The Nick Bare Podcast - Archive - Dr. James DiNicolantonio | Optimizing Salt Intake to Improve Performance

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

Do you have enough salt in your diet? Joining us on this week's episode, we have Dr. James DiNicolantonio to explore how salt intake is a key factor in physical performance and overall health.  Nick and Dr. James dive deep into the science behind how our body responds to salt, as well as debunk some misconceptions about this mineral that have been popularized over the years. Dr. James is a cardiovascular research scientist and doctor of pharmacy at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Missouri, and author of The Salt Fix and Superfuel.  He has shared his expertise on The Dr. Oz Show, The Doctors, and international news media outlets. Dr. James' Website: https://drjamesdinic.com/ Shop BPN Electrolytes here More Resources: BPN website: www.bpnsupps.com Nick’s website: www.nickbare.com Nick’s Instagram: www.instagram.com/nickbarefitness Nick’s Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/barelifenutrition Follow Us On Social Media! Instagram: @thebareperformancepodcast Facebook: The Bare Performance Podcast Twitter: @BarePerformPod Youtube: The Bare Performance Podcast

In this episode of the Bear Performance Podcast. Prior to competition, or if you feel like you have low energy, utilizing higher salt solutions to boost blood value will give you the best performance enhancement you can get 10 to 20 times better than any type of performance enhancing supplement, like beta aline or beet root juice, salt solutions. If you get the concentration correctly and you consume it correctly, will let you vigorously exercise 10 to 20 times longer than any type of performant pre-workout would let you do.

Welcome back to another powerful episode of the podcast. I'm your host, Nick Baer, founder and CEO of Bear Performance Nutrition. Every week, we bring you insightful stories, knowledge, and inspiration to help you reach your full potential in life, fitness, and business. If you enjoy the message we're promoting in this podcast, we would be great to be. greatly appreciate it if you would leave a rating and review on the platform you're listening to. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes that embody the Go One More Mindset.

All right. Today on the show, we have Dr. James D. Nicola Antonio. Welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me on, next. Absolutely. So I've been diving deep into a lot of your content recently. And I just wrapped up like I was telling you, I finished your book, The Salt Fix. and win amazing content and very refreshing.

And what I'd love to really dive deep into right from the start, giving context to your background and why you're talking about things you're talking about and bringing to life some of these very important concepts is one, what made you want to become a doctor? And then two, when did you decide or realize that the experts got it wrong? And the things that these other doctors or medical professionals that were practicing and preaching weren't necessarily correct. And why did you want to go against the grain and challenge that? That's a great question.

Yes, I guess they just give you like a background of my credentials. I'm a doctor or pharmacy and a cardiovascular research scientist at St. Luke's Mid-America Heart Institute, which is a very prestigious Heart Institute. And I do a lot of research there. I've published over 300 academic papers, mostly on nutrition. a lot focusing on hydration, electrolytes, and micronutrients. But really, I mean, probably a lot of my passion on nutrition starts from as a child, I wrestled, ran cross country, did judo, did Kempo karate, always kind of understood a little

bit the importance of salt, but not to the extent obviously that I do now. And sort of what got me interested in challenging the whole low salt paradigm. time is because when I was a community pharmacist, this was probably over 10 years ago, my patients did not do well on those salt diets. If you go to the doctor's office and you have high blood pressure, the first thing they're going to tell you is just to cut your salt intake. They don't actually, you know, typically try to delve in much more deeper than that. And a lot of my patients would come to me and say that, you know, they don't feel good.

Their exercise tolerance is terrible. a lot of them actually would pass out on this actually happened to a few relatives of mine too where they would actually just collapse on a low salt diet because it just bottoms out your blood volume. And so it wasn't matching basically the guidelines saying everyone should consume a low salt diet. It was not matching the health of my patients. And so when I would push back and they would go to their doctors and say they weren't doing well and the doctor would say, okay, so start adding salt back to your diet, they would instantly feel so much better.

even people with atrial fibrillation, their eighth of episodes would almost go completely away. So right then and there, I'll say, okay, something's wrong here with the guidelines. And what's interesting is if you actually look at the level of evidence that's supporting these guidelines of the American Heart Association, congestive heart failure guidelines telling these individuals to go on a low salt diet, it's based on level evidence C, which is just expert opinion. It's not based on like meta analyses of randomized control trials in humans. So I started publishing a lot on this topic and sort of started kind of pointing out the gaps in the evidence. And so it's not just the fact that the evidence does not suggest that this is correct. It's when you actually look at the real world population, so much so much harm you can see when people start cutting out their salt intake.

It's interesting like I was telling you because I went to school for nutrition. And I was studying nutrition between the years of 2009 to 2013 at a university up in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. And when I went to school to study nutrition, I wanted to learn more about nutrition in terms of sports performance. And my expectations of going to college is that's what we were going to learn about. When I got to school, I was sadly mistaking that we were just going to talk about nutrition in terms of disease, primarily diabetes and diabetes.

cardiovascular disease. And one of the things I identified very early on was okay, these professors are telling me stop eating red meat and reduce all the sodium or salt in your diet.

And then I was looking at these professors who were severely overweight who as they're telling me this are eating a bag of Doritos and drinking a Mountain Dew and I thought something doesn't match up here. And that's when I started diving into the research and trying to find out more because I want to do to improve my health,

my performance. And that's where I kind of had my eyes open to what is actually correct out there and what are we being told. And I think one of the big issues, and I think this is why your content is so refreshing, is a lot of society is basing their opinions off of just headlines. I mean, social media, media, newspapers, magazines, headlines, people can read a headline and they can make up their mind as to what that headline means and interpret it themselves. But when we have experts like yourself that are doing the research and uncovering what the actual truth is behind it, it's amazing to see what is actually accurate versus what is just headline. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, sort of like the main reason why people blame salt for high blood pressure is they extrapolate

hypertensives in the reductions in blood pressure off of that population to everybody. And you really can't do that. So if you look at the evidence, only 20% of people with normal blood pressure are quote unquote salt sensitive. In other words, we'll see a significant reduction in blood pressure and only 30% of people with prehypertensive, actually we'll get any type of clinically significant reduction in blood pressure when they lower their salt intake. Now, I would argue that that reduction of blood pressure is actually harmful because you're just decreasing blood volume and you're dehydrating that person. That's not a good

way to lower blood pressure. A good way to lower blood pressure is to improve like insulin sensitivity, improve the dilation of the arteries, increase nitric oxide, like do it in a good way. Don't just dehydrate someone by putting them on a low salt diet. And we're going to, And we've hyper-focused on that surrogate marker, blood pressure. When again, I think it's actually harmful in a lot of people, getting a reduction in blood pressure on a low-salt diet. And we forget all the harms that happen. When you start consuming less than about one and a half teaspoons of salt per day or about

3,000 milligrams of sodium, all the stress hormones dramatically increased to try to retain that salt. So you have increases in all the arteries, stiffening hormones like renin, aldosterone, angiotensate, do, the heart rate increasing hormones, noradrenaline, adrenaline, things we block with medications to prevent death in cardiovascular disease, all dramatically go up, typically anywhere from two to tenfold. So to think that a small reduction in blood pressure, which again is probably harmful, could offset all the increases in stress hormones, artery, stiffening hormones, and insulin resistance

dramatically goes up as well, is beyond me. That's just myopically looking at one surrogate marker. Well, I remember when I was just getting into nutrition. This is probably in high school still. And I heard salt's bad, sodium's bad. And I remember going to the store and I would buy the Mrs. Dash seasonings that were the sodium-free ones. And then I remember it was one day I added some salt to my pre-workout meal. And I used to just always consume like rice and chicken and maybe some coconut oil before going to an hour.

hour before the gym and I threw some salt on that meal one day and my performance in the gym was amazing. Like I had stronger muscular contractions. I felt better. I felt stronger. So I started doing that and experimenting with more salt in my diet and not trying to eliminate. Now, I like what you said in your book, The Salt Fix, where you talk about how we demonize the wrong white crystal. Can you dive deeper into that? I'm assuming that white crystal is sugar. Yeah, I've published a couple of papers on that exact topic. And what I mean by that is that the true white crystal that chronically raises blood pressure in a significant harmful way, that damages the kidneys in a significant harmful way,

that increases the risk of diabetes, is refined sugar and not salt. Because overconsuming refined sugar will chronically elevate glucose levels, which will pull water into the blood vessels and actually increase retention of fluids in the arteries and chronically elevate blood pressure, whereas that doesn't happen with sodium. You don't get chronically elevated levels of sodium. Your body can basically adjust very quickly. And so it's really the sugar that's leading to retention of salt through the increases in insulin.

So what ends up happening is if you were to just cut out the refined sugars and refined carbohydrates, your insulin levels would normalize and drop, and then you wouldn't over retain salt. So it's really not the salt. That's the problem. It's the fact that most of us are overconsuming processed foods, high and refined carbs and sugar that's causing salt sensitivity. So before a lot of processed foods were on the market and these refined sugars, were we seeing the issues in these diseases? Or was the evolution of the disease when we started introducing these processed foods and then salt got the blame as a result of. Yeah, 100%.

So really the increase in sugar intake in the Western world, this is the UK, this is the United States, started increasing really early 1900s. I mean, we used to only consume like four pounds of sugar per person per year. In the early 1900s, which by like 1970s had gone up to about 150, pounds of sugar per person per year, salt intake remained the same. In fact, salt intake actually dropped during that time because prior to refrigeration, we had to use salt to actually preserve our food. So if you look back in Roman times, they would consume typically 25 grams of salt. A lot of the Scandinavian countries, which would preserve a lot of their herring and cod in salt, they consumed

upwards of 100 grams of salt. And we only consume 10 grams of salt now because we have the advent of the refrigerator. So you actually had a decrease in salt intake during the time that you had an increase in cardiovascular events, all cause mortality, hypertension, and things like that. And part of that is due to the increases in refined carbohydrates and sugars because those dramatically increased from basically nothing to 150 pounds of sugar and over 100 pounds of flour per year. So what is your dumb down version of when you constantly hear people are you arguing that salt in the diet, high sodium diet causes high blood pressure. How do you get that message across to people without going too deep into the science of,

here is why you are incorrect? Yeah. So I guess without getting to into the minutia, salt is an essential mineral. If you don't get enough, that is much more harmful than getting too much. because your body, your kidneys, and your body actually maintains salt balance. So trust your salt, basically taste receptors. We have numerous systems in the body that drive us to consume salt. Just like, you know, if you think about it, like animals, they go, how do they inherently know to go to a salt that can consume it?

It's controlled by the body. So I guess in a simple way, I would say think of it like water. I wouldn't chronically restrict your water intake to lower your blood pressure. Your body knows how much water it needs through thirst. And the same thing with salt. The body knows how much salt it needs through it's what's called a cell thermostat. So your body will, I mean, say, for example, you drink too much water. You excrete that, that water.

You go to the bathroom. Is it the same in a sense of salt as if you consume too much salt, your body has processes that will maintain homeostasis and excrete what it doesn't need? Exactly. So like say, for example, your diet, what does your salt intake look like? Do you add salt to meals? Do you supplement with electrolyte powders? What can people do on a daily basis to get more salt in their diet other than just cracking salt over their breakfast, lunch, and dinner?

Yeah, so what people need to understand is when you stop consuming processed foods and you start eating whole nutritious foods, they're very low in salt. and even more so than what we evolved on because we would have never consumed a piece of meat without consuming the salty blood and the salty interstitial fluid. Like if you look at a pack of lions, their faciege is covered in blood and salt, right? We don't get that anymore. We just get basically a pure lean cut of meat. So you have to add the salt back. Otherwise, you're going to be consuming an extremely low amount of salt if you're eating

fresh produce and lean cuts of meats. So the easiest way to do that is to really use something like, Redmond real salt to salt your food. I also use some of their electrolyte powders too, especially prior to performance. I'll just put the powder in water and use that as a way to kind of boost my blood volume prior to exercise.

Kind of with that being said, I did want to kind of transition into hydration, electrolyte balance, and specifically athletic performance. I'm big on electrolyte intake. I've seen the benefit. You know, last year we did a big Iron Man prep series on YouTube and we did a deep dive into how to improve performance throughout the entire series. And one of the things we did is we did a sweat test.

And I can't think of the name of the company who we did it with, but I wore this patch on my arm essentially. And we did it multiple times throughout the series based off of different climates and temperatures because it was a six month prep. And I would wear this patch on my arm and it would measure how much I was, sweating. We took my weight before and after. It calculated how much liquids I consumed during that training session and it measured how much sodium I was losing throughout that session. And I think we realized that, I mean, this was probably the month of September, October here in central Texas. So it was

still really warm and humid and I was sweating a lot. But I think I was losing 2,500 milligrams of sodium during a training session. And that was an eye-opener for me of, holy crap, I'm losing so much. And if I'm not replenishing that, I'm just hurting my performance. So a lot of people think that hydration is just drinking water. But it's so much more than that. What happens when we just drink water and we don't have enough of electrolytes either in our food or in a supplement form? And we're just drinking, drinking, drinking. Yeah, you're right. Most people believe that hydration equals drink plain water.

Unfortunately, actually drinking plain water can actually make things worse. Number one, what ends up happening is after you absorb the water, you dilute your blood sodium levels. And so then your body wants to excrete it. And so if you drink just plain water, you can actually drop your blood volume because your body is saying, okay, I need to actually diaries. I need to get rid of this extra fluid. And studies have shown that drinking just plain water increases the body's susceptibility to electrically induced muscle spasms and cramps because it dilutes your electrolytes. So it's actually one of the worst things to do to drink plain water prior to performance.

And you can actually inhibit vigorous exercise performance as well, drinking plain water, depending on how much you drink. because when you're doing vigorous exercise, which is basically 64% of your VO2 max or higher, gastric emptying, meaning how quickly fluids empty from the stomach to the intestine, goes down. And so you actually, if you consume, let's say, just five ounces of water every 15 minutes, you will exceed your stomach's ability to dump that water and you will increase and expand the stomach and that can lead to bloating and cramping. And that's been shown to just drinking five ounces of water every 15 minutes and vigorous exercise has been shown to decrease performance by two and a half percent.

So not only that, but if you're talking about like a marathon, overconsuming plain water can increase the risk of death due to what's called hyponatremia, basically plummeting sodium levels in the blood. So you've got to be really careful just drinking plain water in both endurance exercise and vigorous exercise performance. I experimented this myself or experienced, excuse me, my second marathon I ever ran. This was a few years ago. It was the Austin Marathon. And my thought process going into was I'm going to make sure I'm hyper hydrated, quote unquote, before going to this race. Because the year prior, I cramped up a lot.

And the Austin Marathon has a bunch of hills. but I cramped up a lot on that marathon. So going into the second marathon, my thought process was, okay, I'm going to hydrate more. So what I did prior to that race is I just drank a gallon of water. And like the day before,

the second half of the day, I just drank water. And within the first half of that marathon, I started cramping up like no other. When I realized after the race was done was, okay, I essentially, I ruined my, I ruined that race because I had no electrolytes in my body, I was assuming, blood volume

decreased, and I ruined the race for myself because I thought I was hydrating when in reality I was doing the opposite. Right. Exactly. Well, this is what's interesting too. A lot of MMA fighters will overhydrate to lose weight. They'll drink a ton of water to actually dehydrate themselves and lose weight. And so we got to, and there's a reason for that.

Basically, drinking a lot of water can flush your body out of a lot of water and reduce blood volume. So there's three basic ways to hydrate. There's from the perspective of, okay, I want to increase my performance later on. Like, I don't care about how I do now. My competition isn't for four weeks. So practicing what's called dehydration acclimation, where you induce mild dehydration multiple times over, let's say, two weeks. your body becomes acclimated to that dehydration. And part of the hormetic response or the adaptive response is to increase baseline blood volume.

And basically that helps to improve performance later on. So and then you would simply rehydrate with a salt solution, basically as salty is sweat. And how you do this is you measure your body weight before you perform. and then you see how much fluid you've lost after. And there's a simple formula to figure out how much salt you would need to replace back what was lost. And it's basically 1,200 milligrams in sodium per liter of fluid is a good starting point for most athletes to replace back. Now, you can get the patches that will test and determine, you know, give you a more accurate measure of how much sodium you're losing. Because if you're practicing in the heat, then typically you're going to lose a full,

teaspoon of salt or 2,300 milligrams of sodium per liter of fluid loss. And so that's, that's one way of hydrating. It's called dehydration, acclimation, and then rehydrating after the amount. Now, the, so that's basically two ways, you're using dehydration acclamation, then you're rehydrating with a salt solution of saltiest sweat. And then prior to competition, or if you feel like you have low energy, utilizing higher salt, solutions to boost blood value. We'll give you the best performance enhancement you can get 10 to 20 times better than any type of performance enhancing supplement, like beta alineine or beet root juice, salt solutions.

If you get the concentration correctly and you consume it correctly, we'll let you vigorously exercise 10 to 20 times longer than any type of performant pre-workout would let you do. And that's primarily for just the day of competition. It's primarily for if you're going to have a really hard training session, you probably want to have a salt solution prior to it. And there's varying degrees of this. And certainly before competition, you are going to be at such a better advantage compared to anyone else by consuming very high doses of salt and fluid. So kind of to just give you like a background here, the linchpin, the main thing that decreases performance is, quote unquote, the relative drop in blood volume that occurs within just five

minutes of vigorous exercise, which typically you, your blood volume drops eight to 10 percent feeding the heart because it now has to flow towards working skeletal muscle. And the blood volume also has to flow to the skin now to dissipate heat. So essentially you have competition. between blood flowing to the heart and now blood flowing to working skeletal muscle and to the skin. So you get this drop of up to 10% in blood volume. So if you can drink salt solutions before competition and you can boost your blood volume by 8 to 10%, you can then prevent the drop that occurs.

And by doing this, you're going to have a larger volume to cool yourself off because we need to understand that we actually pull water from our blood. blood to actually create sweat. So you will have a larger amount of fluid to cool off and dissipate heat. You'll have better cardiac output and blood flow to actually remove waste and to deliver nutrients. And by increasing your blood volume, you decrease myocardial oxygen demand on the heart and the perception of fatigue. You know, you kind of hold your chest sometimes when you work out a lot, literally because your chest is becoming some, and your heart is becoming somewhat ischemic. It's not getting the oxygen delivered through the blood because there's that drop in blood

volume. So you boost the blood volume. Now you can deliver a lot more oxygen and nutrients to the heart and you don't get that perception of fatigue and that chest pain. I'd be curious because I had a 100 mile race early in February. There was a 100 mile ultramarathon here in Texas. And I've never passed out my life before except for after this race. and I was curious, I mean, I finished this race.

I ran 100 miles and 19 hours, 13 minutes, and obviously exerting a lot of effort, the entire 19 hours, right? And I was supplementing with electrolytes, salt, pretty much the entire way through. When I finished the race, I have never seen it like this before, but my hands were swollen, my forearms were swollen, almost around like my wedding ring and my watch. and after the race, I passed down. It was like probably 30 minutes after. And I'm curious if you ever seen anything like that and if it has to do with a drop in blood volume due to an electrolyte balance.

Yeah, there was actually experiments performed in the 1940s showing us that if you don't get enough salt, it can lead to fluid retention. And edema, the exact opposite of what people think. People think that salt leads to like an accumulation of fluid. but actually not getting enough salt can do that because salt puts fluid where it should go. And if you don't have enough electrolytes or sodium, which is the primary controller of water movement, then the water can't move to where it needs to go and it pools. And that leads to what's called edema or swelling in the arms and the lakes. So that's a huge myth that high amounts of salt lead to swelling.

It's typically low amounts of salt that does that. Now, what's happening too, and the reason why you want to and I want to talk about kind of how you should do this because getting the timing right is important and getting the concentration of salt to fluid is important as well. So, you know, the goal again is to get an 8 to 10% boost in blood volume. Now, if you look at a typical athlete, their blood volume is 40% higher than just like a typical. non-athletic adult. So a typical adult man has five liters of blood and an adult woman has four liters. And elite athlete will have 40% more. So like let's say seven liters of blood. Elite, like highly elite rowers will have almost twice that. They'll have nine liters of blood volume. So the main adaptation to exercise is an increase in blood volume because that gives you

the greatest net return on investment. So you've got to figure out a salt solution that will actually lead to an increase in blood volume. And basically, you need solutions that are as salty as sweats or even more so. So that would essentially be about 3,000 milligrams of sodium, upwards of 4,300 milligrams of sodium in anywhere from 26 ounces to a full liter of fluid respectively. and you start slowly consuming those salt solutions 90 minutes before competition, and you slowly consume it over about 30 minutes,

and then by the time you start competing, your blood volume is pete, your blood volume's at 8 to 10% higher, and then you're going to reap all of those benefits. Hey guys, I hope you are enjoying this episode so far with Dr. James. And before we dive any deeper into the importance of sodium intake, not just for daily health, but also performance optimization, I want to share with you how I personally add a central electrolytes to my diet every single day. And at this point, we know that proper hydration is more than just drinking water.

And that is why we added a high-quality electrolyte powder to BPN's product line. Within this product, each serving contains 500 milligrams of sodium from Pinkhamilland salt, plus a full electrolyte profile per serving. It is naturally sweetened and flavored, and we offer it in three refreshing flavors. flavors. Now, I personally add one serving to my post morning run routine, and then I sip on another one or two servings throughout the day. And if you want to experience the benefits of adding electrolytes to improve your daily hydration, we have a link in the episode description to shop BPN's electrolyte powder. Now, let's get back to the show. I'd like to kind of, you know,

we did talk about dehydration acclamation. I found that very interesting, actually, when I was reading your book. But I'd like to transition into performance in hot and cool environments and some of the benefits of heat acclamation as well. Like I was telling you previously, one of the things we say here in Texas is summer miles bring fall smiles. And, you know, we're training here July, August, September, even October, 100 plus degree days and even the mornings are humid and hot. And as much as they are uncomfortable and almost unbearable sometimes, we know that as soon as fall hits, you're just cooking through miles. It feels like absolutely nothing, which I'm assuming is part of that heat acclamation.

I'd love to kind of talk about the benefits of heat acclamation and how people can achieve these results, these desire results, through either running in warmer temperatures or using something like a sauna. Yeah. So the quickest way to become heat acclimated would be going into the sauna every single day for two weeks, or you can go four times a week for three weeks. And you'll be heat acclimated. So that's how you do that. Now, to get down to the more specifics, you need to elevate core body temperature to about 101.3 Fahrenheit. And you want to try and maintain that for 20 to 30 minutes. And when you do that multiple times, you want to to get around 12 to 13 total sessions. Now you're quote unquote heat acclimated. Now, what does that mean heat acclimated? Well, what ends up happening is numerous adaptations occur. So number one, your baseline blood volume dramatically increases. The concentration of red blood cells goes up so you can deliver more oxygen. Your sweat rate increases. The threshold for you to sweat

decreases, meaning you start sweating quicker to cool your body off quicker. Your sweat is also more dilute in electrolytes. So you're not losing as many electrolytes when your heat acclimated. Now, this is key. When your sweat is more dilute, it evaporates faster. So you are literally a better cooling off machine when you are heat acclimated as well. And your baseline core body temperature is lower, meaning it takes a much longer amount of exercise to hit a critical core temperature, which would shut down, let's say, muscle activity and lead to fatigue. So you can exercise longer before you actually hit a critical core temp because you're starting at a lower baseline core body temperature.

So those adaptations from heat acclimation will last even about two weeks after stopping as long as you maintain a good exercise regimen. So if I'm in a big endurance block right now, right? I'm training for a marathon end of May, Buffalo, New York Marathon, if I use the sauna, and we have an infrared sauna at our gym here at our HQ and at my house, if I use an infrared sauna every evening for 30, 45, maybe even an hour, would I experience those benefits throughout this entire prep in terms of a decreased core body temperature, decreased heart rate, which is obviously like one of the things we try to achieve with these aerobic base building runs

or these lactate threshold runs, increased blood volume. If I did this sauna routine for the say that the whole 12, 14, 16 weeks, would I see a massive ROI going into a race? So it depends. You'll absolutely see an improvement if you get a total of, let's say, 10 to 13, sessions within three weeks. So essentially four sessions a week for three weeks. Or you can go every day for two weeks and your heat acclimated. If you do it longer than that, that's actually, you'll start actually getting slightly more benefits as long as you rehydrate appropriately

afterwards. So if you're becoming heat acclimated and you're just tanking your electrolyte pool, you can actually inhibit performance. So you just got to make sure that you're rehydrating really well afterwards with an appropriate amount of electrolytes fluid. And do you find a big difference in a traditional dry sauna as opposed to infrared? So the feeling is different, but infrared is more tolerable because you can you can basically get the same amount of sweating at a lower temperature. But other ways to become heat acclimated as well would be to like go into a hot bath numerous times a week, like four to five times a week and stay in there for the

like 20 minutes, but you don't have to stay in as long in a hot bath because water conducts heat two to four times better than air. So you actually will start sweating much faster in like a hot bath versus a sauna. Now, here's the key. I don't recommend actually doing sauna too soon or too close to competition. I think it's good to have a full week off of it if you can, basically because it is fatiguing and you still retain most of the benefits for a full two weeks as long as you maintain a good exercise regimen. So really, ideally, let's say you're about to have some type of competition, whether it's a race or an MMA fight, you start four weeks prior.

You do sauna sessions every day for two weeks and now you've got a two-week gap where you're not losing salt and fluids, you're not fatiguing yourself, but you're still have a lot of those adaptational benefits. So both with the dehydration acclamation and the heat acclamation, the stressors are good for your body. They will provide these adaptations. However, the biggest takeaway is making sure to rehydrate appropriately after these periods. Exactly.

Yeah. Because here's what's interesting. We do lose a lot of other electrolytes besides just sodium and chloride. which is salt through SWAT. We lose iodine at about 50 to 100 micrograms of iodine per liter of fluid loss. We also lose about 40 micrograms of selenium, about 0.4 milligrams of copper, and we also lose some chromium as well. And the thing is, when you lose a mineral, some minerals have really low bioavailability

that you need to actually consume 100 acts of. what you lost to regain it back. And so chromium is one of those. Chromium only has an oral bioavailability from the diet or supplement of only 1%. So if you lose, let's say 70 micrograms of chromium, or, well, sorry, let's say seven micrograms, because that's typically what you lose, about seven per hour. You've got to consume 700 micrograms to get it back because you're only absorbed 1% on through the diet. So that's why it gets a little tricky of, okay, heat acclamation is great.

But if I do this like a lot, how many, how much minerals am I actually wasting? You just got to make sure you're getting them all back. So diving into, you know, after, after performance in hot and cool environments and in heat acclamation, I'd really like to talk about optimizing sleep behaviors and regulating circadian rhythm. So, you know, reading your book, there's a lot of things I've actually implemented this past year that I've seen a huge return on. One, sleeping in a cooler temperature. So I use this pad. It's a chilly sleep pad that called the oar. Essentially, I fill with water at night and it circulates cold water in my bed and I sleep at 59 degrees. Because what I was finding was I used to wake up in the middle of night, drenched in sweat, super sweaty.

Once I started cooling down how I was sleeping and where I was sleeping, my sleep improved dramatically. Started blocking blue light in the evening, started spending, and I always find like in the summer when I'm outside in the sun more, especially in the mornings and the runs, I sleep better. So what are some of the things that we can do to optimize sleep, but really regulate circadian rhythm. And with that being said, I got into a bunch of biohacking things this past year and just testing and seeing what was working and how it affected me. I also found that using red light therapy

also really helped regulate my circadian rhythm. So what are some of the things that we can do to optimize sleep behaviors? Yeah. So red light is going to be higher in the sun spectrum from early on in the morning and evening, whereas you have more UV in the midday. So the two best things to help set circadian rhythm and improve sleep are basically the same thing. Get morning sunlight, turn lights off at night. You do those two things.

You're going to set your circadian rhythm, how we have always done for millions of years, rising with the sun, falling asleep when there's no lights on because we didn't have electricity. You have to try to match your light. patterns to how our body has evolved because our bodies don't realize that we're in this 21st century, you know, society of just fake blue light and all these other things that are blasting us and messing up our circadian rhythms. So if you can get outside for 10 minutes upon waking

and get some good morning sunlight and then also to make sure to turn off all the lights at night, like my neighbors, they all make fun of our house because our house is just completely completely dark essentially by like 6 p.m. That's key, though. That's really key. I mean, you can keep some lights on, but they have to be like low, like basically low hanging lights that aren't just like really messing up your, your circadian rhythm. And when you do that, what ends up happening is the release of melatonin will happen much sooner and it will be much greater by getting morning sunlight and turning the lights off at night.

And that's going to allow you to sleep better. So if you were to use a red light therapy, would you use that in the morning because of that, that reason? Yeah, you've got to be careful to using red light too close to, to sleep. But if you use it like, let's say 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock, kind of matching like the sunset, that actually might help sleep. But you got to kind of test it out yourself and see because, you know, how close are you to the red light? Is there different infrared in it as well? how bright is it will depend on how it'll affect you. I personally don't think you can always 100% mimic nature and mimic the sun.

If you can actually go out and look and sort of like get some light at sunset, that will probably be better for you than trying to mimic it through red light therapy. I know you talk about this a lot on social media in terms of insomnia and people having trouble sleeping. Yeah. What do you think the biggest issues are in the world and society right now that are contributing to people not being able to sleep? Well, this is interesting. It's hard to say, right?

Exactly. But I've had a lot of people, and I've talked based on a lot of my research and publications on a compound called enositol. Anosetal is essentially just something we make from glucose, but we don't do it very well anymore because of numerous factors. We need magnesium to actually make this compound. we get depleted of it through coffee and caffeine and numerous other things.

So a lot of us are deficient in this compound. And I'm telling you, just taking anositol, like one to two grams twice a day, nine out of ten people that I put on anositol have their REM, their deep sleep goes from 30 minutes to like two hours and 30 minutes. Like they sleep like the dead on this stuff. So they stay asleep and it's the deepest sleep they've ever gotten. And part of it is because anositol allowed. neurotransmitters to be released in the brain like serotonin, which eventually turns into melatonin.

So if you want to release the precursor to melatonin so you can fall asleep, you need anositol compounds to do that. And if you're deficient in it and you take this supplement, it can triple, quadruple your deep sleep. In terms of blue light, I saw in your book that you mentioned blue light can be good in the mornings. However, blue lights should be blocked in the evenings. What is the theory or the concepts of introducing blue light in the morning? Is that to regulate that circadian rhythm? Yeah.

So it's like light isn't bad in the day. It's all, and it's really all light at night that's bad. It's not just blue, green, violet, any type of bright light is terrible. for your sleep if it's, let's say, within two to three hours of you actually having to try to fall asleep. So you want to, you know, blocking out blue light is fine, but really turning off lights or dimming lights is actually a better strategy because they're going to be blocking all spectrums of light, which can inhibit melatonin release before bedtime. Right. I'd assume that's the issue with a lot of the world, though, is that most people before they go to bed or they're

watching TV for an hour or two or they even fall asleep with the TV on. And I'd assume that's just a mess or I mean, they're on their phones or computers or constantly working. Do you shut off completely? You don't look at any screens the last two to three hours before going to bed or at least try to? So I try not to look at my phone 100%. And if I am watching TV, I basically am pretty far away from it where it's not super

bright and messing up nicely. Interesting. You made this post on on social media the day that I loved. I mean, a lot of the stuff you post from like Twitter and then repost to Instagram's just gold. This one

was the modern mistakes of nutrition. One, blaming salt for what sugar did. Two, blaming fat for what sugar did. Three, blaming butter for what margarine did. Four, blaming cholesterol for what inflammation did. Five, blaming eggs. for what toasted and six blaming bacon for what cereal did.

How do we, with that being said, how do we as a society as a world go back to what we used to consume and eat with everyone telling us what we were eating was bad, but maybe what we were eating was good, it's just what was introduced, was not taking the necessary blame that it needed. for example, like introducing margarine instead of and then butter gets the blame. What are the next steps we can do as a country as a world to kind of fix some of these myths and mistakes? Yeah, I think it starts with information, just getting people to understand that, you know, basically eating how we used to eat, how we used to, you know, consume wild meats and forage for the foods that naturally exists. Going back to a diet that you either pick the food from the earth or you hunt the food that's subsisting on the earth

is going to be so much better than to consuming these processed concoctions. And so helping to support regenerative farmers that actually help increase, you know, basically carbon storage because they're improving the actual land using, you know, things like grassbed meats and things like that. That's important. So I think people need to understand that it's not the foods that we've consumed for two million years that got us to this bad place in her health. It's within the last 100 years, all the processed foods that is what's really damaging. A few months ago, I watched this documentary.

It was called Kiss the Ground on Netflix. I'm not sure if you've seen it or heard of it. And that really introduced me to regenerative farming in agriculture. I grew up in Pennsylvania, central Pennsylvania, farms everywhere, dairy farms, Amish communities. And it wasn't really being practiced. And moving down to Texas and learning more about it, I didn't realize how it was growing and becoming popular where there's regenerative farms all around me now that are offering grasshood meats and, and, doing some really good practices in terms of their farming techniques to regenerate what was lost and kind of bringing soil back to life, turning dirt back into soil.

So it is cool to see people actively practicing and approaching it. Some of the pushback I've received from my end of kind of bringing some of this delight in life is people assume that regenerative farming or these new techniques that are better and good are quote unquote tree hugging or hippie. And I think that's where the stereotypes are kind of ruining it is, no, this is this is the way we need to move. This is the direction that we have to go to improve what we've almost broken or disrupted the last couple decades.

Yeah, 100% because the conversation is more than just nutrition. It's about the sustainability of this food supply. And really, when it comes to land mass, regenerative. of farming is really the way forward. Yeah. I'm excited to see how it evolves and how it grows in America and greater. Well, Dr. James, greatly appreciate it. Like I said, it's been refreshing following your content on social media and reading your books. I highly recommend everything you've put out there. The last two I've read, the salt fix and win are just stellar information. and it's in that content that's easily digestible,

and there's a lot of key takeaways that you can implement right away and just improve aspects and parts of your life and see a massive return in a matter of sometimes immediately or days or weeks and months. But it's great content, I really appreciate you. Thanks, Nick. I appreciate you too. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Bear Performance Podcast.

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