Podcast #271 from http://www.bengreenfieldfitness.com/2014/02/271-are-vitaminc-vitamin-e-bad-for-you-exercise-when-youre-sick-why-your-stomach-sticks-outalcohol-cravings-and-more/
Introduction: In today’s episode of the Ben Greenfield fitness podcast: When Is It
Safe To Exercise After Being Sick, Vinegar For Fat Loss, Mucus In
Your Stool, How To Fix Your Colon, Why Your Stomach Sticks
Out, Can A Yeast Infection Cause Alcohol Cravings, and Building
Welcome to the bengreenfieldfitness.com podcast. We provide you
with premier exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon, and wellness
advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you’re
an ironman tri-athlete, or you’re just trying to shed a few pounds, get
ready for non-run-off-the-mill, cutting edge content from
So Brock, I’m surprised you actually showed up for today’s podcast
I would have expected you to be off watching curling at the Winter
‘Cause curling is so thrilling, it is hard to tear myself away from the
feed I have to admit.
From the feed in Sochi, you know, curling…. have you seen the
curling calendars that came out on the internet?
The sexy curling calendars. They actually have ….
They have the women of curling and the men of curling and they’ve
come out with these calendars to raise money, you know what, I don’t
know what they’re raising money for…. curlers, curlers’ anonymous?
Probably beer knowing curlers.
Raising money for beer. So anyways, after seeing those calendars I’m
personally a little bit courteous in curling.
Oh, you are!
Yeah! I’m surprised apparently curling can keep you relatively fit and
You know, I hate to say anything derogatory about my countrymen
but not in Canada. (laughs) I think it leads to beer consumption and
Well just be glad you’re not in Sochi. I don’t know if you’ve seen some
of the feed that has come back from the Winter Olympics but
apparently it’s not all that great of a place like there’s like completely
unfinished hotel rooms and like beds like they have a pillow shortage
like they’ve ran out of pillows.
You know, I was in, I spent a lot of time in Russia in the early 90s in
Minsk and that does not surprise me. I can’t imagine things change a
whole heck of a lot since then and none of the stuff that I’m seeing
coming out of that, out of the reports right now surprises me much. I
mean it’s not the Russian way, they’re not hung up on things like
pillows and having extra blankets and actually even like doors on
Like clean drinking water. Yeah like toilet, toilet bowl lids installed
upside down. It’s ….
They’ve probably just put those on for the Olympics so they should
count themselves like it is a seated all ‘cause it’s just not something
that Russians really worry about and in some ways I kinda hand it to
them to not be so hung up on all this like feature comfort kinda stuff
that we play so much so much importance on.
Yes, it’s very pretty nasty ‘cause I’m thinking about that like they’re
taking all the other countries way outside their comfort zone which is
kinda cool in a way. So if any of our listeners….
They’re showing what bad asses they are really.
That’s right, very pretty nasty. If any of our listeners are over at the
Sochi Olympics, write us in or call the show and ….
Yeah, send some photos.
….let us know how it is and for those who don’t know how to ask
questions for the show, just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com and
there’s like a little right side bar thingy-majig and you click on that
and the magic of the internet opens up its arms to you and allows you
to actually record using your own voice and the built in microphone
on your computer so….
I don’t think it’s called a thingy-majig, I think it might be a thinga
madooddle technically speaking.
And this is the part of the show where Ben goes through all the latest,
coolest and most in depth thinga madooddles that he’s come across
on the internet.
That’s right and speaking of the Olympics why don’t we jump right in
and talk about cheating, doping and steroid use.
I’d love it.
This was a very interesting study that was published, it was actually
published in October but kinda hit the presses earlier this week and
the title of the study was A Cellular Memory Mechanism Aids
Overload Hypertrophy in Muscle Long After Episodic Exposure to
So basically showing the longevity of using steroids. It doesn’t just
end when you stop using it.
Yeah basically in a nutshell, in plain speak – non–geek speak what
that study showed was that when you get exposed to performance
enhancing drugs, your muscles actually remember it and remember it
for like years.
So what this means is for example somebody who uses steroids or
hormones or illegal performance enhancing drugs like say Juan
Pelota also known as Lance Armstrong, by the way, do you that he
has twitter handle called Juan Pelota?
I didn’t ….
You know what that means in Spanish?
Sounds kinda cool. No.
Yeah, you could find it, it’s like twitter.com/juanpelota. Anyways
though, the idea is that you actually remember it. I’ve suspected this
for a long time like you kinda like reset your body’s expectation of
what it can do if you use illegal drugs and so let’s say you get banned
or you stop using those drugs and then come back to the sport.
Technically you’re still able to compete at a higher level than you may
have been able to had you not taken the drug. So it’s really
interesting, I’ll put a link to the study for people who wanna delve in
to a little bit more but to me it kinda brings up the question whether
or not we should ever allow people back in sport after they’ve been
Yeah, yeah it’s interesting actually with all the new talk about the
body having like a set point for your weight even and the central
governor theory that Tim Noakes talks about, it does make sense that
your body does have these memories that it falls back on and goes to.
That’s very cool!
Once the incredible hulk always the incredible hulk.
You can never get unmad.
And of course the other thing that really hit the news this week that
I’ve got a lot of tweets and questions about is it’s called vitamin C….
Oh man, in twitter, everywhere people are crazy for this one.
Vitamin C, vitamin E, antioxidants study and this was in The Journal
of Physiology, the title of the study was Vitamin C and vitamin E
Supplementation Hamper Cellular Adaptation to Endurance Training
in Humans and so we’ve got a bunch of people writing in, asking
should I avoid vitamin C, should I avoid vitamin E, are antioxidants
bad because the media took this and a lot of the headlines said
antioxidants ruin your endurance….
What? The media made a blanket statement that wasn’t correct?
Endurance athlete shouldn’t take vitamin C or endurance athlete
shouldn’t use antioxidants. So here’s the deal with this study and I
tweeted out a little bit about this over at twitter.com/bengreenfield as
well. If you dig in to this study, first of all let’s not even look at what
they’re feeding the participants as far as the actual antioxidants that
they’re using. First of all let’s look at their definition of endurance. So
if you dig in to the results of the study and I’ll link to it in the show
notes. What episode is this 271?
So if you go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/271 I’ll put a full download
to the study pdf over there but first of all they looked at folks who
were running and doing high interval training sessions running for
about 4 sets of 4-6 minutes 3-4 times a week. They’re also look to
people who are running 30-60 mins sub-maximally at aerobic phase
and then they look at folks who were riding a bicycle for an hour or
so. So when we’re talking endurance, we’re talking what frankly a lot
of people at my health club who are recreational athletes and
weekend warriors are doing. We’re talking about like 1/5 of the
volume that a lot of like endurance athletes like marathoners and
ironman triathletes are actually doing. So first of all, the level of
actual endurance is all relative when we’re talking about endurance
exercise and so that’s one thing is that the amount of free radicals and
the need for antioxidants is not as high when you’re not doing as
much ultra endurance or very high volume type of endurance that I
know a lot of folks out there doing and I mean even myself. I’m a low
volume guy but I’m doing more than 30-60 minutes a day on many
days and a lot of times I have weekend workouts where I’m doing
something that I did last weekend where I’m literally you know, hoist
in sandbag and doing hill sprints and ride my bike and by the end of
the day I’ve accumulated a good 2 hrs of exercise. So those are that. If
you wanna delve in and look what they fed this folks, so first of all
let’s talk vitamin C. So vitamin C what they gave them was a vitamin
pill of synthetic ascorbic acid and they used about 250 milligrams of
ascorbic acid per pill and they gave them a total about a 1,000 mg of
vitamin C per day. So when you look at ascorbic acid…. you know how
they make that stuff? Like synthetic ascorbic acid?
No, I don’t.
So it starts off with cornstarch which is basically refined pure corn
sugar or corn syrup and then they put it through about 7 different
They start off with what’s called starch hydrolysis where they
breakdown the cornstarch and the simple sugar and then they
hydrogenate it, they ferment it, they use what’s called acetonation
process where they use a sorbose acid and then they oxidize it they
hydrolyze it again with hydrochloric acid and then they re-crystallize
it meaning that they purify it and mill it into a crystalline powder and
finish product they can technically “legally” call vitamin C but if you
compare it to what you actually get from a food, you know, what
you’re gonna find ….
from the natural source….
…. Growing in a tree or on a plant, ascorbic acid is nothing like it and
ascorbic acid and vitamin C….
It’s nothing like anything at that point after all that.
Yeah, they’re not even structurally identical, the two. I brought this
up on the show before about the difference between like synthetic
vitamin C and what you actually find in nature when it comes to
vitamin C. So like when you look at the complete complex of vitamin
C that you’re gonna find in a fruit or in a whole foods vitamin C
source you’ve got what are called bioflavonoids and there’s actually
kinda this underground name for those bioflavonoids called vitamin
P or also known as factor K. You’ve got another thing called factor J
or tyrosinase which are gonna find in the full vitamin C complex that
you get from say like a whole fruit or even like a ground up whole
fruit or vegetable powder that would be called like a whole food
vitamin C source. And then you’ve also got a different form of
ascorbic acid many times ascorbic acid is bound to minerals which
actually allows it to be absorbed by your body and not cause a lot of
kinda like the stomach issues and some of the downstream issues that
a synthetic vitamin C source can actually cause. So what I’m getting
at here obviously is there’s a big difference between what they’re were
shoving down these folks as gullets in the study vs. what you actually
get when you use vitamin C. I would say from one of two different
sources. If you’re gonna use vitamin C because it is good for you and
you know, I’ll even go hunt down a natural doctor who does high dose
vitamin C injections when I need my immune system to bounce back
fast like if I’m coming down to a race or big travel session and I know
or feel that my immune system is beat up I will go in and do a high
dose vitamin C injection and there are naturopathic physicians that
can do that, I mean you can do a search in your area using like a
Primal Docs, you can use the functional medicine websites but you
can find the person who would give you like a high dose vitamin C
injection. That’s one way that you can do it.
Where did they do those injections? Is that an inter-muscular thing?
It’s actually an intravenous injection, an IV I think I said …..
All right, it’s right into the vein….
I mean IV, it’s a drip, yeah, it’s a drip into your vein. And a lot of
times it’s combined with other vitamins like vitamin B12 and stuff
like that. So that’s one way you can get vitamin C but let’s talk about
easier ways that getting hook up to a needle. You can use a bound
source of vitamin C so I actually have a brand and I’ll link to this in
the show notes it’s called Vitality C and the way that Vitality C works
is the common pathway for vitamin C uptake is via both a glucose
pathway as well as a sodium pathway so what they do is they bind
this natural form of vitamin E (it’s a whole foods, vitamin C rather,
whole foods vitamin C powder) and it’s bound to ribose which I’ve
talked about before, I think we’ve talked about it last week and it’s
also bound to sodium and so it doesn’t breakdown in the gut and it
actually uses what’s the pentose phosphate pathway or the ppp to
allow to vitamin C to get absorbed into the cell. So totally different
absorption pathway than synthetic ascorbic acid and they also use
sulfur in that particular supplement which allows the cell to become a
little bit more permeable to the intake of the vitamin C. So that’s
about the best vitamin C source I found it’s the one that Dr. David
Minkoff who runs the Lifeworks Wellness and Anti-aging Center
down in Florida, that’s one he recommends if you don’t access to like
vitamin C IV so that’s really good. The other way that you can go is
like with the whole foods powder source that’s typically like blended
up fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts. There’s one called Super Berry that
I like that’s really good but either Super Berry or this Vitality C stuff
way way better than like a synthetic ascorbic acid, so that’s number 1,
that’s my first kinda beef with this study is they’re using totally
synthetic corn syrup derived ascorbic acid.
And then number 2 is they’re also using and I’ll give you the exact
title from the study here because they all in the methods. They’re
using 58.5 mg dl alpha tocopheryl acetate tablets for their vitamin E
and I think I mentioned this on the show a few weeks ago how when
you’re looking at vitamin E and if you’re gonna take like a vitamin E
supplement if you look on the label and the vitamin E typical list this
like alpha tocopheryl acetate or alpha tocopheryl succinate, what
they’re gonna put on there or what’s gonna be listed on there if it’s a
natural form of vitamin E is the prefix is gonna a D and if it’s a
synthetic form of vitamin E it’s gonna be labeled with a DL and
there’s a big difference in terms of the chemical structure between D
and DL as far as the actual absorption of the vitamin E vs. it just
basically stick around your tissues or your digestive tract or not
getting absorbed potentially causing some of the effects that cause
these endurance athletes to actually have a lower fitness response or
these semi-endurance athletes to have a lower fitness response
compared to what they will get without the vitamin E. So they use the
completely synthetic form of vitamin E as well so there’s that issue
pretty simple to look for vitamin E that’s natural when it comes to
that type of thing. What this comes down to is you gotta go and read
the study, get to the method section and see what they were using and
anytime you’re looking at a vitamin or supplement study see what’s
going on. The human body is gonna excrete synthetic vitamin E about
3-4 times faster than the natural form of vitamin E so the folks
probably won’t even responding to that particular antioxidant and
you know, there’s definitely a difference in the liver too so basically
you’re binding and transport proteins in your liver, select the natural
D form of vitamin E and pretty much ignore that DL form. So there’s
your chemistry lesson for the day.
I like it! I like it a lot!
So we’ve been adding a lot of stuff to the BG fitness phone app lately
and we’ve got another premium exclusive interview, this releasing on
That’s right! How to lose 75 lbs eating plants is coming out on the
premium podcast on Monday. You actually don’t have to get the app,
you can access the premium episode and there’s like over 300 extra
video and audio and pdf episodes of the Ben Greenfield podcast on
the premium. You should go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/premium,
it’s $9.99 a year and what’s coming out on….
What a bargain!
….. Monday is how to lose 75 lbs eating plants and..
It comes down to a lot more than just diarrhea from a study diet of
bananas and kale.
That’s was I was afraid of. It’s just the eating, are we going back to 30
bananas a day?
It’s an interview with an ultra runner who eats a plant-based diet so
should be interesting stuff and then speaking of diarrhea, we’re
gonna go to Mexico.
So you can join Brock and myself and Mark Sisson, Jessa’s gonna be
there, Mark Sisson’s wife will be there who I know is doing a lot of
writing now for the Mark’s Daily Apple website or for their
newsletter, Darryl Edwards, the fitness explorer guy is gonna be
there. We’re gonna do workouts on the beach, we’re gonna to eat
luxurious health foods, we’re gonna explore the Mayan ruins and you
could still get in, you could still sign up even though it’s coming up
literally in like 2 weeks. If you’re one of those last minute people who
makes decisions like going to Mexico with a drop of a hat then head
over to bengreenfieldfitness.com and check out our link to PrimalCon
Vacation Tulum, Mexico 2014.
It’s gonna be fun.
You can sit around the pool with me while everybody else does cool
stuff. Drink some tequila!
Soak up some sun and then do some sand curling.
That’s right and then one other thing, my book is coming out literally
they’ll ship the 540+ page hard cover manual is gonna ship in 2
weeks and we’re actually got a rally page going for the Beyond
Training Book and what that means….
What is that? Yeah, tell us about this rally.org. I haven’t heard of it
So if you’re listening in and you wanna help support what I’m trying
to do which is to change the way that folks kinda view performance
and exercise and to start to look at things from more of like a health
and an anti-aging and longevity and standpoint that brings in
everything from family, and your relationships to your time
management to just like looking at exercise way and above and
beyond exercise. You can help contribute to the cause and join what
we’re going after
is 5,000 donors
rally.org/beyondtraining. In a couple of weeks I’m gonna announce
the charity that we will be giving the donations to. It’s likely gonna be
through donorschoose.org which means that you’re gonna be able to
choose which charity your funds to go to if you go over there and
donate anything from $1 up to 50 bucks really whatever you want to
donate. But it’s at rally.org/beyondtraining, you don’t even have to
donate you just go over there and share with your friends, spread the
news like have that be your donation and use social currency and tell
other people about but….
After you’ve got a lot of friends with big pockets, then awesome.
Yeah, or friends of $1. So you can head over rally.org/beyondtraining
to check that out and I’m personally kinda respond in all the
comments over there and a big thanks everyone who has donated or
share the love over there so far and we’re gonna, will keep that rolling
for another 2 weeks if you’re listening in right now, mental note
yourself rally.org/beyondtraining. Check it out and I think that’s it.
Check it out!
Listener Q & A:
Hi Ben, Daniel is here. I must have found what you’re doing into that
on twitter and often that you do for everyone. So this is a follow up
with the tweet that I sent you. I was diagnosed with pneumonia 2
days ago, now this could be cause for food or the cold or even with
training maybe. But I was really suffering and what I want to know
really is what I can do to speed remarkably. I’ve got some big races,
world championship qualifying in March and I just want to know
what sort of nutrition I can use to have my body not lose anything.
I’m trying for 3 days now, I’m on antibiotics, should I say probiotics,
what supplements can I use in a diet to help my body, how long
should I leave it before I race again or train again really. Be absolutely
brilliant if you share the advice on this. Thank you very much.
Yeah, this is a great question. We’ve covered, if you’re sick how to get
over it quickly, what can you do to mitigate the possibility of getting
sick but, I don’t think were able to talk about how do you know when
you can go back to training….
…. When you’ve gotten over your cold?
Yeah! It’s kinda of a paradox because exercise actually makes your
immune system stronger so they’ve done studies where they show
that exercisers get fewer colds when they run regularly or when they
exercise regularly and….
I think the key is moderate exercise.
Yeah, it’s moderate levels of exercise so we’re talking, getting back to
that vitamin C, vitamin E study. Folks who are exercising like 30 and
60 minutes a day, you get strong immune system response, you get
an increase production of macrophages which are the cells that attack
bacteria, you improve blood flow and the movement of lymphatic
fluids, that means your immune cells can circulate to your body more
quickly to kill bacteria, to kill viruses. And the other thing that studies
have shown is that consistency is key here. So like the folks who do
like whatever, you know, skip working out for 3 or 4 days then
workout for 3 days or 2 days or whatever, you know, go like week
days on, weekends completely off you actually don’t see as high as an
immune system enhancement as doing like short sessions
consistently every day so that’s something that’s important as well.
When you look at whether or not exercise can actually get you sick,
there’s definitely a temporary decrease in the proper function of your
immune system after a big workout like a hard exercise session like I
mentioned like I threw down like a really hard exercise session last
Saturday. You actually increase cortisol, you increase adrenaline,
your fight and flight hormones and that not only raises your blood
pressure levels and your oxidized cholesterol levels but because of a
lot of things that happened from that increase, you suppress your
immune system. And that’s why people get sick after they run a
marathon or after they do an Ironman triathlon or after they do a
really hard workout especially if they get exposed to cold germs or
things like that….
It will kick you in the butt right after it….
Yeah, exactly. And then if you exercise while you are sick, there’s
some interesting research on this too so they did a study at Ball State
University and my apologies to anyone who goes to Ball State, just for
I was just gonna say why you were apologizing.
They actually, I don’t even know which state Ball State is. Do you
know which state Ball State is?
I’m gonna guess it’s Baltimore?
Who would name their state Ball State? Maybe my mind’s in the
gutter and I’m just thinking Ball State. Anyways, they injected
students with cold germs and I don’t know why you would want to
volunteer to be in that study.
Or where the cold germs came from.
Maybe they were paying these people a lot.
You sneeze into a syringe and then inject. So they injected them with
cold germs and they tracked them for 10 days and each person logged
their exercise session and in the group that did light aerobic activity
for around 40 minutes each day, they didn’t get any sicker, they saw
no significant difference in their cold symptom severity or duration.
So the exercising group did not get better any faster but they also
didn’t get any worse. So exercise didn’t get them more sick but they
were also not doing high intensity exercise. They were doing light
aerobic exercise. So what this means is while you are sick, it’s
probably okay to go for like an easy bike ride in you know, noninclement weather, in not super duper cold weather you know, that’s
going to be tough on your immune system or you know, stressful. You
know, easier sessions, easy swims would be okay, runs. But you also
have to be careful, you’re not going out into public places spreading
germs all over the place.
Don’t go to the public pool with a big runny nose. I’ve seen it. It’s
gross. And also, if it’s a flu or it’s a fever, that requires a great deal of
healing by your body. One of the reasons your body naturally shuts
down when you have the fever, when you have the flu, is because it
needs lots of energy in order to recover and repair and so my opinion
is don’t exercise at all when you’re in that type of situation just
because your body needs every shred of energy that it can get so as far
as working yourself back into exercise, not a lot of studies there as far
as how quickly you can actually get back into exercise but you know,
if you’re looking at a chest illness like a pneumonia or bronchitis, a lot
of times that tends to be a little bit more potent than a head cold,
takes a little bit longer to bounce back from. I would say that
anything that causes you to breathe deeply could aggravate the issue
that I found that a lot of times when I have like an upper respiratory
tract infection or a cold and I do a high intensity interval training, a
lot of times it could spread to your lungs pretty quickly and actually
cause some of that deeper you know, respiratory tract or lower
respiratory tract infection so I’d be kinda careful there. There’s some
evidence that zinc is a pretty good immunomodulator when it comes
to increasing the amounts of your natural antimicrobials.
Cue 36 explosives space modulator. And it also it can upregulate your
t-cells which can help you fight infection so getting a decent dose of
vitamin d like 2000-4000 international units. I already talked about
vitamin c in a whole foods form, that’s gonna be important. There’s
some support for zinc supplementation. There’s also, in other studies,
they showed that people who supplemented with zinc had higher
instances of side effects so you wanna be careful with zinc. Some folks
side effects are….
Deficient in it. Yeah, exactly so you wanna be careful with zinc not to
overdo it on that front but vitamin d, vitamin c would be fine as far as
So as far as getting back into it, I don’t know, is there anything else
that I would recommend. You know probably the one thing here that
would be pretty important would be utilizing electrostimulation. If
you have access to like a compex electrostimulator because what that
allows you to do is keep the muscles activated and even increase
strength of the muscle without putting any stress on in particular
your cardio respiratory system at all so you’re not having to breathe
deep, you don’t have to huff and puff and you literally do
electrostimulator while you’re lying on the couch watching you know,
replays of mad man and still get some muscle stimulation, you know,
this stuff can actually improve blood flow, increase limb flow a little
bit so that’s an option if you have access to electrostimulation.
Another similar option you know, we’re talking about just biohacks
would be the vibration like a vibration platform for example.
Shake the mucus out.
That also. Yeah, exactly. Shake the mucus, clean up the vibration
plate afterwards and then I’ve also got an article called Can You
Exercise If You’re Sick and you know, I’ve got literally hundreds and
hundreds of articles, newsletters I put out every week over at, a lot of
people don’t know this but over at quickanddirtytips.com. You can go
over there and I’ve got just everything you’d wanna know about you
know, fat loss and muscle gain and you know, men’s health, women’s
health, stuff like that so I’ll link to that…
Ben is also known as the Get Fit Guy.
The Get Fit Guy.
You can google that.
And if you google image that, you’ll see that I wear red tighty tight
pants and a black tank top….
I think you have blond hair on that shot too.
It’s kinda like red hair and lipstick so if you wanna see my avatar that
looks nothing like me…
You look fancy.
Then check out quickanddirtytips so there you go. I hope that helps
Yeah, I think the only other thing that I’d throw in there is you’d
really just, you’ve gotta pay attention to yourself and just trust your
body and test the water if you think you’re feeling well enough then
just give it a try but be ready to pull the plug, turn around and go
home if it just doesn’t feel right and just test the water over the
matter of a few days and eventually you’ll feel like you’re back at it
and you can actually finish your workout.
Hi Ben, hi Brock. Love the show. I wanted your take on vinegar as a
fat loss supplement. Can you give me any insight? Is this myth or
something that should be added in a daily dietary consumption?
Thanks a lot.
Yeah, I really just need dumped like a tablespoon of apple cider
vinegar on my salad just sort of crossing my fingers, hoping that it’s
helping me just to keep my fat down.
Yeah. I’m pretty sure vinegar is a really potent fat loss supplement
‘cause it tastes so nasty, you just don’t wanna eat anything else ever
for the rest of the day. No, but seriously, they’ve actually had vinegar
around as a weight loss aid for a long time and they did a study
relatively recently in Japan where they gave folks a high fat diet that
had vinegar in it and then they studied them, I don’t remember the
period of time they looked at them for but at the end of that, decrease
in their body fat significantly like lowering their body fat by 10%
compared to people who ate that same high fat, high calorie intake
without any vinegar and the idea behind this is that vinegar has a lot
of acetic acid in it and acetic acid can activate lypolysis by
upregulating levels of your lipase enzymes that are gonna burn fat. It
can activate some of the genes that specifically causes your body to
store less fat around your waist and it may also increase metabolism
specifically by increasing thermogenesis.
In a similar way that like cold thermogenesis in like activation of like
brown adipose tissue for taking a cold shower would increase fat loss.
Acetic acid may have kind of like a similar effect and that’s actually a
biohack stack that you can use is a shot of apple cider vinegar or if
you’re really daring, I guess you can just use like white vinegar. We’ll
get into in a second why apple cider vinegar would be a much
superior choice. Anyways...
Cause it’s tasty?
And combine that with a cold shower. And if you really want a potent
1-2-3 potent combo shot, apple cider vinegar, some bitter melon
extract, and a cold shower, and that’s a really potent fat loss stack.
When you say a shot, do you mean like a literal an ounce…
Yeah, like a shot glass, yeah, like 1-2 ounces. Exactly. Clean the vodka
out of it of course, from the night before.
It might help.
Yeah. Anyways though, as far as acetic acid goes, the only issue is that
in some of the studies that they’ve done that have showed for
example in mice that acetic acid has a really good effect, it was a lot of
acetic acid that they used….
like the equivalent of using about 20 ounces of vinegar a day so that’s
quite a bit in terms of the thermogenic effect however in terms of the
blood sugar regulating effect, you need a lot less like around 1-2
ounces or so. So I think you’d have to do a lot of vinegar to actually
increase your metabolism but as far as potentially stabilizing blood
sugar, increasing insulin sensitivity, less than that and this would be
something that you’d do right before you’d have a meal would be
something that would help in a similar way that that bitter melon
extract would help.
Or cinnamon, yeah. Now apple cider vinegar is some pretty cool stuff
because apple cider vinegar has some benefits that go way above and
beyond regular vinegar and we actually keep a big bottle of Bragg’s
apple cider vinegar and the reason we use that particular brand of
apple cider vinegar is because it is gluten free, raw, unpasteurized
apple cider vinegar and that’s really important. A lot of vinegars have
gluten in them, a lot to really support things like yeast and fungus
overgrowth but like a good, gluten free raw unpasteurized apple cider
vinegar, I’ll put a link in the show notes, you can literally get Bragg’s
off at Amazon you know, get a prime subscribe and save straight to
Bragg’s mixed mother makes good stuff too, they make that soy sauce
version that’s gluten free. Aminos?
Bragg’s aminos. Yeah. We don’t use that anymore. I believe we looked
into it and we’re not sure it’s a non-GMO source of soy things in that
so not quite sure about that one. I don’t remember. My wife and I
looked into a while back there, I think it was a soy we found to be an
issue with that. But their apple cider vinegar is good stuff. So apples
are really high in pectin which is kind of insoluble fiber that helps you
to feel full faster and be more satisfied with your meal and apple cider
vinegar has pretty high levels of pectin in it so you’ve got that. It’s got
amino acids, obviously the building blocks of proteins in it and one of
the things that may help with when they take in apple cider vinegar is
the availability of amino acids to create more growth hormone or
natural growth hormone in the same way that getting enough sleep
can increase growth hormone, getting adequate doses of amino acids
throughout the day can help with that as well and apple cider vinegar
has amino acids in it. Important for athletes or folks who are worried
about anemia or who are sucking oxygen when they climb a flight the
stairs or kinda getting brain fog or an energy depletion throughout
the day, iron, a key component of hemoglobin and myoglobin, that’s
something that you’ll gonna find in pretty decent amounts in apple
cider vinegar as well specifically because apple cider vinegar actually
helps your body release it’s natural iron and so it’ll increase
absorption and also upregulate your natural release of iron and then
also, it’s got some good digestive enzymes in it that will help break
down proteins into amino acids. So some pretty cool things and
you’re gonna find also with apple cider vinegar that the amino acids
in it are particularly good to make more tryptophan and tryptophan
is what plays a critical role in your release of serotonin which is one of
your feel good neurotransmitters so that may help you avoid kinda
like cravings and eating a lot as well so one of the things that vinegar
has a go on for it and I’m gonna give vinegar as a fat loss supplement
a thumbs up.
Is that 3 stars up or 4?
Hi Ben and Brock. My name is Holly. I just have a quick question for
you. I started a pacific elite fitness gut healing pack 5 days ago and
over the past 2 days I’ve noticed mucus or jelly in my bowel motions.
This has worried me a bit because my nursing knowledge tells me
that this is usually indicative of inflammation and I should stop the
treatment or the cleanse but I know that this gut pack is relatively
gentle and I’m not sure it would cause enough inflammation about
my GI tract would produce mucus if any so I just wanted to know if
you guys have heard of anybody else who had experienced the same
thing or if you had any ideas or information about what could be
causing this. Thanks, you guys are awesome.
I like how Holly calls them bowel motions.
Bowel motions. That’s such a nice word.
It’s so gentle.
It’s like when women are glowing, not sweating.
And it’s like women don’t poop, they have bowel motions. Graceful,
smooth bowel motions.
So when you detox, you get something called the herxheimer reaction
and it’s basically die off. So that reaction is thought to happen when
toxins from dying pathogens like dying virus, bacteria, parasites,
candida, yeast, fungus, that type of thing in your body, kinda
overwhelms your body’s ability to clear some of that stuff out. And
that can create a situation where you get like muscle aches,
sometimes you get headaches, you get skin rashes sometimes, and
excess mucus production is another side effect of a die off reaction
that’s pretty common especially when you’re doing like a gut detox.
And that can increase the amount of mucus in your stools. That’s one
thing that you may be seeing – the particular detox gut healing pack
that Holly is talking about is one that I personally designed. We’ll link
to it in the show notes. But it’s oil of oregano, a really potent antiviral,
antibacterial that can kill off fungus and yeast in the digestive tract. It
is a therapeutic grade probiotic, called Caprobiotics. CapraColostrum
to help heal up the lining of the gut and then it’s also got digestive
enzymes in there, in particular a digestive enzyme complex that
contains slippery elm which helps to coat the lining of your stomach
and heal the stomach. And also it’s got CapraCleanse in there which
has some natural anti bacterials and cleansing supplements in it. So
you put all that stuff together and if you have a yeast or a fungus or
bacterial issue in the digestive tract, you are definitely gonna get
some die off. So, that’s likely what’s going on here but there are other
potentials, too. So for example, you can actually get some of the fillers
and some of the coatings of capsules ‘cause some of those
supplements aren’t tablets, some of them are capsules. Some of those
can just wind up in your poo and look like it’s mucus when in fact it’s
Like the gelatin capsules.
Yeah, it’s just you’re digesting the capsules and that’s one thing that
can pretty easily happen. Parasite infections can also cause mucus in
the stool. And a lot of times if you have a parasite and I went over this
in the gut video that I produced at bengreenfieldfitness.com a couple
of weeks ago where I talked about how to test for parasites and how
to get rid of them. Sometimes there are specific herbs that are active
against certain parasites or certain bacterial infections. If you have
H.pylori for example, mastic gum is really good for fighting that. If
you have something like Blastocystis, berberine or golden seal is
really good for that. So there are sometimes things that you gotta add
in if you actually have a parasite issue, that can contribute to mucus
in the stool that Holly may wanna consider, kinda throwing into the
mix there if it is a parasite issue. Inflammation can definitely cause
mucus in the digestive tract as she alluded to, and that’s typically
inflammation from all sort of colitis, Crohn’s disease or celiac disease.
If you’ve cleaned up your diet, and I would hope that you are if you’re
doing a detox and you’re not doing things like consuming gluten,
digestive irritants, dairy if that tends to be an issue for you, white
sugar can be a big issue, as can like bread, pasta, stuff like that. If
you’re cleaned up your diet from that stuff, it probably would not be
contributing to mucus. If you haven’t then that may be an issue as
well. And then the last thing is of course, just like switching your diet
to a high fat diet and having more oil in your diet can make it look a
little bit like you have mucus in your stool, a lot of times it’s just oil
and fats that are being digested just because you’ve totally switched
your macronutrient profile and you probably aren’t producing
enough lipase yet to digest a lot of those fats and that’s where taking a
digestive enzyme can certainly help. I suspect that because Holly is
doing the detox gut healing pack and because I’ve noticed this in
myself and I’ve also had a couple other folks report this when they do
detoxes, that it’s a die off reaction and that she’s just basically
cleaning out her digestive tract. So, mucus reactions in response to
detoxes are pretty common.
Okay, so everybody who is slightly grossed up by this whole
conversation so far may wanna fast forward for the next little bit but I
just wanna know, how would I know this, how would I recognize this
in my own bowel motions?
So it’s like stringy white mucusy-looking stuff that usually settles on
top of your poo and it’s usually pretty obvious if you’re one of those
people who look at their poo or if you’re competing at the Russian
Olympic games and you don’t even have a hole in your toilet. You’ve
a lid and there’s a hidden camera in the bathroom so somebody else
is looking at your poo, too. So, yes.
You can always be like -hey, buddy, I just noticed that you may
wanna take a look at this.
Hey, Ben and Brock! This is Josh from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. Love
the podcast. I’m writing in to ask a question for somebody else, a
family member. He’s 22 years old and was recently diagnosed with
colon cancer, stage 3. They’ve had to remove a large majority of his
colon. They found the colon cancer when they were in performing a
routine appendectomy. Now he has very little of his colon left and has
no appendix. And there’s been some months before too when they
removed the appendix and been living without a colon. I’m curious
what kind of recommendation you have from a dietary standpoint for
someone that now has pretty much neither. Thanks again. Keep up
the good work. Bye!
It was not long ago that we talked about the whole idea that the
appendix isn’t as vestigial as we once believed that it actually was a
place where we store some good bacteria.
Yeah, the appendix is like your memory site for the gut bacteria. So if
you had your appendix removed and I’ll put a link to the podcast for
you where we went into this in detail but taking probiotics if you’ve
had an appendectomy or using a lot of fermented foods is extremely
advisable. So we’re kinda treading in the whole medical advice here
thing, I should throw in a disclaimer that – “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 healthcare advise”.
And as far as colon cancer goes and the actual removal of the colon, I
personally don’t have a lot of experience with a diet in particular for
colon removal or for post colon cancer recovery but what I can do is
give you some of the advise and give our listeners some advice on
how to fix the colon that is broken and how to definitely reduce your
risk of colon cancer which is like the 3rd most common cancer that
there is. And it’s a pretty big issue that you’d wanna pay attention to.
So the reason that you wanna pay attention to this is because your
colon is extremely important in doing things like fermenting fiber to
turn it into a short chain fatty acids that get reabsorbed and used by
your body and by your immune system. You get some vitamin
production in your large intestine, too. You get some good bacteria in
your large intestine. You get some mineral and water absorption
there, I mean it’s not just like this storage site, your colon for poo. I
mean there’s a lot of other things that go on that make that a pretty
important organ. And so if you’d have to remove similar to your
appendix, I definitely do think you may want to consider doing
something like using like a full spectrum probiotic like I talked about.
You’re probably gonna have to dial back your fiber intake a little bit
because you’re not gonna have when your primary mechanism for
fermenting and absorbing the byproduct of fermentation anymore.
It’s one of the reasons that gorillas have huge guts, it’s because
they’ve got huge large intestines and huge colons where they ferment
and absorb a lot of the byproducts of fermentation of fiber in their
digestive tract and so if you don’t have that going on, you probably
have to add some good bacteria into the mix. Your colon helps to
remove water and salt and other nutrients from indigestible food
matters. So you probably have to add in minerals, you probably have
to add in a good strong multivitamin complex. Those are some of the
things that you’d wanna consider. When it comes to colons are,
though, there’s a few things that you should know. First of all, I’m not
a fan of colonoscopies at all. I think that they’re a big issue when I
had Konstantin Monastyrsky on the show, the fiber menace guy, he
talked about some of the risks of getting a colonoscopy but what it
comes down to is that there’s not a lot of strong evidence that
colonoscopies actually reduce the –or increase the ability to be able to
find colon cancer. And there’s an estimated 70,000 people each year
that are killed or injured by colonoscopy-related complications. And
that’s higher than the number of annual deaths from colon cancer
itself. So there’s not a lot of evidence that it prevents cancer, you get
increase cancer risk from radiation. A lot of times you get a pretty
dramatic increase in the risk of colon cancer that goes hand in hand
with the increase in the number of screening colonoscopies. So it’s
not really decreasing much of the cancers, anyways. Like these polyps
removals or anything like that.
What it comes down to is that more of a preventive approach is going
to help. Now if you really want to get in to some of the issues as far as
like kidney damage and bowel disorders and some of the other issues
that can happen from colonoscopies, then you should go and check
out the link that I’ll put in the show notes over to Konstantin’s
website. I’ll put them over at bengreenfieldfitness.com/271 but it’s
some pretty interesting stuff and he’s literally got full on 2-hour
interview or 2 hours worth of video that goes into what he calls the
deadly deception about colonoscopy and whether or not it’s actually
worth the risk and there’s transcripts that you could read over there,
too. Now as far as a solution, there are some definite things that you
could do to reduce your risk without getting a colonoscopy. So, being
careful with not overdoing fiber consumption like Konstantin’s talks
about in the interview that I did with him, I don’t go as far as he does,
I don’t peel fruits and I don’t peel vegetables and stuff as he does. But
I’m really careful with a lot of these cleansers that are really high in
like psyllium husk, a lot of like high fiber supplements, that type of
stuff can be an issue in terms of being hard on your colon. Restoring
your colon’s ecosystem is also something that’s important and there
are specific bacteria that can help with a healthy bowel. Certain
probiotics and –there’s this supplement called a colorectal recovery
program that actually helps to restore your colon’s ecosystem and
that’s actually made by that guy Konstantin Monastyrsky and it
restores your intestinal flora, it normalizes your stool, it replaces fiber
synthetic laxatives, stuff like that. And what that one is it’s a whole
foods form of vitamin C like I talked about earlier with a lot of the
minerals that you need to kinda clear out your colon. It’s got a really
high dose glutamine in it to help to heal the lining of your digestive
tract. And then it’s got a really nice probiotic profile that in particular
is designed to help with things like post chemo and post radiotherapy
and that’s something where recovery from colon cancer just might
come in handy It also helps out with stuff like yeast infection, it can
help a little bit with preventing the growth of new polyps in the colon,
or mitigating the risks of colon cancer and kinda restoring normal
colonicology if you’ve had a colonoscopy. So it’s pretty cool stuff. I
went through a 30-day protocol of that colorectal recovery program
after I was on antibiotics and I completely- not to gross folks out- I
pretty much got so constipated. I didn’t go to the bathroom for 5 days
after these antibiotics. That’s what kinda pulled me out of the gutter
and allowed me to have a very satisfactory dumb and dumber style of
That bad, after 5 days, dude!
After 5 days, so yeah! That was after I was on a really strong dose of
probiotics for a Staph issue that I got from basically working out in a
dirty gym while I had open wounds from doing an off-road triathlon.
Wait, you said probiotics. Did you mean antibiotics?
Antibiotics. Yeah, exactly. So check out that colorectal recovery
program ‘cause that’s got some really good stuff in it as far as
restoring your normal colonicology. There’s a lot of common cancer
triggers for colon cancer that you also wanna be careful with. You’re
looking at everything from clostridium in your digestive tract to yeast
and fungus overgrowth which I think we’ll talk about later on. Food
additives can be an issue, pesticides, herbicides. So basically cleaning
up the diet, being really careful with that. And then there’s also some
mechanical triggers as well like EMF radiation from power lines and
cell phones and wifi routers, a lot of those increase your risk for
cellular mutation, We’ve talked about some of that stuff in podcast
episodes with Jack Kruse. And what else? I guess any known
environmental carcinogen, personal care products, plastic storage
containers, Teflon-coated pans, even crystal glasses which can be a
source of lead. You just wanna be careful with a lot of these potential
triggers or potential carcinogens in your diet. But biggest
recommendation for you would be to go check out that colorectal
recovery program, be careful with excessive intake of fiber and then
to visit that website for the fiber menace, in particular read the page
called Colonoscopy, Is it Worth the Risk? Because it really isn’t
known yet whether colonoscopy can actually help reduce the number
of deaths from colorectal cancer and there are a lot of potential side
Hi, Ben! My name is Michael and I’m just calling about abdominal
distention. I’ve got a fairly low body fat but for some reason my
stomach sticks out. You can actually see the muscles on the stomach
but it just sticks out so I’m not fat, even though I’m not fat. So,
wonder if you have any training ideas or supplements or diet tweaks I
can make in order to get rid of this annoying problem. Cheers! I’m
enjoying the podcast every week. Cheers!
Yeah, you see this a lot in young kids it seems. I don’t know why that
You mean like the Ethiopian poster child kids?
Well that and just like the kids running around the neighborhood like
those skin and bones kind of kids have those bellies, too.
Yeah! Sometimes those kids it’s just that the size of their organs are
that much larger than the size of their developing skeletal
Oh! Interesting! I hadn’t thought of that!
Yeah! But in adults and particularly like athletic adults, body
builders, you see these cross fitters sometimes who have low body fat,
the tendency for the stomach to kinda stick out and typically it’s due
to some kind of inflammation or an immune response that is causing
gas bloating and excessive fermentation in the digestive tract. So
there’s a few things that can cause this. One would be small intestine
bacterial overgrowth or SIBO. That’s one big issue with gas and
bloating and kinda having a stomach that sticks out too much
especially after you eat a higher carbohydrate intake during a meal.
SIBO is something you can test. There’s a breath test that you can get
over at Direct Labs where you swallow a glucose solution and it
measures the amount of gases that you produce in response to that
solution. And if there’s a certain number that the rise in those gases
reaches, then it’s a pretty good indication that you have bacterial –
bacteria in your small intestine are kinda overproducing gas in
response to metabolizing that glucose solution or lactose solution
that you drink. And that’s one thing that can cause gas and bloating.
But more common than that is simply –one of two things –either an
immune reaction to a food that you eat and it’s typically wheat, soy,
eggs, and dairy are the biggest triggers. And in a case like that, going
on a basic autoimmune-based diet is one of the best things you could
do. The Paleo Autoimmune Diet is awesome for this. And I’ll link to
that one in the show notes. But that’s’ a 4 to an 8 week diet where you
just eliminate all of the common immune triggers. So that would be
another thing to look into would be elimination of a lot of these
common triggers. Now the other thing that really tends to cause this
issue, that I would say is the most common thing I see, is yeast or
fungus overgrowth in the digestive tract. So if you look at candida
albicans, that’s a yeast that usually lives relatively harmlessly in
pretty small numbers in your digestive system. And it’s controlled by
good bacteria in your body like probiotics from eating fermented
foods or from taking a probiotic and also by your immune system.
But if the beneficial bacterial get killed off by antibiotics or if your
immune system becomes weak due to illness or stress or excessive
intake of some of those immune triggers that I just talked about, or
you’ve been on an antibiotic protocol like I mentioned, then it can kill
off these good bacteria. And when that happens, candida can
overgrow and candida overgrowth in your intestine can penetrate
your gut wall. They can cause a lot of yeast and other toxins that
result in inflammation. And you get a lot of gas and bloating and it
can make your stomach stick out. And so the answer to that in
addition to rebuilding the good amounts of bacteria in your digestive
tract by using like a fermented food and a good therapeutic grade
probiotic would be to remove anything that’s gonna feed yeast and
also anything that contains wheat gluten which also causes gas,
bloating, yeast issue, And so that includes a lot of stuff. That’ll include
balsamic vinaigrette, a lot of salad dressings, any - like I mentioned
vinegar, if it’s a vinegar that has gluten in it or vinegar that’s not raw
or unpasteurized, that can be an issue. A lot of condiments like
catsup, worcestershire sauce, barbecue sauce, soy sauce, mustard, a
lot of green olives that you get in the can, beer is a biggie. So a lot of
that stuff contains things that would potentially aggravate a yeast
issue and then sugar and starch obviously feed yeast and will feed
that fungus overgrowth. So that will include stuff like bread, pasta,
even like a higher intake if you do have an overgrowth of juices,
potatoes, fruits, any of that stuff can really aggravate the issues.
And so this should be a situation where you could even look into
doing something like the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. And that’s
something that’s similar to the autoimmune diet, it eliminates a lot of
common autoimmune based triggers. But that one in particular
actually takes care of a lot of the things that would potentially cause a
yeast or fungus overgrowth as well. So I can link to that one in the
show notes, too. You could even do a 4-8 week of the autoimmune
protocol and then shift into something like this specific carbohydrate
diet for you to eliminate a lot of these yeast and fungus issues. Or you
can just do one or the other. I mean either one of those is gonna be
better than a standard diet to get rid of a lot of these stuff. And then
you also wanna knock out the bad bacteria. You could use an oil of
oregano that’s’ really good, 15-20 drops 3 times a day, extremely
potent with yeast and fungus overgrowth. Another pretty good one
that I mentioned earlier that’s not only good for some parasites but
also good for yeast and fungus overgrowth is this golden seal or
berberine stuff, does a pretty good job as well. Thorne in particular
makes a good berberine. We can link to that for you as well. Those are
some of the biggies and a lot of times if you look at the classic body
builder, weightlifter sucking down whey protein shakes and getting a
lot of dairy in particular as an immune system trigger, you tend to see
that more in the folks who are being careful with excessive
carbohydrate intake but still getting a lot of dairy for its muscle
building effect. That’s where you tend to see the stomachs sticking
out in really fit folks. And then folks who are maybe even eating a
really “healthy” paleo or primal diet or whatever but who simply have
a skewed macronutrient profile towards too much sugar or starch
intake, that could be a really big source of a yeast overgrowth or
candida infection. So those are some of my recommendations for
Michael and his stomach sticking out.
Hi, Ben! And Hi, Brock! This is Richard from New Zealand. Over the
last few years, I’ve noticed I’ve started to drink more and more wine
and I need to drink more water to kinda get the same effect. And it’s
almost like a craving. Once I’ve opened a bottle, I’m gonna carry on
until the job’s done rather than enjoy just sipping a little glass. So I’ve
been researching candida as a cause of this sugar craving as I see it
and possibly also as a contributing factor to me getting a heart bypass
a few years ago. I just wondered if you could share any thoughts you
have on candida, why it develops and how to kill the damn stuff. My
current plant to kill the candida by drinking 2 bottles of excellent
New Zealand pinot noir really doesn’t seem to be working. Thanks,
guys! And hopefully we can keep this just between ourselves. I
wouldn’t want all your listeners to think that I have some sort of
drinking problem, even if I probably do, that’s why I crave so much
Now before everybody gets alarmed and think that we’re totally
ignoring Richard’s request to keep this private. He did send this in
after a couple of emails back and forth about how this would make a
good question for the podcasts. So please don’t get angry and think
we’re being jerks, he’s just joking.
That’s right! If you want to stay anonymous, we’ll keep you
anonymous. Although I probably would, I would rather not call in to
the show and write in your question, or also wear one of those Darth
Vader vain style masks, maybe like an altitude training mask just to
mask your voice. This is what they use for kidnapping all the time.
These are voice modulators. I’m sure there’s an app for that. So but
anyways, the answer is absolutely. The symptoms that you’re getting
can definitely be related to alcohol and specifically candida. So,
candida and alcohol abuse or alcoholism or alcohol addiction or
alcohol cravings very often occur together because drinking alcohol
can create an overgrowth of yeast or perpetuate an existing
overgrowth of yeast. And a lot of times you tend to get food cravings
that go hand in hand with that. Now one of the reasons for that is that
alcohol is a sugar and it is actually one of the more refined sugars that
you can consume because it doesn’t have to be digested and you
absorb it directly through your gastrointestinal wall. Now sugar is like
I mentioned, candida or yeast favorite food source and it’s what it
allows it to grow. So when you drink alcohol on a regular basis, it
encourages that candida overgrowth and the candida ferments sugar
to generate energy so it can survive and that fermentation process
can actually create a lot of toxins in your body.
And it can even release in particular toxins that contain alcohol or
mimic the effects of alcohol in the body. So you can actually, in
response to a high carbohydrate meal, you have a candida issues, you
can almost feel in a way drunk even if you haven’t had any alcohol.
And in many cases, that can result in you craving that feeling and
wanting alcohol even when you’re eating other sources of
carbohydrates. Now candida can also play around with your
neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. And that’s because it
alters your gut bacteria which are crucial in the formation of
neurotransmitters and so that’ll tend to aggravate cravings as well. So
one of the things that you can do is listen to everything that I just said
about controlling candida, not only getting on like a specific
carbohydrate diet but also getting rid of breads, pastas, roll, most
condiments like I mentioned catsup, mustard, relishes, salad
dressings, most fermented beverages and that would include stuff like
kombucha, that would include of course wine, but beer and gin and a
lot of those as well. Being really careful with cheeses, with dried fruits
and fruits in general, and you even got to be careful sometimes with a
lot of lunch meats, corned beef, things of that nature. There are some
health food stores that will sell totally yeast-free or mold-free
products. And you can actually ask, a lot of times they’ll have yeastfree breads that are made using baking powder or non-enriched
forms of flour. They’ll have salad dressings that are yeast-free. A lot of
times they sell whole foods or something like that where you can get
those type of things. But you wanna clean up all the potential things
that would cause candida. You wanna get on all the stuff that I talked
about earlier like oil of oregano and a good digestive cleanse to be
able to restore the normal gut flora. And if you do that hand in hand
with understanding that wine increases vicious cycle if you have a
candida infection that just creates a desire for more wine, then that
can help out quite a bit. Now few other things that are in particular
effective with candida, one would be a form of probiotic that’s called
acidophilus DDS1. Now most therapeutic grade probiotics are going
to contain that particular strain of acidophilus. It produces hydrogen
peroxide and that can have a really good antimicrobial effect in your
digestive tract, it can really help control candida. So something like
that CapraBiotics stuff would be perfect. Essential oils and some of
the better ones in addition to oregano oil would be peppermint oil, is
really really good and then either that golden seal extract or golden
seal type of oil would also be really good for this. And peppermint oil
is literally you can get a cinch of peppermint oil and add it to water,
it’s actually kind of refreshing as a drink, to put a few drops into your
Yeah, didn’t you say last week that you put it in your soda stream?
I mix it with chocolate stevia. So I do chocolate peppermint soda
water. And it’s really good. I’m kinda addicted to it right now. And I
just make that soda stream a few drops of chocolate stevia, a few
drops of peppermint oil, it’s actually really good. And almost wakes
you up, too. The peppermint has this -peppermint is a very heating
essential oil. You feel pretty good. Yeah, invigorating. And extremely
kissable which is a great thing to be around Valentine’s Day right
now. Valentine’s Day is in 2 days.
And then speaking of being kissable, garlic is another thing and we
talked about garlic a few shows ago and how you actually need to take
an enteric coated garlic capsule if you use garlic. It actually opens
when it reaches your intestines. So it can actually be efficacious in
that area. So garlic is really good. And then two other things to look
into, coconut oil is really good. And the oleic acid from olive oil can
have really good effect on candida. So kinda big picture here would be
get on a good therapeutic grade probiotic, you introduce essential oils
like oregano oil and peppermint oil. You can use garlic as part of your
diet or if you’d like you can take an enteric coated garlic capsule. You
use coconut oil and you could even take a tablespoon of that before
bed is actually satiating for your appetite because it gives you that
slow release of fatty acids while you sleep. You use olive oil in your
diet and then eliminate a lot of these common condiments that tend
to contain yeast, meats, fruits, starches, things of that nature and all
that stuff can help tremendously with the huge desire for alcohol in
The other thing to understand with alcohols, let’s say it has absolutely
nothing to do with candida, a lot of times it is related to GABA
deficiency, gamma amino butyric acid. You get a lot of wound up
people who just need that wine at the end of the day. And if it’s that, if
it’s a stress issue. You can replace that if you want to get off wine and
not get the calories or the expense or whatever associated with having
to go through half a bottle of wine every night. Passion flower extract
is really good for that and just getting on a basic passion flower
extract. I know that’s a lot of stuff. I will try and link to most of my
recommendations in the show notes for controlling candida but those
are some of the things that I would highly recommend.
I’m gonna throw in a little plug for Richard just ‘cause he’s a nice
fellow and I actually worked on his audio book called Life After a
Bypass. And it’s -I know it’s up and it’s quite entertaining and quite
informative, so you should get that.
You’re all over the audio sphere between this and Mark Sisson’s
podcast and all these e-books you’re doing. Amazing!
Yeah. I got to …
You’re doing the audio book for the Beyond Training Book as well.
So, there you go, yeah. The audio master.
As fast as you can churn out those chapters.
Hi Ben! It’s Sebastian from Fredericton, New Brunswick. I have a
question. I’m pretty new to triathlon. I come from a cycling
background where I’m a pretty decent runner, so swimming and stuff
are not really my sport. I’m having a hard time building up to
endurance swimming because I’m constantly out of breath so I swim
like 50 meters and I need to stop to catch my breath. How do I
improve my aerobic capacity so that I can swim 750 meters straight?
And I’m building up to even more after that. Alright, love your show!
Hope to hear from you soon.
Sebastian, why so sad?
Yeah. Actually Sebastian does sound pretty sad. Yeah, sad. It’s time
to be happy.
It’s okay. We’ll get you swimming if that’s what you want. It’s okay.
We’ll get you swimming, rocking, and rolling. It’s actually pretty
common to have this frustration with being able to build your aerobic
capacity or feel as though you’re breathless when you’re swimming.
So a few of the things that you can do – first of all, I should mention
that I’ve been swimming in my garage lately. And it’s because I have
one of these VASA trainers. And that’s pretty cool.
You don’t have a Mister Turtle pool that you splash on.
I don’t have a little Mister Turtle pool in my garage.
That doesn’t count.
It’s one of these VASA trainers and they’re pretty sick, actually. I
always thought they were a little bit dorky. But I’ve actually been
training on it and it’s about the closest thing to swimming I’ve ever
experienced. And I can actually practice my breathing. Not only can I
wear like an elevation training mask or a breath restricted device
when I’m on it to kinda make me feel a little bit more of that
breathlessness that I experience in the water. But I can also do one
breath in for two strokes, one breath out for two strokes, and practice
basically the type of breath training that I’ve talked about before in
this podcast that I’ll do when I’m running. Kinda like the 3 breaths or
one breath in for 3 foot strikes, one breath out for 2 foot strikes
similar to this. You can take 1 breath in for two arm stroked, one
breath out for one arm stroke. It’s a really cool way to train. It’s also
expensive. You can get them off Amazon and they’re anywhere from a
$1,000-1,500.Full disclosure, what I’m using in my garage is a demo
unit. But it’s…
Do you have to give it back?
I have to give it back at some point after I’m done kicking my butt on
it for a few months. But really cool thing to have around especially in
the winter. So like my workout yesterday was I’ve got a little cul-desac driveway that’s about 400 meters long. So I do a 400 meter
sprint. And in my garage, I do about 200 meters on the vasa trainer.
And then get off the trainer and head back in the driveway. So it was
–I did a 5 by repeat. So 5 by 400 with the 200 on the vasa trainer
after each 400. So you can do some kinda cool winter swim run
workouts on it. But let’s say you don’t want to get a full on vasa
trainer shipped in a giant box to your house, you can also train your
lungs and get kind of this hypoxic effect using a Power Lung. So that’s
another thing that I used yesterday. I had to drive over to Coeur
d'Alene, Idaho last night to give a –this anti aging health lecture to
some folks over there and what I used on the way over there was my
Power Lung device which allows me to build up my inspiratory and
expiratory muscle strength.
And I do that a lot when I’m driving. So I play a little game. Every
time I pass a mile marker, I’ll do three breaths of a 3 count in, 3 count
out with my Power Lung. So it’s just like this little sets and reps as
I’m driving along on the road and I just keep that next to me. It’s
better than digging around in your cell phone. The other thing that
you can use to take a little bit of the stress out of breathing and
thinking about breathing while you’re swimming as you’re trying to
develop your stroke is the swim snorkel. And Finis makes swim
snorkels. And it’s a front mounted swim snorkel so it just sticks out in
front of you as you’re swimming, And as you get stronger and
stronger using a swim snorkel, they make air flow restrictors that go
on top of those as well. It’s called the Cardio cap. And you can order
both of those from Finis. I’ll put a link in the show notes. But front
mounted swim snorkel and then having a cardio cap to go on top of
that, that can really help as well. Now as far as swim workouts go,
honestly, nothing beats the Swim Smooth Book, and it’s – I forgot the
name of it but it’s published by the folks at Swim Smooth. I’ll hunt it
down and get a link for you. But the idea behind it is that it teaches
you how to start your swim with your warm up so easy swimming and
stretching, getting comfortable in the water and then you move into
drills where you’re all focusing on technique. And then you move into
your main set, and this is just kind of a standard lay out from a swim
workout and the main set may be endurance, or power or speed or
form, and then you finish with your cool down. And so if you’re trying
to build swim endurance what you would do is you always include
your warm up, your drills and your cool down. But for your sets, you
can just do a simple weekly build where first week is a 10 by 25 with 5
second breathers on the wall. And then the next week is a 6 by 50
with 10 seconds of breathing at the wall. And the next week is a 5 by
or a 4 by 100 with 20 seconds of breathing at the wall. So you just
gradually increase both your distance as well as the duration of your
sets while slightly increasing or keeping your rest periods constant
and that’s a really good way to build endurance. Now when I first
started swimming, I did it totally the wrong way. So I started
swimming in college and I remember I was scared to death about
having to swim 500 meters in 10 minutes or less for life guarding
class. And I think I had about 2 months to get ready. And what I
started to do, I would just get in the water and swim until I would
almost be ready to pass out. And usually that took me about 25
meters or so. And then I’d just stop for as long as I need to stop and
then just keep swimming until I got to 500 and that was kinda like
the end of the workout. If I have known that I was supposed to warm
up, do drills then do interval base set that didn’t necessarily mean
swimming 500 meters in a row but that I could break the 500 into
25s or 50s or 100s and then finish with a nice relaxing cool down,
that would have been so much less stressful. And I would have gotten
better, so much faster because swimming is all about efficiency and
economy. So best advice I can give to you is to gradually build with
intervals like that and to use something like the Swim Smooth book
to dictate your workouts ‘cause they got really good progression sets
there. And then do some extra training for your lungs. Use a Power
Lung while you’re in your car, or you’re sitting around, use a swim
snorkel if you can. You can even use one of those vase trainers and
add in the elevation training mask for added effect and those are
some of the places I’d start.
You know the thing that I’ve noticed the most when I start working
with a new swimmer is that it’s not so much the matter like –I’ll be
working with them and they’ll swim across, kaboom, and come back
and they’re like “Oh, man, I’m so out of shape!” It’s really like –it’s
like Ben said earlier, it’s not a matter of really being in shape or out of
shape. It’s building that economy and the – getting your technique
down because once your technique is good, you’ll just find that you
can swim a lot farther because you’re not using as much energy. So…
Making sure to do those drills and getting your technique down will
make way bigger difference than worrying about if you’re in shape or
out of shape.
Yep! Exactly! So, I think that’s great and you can put on your snorkel
and maybe even drag your vasa trainer beside the pool and just get all
geeked out and get lots of, lots of strange looks with the pool.
Awesome! It’s fun times!
And speaking of strange looks…
I think we’ve got a review that’s got strange looks in it.
Oh, iTunes review time yeah!
So this is the time of the show when we give away some Ben
Greenfield Fitness swag. Oh, we‘ve got a beanie and we’ve got a BPAfree water bottle and a very cool tech t-shirt that you can wear to the
gym or in the pool or wherever else you’d like to wear it. And we’re
gonna ship all of that to this week’s iTunes review because it’s such a
great review. So if you, if you wanna get in the running for some swag
sent to you then leave a review at iTunes. And if you just wanna get
the swag and support the show, go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/gear
And what do we have today, Brock?
We’ve got a review, a five star review. Nice! That’s called “Be
Prepared for Strange Looks…” by pedro17.
I don’t know what Pedro is but anyway…
It might be the Pedro from that movie. What’s the movie with Pedro?
Aren’t they all Pedro?
Ben and Brock:Napoleon Dynamite!
Yeah! Might be the Napoleon Dynamite guy.
That’s not it. I didn’t say Pedro.
Shucks! Sweet! I see you’re drinking 1%. Is that enough to keep you?
Strange looks! Gosh! Why don’t you go tell your mom to shut up?
Anyway. The review goes like this, it says “I just finished rolling
around on the floor of my apartment on my foam roller grunting,
groaning and giving my neighbors the wrong idea. What better time
is there to finally give Ben and Brock the props they deserve for
helping me increase my level of fitness and making me to sound a lot
smarter than I am when I’m talking to my friends?”
Making me to sound a lot smarter doesn’t sound very smart.
That’s’ what it actually says. Haha! Increasing my level of fitness and
making me to sound a lot smarter.
That’s not good. We forgive you since you gave us that great visual of
you grunting, groaning and humping your foam roller while giving
your neighbors the wrong idea.
Or the right idea.
Or the right idea. That’s right!
I think you should look at this as half full, not half empty.
What better gift for your loved one on Valentine’s Day than a foam
roller for them to hump.
bengreenfieldfitness.com/love to see Brock and I showing you all the
different ways you can hump a tennis ball to get fitter.
Maybe we should change it to bengreenfieldfitnes.com/hump.
Slash hump. Yep. There you go.
Now don’t go to that url.
Be sure to visit bengreenfieldfitness.com/premium to learn this week
how to lose 75 pounds by eating plants. Check out
bengreenfieldfitness.com/271 for all of the helpful links from today’s
show notes and Brock…
For all you people who keep writing in and asking where the show
notes are, that’s the show notes. Every time we say
bengreenfieldfitness.com/ what a number, that’s the show notes.
Brock, where are the show notes?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t think they have this– that’s just
something they make up.
Visit bengreenfieldfitness.com for even more cutting-edge fitness and