The Rich Roll Podcast - Simon Hill On Optimizing Plant-Based Nutrition For Health, Longevity & Athletic Performance

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

It’s one thing to go vegan. It’s another thing to go plant-based. But optimizing a plant-based diet for health, longevity and athletic prowess is another thing altogether. So today we dive deep into the finer specifics of fueling for peak well-being and performance. To help set us up for nutritional success, we reconvene with Simon Hill. Whereas our first conversation (RRP 638) was quite broad in scope, today’s nutrition science-intensive presents a more focused discussion on the tactics and practical details of optimizing a plant-predominant diet to conquer your athletic ambitions, live long and thrive. For those new to Simon, he plies his master’s degree in nutrition to help people make better diet and lifestyle choices. Outlets for said counsel include his popular Instagram feed (@plant_proof), the Plant Proof Podcast and blog of the same name. Simon is also the plant-based food contributor to Chris Hemsworth’s fitness app, Centr as well as the proprietor of Eden, hands down the best plant-based restaurant in Sydney, Australia. The culmination of Simon’s obsession with nutritional science is The Proof Is In The Plants,the ultimate evidence-based primer on the positive impact of a plant-based diet on human and planetary health—and an essential must-read for any and all interested in grounded nutrition science. If you enjoyed our initial exchange, you’re in for a treat because this one is even better—packed with actionable takeaways certain to upgrade every facet of your well-being. Today we pick up where we last left off, digging deeper into the latest and best nutrition science to deliver specific and practical advice on a variety of typical concerns while simultaneously course correcting common diet misunderstandings. We discuss the difference between caloric density versus nutritional density and turn our attention upon responsible supplementation, going deep on the role of specific nutrients, including iodine, calcium, iron, selenium, zinc, nitrates, lectins, and more. Of course, no discussion on plant-based nutrition would be complete without a discourse on protein. Today we evaluate its importance, how to meet our needs on plants, and the various hotly debated distinctions between animal and plant protein. Finally, we discuss what the latest scientific research indicates concerning the health implications of plant-based meat products, the best ways to transition to a more plant-forward diet, and specific fueling and supplementation strategies for building strength and athletic performance, among many other interesting topics. To read more, click here. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I find Simon to be a highly credible authority with a very grounded and balanced perspective on a subject I think we would all agree can be at times quite emotionally charged. I appreciate the rigor he brings to this field, and this one is chock-a-block with important information and very actionable takeaways for anyone looking to level up their plate. Peace + Plants, Rich

When you broaden the lens, open up the aperture and consider how our food choices affect the planet and you consider what we're doing to billions and billions of animals and that none of us would likely swap places with them. When you do that, it does create a compelling case for adopting a diet that is as plant exclusive as possible. It's not about perfection. This is about adopting this imperfectly, just like my diet is not perfect, it's imperfect. And my message is, let go of the perfection, take some pressure off yourself, remove the self-judgment and just get started. You know, I have full confidence in everyone that as they get started and start to make these changes, they will begin to feel better themselves.

And that is hugely motivating. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Today, back for a second nutrition science intensive, is Simon Hill. Simon holds a master's degree in nutrition science. He hosts the popular Plant Proof podcast. He's the plant-based food contributor to Chris Hemsworth's Fitness App Center. He owns the best plant-based restaurant in Sydney, Australia, Eden, which is a must if you find yourself in Bondi Beach. And he is the author of The Proof is in the Plants, which is an essential evidence-based primer on the positive impact of a plant-based diet on human and planetary health.

Our first conversation, RRP 638 from early November, 2021, was a hit with the audience. And I think this conversation, the details of which I'll get into in a moment, is even better. But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

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Okay, Simon Hill. So today we pick up where we left off in our last episode, our first episode, digging deeper into very specific, practical, and actionable aspects of nutrition, particularly plant-forward nutrition, based upon the latest and best science, including caloric density versus nutritional density. We cover responsible supplementation and go deep on an array of specific nutrients, including iodine, calcium, iron, selenium, zinc, nitrates, and lectins. Of course, no plant-based nutrition science conversation would be complete without covering protein, specifically the differences between plant and animal protein. We also discuss what the latest science says about the health implications of plant-based meat products. We talk about the

best ways to transition to a more plant-forward diet. We also cover specific fueling and supplementation strategies for building strength and athletic performance, as well as many other interesting topics. I personally find Simon to be a highly credible authority with a really grounded and balanced perspective on a subject I think we can all agree can be at times quite emotionally charged. And I just appreciate the rigor that he brings to this field. And this one is chock-a-block with not only important information, but again, as I said earlier, very actionable takeaways for anybody looking to level up their plate. Finally, Simon has also provided a robust index of all the studies that he references in this conversation with all kinds of other graphs and infographics and very interesting stuff that you can dive deep into. Hyperlinks of which you can find in the show notes

on the episode page at richroll.com. So put on your propeller hat because here we go. This is me and Simon Hill. Simon, good to see you. Happy to have you back in on the tail end of your epic United States extended stay. I know you're headed back to Australia soon. So we had to get you back in here

before you skedaddle for round two. How are you feeling today? Very good, thank you for having me. I feel like I'm almost a resident here now. I know, you've been here. How long have you been here at this point? What was meant to be four weeks has turned into three months.

So it's been fun though. The States is essentially my second home. So it's been fun hanging out and catching up with you and getting out to the desert and spending time with Doug. You went out there twice, right? Twice, yeah. Out near Joshua Tree, which is a, it's a fantastic area. And we had a lot of fun exploring the park there

and soaking in the hot springs. In his tubs. Yeah. So lots of sprouts. I just had Mike Posner in here recently and he went out there as well and came back a complete sprouting fanatic. And now all of his social media

is monopolized by sprouting. It's a spell. If you spend time with Doug, you will end up sprouting and your kitchen will turn into a sprout farm. I know, I'll do that. Well, I couldn't let you go back home without getting you back in here.

The initial episode that we did together was super popular. People really dug it. And we talked a little bit about how we wanted to handle this. And I think the idea that we came up with was making this a much more kind of focused, pinpointed conversation. Our first conversation was relatively broad.

We covered your backstory, your personal story. We looked at the hierarchy of evidence and scientific study. We talked about diet war tribalism. We took a look at the science that supports a plant-based diet, the microbiome. We talked about saturated fat, the environmental implications of diet and food choice, many other topics.

If you have not listened to or watched that episode, it's number 638, please make a point of doing it. It's fantastic. But today we're gonna pursue a much more focused discussion directed towards, mostly towards those who are either already eating a plant-based diet, keen on adopting a more plant-centric diet, or looking to improve upon their plant-based diet, keen on adopting a more plant-centric diet or looking to improve upon their plant-based diet

with the goal of essentially setting yourself up for success. And I think the first thing that I wanna get into or where we can start would be to begin with common blind spots. So let's say, okay, Simon, I've been eating a plant-based diet for six months or a year, how do I know I'm doing it right? What are some of the common things that trip people up

or where they go astray before they have kind of the full, you know, encyclopedic knowledge of how to do this properly? There's probably two or three main things that I've identified anyway, in working with many people who are going through this and also through my own experience and talking to people like you.

I think the first is understanding when you're minimizing or removing these animal foods that we have grown accustomed to eating all the time, what do you replace them with? Because there's a lot of different options. Everything from black beans and lentils to very processed vegan foods. The second would be understanding the difference

between an animal-based diet and a plant-based diet in terms of calorie density. So animal foods are typically much more calorie dense. And therefore, if you're wanting to eat a similar number of calories, your plate needs to look fuller when it's plant-based food. And that's a pretty common thing that you hear like,

oh, I tried it, but I was starving all the time. Yes, and that is something that I personally experienced. So as I was making these changes, I was not fully cognizant of the differences in calorie density. And I was experiencing in the very beginning of my transition, a little drop in energy. And I was doubting whether the plant-based foods

were working for me. And really it was just that I was not consuming enough overall calories. So understanding what to replace animal foods with, calorie density. And then the third I'd say is having a general awareness of specific nutrients of focus. So all diets, whether it's an omnivorous diet

or plant-based diet need to be appropriately planned or they can fall short. And if we look around at our current sort of state of health, the omnivorous diet is not really serving us that well. It has a number of holes and gaps. And while a plant-based diet can really improve your overall disease risk profile, and we spoke a lot about that

in terms of shifting these biomarkers in a favorable direction, your cholesterol, your blood glucose control, inflammation, blood pressure, and lower your risk of these chronic diseases that are plaguing our society. At the same time, there are a few nutrients that you need to be aware of

so that you are getting them in the required amounts to not just prevent your risk of these chronic diseases long-term, but to really optimize yourself and feel at your best in your day to day. So the obvious next question being, what are those nutrients? So I call these nutrients of focus.

And I think that's a positive spin on nutrients of concern. And I just, I want people, I wanna draw people's attention to them. In the book, I write about eight of these. And some of these are quite easy to get through your diet or fortified foods. And then others are best access through a supplement. So as a list, these are vitamin B12, vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, iodine, iron,

calcium, zinc, and selenium. Right, so given that a skeptic would say, well, if I have to pay extra close attention to these things, or I have to go outside of my food that I'm consuming and supplement, then this must be a deficient diet by definition. I think we need to zoom out a little bit and understand that nutritional gaps are nothing new.

And it's the very reason that folate and iodine have been used throughout the food system, fortifying foods to prevent iodine deficiency and folate deficiency in the general public. So this idea of fortification or supplements is nothing new. And lots of those nutrients I just reeled off like zinc, selenium, iron, calcium, you can easily access them through your diet.

You don't need to supplement those. It's just a matter of understanding what foods do you want to be incorporating in your diet regularly. And for example, if you're choosing a plant-based milk to swap out dairy, which is rich in calcium, what should you be looking for? And I would add to that, that I understand

there are certain people that are very anti-supplements and therefore that must make this the incorrect diet for optimal health and wellbeing. But not everything that is unnatural is bad for us. And there have been many parts of our life, be it modern housing or climate control that have improved our wellbeing. So I think just presuming that everything that is natural is best is somewhat of a fallacy. And what we should be worried most about is heart health outcomes.

So I have nothing against a diet that includes some supplementation if that means the best outcomes for, be it for myself or anyone that I'm working with. that includes some supplementation, if that means the best outcomes for, be it for myself or anyone that I'm working with. And that is what the data suggests. If you wanna move down this path of very plant rich, plant predominant diets, or even plant exclusive

to lower your risk of chronic disease, then taking some of these supplements is going to allow you to do that in a more optimal manner. Right, certainly things like vitamin D deficiencies are not endemic to the plant-based community. I mean, this is something that omnivores, that a lot of people, perhaps even the majority of people who are not living on the equator experience, right?

Sure, and you could say the same about vitamin B12. There was a study done recently, an American population over 3000 people and 39% of the omnivores in there had insufficient B12 status. So you're right, the nutritional deficiencies are not just something that plant predominant or plant exclusive eaters experience.

And I think we could all agree that the supplement industry, the billion dollar supplement industry is not propped up by vegans. So there's a bit to sort of weigh up there, but the most important thing that I kind of, the point that I wanna make here is that most of this is very easily covered

and it's just a matter of taking some time to get across the information and then you set and forget and you focus on the overall quality of your diet and you have a few supplements or fortified foods and you can have peace of mind that you're getting everything that you need in the required amounts. One question that I've always had,

and I'm not sure I've ever asked it to anybody, certainly nobody of your experience, is there a difference between taking like a specific B12 supplement, either a spray or a sublingual or something like that, and a D and whatever, taking those individually versus getting a really good multivitamin that has kind of everything in it.

This is a great question. And some of this comes down to the person we're talking about. I know that some people who are completely okay with supplements will be happy just taking a multivitamin, knowing that a lot of those nutrients in there, they're already getting in the amounts that they require. You get the bright yellow P.

For example, yeah, so a lot of the B vitamins, you're already getting a lot of those through a very plant rich diet, particularly folate, for example, you're getting it in abundance. You don't really need to be supplementing that. But some people just like to take a multivitamin and that's okay.

I am an advocate for taking a multivitamin if that's the path you want to go down. There are some things to think about with the multivitamins because they're not all formulated for plant predominant, plant rich people. So there are some things to look at specifically. And then others prefer to take individual supplements, which can mean having to buy multiple different supplements

and it's not as convenient, but there are a number of brands now coming out that are creating multi-nutrients specific for the needs of someone who is adopting a plant-based dietary pattern. Like Matt Fraser has a multivitamin that's sort of specific to people who are eating a plant-based diet

that's directed towards the nutrients that perhaps you might be lacking. Yeah, and I think those are great options because they've done the work, they've realized you don't need all of these other vitamins and minerals you're already getting. And they've worked out, calculated through science,

so data-driven, how much of each of these nutrients of focus do you actually need? And therefore you end up with a more personalized supplement. So with respect to B12, there's different types of that. There's methicobalamin and then there's cobalamin. Like which one should you be selecting? And hydroxycobalamin and adenosylcobalamin.

It all gets very confusing. My position is that the most studied version is cyanocobalamin. And for preventing deficiency and reversing it. And therefore the dosages that we have, the recommended amounts of B12 to take are largely from studies looking at that type. So my recommendation is to buy a Cyanocobalamin B12 supplement

and you'd be looking at 250 micrograms daily or two and a half thousand micrograms once a week. Those are your two options. Now, I should add to that, if you are a smoker or you have kidney disease, that's two instances where methylcobalamin is certainly better. And then I would also add

if your supplement contains methylcobalamin, I have worked with many people who have used that form And then I would also add if your supplement contains methylcobalamin, I have worked with many people who have used that form and have completely fine B12 status. So they all seem to work. My preference being cyanocobalamin is purely because that's what most of the science has looked at. Because it's more bioavailable or it converts better?

Well, it tends to be used in the studies more because it's cheaper and more widely available. But we have seen in the last, I'd say five or so years, a lot more brands using methyl cobalamin. And I think that's okay. My recommendation for most of this stuff is your laboratory tests will really tell the story. And that's a great objective way of keeping an eye

on any of these nutrients and just periodically keeping an eye on your overall health. I think it's a good idea. With B12, it's worth mentioning, if you're doing a blood test, the standard blood tests that your physician would order is serum B12. And that's a pretty good marker, but it's not perfect. There are active and inactive B12 molecules in our body.

And the serum B12 test does pick up some of the inactive analogs. And so the general rule of thumb is if you get a serum B12 test and it comes back and you're at the middle or upper part of the range, then you probably don't need to look into things any further. But if you're more towards the lower end of the normal range, then there is another test called MMA that you can request, which is more specific and sensitive to active B12. So, most people won't need to worry about that, but that's one just to be mindful of if your B12 is a little low and perhaps you are subjectively feeling

like you don't have a lot of energy. And when we're talking about vitamin D, is there a difference between D and D3 or are those terms conflated? Those are the same. Is that the same thing? D3 is the type of vitamin D that your body will produce following sun exposure.

And it's also found in animal products and found in plant lichen, which is a type of algae. And then there is D2, which is found in mushrooms, but D2 or D3 will both increase your vitamin D status. It's important to add that 80, 90% of your vitamin D status is determined by sun exposure. So very little contribution from the foods that we eat and that status can be really affected

by how dark your skin is, that where you live in the world, if you live at a Northern latitude, you're more at risk of developing vitamin D deficiency. What are the symptoms of, how does that manifest? It could be an impaired immune system is one of the main ones. And so whether someone needs to supplement vitamin D

is debated around the world heavily. And even the reference ranges are heavily debated country to country. My general sort of advice here is unless you're getting daily sun exposure and that sun exposure, the rule of thumb is about half of the time it would take for you to burn is the amount of time in the sun it would take

to produce adequate amount of vitamin D. Yeah, I mean, translation is the sun exposure required to produce an adequate amount of vitamin D is much more than I think people think. And as I said, if you have darker skin pigmentation, you need to be in the sun for longer to produce the same amount of vitamin D as someone with fairer skin.

And this is why we see people with darker skin more risk of vitamin D deficiency. So you can do a hydroxy vitamin D test and determine whether you are low or you're at a healthy level. That could be your starting point. And so someone like you here in Los Angeles and myself in Sydney, sun exposure may be completely fine. It might be adequate for us. But then someone living in the United Kingdom or perhaps part of Canada, it could be a little different. And if you're on the low side,

the general rule of thumb for supplementation is about 1,000 to 1000 to 2000 IU. And there are a few different vitamin D supplements out there, as I mentioned. So a lot of them are actually not plant-based, they're derived from wool. So if you are looking for one. If you're looking for one that is vegan,

if that's important to you, then you want to find either vitamin D3 from plant lichen and essentially any brand selling vitamin D3 that is vegan will call out vegan on the packaging. Or the other option is vitamin D2 from mushroom. Is there a specific brand that you recommend? You know, I generally do? Or steer clear of that? I generally do steer a little clear of recommending brands.

However, I will say, because I'm asked this all the time, I have put together a PDF and I'm kind of nearly finished. It's been a huge project because trying to find the right supplements, depending on someone's age or whether their lifestyle stage, for example, prenatal, and then looking what's available around the entire world. I can send you that PDF

and you can perhaps put that on your website. Maybe we can link that up in the show notes because this isn't going up for a while. So maybe by then you'll be done. I will be done by then. But I have been reluctant to kind of associate with too many brands in the past, but it is such a regular question I get

that I kind of thought, well, I need to go through this process. So that will definitely be made available. And I should just add to this that if someone is overweight or obese, their requirement for vitamin D is actually higher. So in that instance, it can require sort of two to 3000 IU to achieve a healthy vitamin D status.

So worth just keeping in mind. Two questions. Is there any reason or efficacy behind like mega dosing, any of these, like, is there a minimum effective dose and that once you meet your requirements, you're good? Or is there any added benefit from taking over that amount is the first question. And then the second is if you are deficient,

how long does it take to restore your balance? I assume it's not just one vitamin and then you're good. Like it's gonna take a while, right? Yeah, weeks to months it can take depending on the nutrient that we're talking about and how low someone is and what dose you give them. Mega dosing, look, I would not be recommending doing that unless it's under the guidance of your physician.

And there's a very compelling reason to be doing that. You hear all sorts of things and ideas online like mega dosing vitamin D, for example, the upper limit of vitamin D is set at about 3000 to 4000 IU in Australia. And the sort of studies looking at toxicity have shown that up to 10,000 IU is still safe. However, I think given that the published upper limit

is I believe 4,000 IU, I would be hesitant to recommend anyone does that mega dosing without their physician overlooking it. All right, got it. You mentioned iodine earlier in this list of eight nutrients. So why is that important? And what are the foods that we should be looking at

to make sure that we're meeting our iodine needs? Yeah, this one's often forgotten. And so it deserves a bit more airtime. So iodine is integral to our thyroid hormone production, which regulates our metabolism. And there are quite a few papers now that have shown pescatarians, vegetarians and vegans tend to have lower iodine status.

There are three ways to easily get iodine in your diet. You just need to be aware of them. And the first is seaweed. So dulse and wakame, nori sheets. These are loaded with iodine. And to give you an idea, the recommended daily intake of iodine is 150 micrograms. It's tiny, this is a trace mineral.

You only need a tiny, tiny amount. And to reach that 150 micrograms, you would need about two teaspoons of dulse or wakame flakes or one nori sheet. There are different views of that as a strategy that I see out there. And usually that's pertaining to the fact that the iodine content of seaweed around the world

does vary. So that's just something to keep in mind. And you can do a urinary iodine test if you wanted to check your status at any stage. The second option and is an option where you would know you're definitely getting 150 micrograms is iodized salt. And you would need, depending on the brand, it's usually about half a teaspoon of iodized salt

would provide 150 micrograms. You really need to turn around and read the label to determine that serve. Now, the sort of potential downside of that strategy is that that comes with a thousand milligrams of sodium and the RDI of sodium is around 2000. So it could be an okay strategy, let's say for someone who's doing a lot of exercise

and sweating and has healthy blood pressure, but for someone with even moderately raised blood pressure or certainly someone with hypertension, then that's not going to be the best option for them. I would add to that, and I just read about this a couple of weeks ago and I'm super glad I read it. There was a big study in China that was published,

it must've been about five or six months ago now. And it was actually done, it was a collaboration between a university in Sydney and some Chinese researchers. And they did this big randomized controlled trial looking at cardiovascular disease, specifically stroke in China. And what they were looking at was

if you swap salt, traditional salt out for what's called light salt, which instead of being completely sodium chloride, it's a potassium chloride, which gives you a very similar taste, but unlike sodium, potassium lowers blood pressure. And they did find that that simple swap, swapping to this what's called low salt or light salt,

those are two brands that are available, which now do iodized salt, is a great option for someone who maybe does have moderately high blood pressure. I never heard of that. Is that available? It's available. Outside of China? Yes, so I wanted to make sure,

I thought it could come up today, I wanted to make sure, I thought it could come up today. I wanted to make sure. So you can literally go online and search low salt or light salt. You'll find Amazon, all of the major retailers have it. I'm not sure what grocery supermarkets have it on the shelves here,

but it's definitely available. And it reduces the sodium per serve by between 30 and 60%. So that's a sort of a good option for getting iodine into your diet if blood pressure is not an issue is iodized salt. I think now knowing the availability of low salt that even if you have healthy blood pressure and you opt for an iodized salt,

you may as well get the low salt. And it tastes the same. Yes. Well, I read some reviews and they were, you know, the reviews sections are always quite entertaining and there was some colorful messages in there, but the majority of people seem to think that it was similar and sort of like for like.

So that's a potential option. The third option goes back to what you said earlier around, is just taking a multi nutrient the best way to go. And you can get a single sort of isolated iodine supplement by itself and that will provide 150 micrograms or you can you'll find it in pretty much all multivitamins at that that input level and i should caveat i guess as well now that i think about it these numbers i'm talking about are for healthy adults some of this changes if you're pregnant or breastfeeding, for example, the amount of iodine you need

bumps up to in the 200. So just keep that in mind, but when you're working with a dietician or physician, they'll be able to direct you into towards the correct dose. And is iodine deficiency something that you're gonna find more frequently on a plant-based diet versus an omnivorous diet? Yes, so if you're not having dairy,

which contains a little bit of iodine and seafood, you are, unless you're eating a lot of food with the iodized salt, you are more at risk of experiencing deficiency. So, certainly, and I kind of alluded to this at the start, this has been one of the nutrients that probably hasn't had enough airtime. And you have those three options,

I think they're pretty easy to plan for. So this doesn't need to be an issue. It's just being aware of it, realizing you only need a trace. It's a very small amount you need and just working out what option are you going for? One, two, three, and then set and forget. Right.

A common fear that a lot of people have when considering a plant-based diet is calcium. Oh my goodness, if I don't eat dairy, I'm not drinking milk, my bones are gonna turn brittle, where am I gonna get my calcium? My understanding is that dark leafy greens are a pretty good source of calcium. I've never had an issue with this,

but how do you think about that and ensuring that people are meeting their calcium needs? Firstly, I would say that building strong bones is a team game. We've reduced it very much to just calcium, but it's so much more than that. And even before talking about nutrition, I think it's worth emphasizing that exercise

is arguably far, far more important, both impact exercise, so we're talking about jogging or skipping, going up and downstairs or hopping that sort of impact exercise is a stimulus. The body structure reflects function. And so it responds to that by laying down more bone, increasing your bone mineral density.

And then the second type of exercise resistance training. So be it lower body things like squats or upper body with bands. The research is pretty, pretty clear that we need to be doing this stuff regularly for as long as possible to prevent significant amount of bone loss, which does naturally occur as you age,

but you wanna slow that down. Yeah, there's some interesting studies out there about lack of bone density or bone loss in elite cyclists because there's no impact. Despite the fact that they're incredibly fit, there's an issue with that. And that's a great point. So cycling and swimming are incredible

from a cardiovascular point of view, but they're not loading the bone in the same way. So it's not really about either or, you want to be working both cardiovascular exercising as well as this impact resistance training. And there is a lot of studies showing, for example, with osteopenia or osteoporosis, osteopenia being kind of like pre-diabetes

is to type two diabetes. You go, you first develop- Osteopenia being a precursor to osteoporosis. You sort of go through that phase usually first, but there is a lot of research looking at this and it's clear that just walking, for example, is not enough to prevent that bone loss and to prevent getting to a point

where you have an osteoporotic fracture. And one in two people in this country and in Australia aged over 50 will have an osteoporotic fracture. So this is an incredibly important conversation. So to the start of this and to answer your question more directly, calcium is important and the recommended daily intake around the world, it varies country to country. Again, it's another one where people really haven't settled on a kind of universal figure. The World Health Organization start at 500 milligrams a day.

The United Kingdom is about 700 milligrams a day. And then there are other countries like Australia in the United States where it's between 1,000 and 1,300 milligrams per day. And I was really interested in kind of understanding the data and why there is confusion. And what I landed on was consistently it seems that you need to be consuming at least 700 milligrams, which is in line with the United Kingdom recommendations

as a way of preventing the development of osteopenia or osteoporosis. And what I can tell you is that when you look across all of the different population studies, looking at vegetarian and vegan cohorts, they are consistently getting that much calcium on average. So on average, they're getting that. But whenever you look at an average,

we need to be aware that there are going to be people falling below. So it is still something to be aware of. And you're right, these foods like dark leafy greens and also your cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, but also seeds like sesame seeds and tahini. These are very, very rich in calcium. My recommendation is to add a plant-based milk

to your diet that has calcium in it. Fortified with calcium. Fortified with calcium. And in my experience working with a lot of people, this is a nice way to sort of bulletproof the diet and ensure that you're getting over 700 milligrams. And my general advice is to look for a plant-based milk that has at least 100 milligrams of calcium per 150 mils.

And what that means is when you have a cup or a cup and a half, you'll be getting three, 400 milligrams of calcium. And by the time you've had all of your fruits and vegetables and legumes and nuts and seeds, you're well above the 700 milligrams sort of threshold where we want to be. But as I kind of alluded to, this is a team game

and you can have as much calcium in your diet as you want and still develop osteoporosis. And we know that because countries that drink the most milk have the highest rates of osteoporosis. So what is that attributable to? So it speaks to the fact that it is a team game and there we do see that countries that are consuming the most dairy also have

the lowest vitamin D status will tend to. And vitamin D is crucial for bone mineral density because it actually enhances the absorption of calcium in your diet. So if you're deficient in vitamin D, you will absorb less calcium. So building strong bones, you need to make sure you're across vitamin D, you are hitting this calcium threshold,

but then also vitamin B12, which we spoke about, integral and protein. And if you're covering all of those bases and you are doing the exercise, then that is all going to sort of coalesce to really reduce your risk of developing, quote unquote weak bones. Right, so load bearing exercise,

vitamin D and calcium all work in tandem. And I mentioned protein, and this is partly why the recommendations for protein as someone gets to sort of 50, 60 goes up a little bit. And this is mostly to do with trying to slow down this rate of bone mineral density loss, but also to slow down the rate of muscle loss. And I'm sure we might speak in a minute

about protein and what that looks like. Yeah, I wanna dive into protein, but I wanna put a pin in that. Also, I have questions about plant-based milks. We'll table that for now, because I wanna work through pin in that. Also, I have questions about plant-based milks. We'll table that for now, because I wanna work through these eight nutrients. The next being iron, and correct me if I'm wrong, but iron works similarly in that its absorption

is impacted by your vitamin C levels, or taking iron with vitamin C enhances that absorption. But maybe before even addressing that, talk a little bit about the differences between plant-based iron, in other words, non-heme iron versus animal-based iron, heme iron. Sure, so there are two different types of iron. Heme iron is the type of iron you'll find in blood.

And that's why you get it from animal foods. Animal foods also contain non-heme iron as well. About 40% of the iron in animal foods is heme and 60% is non-heme. And in plants, 100% of the iron is non-heme. Now, broadly speaking, to keep this nice and simple, the main difference is that heme ion is absorbed more rapidly than non-heme ion. And that is because non-heme ion

is often bound to other molecules, which can slow down and reduce the total absorption. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. There is a protective effect of that as well, because we know that high iron in the body it's not necessarily a bad thing. There is a protective effect of that as well because we know that high iron in the body and particularly heme iron is associated with colorectal cancer and cardiovascular disease.

So this is often, I see on social media, this discussion around, well, heme iron is absorbed more rapidly, therefore it must be better. And I think we just need to acknowledge that more is not always better. That's not to say that people eating a plant-based diet don't need to think about iron.

It's the number one deficiency in the world, regardless of what diet people are eating. So this is a real issue. And so there will always be people that are eating a plant-based diet that have problems with iron. It's just part of being human. Everyone, well, not everyone, but a large percentage

of the population are dealing with this. Even people that are eating meat and dairy products three times a day are having problems with iron? There are absolutely still people. Is there a genetic predisposition that is problematic with respect to iron absorption or what does that cause by if somebody is eating plenty of foods that have iron in them?

Well, they could be, but also you're at higher risk when you are a female of childbearing age and menstruation and losing blood. And so it's not all boiling down to just how much you consume. And I think that's important to note. There are at risk groups and females of childbearing age are right up there with the most at risk.

Is there a genetic component? Perhaps, I haven't read anything that speaks to that, but I wouldn't rule that out. I mean, a lot of omnivores are dealing with iron deficiency and it's also not uncommon for someone from an omnivorous diet to change to a plant-based diet and see their iron status go up. That can happen.

If we look at the population studies, again, just comparing omnivores to vegetarians, there is no difference in rates of iron deficiency. However, vegetarians and vegans do have lower iron stores. And you will see that when you do your blood tests and one of the tests looks at iron stores. So not the circulating iron, but how much your body is storing.

And that is typically lower in plant-based eaters, but is not thought to be a problem as long as you're topping up your iron through your diet. I usually like to speak to ways to enhance absorption. A lot of people listening to this, particularly males, their iron status will be completely fine. And they don't really need to focus on this information I'm about to share because it is overcomplicating things. So this is more for someone who potentially has lower iron status and is trying to bump it up a bit. The foods that are very rich in iron are your legumes,

foods like pumpkin seeds, dark leafy greens, chlorella is a great sort of super food that's super rich in iron. And what we wanna focus on is it regularly including these iron rich foods in the diet, but pairing them with specific foods that will enhance absorption and trying to avoid some foods and drinks

that can inhibit absorption. So firstly, talking about the inhibitors, coffee and tea. Yeah, caffeine. They're the two big ones. They can decrease the amount of iron you're absorbing. So if you're sitting down for a big meal with lots of beans and dark leafy greens, it might be a good idea to separate that coffee out at least an hour or so either side of the meal, and you will absorb more iron from that meal. Then there are a few things you can add to your meals

to enhance absorption. The first one and the one that is the most effective is sources of vitamin C. And typically, one that I recommend for people is lemon juice, squeezing that over your dark leafy greens or your stir fry with beans. But equally there are other foods like strawberries that are packed with vitamin C.

So a snack could be dried apricots, which is super rich in iron with some strawberries. And that's a nice match. Bell pepper or capsicum, we call it in Australia. That's another very vitamin C rich food. So matching these foods in your meals to enhance iron absorption. And then the other one that I think is really neat

and there's some cool science looking at this is onion and garlic will both increase iron absorption significantly. I didn't know that one. So, I usually start any sort of meal, savory meal stir fry or tofu scramble in the pan with some onion and garlic. And I think a lot of people do that.

That can be a great strategy as well to increase the iron absorption. One of the habits that I adopted a while ago that I still do today is I keep a bag of pumpkin seeds in my car with some fruit that's high in vitamin C. So when I'm driving around, like that's like my little go-to snack and helps me kind of keep things topped off.

You're on the program. Yeah. keep things topped off. You're on the program. Yeah. Another habit that I've adopted is eating, a few Brazil nuts every day or every other day, which are high in selenium, right? Which is another nutrient on your list.

Why is selenium important? So selenium feeds back to thyroid again, important for production of thyroid hormones. And as you say, it doesn't require a lot of planning to hit the selenium recommended intake levels, which are only about 60, 70 micrograms a day, not much. One, two Brazil nuts will get you there. And you're also getting quite a lot of selenium

through wheat, so whole wheat pasta or bread and a lot of other foods like mushrooms. So you will be getting it elsewhere in your diet, but the addition of one or two Brazil nuts will just ensure you're categorically above that recommended level. And there's something about the Brazil nut or the selenium content of the Brazil nut

that has some downstream impact on testosterone production, right? Okay, I haven't read that, but that's interesting. Yeah, I think it's, well, I don't wanna speak out of school cause I don't know, but I'm remembering something about that. Well, we can look into it. Yeah, maybe you can look into that. We'll link something up in the show notes about that. Well, we can look into it. Yeah, maybe you can look into that. We can look into it.

We'll link something up in the show notes about that. All right, so selenium is important, why? So back to thyroid, it's more- Oh yeah, you already mentioned that. Yeah, metabolism. I mean, it has a whole lot of different functions in the body, but it is integral again to thyroid health, which is integral to your metabolism

and management of your body weight. So I don't think we really need to go into too much more than that in terms of the biological sort of pathways. But the main point being, it's super easy to get in your diet. So although it's in this list of eight nutrients of focus, rarely would plant-based eat and not get enough selenium. I just like talking about it because it's a nice one

to point to Brazil nuts as a single food that people can look to to ensure adequate intake. Okay, final thing on your list of eight nutrients is zinc. We're hearing a lot about zinc lately. We're being told that we should be making sure that we're on top of our zinc for COVID purposes. So I assume without knowing that there's some link between zinc and immune system function.

Definitely, very important for immunity, for hair, skin, nail health, for energy production, preventing DNA damage. It's a crucial mineral and you're going to find it mostly in nuts and legumes and seeds, hemp seeds, for example, packed with zinc. But cashews, another great one, pretty easy to get

as long as you're regularly eating nuts and seeds and legumes, which anyone who is adopting a whole food plant-based diet will be, you'll have no problems reaching the sort of adequate intake for that. Right. I think that's a good place to pivot to a different category here.

At the outset, we kind of opened this with a discussion about how to optimize your plant-based diet and the idea that just because you're eating vegan doesn't necessarily mean that it's healthy. There's all kinds of meat and dairy analogs out there. Some of them moderately healthy, some very much not healthy. So on that note,

let's talk a little bit about these analogs. When we think about what's available now, the Beyond Meats and the Impossibles, are these products healthy? Do they have a place in a healthy, optimal plant-based diet? I think they certainly have a place. No word about it. But there are some that are healthier than others.

So it's nice to be able to read the label and quickly scan to see a few different things and make a healthier decision. And what are the things that we should be looking at when we look at that label? So I usually focus on sodium, on fiber and saturated fat. And I'm looking for a product that has 400 milligrams or less sodium per serve.

Ideally around five grams of fiber per serve. That is not always achievable. That narrows the field a lot. Yeah, that pretty much eliminates almost everything in the category. Yeah, well, not quite, but it will really point you in the right direction. And then saturated fat,

look, this really depends on the person. If you're someone who has healthy cholesterol levels, and we kind of spoke about what optimal cholesterol levels are previously, which is south of 100 milligrams per deciliter. And as you get down to 60 to 70, that's where you see no atherosclerosis. If you're sitting down at that sort of level, you can afford to have a bit more saturated fat in your diet. And so when I'm working with people, I encourage someone who has higher cholesterol to be looking for the lowest saturated fat options.

These are the ones that have two grams or less saturated fat per serve. But if your cholesterol is at an optimal level, then I really see no problem with the four or five grams of saturated fat per serve within the context of a healthy plant-based dietary pattern. And that seems to be pretty typical. A lot of them sit at around three grams of saturated fat,

four or five. I certainly wouldn't be routinely selecting the ones that have north of five grams of saturated fat per serve. What about the binders and the emulsifiers and all these other ingredients that go into, creating that texture that people like? So my answer to that would be, we need more data. And I'm not saying that these are necessarily bad

or they're not, there just hasn't been a lot of studies on some of these ingredients. And there was a study that came out last week on carboxymethyl cellulose, which is a common emulsifier. And I spoke to Tim Spector, who's a professor from King's College about this. And it was a short-term study, but these studies I should say Rich,

they're just starting to surface looking at how these ingredients interact with our microbiome, for example. And they did see a disruption in this study to the microbiome with the consumption of this emulsifier. However, it was 15 grams a day. And if you're consuming one plant-based burger that has probably half a gram of it maximum in there,

then perhaps it doesn't have the same effect. So in the absence of the data, I'm kind of reserving my judgment on a lot of those ingredients. What I will say is that there has been a study out of Stanford University called the SWAP Meat Trial. And I think this is quite instructive because it really, it takes a very well-known plant-based meat product beyond burger

and stacks it up directly against meat products. And they chose high quality organic meat products to make sure that this was a good study fair. And I think this is instructive because it looked more at our overall risk factors for cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death. Having a heart attack is the most likely reason

that you or I are to die. That's just fact. And they had these subjects come in and do an eight week randomized controlled trial crossover. So you had a period where you ate the animal, the animal meat products, and then you had a period where you ate

the plant-based meats supplied by Beyond. And they got sausages. So every participant did both. Every participant did both and they did them in different orders. And they were most interested in blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, and also a biomarker of cardiovascular disease called TMAO. And they instructed participants to consume two serves of these meat products per day. So that was the kind of volume that they were exposed to.

And they did see over the course of this study that when subjects were consuming the plant-based meats, they had significant reductions in TMAO. They had significant reductions in LDL cholesterol. And I wanna remind people, this is not comparing against the unhealthiest meats out there. It was literally from an organic butcher in San Francisco.

And these were 80% lean beef products. So it wasn't set up to make the beef fail. And then blood pressure, they saw no significant difference. And that was important because a lot of these plant-based meat products are often very rich in sodium, which I mentioned before. So, I mean, the findings from that study are promising. It's one study, it's early days,

but based on the nutritional profile of these products, particularly if you're selecting them according to how I kind of walk through and the results of that study, I have no problem with these featuring within a whole food plant-based dietary pattern. I certainly don't think they should be the mainstay at every single meal

because then they're coming at the expense of legumes and tempeh and beans, lentils, tempeh, tofu, foods that we know absolutely are great for driving down disease risk. Yeah, you're gonna get no argument from me that the program really should be predominated by whole foods, plant-based, close to their natural state. The question was really like,

if you have one of these every once in a while, what is the impact of that? And I think one of the reasons that I bring it up is there's a narrative, particularly amongst sort of the paleo crowd, right? Like these are all science experiments, they're terrible. There are GMOs in a lot of these products and there are these emulsifiers and all these other things, these binders that a lot of these products and there are, you know, these emulsifiers

and all these other things, these binders that go into creating these products. So yes, a whole food is going to always be better, but you know, how bad are they truly? Like what is, you know, a trumped up narrative versus the truth? And what I gather from what you're saying is we're just at the beginning of studying this,

the Stanford University study seems to be interesting in that when balanced at least against a typical burger, an organic burger, it's still gonna measure out better in terms of those main markers. Compared to what is like the critical question here. If people are adding these into their diet and it's knocking out the enormous amounts of animal protein, I think it's definitely shifting

their overall health profile in the right direction. And I'm also mindful of the fact that consistency over time is far more important than how healthy every single food or every single meal is. And some of these foods make it easier for people to sustain an otherwise whole food plant based dietary pattern for longer. Some of that can be down to social circumstances, many different factors. So my sort of view of them is I certainly wouldn't want to vilify them. I think they serve a role. With that said, I would love more and more studies to be done on them. And I think that we should hold these companies accountable so that as more

data comes out and we understand more, they are reformulating and continuing to improve their product to make it not just delicious and a great alternative to meat, but healthier as well. Yeah, particularly the more ubiquitous they become and the more they find their way into kind of our fast food and fast casual infrastructure, because so many people are eating them. So there is an accountability thing

that I think is important here. And my hope is that as these things continue to scale, that we're also seeing the on-ramping of healthier versions of all of these things. And I'm already seeing that. Like I just was in Vancouver at this big plant-based expo and there must've been 200 exhibitors there. There's so many food companies

that are doing interesting things. And to see what people are doing with mushrooms and all these like ingredients that you never would have thought would comprise like the architecture of a plant-based food, but doing it with natural ingredients. And I think that's pretty exciting. Yeah, I love that.

There's some really great mushroom products coming out. There's a few of those in Australia. And I'm very optimistic. For example, there is a company in Australia called Buds. And I like the fact that they're Australian because there's not a whole lot of kind of big players in this space that are. So I'm kind of rooting for them.

But I say that because they have contacted me and I've spoken to them about the nutritional profile of their products. So I do genuinely think that these companies are aware that they need to not only be an alternative, they do need to be healthier. And a great example of that is Back to Beyond Meat. They just released, I think, two new burgers.

One is, I think, about 50% reduced saturated fat and the other is 30% reduced saturated fat. And these are iterations for them. So, that change, that will happen. And key message being, they probably shouldn't be the absolute mainstay of your diet, but their inclusion can make a diet more enjoyable for certain people.

And let's also keep in mind that compared to the products they're displacing, they're much better for the environment from a land use point of view, from a water preservation point of view, from a greenhouse gas emitting point of view. And at the same time, they're kinder to all life on the planet. Yeah, 100%. But it's also a compared to what situation as well, because most of them are not organic

and they rely on monocropping for their supply chain. So there's a whole other like layer or level of creating these things in a more sustainable, healthy way. I think that's part of holding them accountable. You know, very much at the moment, they kind of seem to be from my understanding and speaking to certain people is that they're piggybacking off of a lot of the sort

of monocrops that are grown, that are fed into the animal agriculture industry. But certainly what I'd like to see going forward is these companies supporting regenerative agriculture and not just using monocropped ingredients, thinking about polycropping. And that's just another component of holding them accountable. And most of them are pledging

that they are pro planetary health. So I'm optimistic. Of course, that's the whole reason for their existence. But I think the real value add proposition here is that it's transitioning people who are otherwise not consider going plant-based at all into a more plant oriented diet and getting them off these animal products.

So it's, again, it goes back to the comparison against what are you comparing these things to. And part of that transition period, it can be difficult to acclimatize to more fiber. And so that's where some of these products can be really helpful. And I actually recommend them to a number of people that are going through the steps

of trying to reduce animal products in their diet. And perhaps they're finding the sudden increase in legumes to be a little bit like an atomic bomb. And that is one way of helping back off the fiber a little bit and make that process more comfortable. Well, let's talk about that for a minute because that's another thing that I hear a lot, I'm sure you do as well.

I try to plant-based diet and the beans and the legumes and all of that, I just was so bloated and gassy and I just couldn't hang with it. It's a process. And we spoke about that other, the fermented food fiber study last time, which I think illustrated that the addition of fiber to the diet will have varying effects on people

depending on where their baseline microbiome is. So if someone has a more severely disrupted microbiome, perhaps they had a lot of antibiotics growing up and have been eating a very high ultra processed food diet that we know is disruptive. They may struggle a little more with increasing their fiber intake very rapidly. So going slow and low is, from my experience,

by far the best strategy rather than an over the night, changing from the average intake of fiber is about 12 to 15 grams in Australia and America. Going from that to north of 30, 40 grams is going to really shock your system. So I usually work on ramping it up with people, starting with small increments. For example, a quarter of a cup of cooked lentils is about four grams of fiber. And that's how much I'll get people to modulate their

diet by every day, second day, and to step through these changes over two, three, four months rather than trying to do it all in one week. On the topic of legumes, a game changer that I've personally felt and used and also something that I know has helped a lot of other people is pressure cookers and instant pot, have you heard of that? Yeah, we have one. Yeah, so I mean, if you're buying dried beans,

they need to be soaked and then cooked, that can be a very drawn out long process and some people don't have the time to do that. And a pressure cooker is a much faster way of doing it. You still can soak them beforehand, but soaking doesn't take up a lot of your own time and it is optional. But the pressure cooker will essentially,

you'll have your beans or legumes ready in an hour, hour and a half, depending on the type and certainly makes them a lot more digestible. And you can add into there some ginger or kombu, which is a type of seaweed, which I haven't found a whole lot of good data on, but anecdotally does seem to be helping people digest them. And so that's one strategy that I do recommend

is making sure you're preparing your legumes properly. And in doing that, you'll reduce some of the fermentable carbohydrates, the sort of gas producing carbohydrates. And thus they'll be a little bit easier to tolerate. If you're buying canned beans, you can also reduce some of those gas producing molecules by rinsing them very thoroughly under water

before you eat them. But ostensibly what you're saying is in terms of this acclimation period, it's really a period of time in which your microbiome has to adjust to this different type of food. And by eating it, you're kind of seeding your gut lining with the prebiotic, the biota ostensibly that you need to create this new flora

that then can digest these foods without the bloating and the gassiness. Is that correct? And so exactly, it's a little bit like fertilizer. You're sprinkling this fertilizer over the microbes and they will proliferate and the microbes that are fermenting these carbohydrates will grow in numbers. And so your gut put simply will grow stronger,

similar to going into the gym, picking up a weight and progressively increasing that weight, your muscle will grow stronger, similar to going into the gym, picking up a weight and progressively increasing that weight, your muscle will grow stronger. And the downstream effect of doing that is creating a more diverse microbiome, which produces more of those wonderful short chain fatty acids,

which help maintain the integrity of that mucosal layer and the epithelial cells that line the large intestine and helps reduce inflammation and improve blood glucose control. All those things we spoke about previously. Right, the diversity of plant foods contributes to a more diverse microbiome, which makes you more robust. The analogy being when you go to the gym,

you do all different kinds of, as many different types of exercises as possible to become as bulletproof as possible. Yeah, and I've kind of oversimplified it a little bit there. There is more going on in terms of the microbiota composition. We're just learning now about polyphenols,

how they affect the microbiome. I like how excited you get. Every time you say polyphenols, you get this big smile on your face. Like the only person who smiles more broadly with that word is Dr. B, I think. Yeah, and ironically, we've had some great chats about them. But I say that because like black beans for example

are very rich in polyphenols. And so it's not just fiber that is modulating the microbiome but also these polyphenols, which just five, 10 years ago we thought were all absorbed in the small intestine. Most of them are traveling through to the large intestine where they are directly affecting the microbiota where they're acting as another form of prebiotic. They fall under the same banner

as prebiotic fiber and resistant starch. And they provoke an increase in the proliferation of these short chain fatty acid producing bacteria. There was a recent study that came out which took older people. These were people that were aged about 66 years of age and did a randomized controlled trial and very neat design because they held the fiber the same, but just increased polyphenols in one arm.

And they saw that the group who added these polyphenols and that was largely from like green tea and pomegranate and some cocoa. These are all very polyphenol rich foods. They had decreased levels of zonulin, which is a marker of intestinal permeability or quote unquote leaky gut. So for somebody who suffers from some kind of

ulcerative colitis or autoimmune gut related disorder amping up your polyphenols might be a good idea. Yeah, and the idea here and this is very, very preliminary, but there are some theories out there that where someone is not tolerating the fiber, the increase in fiber so much, it might be a good strategy to increase polyphenols first.

And from some of these foods where they're incredibly rich in polyphenols, but quite low in fiber, like green tea, for example, as a way to encourage microbiome diversity, similar to what we spoke about with the fermented foods. Right, so you're increasing, you're decreasing gut permeability prior to

sort of ramping up the fiber, which might cause some distress if you have a permeability issue. Yeah, and that's something that an experiment no doubt will test. And I think the Sonnenbergs at Stanford are doing something similar. So we'll know more about that,

but in theory from a mechanistic point of view, it does make sense. Yeah, I gotta get those Sonnenbergs on the podcast. Have you spoken to them? Yeah, I spoke get those Sonnenbergs on the podcast. Have you spoken to them? Yeah, I spoke to- We talked about that, didn't we? Yeah, well, actually only spoke to Justin

about four days ago for the first time. I've spoken many times to Chris Gardner, but yeah, you should get them- Chris Gardner is the one who did the Beyond versus Organic Beef Study, right? And he comes up with all these acronyms like the SWAP meat trial and like diet fits and he's a laugh.

But yeah, the Sonnenbergs, both Justin and Erica are like the whizzes when it comes to the microbiome. So certainly, yeah, you should get them on. I hear everything you're saying, but Simon with respect to beans at least, Dr. Gundry told me I gotta worry about these lectins. to beans at least, Dr. Gundry told me, I gotta worry about these lectins. Well, this comes back to understanding exposure level

when we consider whether a food or a nutrient is healthy or harmful. And an analogy here that I'll use is oxygen. If I gave you pure oxygen, 100% oxygen, you would pass out and eventually die. But I'm sure that you would agree with me that oxygen is healthy and it's life sustaining and we need it, it's in our air, right?

Oxygen in air is at 26%, I believe, is the concentration. And at that level, it is the concentration. And at that level, it is very healthy. The dose makes the poison. And this is similar with lectins. We could cherry pick and look at some mechanistic studies, animal studies where they're exposed to very, very high, extremely high levels of lectins that you would never be exposed to in your diet.

And we could show some impairment of the microbiome or the intestinal barrier and leaky gut. However, if we zoom back out and look at all of the data on people consuming legumes, observational data shows that there are the hallmark of the diets of the people who live the longest. And then we see experimentally in randomized controlled trials

that the addition of these foods help improve biomarkers of disease like cholesterol, for example. So the dose really makes the poison. Beans do contain lectins, that's true. And it's why I wouldn't recommend eating dried beans. But nobody eats dried beans. Nobody does except there is one study where,

and this is cited, where patients, if I recall correctly, in Japan were accidentally fed raw, improperly prepared legumes and they had an acute reaction response to it. And certainly I just wouldn't recommend doing it. It's why we soak. It's why we use a pressure cooker. It reduces lectins and they're still there,

but they're reduced to a level where they're actually thought, but they're reduced to a level where they're actually thought to be very beneficial. And this is the sort of ironic thing. And you could run a search and look at this online. There are just as many mechanistic studies showing benefits of lectins and that lectins actually have anti-carcinogenic properties.

So why does Gundry have such a bee in his bonnet over this? and that lectins actually have anti-carcinogenic properties. So why does Gundry have such a bee in his bonnet over this? Well, I think that he's over-extrapolating from these studies in animals where they are exposed to enormous amount of lectins. I haven't seen any good evidence to suggest that we should be worried about lectins in properly prepared legumes. And very, very consistently, legumes are shown to improve health.

They're arguably one of the healthiest foods out there on planet earth. So, it's an absolute message and it helps sell a book. I'm not sure what else I can say. Yeah, I mean, it is the consistent theme across all the blue zones. And Dan Buettner is always talking about beans being really the centerpiece of a healthy diet.

So I think we can put to rest the lectin fear. And then with that said, still acknowledge that when you're adding legumes to your diet and you haven't had them in your diet, that it's going to take some time for your microbiome to adjust, go low, go slow, use some of those strategies that we spoke about and you will absolutely get there. Right, you're gonna fart

and you're gonna burp a little bit, but it'll be fine. It'll be a bumpy ride, but it'll be worth it. So Simon, animal protein versus plant protein, perhaps the number one concern for most people who are considering a plant-based diet. Let's break this down to basics first. Protein, what is it? It's amino acids.

And they're the building blocks of all of the 30,000 odd proteins in our body. And there are 11 non-essential amino acids. Those are amino acids our body can produce endogenously. And then there are nine essential amino acids, which our body cannot produce. And therefore it's critical that we're getting them in our diet in some way, shape or form in the required amounts.

We covered previously that there is a myth that plant-based foods are missing essential amino acids. And that's not true. All plants do contain all nine essential amino acids. So it's not as if when you are removing animal foods and you're going to plant foods that there is absence of any of these building blocks that you cannot get. And therefore your body would have trouble building protein. That's not the case.

Second thing that I think is important for all of us to understand and sometimes I overlook this in my explanations is our food contains protein, whether it's chicken or whether it's beans or whether it's tofu, whatever it may be. And when we digest that,

we break that protein down into amino acids and amino acids are absorbed into the bloodstream. And then once they're in our bloodstream, they're not tagged. Our body has no idea if that was a leucine molecule from chicken or if it was from soy. There, once they're in the bloodstream, they are just available amino acids

for our body to use as it needs to, to produce protein. So with all of that said, then it becomes clear that we just need to get enough of those nine essential amino acids into our bloodstream and our body will do the rest of the work. The bloodstream transports them where they need to go. And when they arrive at their destination,

they're the building blocks to be assembled into whatever the body needs in that specific location. Exactly. And I don't wanna cover retrace too much territory, but the only way that you would run into problem on a plant-based diet in terms of supplying adequate amounts of each of those nine essential amino acids is if you were severely under eating

and getting nowhere near the total number of calories that you require, and or living off of one or two foods, as you can often see in certain parts of the world where there are food security issues. And that's a whole nother conversation. If you're super deficient in one of the nine essential amino acids,

then your body can't actually rebuild those proteins that it needs and you're gonna run into problems. Exactly, it becomes a limiting amino acid and then it affects protein synthesis. And of course we want to avoid that. If you are eating with diversity and you're paying attention to regularly consuming the protein-rich plant foods, which I like to point out that most of the protein is coming from the legume food group, also quite a bit from nuts and seeds.

So if you are including regularly the likes of beans, lentils, chickpeas, tofu, tempeh, legume pastas, even seitan or total TVP, these are all very, very protein rich foods. And as long as you're including them in your diet, and I like to recommend people have, at least three serves of those a day, a serve being about half a cup of beans or half a cup of tofu or a cup of soy milk.

That's another good, very protein rich serve. As long as you're getting three of those in a day across the diet, then you will be consuming these essential amino acids in the required amounts. Of course, if you're an athlete then you're gonna wanna pay even more attention to leaning into that food group and you might consider a protein supplement

which is something that all athletes consider whether they consume an omnivorous diet or a plant-based diet. And then there is also a strong case to be made. And I was recently speaking with Jenny Messina, who's a very well-known registered dietician in the sort of plant-based community. And we were talking about,

there is a very compelling case for paying a little more attention to protein as you get over the age of 50. And some of that again, feeds back to our earlier conversation around bone mineral density and lean muscle. We know that having more lean muscle as you get older is associated with longevity.

So, overall, as you get above 50, I like people to lean a little more into legumes and to make room for that, not excluding them, but a little less into whole grains and potatoes and starches. And that allows them to sort of slightly bump up that protein intake.

And I think you've had Volta Longo on here a couple of times. And he's also an advocate of that strategy to just bump that protein up a little bit to actually help increase lifespan and health outcomes. Right, so to play devil's advocate, what is your response to the statement that animal protein is just superior?

Like, is there a foundation for that argument or what else goes into animal protein that would provide that person with some logical basis? I think we have to define what is superior, right? Right, well, let's do that. If you were saying to me, building lean muscle, is it easier to build lean muscle

with a diet full of animal products than plant-based products with less consideration and planning? Yes, it is. I mean, we have to be able to acknowledge that. That's not saying you can't get the same result. You can, but you have to plan a little more on the plant-based side of things.

But my definition of superior is I wanna be fit and I wanna build muscle, but at the same time, I wanna consider my long-term health outcomes and I wanna consider longevity. And we have to understand that there's a trade-off here. One of the big differences is the ratio and concentration of particular amino acids between animal and plant foods.

And while animal foods might be very rich in certain amino acids that activate mTOR, for example, and raise IGF-1 levels, and while that might be great for promoting growth, we understand through a lot of mechanistic research, and I will preface this by saying most of this is in animal models because it cannot be done in humans, at least not at this stage. We understand that over-activating those works against you in terms of your longevity. So, this is not a sort of simple answer

as a simple question of what's superior, it's really what's meaningful to you. And personally, I made the decision that I want to be consuming foods that are allowing me to achieve my athletic endeavors, pursue those goals, but at the same time, not over activate mTOR to the point that I'm putting myself at higher risk of certain diseases

and potentially shortening my overall lifespan. Right, so if you're 24 years old and all you care about is how you're gonna perform in four months at the championships or what have you, and you don't care about anything else, all you wanna do is ramp up that IGF-1 and get as much strength and growth as conceivable in a short period of time.

But that's at the cost of longevity, long-term health, all these things that are important in terms of maintaining vitality, fitness, strength, all of those things over the extension of your lifetime. And even as a kind of a plant-based person, you can still modulate your diet to promote muscle growth and strength. And I spoke to one of the studies that looked at comparing healthy young adults, omnivorous diet versus a vegan diet. And they matched that total protein intake

at about 1.6, 1.7 grams per kilo, which is a high protein intake. And they saw no differences in lean muscle and strength. So I think- That's a really important point to make. So I think that there is a way to kind of have both. And so, you can shift to a plant-based diet and then modify it in a way

where you are getting the performance gains that you're looking for. And I still think you're better protected than the animal-based diet. Are you potentially making a trade-off compared to a slightly lower protein plant-based diet? I think possibly, and that's based on those mechanistic animal studies.

But back to your earlier point, people have different goals. And for some people, it will be meaningful to build muscle and to build strength while adopting this dietary pattern that is overall better for their chronic disease, better for the planet and better for the animals. In addition, if we're gonna contemplate like quote unquote gains, you also have to consider all of these other things

like inflammation and foods that you're eating that are gonna allow your body to recover more quickly. And if you're eating a predominantly plant-based diet, chances are it's gonna be more anti-inflammatory than an animal-based or animal-centric diet, which is gonna allow your body to recover more quickly. So that has to go into that equation as well. And I think there is something in that

that we haven't yet determined from science, but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence from athletes toward the end of their careers who are shifting towards more plant-based. And really cool. And I wish I had details to share and it'll sound like I'm obsessed with Stanford, but hey, they're doing great research. I'm obsessed with Stanford.

I'm biased, but- And I noticed you're wearing an SF hat. So last time you were wearing an LA hat. That's a funny story. One of your listeners sent me this hat. Oh, really? So I think they wanted me, they're from San Francisco, Patrick actually, so thank you, Patrick.

I obviously wear the LA one too much, I love hats. But back to Stanford, again, Professor Christopher Gardner and his group, they are about to run for the first time. And this is with athletes at Stanford. They didn't get access to the real high level athletes. The coaches didn't want them to be playing around with their diets,

but they still got athletes from Stanford University and they will be doing a randomized controlled trial of a completely plant-based versus an omnivorous diet, looking at strength and endurance over the long term. Interesting, interesting. Any of the swimmers doing that? I might have to make a phone call or two. Yeah.

I'd love to know more about that. Yeah. Super interesting. Shifting gears a little bit, one of the things that we're cautioned against with respect to animal products, particularly processed meats is nitrates, right? Nitrates, carcinogenic,

but here we have greens that have nitrates and those are good nitrates. What's going on? Isn't that confusing? Yeah, it is. So- It's like bi-weekly. Does it mean once every two weeks or twice a week?

Yeah, I don't know. Don't test me on those kind of things. So I guess the first thing is that nitrates are a wonderful supplement and we can go into that from a performance point of view. There's some good data on that. But from a food point of view, we have nitrates in ultra processed meats, as you said,

and then there's nitrates that are in dark leafy greens, beetroot and celery. And how can these molecules, the same molecule have a different effect on our physiology and our health outcomes? It has a lot to do with the food matrix and what those nitrates are packaged next to. So we know that in ultra processed foods,

the nitrates they're often used as a preservative. That's why they're in like cured meats. We know that when you consume those, the pathway they go down is one that ends up resulting in the production of N-nitroso compounds. And a lot of that is thought to be due to the fact that they're packaged, the nitrates are packaged next to amines and heme iron,

which is thought to be what preferentially shoots them down this pathway. And the N-nitroso compounds can damage DNA in the gut and are thought to be probably carcinogenic. So that's that pathway. And then the nitrates in dark leafy greens and beetroot, these foods that are associated with great health outcomes and time and time again,

we really see we should be leaning into more of. They're packaged next to polyphenols and vitamin C. And the evidence so far shows that because of that, they're reduced from nitrates to nitrites and then nitrites to nitric oxide. And we know that nitric oxide is very beneficial from an endothelial cell function, improving the function of your arteries,

blood flow, driving down inflammation. It's like an endurance booster. Yeah, and that's why there's a whole lot of supplements out there via different pathways we can go into that boost nitric oxide, nitrates being one of those. So the take-home point is that there is sort of two different pathways and the fate is

determined by what is packaged next to that nitrate. There's an interesting study that I looked at, which dug into the oral microbiome. The microbiome is not just in the colon. We have lots of bacteria in the oral cavity. And it does seem that first step I said there from dark leafy greens and beetroot where nitrates goes to nitrites, right? Which is absolutely required in order to get to nitric oxide.

That first step starts in the mouth. And- With the saliva? Yeah. With whatever's in the saliva- So there's some bacteria on the dorsal side, the top side of the tongue that seems to start that reduction.

And very interestingly, a set of researchers thought, well, what about if we give, we do a randomized controlled trial and have some subjects consume a mouthwash with an antimicrobial. And they saw that these subjects who were using the mouthwash and it was over about,

there's a few studies now, three day and a seven day, but quite quickly they saw that these subjects had less nitric oxide production and higher blood pressure. I don't know whether we should read too much into that, but it's an interesting fact, probably more so for someone with hypertension that is thinking about all of the different tools and levers they can pull to lower their blood pressure,

which nitrates will do. But if you are using this mouthwash and it contained an antimicrobial called chlorhexidine, which is quite common, that might impair the conversion to nitric oxide. It can't be a good idea to take an antimicrobial mouthwash and kill the microbiome that exists in your mouth. I agree, it's kind of like taking antibiotics.

I think we're just starting to learn about the importance of the oral microbiome. So yeah, I would agree. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There might be a few dentists out there listening who don't like to hear that. So I'm sure there's two sides to that conversation, but for what it's worth, that's what the study found. Right, yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, obviously you don't want bad breath and if you have an infection or something like that in your mouth, you wanna clean that out, but you would want something that was targeted as opposed to just destroying all the life forms that exist symbiotically in your mouth and perform a healthy function for you.

Yeah, I suspect that that's probably the answer here is that maybe these have some utility in certain circumstances, but maybe they're not just a kind of everyday thing that you want to be using all the time and really just killing off these microbes, many of which have very beneficial effects. So nitrites, nitrous oxide, a good source of that is beets.

Athletes know this. Lettuce. Lettuce also dark leafy green. Well, that's not such a dark leafy green. Depends on what kind of lettuce I suppose. Lettuce has more leafy green. Well, that's not such a dark leafy green. Depends on what kind of lettuce I suppose. Lettuce has more nitrates than spinach. Very, very, I was surprised by that. But just your average like iceberg lettuce.

It's a good question. I'd have to dig into the study and see, they just really said lettuce, but you're right. There are different types. So perhaps I can put that on my list of things to go and look at, but nonetheless, the dark leafy greens are really rich in nitrates.

So is celery, beetroot, so like the superstar. And now you see- Is that the active ingredient in beetroot? Or are there other things in beetroot that make it such an effective endurance booster? That is certainly the main active compound. And the reason why you're seeing athletes all across the world consume beetroot powder.

It's very effective. Yes. Like if I am going out for a long workout, I can feel the difference from when I put beets and beet greens into my smoothie beforehand versus when I don't. Like it's noticeable. So the science looking at this has shown

that these nitrates in beetroot essentially reduce the amount of oxygen that your body requires to produce the same amount of work. So you're more efficient. Which is like, it's like going from altitude down to sea level. amount of work. So you're more efficient. Which is like, it's like going from altitude down to sea level. Yes, so you can do the same amount of muscular work

for longer, or you can do increased muscular work for the same period of time. And this is one that I've recommended this to many athletes and across the board, everyone seems to have great results with it. But dosing is important and the timing are two very important things to consider. So talk about that.

I don't know anything about that. I just dump a bunch of beets in my smoothie and go out the door. Yeah, and you're probably doing it perfectly right. The timing, you could probably do a little better. It seems that maximum effect is about two, two and a half hours before your exercise. Now that can be challenging

if you are someone who wakes up and exercises first thing. So it's obviously, it needs to work in with how you're doing it, but, and what your schedule is, sorry. But that does seem to be maximum effect, two and a half to three hours prior. And in terms of the dosage, so people will see depending on the brand they're looking at,

it could show up as millimoles or it could show up as grams. I'm gonna speak in grams because it's a little bit more common and there is a conversion. So one millimole is 62 grams of nitrates if you wanna convert back. But consistently the science shows you need about 530 grams of nitrates to get maximum effect.

There is some effect occurring at about 300. So there's this 300 to 530 range grams of nitrates with the best sort of ergogenic effect, performance enhancing benefit occurring at 530 grams. Once you go above that, it doesn't seem like there's any extra benefit. And I will say the more aerobically fit the athlete, the smaller the benefit they get.

So this is all about increasing your efficiency, but if you're already a very efficient person, athlete, then the gains are a little bit lower. Right, but the more elite and efficient you are, the less gains you need to differentiate yourself from everybody else, right? Like a 1% increase versus a 5% increase when you're at the elite level, I mean, 1% is huge.

Sure, and also arguably those are the people that should be focusing on this sort of stuff the most because they've got all the basic foundations, right? And the basic foundations of dietary pattern and sleep and stuff are so much more important than what we're talking about here. These are kind of like the very, very top. Yeah, it's the cherry on top.

The plant-based sundae. Yeah, so I mean, that's kind of the current thinking in terms of dosage. Sorry to interrupt, but like that gram amount, 530, that's kind of the current thinking in terms of dosage. Sorry to interrupt, but like that gram amount, 530, what did you say? 530 grams. So translate that into- Sorry, 530 milligrams.

Let me clarify. Yeah, you said grams before. Let me clarify. One millimole is 62 milligrams. Okay, that's a big difference. Yeah, I wanna really clarify that. And so you're targeting 300 to 530 milligrams. Okay, that's not very much.

So how much would be in a typical beet? So to hit that 530 milligrams, I've calculated at three and a half medium-sized beetroots. Beetroot, that's an Australian thing. So when you say beetroot, that means the beet with the greens on top of it? Just the beet. Or just the beet? Just the beet.

And what is the, like I always put when I'm making a smoothie, I take the greens. You know, you go to the grocery store, they rip the greens off and they wanna toss them away, but I love the greens and I put those in the smoothie or I cook them. So that's a good question. Yeah, they will contain nitrates as well. But at a lesser density.

Yeah, the study that I saw that looked at nitrate content was just looking at the beet, which was, and I calculated you would need three and a half medium sized beets to get to that 500. That's a lot. That's a lot. And that's probably why the powders have become so popular. And so you just need to find one that is supplying 530 milligrams.

And I think we should probably also make it clear here that with all of these supplements, nitrates included, if you're a professional athlete, you need to be working with your club dietician. They will be considering what brands you can and cannot buy. Often you need to buy brands that have gone through specific testing. And there has been issues where what's in, what the ingredient label says is in the product

is not actually what's in there. So you kind of, if you're going to add these things into your regime and you're a professional athlete, sit down with the right people. Is there any thoughts around usage in terms of cycling? Like, is this something that you could do every day? And it's just like, if you're training really hard, should you use it daily or should you use it

for a period of time, get off it, go back on it? Would you use it daily or should you use it for a period of time, get off it, go back on it? I'm not sure there is enough data to say what is the best option there. So far, the data is suggesting that it's completely safe to take that on a daily basis. But whether coming on and off is a more effective strategy and leads to greater efficiency long-term,

I don't think that's been teased out. Right. Are there, I wanna kind of slide into a conversation about supplements for athletes more broadly, but on the subject of beetroot and nitrates and nitrites, is there a supplement, like why not go right directly to the nitrous oxide? Like, can you, is there a supplement, like why not go right directly to the nitrous oxide? Like, is there a supplement where you could just

in capsule form take nitrous oxide and achieve the effect that the beetroot active ingredient is producing? I don't think it's that easy. From my read is if you want to actually absorb it and increase nitric oxide levels in the body, you have to deliver one of the precursors. And that is either nitrates

or the other one that you will see is L-citrulline. And L-citrulline is another supplement that will boost nitric oxide in the body. It does it by raising arginine levels, which then are converted via a completely different pathway to what we've spoken about. It's an endogenous pathway to nitric oxide. So as far as I'm aware, you need to provide a precursor

and that has to be in the form of nitrates or L-citrulline. My preference of the two is nitrates because there's been more study on them. Got it. I'm just gonna eat my beets. Yeah. Am I good with that? That's what I do for what it's worth.

Supplements for athletes at the top of this pyramid, obviously protein powders. So let's talk about that. Like, do we need to be taking protein powders. So let's talk about that. Like, do we need to be taking protein powders? How much is this advisable? When should we take it? And which types of plant protein extracts are optimal? And there's a lot in that question.

There's a lot there. It's going to be context dependent. I will say, I think most athletes certainly that I've worked with or spoken to find a protein powder, a very convenient way to get 30 grams of protein in. And it's also a little less filling than always eating legumes. So I think it certainly has utility,

but I will say that you can still build muscle and perform very well without it. Yeah, I had Robert Cheek in here and he was talking about his history with this going from, and mine is similar, like having a pantry full of all kinds of powders, then thinking like, is this doing anything and weaning himself off of it and realizing that without any of it,

he was making gains that he wasn't capable of prior. And his point being like, maybe they have use, but they shouldn't come at the cost of sourcing your nutrients from whole foods. And if you're meeting those needs, is there any advantage at all to even doing this in the first place, the powders? So the advantage can be,

if you're trying to lower your total caloric intake, for example, then it's a very concentrated source of protein for a small amount of calories. So depending on the type of athlete, that might be something that they're trying to do. And therefore it has good utility. That makes sense.

I'm a minimalist, relative minimalist when it comes to supplements, but I do have a protein powder and I usually throw a scoop or so into a smoothie that I have every day. My recommendation for trying to choose one because there's so many on the market is, you know, firstly, 25 to 30 grams of protein in a serve as a minimum.

Sometimes you see some coming out now and they're diluted down to 15, 16 grams. You need 25, 30 grams as a minimum to maximize muscle protein synthesis, if that's your goal. Secondly is I like to look for one that has the amino acid profile. And this goes back to our trade off we were talking about before,

because if you're an athlete and you are looking to boost your performance, then leucine is important. And you can find one that has two to three grams of leucine per serve. And you know that that's going to be a very anabolic protein. So firstly, does it have enough protein per serve?

Secondly, looking at the leucine content. Over and beyond that, I usually tell people to find one that they enjoy. They like the brand ethos. It tastes good. And they're kind of the two most important things I'm looking at from a performance point of view. There are a lot of different blends and different types.

You've got potato protein is now starting to surface, pumpkin, you've got brown rice, you've got pea protein, you've got mung bean, fava, there's a whole lot coming out. Yeah, we have ham, such a inchy chia, I'm seeing now sunflower, all different kinds. So yeah, I mean, my obvious question is, which one of those has the best profile for athletic performance

or which one of those has a better leucine profile? Typically speaking, the pea protein brown rice protein blend is like the plant-based whey protein. Yeah, that's the most common that you see. It's the most common. And it is for a reason in that when you put those two together,

you get a very similar amino acid profile to whey protein. So without over complicating things, that's a great worthy option for anyone. With that said, if you stick to the first two principles that I said of 25 to 30 grams, two to three grams of leucine, then I'm not so concerned really what that blend is. It could be four or five of those. And I'm more interested at that point in what someone likes in terms of palatability and therefore they're going to be happy with including it into their diet every day.

There's gotta be differences in absorption as well, whey versus these plant alternatives and then amongst the different varieties of plant proteins in terms of how well the body can uptake these nutrients. Yeah, you would be surprised when you isolate the plant protein in any of these forms, the absorption becomes almost comparable with whey. And we're talking up into the 90% absorptions

in these isolated plant forms. That's one of the big benefits of these. They are very bioavailable. And the difference is probably only a couple of percent between them and whey. And there are a bunch of randomized controlled trials where they've compared whey with brown rice and with pea and looked at athletes doing resistance training

and found no difference between the two arms where one arm was supplementing with whey and one arm was supplementing with the plant protein. So I wouldn't be concerned about the bioavailability of them and the protein researchers that are not, they're not plant-based. These guys are omnivorous. They all tend to agree now that as long as the protein serve is right, is ticking the box and leucine is at two or three grams, then there is no difference between the two.

That's a huge shift from not that long ago. Yeah. In terms of what the scientific community is saying. Yeah, there were some ideas that you would need to consume much more plant protein to get the same effect. And that's largely now being debunked by two or three different studies, as I say,

that have looked at these isolated forms. As long as the leucine is matched, I will say that seems to be why whey protein in particular is good is that it's high in leucine. So as long as that plant-based protein powder is meeting that two to three gram threshold, then you can be comfortable, you are not sacrificing anything.

One question I've always had is given that what we're trying to do is ensure that we're getting those nine essential amino acids. And when we eat foods, we break down those proteins into their respective amino acid components. Instead of a protein powder supplement, why not take a supplement of aminos or branch chain amino acids,

so that you're bypassing that step of breaking them down and creating perhaps an even more absorbable form of the building blocks of protein? Like, is that an ignorant statement or how does that work? It makes logical sense, but remember, these proteins also contain non-essential amino acids and non-essential amino acids are important for muscle protein synthesis.

And so your body is making those, but when you're wanting to build a lot of lean muscle, having more of those is helpful. So if you were just taking the BCAA supplement or an essential amino acid supplement, you're missing out on all of those non-essentials. So that's probably the first point that I would make there. And I think largely, particularly the BCAAs, right, is when you're just taking the BCAAs,

you're not getting any benefit at all over and above protein powder. So my advice to people is that you could add the BCAAs, but for the same price, you could add a good protein powder, which is providing all of those other non-essential and essential amino acids that are still critical for building muscle. It's not as though just leucine and valine, for example, which are often two that people talk about

are the only ones that matter. All of them matter. And so providing your body with a good mix of all of them is sort of generally the school of thought and the recommendation for the best result. Interesting, so don't waste your money on BCAAs. I wouldn't waste your money on BCAAs or isolated amino acids.

I would stick to just finding a protein powder that provides all of the nine plus non-essential amino acids in varying amounts. And it's gonna be much more cost-effective too. Conventional wisdom for a long time was that there's this special window post-workout about 30 minutes in which you should replenish your body with protein and other certain nutrients,

electrolytes, et cetera, to optimize the reparative cycle. Is that still the case? Has science pivoted in terms of how we're thinking about that? I think there's something in timing for sure and how much protein you're having at each meal. But I think that that,

if we were to sort of prioritize things, first it's exercise and the stimulus, and then it's your overall diet, and then it's total protein. And then underneath that, it's the timing of the meals and how much protein you're having in each meal. So I don't want to kind of get carried away on this because it's less important. But if you're really fine tuning, this is where this stuff gets more important. And the current evidence suggests that firstly, instead of having, say you have 120 grams of protein

in a day, instead of having all of that in one meal, from a muscle protein synthesis point of view, and from a strength point of view, recovery point of view, it seems that you're much better breaking that down into three or four meals. Breaking it down, not to the point where you have less than 30 grams of protein in a meal, but splitting it out over multiple meals throughout the day.

And the reason for this is that each time you have a meal, you can spike muscle protein synthesis if your meal is rich in protein and leucine, but it has a ceiling. So if you have 120 grams at one point in the day, you'll spike it, it'll hit that ceiling and then you get nothing else for the rest of the day. Whereas when you-

So that additional protein gets metabolized in some other way that doesn't lead to- And it's still going to be used for the body. Anabolic effect. Yeah, but it's not gonna have the anabolic effect and result in as much growth, muscle growth and strength improvement compared to when you divvy it out, 30 grams and then three hours later,

another meal with 30 grams of protein and then three hours later, and then maybe it's three or four meals across the day, you get multiple spikes of muscle protein synthesis and overall a greater net effect of muscle protein synthesis in that 24 hour period. I wanna get into intermittent fasting and all of that, but I don't wanna go too deep into that right now.

I wanna stick on what we're talking about, but I do have a question that is perhaps pertinent, which is, is there some kind of positive adaptation that can be had for a periodic sort of fasted workout, fasted state where let's say one day a week, you do a hard workout and you don't eat until, you know, many, many hours later, you're kind of putting your body into a, you know, a stress situation

that creates a certain adaptation that is something you don't wanna do every day, but is there a benefit to experimenting with that? I think it's plausible from a hormesis point of view and David Sinclair talks about this and perhaps that's a way of activating these disease resistance pathways. But anyone who's involved in the protein research

and lean muscle will tell you not to do that because it's probably a good way to go into a sort of catabolic state. And if you're trying to preserve muscle and you're an athlete, then I don't think that's going to be the strategy you're going to want to pursue. You're better off consuming meals regularly

throughout the day. It's interesting. I mean, from an endurance athlete perspective and not being a scientist, like I have played around with this and I've had an experience where it's sort of like, okay, my body knows that it can do this hard workout and not be fed for a very long time.

So in the future, when I find myself in a situation of semi depletion, I feel like I can push past that. And maybe that's just a mental barrier that an experience like that allows me to believe that I can do a little bit more on less, but I have to believe there's some sort of biological component to that. It would be little bit more on less, but I have to believe there's some sort of biological component to that. It would be an interesting study to do,

to take some endurance athletes and adjust their meal timings throughout the day and measure some meaningful biomarkers. But yeah, it's certainly not out of the question that there is some adaptation and some benefit to doing that. Again, I think it comes back though to what someone's goals are. And I think if you were sort of erring

on the side of caution of preserving lean muscle mass, definitely the research shows that you don't wanna be in a fasted state for too long. You start catabolizing your own muscle tissue, which is not good. So that's- Unless you're trying to get super lean. you start catabolizing your own muscle tissue, which is not good. So unless you're trying to get super lean. Yeah, and look, if you're trying to get super lean. That's not a very healthy way of doing it.

It's not that healthy. And I mean, judging someone's health by the outside is kind of fraught with danger, especially if you're looking at lean muscle, we know this, right? You only have to look at bodybuilders and their life expectancy is not amazing. That could be many things going on there,

including anabolic steroids. It might have something to do with it. Yeah, but point being is that it's, you know, it's this entire conversation around preserving lean muscle mass and maximizing strength, I do think at the core of it is a trade-off. I believe that's where the research points to. The more we wanna squeeze out of growth

and increasing our strength, I think we are potentially sacrificing long-term health. Yeah. Back to the subject of supplements for athletes. I think we are potentially sacrificing long-term health. Yeah. Back to the subject of supplements for athletes. I mean, and just to say it out loud, I'm not somebody who's taking a crazy number of supplements. I believe in responsible supplementation,

but I always kind of err on the lesser side. Like there's very few things that I take with any regularity but this is an interesting conversation. So aside from protein powders, what are some of the other things that athletes might benefit from and particularly plant-based athletes?

We spoke about nitrates and L-citrulline. The other, I guess, two that we could talk about are, or three, there's beta alanine. I never hear about this. So there's beta alanine, creatine and caffeine, before I forget those three, along with nitrates. So consistently in all of the consensus position papers, looking at the best science,

they're the ones that surface as having the most ergogenic effect. Well, let's start with beta-alanine. Sure, so beta-alanine, alanine or alanine is anyone who's taking this, or some people that have taken this will have experienced some paresthesia. You can get tingles in your fingers.

Like when you overdose on niacin? Yeah, and there's a trick, remind me, I'll come back to that when we talk about dosage to try and avoid that. But in short, what is beta alanine doing? It seems to be most effective short bursts of high intensive exercise. We're talking up to 25, 30 minutes. The research hasn't really gone beyond that.

And at a mechanism point of view, beta alanine increases carnosine. And carnosine essentially is like, it's an antioxidant. You can think of it of the way I like to think about carnosine is it's sort of mopping up all of the free radicals we produce while we're exercising,

cleaning them out and helps reduce fatigue. So you can perform a higher power for longer. And we see quite significant improvements in power and strength with better alanine supplementation. It's the typical dose. And again, I'll put this into a document for you, but high level, it's about four to six. This one is grams, four to six grams per day.

And the timing of this one is interesting. For a long time, it was thought that you have to supplement this right before you work out. That's kind of been disproven and you can now spread the supplementation out or take it whenever. The most important thing is that you're just saturating your cells with it, similar to what happens with creatine, so that your baseline levels of carnosine go up. So four to six grams, and you could take that in one dose, but that is where quite a lot of people get this tingling. It's like a hot rush, itchy, it's uncomfortable.

And it's often put into those like hardcore pre-workouts. That's the ingredient that's doing that. So the strategy there- Like that crazy stuff at GNC that comes in like a bright red can or can of plastic tub or something. Yeah, and now you have a whole lot of things in there. I am not a big advocate of those. I think you're better off trying some of these targeted ones

where it's a single ingredient or like two or three ingredients and seeing. Does it come in like a capsule form? You can get capsule or you can get a powder. Usually it's a flavored raspberry or lemon or something. And if you want to avoid that paresthesia, because you don't have to take this as one single bolus before you work out, you split it. So it could be two or three serves throughout the day.

And then usually that removes that side effect. So that's better alanine. That's one for people to consider. Creatine is the kind of obvious one. Yeah, that's, I mean, most people have heard of that. It's sort of, you know, typical amongst the bodybuilding crowd. What's interesting about creatine,

I mean, first of all, it's very effective. So I wanna understand better why that is. But in recent years, very recently, there seems to be some studies coming out about the impact of creatine on depression. It's sort of this mood elevator and perhaps has a positive impact on cognition, which is super interesting.

Yeah, the brain health side of things. And it seems that creatine is depleted often in people with schizophrenia or depression. So it does have a role beyond muscle. And I think that's been underappreciated certainly for a long time. And maybe we start on the cognition piece and then we go into the performance. There has been, it's very limited science

looking at creatine and brain health. So that's the first thing I wanna say. It's very early days emerging. At the moment, the current state of the literature is that protocols have not yet been identified. It's too preliminary for that. They've identified, which is very interesting that creatine, our neurons actually produce creatine

and the creatine in our brain is separate to the creatine in the body for the most part. So there is also a lot of question marks over whether you just supplement orally and does that increase the creatine levels in the brain? Does it pass the blood brain barrier? And it may be that if you have depression or you have a condition that affects the blood brain barrier,

it does cross or that it only crosses if you have depleted levels in the brain. And that is a very ongoing area of research. So I think it's a watch this space, there could be some utility there, there's something going on. There have been talks of vegetarians in particular, perhaps benefiting from creatine supplementation from a cognitive point of view. And the theory there is that, well, animal products do contain a little bit of creatine. Your body, it's not an essential compound. Your body does make it, but there is some advantages,

at least from a performance point of view, to have a bit more in your body over and above what it makes. And animal products do contain a little bit of creatine, not enough to fully saturate the body with creatine, unless you're gonna have two kilograms of meat or something. But there has been this school of thought that because there is some creatine

coming in through animal products, perhaps vegetarians could benefit from creatine supplementation from a cognitive point of view. And there's two studies that have come out that I think are interesting to talk about here because I do think this is a little bit misunderstood. The first is, and I think the most important is they have done neuroimaging

and scan the brains of vegetarians and omnivores. And they've been able to see that the creatine levels in the brain are exactly the same, which is really, really interesting. And that probably is back to what I said earlier, that our neurons are actually synthesizing creatine separate to the rest of the body. So that's different to what we see in muscles.

In muscle tissue, you see vegetarians have less creatine than omnivores, which is one of the main reasons why vegetarians potentially have a better performance effect from creatine supplementation. There's a study that came out 2010 by a researcher called Benton. And this is the kind of study that everyone cites

looking at cognition between vegetarians and omnivores with creatine supplementation. at cognition between vegetarians and omnivores with creatine supplementation. So it was a randomized controlled trial placebo. And what they showed is there was a significant difference in cognition between the vegetarians and the omnivores that were supplementing with creatine. But this study is misinterpreted. So let me run through.

So this is the study that gets thrown around on social media to establish that vegetarians have some kind of brain problem. Yeah, so let me just walk through exactly how they did this study. And we can just think about the findings here. So baseline, they tested the cognition of the omnivores and the vegetarians.

This was before supplementation. And this test, this was a recall test. So you're gonna hear 30 different words, and then you've got two minutes to write them down as many as you can. That was the cognitive domain. It's a memory test. At baseline, there was no

difference between the two groups. So the vegetarians and the omnivores performed exactly the same. Then they did creatine supplementation. And this was a higher dose creatine protocol than what you would do for performance. It was 20 grams a day over about a week period. And they performed a test again. And in that test, the vegetarians performed as they did at baseline, but the omnivores performed really poorly. So there was a significant difference

between the two groups, but it wasn't driven by the vegetarians performing poorly. It was driven by the omnivores performing poorly. So something about the creatine supplementation decreased the omnivores cognition. Perhaps, it was a very surprising finding. And I think it's being misinterpreted as vegetarians are deplete in creatine. And when you add it to their diet, their cognition improves. That's not what the

study showed. Their baseline and their retest was exactly the same. For some reason, the omnivores performance dropped off. And that's what created the significant difference. So that's the Benton 2010 study. And Hamilton Rochelle, who's a big researcher in this space, he just published a review called Creatine and Brain Health. It's fantastic for anyone to read about all of this. And he essentially speaks about the misinterpretations of that study, talks about the fact that vegetarians and omnivores

have the same levels of creatine in their brains on scans and finishes by saying we need further research because for now we can't see a significant reason for vegetarians to be supplementing with creatine for brain health. That's fascinating. So how does it get perverted and turned into this narrative that gets thrown around?

I'm not sure it's intentional. I'm not sure it's intentional. I think that if you sort of just look at one side of the study and you disregard the baseline, and you just look at the two bars on this graph, you see the vegetarians performing really well compared to the omnivores. So I think it's just a misinterpretation of the data

more than anything. But what it does say is there's no reason to be alarmed that if you're a vegetarian or a vegan and you're not supplementing with creatine that you're going to have a cognitive deficit. The science does not show that. And while there will be more science done, I think down the track,

if they work out a way to increase creatine levels in the brain for certain conditions, whether it's schizophrenia or depression. I think omnivores and vegetarians will likely benefit in a similar manner. Have they done studies on depression specifically? Because you spoke about cognition, but depression is an altogether different thing.

I haven't seen any of the data in terms of supplementing people with depression with creatine and seeing outcomes. I can look into that. But what I've seen is that people with depression often have lower levels of creatine. And I believe certainly the conclusion of Hamilton Rochelle's paper

was that we need far more information and even for conditions like depression and schizophrenia, there's no science to date that gives us very clear confidence to recommend a certain protocol of supplementation for these people. Got it. So in the context of athletic performance, there's some anabolic effect to creatine.

So walk me, help me and everybody understand what that is. I guess, put simply, our body uses glucose or carbohydrates into glucose that enters our cells. People will have heard of the mitochondria. And this is like the energy factory. And through a whole sort of complex set of biological reactions, we turn this glucose into ATP. And creatine allows you to produce more ATP.

And that is allowing you then to increase your power and your strength. And the benefit of that is that you can increase your training volume and then therefore get greater adaptations. So it's not a situation in which it just grows your muscle. It just allows you to push harder, go longer. And then as a result of that, get stronger, faster, et cetera.

For the most part, you will get a little bit of a filling out with the water retention that can kind of make you feel a bit fuller. Puffy. Yeah, and some people like that look and others don't. And I've definitely, the feedback I've had from some endurance athletes is they don't like that. And they think it works against their performance

carrying that extra sort of water retention. But by and large, it is just allowing you to do more work. You get a greater stimulus and then therefore greater adaptations. And it's one of the safest, most studied ingredients. Safety up to 30 plus grams per day with no side effects other than some gastrointestinal upset in certain individuals. So something to be aware of, but it's not that common.

Certainly not as common as sodium bicarbonate, which is another supplement that I really don't recommend because it causes a lot of gastrointestinal upset, even though it is quite ergogenic. But creatine seems to not affect that many people in that way. And the dosing has, the recommendations have changed over the years.

It used to be thought you need to have a high dose, 20 grams a day for about a week, that will saturate your cells. And then you can to have a high dose, 20 grams a day for about a week, that will saturate your cells. And then you can drop to a maintenance dose of five grams per day. That still is an option. The it's now also been shown that if you just jump straight to five grams a day, by four weeks in,

you will have saturated your cells. So you can choose your own adventure there. Interesting. I mean, I would think that much like a bodybuilder has a bulk phase and a lean phase that an endurance athlete could benefit from this by using it during heavy training periods or training camps to get the adaption, adaptation effects, but then cycle off of it where they can lean out

and lose some of that water retention that creates unnecessary, a weight drain where power to weight is so important and that's in those sports. Yeah, I think that makes sense. And that's probably also what bodybuilders do. And when they're trying to lean out, they jump off of it. So, you know, certainly there's nothing wrong

with using it like that in a sort of cycling, cycle on off fashion. Right, and it does seem like it's safe. I mean, is it, how do they manufacture it? What is it comprised of? That's a great question. I always wondered, I always assumed it wasn't a vegan product.

No. Because you associate creatine with animal products. Yeah, you certainly can get vegan creatine. I always wondered, I always assumed it wasn't a vegan product. No. Because you associate creatine with animal products. Yeah, you certainly can get vegan creatine 100%. And the more and more now you're seeing brands that are selling vegan creatine, we'll have that on the label. So I know that's certainly possible.

It's probably, it's synthetic. So it's probably made in a laboratory. Right, but basically on the safer side of supplements that you're gonna take. Definitely the, I mean, in all of the different consensus positions, it is considered the most studied and the safest of all of these various supplements

that we're talking about. The final supplement, it's not really a supplement. I mean, you have coffee, right? Like caffeine, we all know that that is an athletic performance enhancer. I've had such a, you know, I've been off caffeine. I go back and then I'm like, I'm training and it's like, well, if I drink a cup of coffee before this workout,

I know I'm gonna have a better workout. Yeah. And then suddenly I'm back on coffee. Yeah, you can, some people have a love-hate relationship with it. Some people do really poorly on caffeine, which we should know where they feel anxious. And they're certainly someone that I wouldn't recommend supplementing with caffeine or loading up on the coffee.

Other people are severely, their sleep is severely disturbed. So- Yeah, Matthew Walker talks about that. Like even, you know, one cup of coffee at eight o'clock in the morning has an impact on your ability to get a restful night's sleep that evening. Exactly, and the really interesting thing

is there's a genetic component to that. So how quickly your body metabolizes caffeine is highly variable. So you do hear some people say, I can have a coffee midday one o'clock, two o'clock and I'm fine and others they just cannot sleep. It's also an age thing too. Like when I was 24, I could probably drink a cup of coffee

after dinner and fall asleep fine. And now if I did that, I would be, there's no way I would sleep. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I could sleep with a coffee after midday. And the research looking at this seems to suggest there's a few different mechanisms happening, but one is it makes you sort of hyper vigilant

and more alert, but very interestingly, it seems to lower your perceived level of exertion. So you don't feel as if you're working as hard, which often we put a limit on what we can do just through what we think, not physically what we can achieve. And perhaps it allows us to tap into more of our physical capability.

That's one of the ideas. And from a performance ergogenic point of view, the research really zooms in and narrows in on this three to six milligram per kilogram of body weight dose as being the sort of clinically effective dose. And when you ramp up and you go above nine milligrams per kilogram,

there doesn't seem to be any extra benefit. And that's where you start to see more of these side effects like anxiety, gastrointestinal upset, affecting sleep. So something to be mindful of there. So for someone who is, let's say 70 kilograms and you can convert all this to pounds if you want. I have no idea what that means. I think roughly, and I don't have a calculator here,

but we're talking sort of 150 pounds, okay? For someone of that size, if we were to take six milligrams, we're looking at a dose of 420 milligrams of caffeine, which really is not going to be achieved through coffee unless you have a whole lot of coffee. One shot of coffee is about 60 milligrams. So to get up to that three, 400 odd milligrams to sort of get maximum performance effect, you need to look to the supplements that have caffeine in their formulas.

That's not saying though, that at the lower end of the range, three milligrams per kilogram, you're still getting a benefit as well. So I think that's one usually that people need to play around with and find what is most comfortable and work from there.

Yeah, too much and you're toast. Yeah, I don't think I would cope very well, to be honest, at the high dose of, at that sort of 450 milligram dose of caffeine, I perform much better at about half of that. Yeah, but on the adage of energy can neither be created nor destroyed, like you're essentially borrowing energy, right, you're creating a debt

that you're gonna have to repay. So how hefty is that debt repayment? Like are you, if it's all about like, I need to have the best performance possible on this particular day, and that's your priority, then, you know, caffeine can certainly help produce that result. But if you're trying to perform day in, day out

in a heavy training period, you're gonna run into some kind of drain situation that perhaps is gonna undermine the greater goal that you're gonna run into some kind of drain situation that perhaps is gonna undermine the greater goal that you're seeking. Definitely if it's affecting your sleep and you're not nourishing your body to supply the nutrients and calories that you need through being able to have achieved greater output.

I think certainly that's the case. I would say overall, like if we thought about coffee for a moment here, instead of just caffeine, again, it's not for everyone. Certain people do not do well on coffee, but overall the research looking at coffee and cardiovascular disease and neurodegenerative disease is quite positive.

And just like tea, three to sort of five cups a day is associated with better health outcomes. And there are a number of mechanisms that help explain that, one of which being polyphenols. So I think there's a place for this within a program, but we need to be cognizant of the fact that, it can really affect your cortisol levels, your stress can affect your sleep.

So you need to find that happy balance where you're getting the performance outcome that you're looking for, and also the recovery and downtime that you're looking for. What are some of the common supplements that you see people taking where you think like, well, this is garbage, like why are people doing that? Well, that's usually what I say

about branch chain amino acids. Right, so we talked about that. Are there others that fall into that category? I mean, what about MCT oil in the coffee, right? That's a big one. Is there a benefit to that? I mean, certainly it's a lot of calories, but in that vein of practices

or things that are popular at the moment right now that you see people doing, particularly kind of in the fitness world that you would like to disabuse people. I mean, anything sort of outside of creatine, L-citrulline, beta alanine, caffeine and nitrates it's just worth noting that there's very limited evidence. Those are considered the five ergogenic supplements

with good grounded evidence. They've been tested for five ergogenic supplements with good grounded evidence. They've been tested for both ergogenic effect and also for safety. So anything beyond there, look, it doesn't mean that they don't work. It just means that there's not a whole lot of data to sort of make a decision. And therefore you are running a sort of trial and error approach.

So you have to be able to justify the cost. And like MCTs, there are people that swear by them. And MCTs don't raise cholesterol. So I don't have a problem with people using MCT oil if they think they're getting a benefit out of it. Then I've certainly got no judgment on that. I guess I just wanna reiterate that there's probably not a lot of data

on many of those things. A close cousin to supplementation is quote unquote superfoods. I don't wanna go too deep down a rabbit hole here. We're tiptoeing into Darren Alleyne territory a little bit, our mutual friend. This is his backyard. But perhaps we could spend a minute or two,

like if you had to pick like the top performing, like these are expensive, right? Are we really gonna go and buy all this stuff? Like where's our money best spent? So if you had to choose, what are the kind of top performers that might make their way into your routine? Like we've got chia seeds, like I'm, I like,

like mine would be chia seeds, spirulina, moringa and maca powder. Yeah, so you, I mean, I have most of those on rotation. I think the chia and the flax are great for, particularly for plant-based eaters. They're really rich in the omega-3s. I mean, I would put hemp seeds in there. Hemp seeds as well.

So we could say chia seeds, hemp seeds, flax, they'd be right up the top. Then you do have- The flax need to be ground though, right? Otherwise you're not gonna be able to absorb them. Yes. And chia seeds really should be soaked or ground as well for the same reason.

So that's something to be mindful of. The other one that I use a lot is chlorella. I mentioned it before, it's loaded in iron. So that's another kind of green powder that you can throw in but I tend to not have too many more than that and focus more on just consistently getting lots of color through the fruits and vegetables. And then basing my diet around those

and whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds. But I certainly will have some of those on hand and throw them into my smoothies. Yeah, the one final thing that I would add is cordyceps, particularly if you're an endurance athlete, because much like beetroot, like that's the one thing that beetroot and cordyceps are the two where I actually feel,

I can feel a noticeable difference. Yeah, I've heard that. I haven't used cordyceps myself, but I have heard that. I've used lion's mane and anecdotally speaking, I feel like my cognition is better, focus is better with that. I also do like some of the mushroom powders, like reishi powder.

Reishi, chaga. Yeah, some of these powders are very rich in prebiotics. And there is some data showing prebiotic effect of reishi and improving microbiome composition. So, you know, some of those are neat and emerging. Right. All right, moving on. We talked about plant-based milks earlier. It used to be, you'd go to the grocery store,

maybe there was rice milk. If you were lucky, there was soy milk. Now there's just a proliferation of every imaginable non-dairy alternative. We've got oat, we've got soy, rice, coconut, almond. Which ones are best? What should we be looking for? What should we be looking to avoid?

Like, how do you think about this? Or do you just make it at home yourself? Look, I don't tend to make it all at home myself. I have done it, but you can fortify, you can add calcium, for example, at home with a red algae powder, and you can make your own almond milk and then add the calcium for example, at home with a red algae powder and you can make your own almond milk and then add the calcium in afterwards,

which is something that I know quite a few people will do, but it requires a fair bit of effort. So the store-bought ones, there are a few reasons why I think they're good. One is that I do think the calcium fortification is important. And we have to think about someone's overall diet. So if someone is looking to their milk as a source of protein,

and let's say it's providing a very important source of protein to that person's overall diet, then when they make the swap to a plant-based milk, they want to opt for one that is equivalent in protein. And the obvious one is soy milk, but now there are other alternatives that are popping up like pea milk, for example,

where both of those will have that sort of eight grams of protein per serve, which is on par with the dairy milk. So you have to know your overall dietary pattern and what the purpose of adding this into your diet is. If it's just being added to a coffee each day in a very small amount, then that's a different conversation because that that person is going to want to look at it more from a flavor and experience point of view. But broadly speaking, I like to get people to look for something that is as close to dairy milk from a like for like sort of perspective,

particularly if it's the main milk that they're going to be drinking and having their fridge for their family. Right. And so eight grams of protein and calcium fortification at sort of that 100 milligrams per 150 mils. So you can turn around and look per serve. of that 100 milligrams per 150 mils. So you can turn around and look per serve.

You should have around 300 milligrams of calcium in a serve is exactly matched for what you would get through dairy. And then you're now starting to see, Rich, some other plant-based milks pop up that contain B12 and iodine and vitamin D. And again, whether you need these or not, really depends on back to our earlier conversation. Are you supplementing?

Are you getting enough sun? What does the rest of your diet look like? On top of that, you also have to learn how to read the labels. Like a lot of these things have added sugar and it's back to a conversation around preservatives, emulsifiers, all of these other things that go into creating that texture that you're looking for

in these products. So some are more natural than others. If it's, you know, a lot of them have added sugar. I usually go for the unsweetened version. That is most brands will have not all, but a lot of them have a sweet version and an unsweetened. Sure, and then there's the fat content as well. Like a coconut milk is gonna be higher in fat

than the others, right? Yeah, so if you're trying to limit your saturated fat, then you're probably going to lean more towards a pea milk or a soy milk. And soy has particular properties actually that's very good for lowering cholesterol. And we can talk about that if you want at some stage. People get freaked out when you talk about soy though.

Yeah, so that's why I like to state and they don't need to get freaked out about soy, but I understand that there is quite a lot of stigma around it. But the high quality science we have suggests people don't need to fear it. But for whatever reason, some people don't want to consume soy. And so I would look for other options like the pea milk

that is comparable to dairy in terms of overall protein content. Oat milk seems to be killing the game right now. Yeah, oat milk's great. And the reason it's going so well is it's incredible in coffee. It's very creamy. My only sort of criticism,

if that's the right word of oat milk, is that if you are looking for something that is comparable to dairy from a protein point of view, if for example, you want this to be one of the sort of high protein plant foods that you're going to eat in the day, then that's not the case for oat milk. So just something to be aware of. What about almond milk that you make at home

in three seconds in Vitamix or cashew milk? It's so easy once you figure out how to do that. It's easy and my recommendation is if you do that, then that's fantastic. I would buy a red, you can buy red algae powder. So back to the super foods we were talking about and I would put red algae powder in and red algae powder is super concentrated in calcium.

You can't taste it and all of a sudden that transforms your milk that you're making at home to one that is packed with calcium. That's great hack, I never heard of that before. And it's actually quite cheap and this one I will name a brand because I know it on the top of my head. I think it's called Now Foods

and they sell on Amazon around the world. And they, at least they used to, when I last looked at this, have a powdered form, not just the capsule. So you can just dose that in at about, you wanna dose it about a thousand milligrams of calcium for one liter. Okay.

In the way that people get freaked out when you talk about soy or soy milk, people also get freaked out when the topic, the subject turns to grains, right? Whole grains are an important part of a healthy diet, certainly a healthy whole food plant-based diet, but then people lose their minds. They're like, how can grains are the devil,

grains are the worst thing that you could be eating. How could you possibly say that I should be eating grains? Yeah, so this comes back, I think, the best sort of on-ramp here or departure point to explain this is probably that carbohydrates is an umbrella term. And we often see all these different foods lumped under the one sort of umbrella

as well as a carbohydrate rich food, it must be bad for our health. And that stems from the most heavily processed cereal to brown rice and quinoa. And we see all these foods bucketed underneath the same sort of umbrella. And in reality, they have different effects on our health. I think it's important to understand what's the difference

between a refined grain and an unrefined. And it takes me back to university. I used to think about the word BEG. So B stands for bran, E stands for endosperm and G stands for germ. This describes the three layers of a whole grain. And really the bran, the outer layer is where most of the fiber is.

And then the endosperm in the middle is sort of the largest component is just the starch carbohydrate part. The white bread part. Yes. And then the right deep, deep in there's the germ. And the germ is where a lot of the antioxidants and phytochemicals, vitamins and minerals are.

And in a refined grain, you just have the endosperm, the middle layer. So you get rid of the nice high fiber outer casing and you get rid of this very nutrient dense germ from the middle and you're just left with the starch. So you can imagine another analogy here is all of a sudden, you've got your carbohydrates are naked. They're not wearing their clothes anymore. And whereas the whole grain is providing much more fiber, much more antioxidants,

phytochemicals, vitamins, and minerals. And they have very different effects on our physiology from how they're metabolized, how they affect our gut microbiome. If you're eating refined grains, you're foregoing that fiber that you could have had. And therefore you're not feeding your microbes at the same time.

So they are very different. I like to point people to brown rice and wild rice and buckwheat and amaranth and barley. These are all really, really healthy whole grains that we should be including in our diet. They are consistently associated with better health outcomes, with longevity. And usually I like people to be getting at least three serves of those per day, a serve being sort of half a cup of rice or quinoa or two pieces of whole wheat bread, for example. And if you're doing that,

you are absolutely overall improving the overall healthfulness of your diet. Okay, so for the consumer going to the market, problems ensue because there's a lot of confusion about what constitutes a whole grain versus a refined grain. And there's a lot of marketing shenanigans that go on into masking what is a refined grain and trying to advertise it

as something more in the vein of a whole grain. And so I think people are trying to make informed choices and are often led astray. So how do we know? Like, for example, bread, like talk about bread a little bit, because I think people would be amazed to hear like what goes into this.

Well, I used to just pick up any sort of multi-grain bread. Like if it's just on the darker side, it's probably better. And if you can see some seeds. Yeah. I thought that was how you choose a healthy bread for a long time. And it's probably not the best way of trying to decipher what's healthy, what's less healthy.

And I like to point people to think about two different things when trying to choose a bread, but some of this applies to just any food in a package. The first is that the first ingredient written on the bread, on the ingredient list is very important. Very, very important. Enriched flour. If it's enriched flour,

then all of a sudden we've jumped into refined carbohydrate territory. Very, very important. Enriched flour. If it's enriched flour, then, you know, where all of a sudden we've jumped into refined carbohydrate territory. And that's probably going to be a product we want to skip and look for something else. Enriched is such an interesting choice of words. It should be a deprived flour or something like that. It's a positive spin.

Impoverished flour. Come on, they're marketers. I don't blame them for using that word. But the first word is very important. We also don't wanna see wheat flour. Wheat flour tricks a lot of people. What you wanna see is the first word is whole, whole wheat flour, whole wheat grain, whole meal. The very first part of that word should say whole.

Good luck finding that. So there's almost no, I mean, it's very difficult. We're narrowing the field, but it's definitely positive, definitely possible to find one. And the second thing I like people to look at, which is really the final thing, the two of these together works very well

to identify healthy bread, is looking at the carbohydrate to fiber ratio. So what we wanna see is a ratio of five to one or better. Okay, so by that, what I mean is if per serve you have 20 grams of carbohydrates, I wanna see that that product has four grams of fiber or more.

That's a very good indicator. Again, that what we're dealing with here is a less refined product that goes for anything in a wrapper and also for breads. It's interesting. I've never heard that before. Yeah. less refined product that goes for anything in a wrapper and also for breads. It's interesting, I've never heard that before.

Yeah, actually I should attribute that because you know who told me that? Dr. Greger. Spot on. So that's some of Dr. Greger's magic. And I think when you think about that, plus you think about that first ingredient, it is a very,

it's a very quick and easy way to identify, you know, sort of unhealthy bread or less healthy bread to one that is truly giving you that serve whole grains, which is what we're after. So if you find that bread that begins with the word whole and has the appropriate ratio, that has an okay place in your routine in terms of eating that kind of bread.

So if you find that we need not vilify bread as a blanket term, we can have that and feel like we're nourishing ourselves on some level. And we only have to look to the Sardinians, centenarians in Sardinia, they regularly eat bread. They have whole meal sourdough, which is one of my favorite breads. Right, sourdough is interesting.

It's a white bread, but it's actually, I mean, there's a difference between, is there a difference between the sourdough that you buy in the grocery store versus like the homemade sourdough, which is like a whole thing? Well, I think the big difference we're talking about here again is that starting grain.

Is it whole or is it refined? A lot of the sourdough that you would pick up just off the shelf is not wholemeal. It's not a wholemeal base in that recipe. So trying to find a wholemeal sourdough can be a little tricky. I know a couple of places, for example, in Sydney, one just happens to be down the road from me

that I was able to locate, but it's something people can look out for. But you will be able to find a wholemeal bread in general. And the other one to point out here is there's a whole nother sort of class of breads, Ezekiel sprouted breads. And these, they are sprouting whole grains. So this is Doug Evans approved.

This is absolutely Doug Evans approved. So that's a whole nother option. You can look for the sprouted quinoa or sprouted flax or any type of sprouted bread or Ezekiel bread is another great option. And I tend to rotate through sort of wholemeal bread, wholemeal sourdough with an Ezekiel. If the bread is in the freezer section,

as opposed to the bakery section, in my mind, that's a good place to start. Like if it has to be refrigerated, there's something alive in there that maybe would warrant a deeper look. For sure, I think that's another good tip. Yeah. If your priority is lowering your cholesterol

or losing weight, like how do we, understanding that there's no one size fits all plant-based diet, we talked about athletes, we talked about some general principles, how do you modify your approach to your plant-based diet to achieve weight loss or lower those markers? Usually when I talk about cholesterol lowering, I point to a series of recommendations from an MD in Canada called

Dr. David Jenkins. And he has developed what's called the portfolio diet. Some people may have heard of this before. It's a plant-based dietary pattern and it focuses more on what you're adding. It's got four steps to it. And it's been clinically shown in randomized controlled trials to lower your cholesterol by 30 odd percent. And really that's not going full plant. That's coming from an omnivorous diet.

So if you were to go full plant and tap into these four recommendations even more, then the cholesterol lowering could arguably be above 30%. And I've certainly seen that with a number of people I've worked with. So the first recommendation of the four in the portfolio diet, and I'll give you a PDF, I have a beautiful PDF summary of this from Dr. David Jenkins. First step is a couple of small handfuls of nuts per day. So that could be walnuts, it could be pistachios,

could be almonds, it could be a serve of nut butter, which is a tablespoon or two. It's interesting. I wouldn't intuitively associate those with lowering cholesterol. So let me tell you what's happening there. Nuts consistently have been shown in the literature

to lower cholesterol. And the reason for that is their unsaturated fat content, particularly the polyunsaturated fats, which as opposed to saturated fat, which increases cholesterol, unsaturated fats, particularly the polyunsaturated fats, lower cholesterol. So that's what's happening there. The second recommendation in the portfolio diet is to have at least two to three serves of plant protein per day,

ideally with a few of those being from soy foods. So this overall could be two or three serves from lentils, chickpeas, tofu, tempeh, these sorts of foods. The reason for a recommendation to include some soy foods within that, edamame, for example, or tofu, is that they do have a particularly good way of lowering cholesterol. And- That's unique to soy? That's a unique to soy and it's large,

it's probably driven actually through polyphenols. The phytoestrogens, which is what everyone sort of refers to them as, they're actually isoflavones, which are polyphenols. And it does seem that about one in two people have a particular microbiome composition where they can convert these compounds into a compound called Equal,

which is providing many benefits throughout the body. So two to three serves of plant protein being tip number two. And remember that this is for most people coming at the expense of red meat and chicken. The third recommendation is to have five serves of fruits and vegetables per day. Five serves of fruits and vegetables per day, which is well above what the average intake is.

And with a bias towards fruits and vegetables that have a lot of soluble fiber, viscous fiber that pulls bile out of the digestive system. And in doing that helps to lower cholesterol. These sort of viscous foods are like eggplant, okra. We've got berries are another great one, apples. So these sorts of foods. And then the fourth tip is, or fourth recommendation within this portfolio diet is the consumption of plant sterols. So these are a phytochemical that essentially blocks the absorption of cholesterol.

And you can do this, there are some products that are fortified with these plant sterols, but probably the best and easiest way to do this because you need two grams of these plant sterols per day to be clinically effective. That's shown in randomized controlled trials is to take a supplement.

And there's a bunch of different brands offering them and they're pretty much always at two grams per serve because that is the clinically proven dose. So those are the four sort of recommendations that on the aggregate lead to a 30% reduction in your LDL cholesterol, which is the atherogenic cholesterol that contributes to the fatty plaque being laid down in our arteries and then a heart attack or a stroke. I would say, because that can be quite a significant drop, if you're currently on medications,

you should be doing this under the supervision of your physician. You should at least let them know that, look, I'm gonna be changing my diet and you could point to this PDF that I will provide. At which point the doctor says, go for it. It's not gonna make any difference. Your statin is always gonna be your statin.

Right. And you might be the first person that goes back and surprises them. But the point of keeping them across it is that it may well affect your dose of your medication. Right. It seems like these are, well, two things. First, by eating these foods,

you're kind of crowding out the other foods that might take up space on your plate. So it's not about what you're eliminating, it's about focusing on these new things. And then suddenly there's no room for all those other things that are elevating your cholesterol. But beyond that, with the exception of maybe amping up

your fruit and vegetable intake, these seem like principles that are good for anybody, whether you're trying to lower your cholesterol or not. 100%. Yeah. And overall, it's just shifting people to a whole food plant-based dietary pattern. It's just that it has that specific protocol

has been tried and tested and has shown to result in this very clinically meaningful drop in cholesterol, which is equivalent to low dose statins. So that 30% reduction is very significant. For the average person that's taking their cholesterol from 130, which as we established is well above optimal, down to 90 or around 90, which is moving in a very favorable direction. And this is something that has been proven out. Plenty of people have done this and-

A lot of people- Effectively lower their- Many different studies tried and tested. And in fact, it's so tried and tested that most physicians if presented with this will be well aware of it. It's a very commonly understood protocol and has now influenced some of the national

cholesterol lowering dietary guidelines. Oh, that's good to hear. How would this differ if weight loss is the priority beyond the obvious, like maybe reduce your portions? Like what are the kind of tweaks that you're gonna make if that's your goal? Firstly, understanding calorie density is important. In my book, I separate foods

into sort of low calorie density, medium calorie density, high calorie density and very high. And the low calorie dense foods are pretty much all of your fruits and vegetables other than say dates and avocados, which are very healthy foods, but are just a bit more calorie dense.

So in that low calorie sort of food table, I have all the fruits and vegetables. It's got the dark leafy greens, it's got the cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage and broccolini. It's got pretty much all of your various fruits. It's got mushrooms and it also has tofu in there. And usually if someone comes to me

and they're wanting to lose weight, let's say that's their goal, that's right for them. First, I check, are they eating according to sort of the plant-based food pyramid that I have in there or has a whole lot of ultra processed foods snuck in, which sometimes can happen. In which case you just remove those and you barely have to worry about anything else

and it takes care of itself. Right, those are hyper palatable and they're driving that excess consumption and we can't control the environment around us, but we can try as best as possible to control the environment in our four walls and at least make it harder, create more resistance to consuming those foods.

So if they're not in the house, if the ice cream's not there, you have to overcome a lot of resistance to jump into the car when you get the craving. Calorie density back to those four different sort of groups of plant-based foods, whole plant-based foods. My recommendation is to really load up on those fruits and vegetables,

particularly before your main meal as a way of filling up and it will improve your satiety before you get more of the calorie dense foods on your plate. And one of the sort of superstars that often people are surprised by here is potato yeah it's you know potato is a much maligned food right largely because we fry it and turn it into chips but if you just take the the sort of boiled or baked potato and look at that, it is a very satiating food. It's low in calories.

So it's a great way to feel full on fewer calories. And it actually has a lot more nutrients than people realize. Like even the average russet potato is pretty good if you just don't put a ton of butter on it or sour cream or whatever and just eat it for what it is. It's filling. This is something Chef AJ talks a lot about. Like if you just increase those low calorie density foods

that are super high in fiber, you can fill yourself up. And I think kind of preloading before your meal so that you don't go into a meal starving, you're in a better place to make better selective decisions. Definitely. That's great advice. Like big salads before you go into your main meal. Cauliflower, there is another one in there. And being aware of the hidden calorie bombs,

like what dressing are you using? What is this? It's all in the sauces and all that other stuff that seems benign and those are the real killers. And so there's a study that speaks pretty much to that out of Johns Hopkins that looked at how many extra calories does someone consume if they eat out like five, six times a week

versus someone who cooks at home almost every day. And they were able to determine that that person eating out just five or six meals a week were eating on average a thousand calories more per week, which over the course of the year is equivalent to around seven kilograms of butter. And probably what's happening there is that in restaurants and in cafes,

there are a lot of hidden calories in the food. They're just trying to make it taste good. And they're not showing you a nutrition profile on this food and they're gonna slather it with stuff, whether they tell you or not for the most part. The chefs call it SOS, salt, oil and sugar. And that's a- That's what Alan Goldhammer calls it.

It's a secret weapon for them to make the food more appealing. But with that said, if your goal is to lose weight, trying to prep at home and have as much meals that you're making yourself will give you a better control over what's in there. Yeah. Well, dude, we did three hours.

We had to do three hours. We did three hours last time before we completely shut it down. Like any final thoughts or parting words for people? I feel like we covered a lot here. I think we gave people a lot of stuff to think about and take home with them. I think in our first conversation,

we kind of established the science underpinning a plant predominant to exclusive diet being best for human health. And my entire thesis is, and I wanna kind of make this clear because I'm not sure I really spoke to that, is that when you broaden the lens, open up the aperture and consider how our food choices affect the planet.

And you consider what we're doing to billions and billions of animals and the unnecessary pain and suffering that they are enduring, experiencing. And that none of us would likely swap places with them. When you do that, it does create a compelling case for adopting a diet that is as plant exclusive as possible. And I say as plant exclusive as possible

rather than a sort of firm endpoint because we all have our own circumstances, means, social circumstances. And I'm aware that this will look different for each individual. So my message is about, I have unconditional love for everyone no matter where they end up.

And it's not about perfection. This is about adopting this imperfectly, just like my diet is not perfect, it's imperfect. And we, rather than having a few people around the world make improvements perfectly, if we want to see great changes in public health, if we wanna see great changes in planetary health, if we wanna see great changes in planetary health, if we want to minimize the unnecessary pain

and suffering that we're inflicting, then we need billions of people doing this imperfectly. So with that in mind, my message is to let go of the perfection and take some pressure off yourself, takes it removed the self judgment and just get started. And that may be a small change, such as just changing one component of your meal,

swapping red meat for lentils. But by getting started hopefully today or tomorrow, you start the momentum. And I have full confidence in everyone that as they get started and start to make these changes, they will begin to feel better themselves. And that is hugely motivating, hugely motivating as is what you feel from a mental point of view. And I have made this transition and I was aware of the health benefits that were up for grabs, but what I was not aware of was how good it feels to live more congruently and to align your actions with your values and beliefs and the peace that that brings. So start slowly, take some pressure off

and I wish you all the best of luck. Amen, brother. I have lots of thoughts, but you know, I think that you just ended it so beautifully that I'm not gonna say anything more other than thank you. You're a gift. It's been really fun hanging out with you

here in Los Angeles. Hopefully we get to do it in Australia. We'll see at some point in the not too distant future. If we let you in. I really appreciate the level of care and precision that you bring to your work and the way in which you acquit yourself and conduct yourself in the digital space

that as we all know is kind of rife with a lot of bad behavior right now. And I always look to you as a lighthouse and a guidepost for kind of setting not only a tone, but as somebody who cares about trustworthiness in terms of, you know, what you choose to offer people in the public space. The book is, The Proof is in the Plants,

available everywhere. It's a fantastic resource. As I said last time, it really is like the comprehensive primer on all things plant-based. It's so vetted with the science and really you don't need to look any further than that book to answer any and every question that you may have about this diet.

And that's it, man, to be continued. Part two concluded, but many parts unknown yet to come. We did it, I appreciate you. Thanks, man. Thank you. Simon is gonna provide us with a list of resources to support the statements made today. Some PDFs, I guess. We'll include everything that we can in the show notes.

So if you're interested in diving deeper, you can go there, you can go to his book, you can go to his podcast, Plant Proof, and you can find Simon on all the social media channels at Plant Proof. Well, plant underscore proof on Twitter. Same on Instagram. The same on Instagram?

Yeah. And in those places, you're very active. Like you share lots of stuff and every study that you come across and you're not afraid to mix it up with people there and share your opinion. And so it's a fun follow as well. Thank you very much.

Yeah, man, it's been good. Episode two, I think we did it. We did, episode three on the horizon. Peace. Plants. Proof. That's it for today. Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra,

Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo,

with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and AJ Akpodiete. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace.

Plants. Namaste. Namaste. Proof.