say functional food so we have fish your your favorite of course of course garlic yeah why garlic so so we have fish just to recap we have fish we have broccoli and other cruciferous

uh also leafy greens right spinach is probably up there you kind of that was the previous group and now garlic why garlic uh first and foremost garlic is probably makes you smell like shit oh yeah totally but still curry does that too and it hasn't stopped me from eating it oh yeah i'm i'm over it i eat um more than i even need to just because i like garlic i probably eat a few cloves a day and i'm sure i don't notice it but i'm sure i don't smell too great at least sometimes but it was like the definition of functional food is food with a function. And if the function is going to be reducing blood pressure, the first question is, can I just eat enough of this food to knock myself out? With garlic, you can.

I'm actually going to have to give a disclaimer on this. Some people use garlic before they head to the gym as a sort of nitric oxide booster. First and foremost, yes, that does work. Secondly, it's not recommended because you exhale a lot at the gym and there are going to be other people there who will not take kindly to the garlic shenanigans you're doing. And if you do any overhead work, you may very well pass out from low blood pressure. Garlic can quickly and potently reduce blood pressure. So that is enough to call it a functional food. What's in garlic?

What's the special? What's the secret sauce? So I don't know exactly what the entire category is, but they're basically sulfur-bearing compounds. Small amino acids that have sulfur on them survive digestion and then just give sulfur off within the human body. But when the sulfur is in the human body, rather than being, say, incorporated into a sulfur-bearing amino acid like L-cysteine, the sulfur just floats around and it usually forms hydrogen disulfide, which is the molecule known for producing egg farts, or at least the smell thereof.

Hydrogen disulfide is actually similar to nitric oxide in the fact that it relaxes blood vessels. Furthermore, it actually bolsters antioxidant defenses. Like there's three different molecules known as the gasotransmitters small transmitters kind of like neurotransmitters but like neurotransmitters are called that because they're transmitters within neurons gasotransmitters are transmitters that are gases it's nitric oxide hydrogen disulfide and carbon monoxide and the three of them can pass through any cell barrier they want because they're small gases and they just don't care about barriers they just slip on

through our cells need better uh border defenses i knew you were going to say that i thought about it i was like ah whatever i'll say it like if i if you heard me stuttering a little bit it's just as soon as they get it you're like all right as soon as they pass through the membranes because they don't care it's like oh god he's gonna say it isn't he but yeah so gotta have strong borders you know yeah they reduce blood pressure they bolster antioxidant defenses they actually help the immune system it's very much just like a secondary nitric oxide that works in concert with it. Furthermore, if you boost one of them up too much, the other one will follow suit because they have to have some sort of balance with each other. Okay.

So that is why garlic is one of your top functional foods. What other benefits are there and how much do you need to eat to get those benefits? The dose you need to eat is about two cloves a day i just specify the clothes of the segments not the entire bulb two bulbs a day would be impressive uh it might kill you i will have to admit you you would smell like an abomination that would be amazing but yeah one to two cloves a day and like you could get all fancy and just like actually do the whole unwrap the clove cut it open let it oxidize in the air before lightly sautéing it or you could just plop them in your mouth and just don't forget the the himalayan

rock salt oh yes it has to be kosher i saw aubrey marcus That's what it's got to be Himalayan salt. And it's got to be lightly oxidized garlic. No, that's just it's like he has that recommendation. It has to be the Himalayan salt with lightly oxidized garlic. And I'm serious. Like, yeah, just pop a freaking clove in your face and chew it if you're man enough. All right. So it's so it's one to two cloves a day um does cooking

change that at all cooking the garlic uh cooking the garlic like all cooking processes will change the amount of bioactives in there at the end of the day if you're having two cloves a day i wouldn't care too much about the process unless you boil it without breaking the skin first, because that could straight up inactivate everything. Interesting. But if you're chopping it up and you're putting it into your stir fry, for example. Oh yeah, it's totally fine. Cool. And what are their benefits? It is one of the few things that has pretty good evidence for like not just the common cold but any sort of throat infection to reduce the frequency you get it increase the rate of which you're cured from it and reduce intensity there are a few studies that have perhaps the most practical measurement when it

comes to sickness how many days do you need to take off work? Because garlic is unique in the sense that even if it doesn't cure you, you just feel good enough to go to work. Because sometimes you're just too sick to go to work. Other times you can suck it up. Garlic seems to help you suck it up a bit more. Beyond that, it's just a general antioxidant. I don't think the antibacterial properties are enough to really care about, especially with oral ingestion. You may hear a lot of people talking about that because garlic's first medicinal usage was as a battlefield antibiotic. Don't rub garlic in your wounds. That is not a good idea.

Just hearing it from me. Well, you know, you haven't been in battle. Oh, if it's my last resort, I might rub garlic in the wounds. But truth be told, I'd probably just eat it and go out happy. You might get it when you're in Canada. Well, I don't know. You know, the civil war, the upcoming civil war might spread. So you might get a chance to do that.

Maybe we can bring 1812 up to a 2-0 ranking. I do also have to tell your viewers, i'm sure i've told you this before but my own personal definition of 1812 in somebody this is a like history lesson for those you don't know canada is actually undefeated in wars against the u.s because the war of 1812 us canadians beat you yankees we wouldn't today we straight up would just get destroyed but we're still technically winning 1-0 record and we're not going to challenge you again nope nope we're beyond the days of war we're not barbarians after all and that's what it means to 1812 somebody you beat them technically you know they'd wipe the floor with you, so you just

casually avoid any times that they want to even the score. Just so you can continue bragging for as long as you can. We'll take our revenge. It's coming. You have a failed drama teacher leading your nation. Your end is imminent. There's something in the middies

that you need to pay your attention to. Don't look up north. Nothing's happening up north north it'll be the american version of lieben's realm you know where are we going to go we're going to go north we're not going to go south we have a big wall there we can't go south we're going north the wall prevents you from manifesting more destiny the destiny is north it's always north gotta go up not down gotta connect that alaska anyways uh all right so garlic i think um that covers garlic what else do you got because you also have some spices as well right oh yeah so i was actually thinking about this a bit because a lot of people do state that spices and things like spirulina are functional foods. But the more I think about it, I wouldn't call cinnamon a food, to be honest.

And if spirulina wasn't healthy, I wouldn't be eating spirulina either. Like technically stuff like cinnamon, turmeric, spirulina, they're all good things to have, but how many of us would actually be eating them in like a high dose? Yeah, you're going to supplement. I mean, turmeric, if you really like curry, I guess.

Another one could be blueberries. They're a bit expensive. Also, I should mention, not many of the listeners may know this, but when it comes to blueberries, if you do want to buy it, frozen is better than fresh. Why? Because the antioxidants within blueberries over time, like the reason antioxidants are in fruits are to prevent the fruits from oxidizing.

Once the fruit goes brown and just rotten and all that, all its antioxidants are used up. It can no longer prevent oxidation, thus it oxidizes. So the more it's exposed to air, the more its antioxidants are just decreased over time. Now, the process of freezing could potentially destroy antioxidants as well. But the ones that we want when it comes to health benefits of blueberries, the anthocyanins, seem to be resilient against the cold. So first, we freeze them. There's no major destruction of the anthocyanins seem to be resilient against the cold. So first we freeze them. There's no major destruction of the anthocyanins in blueberries. And then because they're not really exposed to

oxygen and they're frozen, all their metabolic processes are slowed. They have a significantly lesser rate of decay when they're on the shelves at stores. They most likely have a higher antioxidant content. And if you just leave them in your fridge for a week or so, they're on the shelves at stores, they most likely have a higher antioxidant content. And if you just leave them in your fridge for a week or so, they're going to retain a lot more of them than fresh ones. Furthermore, they're cheaper. Which is a significant point because fresh blueberries are probably one of the most expensive fruits at this point in time. Yeah, they're pretty absurdly expensive as far as fruit goes. And why blueberries? What do I get for eating blueberries regularly? All berries that are on the blue to black spectrum color, but the darker skinned anthocyanins

do have cognitive boosting properties and are generally antioxidants that can reach the brain. So I wouldn't say like if you're a young youth, otherwise healthy, and you're a student, I'm not going to go out and say that blueberries will make you smarter. But at the same time, if you're a 70-year-old whose cognition is starting to fade, you may very well have noticeable improvements in cognition with, say, a cup of frozen blueberries made into a smoothie every morning and for just any food product to have noticeable improvements in cognition is quite remarkable and in the younger healthier population would there be any neuroprotective

benefits of having blueberries regularly do you think there technically would be yes but at the same time i don't think they'd manifest in any sort of behaviors sure sure no i mean it's a it'd be proactive in nature according to rat studies they may actually make youth smarter but the rat studies so it's going to be a bit hard to replicate well we got i mean whatever we are just big rats right so yeah let's start selling blueberries yeah like on one hand, when it comes to blueberries, there isn't a major species difference when it comes to how it affects rats versus humans. But when it comes to just increasing overall cognition of young humans,

for some reason, a lot of human studies just outright fail on that. We're smart enough as young humans that it's very hard to have an exogenous factor boost us that much yeah yeah no i was joking yeah maybe my dead pan delivery didn't that that that highlights uh something we we mentioned earlier is that it's very common in the in the supplement space for anyone listening who's not too familiar with it to take rat research and to have benefits in the animal model and just extrapolate those to humans because we share a lot of dna with rats so people you know the unscrupulous marketers will cite rat research and say well we could expect the same thing in humans

because we share all this dna and then you casually mentioned that we shared 97 dna with bananas and they get all pissy about that it's's like, oh, are you sassing me? Yes. So we could start conducting studies on bananas and extrapolate those. Oh yeah, totally. Just as valid. Okay, technically a little bit less valid. Just inject a banana with testosterone. It's not lifting any weights. What do we do now? Well, just like drop a barbell on it and see what happens. It's not motivated. Give it more money.

Show them. We got to build a dream board for the banana. What would a banana's dream board look like? What would it be pasting on its dream board? Its vision board? It's doing everything to become a chocolate dip banana like that that's the end goal it's like a scrooge mcduck like pool of godiva chocolate and they're just swimming through it the liquid gold dream i like it so blueberries then any other specific reasons, any other specific benefits that you could expect from eating, I guess, is a cup a day? Is that kind of like the amount?

Well, when I say a cup a day, I'm specifically meaning like just if you have a bag of frozen blueberries and you pour them out. If you have fresh-weighed blueberries, it's probably going to be a little bit less than a cup a day because like they're more compacted in a way and if you have like just straight up dehydrated blueberries it's probably gonna be half a cup like 125 milligrams sort of thing milliliters whatever turning berries into liquids is without actually turning them in liquids as weird measurements whatever just grab a tomato tomato yeah just grab a handful of your face all right handful good handful of uh of blueberries a day any other health benefits any other reasons why you wanted to talk about them in particular uh the only reason i want to talk about them is because improvements to cognition among functional foods is quite rare and the fact that they do

extend beyond blueberries to like blackberries cloud berries wolfberries anything in the blue black spectrum blueberries are simply the most well researched ones but any dark berry will do great what do you got for us next perhaps cranberries for a completely different reason like other end of the body as well i don't even see they've got to be at the grocery store i I must just not be seeing them. I've only seen them frozen, to be honest. Well, I've seen them fresh sometimes. They're not too popular.

But yeah, the whole fact that cranberries can just help with urinary tract infections to a degree that rivals pharmaceuticals, that's impressive. Just have to admit. Very impressive. But what if you don't have a uti oh then just you don't really need to eat cranberries yeah i don't really think there's anything special about cranberries at least compared to other berries like sure cranberries are packed with antioxidants yada yada yada all that but all berries are their only super niche thing is their benefits to urinary health in particular helping with utis so if you have a uti or you're about to get into a situation of which

you think you can get to uti you should stop and reconsider your life you could just go on and just tangent about all the possible situations of which you may expect to encounter a UTI infection in the next five minutes. So if you're active on Tinder, that is perhaps the most polite way to ever address this topic. I mean, euphemism is my strength, right? I mean, come on, I'm the most politically correct person I know. You can't laugh at that. Come on, man. Don't blow my cover. Okay. Next topic. Okay. So that's cranberries. Moving on, moving on. There's nothing to see here. And what about rosemary? Is there anything neat about rosemary? I just like it and I've heard some things, but

I want to hear your wisdoms. Yeah, so I'm not actually fully researched on rosemary. But at the same time, of the research I've done into it, there is one particular molecule known as rosmarinic acid. And based on, like, I still don't know exactly how rosmarinic acid works, but it's in a wide variety of herbs it's in lemon balm in particular like not even related to rosemary and it does seem that it could be on track to be the next resveratrol the next curcumin just one molecule that everybody hypes up like over the top but does have some earnest benefits. Such as? The ones that I've seen, I can't say the following with 100% certainty,

but it seems to be somewhat of an immune booster, but mostly an antioxidant that has, like not one of those general antioxidants that floats around and just eats oxidants, but more so one of the ones that associates with vital proteins and actually gets in a cell and helps with cellular function. So one of the better antioxidants, kind of like olive leaf extract in that sense. If you want to put rosemary on your steak, go right ahead. But pending more research, the best source of rosmarinic acid may not even be rosemary.

And what is it? I don't't know or what is a better source i am just googling that now and by googling i mean going into my personal research of perilla oil i i just looked on examine it's wrote the stuff. Okay. I can look it up. But yeah, so definitely it's in lemon balm. But when it comes to spices, it's in sage, savory, mint, thyme, basil, and also the medicine holy basil, which is surprisingly not at all related to basil. Somehow they both have rosemary acid in them. And yeah, it seemed perilla oil has the highest content i don't even know what that is it's you know how every now and then you see like dietary supplements they're like omega-3,6,9 and it's like full spectrum fatty acids or whatever perilla oil is like

the oil that you use when you can't use gamma linoleic oil, GLA, which is like the third cousin twice removed that's kind of ugly and everyone forgets about of the dietary oil family. That's neat. There's a motto right there. There's a slogan. The twice removed oil. Ugly that no one really likes. There you go. Yeah, yeah pretty much buy it if that resonates with you okay well that was that was my i wanted to ask rosemary just because i

was curious what's next on your list so there's a lot more to that i can potentially talk about like tons of different spices different teas in particular because each tea is its own water extraction of a different plant but pretty much the only other things that I could mention briefly would be, first of all, coffee. The coffee beans themselves, like lots of antioxidants, some basic research saying that they could delay Alzheimer's, even beyond the caffeine content. Just without getting too much into it, if you're going to have caffeine and I'd opt for coffee rather than energy drink or something. You know, I have actually a self-serving question. Does it make any sense to you that at this point, as I've gotten older, I seem to have gotten more caffeine sensitive, particularly with my sleep, which makes sense for a number of reasons. which makes sense for a number of reasons but does it make sense to you that i really have the feeling now that my body likes coffee more than something with caffeine anhydrous that i feel more

of a fallout of sorts from caffeine anhydrous than the caffeine in coffee does that make any sense to you uh biologically speaking not really but at the same time it could just be a habit forming thing because even if the thing is a complete placebo if you have it every single day for a long period of time, your body is going to get used to that habit in a sort of way. Sure. Yeah. No, but I mean, I've had the habit though, either way of what I'm thinking of is pre-workout versus which has just caffeine and hydros versus coffee. And physically, I swear there's a bit of a difference more in the after. And it's not something that I went looking for. I don't know. I didn't have any good technical explanation for

it. I've only just experienced it and I don't know why. Yeah, I don't really know. I've heard a lot of people mention stuff along those lines, but I've never really found an answer that really satisfied me. The association one is the only one that I can think of. And even then, it's the whole it's an iffy kind of position. Like, maybe it's this. Like, I have no confident answer for why coffee treats you different than caffeine anhydrous. But it does do that to a lot of people. Interesting.

Just wanted to ask. All right. So that's coffee. Just drink it. So you were saying that you have some other things that you could bring up. I just have to mention to the viewers right now that we've talked about what I'm about to bring up a while ago. And we're still both unable to find a tasteful segue into the worst functional food that you should never eat. So I'm just going to go straight ahead. Citrus colosynthus, also known as bitter cucumber. This is not bitter melon, mind you, because bitter melon is the source for sinophore. Bitter melon, mind you, because bitter melon is the source for sinophore.

But bitter cucumber is a food of which when you eat it, you will actually have colonic inflammation and shit blood. Bam. Yeah, there's an examined page literally with scientific evidence of we fed these people the bitter gourd and they started shitting blood. We probably shouldn't do this anymore. So what's going to happen now is someone listening is going to feed that to somebody they don't like is what's going to happen. Or just as a prank,

even if they like them, just they have that kind of relationship. Here, here's some bitter cucumber salad today. But there's like an article I wrote a while ago about like five supplements that you never want to take. And one of them was about like a really potent estrogen.

I mentioned just like a lot of people may things like, oh, potent estrogen means prank my bro. But no, this is a bit too powerful for that. And then apparently people just like, wow, that makes me want to do it even more. So great. Now they're going to mix that with this. And yeah, it's even better now. I hold no responsibility for what happens in the near future with this

information. Works for me. All right. Bitter cucumber. Never consume it. Yeah. I mean, you can give it to somebody else,

but just don't do it yourself. Unless you're, unless you're into that kind of thing. Yeah. But there's like joking, shitting blood. And then there is, Oh wait,

this is beyond a joke, shitting blood and then there is oh wait this is beyond a joke shitting blood so it's pretty intense it's not it's not just a little bit it's like oh wow uh i'm dying it's 100 dose dependent and it's a cucumber right 100 milligrams of the thing starts the bleeding oh wow yeah so if you just have the don't take a big bite just like that's impressive actually yeah it's like just keeping it back the noggin because every now and then people just like oh wow this made me feel a little bit sleepy surely this is the worst side effect a supplement could ever have then you're just like oh bring up these studies all right well um this has been a very enlightening and tangential and amusing conversation as always thank you thank you glad to be here

and i look forward to our next conversation i feel like there's a there's probably another word for what these are but uh it's good. We have some information. We have some random tangents. It's more fun than the monologues that I normally do. So I appreciate it. I enjoy these as well. Nice break from work. All right, man. See you next time.

Talk to you later. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don't mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you're listening from. This not only convinces people that they should check the show out, it also increases its search visibility and thus helps more people find their way to me and learn how to build their best bodies ever too. And of course,

if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then just subscribe to the podcast and you won't miss out on any of the new goodies. Lastly, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself, I'm not big on promoting stuff that I don't personally use and believe in. So instead, I'm going to just quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically, my 100% natural Legion protein bar. Unlike many protein bars, mine are not chalky, crumbly, hard-to-get-down lumps made with low-quality and undesirable forms of protein, like milk protein, calcium caseinate, and soy protein, and chock full of artificial sweeteners, flavors, dyes, and other chemical junk. flavors, dyes, and other chemical junk. Instead, my protein bars contain 20 grams of high quality protein from a blend of whey isolate, whey hydrolysate, whey concentrate, and pea protein isolate, are naturally sweetened and flavored, and do not sit on shelves for months on end. And so every bite is savory, moist, and pleasantly

chewable. My goal was to create an all natural protein bar that tastes like high protein candy. And many of my customers say that I have done just that. So if you want a clean, all natural, that. So if you want a clean, all natural, low calorie and low sugar protein bar that has 20 grams of five-star protein that tastes as good as it looks, and that is easy on your stomach, then you want to head over to www.legionathletics.com and try my protein bars today. And just to show how much I appreciate all of my podcast peoples, use the coupon code podcast at checkout and you will save 10% on your entire order. I also have a very simple 100% money back guarantee that works like this. You either love my stuff or you get your money back, period. No having to return the products, fill out forms, or jump through any other hoops, so you really can't lose here. Head over to www.legionathletics.com.

Now, place your order and see for yourself why my supplements have thousands of rave reviews all over the internet.