March 21, 2013
Podcast #234 from
https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2013/03/234-how-much-water-do-you-really-need-to-drink-each-day/
[0:00:00.0]
Introduction: In today’s episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast: How much water do you really need to drink each day? Also, how to get rid of varicose veins; the difference between protein and amino acids; fueling a 10-day camping trip; what causes hives; and how many hours a week should you lift weights?
Brock: Hey Ben! I got a question for you.
Ben: Yow.
Brock: I know it’s not the usual early, early, ridiculously early time of day for you, but I gotta ask, did you have a smooth silky glorious morning movement this morning?
Ben: I did. I followed my own advice, Brock.
Brock: You had a glorious movement, Baby?
Ben: Yeah. That was like Austin Powers. I’m sure that you’re referring to the recent podcast with the aptly named Certified Health Nut, Troy Casey, that we released…
Brock: Wait.
Ben: Go ahead.
Brock: You did a podcast about poop?
Ben: Yeah. You didn’t hear it?
Brock: No. I just assumed.
Ben: That’s just how you start a conversation, anyways. Yeah. We geeked out on the best ways to get stuff moving smoothly and and he had his take on it, I had my take on it. We put it on podcast, on a post. So, there you have it. Folks can go listen in but yeah…
Brock: You put it on a post.
Ben: I talked about how to…(we put it on a post).
Brock: When you’re talking about poop, you, just putting it on a post sounds wrong.
Ben: We talked about how to nuke your colon and all that stuff and I even, at some point this week, tweeted a video because one of our listeners, Joe, he got a squatty potty sent to his house and said that it was the best thing that ever happened to him since his wedding day. So there you go.
Brock: Oh dear!
Ben: Really bad wedding day or really nice poop.
News Flashes:
Brock: Okay. This is the time of the podcast where Ben tells us what the heck he’s talking about everyday on Twitter, on Facebook and on Google+ when he puts those crazy studies up there that we’re just supposed to be able to understand.
Ben: I’ll do my best, man. And by the way, if people get bored when I’m talking about the latest news, I mean, let us know. We can certainly cut this section out but I’m hoping it’s helping somebody other than me feel like I have some justification for reading studies and geeking out on them. So I’m going to assume that folks are hitting the “fast forward” button. But if you are, let us know because I’m gonna talk about some of the things that were big in the whole health and fitness realm this week. Now, one of the first things was this idea behind these brand new concepts of only ever for the rest of your life, drinking one form of liquid food in its raw chemical form called soylent. Did you hear about this, Brock?
Brock: I saw you tweet about it but I didn’t follow the link ‘cause I was terrified that it was made from people.
Ben: Crazy. This guy, he noted that the whole food market is full of waste in regulation and biased allocation with geopolitical implications yadayadayada…so he’s like, well, I’m just going to make my own food out of a basic number of chemicals that you could buy from a website or formulate yourself and make it, like, the perfect food for the human body. And so he did. And he started to track his biomarkers as he did so. So he was tracking his weight, he was tracking his basic blood panel, (not really detailed blood panel) like triglycerides and cholesterol. He was tracking his running progress and then his energy levels in terms of how he felt what his appetite was like. And he was noting this big boost in performance and according to him, his blood biomarkers were looking a little bit better, although I have my own thoughts on that. And he started to basically sell the stuff online. I think it’s at soylent.me or something like that. I’ll put a link to this guy’s article in the show notes. And I have my own thoughts on this, which we’ll get to in a second. But it’s just a mix of a bunch of stuff.
[0:05:01.8]
He’s got carbohydrates, protein, fats (he didn’t put any cholesterol at all in it), some fiber, some copper chromium mineral, some vitamins like vitamin D and stuff like that. It looks like he’s going after like the minimum recommended allowance for most of this stuff and basically, turns into this liquid blend. And he’s even willing to ship people a free batch if they’re willing to get a complete blood count and a chem panel and a lipid blood test and bonus points for getting a psych eval after they’ve used this stuff only and no food. So, my thoughts on this…
Brock: I’m very curious, what the heck it tastes like because if that’s the only thing you’re going to eat for the rest of your life, it better taste like (I don’t know) something amazing.
Ben: Yeah. So here’s…
Brock: At least, chocolate.
Ben: Yeah. Exactly. Chocolates and peanut butter. The idea of being simple and not having a lot of variety in your diet is not necessarily bad. There’s actually another study that just came out this week that showed that more variety can actually cause you to get fatter because it’s harder to keep track of what you’re eating, how many calories, where your dietary foodstuff is coming from. And I know, for me, if I stick to a pretty predictable diet throughout the week, I do better in terms of my body composition and my energy and stuff like that. But this takes things to a whole another level.
Brock: Yeah. This is beyond consistency. This is exactly the same thing everyday, not just sort of the same thing or the same types of meals everyday.
Ben: Yeah. First of all, the omission of cholesterol is huge. Cholesterol, you look at Paul Jaminet’s perfect health diet (we’ve had him on this podcast), there’s a reason that mommy’s breast milk is like, whatever it comes out to, like 60-70% fat-based and much of that cholesterol, because it’s crucial. And there’s none of that in there so he’s gonna be looking down the road at fatty acid deficiencies and a lot of stuff on a bigger level that a lot of vegans and vegetarians have to kinda deal with but other way, way bigger level. The doses…
Brock: Can’t your body synthesize cholesterol from other fats?
Ben: Your body can do that but you do need some dietary sources of cholesterol. That’s a good point, Brock. Your body can synthesize cholesterol from some fats but his fat sources exclusively from olive oil, which is mostly oleic acid on a mixed source of fats. And so the fatty acid ratio is off. There’s no saturated fats such as you’d find in coconut oil. There’s no gamma linoleic acid. There’s no arachidonic acid. You can’t synthesize all the fatty acids that you need from one single oleic acid fat source.
Brock: Gotcha.
Ben: Vitamin D is the only 400 international units and yes, that’s the RDA but most folks need a lot more than that. There’s no vitamin K in there. There’s very few trace elements like boron, for example, in there, which, for guys, is really, really important for testosterone and stuff like that. The carb source is malto dextrin, which has a, frankly, very high glycemic index, which is why it’s in most sports beverages but he’s gonna be spiking his blood glucose every single time he sucks down a bunch of malto dextrin. Protein in this, if you were to dose at the doses that he’s recommending you would come out like 50 grams a day, which is enough to cause you to not have muscle wasting happen but not much past that. So you can’t really be exercising and stuff as you’re on this and if for exercising individuals, the exclusion of stuff like creatine and nitric oxide precursors and choline and a lot of this other stuff you’re gonna find naturally in meat, none of that’s in there as well. So you’re gonna miss out on all that. And then a lot of stuff he puts in there is superfoods like ginseng and gingko and stuff. It’s a super, super low, low microgram-based doses, way less than what you’d actually need. Ultimately, I think that this guy might feel pretty good and just about anybody would feel pretty good switching from a standard American diet to the almighty soylent but I’m not gonna be drinking any anytime soon whether you pay me or not.
Brock: Yeah. That’s a terrible name. I know he’s probably doing a tongue in cheek but I just can’t help but think it’s made from people and that’s just not good.
Ben: Soylent green.
Brock: Chalton Heston to come and as the stuff. Anyway, not made from people but it’s not made for people either.
Ben: That’s right.
Brock: Let’s move along.
Ben: I’m gonna talk about showers now so you can feel all clean. Usually, when we talk about showers, we talk about cold thermogenesis and all that crap and I’m not going to harp on that.
[0:10:04.1]
I wanna talk about photon showers and I don’t know if you saw this but Delta Airlines unveiled a special photon shower this month at the Ted Conference in Long Beach. And basically, what it comes down to is, they are bombarding you with natural light to reset your circadian rhythm and trying to put this in literally a photon shower that you could step into at an airport or in a lounge and get this blue light…
Brock: If there’s anything I learned from Star Trek is, that’s a bad idea.
Ben: ‘Cause you might get teletransported somewhere?
Brock: Well, the photon torpedoes were not things you wanna expose yourself to.
Ben: Well, I would imagine that these are relatively low level photon emissions. It comes down to the fact that you have these photo receptors in your eyes that you don’t even use to see stuff – they’re just used to detect light and they’re tied intimately to your circadian rhythm – to your master clock. So what you do in one of these chambers is (they’re called photosensitive retinal ganglion cells – these cells at the back of your eye that can only see light, not vision) this thing just hits you with a bunch of blue light that basically resets your circadian clock from whatever area that you’ve arrived into and so the idea is, you get rid of jet lag. It’s similar to the idea like I’ve talked before (I’ll link to it in the show notes) like the blue light box that you could put on your desk in the morning. It’s called the Nature Bright Sun Touch that emits blue light. It’s the reason that I go out every single morning and try and look directly into sunlight or somewhere near direct sunlight so that I start up my circadian rhythm, jumpstart my cortisol, stuff like that. Same reason that if you can go outside when you fly into a new area, it can help to reset your master clock, that along with a little bit of grounding and earthing and kinda making sure that your feet touch the ground. Pretty interesting that they’re making it into a waterless photon shower.
Brock: So you don’t get clean at the same time as getting awake. You just get awake.
Ben: Yeah. I believe that you just get awake. But I don’t know. It could be a good hot date. Take your next date in to the photon shower and see how that works out for you. Getting it on the photon shower. The last thing that I wanted to mention was somebody sent me over a link to this discussion that’s going on about thyroid and whether or not endurance training can affect your thyroid hormone production. And this is something that I’m kinda geeking out on right now, not only because I’m writing this book on the trade-off between performance and health – the trade-off between training and health, but also because I’m writing an article for Lava Magazine right now on the idea of calorie density and nutrient density and how important that is for people who are training so that they don’t put themselves into this state of hormonal depletion. And one of your hormones, of course, is thyroid. The original article that sparked the controversy about this was written by John Kiefer and we’ve talked about him on the show before. He’s the guy who’s into the whole carb loading protocol, which, no surprise, is a popular diet because you eat a bunch of pizza and potatoes and carbs at night and stuff your face. His article is about carb loading. It was about how chronic levels of exercise may actually deplete your T3 levels and lead to a throttling of your metabolism and your cellular efficiency. And he cites a billion studies to support what he’s saying. On another blog, this guy named Alex Hutchinson, who we’ve talked about before, he runs a really good blog called Sweat Science, he basically, delved into these studies a little bit more. And he found some interesting things like for example, you only really experience a significant drop in thyroid production when you are combining endurance training or high intensity interval training with caloric restriction. And so, that’s kind of the one two combo that has to be present.
Brock: Yeah. We talked about that a couple of weeks ago on the show – the combination.
Ben: Yeah. Exactly. And another issue is that, for example, the drop in T3 (thyroid production hormone) that can occur with intense bouts of exercise that are happening all at once, what happens is you can see a dip but if you follow it for several weeks, it begins to rise back up. It’s like your metabolism bounces back after that initial message to your body that it might need to down-regulate metabolism.
[0:15:04.0]
Another thing is that you gotta look at the difference between a short-term study and a long-term study. Another issue is that when you exercise, you simply metabolize T3 a lot faster and so some of these studies that look at what’s called T3 Kinetics, which is how quickly you metabolize T3. One of the reasons that you would see T3 disappearing more quickly in an exercising individual compared to a sedentary individual, is just the fact that we metabolize hormones more quickly (period), which is why it’s important to do things like include seaweed in your diet like iodine from nori. I personally use a bunch of nori wraps. We could use Kelp or Dolci or Kombu or any of these other really, really good sources of iodine along with selenium from stuff like raw Brazil nuts, for example. But the idea is that, yeah, you certainly can draw all of these famous runners like Alberto Salazar and Paula Radcliff and Ryan Hall and folks who have been known to have had diagnosed thyroid problems and you could probably blame the majority of what’s going on with them on a combination of endurance training and caloric depletion – intense caloric restriction to really get as skinny as possible to win a bunch of money in a race, for example. That’s one of those deals where you’re making that health vs. performance trade-off to put food on the table. But for most of us, as long as we’re eating enough food to support our training, the thyroid issue is not one that we necessarily need to worry about, I would say, as much as some of the other hormones that tend to take bigger hits like testosterone and estrogens and cortisol, and things of that nature.
Special Announcements:
Brock: All right. It looks like you and the fat-burning man have been keeping yourselves pretty busy lately.
Ben: We have. I actually put this out on a podcast. He and I did a really, really quick 3-minute podcast that, if you’re subscribed to this, you probably already heard where we talked about our favorite fat-burning workout. But he and I created this website called The Lean Lifestyle Insider, where we’ve got over 4 hours of video and audio and a bunch of transcripts and resources and all this stuff to teach people exactly what we do – each of us in our own respective way, to keep our bodies in fat-burning mode all day long.
Brock: So it’s not just talking about being in ketosis constantly?
Ben: No. It’s not. And there is no pooping involved, I promise. I think I hold the squatty potty at one point. But anyways, yeah, my version of it is over at leanlifestyleinsider.com/b. The only difference between my version and his version is if you don’t go to “B”, then I don’t get paid. But yeah, it’s over at leanlifestyleinsider.com/b. And we really tried to over deliver. We spent several weeks putting this together. It’s a one-time 47 bucks and you basically get a ticket to access it for the rest of all time. And it’s just kinda some cool practical stuff where we go over our whole breakfast and morning routine, our whole lunch and midday routine, our afternoon and our workouts and then our evening/bedtime routine. And it’s just real in-the-trenches stuff. So I highly recommend, folks, check it out. I think it’s a good…let’s put it this way, if it wasn’t me on the video, I’d buy it. So there you go.
Brock: All right. That’s a good sign. You seem to be in the mood for webinars so you’ve got a couple of inner circle webinars coming up, too.
Ben: I do. This again, I don’t wanna get all salesy. I promise, the special announcements will be short here. But we’re doing 2 webinars this month in the inner circle. One is April 6th and it’s called How to Create Superhuman Kids where we’re gonna talk about what our kids eat, how we get them to eat what they eat, how our kids exercise, what supplements our kids take, how to optimize sleep patterns in kids, basically, how to maximize a kid’s health and performance and vitality. I’ve got my kids doing bear crawls around the house and kettlebell swings and medicine balls slams.
Brock: Oh! Did you get them the kettlebells?
Ben: Oh yeah. Exactly. We’ve only had one minor fatality with the kettlebells, so far. I had the Ts and the stop at shoulder height, not to go above their heads. They just turned 5 yesterday actually, and they’re doing a lot of stuff and we’ve got them eating the right way, too but they still enjoy life. They don’t feel like they’re in a Siberian Salt Mine prison. We teach you how you, too can have children who aren’t in Siberian Salt Mine prisons.
Brock: Very nice.
Ben: And that is on Saturday, April 6th. That’s for Inner Circle members. It’s 10 bucks a month to be in the Inner Circle and it is really the best 10 bucks a month you’ll ever gonna spend because you, pretty much, have full access to me and my wife, Jessa and you can ask us anything anytime. It’s one big family in there.
[0:20:21.1]
We respond. We talk about stuff that we’ve talked about on podcast and kinda delve into it a little bit more. You get to see what we’re eating. You get access to all the webinars we’ve done in the past like healthy travel tips and time management secrets, even little things like how to make your own bone broth, how to make your own coconut milk, stuff like that. I’m also doing in April, kind of a bonus webinar for the Inner Circle called Ask Me Anything about Minimalist Triathlon Training because right now, I’m training for Ironman Canada. My goal’s to do it on 6-9 hours of training per week. Nobody hit that double digit training week and I’m gonna open it up and let folks ask me anything about the tips and techniques and tools that I’m using for that. Both of those are this month’s Inner Circle webinars. Again, I don’t wanna get all salesy but I get excited when I got this stuff that I think is really good helpful content that’s available literally for 10 bucks a month. And I think that’s a Sliman deal, if you ask me.
Brock: It’s a steal of a deal.
Listener Q & A:
Chris: Hey Ben! I’ve a question about veins for you. I’ve noticed over the past few months that I had these veins that have been popping out both of my shoulders and in one of my biceps. They’re kind of like varicose veins just not a severe that is zig zaggy looking. I just wanna know: are these bad? Can I get something, maybe take something or out something on them to make them clear up and turn into regular veins or am I just screwed? If you know anything about it, help me out. I’ll appreciate it. Thanks.
Ben: Well, Brock, I’ve got one word for Chris and that would be “laser”. A laser on a shark would be even better. That’d be one way to get rid of your varicose veins.
Brock: Then if you miss this with the laser, you just bite your shoulder off and get it done.
Ben: Yeah. You gotta kinda understand like which treatments are gonna work. You have to understand what causes varicose veins in the first place. I’ll link to another podcast in the show notes that we did on varicose veins but it’s just a circulatory issue. Your veins carry blood from whatever parts of your body – your arms, your legs, etc., back to your heart and when you’re talking about the legs, which is actually where most people get varicose veins, the muscles in your legs squeeze you veins and push the blood back up towards your heart and so you have valves that stop that blood that’s going back up towards your heart from following the pull of gravity back down towards your feet or down towards your arms, if we’re talking about valves in the shoulder area. And when the valves wear out or they’ve got a lot of pressure on them, whether due to age or weight or pregnancy or lots of shoulder presses or something like that or even lots of time on your feet, the blood can get trapped in and enlarge the veins. And so once you know what’s causing them, there are some things that you can do. First of all, I do wanna throw out that I’m not joking about the lasers. In many cases when we’re not talking about a body part that you can actually elevate per se (it’s already elevated and above the heart and a body part that already has some amount of muscle tone and good circularity and vascularity such as in the shoulders and in the bicep), sometimes, you gotta take lasers to that kind of stuff, if it is a varicose vein.
Brock: I’d actually know somebody who may or may not be my mother who actually had some varicose veins and have to try laser and it was amazing, the difference. It was really very, very effective and quick.
Ben: And now the whole world knows Brock’s mom’s medical issues.
Brock: Yeah. Sorry, mom. She doesn’t mind.
Ben: Well, our moms are probably 50% of our audience. So we just lost 25%. No, we just lost 50%. All right. Do math, Ben.
[0:25:06.0]
Anyways, what are some other things you can do if you’re not gonna do lasers whether you have veins on your shoulders or you biceps or your arms? Well, if we’re talking about things that you can do from a food standpoint, water can not only help you a lot…we’ll talk a little bit later in the podcast about how to hydrate properly. But one thing that actually can cause stress on your leg veins and I figure, even though I think I may have promised not to talk about poop too much, I’m gonna talk about it.
Brock: I knew you can do it.
Ben: I can’t do a podcast without the poop alert. When you’re straining on the leg veins, that can actually cause some of these issues. Proper hydration and paying attention to what I talked about in the poop podcast that we just did can actually be helpful, especially if you got varicose vein issues in your legs. Compression socks and compression tights can help a ton. You can even elevate the foot of your bed by putting a couple of phone books under each side of your bed if you really seriously want to activate a little bit more efficient venous return. And that can also help with recovery a little bit as well if you’ve had a long run. If your significant other is okay with feeling like she’s sleeping on slanted ground.
Brock: Slowly sliding off the bed.
Ben: Exactly. A few other things that can help out: One is that cold exposure causes constriction of the superficial veins. It directly stimulates the smooth muscle lining of those superficial blood vessels and so doing like hot-cold contrast type of showers can help out quite a bit with venous return and with eliminating some of these varicose veins. And again, that would work on the upper body or the lower body. There are also supplements that you can take and specifically, herbal supplements that have been shown to help a little bit with vascularity or what’s called venous insufficiency. One would be one called Horse Chestnut Extract. I’ll link to a few good brands in the show notes for this episode. What’s the episode show note, by the way, Brock?
Brock: It’s Episode 234.
Ben: Episode 234. That’s easy to remember. We’ll talk about Horse Chestnut. We all love our Horse chestnut. It can be dangerous in high amounts and some people have an adverse effect toward Horse Chestnut. If you’ve got a kidney or liver issue, I don’t recommend that you take it. I also don’t recommend you combine it with blood thinning medications because it does have a blood thinning effect and that’s one of the ways that’ll really help with venous insufficiency. But that’s one thing that can help out. Another thing that can help out in a different way because of the type of antioxidants in it that can specifically assist with connective tissue structure of blood vessels would be Grape Seed Extract and Pine Bark Extract. And you’re gonna find this stuff in a lot of different whole food antioxidants type of compounds that are out there but you can also just get them in their isolated form and use something like that if venous insufficiency is an issue and you struggle with varicose veins so you’d wanna eliminate them. The last type of herb is one called Butcher’s Broom. That acts in a different manner as well. What that does is it strengthens the collagen in the blood vessel walls and helps to improve circulation a little bit. It has these components called ruscogenins in them. They can basically tighten, weaken and stretch vessels such as those that will be associated with varicose veins. So, Butcher’s Broom and I assume it’s named Butcher’s Broom because the way that the plant looks.
Brock: But butchers don’t use brooms… do they?
Ben: Maybe it’s sold by a butcher with a broom. I don’t know. Honestly, I haven’t studied up on Butcher’s too much. It’s possible that they may use brooms. I don’t know.
Brock: That’s a really awful way to clean up meat.
Ben: Probably not the most efficient way to go about cleaning up ground beef and bone bits from concrete floor. Anyways, Butcher’s Broom. So now that you’ve got that visual in your head of smeared blood and bone bits on the floor of a butcher’s block. Butcher’s Broom. There you go. So those are some of the basic supplements that you could look into and some of the measures that you could do for varicose veins. And of course, it has our MO on any of these podcasts if you’ve got stuff that you found to be effective for you, go ahead and leave them in the show notes for Chris and I’m sure that he would love to see what you’ve found that works for you.
Brock: Chris wasn’t completely certain that they were varicose veins. Is there anything else that they could be?
[0:30:04.3]
Ben: They could be simply enlarged valves. That’s one type of thing that you can run into when you’ve really been working a muscle such as the biceps or the shoulders simply because as valves are gonna get bigger as more blood is flowing through the arms. One of the things that you can do about that is just to quit getting so jacked. If you are focusing on taking something that’s gonna help with blood smoothness a little bit, such as the Horse Chestnut Extract, even like a good high quality Fish Oil could help with this a little bit. You’re gonna put a little bit of less stress on these valves but anytime you’re looking in an area that’s getting a bit like that in a vessel, it’s usually a valve. And I’ve personally had stuff like that going on in my shoulders before when I lift a lot. If you look at a body builder up close, just about any body builder’s gonna have this kind of issues. In some cases, it’s tough to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to having like a perfect venous appearance. The other option is to just hire someone to follow you around with an air brush. That would also work.
Brock: I actually personally think that those veins look pretty bad ass so he should just live with it, Chris.
Ben: Yup. Get your “welcome to the gun show” T-shirt and blast them out.
Brock: Flex away.
Brian: Hello! I’m kinda new to the whole supplement thing. You guys mentioned the Nature Aminos supplement. Is that amino acids or is it protein? I don’t really understand when you’re talking about which one most work ‘cause I’m very interested in starting to do something of that nature, if you could help me with that by answering that on the podcast, please. My name is Brian from Indiana. Thanks.
Brock: Isn’t it a great question ‘cause it really is a small differentiation between complex amino acid pattern and actual protein.
Ben: Yeah. It is an amino acid. It’s a dietary protein substitute basically, that has a bunch of essential amino acid in its purified crystalline form and amino acid (for those of you who want a quick 5-second chemistry lesson), are the main constituent of dietary protein. So anytime you’re taking in a protein powder or steak or whatever, the proteins in that are comprised of amino acids. The Master Amino Pattern is not made from an animal source. This is a laboratory-produced essential amino acid even though amino acids are 100% natural. The difference between it and most protein sources is how quickly it’s digested and absorbed because the protein has already been broken down. If you look at a protein powder or a dietary protein, most proteins (and you may know this if you were in Nutrition 101) are about 4 calories per gram. So you’re getting calories when you’re taking in protein and there is a need to actually digest and break down and get activated by pepsin in your stomach to start to pre-digest some of those proteins and get them broken down with hydrochloric acid. Whereas, when you look at something like an essential amino acid such as the MAP, it’s only about .04 kilocalories per gram. There’s really zero calories in it per se. All you’re getting are amino acids. And for that reason, you can’t really count it as calories. You can’t throw back 10 amino acid capsules after workout and expect your body to actually not be sent the message that there is caloric depletion happening so it won’t keep you out of strict catabolism if you’re not including any calories at all with it. At the same time, if you don’t account for those amino acids and you just take, let’s say you’re taking 10 grams a day of essential amino acids and you’re not paying attention to making sure that you don’t take quite as much protein powder or you don’t use quite as much of a protein check where you don’t cut back on your meat intake a little bit, you can actually get too much nitrogen and too much ammonia build-up if you’re not careful. So that’s something to take into account as well. Now, one of the guys who was responsible for formulating Master Amino Pattern, Dr. David Minkoff, he did an hour-long podcast over at one of the websites that I run called Endurance Planet at enduranceplanet.com where they just geeked out on everything you’d ever need to know about essential amino acid supplements. And that was a great episode. You could find it over at enduranceplanet.com or just look up “endurance planet” in iTunes.
[0:35:02.8]
It’s pretty fascinating how much more quickly the stuff digests so you’re looking at 3-6 hours for a dietary protein from steak or a protein powder vs. about 20 minutes for this stuff. You’re looking at net nitrogen utilization for body protein synthesis at being about 99% for an essential amino acids capsule like NatureAminos vs. being anywhere from 16 to a maximum of right around 30% for a dietary protein. And there is really no food sensitivity or adverse reaction to it that you might get from whey or eggs or something like that. So it’s pretty interesting stuff. As far as whether or not it’s an amino acid or protein it’s kind of amino acids that make up protein. That’s kind of the idea behind it. It’s one of the staples in my supplementation protocol. I honestly don’t use it everyday. I use about 5-10 capsules of it before a hard workout or occasionally, after a hard workout when I wanna bump up my blood levels of amino acids and I will sometimes use it to shut down appetite cravings at night. And then I’ll use it during a race like during an Ironman or Half Ironman Triathlon at 5 per hour and 10 of them about half hour before. That’s a skinny on essential amino acids.
Brock: When you say using it to shut down cravings, do you mean you’re actually like when you’re feeling hungry, your stomach is growling, you take that to sort of calm down the growling or more of you’re not actually hungry but you just wanna eat something kind of craving?
Ben: Amino acids are precursor for all of your neurotransmitters. So if you have a serotonin or a dopamine deficiency or something like that, that kind of deficiency can cause you to crave foods. And just for self-experimentation, I found that during periods of heavy training, when my body is having a really, really high protein turnover and high amino acid turnover, that my cravings at night go up even if I’m accounting during the day for the excessive calorie utilization by eating more calories and I’m convinced that big, big part of it is neurotransmitter depletion from amino acid depletion. And so during periods of heavy training, if I use those amino acids, I don’t get as many appetite cravings at night and I think it’s because it’s a little bit more like a neurotransmitter balancing type of thing. But that’s a total and equals one deal and I’m just saying that’s something that’s worked for me. And we’ll put a link to a really good FAQ section about Master Amino Pattern in the show notes and you can get the stuff over at Pacific Elite Fitness. It’s kinda spendy. If you buy it in bulk, it’s a little less spendy but it’s not a cheap supplement but you definitely notice a difference when you use it.
George: Hello Ben! This is George from Cincinnati. I’m planning for a 10-day trip with my son’s boy-scout trip this summer and looking at nutrition options. While the trip is providing food, I’m looking at personal alternative options during the day’s activities. Listening to last week’s podcast on UCAN Superstarch, is that something that’s effective to use for 10 straight days? I’ve gone back through your archives and in Episode 199, there’s a good question about the race in Mongolia where you suggest Pemmican bars, Living Fuel Supergreens, chocolate, nuts and few more items. Would you suggest including Superstarch into that mix to keep me going strong for 10 days while keeping as lightweight as possible? Enjoy the show. Thanks so much.
Brock: This is an interesting idea. It never occurred to me to try using it for multiple days. In my mind, it’s a thing used during a race and maybe during a really long workout but yeah, could you use it as a supplement when you’re doing stuff?
Ben: I wouldn’t, personally. Yeah, it’s a starch. Sure, it’s low glycemic index and it causes more stable blood sugar levels and all that jazz but just like thatThat soylent stuff that we’re talking about, it doesn’t give you a full nutrient profile. It is just starch and talk about boring, unless you get a stuff that has a bunch of artificial sweeteners added to it, actually the cran rasp flavor is flavored with stevia. So that’s one option. But boredom, seriously, I would chew myself out if I was a boy scout being fed UCAN Superstarch for 10 days as much as I would advocate using the stuff…
Brock: Wait…take your boy scouts guns? That’s not good. You crazy Americans. Don’t let them shoot themselves.
Ben: Yeah. To hang myself at a sailor’s nod or stab myself multiple times with a pen knife, whatever, I would not advocate doing this to a child.
[0:40:02.4]
UCAN Superstarch takes the digestive system some getting used to so there may be some gastric distress that can result from something like this and you could have some serious liquid or explosive poop adventures going on during this 10-day trip, which would not be fun.
Brock: It’s like the 10th time now since you promised you aren’t gonna talk about it.
Ben: You know what? When we’re talking about nutrition, that just comes up. Yeah. I’m a fan of the stuff for the 5-10 hour endurance events, even the marathon, stuff like that but just for the sake of sanity, for the sake of a child’s enjoyment and for the potential to avoid any gastric issues, I would not be using this stuff for a 10-straight-day type of supplement. I would, instead, be going after the type of real food that I recommend to that listener. I’ll link to that over a podcast that we did where the guy was doing the adventure race in Mongolia, wanted to know what you could take long.
Brock: I thought it’s awesome.
Ben: Yeah.
Brock: I’m further wishing that guy would write back in and tell us how it went. If you’re listening, please tell us how that thing went. That sounded amazing.
Ben: He was probably dead. He’s probably frozen and ditched somewhere in Mongolia with a backpack full of Supergreens and Pemmican.
Brock: Boy scouts snuck up and shot him.
Ben: Anyways though, wishing he’d stayed in New York City and done the Urbanathlon by men’s help. Anyways though, yeah, I recommended to him the Cocochia and chia seeds and some Supergreens and some Pemmican, some jerky, some of the stuff that travels really well, a little bit of dark chocolates, some raw nuts, stuff that has some palatability to it and also is gonna give you some of those antioxidants and polyphenols and fatty acids. Even that Supergreen stuff has probiotics in it and just a lot of these things that your body is gonna need when you’re throwing it out there for 10 days in a row. You also need to consider the different needs of young athletes or young exercising individuals. For example, studies have shown that exercising children (under the age of 13) have had 10-40% higher fat oxidation rate compared to exercising adults, which is yet another reason not to fuel a kid with just starch and energy bars or candy during a day hike or a multi day hike. I’m a fan of the nuts and the seeds and when they’re transportable, even going after like guacamole avocadoes, olive oil, stuff like that. Even coconut oil and medium chain triglyceride oil, that stuff can be mixed with a little bit of chocolate or a little bit of nut butter and it can be made relatively palatable even for a kid. Kids tend to burn lower amounts of carbs like I just mentioned. But they do tend to rely more on exogenous crabs as a fuel when they’re burning carbs. The main reason for that is kids just store less glycogen in their liver and less in their muscles. And so you also need to understand that whereas you may be able to hike for an hour and not get hypoglycemic, a kid might need something little every half hour or so and so you need to understand that they’re gonna basically, burn through foodstuff that they’re eating during exercise more quickly. The other thing that you need to understand is that it hasn’t been shown in any studies that for exercise sessions, especially 75 minutes or less, in general, eating carbohydrates doesn’t appear to give kids some kind of an extra performance advantage. However, an increase in fatty acids may. So, what this means is that, I would always make sure that (again, another reason not to use just something like Superstarch), no matter what snack that you’re giving a kid during a day hike or multi-day event, they’re always keeping fatty acid levels elevated as well. In other words, every time you give them a carbohydrate, try and include a little bit of fat along with it. And again, that could come down to something simple as dark chocolate with some nuts, coconut oil with some nut butter or one of these Cocochia bars or Hammer bars or even on your stops, making sure that you’re fueling like canned sardines and olive oil, stuff like that. But always making sure you’re keeping those fatty acid levels up just a little bit. Those are some of the things to think about. And then, of course, just because of kids, surface areas are related to their body size. They have to focus a little bit more on hydration than adults, so you keep an eye on that. Really good resource for this (we’ll try and link to it in the show notes), would be the Real Foods Cookbook over at enduranceplanet.com/bookstore. That’s a new book we have over and that’s got a bunch of real food recipes like rice cakes that you can make and wrap in aluminum foil and different ways to use chia seeds creatively when you’re out there and just lots of little things like that. Ultimately though, don’t torture the kids with freaking Superstarch for 10 days in a row. Gosh!
[0:45:12.9]
Brock: George, that sounds like a delicious camping trip, I wanna come along.
Ben: If you take my recommendations.
Brock: Yes. No to UCAN for 10 days.
Ray: Hi Ben! Hi Brock! This is Ray from Wisconsin. I was hoping you could help me out with the problem my wife has had over the past 30 years. After she works out, she’ll break out into bad red rash – hives. It starts on her feet, goes to her legs, gets on her arms and torso. And it can even happen when she’s not working out, just on a warm summer day, she doesn’t even have to be in the sun and all of a sudden, you’ll start to see the signs of it. Winter time, too, she can be inside a mall or grocery store and she comes home and you can start to see the rash begin to form. I hope you can provide some insights that our doctors haven’t been able to give us some type of tip of what’s going on. We’d really appreciate it. Keep up the good work, guys. I really enjoy the show. Thanks a lot. Bye.
Brock: At the beginning of his question, I thought, “okay, she gets hives when she finishes workouts. Oh, okay, well then, she gets it when she’s in the sun. Oh, she gets it when she’s not in the sun!” Gravy, wife! She’s just getting hives no matter what. That’s terrible!
Ben: Yeah. Anytime you’re looking at hives, it’s coming down to a histamine reaction in most cases. There is this whole exercise-induced thing. It’s called cholinergic urticaria and it’s hives that are brought on specifically by heat, sweat, exercise, even emotional stress, in some cases. And it can really impair quality of life just because the symptoms can come on pretty rapidly and they can be either embarrassing or uncomfortable with some tingling and some heat and redness and stuff like that. The mechanism of action is that histamine is released from what are called basal fills, which are these cells in your bodies and those are going to have increased activity when you’re producing a bunch of immunoglobulins against potential autoimmune triggers. And hypersensitivities can be due to everything from stuff in your environment such as pollen, for example, to elements that are in foods stuff like gluten and soy, eggs, for example, for many people, whey for many people. Night shades and tree nuts can do this in some folks. And so what it would come down to is ideally, doing an anti allergenic diet or an elimination type of diet or you’re getting rid of a lot of these potential triggers and preferably getting rid of all of them at once and the big ones first like gluten, soy, dairy. Those beat some of the biggies. But the also, night shades, tree nuts, even some of the root vegetables. You’d want like eggplant, for example, which I guess is a night shade or root vegetable, maybe both. I don’t know, maybe it flies under both radars. Anyways, the idea is you’re eliminating all these autoimmune triggers and then you just introduce them back in one by one, preferably one every two weeks or so and you’ll see which one might cause this rash or this hive to reappear. And then, there you have it – Sherlock Holmes. You’ve got your allergen identified. Like I mentioned, you can, with excess cortisol or an overactive immune system from stress, also react like this but usually, it’s not quite as pronounced as being just like all the freaking time. So I would go after this from an autoimmune standpoint and you could certainly test something like this. You could get a Metametrix Immunoglubulin Test. I’ll link to a good one over at Direct Labs. You could get a US Biotech Immunoglubulin. You could do an Elisa Food Panel. You could do a Cyrex Test for gluten. I’m guessing you’re gonna find a few different triggers there. You could do that or you could just move to Dubai and wear a burke all day. There’s another option for you if you wanna go that route.
Brock: Or there’s always the bubble as well. Become a person that’s in one of those inflatable bubbles.
Ben: I, too, would wanna market one of those. Pacific Elite Fitness, a fine purveyor of…and by the way, there’s a bunch of new stuff over there. I’ve got a bunch of detox gear, recovery gear, muscle gaining gear, our new structure water filters that they’re doing over at Greenfield Naturals. We’ve got links to those over there, basically, just to everything that you’d need to geek out on this stuff. It’s over at Pacific Elite Fitness. And everytime I find something new, I pump it out over there.
[0:50:11.4]
So that’s a good resource, too but yeah, we should start selling a full body bubble at the Pacific Elite Fitness Full Body Bubble. It can even come with a podcast feed that goes in through a detox hepafilter style speaker that talks to people while they’re rolling around in their bubble and it could turn red and has some sirens that go off if they come within 10 feet of unfermented soy or something like that.
Brock: I’m not investing in this.
Charlie: Hey Ben! My name is Charlie from Georgia Vermont and I listen to a lot of your podcast and listened to Tim Noakes and concerns with overhydration during exercise. I was wondering if you have any recommendations about just normal daily water intake without necessarily any exercise involvement. I just wanna know what I should daily be taking for water intake to maintain homeostasis. Thanks.
Brock: Wait a second, Charlie, did you say a day with no workouts or exercise? Do you have days like that? What?
Ben: Weird.
Brock: Something must be wrong with Charlie.
Ben: Seriously, he’s living the evolutionary ancestral lifestyle, listening to his body and giving it a break every once in a while for crying out loud. Anyways, though, I think that this whole idea behind taking how many pounds that you weigh and dividing that by 2 to figure out how many ounces of water that you need to drink is fraught with error because you can get literally up to a liter and in many cases, more of water from just the food that you eat. I mean, fruits and veggies are up to 97% water. And you also can get hydrated through caffeinated beverages like coffee and tea, even soda can hydrate you. And the amount of diuresis or peeing off that occurs from something like a caffeinated beverage is nowhere near the water that you’re actually getting from it. Even a cup of coffee, if you drink a cup of coffee, that’s equivalent of about 2/3 a cup of water. And so a lot of people aren’t taking into account all of these exogenous sources of water that they’re getting when it comes to how much to drink. That’s one thing to think about. You don’t necessarily have to get x amount of water per day no matter what. I personally, just listen to my thirst and I drink when I’m thirsty. But I can tell you something even more interesting than that, having just to mention this concept behind structured water. And that is that your whole production of energy, the whole phosphorelation of adenosine diphosphate at the cellular level and the whole production of energy, that has a lower free energy associated with it when water bonding is a little bit easier to break in your body, meaning that there’s less free energy required to break bonds that have to change the water structure that’s hydrating the cells within your body. And this may sound like woowoo stuff but there’s a lot of cool research going on out there that looks at the effects of hydration when you are consuming water that has been treated properly and water that is from a crappy, fluorinated, chlorine-filled municipal source. Something to take into consideration is the type of water that you drink and if you wanna get away way out there in the far woowoo land, look at research by a guy like Masaru Emoto, who even looked at water’s hydration capacity and water that had been exposed to positive thoughts and prayers and a positive environment vs. water that was exposed to negative thoughts and a negative environment. It’s pretty mind-blowing stuff when you start to look at this from even a spiritual perspective. One of the things is that, for example, I think my lucky stars that Spokane, the city where I live doesn’t fluorinate its water because fluoride can actually block a lot of the uptake of iodine. And iodine is one of the elements that’s crucial to your body properly hydrating itself. Low levels of minerals from water that’s been de-mineralized or water that hasn’t had minerals added back into it, that can also affect the amount of water that your body hold on to and hence, your ability to stay in an adequate state of hydration. It’s just very, very difficult to hydrate properly with bad water.
[0:55:00.8]
And so for me, I find that I gotta drink far less now that I have a central structure water filter in my house. I use iodine. I use trace liquid minerals and I think it’s a huge, huge issue out there when it comes to people just drinking crappy water, whether it be headaches or cramping or chronic dehydration, you really have to pay attention to what you’re drinking. I turn down water and plastic bottles now. You saw, Brock, all the water that we gave out at the Superhuman event. Frankly, all the speakers were getting water from structured glass bottles and all the handies got the brand new specialized purest BPA-free bottles. We primarily, unless we’re out exercising, drink from glass always at home and we use a central structured water filter, add some minerals and iodine into the mix. And if you really want to know what it feels like to be properly hydrated all day long and set up your body for ideal performance based off of that and not cramping and stuff like that, not that cramping is always due to dehydration but sometimes it is, you really gotta pay attention to the type of water you drink. So the ultimate answer to how much water should you drink everyday is gonna depend on the type of water that you’re drinking, how many fruits and vegetables you’re consuming and there are a lot of variables in there. But I can tell you that I personally just drink to thirst and I don’t pay any attention at all and I feel fine doing just that. I drink to thirst during exercise, drink to thirst while I’m sitting at home during the day, certainly throwing a little bit of Kombucha and coconut water into the mix, have a cup of coffee in the morning, and I’m golden and as my boys say “Daddy, you’re hydrated because your pee is the right color” because they actually….I have strange children. They actually go look in the toilet to see if dad is hydrating properly.
Brock: I’m glad somebody else is looking out for you. That’s good. A few years ago, I hope there was a great big movement where everybody was getting rid of their plastic bottles and they were going to glass or aluminum. How do you feel about the aluminum bottles?
Ben: I would be a little bit concerned about metal leeching from aluminum. It’s not something that I use. I’m actually pretty careful with metal. I mean like iron from a cast iron skillet is not big of a deal but I’d be careful with aluminum containers. Obviously, they’re not gonna have the BPA and stuff like that in them but I would just be kinda careful. I’d be hesitant in terms of the source and the amount of metals that you might be putting into your body with something like drinking regularly from an aluminum container. I find that stuff to seem to taste a little bit more metallic, too, which I don’t like.
Brock: Yeah. Definitely, it tastes more metallic and I don’t know if there are any studies that backed it up but a lot of people are talking about the link between aluminum and Alzheimer’s being quite a thing.
Ben: Yeah. You hear about that with vaccinations and stuff like that, too and I guess we’re not to open up that can of worms right now but aluminum would certainly be healthier than plastic. I would say stainless steel, if you’re gonna go with the metal source, would be better than aluminum and I’m a big fan of glasses.
Austin: Hi Ben! My name is Austin and I was just wondering…I’ve heard that when you’re training, when you weight lift too much, that eventually, the benefits stop and actually begins to destroy the muscles when you lift too much. So I’m just wondering at what point in time of lifting does that happen? Is it lifting more than 5 hours a week or 10 hours a week? Just wondering.
Brock: Austin, the answer is 7 ½ hours.
Ben: Brock knows it having been through rhabdo and at the hospital after having 7 ½-hour weight training session.
Brock: Did I tell you the rhabdo story about the guy who had himself into rhabdo biolysis by doing a bunch of cocaine and then putting a whole bunch of weight on his shoulders and doing 200 squats? I only know this because my girlfriend’s an emergency room nurse and he came into the emergency room while she was working.
Ben: Wow. Yeah. I usually call it at a 100 when I’m doing a squatting on cocaine thing so I can’t imagine doing 200.
Brock: That’s smart.
Ben: I typically am fairly conservative when I’m snorting crack before workout, which is hard to do when you’re on crack.
Brock: Word of the wise. Okay. Enough. Seriously…
Ben: Yeah. Exercise can elevate creatine kinase and that’s brigade CK and you can get CK up to the extent that you might meet the diagnostic criteria for what’s called rhabdomyolysis if the exercise-induced elevation in CK is too high. So basically, rhabdomyolysis is this clinical syndrome that results from injury to your skeletal muscle and release of all these metabolism and cellular contents into the extracellular fluid into your circulation it hits your kidneys and leads to stuff like renal failure. It could lead to coagulation and in some cases, even death. You’ll hear about this every football season, at least a few football teams across the nation have some kind of rhabdo going on. And as we just learned from Brock’s extremely educational anecdote, it can be elevated through that use of drugs and alcohol as well as infections.
[1:00:38.0]
And sometimes even we get muscle pain. Sometimes, you just get this increase in CK and that’s accompanied by an increase in myoglobin. If you’re testing the levels of liver enzymes like amino transferases, you’re gonna see an elevation in those in the blood or in the urine. You also pee really dark color in many cases when this is happening. And my children have never accused me of having rhabdomyolysis based on my pee color.
Brock: Daddy, daddy, put the cocaine down.
Ben: When you look at creatine kinase levels in folks who have been exercising with high intensity exercise or long duration exercise or weight burning exercise, especially like e-centric muscle contractions like lifting a muscle slow or downhill running is another perfect example, the increase in creatine kinase is hugely variable. Some people have a creatine kinase that’s like 20 times normal after they run a marathon. And other times, interestingly, it’s way lower in women. You’ll get like 8-10 times normal. After Ironman, usually, you see about 12-20 times normal. Sometimes, higher than that and it can stay elevated for up to 19 days after an event. I’m actually releasing a video on Monday after this podcast comes out with this lady who’s developing this way to literally test your body day after day. If you want us do a blood test and just find out everything that’s going on after you’ve done a hard workout and see how long your body takes to recover, totally geeked out self-quantification stuff but cool stuff, stay tuned Monday for that, by the way, over at bengreenfieldfitness.com. Anyway, the segue and what I’m getting at here is that creatine kinase production is gonna be hugely variable from individual to individual and some people, especially, based off of training history can handle literally like a body builder, couple of 2-hour sessions a day in the weight room, 5-6 days a week and they’re fine ‘cause they’re hitting different muscle groups. One day, you’re on your legs and your core and another day, you’re on your arms and another day, you’re on your chest and your shoulders and so, you’re getting muscle damage but it’s in different areas of tissue and you’ve gotten to the point where you can metabolize creatine kinase pretty well. Yeah, there’s probably still a little bit of stress on the kidneys but no to the point of renal failure or anything like that. What it comes down to though, is there’s no way to know unless you were to test your creatine kinase levels after workout but you could pay attention to qualitative variables from muscle sore to the touch, you shouldn’t work it out again on that day. If you’re depleted and you can’t put up as much weight as you could the day before or a couple of days before, that’s a pretty good sign. Really, rule is youshould be able to walk into the weight room and be able to meet or exceed whatever you did in the weight room in the previous workout. And if you can’t, you’re probably not fit to be in there working out. If I walk in and I drop on to the squat bar for a warm up, and a 45-lb plate on either side is throwing me for a loop, I shouldn’t be underneath that bar. And so you’ve gotta listen to your body and that’s a situation where I’ll step out of the weight room and I’ll walk downstairs into the sauna with an elastic band and I’ll do some extra rotation and some hip abduction and some front and side planking and call it a workout. And I’ll try and get under the bar the next day and I’ll just flip flop my workouts for the week. I do that a lot – move my recovery day to a different day of the week depending on how I feel. Ultimately though, I know that’s a copout answer but who knows how much is too much is gonna vary greatly depending on your training status and what your body’s ready for.
Brock: That may seem like a copout to some people but to me, coming from an endurance athlete side of things, I’ve always approached weights the same way that I approach running where you’re actually supposed to feel that fatigue and you’re building on that fatigue. That’s really interesting. I didn’t know that you should give up, basically, if you’re not able to lift what you were the day before.
Ben: Yeah. With weights, definitely. With endurance exercise, there are some situations where you want the hermetic effect of excessive stress and so like in a build-up to Ironman, I’m racing Ironman Canada in August and starting around June, there’ll be a good 8 weeks there where I’ll have 2 or 3 days that are really demanding of me. And for me, demanding means I’m going out for 2 hours worth of cycling intervals coming back and straight off of the bike throwing in ten 400-meter repeats on the hill behind my house.
[1:05:07.1]
That’s a really tough demanding workout and I guarantee that those hill repeats are not gonna be the type of repeats where I’m like “couldn’t meet or exceed what I did last week, so I’m not gonna do any more.” Sometimes, you do have to push through some fatigue and discomfort to break through a training barrier but I don’t recommend doing it in the weight room. Usually, that’s what one your metabolic conditioning sessions and as far as weight lifting goes, just because of the biomechanics, increased risk of injury, etc., I think you should feel fresh when you’re lifting pretty much all the time.
Brock: Okay. Well, that finishes up the questions for today. Once again, make sure that you go down to bengreenfieldfitness.com and check out the show notes where we put all the stuff we talked about. There’s a links galore this week. Some weeks are little sparse but this week is bananas with links and make sure that you check out that Lean Lifestyle Insider. There is also a link for that, make sure you check that out and the Inner Circle webinars. Head on down the bengreenfieldfitness.com where we’ve got everything you need.
Ben: That’s right and I should mention that, for this podcast, Episode #234, I’m gonna create a list using MyList. We’re actually gonna start to embed…
Brock: Yeehaw!
Ben: Cannot focus.
Brock: That’s fantastic!
Ben: All right. If you can’t beat them, join them. What we’re gonna do is we’ve got this MyList thing going on. We’re gonna take that MyList and we’re gonna embed it in the actual post over at bengreenfieldfitness.com so you don’t even have to surf over at Facebook.com. What we’re gonna do is we’ll create a MyList that shows you every single thing that you need for freaking your vessels don’t look the way that you want them to and your veins that are messed up. We’re gonna show you the…what were some other stuff we talked about in podcast episode, Brock?
Brock: I don’t know. I’m too busy doing funny voice.
Ben: You didn’t crack cocaine over there and bench pressing. We’re talking about what you got feed them boy scouts. We’ll do a MyList for that. We’ll shade on them fancy Master Amino Acid Pattern capsules that you could take and shove those in your face when you’re out there on trail.
Brock: That’s a steak in a capsule, I tell you what?
Ben: We’ve been talking about the structured water filters and how you could use them so check out the MyList. Go to MyList.com/bengreenfield. You could go to Facebook page of Ben Greenfield over at facebook.com/bgfitness. Or you could just head on to bengreenfieldfitness.com show notes for Episode 234. Get it on, get it out, yeehaw, dengdeng and we’ll talk to you next week. Over and out from bengreenfieldfitness.com.
March 21, 2013 free podcast: How Much Water Do You Really Need To Drink Each Day? Also: how to get rid of varicose veins, the difference between protein and amino acids, healthy eating for camping, what causes hives, and how many hours a week should you lift weights?
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- Doesn’t appear endurance training is quite as bad for your thyroid as some would have you to believe.
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Listener Q&A:
As compiled, edited and sometimes read by Brock, the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast “sidekick”.
Chris says @ 00:22:05
He has veins that are popping out in his shoulders and bicep. They look like varicose veins (but not as severe – zig zaggy) and he doesn’t like the way it looks. Is there anything he can use to make them disappear or is he screwed?
~ In my response, I mention the transcript to a previous episode we did on varicose veins, Also: Horse Chestnut Extract, Grape Seed Extract, and Butcher’s Broom.
Brian asks @ 00:31:30
He is new to the supplement thing and would like to know about NatureAminos – is it Amino Acids or Protein?
~ In my response, I mention MAP, FAQ and Ask the Doc Special: Your Guide to Understanding Master Amino Acid Pattern.
George asks @ 00:37:57
Planning a 10 day trip with some boy scouts and would like to know if UCAN SuperStarch be ok to take for 10 straight days (thrown in with the stuff you recommended to a listener for a race in Mongolia – pemican, dark chocolate, SuperGreens, nuts).
~ In the response, I mention my previous episode on the race in Mongolia. In that podcast, I had talked about Pemmican, Cocochia bars, and Supergreens. I also mention you can make your own beef jerky OR eat 200-300 calories of jerky from US Wellness Meats. You can also eat or swallow 25-50 EnergyBits and 5-10 Master Amino Pattern (MAP) capsules. Use 10% discount code “BEN” at EnergyBits.com and get NatureAminos at pacificfit.net. Also check out the real food cookbook.
Ray asks @ 00:45:25
His wife breaks out in a red rash (hives) after she works out. All over her feet, legs, arms and torso. It happens on a warm summer day and in the winter too (inside, at the mall or at home).
~ In my response, I recommend allergy and immunoglobulin testing.
Charlie says @ 00:50:45
He would like to know your recommendation for water intake on a regular day with no workouts or exercise.
~ In my response to Charlie, I mention a home central structured water filter (use code SID288C77TC29 at GreenfieldNaturals.com for 10% discount)
Austin asks @ 00:58:18
He has heard that when you weight lift too much it starts to destroy your muscles rather than build them up. At what point in time does that happen – 5 hours a week or 10 hours a week?
~ In my response, I mention Performance testing at pacificfit.net.
Read more https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/2013/03/234-how-much-water-do-you-really-need-to-drink-each-day/