July 9, 2014
Podcast #287 from https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2014/07/287-foam-rolling-101-collagen-confusion-germs-on-water-fountains/
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Introduction: Ben Greenfield Fitness episode 287. What Is The Best Way To Eat Eggs, Gelatin vs. Collagen, Better Sleep For New Mothers, Foam Rolling 101, Germs On Water Fountains, and much more.
Welcome to the bengreenfieldfitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon, and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you’re an Ironman triathlete or you’re just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non-run-of-the-mill, cutting–edge content from bengreenfieldfitness.com.
Brock: So this week has been pretty cool workout vice for me, how about for you?
Ben: Well, Brock, I’m quaking in my boots this morning because I’ve got – Wednesdays now are the day where I have my toughest workout of the week, meaning…
Brock: You’re quaking in your boots!
Ben: I’m quaking in my boots! That’s the nice way to say crapping my pants.
Brock: Freaking out on the inside?
Ben: Anticipation of this afternoon’s workout.
Brock: So what is it?
Ben: Well, I’m now down to about a month and a half before I shove off to California to go do the Kokoro Camp and SealFit Academy with Commander Mark Divine and Mark has guaranteed me that he’s going to give me special treatment, meaning that they’re gonna focus on trying to break me as much as possible. So now I’m doing at least one…
Brock: Not cool!
Ben: I’m now doing at least one SealFit wad each week, what’s called an operator wad. And these are designed to kinda just make you a little bit more mentally and physically tough and so today’s workout is called the Curtis. And the way the Curtis goes is you load up a barbell to 135 lbs., so not a ton of weight but basically 45 lb. weight played on either side. And then Curtis is a 100 reps of a power claim up to my shoulders, rack it on my shoulders and then left lunge just basically a left reverse lunge to a right reverse lunge to an overhead push press. And I do that a hundred times. That’s the workout.
Brock: Wow! Without stopping.
Ben: I will probably maybe get about 20 in and then I’ll break it into tens, and then I’ll break it into fives, then threes, then twos, ones, and whatever it takes to get to a hundred. There’s no way that…
Brock: Yeah. I’m just thinking mental strength is gonna be the issue.
Ben: Yeah! There’s no way I could do it all at once. So, yeah! That’s today’s fun.
Brock: Wow! Yeah, that definitely – there’s a lot of physical issues with that, but mentally that’s gonna be really tough.
Ben: Yes! And whoever Curtis is, I’m sure that I’ll be cursing Curtis by this evening.
Brock: That makes my workout seem like a sort of skipping through the daisies on a lovely spring morning. All I did was a whole bunch of plank exercises and some wall sits and some lunges and lunge jumps and then went for a fast run.
Ben: It was!
News Flashes:
Brock: Tons and tons of news flashes each and every day on twitter.com/bengreenfield and now we’re gonna show you the three best.
Ben: That’s right! Put your propeller hats on ‘cause we’re gonna dig into a study. So today’s study that we’re gonna talk about is from the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. And this is the one that I tweeted out over at twitter.com/bengreenfield and what I actually told you in that tweet was that you may actually want to run behind the person in front of you in your next triathlon or 5K or 10K or marathon.
Brock: Instead of running in front of the person behind you?
Ben: Instead of running in the front of them. Of course, there is the exception that if they have gas or if they’re doing the whole shotgun as they run that may be a reason not to run behind them. However, this study actually looked into drafting. And found that when you run close to the person behind you, you not only finish and in this case…
Brock: Wait, wait, the person in front of you….
Ben: The person in front of you, that’s right. You draft off of them, the same ways you would draft off of someone on a bicycle. So, not only they found that the runners were able to finish a 3,000 meter run which is a significant amount of difference in 9 minutes and 4 seconds vs. 9 minutes and 13 seconds when they drafted off of a runner in front of them.
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Ben: And they also found that when they told them to rate how hard they worked on a 1-20 scale, even though they ran faster, they rated the drafting effort as a 13 whereas when they weren’t drafting it was rated as a 20. So basically they ran faster at a lower rating of perceived exertion when they were running behind somebody. So maybe it’s that the person was breaking the wind, not the way that you think, but literally breaking the wind for them, and maybe and the research talks about this in the study, the fact that you’re simply able to pace a little bit better when you’re trying to keep up with the person in front of you. But ultimately, kinda getting close up to the person who’s in front of you and literally running with them almost step per step, just a couple of feet behind them, can actually be a pretty good strategy in a competitive running event or a triathlon, or any other effort for which you wanna keep up with somebody or lower your rating of perceived exertion, or run faster.
Brock: Especially if you’ve got a killer head wind!
Ben: That’s right!
Brock: That makes it more comfortable as well!
Ben: And speaking of running, I’m going to link to one of the funniest things that I’ve seen this week on the internet when it comes to running. And that is the Oatmeal’s Dos and Don’ts of Running Your First Marathon.
Brock: Nice! I love the Oatmeal.
Ben: The Oatmeal’s one of my favorite websites for comics at the oatmeal.com and I’ll link to this specific cartoon. But it’s all of the do’s and don’ts. They’re pretty funny, like this one – Do let those pre-race jitters fly. Start out at a completely impractical pace. This will demoralize other runners into quitting early, and you’ll be called marathon champion at Mile 2. Let me see…
Brock: That’s happened to me several times.
Ben: Here’s a good one – “Do delude yourself into thinking there is anything enjoyable about eating energy gels.” And then it shows a guy eating an energy gel and saying “This tastes like boob milk from a cyborg!” Here’s another good one that will be able to empathize with whoever ran a triathlon or marathon or 5K. “Do not stop running when getting a drink at an aid station. By enduring the sprint choke, you could shave 3, possibly 4 seconds off your 5 plus hour finish time. Marathon success does not come from training or perseverance; it comes from water boarding yourself at aid stations.” I love what they say at the end. Here’s a good one that we’ve all seen also. “Do end on a high note. When you see the finish line, start sprinting like a coked out orangutan. No one will ever suspect that you walked-jogged the previous 25, 26 miles.” I love it. And it goes on and on. There’s a lot of really good ones in there. But if you want a good chuckle today, go check out the Oatmeal’s Dos and Don’ts. We’ll link to that over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/287.
Brock: We should probably give a little bit of an explicit warning if you’re easily offended by language, you may not wanna go and see it. It’s not super foul, but the Oatmeal does get a little (inaudible) sometimes.
Ben: Yeah! It does tend to have colorful language. So, and then finally an interesting article to flip a complete 180 and delve back into science, biohacksblog.com had a really interesting article on how something called the resistance starch can not only help to kinda repopulate your gut flora and help to stabilize your appetite and slow blood sugar release, and we’re talking about things like green bananas and potato starch and plantains and things of that nature, but it may actually also make you smarter. And the reason for that, and this is gonna get a little bit geeky, so my apologies in advance, time to put our propeller hats back on and maybe even our white lab coats and what’s that thing you out in your white lab coat pocket that makes you…
Brock: The pencil protector? Pocket protector?
Ben: Yes, the pocket protector. Let’s put our pocket protectors on. So basically, butyrate is a short-chain fatty acid and it’s a short chain fatty acid that gets increased in your gut when you consume these things like half-ripe bananas, like green bananas or like potato starch or potatoes that have been cooked and then cooled. And what happens is that butyrate inhibits something called histone deacelytase. That’s HDAC, we’ll abbreviate it as.
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And what that is is that’s an enzyme that has a specific action of removing acetyl groups from histones. So, and I warned you we’re gonna get geeky on this one.
Brock: Yeah! I’m scratching my head.
Ben: But basically, in short what that does is when that HDAC activity goes up, you get increased expression of what are called neuroplasticity genes in your brain which are going to enhance your ability to learn and enhance cognitive performance but there’s also evidence that when you inhibit HDAC there’s reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease and the formation of a lot of these neurofibrillary tangles that can cause Alzheimer’s. So what this means is that the consumption of resistance starches or the inclusion of resistance starches in the diet by increasing butyrate in the gut can actually make you smarter. Now you can also – if you don’t like the gas that you may experience when you consume resistance starches, there are other things out there. And this article at biohacksblog.com that we’ll link to in the show notes goes into them, but there are things like sodium butyrate, and acetyl-L-carnitine and some other things that you can actually get in supplemental form and perhaps experiment with to see if you notice an improvement in cognitive performance from this formation of butyrate in your gut. Now the other thing that you can get butyrate from is of course butter. So you can include some grass-fed butter in your diet as well. I’m personally a fan of kinda taking the natural approach. I eat small amounts of fiber throughout the day. I eat a lot of green vegetables. I do some potato starches and rice –based starches occasionally with dinner after a workout. But I’m not a huge fan of doing something unnatural. We talked about the potato diet last week. And it sure it’s a biohack or whatever but it’s just one of those things that’s just exhausting when it comes to trying to follow this strict diet to enhance cognitive performance versus just working vegetable-based fibers and maybe a little bit of unripe fruit here and there into your diet. I think you could get some pretty good butyrate and gut flora expression that can help with cognitive performance. So…
Brock: You know, unknowingly, I made myself a little bit of a thing like this for breakfast this morning. I chopped up a green banana, fried it up in some butter, some grass-fed butter, with a couple eggs. That’s my breakfast.
Ben: Actually, that’s a perfect example of a way that you could increase butyrate. You can increase or get a lot of the benefits of egg which we’ll talk about later in the podcast when it comes to cognitive performance. And that’s natural, right? You’re not…
Brock: And delicious!
Ben: …cooking and cooling a potato and having five potatoes for breakfast or something like that. So, I love that green banana fried in butter, with a little bit of eggs. Perfect! Thank you, Brock!
Special Announcements:
Brock: So something super cool just happened to the Rockstar Triathlete Academy.
Ben: Yeah! So for the past three years, I’ve been dumping articles and audios and videos along with another coach down in Florida into our online school for triathletes called the Rockstar Triathlete Academy. And it was something that you paid for each month to be able to access out entire protected vault of videos and audios and articles. And we decided that rather than charging people a monthly membership to go in and access all of these content, we just switched it up so you could just buy a lifetime access pass and get access to all of it. So there is no longer any monthly fee to access any of that stuff, it’s all just – you get in for one time purchase – it’s $97 and it’s actually a ton – it’s literally three years worth of triathlon training content and it’s everything from how to put on or take off a wet suit as quickly as possible to how to choose a triathlon bike and what questions to ask your bike shop to all sorts of strategies. How to run uphill. How to run downhill. So it’s actually a lot of stuff. I’m pretty dang proud of everything we have in there actually.
Brock: Yeah! It’s pretty good!
Ben: We’ve literally got hundreds of interviews with pro triathletes and coaches and stuff like that. So that’s over at rockstartriathlete.com. So…
Brock: So what about all us champs who got in a couple of years ago and have been paying monthly? What happens to us?
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Ben: You just stand, you don’t pay anything. You just stay in and you just, you aren’t charged anything anymore, ever.
Brock: Nice!
Ben: So, there you go! So rockstartriathlete.com, check that out. And then speaking of triathlon, one of the quick thing that I wanted to mention – and by the way for our new listeners, this is not a triathlon podcast per se, for triathletes, we’ve been talking about endurance and marathon and stuff like that, but I just don’t wanna scare our new listeners away thinking…
Brock: Yeah! We’ll be getting into some very non-sport related stuff really soon.
Ben: You don’t have to be an Ironman triathlete to listen to this. But basically the Ironman Sports Medicine Conference for those of you who are listening in who are doctors, physical therapists, chiropractic docs, you wanna go check out the Super Bowl of triathlon down on the Big Island this year in Kona, and you also are interested in getting continuing education credits at the Ironman Sports Medicine Conference, I’m going to be speaking down there on Defying the Norms of Sports Nutrition. So I will put a link in the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/287 where you can go check out the Ironman Sports medicine Conference in October during Ironman Hawaii and go hang out on the Big Island. So check that out. We’ll be talking about this more probably next week but not only myself will be in Hawaii, Brock is probably gonna be there doing some coverage for Endurance Planet.
Brock: Aloha!
Ben: So it’s gonna be some – a pretty good time so if you happen to be in Kona in October, then check that out. We’ll link to that in the show notes.
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Listener Q and A:
Andrew: Hi, Ben! How you’ve been? My name’s Andrew and I’m a big fan of your podcasts and listen regularly in the U.K. A quick question please regarding eggs and specifically the healthy cooking of eggs. I’m on a hypertrophy diet, I need 4 eggs everyday for breakfast usually fried in coconut oil. I prefer to eat my eggs scrambled but I’m reading and hearing a lot that scrambling introduces oxygen which in conjunction with the heat of cooking oxidizes the cholesterol leaving free radicals detrimental to health. What are your views, please? All the best!
Brock: So first of all, we should probably address what is a hypertrophy diet.
Ben: A hypertrophy diet is a diet that I’m guessing is designed for hypertrophy.
Brock: This is so, – so specifically targeting the growth of muscles.
Ben: The growth of muscle, that’s right! So muscle growth diet. And incidentally, not to put Andrew on the spot here, but I should know that you don’t need to eat a high protein diet to build muscle. And there is zero evidence that eating anything more than 0.7 grams per pound of body weight of protein is going to help you build any additional amount of muscle. So what that means is once you exceed about 30% or so of your daily total calorie intake from protein, you’re not gonna get any extra muscle building effect, and you’re probably just gonna make your kidneys have to work a little bit harder to deal with all the metabolic by-product of protein breakdown.
Brock: And I’m guessing that unless Andrew is the size of Andre The Giant, he probably doesn’t need four eggs every single day.
Ben: Maybe. It depends how much protein you’re eating the rest of the day if you’re having fish with lunch and steak with dinner, then four eggs in the morning might be a little much. I personally have about 20 grams or so of whey protein with breakfast in my green smoothie and so he’s having a little bit more than that. He’s probably having closer to 35 grams from 4 eggs. But still, it kinda depends on your protein intake the rest of the day.
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But on to Andrew’s question. What is the best way to eat eggs? I personally like to crack them against my head and let the yolk run down my face and then kinda lick it off my face as it runs down. I like to leave that stickiness on there for a little while, too.
Brock: It’s good for your hair, I hear, if you crack it on the top of your head and just let it roll through your hair.
Ben: Shiny hair gives me that Pantene shampoo look as I shake my hair around.
Brock: Who needs mousse when you got eggs in your hair?
Ben: Smile slightly at the camera. You like those eggs, don’t you?
Brock: (Laughs)
Ben: So the best way to eat eggs, first of all as far as this oxidation of cholesterol in eggs, it doesn’t harm eggs to scramble eggs or cook eggs. That does not oxidize the cholesterol in eggs. The reason that that has become a concern among folks who are setting up on eggs is the fact that it is possible to oxidized the cholesterol in eggs but that happens when you powderize eggs. During commercial processing when eggs get forced up a tiny hole at high temperatures and high pressure to create the kind of powdered egg products that say like a cafeteria might use or a hotel might use, the actual powdered eggs, that is the type of process that will oxidize the cholesterol in eggs. It’s highly unlikely that just heating eggs naturally during a scrambling process is gonna do much in terms of oxidation. Now let’s just say that lipid oxidation and damaging of the fats would occur when you subject something like an egg yolk to heat, well you need to consider is that egg yolks have a lot of vitamin E in them and vitamin E is there to prevent oxidation and vitamin E is very good at preventing oxidation. So that’s just a reason to – if you are gonna eat eggs, get pastured eggs because the yolks of pastured eggs have about 4 times the amount of vitamin E that you’re gonna find in standard egg yolk. So use a pastured egg. The vitamin E in that is gonna help with oxidation anyways and ultimately don’t worry too much. I like to cook my eggs on low to medium heat just to play things on the safe side anyways. But it’s really the powdered egg products where eggs are getting sprayed, dried and forced through tiny holes at obscenely high temperatures and pressures in factories to powderize them for processed foods. That’s where you have to worry about oxidation of cholesterol from eggs. So..
Brock: Then they have to worry about all the stuff that’s just being mixed with when it’s reconstituted as well. It’s usually some kind of vegetable oil.
Ben: Yeah! So as far as eggs go, I’m definitely a fan of eggs. There are some people that think that they’re allergic to eggs first of all. And I think that in most cases, that’s bull. And the reason for that is that they’ve done a study that found that anybody who took one of these popular IgG allergy test and found that they were sensitive to eggs and specifically that means that they tested positive for what’s called the albumin-specific IgG level which is the type of protein that you find in egg whites, well what they found was that every single subject that they put into this study tested positive for this IgG level for egg whites whether they had active allergies, whether they had resolved egg allergies, or whether they had no egg allergies at all. And what the paper concluded was that IgG responses to egg whites are probably just a completely normal physiological response to a protein that you are frequently ingesting. So basically if you eat eggs a lot, if you take one of these food allergy tests, it’ll tell you that you’re allergic to eggs. So the only time that you might not test positive to an IgG test for eggs would be if you just don’t really eat eggs much at all. So the only thing that would convince me that someone who tested positive for an egg allergy was actually allergic to eggs was if it was accompanied by inflammation. So if you test for example C-reactive protein or what’s called HS-CRP, or you test- there’s another test that you can do for cytokines, inflammatory cytokines, or you get acne or achy joints or a bunch of GI upset and bloating and all of these indicators…
Brock: Or like me when I was a little kid, if I got some egg whites, it would make my face swell up like a potato, you couldn’t even see my eyes.
Ben: Yeah! My nephew has to go to the hospital if he eats eggs. That’s an egg allergy. That’s an egg intolerance. Just a basic blood test that tells that you’ve got allergens circulating in your bloodstream against egg whites, all that can mean is that you’re just eating a lot of eggs. And that’s not an issue. So first of all, as far as egg allergies go, I just wanted to mention that while we’re talking about eggs…
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Brock: We sort of went off topic there but that’d be interesting but really interesting.
Ben: Yeah! Eggs are extremely micronutrient –dense. I’m a huge fan of eating them as far as the best way to eat them, first of all, if you’re gonna scramble them or fry them, I wouldn’t use coconut oil specially if you’re using a good extra virgin unrefined coconut oil which is what I recommend, because coconut oil actually has a pretty low smoke point. We cook our eggs typically in an avocado oil…
Brock: Bacon fat.
Ben: …sometimes in a little bit of butter or bacon fat, but that’s actually much better than coconut oil. Another really good one that you can cook eggs in is macadamia oil or olive oil. Both of those also have higher smoke points than coconut oil. I know coconut oil…
Brock: Really? Olive oil!
Ben: …tastes fantastic. Yeah, not extra virgin olive oil, just regular olive oil. So olive oil, macadamia nut oil, or avocado oil, would all be better choices or just bacon fat for cooking your eggs in. So I wouldn’t use coconut oil if you’re gonna scramble or fry it. Now you can also simply drop an egg into a smoothie and you can use a raw egg if you do something like that and that’s not that big of an issue, you’ve got a bigger risk of dying in a plane crash than you do of getting salmonella from raw egg. And if you’re really concerned about it, just rinse the outside of the egg before you crack it with a little bit of oregano or vinegar and water solution because that’s where a lot of the potential…
Brock: Contaminants.
Ben: …contaminants might be playing around, that’s on the outside of the egg, not the inside of the eggs. Now, the other thing is that when you eat a raw egg white, you find a lot of information floating around out there that raw egg whites might bind the biotin which is the valuable component that’s found in egg yolk and prevent the absorption of that. Well, biotin begins to break down as an egg is cooked so if you’re very worried about that, then don’t eat the raw egg, just switch to cooking the eggs if you’re really worried about biotin but I wouldn’t. It’s not a huge, huge concern of mine at all. Finally, what I should mention is that I’ve been seeing a lot of recipes out there for egg coffee. Have you seen this, Brock?
Brock: I have, yeah! Yeah, Mark Sisson had a good one.
Ben: Yeah! Basically you take coffee and you mix it up, they recommend just mixing it and put egg yolks rather than egg whites as the egg yolks is where the good micronutrients reside anyways. But yeah, basically you make coffee and then you add scrambled egg yolks, some cinnamon, some turmeric, some vanilla, little bit of butter in there, and you just basically mix it all up and you can throw that in a blender, it makes like this frothy egg yolk mixture but it’s supposed to actually be pretty good. I haven’t personally tried, have you?
Brock: I haven’t, no. I’ve been tempted to, but I just – I like mine cooked, the way I like them.
Ben: So scramble them, toss ‘em raw in smoothies…
Brock: Make some ice cream out of it, with some coconut milk.
Ben: Fry ‘em. Put them in coffee. Honestly, Andrew, I don’t really care how you eat your eggs. I just wouldn’t eat them powdered. And I’d choose something other than coconut oil to cook them in.
Gelatin: Hey, Ben and Brock! I’m trying to consider some strategies for healing gut permeability besides bone broth and I’m mainly wanting to compare three products. There’s the Great Lakes Gelatin, Great Lakes Hydrolyzed Collagen, and Dave Asprey’s Upgraded Collagen. So for the purpose of healing gut permeability, is it much better to take Great Lakes Gelatin or Great Lakes Hydrolyzed Collagen? What would be the differences here if there are? Also, Dave states that unlike gelatin which is damaged by heat processing, his collagen leaves the peptide intact and provides more collagen than bone broth. Do you think that the upgraded collagen will provide much more of the benefit? Thanks for any help you guys can provide.
Ben: Well, you know what the ultimate question here is, Brock?
Brock: What’s that?
Ben: Which is better for getting nice, supple lips if you’re going to get plastic surgery, gelatin or collagen?
Brock: Hmm, yeah, the big kissable Angelina Jolie kind of lips.
Ben: Yeah! I love those huge lips, yeah!
Brock: She sure looks like a duck face all the time.
Ben: Duck face. Big lips. Mwah! Gelatin versus collagen.
Brock: That’s the most attractive moment of the entire podcast, ladies and gentlemen.
Ben: I think this is kinda confusing to some folks. So, first of all, the main difference when you look at gelatin versus collagen is just the processing. So we’ve talked about Great Lakes Gelatin before which is the brand of gelatin you can get off Amazon, it’s got the red label on it. And then they’ve also got Great Lakes, that’s this one with the green label that’s called just Collagen. And you’ll notice if you’ve used this that the Collagen will tend to basically dissolve in even a cold liquid pretty easily. So you can mix it in drinks and shakes and smoothies or ice cream or put a tablespoon in pretty much anywhere and it dissolves, and it doesn’t clump or produce this gelatinized effect.
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Whereas gelatin, unless you put it into something hot, generally what happens is as soon as it cools down, it makes a jello-like effect. That’s why they call it gelatin.
Brock: Does it taste like strawberries?
Ben: J-E-L-L-O. So…
Brock: Does it taste like the moon?
Ben: From a qualitative standpoint thus, they are basically the difference is that when you’re making collagen, let’s look at Great Lakes for example, so what Great Lakes does is they use grass-fed beef and they actually source grass-fed beef hides for their raw material for their gelatin products, And the way that gelatin and collagen is made is you split the hides and the hides is the area of an animal that’s under the hair where all the collagen is. I know this sounds really nasty but for any of you who use collagen whether it’s Dave Asprey’s Upgraded Collagen or Great Lakes Collagen or whatever, that’s where it’s coming from.
Brock: That’s what you’re eating.
Ben: So if you’re vegan or vegetarian, just know that it’s an animal hide. And what happens is for something like Great Lakes gelatin, what they do is they out that hide into what’s called an alkaline solution and they keep it in there for a number of days and that helps the material to get broken down into smaller pieces of skin which is again kinda gross to think about. So now we’ve got all this animal skin and it gets acid-washed and then put in these little cooking kettles and that separates the talo from the skin from the collagen. And then what happens is they filter the collagen and they put it through what’s called the vacuum evaporator. And that’s actually a pretty delicate process. It’s a little bit above 200 degrees. And it goes through this vacuum evaporator. And then after the collagen evaporates, they actually put it to this sanitation process at about 240, 250 degrees to kill off any bacteria and at that point, that is pure collagen. And then what they do from there is they take the collagen and turn it into what’s called collagen hydrolysate. And collagen hydrolysate gets heated to even higher temperatures with this process to reduce what’s called the molecular weight and that cleaves the amino acid bonds that’s called hydrolysis or using water at a high temperature to cleave all these bonds. And then it’s spray-dried, just like the eggs we were talking about earlier, at really high temperatures and pressures to be made into a dry powder. Now if you wanna go on and you want to have it become gelatin instead of collagen rather than putting it through that entire process that I just described, the hydrolysis and the cleaving and the spray-drying, instead what happens is it gets sent into something called a votator. Ever heard of a votator before?
Brock: I have not.
Ben: A votator is one of the most commonly used food apparatuses in the US and it’s kinda standard equipment in a lot of food labs and it’s basically – it allows for something to emulsify and kinda agitate it. It’s basically almost like a very fancy way to stir things up.
Brock: Is it like one of those paint shakers?
Ben: Kinda similar and kinda looks like that, too. But basically what happens is the collagen gets sent to a votator. It’s chilled, it’s solidified, it’s pumped on to a drying belt, and that’s gelatin. So that’s the difference between gelatin and hydrolysis. The primary difference being that collagen rather than being broken down by hydrolysis and heat and spray-drying, it just gets cooled. So technically the gelatin undergoes a lot less processing than the hydrolysis when we’re looking at something like Great Lakes for example as a product. And when you’re looking at something like the Upgraded Collagen, Dave Asprey’s Upgraded Collagen, well it actually is true that that stuff is a little – it’s more expensive but it’s a little bit healthier for you than the Great Lakes Collagen Hydrolysate because the Upgraded Collagen is broken down via an enzymatic process, they use enzymes rather than using a high amount of heat in the process that I talked about for hydrolysis. So technically you get a product that has a little less oxidation and it’s gone through a little less heat damaging. So you get a little bit better protein in that sense. And the whole reason that you’d wanna use any of this stuff anyways is because of what we talked about in last week’s podcast. You could go back and listen to podcast number 286. But we talked about glycine and how so many of the proteins that we eat these days such as just basic meat from steak it doesn’t include the high amounts of glycine and lysine and proline that you get in collagen and gelatin, and things like bone broth and bone marrow.
[0:35:07.2]
And of course if you can you should eat bone broth or bone marrow as a staple of your diet rather than with collagen or gelatin just because it doesn’t have any of the processing, it doesn’t need you to go through this enzymatic processing, hydrolysis, any amount of heating whatsoever, etc. but you can exactly put a vat of bone broth into your luggage and when you have a plane flight to Florida and it is sometimes not something that you might be able to go out of your way on a Sunday evening. And so if you just need to throw somethin’ or stir somethin’ into your smoothie really quickly to allow for benefits for your hair, your skin, or your muscle or your cartilage or your ligaments or your blood cells, all of which collagen can help with, that’s where it can come in handy just add some collagen powder like some collagen hydrolysed powder to a smoothie or a shake or if you want to – you know, like my wife will make little popsicles and stuff for the kids using gelatin. So that’s where these powders would come in handy and I’d say honestly if you wanted to really choose the least process form of collagen hydrolysate, go with upgraded collagen. If you don’t wanna go with that and you don’t mind having the gelatin that clumps at lower temperatures, then get that Great Lakes unflavored gelatin stuff and we’ll put links to both of those in the show notes over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/287 but of course I can’t emphasize enough that the best thing that you can do for your body ultimately is that you make your own home made bone broth. I think there’s a website where we can order bone broth. It’s like – I think it’s TheBrothery.com. Yeah! To me that sounds like a porn site or something… brothery.com. Let me check here… thebrothery.com they ship anywhere in the continental United States and it’s home-made bone broth. So, there you go thebrothery.com.
Brock: thebrothery.com.
Jenn: Hi Ben, my name is Jenn. I had a baby at the end of May, he’s 6 week old now. So, you can imagine I am up every 3 hours feeding him whether it’s day or night. So, I was wondering if there’s anything I can do or supplement I can take to help the little sleep that I do get to be more restorative and likewise if there’s anything I can do or take during the day to have more energy. I also have a 2 year old so taking that while the baby nap is really not an option. Thanks for your help. Love the show!
Ben: Jenn, just sleep. Children are very hardy; they will survive when left along for long periods of time. You know, babies will actually – they’ll become more tough, more resilient when you just leave them alone. So, go get your sleep, lock yourself in your room, put your white noise app on, let your baby cry… (laughs)
Brock: I am – if you’re wondering what I’m doing- I’m phoning child services right now with the other hand.
Ben: Yeah, seriously. Even though I’m definitely a fan of the whole like unstructured free play with kids, there’s a serious amount of very valuable attachment that occurs when children are young and you do need to get up and take care of them at multiple times and it is exhausting and the problem with of course being a new mother is that when you look at a lot of the let’s say the hacks that we talked about in this podcast like passion flower, magnesium and herbs and pulsed electro-magnetic field therapy and all these things that you can do. Well, first of all there is limited research on a lot of those things and breast milk and how much of that actually winds up in there for somebody’s hacks like pulsed electro-magnetic field and stuff like that. Not a lot of evidence on that type of thing and its effect on babies so what I think that Jenn should focus on are natural ways to get more sleep and have more energy. And I will put a link in the show notes to the two part article series that I written on getting better sleep, beating insomnia, managing jet lag. I’ve written pretty extensively about that on the podcast and I would definitely check that out if I were Jenn. But a few of the other things that you can do just to ensure – whether you’re a new mom or not if you just wanna use natural means without pulling out supplements or fancy bio hacks to get better sleep or to have more energy, I’ll give you some of my best tips.
Brock: This doesn’t include Quaaludes and red wine then?
Ben: No. No benzodiazepines or Phenibut. By the way, have you ever tried Phenibut for sleep?
Brock: No! I actually don’t know what that is.
Ben: It’s a sleep aid that actually used a lot of times in military situations where you gotta get quick periods of deep sleep, wake up and be able to operate at a high capacity.
[0:40:07.8]
I actually experimented with it a couple of times this month. It’s very interesting, you get this deep lucid dreaming and you wake up and you just like pop up out of bed and you’re good to go. The problem is it’s highly addictive and some people report beginning to experience significant mental disturbances during sleep at night like disturbed lucid dreaming with long term use but I just experimented a couple of times about 500 mg of Phenibut. I did definitely sleep like a rock, take about an hour or two before you go to bed at night but be careful with that stuff.
Brock: I wanna try some of that hemp oil.
Ben: And Jenn, don’t take Phenibut or feed it to your baby although hemp oil – that’s another interesting one. Yeah, listen to the podcast that we did if you’re listening in, listen to the podcast that we did on hemp oil extract. Not marijuana per se with the mind- altering effects of marijuana which I know I’m against. It’s just something that may not be practical for children or for new mothers but yeah, check out that episode, it’s interesting. So, off that segue now and back to Jenn, first of all Jenn – some of the big tips I can give you. Get the room cool that you’re sleeping in. The ideal range for the human body for adequate deep sleep is 65-70 degrees. That’s one of the first things that I do when I travel and I want deep sleep. I log into my hotel room and I turn down the temperature to 66, that’s my perfect sleeping temp and if it won’t go lower than 66, I call downstairs and they send engineering up to adjust my thermometer because some hotels just to save on money will keep it from going lower than like 68-70 and it just like a quick fix like they turn on the screwdriver and they make it able to go down lower than that. I keep the room at 66 for a nice cool sleeping. The next thing is if you’re able to use your bedroom for sleep and sex only, that’s ideal. So eliminate tv’s, laptops, electronics clutter, all of that stuff. It’s just basic sleep hygiene and I know that this might sound like boring and easy stuff but it does make a big, big difference when you make that decision not to take your laptop into your bedroom or only to allow your phone in your bedroom if it’s in airplane mode. It’s the little things that add up when it comes up to natural sleep and deeper amounts of sleep. Now of course Jenn doesn’t have to worry about alcohol and caffeine but of course both of those can affect sleep as well or keep sleep from being more restorative so be careful with that. Get yourself a nice – I like the sleep master sleep mask because it covers both your ears and your eyes, keeps things completely dark and you’d put that on while your asleep Jenn and then when you have to get up and you need to take care of the baby or open the refrigerator or tool around with the lights on in the house, do two things: first of all, wear some blue light blocking glasses, easy to find on a website like low blue lights or like the gunnar glasses. You can get off of the gunnar website, there’s any number of blue light blocking glasses that you can get but then also consider in your room or the light that you use as you’re up and around during the night. Using primarily light from the red light wave spectrum so you can get red light bulbs or red light flash lights or you can get red light infrared light therapy devices things like this off of Amazon and you can use those as the light source that you’re using at night. And that’s what I use. I’ve got a little red light bulb, cost me $10 off of Amazon that I keep next to my bed at night. When I need to get up during to use the bathroom, need to get a few things done and reading in my bed before I go to sleep at night, it’s only red light. I don’t have the light in my bedroom on at all, I just put that little external red light on and then if I need to get up and go to the kitchen where I don’t have that red light or I need to open the refrigerator to have my midnight snack of ice cream, I wear my blue light blocking glasses.
Brock: You don’t carry a little candle with you like Ebenezer Scrooge shuffling along…
Ben: I use the blue light glasses because those actually remove all the calories from the ice cream. People are aware of that little biohack.
Brock: Yes of course. We don’t know in fact.
Ben: Okay so, a few other things that I’d recommend to you as far as sleep goes. Little things like: deep breathing or meditation as well as journaling, all those little woo woo things. Those can definitely help you relax more quickly and get you into deep sleep more quickly. And so something as simple as closing your eyes and doing some box breathing like a nice four count in, four count hold, four count out for a couple of minutes after you’ve got enough and…
[0:45:03.9]
Brock: Box beating does not involve a box by the way.
Ben: No, you do not need to sit inside a little cardboard box as you do this.
Brock: Or don’t hold the box in front of your face.
Ben: Oh yes or anything like that. And then as far energy goes during the day, a few super duper natural things that you can do: one would be called water. I’m a big fan of a huge glass of cold water when you wake up in the morning and then if you need – even if you’re unable to say like jump into a cold showers, splash cold water on your face which are two great ways to get rid of lethargy, you’re being groggy. You can just drink a big glass of ice cold water and I’m a big fan of that for naturally boosting your energy. The other thing is sunlight or blue light exposure at some point during the day can help out quite a bit so you can – just like you can get red light devices, you can get blue light devices that emit blue light at certain points throughout the day such as in the morning when you get up; if you’re living in a gray area like Seattle or Portland or Siberia or Alaska…
Brock: …or Winnipeg.
Ben: The other thing that you could do is get out in the sunlight when you are up. Let say you’ve gotten four hours of sleep ‘cause you’ve been up and down with the baby, you wake up its, whatever, let’s say it’s 6:30 AM, you’re tired but you gotta get on with your day. You gotta take care of that 2 year old, you need to get up and get ready to take care of the baby once they wake up. Get out in the sunlight, just go outside, stand out there in your bare feet for a few minutes as you drink your glass of cold water and you can skip the coffee, you can skip the caffeine, skip the energy drinks, skip the smart drugs, and just use some of those natural techniques and you know I know that we talked about the herbs and the drugs and the electronics and stuff like that on this podcast but I mean some of those things just keep in the room cool, relaxing, de-stressing, having good sleep hygiene, drinking some cold water, getting some sunlight exposure, those are some natural ways that you could get better sleep and have more energy and those are great, too, because they’re not gonna affect your kids, they’re not gonna affect your breast milk. So, those are some of the things that I do.
Joe: Hey Ben, I have a question. I have a new personal trainer and he’s suggesting that I use the foam roller thing and it hurts when I foam roll. He says that after a while it won’t hurt anymore and the benefit will outweigh the pain I’m going through foam rolling with the foam rollers so I want your opinion on it. Thank you.
Brock: Joe, it does get easier.
Ben: It does get easier Joe.
Brock: It really, really does. It gets worst before I get seizure or it gets better but it does get better.
Ben: Yeah, you’re hurt like a mother before it gets easier Joe. It just gonna…
Brock: And you look like an idiot while you’re getting use to it too. It’s just stashing out on the floor, falling off your foam roller.
Ben: As you grimace and hump that foam roller. Foam rolling is something that I personally do at least twice a week. Brock is one of the athletes that I coach. He knows that foam rolling appears as a requirement on his schedule at least a couple of times a week and that’s typically a full body foam rolling session. We don’t even mess around with those sissy foam rollers that you see at the gym. We go straight to this one called the Rumble Roller which has all these sharp pointy ridges coming off it which just make it all the more masochistic.
Brock: It’s actually made of iron; it’s not foam at all. It’s an iron roller.
Ben: Yeah, yeah and if you push the little button on the side, little needles come out of the ridges just to enhance that effect and make you all the more tough. So basically, it starts with trigger points. Trigger points are these knots that formed in your muscles and a common example of that would be like your IT band on the outside of your leg. If you have a trigger point in that muscle and you’re foam rolling your IT band, it causes this pain and discomfort, kinda radiate up your hip or even all the way down to your leg while you’re rolling, you know, it will sometimes radiate literally like down to your feet and the reason that you’re doing the foam rolling is to get rid of a lot of these trigger points to release them. Now, when you just stretch, that doesn’t release muscle tightness, it doesn’t release trigger points and when if you imagine like a rope with a knot tied into it and then you stretch that rope, all it does is it creates tension and it makes that not even tighter. So, what foam rolling does is it breaks up muscle knots with direct pressure and with direct tension. So you get – it resumes basic normal blood flow oxygen delivery, nutrient delivery that would normally be interrupted to a muscle tissue as well as allowing for increase range of emotion that you normally wouldn’t get because of the formation of those knots. When you compress something it’s basically just like tenderizing meat, just like taking out a steak and hitting it with a hammer, rolling with the rolling pin, it’s gonna be more tender and more supple but that process does hurt because trigger points are these knotted areas of connective tissue and fascial adhesions and there’s nerve fibers that are getting hit and there’s…
[0:50:13.9]
…pressure your body – your body interprets pressure in a very similar way as it interprets pain. These nociceptors are stimulated along with pressure receptors in very similar way so you can feel pain and pressure as the same sensation often. The more foam rolling that you do and this is gonna sound really simple but the fewer trigger points you’re gonna have the more connective tissues suppleness you’re gonna have and the less it’s gonna hurt as time goes on but you will have periods of time that you go through in your life where no matter how much you foam roll, you’ll finish a long run and you’re gonna have fascial adhesion and you’re gonna have knots, you’re gonna have trigger points that simply are gonna hurt no matter what. I have certain areas in my body that I know even though I foam roll twice a week, if I’ve done a tough workout they’re always gonna hurt usually it’s the outside of my hips, my piriformis and the front of my leg a little bit. Sometimes the underside of my armpit if I’ve been swimming a lot but…
Brock: In study, even hard work out like after a day of sitting on the desk, working on a computer, it really hurts to roll out my shoulders and my neck.
Ben: Yup, exactly and you’ll also need to consider that this is something that you need to be in for the long run because it can take literally a year and a half to two years to realign connective tissue and realign fascia. That’s why, for example if you start weight training and you stop your weight training program or you stop certain exercises, you’re never gonna get very good at those specific movements especially things like dead lifts and squats and overhead presses. You have to have done those consistently in your workout routine for a year and a half or two before your body actually starts to become extremely efficient at those movements. And it’s the same with something like fascial adhesions or fascial quality. It takes a long time for fascia to realign and the longer you’ve been beating up your body with things like running or cycling or poor posture on your computer at work the longer it’s gonna take to realign and re-train that fascia. So, foam rolling is something that you’ll be in for the long haul but yes, it eventually does to get a little bit easier to move over and around the foam roller and eventually the general pain and general hurt the whole time is replaced by a little bit more of a therapeutic feeling with a few little grimaces here and there as you hit certain knots. Ultimately what I do – if you go to youtube.com/bengreenfieldfitness you will be able to type in foam roller and you’ll see some of my key foam rolling exercises, me demonstrating them. The specific moves that I like to do is kinda like staples in my program. My protocol is pretty much like I foam roll twice a week for 15-20 minutes, when I travel I travel with a lacrosse ball and because I travel about one to two weeks for any given month, I will use that period of time to hit deeper areas or areas of the foam roller can’t get. When I get back home, I get back into the foam rolling practice but I just used basically those two methods of deep tissue therapy. The reason it hurts is ‘cause you’re releasing fascia and you’re hitting some of those knots and it does get easier.
KJ: This is KJ from NJ. What is more sanitary- the water fountain or the water faucet at the gym? A lot of people say you shouldn’t drink out of the water fountain. What if I want to use the water from the water faucet in the locker room, would that be better from the sanitation standpoint? Love your show and will look forward to your advice. Thanks!
Brock: KJ is definitely one of those guys who doesn’t put his mouth right on the water fountain, I’m guessing.
Ben: I do, I literally get right down on that while – I like the metallic taste.
Brock: Hmm, yeah. I like to pretend it’s a nipple.
Ben: Uhmm, yeah exactly. Yeah, that’s a little messed up. Maybe some….
Brock: Sorry about that.
Ben: …Freudian issues going on there that you need to work out.
Brock: I shouldn’t have said that all.
Ben: So, they’ve actually looked at the sanitation and amounts of bacteria on water fountains and come up with some shocking amounts of bacteria like more bacteria than the surface of a toilet seat when you’re looking at like the spigot at somebody’s fountain. So what actually did in one study was – back in 2005, the National Sanitation Foundation tested various areas around two different elementary schools for bacteria content. They found that the most bacteria-laden area in the entire school wasn’t the bathroom but the water fountain. So the water fountain had 2.7 million bacteria cells per square inch which was like thousands more than any other area they tested and that came in number one.
[0:55:03.0]
The toilet incidentally came in number eight. I’m not sure what all was in between the water fountain and the toilet. I’m sure maybe other children, books or the floor was probably mixed in there somewhere but ultimately water fountain ruled as number one. And then there was a more informal study that kinda hit the news a few years ago as actually back in 2007 were this elementary school student tested four different water fountains and one toilet around the school using cotton swabs and petri dishes and it kinda backed up the results from the National Sanitation Foundation that show that the fountains had way more bacteria than the toilets and the toilets were actually surprisingly clean. Then there was one other study that was done where they looked at supermarkets and looked at the floors of supermarkets. Then they also tested parks and park sandboxes and what they found was that water fountains in both parks as well as supermarkets had more bacteria than the floors and the sandboxes. The interesting thing here is that when you look at the actual water itself and you test the water coming out of the fountain, it’s relatively free of bacteria because the water comes out of that spout in like this ark and that prevents it from actually touching the spigot. When you look at a water cooler where the water goes straight down and they’ve tested the water from water coolers that actually has the higher bacterial content because typically people put their water bottles or their glasses right up against that spigot which is pouring downwards and it’s actually probably cleaned less than the spigot of a water fountain and you get the most bacteria in the actual water that you’re drinking from like an office water cooler than you would from like an upward spouting water fountain. So ultimately, I drink from the water fountain at the gym. I don’t use that little water cooler that pours down into my water bottle that a lot of gyms have nowadays. I use the water fountain. I don’t wrap my mouth around the metallic spigot. I make sure I let the water run for about 5 seconds before I start to drink from the spout of water that’s coming out. Ultimately, I don’t worry about it too much. There is this whole healthy hygiene hypothesis to where – if we live life in a bubble we’re never getting exposed to bacteria and our immune systems are never gonna develop but ultimately even the water fountains still have a lot of germs on them. The actual water itself is not that big of a deal. You know what’s more annoying to me – this is like my pet peeve. We’ve got two water fountains at our gym, you’ve got the normal one and the one that’s low like the one that’s kinda sort of for kids or short people or whatever. I walk up to the water fountain and there will be a line of people waiting for the water fountain that’s at normal height and nobody wants to bend down. Reminder – this is at the freakin’ gym. Nobody wants to bend down and drink from the short water fountain. Nobody wants to squat down at the gym and drink from the lower water fountain. So…
Brock: Or taking the elevator at the gym…
Ben: Yeah, it’s nuts. That’s my big pet peeves. I’m just like –or I’ll be drinking from the tall water fountain ‘cause I walk up and if I have a choice I’ll go for the tall one if there’s no main line there and people start to stand up in line behind me and give me these looks like hurry up when the short water fountain is sittin’ right there. So yeah, it’s my pet peeve, it’s my rant for the day. Drink from the short fountain, people.
Brock: I get way more angry with the people who push the handicaps wheelchair button on the doors when they’re clearly not handicap or have any issues at all. That’s the ultimately lazy move.
Ben: Yes, yes that too.
Brock: They should be ashamed of themselves.
Ben: Although I use the handicap bathroom at airports because I go in to those bathrooms and I do workouts in them and I am that guy who is using the handicap bathroom for workouts.
Brock: That’s okay as long as there’s no handicap people waiting, crossing their legs and dancing.
Ben: There has been one time where I walked out of the bathroom after doing my push-ups and my squats and my jumping jacks, and there was a lady there with her two kids in the stroller crying giving me this really annoyed look ‘cause I came out of the bathroom and was obviously a young fit dude using the handicap bathroom at the airport and I felt bad for a little while but I still do it.
Brock: Yeah, I’m sure you and the lady both got over it quite quickly.
Ben: Yes.
Brock: Anyway…
Ben: Speaking of the handicap bathroom at the airports, we have a swag to give out for people.
Brock: Yes and that’s very related.
Ben: Clue. How that segue actually works.
Brock: By the way, we got two emails now wanting to correct you. It’s pronounced segue.
[1:00:00.8]
Ben: Segue. What did I say?
Brock: Sedg-way.
Ben: That’s because I read, I don’t actually talk to people. I just read so I pronounce words in my head. For the longest time when I was reading, I would read the word “misled” as “misled”. I talked to people when I was in high school for the longest time and I would use this word “misled”, I’ll be “He totally misled us”, “What do you mean – misled?” and eventually I learn that it is actually pronounced “misled” but that’s how bad I am with reading words vs. saying them.
Brock: This is the danger of being anti-social.
Ben: Uhmm, yeah okay, so segue. First of all, gear. You can support this podcast if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/gear and for $47 you get this awesome tech t-shirt – that’s not this big cotton tent but an actual cool exercise t-shirt that looks good on you. It makes your body looks better. You actually don’t need to exercise by the way if you wear the Ben Greenfield fitness t-shirt. You just put on the t-shirt and…
Brock: It’s extremely slimming!
Ben: Exactly. You can put on the t-shirt over a bikini and people will tell you, you have an awesome body. It even does that. So, you also get a guilt-free, BPA-free Ben Greenfield fitness water bottle that you can drink eggs from and you get a sweet beanie. We by-pass the hat and we went straight to the beanie which looks awesome.
Brock: Which you could store eggs in.
Ben: That’s right! So, you can get all that over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/gear and support the show when you do that and it does indeed support the show. We got to pay for bandwidth, we got to pay for hosting fees and for $47 you get that pack and you get awesome swag and you support the show. But you also can get free swag just send to you if you leave a review on iTunes and we read your review on the podcast. We have some swag to give away right now to somebody who left us a review on iTunes. So, you wanna dig in, Brock?
Brock: Yeah, it’s an incredibly short but sweet review this week by Pagelpack. Pagelpack says…
Ben: Hmm, almost name for my kids, pagelpack. My wife calls me Pagelpack.
Brock: Give me a pagelpack. Anyway, “Very informative podcast, I really like how he takes the time to create a special webpage for each podcast with links, notes, and Q and A answers”.
Ben: Yeah, well Brock and I actually tag team that. I’d like to take all the credit for that. You know what, that’s what a lot of people I think – if you’re listening in, you may not realize this but we go through painstakingly long efforts to create enormously helpful show notes for you and we link to each of those show notes with the number for the podcast. So right now if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/287, I’ve got everything from some of the collagen links, to the foam roller, to my two-part series on getting better sleep, to all the studies that we talked about, to the cartoon on running, like we let you be super lazy. You just go there and click away. Just click, click, click, click, click.
Brock: Just click to your heart’s content.
Ben: Clicking frenzy. That’s all over on the show notes so thank you.
Brock: And what’s even better if you wait a couple of weeks after the show has been around for a while, you can go to those same show notes and click on a link to a transcript of everything that we said.
Ben: That’s right! We take care of you – our valued listeners. So, check that out and thank you Pagelpack. Email [email protected] and we’ll get a pack of swag out for you to pack.
Brock: Oh! Pagelpack of swag!
Ben: Pack along with your pagels. I’m packin’, I’m packin’ a press of pagels.
Brock: As long as they’re gluten-free pagels.
Ben: Hmm, that’s right. So, the last thing that I wanted to mention other than that is – I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago but I’m gonna mention it again because it’s a podcast I’ve been diggin’ quite a bit recently. I don’t talk about a lot of other podcast on the show because of course ours is the best but there’s another podcast that’s a close second– it’s my friend Jordan’s Art of Charm podcast and it’s not just about seducing women although I think you can probably find a little bit of information on there about seducing women.
Brock: …and seducing men.
Ben: Sorry, my apologies to ladies listening in. I’m kinda joking. It’s actually doesn’t have any kind of stuff on it at all. Just about the name. It’s about how both men and women can be more charming and it’s got a bunch of resources and practical tips and drills to do things like manage relationships and network, and take your life to the next level and pretty much every area except for health – that’s where I come in. So, go check out the Art of Charm podcast, it’s somewhere on iTunes. I let you take it from there but I bet you can hunt it down with the information I’ve just given you. So Art of Charm, check that out and go have some eggs.
Brock: Definitely! I need some eggs.
Visit bengreenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness, nutrition, and performance advice.
[1:05:47.0] END
July 9, 2014 Podcast: What Is The Best Way To Eat Eggs, Gelatin vs. Collagen, Better Sleep for New Mothers, Foam Roller 101, and Germs on Water Fountains.
Have a podcast question for Ben? Click the tab on the right, use the Contact button on the app, click Ask a Podcast Question at the bottom of this page, Skype “pacificfit” or use the “Ask Ben” form…but be prepared to wait – we prioritize audio questions over text questions.
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News Flashes:
You can get these News Flashes hot off the presses if you follow Ben on Twitter.com/BenGreenfield, Facebook.com/BGFitness and Google+.
- You may want to actually run *behind* (AKA Draft) the person in front of you in your next triathlon, 5K, 10K or marathon.
- The do’s and don’ts of running your first marathon. Hilarious.
- Ever wondered how a green banana or stick of butter could make you smarter?
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Special Announcements:
The Rock Star Triathlete Academy has relaunched with a lifestyle membership card! Click here for all details.
Check out the Ironman Sports Medicine conference in October during Ironman Hawaii. Ben will be speaking on nutrition myths and alternative methods of fueling Ironman.
Go ask your burning Obstacle Racing questions at http://www.ObstacleDominator.com for the brand new Obstacle Dominator podcast.
Grab this Official Ben Greenfield Fitness Gear package that comes with a tech shirt, a beanie and a water bottle. And of course, this week’s top iTunes review – gets some BG Fitness swag straight from Ben – leave your review for a chance to win some!
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Listener Q&A:
As compiled, deciphered, edited and sometimes read by Brock Skywalker Armstrong, the Podcast Sidekick and Audio Ninja.
What Is The Best Way To Eat Eggs?
Andrew asks: He is following a hypertrophy diet right now and is eating 4 eggs cooked in coconut oil every day for breakfast. He likes his eggs scrambled but has heard that scrambling eggs can introduce oxygen that along with the heat from cooking, can oxidize the cholesterol in the eggs and create free radicals that are detrimental to health. What is the best way to eat eggs?
Gelatin vs. Collagen
Gelatin asks: He is wanting to use something other than bone broth to heal his gut. Which would be the best substitute: Great Lakes Gelatin, Great Lakes Hydrolyzed Collagen or Upgraded Collagen. What would be the differences? Is there any truth to Dave Asprey’s claims that his collagen is produced in a way that leaves the peptides intact and provides more collagen than bone broth.
Better Sleep for New Mothers
Jenn asks: She just had a baby 6 weeks ago (and also has a 2 year old). Needless to say she is not getting good sleep at night and is not able to nap during the day. Is there anything she can take/do at night to help the little sleep she does get be more restorative? Or is there something she can use during the day to have more energy?
In my response I recommend:
–My two part series on getting better sleep.
Foam Roller 101
Joe asks: His personal trainer has been telling him to foam roll but he finds it very painful. His trainer says it will get easier and hurt less with time. What is your opinion and how/why does it get easier and less painful?
In my response I recommend:
–Rumble Roller
Germs on Water Fountains
KJ asks: What is more sanitary? The water fountain or the water faucet at the gym? He has heard that you shouldn’t drink out of a water fountain but is it any more sanitary to use the faucet in the locker room instead?
Hey Ben – Just a quick observation regarding the 'drafting effect' — I'm going to guess that at least a portion of the non-aero benefit of drafting (running or cycling or indeed a number of other activities) is that the drafter's brain can lock onto and replicate the movement at a subconscious level, thereby reducing perceived fatigue.
I have nerve damage in one leg which makes my stride ungainly, but it instantly improves if I can trail someone and let mimicry take over. I expect this is a learning pathway that drafting plugs into, and in future we'll see a lot more training that employs watching an ideal stride/pedal motion/whatever while on the go.
Congrats on Kona and best to your family, Kiki
Very cool! Thanks for the insight, Kiki.
Hey Ben,
You mentioned in this episode that coconut oil has a low smoke point. Many state that it has a high smoke point can you explain the confusion?
Cheers,
Angelo
Some coconut oils have “stabilizers” added to it to help with the smoke point and that could be where the confusion comes from. This is the chart I use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_point