Podcast #226 from

http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/2013/01/226-shorten-the-duration-of-a-

cold/

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Introduction:In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast: How to make

our immune system bullet-proof and shorten the duration of a

colds. Also: IGF1 and Testosterone Levels, what to do during long

commutes, preparing for a hard race on a low carb diet, can altitude

affect PMS, the best Personal Trainer certification, and how a high

fat diet can irritate your throat.

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: All right, Ben, here we are. I’m back. You’re at home. Everything is

the way it should be.

Ben: I’ve escaped my Russian prison from last week.

Brock: It was really that bad.

Ben: It was a strange bed and breakfast. It really was like the spare

bedroom of somebody’s house with a mini fridge in the corner and

all that jazz. I’m happy to be back in my office. We’re not recording

at our usual time so my morning voice has disappeared.

Brock: Yeah. You sound a little more spry than usual but not too different.

Ben: Yeah. Spry is a good word. I’ll actually hop up and do some jumping

heel taps in between each question. If you guys hear any tapping

going on, that’s what’s up. That’s my spryness.

Brock: I expect you to do some running like super Mario.

Ben: And I’ve got chai. My wife makes chai everyday. She uses ginger and

cloves and all that stuff and I happen to score a glass of that before I

came in here. Chai watered down with a little bit of coconut milk if

you can call that watering down. And I’m ready to podcast, dude.

Brock: Might just do it.

News Flashes:

Brock: To get these and other interesting news flashes every week, make

sure to follow Ben on Twitter at twitter.com/bengreenfield and also

go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and find all the other links to places

like Facebook, Google+.

Ben: It wouldn’t be a podcast if we didn’t talk about one thing and you

know what that is, Brock?

Brock: It’s beer, isn’t it?

Ben: Close. Poop actually.

Brock: That would’ve been my second guess.

Ben: Of course. And I tweeted earlier that there’s an interesting article on

Scientific American this week on Poop Transplants for Serious

Digestive Issues. And those of you listeners who are perhaps on the

pointy end of health may have heard of fecal transplants before but

this article delved quite deeply. There are no puns intended at any

point throughout my explanation of this article.

Brock: There are so many of those.

Ben: There’s a condition though that’s pretty serious in the US alone,

that about half a million people suffer from and about 15000 people

a year die from and it is basically diarrhea caused by something

called C difficile which is a bacteria. And this article goes into how

an emerging treatment to get rid of C difficile extremely effectively

without the use of antibiotics which C difficile has become resistant

to is called fecal bacteria therapy or a poop transplant where they

take the donor poop from a healthy patient and they insert it into

your gut using basically this tube that gets inserted into your butt or

down your mouth and it sounds really gross but that healthy helpful

bacteria that you get inserted can actually completely get rid this

issue. And as a matter of fact, fecal transplants are being used now

to treat a bunch of stuff like irritable bowel syndrome, even some

neurological conditions like Parkinson’s, constipation. So it’s really,

really interesting and of course, I was happy to see towards the end

of this article that over at the University of Guelph, which I believe

is in Germany, (but I’m not sure and the only reason I said it is that

Guelph sounds German) is that they’re creating synthetic poop and

this fake feces which they called (quite disappointingly actually

because it doesn’t sound very scientific) re-poopulate.

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Brock: That’s fantastic.

Ben: Anyways, it’s a super probiotic stool substitute that can be

substituted into the GI tract in a similar manner as a fecal

transplant and potentially be a little bit more settling to folks who

are concerned about someone else’s poop vs. fake poop being

inserted in their bodies even though I think from a biochemical

standpoint, it’s really the same thing.

Brock: They’re not just digging into somebody’s toilet and pulling it out

like it gets treated and cleaned up and stuff before it gets inserted.

Ben: Exactly. And the term that they use in the article to describe the

bacterial mixture of the fake feces is, they say it’s more palatable.

And I’m just curious who writing the article is was comparing the

palatability of the real poop vs. the fake poop. But there you go. For

those of you who are interested in the stuff, in all seriousness, I

think that we’re going to see this type of transplants being

something used more and more for digestive issues.

Brock: Yeah. We’re having a good laugh but it’s actually, yeah, it’s been

around for a while but it’s certainly becoming a much more

practiced and effective procedure. So it’s awesome.

Ben: Yeah. Exactly. And the next thing that I tweeted was an interesting

investigation that they did to B12 deficiencies. This study was in the

Nutrition Reviews Journal. The title of it is How Prevalent is

Vitamin B12 Deficiency among Vegetarians and they looked at a

wide range of vegetarians including those who are pregnant,

adolescents, elderly, children, etc. and found extremely high levels

of B12 deficiencies is up into an average of close to 80% across the

board for vegetarians. And this should probably not as a surprise to

a lot of people who are vegetarians and vegans because vitamin B12

deficiencies are one of the big issues when you’re not consuming

really the highest sources of vitamin B12 which would be meat. By

the way, for those of you who are scratching your head over vitamin

B12, it also goes by the name cobalamin. If you’re not getting B12 in

your diet, there are a variety of signs and symptoms that manifest.

Here’s the cool thing though: there’s a really useful vitamin B12

signs and symptoms assessment checklist that one of my Twitter

followers (whose name I’m blanking on right now), tweeted after

seeing me talk about this study and I’m going to link to it in the

show notes. Of course, we link to a ton of stuff in the show notes

and this is Episode #226, right?

Brock: Yup!

Ben: So normally, if you wanted to really test vitamin B12, you get what’s

called the blood serum vitamin B12 test and you’d wanna make sure

that you’re above what’s called 200 nanograms per liter if you’re

measuring in nanograms per liter. But what this test can actually do

and they looked at this is they noticed that when someone indicates

B12 deficiency on this test which is simply a bunch of items that you

go in and checklist, it tends to correlate quite well with the drop in

blood serum vitamin B12 values when you do both the test online

following up with a blood test. So I’ll put a link to that test online

where you could go and see if you might be at risk of deficiency

from vitamin B12. And then you’ve kinda got 2 ways to go. You

could (if you’re vegetarian) use a sublingual Vitamin B12 Spray.

That’s honestly probably the best way to do it. And there’s one I

believe is by Nano Pharmaceuticals. I’ll link to it in the show notes.

It’s super affordable. You can get it off at Amazon or wherever but

it’s just a sublingual spray that you can use for helping out your

vitamin B12 levels. That would be if you’re vegetarian or if you’re

vegan. The other way that you could do it and I went over this in

last week’s episode as there’s a bunch of stuff that happens to be

kind of fun or at least novel to eat that you could use to jack up your

vitamin B12 levels to the roof. And some of those things are like

liver, shellfish, fish eggs or what we know as caviar. I suspect that

most people probably go for the caviar over the liver. But I’m not

sure. You’ll never know with the Ben Greenfield Fitness listeners.

Octopus, crab, lobster, I think most people definitely go for lobster

over liver.

Brock: I’m getting so hungry.

Ben: Beef, lamb, (go get yourself a sugar of mutton, Brock and we’ll take

a quick pause here), cheese and eggs. So there you go.

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If you have that stuff as staples in your diet, you probably don’t

need to worry about B12 but especially for vegans and vegetarians,

just be careful and be aware of that checklist that would allow you

to go and easily measure something like this because B12 deficiency

is something that really affect your energy levels. And interestingly,

because I had someone whom I was working with, a vegan athlete

who I got on the B12, their sleep got crazy good all of a sudden after

they got on B12 and I suspect it was because they had a B12

deficiency.

Brock: B12 will certainly make you spry.

Ben: That’s right. The next thing is that there was an interesting article in

Scientific American also about intermittent fasting. And I thought

that this was a cool article and I’ll get a link to it in the show notes

for this episode over at bengreenfieldfitness.com because it really

went into all the different ways that intermittent fasting might help

us to live longer, for example, increased levels of what are called

chaperone proteins which help the molecules in your cell to

assemble properly. Higher levels of what’s called brain derived

neurotrophic factor or BDNF which is the special protein that

prevents your brain neurons from dying and can help you get

smarter. It ramps up what’s called autophagy which is basically

your body’s garbage disposal system that gets rid of damaged

molecules and helps you with cellular turnover clean up, basically.

And all this stuff happens when you are doing this type of

intermittent fasting like for me, it’s usually a 12-hour period

throughout the day that I try not to eat. For some people, they get

up to a 16-hour period and while long-term studies are kinda sparse

in terms of how this affects folks, we know from an ancestral or an

evolutionary perspective that eating regularly, snacking regularly,

grazing, even eating 3 meals a day is relatively new phenomenon.

We actually do okay and some cool things happen when we do have

periods of time during which we don’t necessarily eat and you may

just set that up as like one day a month where you fast, where all

you have is maybe a greens drink and some water and a little bit of

amino acids or something like that. You don’t have to do this

everyday or even every week. But I think having a little bit of fasting

here and there could certainly help you out. Let’s put it this way: if

you’re to fast one day a month, that gives you 12 days a year of a

complete fast where you take advantage of some of this kind of stuff

like a 24-hour fast. I’ll link to the article in the show notes but I

thought it was pretty interesting.

Brock: Yeah. I think even just looking at the evolution of our language, the

fact that we call it breakfast – we’re breaking the fast every

morning, that points to the fact that we were built that way. That’s

the way that our history of eating has evolved.

Ben: Yes. You just have to walk a fine line because who wants to live

longer if you’re like chewing your fingernails and biting the inside of

your cheek the whole time.

Brock: Yeah. There are prices to everything.

Ben: One last thing I wanted to mention that I thought was funny and it

was a study on tomato juice in which they found that the use of

tomato juice actually beat out traditional sports drinks when you

use that as a sports drink during exercise. This was in the Journal of

Food Chemistry and Toxicology. And what they found was that

when they looked at 2 things – creatine phosphokinase and lactate

dehyrogenase which are really important markers of basically, how

much exercises beat you up. They were significantly controlled

when tomato juice was used during an exercise session compared to

(this was in trained good athletes) traditional carbohydrate sports

drinks. This was a study over 2-month period of time and it’s

because the lycopene - that natural antioxidant in tomatoes. But

these folks, they exercised just as well. They just used tomato juice

instead of sports drinks.

Brock: Is this like Mott’s tomato juice or was this juiced at home like

smashed up nice organic tomatoes?

Ben: I don’t really know but I would imagine you could probably just go

out and grab some of the V8 tomato juice and do okay in terms of

you need some anti inflammatory in a pinch, you’re driving home

from a workout, you aren’t gonna get a chance to have dinner,

technically, it might not be the best thing in the world. You could

pull over on to the gas station and grab yourself some V8 tomato

juice and it’s be better that grabbing a Gatorade or a Powerade.

Let’s put it that way.

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Brock: So we’re talking post exercise, not during.

Ben: Well, a lot of these things that have an effect during exercise or also

gonna have an effect if you take them pre exercise or post exercise

because let’s face it, it’s still gonna be in the bloodstream.

Ultimately, with a lot of these stuff, it doesn’t matter.

Brock: If you’re on a 2-hour bike ride and you’re gulping down warm V8 to

your water bottle, that’s not very pleasant.

Ben: Yeah. I actually like that but I’m pretty masochistic.

Special Announcements:

Brock: Okay. As always, tons of stuff going on at bengreenfieldfitness.com

and I know this week was maybe, would you call it your most

controversial post ever?

Ben: The 12 Myths about Fiber. It certainly did strike a chord among

folks and without drawing too long on the post itself. I’d encourage

you to go over and read the post The 12 Myths about Fiber written

by a fellow named Konstantin, a guest post. I didn’t write the

article. He did. But he really goes into how we perhaps been mis-

educated a little bit about the benefits of fiber and there is quite a

good discussion under the post but he’s really not a fan of any of

these types of fiber supplements that I use like psyllium seeds, stuff

like this that has kind of whistled its way into the health industry as

being the cat’s meow when it comes to clearing up digestive issues

and reducing risk of colon cancer and stuff like that. He goes into

how it may actually have the opposite effect and a lot of the

deleterious effects too. Interesting article that I’d recommend that

you read. And then another is also an article this week about how to

get ready if you’re doing like a Tough Mudder or Spartan Race or

something like that. Two completely different articles but there are

some good reads for you this week over at

bengreenfieldfitness.com. A couple other things that we should

mention: First of all, this podcast is brought to you by

AudiblePodcast.com/ben and I know that Brock found a book on

Audible that he wanted to mention to you.

Brock: Yeah. First, we should mention if you go to

audiblepodcast.com/ben and sign up, you get a free book. You don’t

have to pay for your first book. You can download one. Give it a try

and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to stick around but if you do,

you get a free book and I’m gonna recommend Fat Chance: Beating

the Odds against Sugar by a guy named Robert Lustig. I heard him

interviewed the other day on Science Friday and some of the stuff

he was saying was really interesting and he talks about to help us

lose weight and recover our health, Lustig presents personal

strategies to re-adjust the key hormones that regulate hunger,

reward and stress. He spends a lot of time talking about how the

food industry responded to the government-mandated lowering of

fat in the 1970’s by pouring in more sugar into all of our food. So it’s

an interesting read, I think and I think it’s mostly in line with what

you’ll hear in this podcast, too.

Ben: Yeah. I got a chance to meet Dr. Lustig 0ver at the Ancestral Health

Symposium. He’s a pretty sharp guy. I’m really keeping my fingers

crossed he’s not a podcast listener here but he might do himself a

favor if he lost a few pounds. It might improve credibility there.

Who knows maybe he’s just jacked underneath his suit and that’s

the poorliness that I saw but he’s not obese or anything but

anyways, just a thought. But either way, I’m sure his book’s great.

You could check that out at AudiblePodcast.com/ben. The Fat

Chance – great title for a book. A few other things: We get all of

these podcasts transcribed and a lot of people read the

transcriptions because sometimes it’s useful when you just wanna

go to a search for a term, not listen to a full hour-long podcast but

just go read up on something quick that I was talking about or copy

and paste something to a friend and send it to him via e-mail, you

know that type of thing. Ever since we started transcribing the

podcast, it got really popular. Lots of folks read them and you can

find them right there on the right side of the page of

bengreenfieldfitness.com. They’re also all uploaded as PDFs to our

slide show account. The issue is that it’s kind of expensive to have a

real person actually go through and type all the episodes and these

automatic computer programs that are supposed to be able to

transcribe stuff, let’s just say that they do a super crappy job with

any word that’s more than about 2 syllables long.

Brock: They don’t deal with accents well either and being that I’m

Canadian, it would just make a mess of me.

[0:20:06.3]

Ben: It just put a bunch of gibberish when it comes to Brock. We’re

looking for anybody/any business in the health or the fitness or

nutritions-based that wants to get a banner and an advertisement

up on our “Transcript” pages and basically sponsor the transcripts.

Our costs range from about $400-500 a month to paying how much

we blabber to get the podcast transcribed and I think a real win-win

here would be if we can find somebody who can get some

advertisement supplement transcript and kick in that amount on a

monthly basis. So if you know of a business who’d be interested in

doing this or you’re interested in doing it yourself, let us know and

we’ll work something out with you. Just send me an e-mail. Really,

it’d be the easiest way to do it. E-mail me at

ben@bengreenfieldfitness.com so we can keep on providing

transcripts ‘cause right now, I am essentially paying for that out on

my own pocket and it’s breaking the bank. I’m having to eat bread

and old cheese everyday for dinner and breakfast and lunch.

Brock: I was gonna say I hear that you’ve signed up somebody else to come

and speak at your Become Superhuman Live event as well.

Ben: Yes. I wanted to mention that and Nora Gedgaudas, author of

Primal Body Primal Mind is going to be joining a host of other

speakers like Phil Maffetone and David Minkoff and Monica

Reinagel, the nutrition diva and a bunch of other folks. I will put a

link in the show notes to the full page but she’s gonna be talking

about Cultivating a Natural Mental Edge for Peak Performance.

She’s really good at biofeedback and neurotransmitters and stuff

like that so she’s gonna be teaching us all that and anybody who

shows up, of course, will get to meet Nora and go to some of the

after-party events with her. And it’s gonna be quite the event that

keeps on getting better and better but it’s filling up and you need to

register if you’re gonna go to that. I talked to a ton of people and

they’re like “yeah, I’m coming”. And you do register so that you can

get your hotel room because we’ve only got a limited number of

discounted hotel room slots available and so that we can get your

goody bag prepped and everything like that ‘cause it’s coming up

quick – March 8th and 9th. Spokane is easier to get to than you

might think and people are coming in from all over the world so

check that out. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the live event

over at bengreenfieldfitness.com. That’s called Become

Superhuman. Speaking of a transcript sponsor, we are also looking

for title sponsors for that event. You want your banner hung at the

event. You want your logo on the powerpoint. You want your stuff

in the goody bags, hand it out to all the attendees and everything.

You can get hooked up as an event title sponsor so if you’re

interested in that opportunity also, e-mail me:

ben@bengreenfieldfitness.com and we’ve got a ton of other

updates, camps, clinics, upcoming speaking events that I’m gonna

be at, all sorts of goodies for you. So if you want to drink the Cool

Aid and just check out all the different opportunities. They’re all

over there at bengreenfieldfitness.com. You just click you like this

episode, Episode #226. Peruse them, you’re gonna find some cool

stuff whether you’re an Ironman triathlete or you just to shed a few

pounds. And then the last thing, of course, that you should know is

that as we’re about to jump in to the Q and A here, we have a

MyList that we put up for every single episode and that’s over at

MyList.com/bengreenfield. And when you go to

MyList.com/bengreenfield, you’ll be able to access pretty much a

list of anything I talk about. So as we go to the Q and A, if you hear

me mention this and that, you get confused, if you’re not gonna

remember stuff, check out with MyList because we go out of our

way to make a handy dandy list for you in every episode.

Brock: We also, if you do go to bengreenfieldfitness.com, find the episode,

scroll down to the section with the Listener Q and A and I know a

lot of people find this really handy but I don’t think we’ve ever

mentioned that we do this on the show. I put the time code in next

to every question so if you’re looking back, you’ve come back 3

weeks later and you’re wanting to figure out or find that question

that we talked about the testosterone levels in, you can go to the

show notes, find that it happened at 45 minutes and 32 seconds and

that makes it easier for you to find that in the future.

Ben: Awesome. You know what? Between the news flashes and the

special announcements, I’m already out of chai, which means that

this thing is gonna be long for you and jump into the Q and A.

[0:25:00.3]

Wanna get personal access to all of Ben Greenfield’s secrets life?

This March in Spokane, Washington. Ben is bringing the world’s

best speakers straight to you. You’re gonna get step by step

blueprints for performance, fat loss, recovery, digestion, brain,

sleep, and hormone optimization and get inside or access to private

parties special sessions for podcast listeners only. And of course,

delicious locally grown organic meals. The conference is called

Become Super Human and it’s already filling up fast. But you can

get in now at bengreenfieldfitness.com/superhuman. You’ll come

away from this live 2 day event completely set for life to achieve

everything you want for your body, mind and performance.

Whether you want to maximize fat loss, achieve an ironman

triathlon, or push your body and mind to the absolutely limits of

human performance. So visit

bengreenfieldfitness.com/superhuman and we’ll see you live and in

person March 8th and 9th, 2013.

Listener Q & A:

Clay: Hi Ben! This is Clay Anderson from South Dakota. You can kinda

tell from my voice I’m starting to get the lung crud. I’ve got a cold, a

sinus headache and cold going on and just wondered if…you know,

I’m getting a green mucus and I’m assuming that’s viral and

normally, antibiotics would be used to kill that. Is there anything

that I could be looking on a different kind of shelf rather than a

traditional antibiotic to cure this and possibly just throughout all

the good flora I’ve tried to achieve was the Probiotic if you know

more about that. Thanks.

Brock: Okay. I guess one of us has to say it and I’m gonna be that one.

Viruses are not affected by antibiotics.

Ben: Yeah. Exactly. Perhaps Clay, it was just a semantics issue there. But

either way, if you’ve got lung crud and sinus headache and a cold

and this mucus, you definitely got likely some kind of an infection

going on and so let’s talk about some ways that you could for

example, not only shorten the duration of a cold but potentially

make your immune system a little bit more bullet-proof. Before we

do though, let’s talk about snot. A lot of times in the winter and in

the cold season, a lot of people do get green snot (green mucus) and

while green mucus in the morning is no cause for warning, constant

green-colored mucus throughout the day can a lot of times, mean

that you are suffering from a bacterial infection and it can be an

indication of an infection. And the reason that it turns green is

you’ve got these white blood cells that are part of your body’s

defense system and those die as they fight the bacteria and when

the part of that white blood cell called the white corpuscle dies, it

turns green in color and you also get some bacteria and some fungi

that begin to multiply and cause swelling and could contribute for

example, to this headache that Clay is getting and it’s a classic

upper respiratory tract infection type of thing. And sometimes

you’re gonna find that snot is yellow when this happens and a lot of

times when it’s yellow, it can be more of a viral infection than a

bacterial infection, interestingly.

Brock: If the snot is yellow, just stay mellow.

Ben: Don’t give up your day job, dude.

Brock: Damn.

Ben: Yeah. Keep working on that one. Maybe if you did it with your

accordion. And then the mucus should really be white and clear

most of the time. The only other color you’re gonna see sometimes

is just reddish pink which could happen if you got punched in the

nose or like me the other day, snowboarding and your nose gets so

dry from that super cold air and get a little bit of bleeding in that

case. But the green a lot of times, that is a bacterial infection. And

so antibiotics are probably not gonna be the way to go unless you

were diagnosed with an actual viral issue going on. But let’s say that

you did have the need to take antibiotics, I will link to an article that

I wrote about how to mitigate the effects of taking antibiotics

because they do kill off the good bacteria in your GI tract. You

could (and a lot of people do this) take a bunch of probiotics while

they are on an antibiotics regimen and the fact is that doesn’t really

do much for you because the antiobiotics pretty much nuke those

probiotics as soon as you take them in.

[0:30:01.2]

There’s certainly quite a bit of benefit to starting into a good

antibiotic regimen as soon as you get off the antibiotics but there’s

not gonna be much that’s gonna stand up to antibiotics aside from

one probiotic strain and that’s called saccharomyces boulardii.

You’ll find it in some probiotic compounds but saccharomyces

boulardii is one probiotic strain that can do a decent job

maintaining some amount of gut flora while you’re on antibiotics

but most of the probiotics are just gonna get killed off by the

antibiotics either way. However, as soon as you get off that

antibiotic regimen, you’d only wanna start on the fermented foods

like kombucha and kiefer and sauerkraut and pickled things,

kimchi, stuff like that. But usually, I also start in like a good

probiotic. I’m also a fan of teeming up the probiotics with some

type of an anti yeast compound. I’m a big fan of Oil of Oregano for

this like a few drops of Oil of Oregano everyday because yeast and

fungus can, a lot of times churn up in the digestive tract when you

have a bacterial imbalance such as would be created when you

finished up an antibiotic regimen. That’ll be one thing: get on a

good probiotic and a good oil of oregano after you finish that

antibiotic regimen and look for something like saccharomyces

boulardii during. You’re gonna wanna protect your organs when

you’re on antibiotics and just a basic liver detox, probably best too

will be like milk thistle extract is a really, really good liver detox.

Another one is acetylcysteine. That’s one that they’ll use in

hospitals a lot of times for supporting the liver and protecting it in

the presence of high amounts of pharmaceutical intake or alcohol

and stuff like that. Ginger can help settle the stomach and limit the

nausea a little bit from antibiotics. So that’s something to do as

well. You can just peel ginger and slice into small sizes and boil it

and let it simmer for 15-20 minutes and just chew on it or drink the

ginger tea that you just made.

Brock: Would you chew on it or just swallow it?

Ben: You could chew on it or swallow. I mean you could take ginger pills,

whatever. I like to chew on gingers that are boiled. I think it’s

good. And then glutamine is another one to look into. Glutamine

helps you to repair your intestinal lining and also could help to

(similarly to oil of oregano) eliminate yeast infections. Similar to

glutamine like a bone broth would have an effect as well. A lot of

people don’t wanna make a bone broth when they’re sick though so

you could just use a glutamine supplement or a gelatin supplement

or something of that nature. But either way, those are some of the

things that you can do to mitigate the effects of antibiotics. But let’s

talk about not getting sick in the first place, shall we?

Brock: That sounds like a great plan.

Ben: All right. Wellness FX recently had a really good article on their

website. And in that article, they interviewed all the different

practitioners and physicians about what they would do and what

their favorite things are that they recommend to their patients and

their clients to help them not get sick and also to get over sickness

more quickly. Some of the more interesting ones that folks may not

be aware of…

Brock: Yeah. There are a bunch in that article, there were just sort of

obvious things like wash your hands, cough into your shoulder or

into your elbow that kind of stuff. But then there are some

interesting ones as well.

Ben: Yeah. Get enough sleep, whatever. We don’t care about this stuff.

We’re not the weird stuff. Pure ascorbic acid – Dr. Daniel Chong

recommended you take 1-2 grams of pure ascorbic acid during flu

season or cold season and if you’re getting sick or you’re over

stressed, you take that amount every waking hour of the day until

you get loose stools and then when you’re well again, you go back to

the standard dose. And for anybody who’s taking 1-2 grams of

vitamin C, taking that amount every waking hour until you get loose

stools is a lot of vitamin C but he says it can help you get better

faster. And when you’re using it, just that much per day, not every

hour that it can help boost your immune system. So there’s an

option. Dr. Hernandez, a naturopathic physician over at Wellness

FX recommended a Stragalus. Taking a Stragalus twice a day during

flu and cold season and Stragalus is just basically an herb. There

was a recommendation on there for Elderberry Tincture, which is

something I tried a little bit and found that when I’m starting to get

sick (when I’m just staring to get the sniffles and everything), I’ve

got some Elderberry Tincture that I keep in my bathroom and a few

drops of that and knock on wood, right as rain. So I like the

Elderberry Tincture and I’ve noticed the same effect with an

Echinacea Tincture. And for those who don’t know what a tincture

is, it’s just like the oil (the extract). Another thing that was in there

that I thought was interesting was Colloidal Silver Spray.

[0:35:06.8]

Colloidal Silver Spray was recommended by Dr. Justin Mager. He’s

actually coming up to speak at the Superhuman event and he

recommends Colloidal Silver Spray for topical anti-microbial

activity. This would be like using it on cat’s wounds, scrape, stuff

like that during cold and flu season. But also something called

DHEA which a lot of times is recommended as a hormonal

precursor or hormone really. He recommends about 20 mg of

DHEA for women and 50 mg for men to boost your immune

function the day before and the day of travel like when you going to

do airplane travel or something like that – DHEA. I thought that

was an interesting suggestion, one that I wasn’t familiar with.

Another physician, Dr. Nibbe – she recommends a homeopathic

remedy that has been shown in clinical studies to reduce the days

that you stay sick. And the name of this remedy is oscillococcinum.

It’s a homeopathic remedy. You take just a little bit of it and it’s

supposed to not prevent flues and colds from recurring but possibly

to reduce the number of days that you stay sick. So those were

some of I thought the interesting remedies that were recommended

and I did produce a MyList for all this stuff – all the 21 tips that

were in that article and I’ll link to the article and also to the MyList

for that in the show notes. For people, you know, ‘cause we’re

recording this during January which is still kinda cold and flu

season, those are some of the things to try. What I personally do is I

use Oil of Oregano. I use Elder Berry and I use Echinacea. Those

are kinda my three. But there’s more than one way to skin a cat –

more than one way to boost your immune system and you could

take advantage of any of these methods that I just run over.

Scott: Hey Ben! This is Scott. I’m a 29 year-old male and had been

training for about 5 months for my first power lifting meet. I

decided to have some blood work done for tracking purposes. I

have both lab results done first thing in the morning in a fasted

state and about 8 weeks apart. Both show low free testosterone

levels. The first one, 3.9 ____[0:37:19.7]grams per ml and the

other one, 4.7 _____[0:37:22.8]grams per ml. Both (we’re told)

were extremely low and both tests also showed high IGF1 levels of

332 and 300 nanograms per ml. The way I interpreted these results

are that I’m making 20th HGH because of the steadily high IGF1

levels which seems to be conducive to putting on size and gaining

strength. However, I’m afraid much of it is being wasted by such

low testosterone. Am I interpreting this correctly? That even with

high IGF1 levels leading to high indigenous HGH production that

extremely low testosterone could be counteracting it. What other

markers could I use to test that maybe give more information?

Thanks and happy 2013.

Ben: Wow! We’ve got some smart listeners, don’t we, Brock?

Brock: Yeah. I was just gonna say maybe we should start by explaining

what IGF1 is.

Ben: Everything that Scott just went over. Yeah, IGF1 is insulin-like

growth factor and that’s something that you may see elevated, for

example, when someone has eaten a diet high in starches and

sugars and things that may boost insulin. But you can also see IGF1

go up when there is a high amount of growth hormone. And growth

hormone is something that could be released by everything from

heavy weight lifting to adequate amount of sleep, etc. What’s not

normal though is if you have high insulin-like growth factor and

high growth hormone and the 2 do tend to go hand in hand, you

should also at the same time have high testosterone because we’re

talking about a bunch of different hormones that are anabolic, that

promote muscle growth and promote muscle recovery. And if your

IGF1 is up and your growth hormone is up and it’s likely that the

high growth hormone is what will cause elevated IGF1 values if

you’ve got a decent diet and not doing lots of sugar and you haven’t

just eaten a container of yogurt or something else that could boost

IGF1 levels.

Brock: And you’re like Scott and are training for a power lifting

competition.

Ben: Exactly. There are a couple of things that you may want to consider.

First of all and I don’t want to scare Scott off here. But back when

we had Christopher Walker on the podcast to talk about hormone

balances, Christopher had a testosterone deficiency that ended up,

eventually, he found being the effect of a pituitary tumor. Granted

it was a benign pituitary tumor and what that means is that it was

mild and it was non-cancer so it was not spreading but it was a

tumor that was affecting the pituitary glands effect on these

anabolic hormones.

[0:40:17.3]

And when you have this pituitary tumor, a lot of times, what you

tend to see are increased concentrations of growth hormone and of

IGF1 that elevate without them actually affecting your testosterone

levels. So one of the things that you may want to consider is going

back and listening to that episode with Christopher Walker where

he talked about how he actually got his testosterone levels back up

in the presence of pituitary tumor. And for him it was dietary

modifications – eliminating sugars, eliminating starches, ensuring a

lot of rests really not overworking the body, allowing the body to

naturally get the testosterone levels back up. Primarily, if you’re

kind of like an R and R approach ‘cause he was a heavily exercising

endurance triathlete and he never actually went in and got the

tumor removed or anything like that. He just keeps

_____[0:41:11.9] on it through medical imaging every now and

again to make sure that it’s not growing.

Brock: That was really cool that he actually never did go in for surgery to

have it removed. He’s just managed to balance everything naturally.

Ben: Yeah. And I’m not sure how common these pituitary tumors are but

they certainly are benign and it’s not an incredibly risky type of

state but certainly something that you should look into. And

sometimes, they will surgically remove the tumor and when that

happens, you may need to actually get on like an insulin-like growth

factor therapy for a short period of time because it’s gonna

significantly reduce your insulin-like growth factor levels and your

growth hormone levels. That’s what I would throw out there for

Scott if it is a matter of for example, let’s say the leydig cells and his

testes are not properly producing testosterone, there can be any

number of issues. There can be a zinc deficiency for example. It

could be a biotin deficiency. There’s a bunch of different

micronutrient deficiencies that may affect you ability to produce

testosterone. And there are some precursors. I’ve actually got a

guest article coming up here very soon on bengreenfieldfitness.com

about some of the more common ways to increase testosterone

when you’re in a state like this, when something like this happens.

And vitamin D, zinc, I believe boron is one of them. It’s in the

article as well but just some basic things that you can take to help

your body naturally increase its testosterone production so keep

your eyes for that article to come out soon at

bengreenfieldfitness.com ‘cause that’s gonna help you quite a bit

too vs. a lot of these herbal testosterone boosters that don’t

necessarily have a ton of research behind them. You can always be

better off supporting your body’s own indigenous internal ability to

produce testosterone. Now, the reason that I’ve only really

scratched the surface on Scott’s question is because when I’m doing

a phone consult with somebody or something like that, we sit down

and go through their full dietary protocol and their full supplement

protocol and really look for the holes that might be causing an issue

like this. I’ll put a link as well to the (you know, I do 20-minute

consultations and I do 60-minute consultations and that’s

something that will certainly be prudent to use in a case like this

‘cause I don’t have a ton of information about Scott to really know

what dietary and supplement and even exercise factors could be

affecting the low free testosterone levels.

Driver: For the last couple of weeks, I have been spending from 2-4 hours

driving and it looks like that’s going to stay the same for a long

time. I noticed that since I’ve been spending so much time in the

car, my running form has worsened and I’m even getting sore knees

especially on my left leg. I wonder if there’s a relation. I think it is

and do you have any recommendations? Anything I can do in the

car or posture or a C-cord that I can use? Thank you for your time.

Bye.

Brock: Oh…4 hours in the car everyday.

Ben: I freaking hate road trips. I don’t even drive. I have a truck and I in

it once a week.

Brock: I haven’t owned a car in almost 3 years now. I take my bicycle

everywhere. I get really weird looks ‘cause I go to grocery store

nowadays and I’ve got a scarf and a full face mask and they

probably think I ‘m gonna rob the store. Just what I do so I don’t

freeze to death but I go everywhere on my bike in the snow, in the

ice and…

Brock: It doesn’t sound like this is an option in this case.

Ben: I hate to drive. Yeah. Replace that for our comment with the bike

ride. The reason that your back hurts when you’re driving a car,

when you’re in an airplane, whatever, is because of tight hip flexors.

[0:45:10.1]

That’s the most common reason. What happens is when you work

at a desk all day, you sit all day, not only does it weaken your hip

flexors but they tend to shorten up when you’re in that seated

position and it can cause back pain, it can increase your risk of foot

and ankle and knee injuries. And when you’re at your desk, the best

way to do it is to stand up every hour and stretch. (Like I know

Brock is probably doing jumping jacks or something in the

background with his microphone on mute.)

Brock: I’m doing lunges.

Ben: Lunges. There you go. A lunging hip flexor stretch really is one of

the great ways that you can help to work the hips and stretch the

hip flexors. It’s easier than hula hooping which also could stretch

your hip flexors. But what I do when I’m on the road trip and forced

to be in a car for a long period of time, is I try and stop when I can

and do a lunging hip flexor stretch and you need to do it for at least

6 seconds per side to overcome what’s called your goggy tendon

organ which is that stretch reflex that needs to actually get

stimulated to get the muscle to lengthen. So to overcome that, you

need to hold a stretch for 6 seconds. You can hold it for 20-30

seconds if you want to but just a lunging stretch really, lifting you

arms overhead and lunging and holding for one side and then

lunging and holding for the other side. And that stretches the

muscle on the front of your leg that attaches to your hip that’s

where you wanna feel that. And then kinda lean back and look up

at the sky. You do that to intensify the stretch. Other stretches that

you can do are bridging stretches where you’re lying on the ground

on your back pushing your hips up toward the sky not quite as easy

to do when you’re stopped at a gas station or hardware or

something like that lest you want gasoline on your back of your T-

shirt.

Brock: Yeah. Don’t do it behind the truck stop.

Ben: Yeah. But I usually do the lunging hip flexor stretch and then I do

the swinging the leg from front to back and also form side to side to

stretch out the hip flexors on a leg. Basically, I’ll do 10 leg swings on

each side front to back like ballistic legs swings or I’m swinging the

legs up and swinging it back. And then I do the same thing side to

side as well. The last thing you can do is you got to be careful with

this that you don’t hyper extend your lower back and you can just

kneel on the ground and then lean back putting your hands behind

you for support and arch your back just a little bit and look for the

sky as you’re leaning back and you’ll feel that in the front of both

legs. And that’s a really quick one that you can do in a pinch when

you don’t have long to stretch. I do all of those when I’m on a road

trip and whenever I stop, I stretch my hip flexors quite intensively

and it helps a lot. Now, you can also tilt your pelvis to the point

where you’ve got a little bit of a hip flexor stretch by simply using

one of those seats that you put in the car like one of those seat

attachments that has a lumbar support for the low back. That’s one

of the ways that that works. It keeps your hip flexors just slightly

more lengthened when you’re in that seated position. It’s not gonna

hold a candle to lunging or leg swings or any of that other stuff that

I talked about but it can certainly help a little bit when you just

don’t have the option of getting out of your car. So that’s another

thing that you could do as well as just use one of those lumbar hip

flexor supports. But the most important thing for you to realize is

that you’ve got to keep flexors stretched and stopping as much as

you can to stretch them or if stopping isn’t an option, using a

lumbar back support and then stretching your hip flexor both

before and after your trip is gonna help a ton.

Brock: And I find when I’m driving for a long time, my right IT bend gets

really tight and I think it’s because your right foot is constantly

either holding the gas pedal down or briefly shifting over to the

brake pedal so this probably isn’t very safe but occasionally, when

my IT bend gets really sore, I actually switch to use my left foot on

the gas pedal if you don’t have cruise control. And I find that gives

your leg just a bit of a break and you do sort of shift around in the

seat as well so you’re not just sitting in exactly the same position the

entire time that you’re in the car.

Ben: Yeah. That or you could get a Harley. That’d be another option.

Just get a hog. That’ll allow you to lean back in a lounge position.

That might be an option, too. He sounds like a guy with probably

be able to grab a Harley Davidson and just jet to it that way.

Brock: Yeah. I think I heard those handle bar mustache in his voice.

Ben: I think I did hear a handle bar. And by the way, I’ll put a link to an

article that has some really good hip flexor exercises in the show

notes for 226. So there you go.

Vince: Hey Ben! This is Vince from San Francisco. So with the 24th cycling

season winding down toward the end of summer, I started to

embark on a low carb diet and I’m _____[0:50:04.0] with 30-50

grams carbs a day and I sort of tapered off my intensive cycling and

spends more time in the gym lifting and I’ve lost significant body

fat.

[0:50:19.0]

I also feel great. I don’t feel hungry. I have plenty of energy in the

gym and plenty of energy when I do hop on my bike although the

time I spend on my bike in the past 4 months has not been as

competitive as it might be during the racing season. Is this the type

of eating that I can maintain as I start to ramp up for the 2013

competitive cycling season? I’m usually racing at least just a few

times a month. I’m concerned that a low car diet is not gonna

provide that sort of boost of instantly accessible energy that you

need in something like a crit. Any thoughts on that topic would be

much appreciated. Thanks.

Brock: People are always worried about the low carbs not giving them

enough energy.

Ben: That’s right. A bike crit, for those of you who don’t know what it is,

it’s total number of laps over total time and it’s usually relatively

short and intense. You’re not gonna be out there for 2 or 3 hours in

most cases unless you’re like Gram Oslo. But it is intense whereas

this isn’t an issue where glycogen depletion or carbohydrate

depletion is an issue as much as it is the fact that you’re using fast

twitch muscle which relies primarily on glucose as a fuel is an issue.

It is certainly true that you just can’t achieve certain intensities,

burn certain matches so to speak unless you are using a certain

percentage of glucose as a fuel. And if you went into an event like

this completely glycogen depleted, meaning that your muscle

glycogen levels are extremely low, you could risk not having that

energy that you need. But there’s a couple of things to consider

here. First of all, on a good low carb diet, not only are you still

taking in a range of 400-600 calories of carbohydrate on a daily

basis which is combined with other food sources gonna be pretty

adequate for keeping your muscle glycogen levels topped off. But

you’re also getting some glucose conversion from proteins that you

eat. Those can get converted into glycogens. You can get some

amount of glycogen conversion from the backbone of free fatty

acids from the glycerol backbone of fatty acids and so don’t think

that just because you’re only taking in, say, a 100 or 150 grams of

carbohydrates or 400-600 calories of carbohydrates per day, that

that’s all that your body has to rely on.

Brock: He said that he’s doing a lot lower. He’s doing 30-50 grams per day.

Ben: He’s on 30-50?

Brock: He’s on a super low carb.

Ben: Yeah. That’s gonna relate to what I am about to say and that is the

same thing that I mentioned. I believe I mentioned this recently on

Richwell’s podcast and we talked about the use of carbohydrates

and basic physiology which you can delve into.

We geeked out for a good 2 hours on that stuff. But sugar is a

sometimes drug, meaning that when we’re talking about taking this

low carbohydrate diet approach. You do get to a point where if you

wanna go out and do something like something that’s unnatural like

running from a lion not just once but multiple times like you’re

gonna be doing during a crit. Running from a lion for many, many

times around the block. And sometimes, you do need to give your

body a relatively unnatural source of fuel and certainly, if I was

taking in 30-50 grams a day for about 48 hours or a minimum of 24

hours prior to that event, I would consider tweaking up to closer to

100-150 grams of carbohydrate for those last couple of days so that

you do go in with a little bit more topped off muscle glycogen

storage because a lot of times, someone is taking in 30-50 grams of

carbohydrate per day, they are potentially in a state of ketosis,

meaning that they’re burning fatty acids primarily as a fuel. They

probably have a slightly lower muscle glycogen source in the

average person. They do have lower muscle glycogen source in the

average person walking around. And it could help if you wanna

have your cake and eat it, too to just slightly up that carbon take for

this last couple of days before an intense event like this. This crit

was 100-mile bike ride like a century ride in aerobic pace or hiking

up the pacific crest trail or something like that. You’d do just fine

just utilizing fatty acids as a fuel. Maybe using some chia seeds or

maybe some super starch or something like that but if this were me,

I would be jacking up the carb intake just a little bit for that final

24-48 hours, don’t need to go ape nuts on it.

[0:55:12.4]

And then before the event, taking in a little bit of carbohydrate

source like a sports drink or a couple of sweet potatoes or yams or

something of that nature. I’d slam a gel right beforehand and then

I’d go all out. The fact is that there’s really not gonna be much of an

effect for a short period of time with this. It’s the people whose guts

get ravaged and it create in that state of acidity and inflammation

who are doing something like the sugar approach for 10 hours in a

row during Ironman and also loading up with sugars for 6 months

leading up to that event. Getting a little bit of extra carbs into the

body before a crit so you can really be as explosive as possible and

use your glycolytic energy system tapped into that as much as

possible, there’s no gonna be much of a health effect from doing

something like that.

Brock: You’re talking about being like I had a 150-200 grams is still like

quarter of what the general population is getting as far as

carbohydrate per day goes. It’s still a low carb.

Ben: Yeah. The way I lay this out in my Low Carb Fueling Package and

you can check it out at lowcarbtriathlete.com/lowcarbpackage. It’s

not just for triathletes. It’s for any active person. I have a fat

adaptation week. I have a maintenance phase. The fat adaptation

week is very ketogenic. The maintenance phase is closer to 100-150

grams per day of carbs which a lot of endurance athletes do better

on vs. that ketogenic approach. And then there’s also a race week

phase which has that gradual amping up of carbs just slightly going

into a race - just a little bit extra and a special bit of extra on race

days. That’s the scenario that I personally use and that’s what I

would recommend to Vince.

Chris: Hi Ben and Brock! I have a question about the topic all men love to

talk about – menstruation. My girlfriend has been experiencing

increasingly severe symptoms associated with her period and has

noticed that has got much worse since she lived in Utah for school.

She’s 19 years old. She’s been living at about 5000 feet of elevation

but didn’t seem to have quite the same issues when she came back

to Southern California last summer where she grew up at around

1000 feet elevation. The symptoms range from usual emotional

sensitivity and bloating to extreme or complete loss of appetite,

lower back pain and sharp stomach pains, sometimes to the point

where she can’t tolerate the pain to get out of bed in the morning.

We were wondering if this could be a result of just getting a little

older, the elevation change or the different climate or just anything

else. I want to see if you have any insight on a holistic approach to

minimizing the extremes of the symptoms. No disrespect to you or

Brock, but I was wondering if you could talk Jessa and giving her

insights as well. Thanks. I love the show.

Ben: You know, I asked Jessa about this. You know what she said?

Brock: In can’t even guess.

Ben: She was like, “I have no idea why you’re asking me this”. Chris, I

did delve into the research to look at an answer for your question

and it turns out this stuff has been investigated. The International

Journal of Gynecology looked at hormone profiles during the

menstrual cycle at high altitude. And they found some interesting

effects. They found that estradiol which is basically going to affect

your estrogen levels that was higher at altitude and also during the

actual cycle itself on days 5, days 8 and days 12. Progesterone was

also significantly higher and this type of hormonal fluctuations can

certainly affect not only menstruation, the time you have the

menstrual cycle, the period of time that menstruation takes place or

the length that it lasts, but also I feel psychologically and from a

stress standpoint in terms of nervous tension and mood swings and

irritability and anxiety and insomnia and stuff like that can happen

with menstruation or PMS. There are bunch of different types of

PMS. And many of them are related to either progesterone

deficiencies or excesses or estrogen deficiencies or excesses and all

of those affect your dopamine levels, your serotonin levels and your

neurotransmitter levels. What that means is that there is a

significant psychological and mental effect when your hormones are

fluctuating like this and there are certainly things that you can do

from a neurotransmitter standpoint.

[1:00:01.0]

Now, PMS tends to be classified into several different subtypes and

one of the subtypes that is associated with a relative progesterone

excess (which is what can happen at altitude) is that there is a

deficiency of norepinephrine in the central nervous system and the

deficiency of norepinephrine can be slightly addressed by getting

adequate tyrosine into the diet. So if your girlfriend has insufficient

dietary tyrosine, she may benefit from using a tyrosine supplement.

One really, really good combo when you’re trying to stabilize

neurotransmitters is a combination of something called 5HTP with

tyrosine typically in about 1:10 ratio, like 300 mg of 5HTP along

with 3000 mg of tyrosine on a daily basis. That could be something

to experiment with a little bit just to see how you’ll feel or

something like that. I’m not a physician. I don’t want you to

perceive this as medical advice.

Brock: Ben is not a doctor and the content provided on this podcast is for

informational purposes only and should not be construed as

medical or health care advice.

Ben: There’s something that I would certainly consider. I actually have a

5HTP supplements combined with tyrosine in my cupboard here

that my wife used the last time she had her cycle just to see if it

affected her mood at all and she liked it and felt that it works a little

bit. That’s something to look into is a combination of HTP and

tyrosine. But there’s another study that was more of a Chinese

medical approach and this was a study of 2 different populations in

China: one living at lower altitude and one living at high altitude. I

believe one was that about 6000, one was that about 12000 feet.

What they looked at was menstruation and the instance of

abdominal pain and body temperature and symptoms of PMS. And

they found that the symptoms in the high altitude group what was

called the Zadou population was much more serious – much higher.

The mechanism of pathology that they used (to describe the issue

though), the Chinese medical terms and now I can link to the article

in the show notes. But basically, it was a deficiency of chi which is

kinda like life force energy in Chinese medicine and so what they

recommended in this case was invigorating, chi promoting the flow

of chi. And when you’re looking at promoting the flow of chi or

balancing emotions in Chinese medicine, some of the ways that you

would improve chi, interestingly, kinda go hand in hand with some

of the traditional recommendations that are out there from a

natural medicine standpoint for addressing PMS. So some of the

things that are recommended to increase your chi are deep

breathing exercises and yoga would count to something like that as

would simply having like a 5-minute period of time that you go

through where you do deep breathing. And if you don’t know how

to do this there’s all sorts of phone apps out there that can help you

with deep breathing like Azumio. Check out azumio.com. They’ve

got a suite of different phone apps that help you with stress and

train you how to do deep breathing and stuff like that. Things that

would be considered to be chi robbing or chi stealing activities

would be watching a lot of TV, talking a lot or engaging in a lot of

physical interactions, spending a lot of time in crowded places.

These are all things that you may want to consider avoiding as

much as possible when you’re in your menstrual phase simply

because they may rob chi that is already deficient during that phase

of your cycle. All the foods recommended are as (wouldn’t surprise

you here but none of the processed preservative laden foods,

avoiding starches, sugars, things of that nature). Stretching is

highly recommended as is Chi Gong or martial arts classes which I

know might be a little bit of stretch for you but yoga would be a

perfect example, something that you could do. Decent sleep and

avoidance of caffeine especially in conjunction with your cycle that

would be something that would be important for managing chi.

And there’s some interesting things like wearing bright colors,

listening to uplifting music, surrounding yourself with paintings or

with pictures or with actual flowers and plants and things that help

to improve the mood from that standpoint. Some of that stuff may

sound kinda woowoo but is established in Chinese medicine as a

good way to improve life force, to improve chi. A couple of different

ways that you can combo this from that I would recommend that

under our transmitter standpoint, in terms of making sure that

you’re getting adequate HTP and tyrosine and in the chi standpoint,

in terms of really making sure that you’re stabilizing yourself – deep

breathing, yoga, positive emotions, positive colors, even using some

of these biofeedback phone apps if you need to and wanting to

combo that would certainly be worth a try.

[1:05:09.8]

Brock: Can you train your PMS at altitude like what it actually is sort

of…would there be adaptations that happen over time, do you

think?

Ben: I couldn’t find any studies that showed what happens when

someone goes from low altitude to high altitude as far as if the

effects eventually drop over time as far as deleterious effects or

negative effects during the menstrual cycle or during menstruation.

But it’s likely because people act on it to a high altitude, right? So,

it’s certainly possible that a lot of the things that are affecting FH,

LSH, progesterone, estradiol, a lot of these things will potentially

stabilize along with the amount of time spent to altitude.

Brock: And just one last thing, Chris, Don’t ever suggest that your

girlfriend is getting older. Just don’t.

Ben: Yeah. That’s doghouse material. And something I just realized

based off of what I just said about acclimating. One thing that you

should pay attention to is that in this study that was done in this

Chinese culture is the people living at low altitude for a long period

of time vs. living at high altitude and despite that these people in

the high altitude group had been living and grown up at a high

altitude, their symptoms of PMS are still worse. Part of it might just

be that high altitude hypoxic environment affecting physiology to

the extent where some of these stuff is not something that you get

used to over time.

Tony: Hi Ben! Hi! I just saw your website and I’m thinking about going

to a Personal Training or getting a Personal Training certification. I

know there’s a lot out there. I’d actually done the NASM. I wasn’t

very impressed with that one. There’s one called National Personal

Training Institute. It’s a chain. They’re around the United States

(most states). It’s a 6-month course. You go to school on like 9:00

to 3:00, 5 days a week. It seems pretty thorough. I’ve actually

talked to one of the teachers here at Dallas, Texas. My problem is

about $6000 which I find a little pricey. But a few form of

information supposedly they cover a lot of different routines,

workout regimens, a lot of anatomy, physiology which sounded

good to me because it’s a classroom setting as opposed to getting

something online or just reading from a textbook. So anyway, I was

just wondering what your thoughts on getting a Personal Training

certification, preferably, a national certification. Thanks, man.

Brock: I think it’s kind of a case if you get what you pay for in this

circumstance.

Ben: Yeah. $6000 is pricey, though. Here’s the deal. I took a look at the

National Personal Training Institute. I love the idea of doing an

internship to get your Personal Trainer certification because in

most cases, if you wander into a gym to hire a personal trainer, it’s

very likely that they might have some weekend Mickey Mouse

certification that the gym that you’re waltzing into has accepted as

adequate because that personal trainer is going to settle for a lower

hourly pay based off of the status of their certification. But you

don’t see all that behind the scene stuff. All you do is walk in, you

see that they’re the most affordable personal trainer or they’re the

one who has the most available hours or whatever and you hire

them and you get hurt, you get messed up, and perhaps you get

messed up for life because they don’t know what they were doing.

And it is certainly possible to sit for a weekend open book internet

exam and get a Personal Training certification. And a lot of times, it

can be a tough sell for something like the National Personal

Training Institute to sell a $6000 certification when you can get one

of these weekend open book certifications in a weekend vs. studying

for 6 months vs. being required to have a university degree or

something of that nature to be personal trainer. Their certification

program, the Personal Fitness Training program through the

National Personal Training Institute, it looks like what you do is

you gotta have 3oo hours of classroom instruction, 200 hours of

supervised hands-on gym time, and essentially like a real kind of

hands-on internship practical type of learning process that I really

like to see compared to the average Personal Trainer certification.

In my case, my Personal Trainer certification require me to have at

least an undergraduate degree in exercise Science and have

completed certain exercise courses at the undergraduate level while

going through that certification. And so what you always wanna

look for, you usually can’t go wrong if you’re getting somebody

who’s NSCA, NASM or ACSM. Those are 3 really good ones to look

for -National Science and Conditioning Association, National

Academy of Sports Medicine or American College of Sports

Medicine.

[1:10:06.2]

Brock: In Canada, we’ve got the NCCP, the National Coaching

Certification.

Ben: Yeah. And so, $6000 is a lot of money but it’s less expensive than

going and getting an undergraduate degree and you probably come

out with just about as much if not more instruction as someone who

has gone through an Exercise Science program. But the science

part of things physiology, biomechanics, nutrition – you might be a

little weak in those areas vs. the practical hands-on here’s how to do

and how to instruct a dead lift type of thing. You may wanna be

aware of the fact that you might have to go outside the bounds of

this particular certification if you end up doing it and top it off with

Institute for Integrated Nutrition or like the Check Institute or my

own SuperhumanCoach.com Mentorship program or something

that lets you learn a little bit more about hormones and physiology

and nutrition and food and all these other things that are gonna pop

up, that are gonna allow you to get more benefit the works that you

do with your clients. But ultimately, it looks like a good program. If

you didn’t do this program and you ended up going for less

expensive Personal Training certification, if I were one of your

clients, I will certainly be more comfortable if you still went through

some kind of an internship or something like that. You gotta put the

time in somehow. US Weight Lifting would be another example of

a certification that you could go through. There are different ways

to do this, for example, for me, most of my Olympic weight training

instruction came from me interning with a football team for a year

because they were coached by another weight training coach. And

so everytime he was coaching them, I was getting coached and a lot

of hands-on stuff and that’s how I learned. But whenever we’re

talking of something like this, think of personal training like

surgery. You can’t just read about it. You gotta go and then actually

get some hands-on time. You gotta hold the tools. You gotta watch

people doing it. You can’t just have your nose on a book and expect

to be a good surgeon. The same goes for something like personal

training. So what I would recommend ultimately is you either get

the NASM or the ACSM or the NSCA or something like that then

you go on and you do an internship somewhere assuming you’re not

going to college or you pay the money and you get this National

Personal Training Institute certification but then you top that off by

going through my mentorship program at SuperhumanCoach.com.

I work with a bunch of personal trainers to teach more advanced

nutritional concepts or you go through like Check Institute or

Integrative Medicine, Integrative Nutrition, Precision Nutrition is

another one. One of those kinda top off your knowledge of some of

the stuff that’s probably not gonna get addressed by this institute.

Brock: And I think that’s an ongoing process too like personally, pretty

much every year, I take another type of certification or attend

another type of seminar or something just so you’re always learning

and building on that information and not getting stuck. And as you

know from the show, things change rapidly over for running out

more information about how the body actually works so if you’ve

taken an amazing certification but it was 6 years ago and you

haven’t taken anything since, you’re missing out like that too. So

really continue to learn every chance you get.

Ben: Yeah. Plus humans are evolving at a rapid pace and we probably

have a third arm and green eyes here before we know it.

Brock: Yeah. I’ve had my…wait…did you say green eyes?

Ben: Well, what I mean by green eyes are the kind that grows on the top

of your head that attached to the end of antennas?

Brock: Of course! Yes, those ones.

Ben: So yeah. You wanna stay on top of these things.

Keerthi: Hi Ben! This is Keerthi from San Diego. I’m on a high fat diet for a

while now and I observe that whenever I eat a lot of fat in my diet

even from healthy sources like grass with butter, coconut oil, etc. I

have irritation in my throat. Do you know the reason behind this

and is there any remedy for this? Thank you.

Ben: Irritation in the throat from fats or fatty foods or greasy foods. I

hate to be too simple here but usually it just means that you’re not

digesting them well. And this can be for many number of reasons

like you don’t have the digestive enzymes responsible for doing

something like that and that can be completely genetic. Agents, for

example, get a blood flush on their face when they drink alcohol and

feel crappy because they don’t have much alcohol dehydrogenase on

board. And by popping some alcohol dehydrogenase prior to

drinking, they can mitigate some of the effects of that. Someone

who has inadequate enzymes for digesting fat could benefit prior to

a high fat meal by popping some digestive enzymes or by using for

example, some lipase or something like that. So that can definitely

be one of the reasons…

[1:15:05.4]

Brock: So is that like an acid reflux kind of an idea?

Ben: Well, not necessarily.

Brock: Like instead of digesting it, it’s coming back up?

Ben: I find a lot of people who seem to have relatively healthy guts and

do just fine with other foods, don’t have heart burn, don’t appear to

have gut flora imbalances and stuff like that that could cause heart

burn. They just need a little bit of extra help digesting fat and I

suspect that a big part of it could be genetic – low indigenous levels

of digestive enzymes, needing some help in that department.

Brock: I’m just wondering how it reaches the throat. How does it become a

throat irritation?

Ben: Well, because if you’ve got undigested food, it’s going to create inter

abdominal pressure that pushes things back up and into the

esophagus.

Brock: Okay. That’s what I was getting at.

Ben: Yeah. It’s just a pressure issue. It could also be a bile issue. Bile is

the digested food that’s stored in your gallbladder and it’s used to

break down fats during digestion and turn them into little fatty

acids that get absorbed by your digestive tract. A bunch of stuff

makes bile primarily cholesterol, bile salts, water, and what’s called

bilirubin which is a product of red blood cells. There certainly is

potential for nutritional deficiencies in particular like mineral

deficiencies or dehydration specifically to cause inadequate

production of bile or you may simply need to use some bile

stimulating strategies prior to consuming a high fat meal. So there

are things that you can eat to promote the flow of bile. Lemon juice

is one example. Lemon juice helps a lot of people who don’t do a

good job with digesting foods, just using a little bit of lemon juice

on food or drinking some lemon juice prior to eating food. That

helps to promote bile flow and that will be one thing that you could

try. Antioxidants also can help with bile flow and that would just be

including things like blueberries, blackberries, strawberries or just

an antioxidant blend on a daily basis. Artichoke extract or

artichokes themselves – those are considered to be what’s called the

choleretic, meaning that they can improve bile production and they

can relieve gallbladder discomfort and relieve some of the

discomfort that you might get from eating fatty meals which is why

dipping your artichoke in butter or eating artichoke hearts in oil can

be quite pleasant. It’s like turkey in cranberry. So you can cope

with artichokes. You can use an artichoke supplement but that

would be something you could include is artichokes. Beets - the

next time you use beets, you can save the leafy green tops from the

leaves and beet leaves are something you can add to a salad or you

can steam. And beet leaves are also really good choleretic agent for

stimulating bile production. And pretty much anything bitter like

bitters. You can buy bitter herbs, bitter leafy salad greens. Beet

leaves are bitter. Any of these type of things waltzes with bile

production. So if it’s bitter, it helps. The last thing would be garlic.

The allicin in garlic is a sulfur-based compound that can help not

only with you liver but also with the production of bile. Onions to a

lesser extent, but onions can also help with that. You could

introduce some onions and garlic into the diet. Include more the

bitters like the leafy greens, throw in some artichokes, throw in

some antioxidants, get some lemon juice in there, some digestive

enzymes and those would be some of the ways that you’d step up

your body’s ability to be able to digest fats if fats are kinda throwing

your growth ball.

Brock: Okay. So that finishes it up for today. So everybody, make sure, if

you’re in during the podcast, go over to iTunes and leave us a

ranking, leave a comment. It really helps out. And if you do have a

question, go over to bengreenfieldfitness.com and use the handy

dandy little tab on the right hand side of the screen or you can

always just record an audio file and e-mail to

ben@bengreenfieldfitness.com or you can use the “Ask Ben” form

at the bottom of the page.

Ben: Or you could send a talking greeting card. That would be a really

unique and cool way to do it.

Brock: I don’t know how we’d put that on the show but go for it. I’ll figure

it out.

Ben: I’ll just open it in front of my microphone. I’ll be, this week, down

at (for those of you listening just when it comes out) San Francisco

a week for A Day that’s Breeze Bulletproof Bio Hacking conference.

So if any of you guys are down there, say “hello”, be sure to check

audiblepodcast.com/ben and grab Fat Chance by Robert Lustig or

whatever else you fancy ‘cause you get it for free. Make sure you

check out the show notes where I’ve got links to some of the

opportunities in there for example, e-mailing me if you’d like to be a

transcript sponsor and also letting me know if you’re interested in

coming on as an event title sponsor for the Become Superhuman

Live event. And of course, if you haven’t yet registered for that

event, be sure to do so and I look forward to seeing lots of awesome

and fantastic listeners this March. So leave a rating and review in

iTunes and we’ll check you later.

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