"13 Game-Changing Health Insights from Top Experts: What I Learned This Year"

Key Takeaways:

• This year, I learned invaluable insights about fat loss, muscle building, and general health from guests on my channel.
• Diet perspectives from fitness enthusiasts can be as powerful as scientific knowledge.
• Probiotics, like Seed, can significantly impact gut health and overall well-being.
• Understanding the effects of carbohydrates during endurance training can reshape dietary strategies.
• The intricate relationship between diet and performance is more nuanced than we often think.

What I've learned this past year about fat loss, about building muscle, about general health from the guests that have been on my channel is nothing short of amazing. I've learned things beyond the science. I've learned from people that have been doing this for a long time.

And this year has been a tremendous year of growth when it comes down to scientific knowledge, but also and more importantly, practical application.

And I want to share with you the 13 most valuable things that I learned from various guests on this channel this year.

The first one that I'm gonna talk about isn't even from a scientist. It's just from an amazing man that I met in Hawaii. He was 55 years old and I brought him on the channel. His name was Bill.

And this guy was shredded to the bone Lifetime natural lifts amazing weights, but does amazing things with Kele. Well, what he had to say about diet was so powerful. We'll get into that in just a second.

After today's video, I'll put a link down below for something that's extremely important, and that is a probiotic and it is Seed, which is not just a probiotic, it's a synbiotic. So it is a prebiotic and a probiotic combined in one capsule. So it has a multi-stage delivery system and that is a 25% off discount link.

The one thing that we see time and time again in the literature is that gut bacteria, our microbiome, probiotics do matter. But most probiotics are garbage and I don't even take them. I take Seed because it's different, because it's not a typical probiotic. They put their money where their mouth is with their science, with their clinical trials and it's the real deal.

So that link is down below. It's a 25% off discount link. I really think that you will probably notice a difference within a week or two of taking it. Not just in your gut health, but probably your energy and just your ability to sleep. So much of that is dictated by our gut microbiome.

So this first thing comes from Bill Maeda, maybe you've seen him on Instagram. What I want to show you this clip from him is he talks about when you eat food, when he eats food, he feels this fire in his stomach. He feels a fire. He feels that energy from food.

And I know this isn't the scientific thing that you're looking for, but I wanted to put it at the front because I am telling you as someone that has been in this industry for a really long time, this is a valuable piece of information. So just listen to a wise person and then I'll come back in just a second.

"When I eat large amounts of something that's good or not good doesn't matter. I always consider that fuel. Fuel. So whatever it is, whether it's Costco hot dogs or a perfectly done macrobiotic masterpiece, it enters my body in the context of it being fuel. Like literally, I just ate, you know, a couple of pork chops with a bunch of white rice. And right now I feel that that is burning.

It doesn't sit there. It's not something that tasted good. I took in the amount of that just right. I have a lot more there and I might go into that later, but. Right. I took just the right amount. There's a lot of salt, there's a lot of cream of mushroom soup and white rice in there. But I'm burning that right now.

I can feel, you know, we had a little workout earlier. I can feel just, you know, from what we did there. I'm replenishing myself. So I guess I eat randomly. It's intuitive. There's no science or there's no. I've never weighed my food. I've never measured it into individual little containers and timed my meals.

So I posted a video where I have ice cream that I mixed up with a Starbucks coffee. And that's literally. I mean that people say, God, two scoops of ice cream and freaking cold brew coffee. But on that day, I will routinely use foods like that as a pre-workout number one. Obviously, there's sugar and caffeine and it doesn't have to have coffee.

Sometimes I'll eat like a croissant or a pastry before a workout because obviously it's g me. It's more psychological. It gives me a degree of guilt and. Sorry, there are some days I don't want to get out there. So I need something that gives me a little bit of dopamine, but also gives me a little bit of guilt.

Like after you ate that, you're gonna sit down and not do fuck you, you guys. So I will drink that coffee and the ice cream and yeah, that's not the best thing to do. But then I'll go out and I. What I just had, I know it's not good. So I've also had this and this is probably wrong, but I still believe it. I have this belief that I can energetically and I guess metabolically burn what I just consume.

So if I have a powerful snack, I tend to have a powerful workout whether I want to or not. Now, this could be any food. It could be junk, it could be. But if you feel that fire.

And he mentions in another part where he talks about sometimes he eats a croissant or something before a workout because he wants to feel that fire. You should feel how your food feels. And that's what we have a problem with, particularly in the United States, is our food is so removed from us and it's so processed and adulterated.

We don't feel that fire.

Okay, you're looking for science, let's get to the science. The next thing that I learned is from Dr. Andrew Kutnik, and this is really interesting stuff. He was so excited to tell me this.

Essentially, we have learned now that when we are training, when we are working out, even with long workouts, we don't need a whole lot of carbohydrates to sustain long activity. What they found is that all you need is quite literally between 3 and 4 grams of carbohydrates every 20 minutes.

So we're talking about 12 or so grams of carbs per hour. And all that is doing is preventing hypoglycemia. So you're not getting any additional performance benefit by having carbs, even during long endurance work.

And I know some people would disagree, but this was large scientific data. I'm just going to let Dr. Andrew Kutnik take it away because I don't have a dog in the fight one way or the other. I found this very interesting.

Again, we talked about this idea of exercise-induced hyperglycemia. Well, to my knowledge, very few or no one has really looked at this in the context of a very low carbohydrate ketogenic diet, because there's an idea that you can kind of go on forever on a ketogenic diet and you won't bonk. At least some people say that.

Whereas the other theory is that, well, if you're in a low glycogen environment and you're also taking no carbohydrates, and we know that these diets can lower blood sugar, wouldn't it put you at more risk for hyperglycemia? In theory, it would actually put you at higher risk. And so we then said, okay, we want to provide carb supplementation, not just on a high carb diet, which is the prevailing performance optimization protocol.

You do high carb diets and you give a certain amount of carbohydrates at set intervals, usually about 20-minute intervals. And you're usually shooting for anywhere between 60 grams per hour. So it's 20 grams every 20 minutes or up to now in some recommendations, up to 120 grams per hour. So a ridiculous amount of carbohydrates that are consumed.

What we did instead is we actually provided only enough carbohydrates 6 to 12 times lower than those optimization carbohydrate protocols. Thinking that we're only going to give enough carbohydrate to mitigate exercise-induced hypoglycemia. We're isolating out the glycemic effect by doing the diet and actually prolonging fasts of up to 15 hours before exercise.

And then we're going to give carb supplementation across diet. What we saw is not only did people perform exactly the same on a low carb versus high carb diet, over six weeks of adaptation to hitting the wall prolonged exercise. Rethinking this whole paradigm of high carb being superior for prolonged exercise.

But then we gave carb supplementation on both protocols only up to 3.4 grams approximately. Because weight based every 20 minutes for these athletes. So very, very minimal levels.

Not only was it able to mitigate exercise-induced hypoglycemia. So exercise-induced hypoglycemia happened in almost the majority of both diet groups. It completely eliminated that across both diet groups and led to a 22% performance increase in prolonged exercise in these athletes.

Illustrating that irrespective of diet, high or low carb that you saw in performance improvement. But both improved similarly, illustrating that it doesn't matter the diet you're on, that carb supplementation may be important, but it may not be as much as you think you need. Some of the prevailing thinking is that you need 60 to 120 grams per hour at the very least. This questions whether that may be necessary.

And it certainly requires future evaluation because we're only giving 3.4 grams, 3.4 to 3.6 grams every 20 minutes, which is six to 12 times lower than is recommended. Ooh, this next one's gonna catch me some heat. Because it's a guy that always spurs some controversy.

But I cannot deny this was accurate. What he was talking about was accurate. Good old Paul Saladino. Now people have their opinions of Paul. I know Paul personally.

He is a very kind person. And yes, every person has their things, so sure. But I like Paul. And the thing is he taught me something I didn't know about French fries. He taught me about acrylamide. He taught me about these other compounds that are in French fries.

That's so wild. That are also in cigarettes. Super wild. So I'll just cut to this clip. He brought like a pack of cigarettes of Marlboro onto my channel. And I was like, what the heck are these for anyway? Just watch this.

"It's very interesting. All right, so you slid this across the table. What are you gonna tell me now? You change your mind on cigarettes? That's what I do, man. I just changed my mind on everything. It changed like the wind.

No, I brought these as a prop because I've had them in my backpack the last few days that I've been in Los Angeles. And I'm always self-conscious. Somebody be like, what are you walking around with Marlboro for? But this is interesting. It's an illustration for people because it came across some really interesting studies on seed oils and how they're connected with cigarettes.

And so the idea here is that if you look at seed oils when you cook them, when you heat them, and specifically you look at French fries, like at McDonald's or In-N-Out or any fast-food joint, they're gonna cook in seed oils.

McDonald's French fries have 19 ingredients and they cook in four different types of seed oils. Canola, soybean, hydrogenated soybean oil, et cetera. And there's been multiple studies looking at this, but one specifically looked at seed oils and the amount of toxic lipid oxidation byproducts when you make French fries out of them.

Right. There's Acrolein and alpha beta unsaturated aldehydes. And they looked at the amount of alpha beta unsaturated aldehydes in 152 grams of French fries, which is a large fries from McDonald's or In-N-Out.

And there is the same amount of these toxic chemicals which are grouped as 2A carcinogens from the WHO that you find in 25 cigarettes. So the striking thing that I wanted to tell you is that if you. I know you don't think this, but if someone thinks that seed oils are benign, consider the fact that eating a large fries from In-N-Out or McDonald's contains the same amount of these toxic chemicals as a pack of cigarettes.

Next, I learned from Chris Duffin how important tissue quality is and the enzymatic activity in our tissue. I had no idea that like a muscle injury could be caused by like sort of enzymatic reactions causing our muscle to tense up and fire improperly.

And that's almost the precursor to an injury that we don't even know much about. So tissue quality like actually like getting blood flow into the tissue to be able to maintain velocity, that was a game changer for me.

That's you getting older. I'm prone to injuries. Like it happens right? Like especially if I'm super calorically deprived, like I'm prone to injuries. So with that, it's really nice to know that. Wait a minute, like by increasing blood flow and getting blood into an area like tissue quality can actually make a difference with like body fat, with building muscle, particularly with building muscle.

And also just, it's just wild. So anyway, just check out this clip from him where he talks about getting blood into the tissue.

"Well your diet literally affects like the insertion points of your muscles into the joints. Like that is the single fastest like lever that you can pull on. Training that can make a difference today or tomorrow is by improving the tissue quality of the muscles.

We're talking about full muscle bellies, full of glycogen blood, good intracellular hydration like one that's gonna, that's absolutely going to help with things like anabolism and recovery. So massive.

But it's going to help with your workout right now and you're going to feel it with a classic bodybuild with a pump, right. But the pump is actually not just like this good looking muscles and nice veins standing.

It's your power lifting suit. It's a full body suit.

So our bodies, you, we've got our skin, we've got our fascia that wraps the muscle and so literally as you feel the muscle out and push against that you're creating tension in ability to have more leverage and more power output. It's a 3D stretch of that material. So one is, it's swelling up. That muscle belly is getting further away and changing the insertion point to give you more leverage to the joint.

Like physically you're able to create more torque with the same muscle by doing that. And when it's depleted, you've got slack, less tension in the body because you know it is your fascia has all been stretched to a certain limit and now the muscle is depleted within that and it doesn't have as much power the more we constrict it.

This is, I said a full body suit because in powerlifting they used to wear like a squat suit and a bench press shirt. It's literally you can have that same effect by swelling your body against those restrictive measures. And you can enhance your power sometimes just by like wrapping, you know, a muscle.

You know, if you ever have a sore muscle, do a little WRP on it. It feels better. We're creating that tension for it to work against. So now we're directing that tension up and down the length of the muscle instead of losing some efficiency in this outward size of the muscle.

Does that make sense? Makes total sense. It's absolutely incredible. So like when you go to train after taking a break, like doing a full, like you need to fill out your body, you can't just walk into a work into a training session flat and deplete.

I mean you can, but you're just not going to perform as well. And your risk of injury is heightened because you're, you're totally like, you're slack in your system. Your body's suit is not filled out and ready.

So we're not talking just like the cellular level of what's happening, you know, you know, in the tissue with being able to turn over and get the, you know, the toxins or byproducts out of the system as well as fuel, you know, you know, new nutrients into the muscle.

But the actual mechanical leverages are impacted by this. So taking products that are high in nitrates could be. There's a lot of different food products that have that high potassium as well. So having some tomatoes and some beets and things like these are all ways of doing that.

Or there's a lot of supplement products that you can do that with. Betaine anhydrous, really great product. Arginine nitrate. There's a lot of different arginines. L citrulline.

I also, it's kind of a, it's a secret, but in my formula I put in lactate.

Next, I learned from Dr. Scott Schur about methylene blue. Now I had heard it before and I actually thought that it was kind of like it's a random thing. But hearing the evidence on it, particularly surrounding metabolic flexibility, the ability to help your mitochondria use fats better and use carbs better at specific times.

Hearing Scott describe how methylene blue works really was interesting. Now full disclaimer like you probably shouldn't like or disclosure. I guess you should probably know that like methylene blue isn't for everybody. But it's very interesting and I've experimented with it and I noticed quite a difference in my energy.

But I also just noticed a difference in I think my athletic performance. So I did a video talking about how it was like a really powerful legal performance enhancer.

Anyway, take it away, Scott.

"Yeah, I mean I worked with a guy recently that did the Leadville Ultra Marathon 100 mile race and I've aritect with a bunch of marathoners. And the problem is, especially if they're not most, you know, most athletes are not fat adapted like that.

They don't have the capacity to do, you know, what you can do or have that metabolic flexibility. If they can do that, they often find that they don't feel like they have those walls when they do these longer, these longer things like the 20 mile hours or marathons or whatever.

But what I found is that methylene blue can be really great as a way to compensate for some of that stress that's happening and continue to have the capacity to continue to make more energy at the same time as they're getting depleted because of, you know, these long, long distance kinds of runs.

So I was giving him 32 milligrams of methylene blue every four hours and he beat his race time by three hours the following year. Now we were also working on his GI system and doing things with glutamine as well, which gets depleted by the small intestine.

But that's a different story but important. But I think I've seen this across the board that if you can give people that are doing especially endurance methylene blue, they do better, they have better outcomes overall.

And I think the primary one is just related to the continued capacity to create aerobic metabolism. So their shift over to anaerobic metabolism is further downstream than it would be if they have methylene blue on board.

That's what I think is happening. And I have some, even some of my patients that refuse to exercise without methylene blue because they can keep their heart rate up higher for longer when they have it on board.

The next I learned from Brian McKenzie how important and powerful the breath is. Like truly learning to breathe, not just to calm yourself down, but during exercise and actually like holding your breath and doing things where you build CO2 tolerance.

So basically like holding your breath while training to build CO2 tolerance. I mean he doesn't let all the cats out of the bag, but he talks about just how it's one of the biggest levers that you can pull to improve your performance with people who have dysfunctional breath.

And that is by the way, dysfunctional breathing. And anything in my opinion, anything above 15 breaths a minute is dysfunctional. You have a massive gap in how your physiology is going to operate.

And we can make major changes very quickly. And that would be through things like going for a walk and shutting your mouth or doing a little breath work and slowing down your breathing to a degree or doing some breath hold work that actually helped us increase the CO2 in the system so that we actually were using the oxygen a bit more.

And it's not just about the oxygen. That oxygen is a worthless destructive molecule without carbon dioxide inside of this system. In fact, it's largely a destructive oxygen is very destructive itself and far more destructive than CO2. It's just how that CO2 is getting used, right?

And if I don't have enough of it in the system, the vasculature constricts more, right? So if I have more of it in the system, the vasculature opens up, we asodilate, so we, we start to train the system as a whole when we actually bring on an adequate amount of that.

So I think, to answer your question, CO2 tolerance becomes a very big player in some of the lowest hanging fruit that people could actually go and understand. And that is simply by just slowing down your breathing a few times a day, maybe doing some breathing protocols that you like, maybe not doing some hyperventilation stuff if you've got any issues going on, just until you've addressed this stuff and then applying this into your current movement strategy like go for a walk, 20, 30, 45 minutes and shut your mouth and see how you feel after that.

And there will be a very big difference if it's the first time you've really done something like that.

I learned from Dr. Ben Bickman a whole lot about Ozempic and GLP1 receptor agonists. But I learned what happens after about 18 to 24 months of being on these GLP1 receptor agonists, stuff that I wasn't really quite sure of. So he explained it quite well.

But he also explained a little bit of the history. We'll keep this short. We'll cut to a couple sections. I want to cut to where he talks about what can happen after a couple of years on this stuff, but also a little bit of why Ozempic was created and what it was really for, especially in the way of like metabolic health and potential like insulin resistance.

And when these GLP1 based drugs were first used, they were used at a relatively lower dose, a low enough dose where the main effect was to simply inhibit glucagon. And thus the main clinical outcome was you were controlling glucose levels better and thus, finally, it was only used for type 2 diabetes.

However, these shrewd scientists, and I don't mean that in any kind of negative way, noticed that these people also tended to eat a little less. They just had a slightly better satiety. They were eating a little less and losing a little weight.

That then became the focus for this kind of new version of the drugs where they wanted to now control the glucagon and improve glucose levels in the diabetic, but because it was so good at slowing down.

So I guess there's myriad mechanisms here that I ought to mention, but the net effect being that they also discovered that at higher doses it became profoundly effective at controlling weight.

And so then it got marketed as a weight loss drug when it used to only be marketed as a diabetes drug. I could admit a low dose, very low dose, for a limited period of time to just learn how to eat differently. Maybe there's some value, but even in those people.

What's so interesting, at that 24 month time point, 71% of people are getting off the drug on their own. They're tired of feeling sick. Even then at 24 months, that's when most people find that their sweet cravings have returned right back to where they were.

I cannot cite the study, I'm afraid. I don't remember what journal it was published in, but I can see the picture perfectly in my mind. They measured sweet cravings at time 0, then six months on the drug. The sweet cravings just bottomed out.

Yeah, their ability, their cravings for anything sweet just went to, you know, zero on a scale of whatever. And then 12 months, it came back up a bit, 18 months, it came back up a bit, 24 months, it was right back to where it started. Even though they had maintained the use of the drug.

But this is again evidence of this diminishing returns. And too much of something will result in a resistance to that something. And so if the effect of the GLP1 drug is to control sweet cravings, well, it shouldn't be surprising that those cravings start to return.

I think Ben explains things so dang well. As a matter of fact, another thing that I learned on this channel this year is actually from another video that I filmed with him on a separate occasion.

I asked him a question about fats and carbs together, because in a lot of ways, theoretically, like combining fats and carbs together in one meal would be metabolically difficult.

So he does a great job of explaining how the cell can partition and how it uses fuel and how combining fats and carbs together may not be the best thing, and that's what makes a standard American diet, is the high amounts of fats and carbs in one sitting.

I knew this theoretically, but he really put some mechanisms in play, and it just helped me understand it. And I think it can teach people a lot about, hey, maybe allocate carbs to one time and allocate fats to another time. Maybe don't have them all together at the same time.

If you have a lot of fat and carbs together, that is a particularly fattening mix because you have both of the two components. So first of all, you would burn glucose as.

As the primary fuel in that state because insulin dictates fuel use. In fact, I just finished a lecture about the Randall cycle or the glucose fatty acid cycle, and described how it really is, at its heart, a manifestation of insulin.

If insulin is low, the body is sugar burning or glucose burning. If sorry. If insulin's high, if insulin's high, sugar burning. If insulin is low, fat burning.

If you’ve spiked insulin because of the glucose consumption and you've won with high insulin, you have signaled the fat cell that it's time to grow, but that alone is insufficient. If I took you and injected a dose of insulin in you, that would, yes, stimulate fat cell growth by pulling in glucose and inhibiting free fatty acid release, and you would faint because there wouldn't be insulin.

There would be insufficient other nutrients in your blood. So I wouldn't have stimulated your fat cells to grow at all because there's no fuel for that growth.

So as much I'm touching on a deeper debate now. Oh, this is great. Which is, why do we get fat and how do we lose it? But as much as we want to go into separate camps and people say, no, it's purely calories, we know that's not true. That is so easy to disprove that it's almost laughable that that idea still has any credence.

Now, one of my favorite people in the world, Dr. Tommy Wood, MD, PhD, super smart guy, almost too smart. Tommy. I can get away with saying that because I know him. Point is, he published a paper this year, and he talked about it on my channel about how building muscle and resistance training makes the brain function better.

We'll keep this one short and to show you a clip, but it's a little motivation to get in the gym:

"When you look at those in those same data sets as long as, and we did this in a study in NHANES and we were looking at cognitive function in older adults, but we saw something similar, which is that higher lean mass on DEXA was actually associated initially with worse cognitive function. And I'm just like, this doesn't make any sense.

Like why doesn't this fit my worldview, which is that the bigger biceps make you smarter. What's wrong with the data? And I think it's exactly that reason. So once you look at strength relative to muscle mass, so we created like this relative strength metric because we also had some strength data, it was isokinetic leg extension strength, then what you see is that as long as your muscles are strong relative to their size, it doesn't matter how big they are.

If they are proportionally strong because you probably because you've accrued them through physical activity, then there's benefit to it. So I think when we talk about lean mass or muscle mass, the most critical thing is how that has been gained and then how you use it, which then confers benefits.

Just having more muscle mass because you have more total mass isn't enough for you to see benefit. And you're probably then going to see the net detrimental effect of the other tissue types that you've accrued at the same time, which is generally going to be increasing visceral fat, especially in the male population.

And then that has a negative effect on cardiovascular disease health and cognitive health and all these other things.

Number 10, my good friend Joaco Willink. So Joaco talked to me about how he prefers to be fasted when he trains. And even though it wasn't scientific, it was just powerful and I really liked it and I loved what he had to say and I think it just really encompasses why I like to train fasted too and like why we just have a problem with just consumption in general.

So check this one out from Joaco:

"In the Seal Teams, you eat when you can. I also don't like to train with food in my stomach. So like some people that eat before they work out in the morning, I don't like to eat before I work out in the morning. And again I look, I'm not trying to tell anyone to do this.

I don't know what your life is like, I don't know what works for you. You should do what feels good for you. I'm just telling you, ask me what I do, I'm going to tell you what I do, I'm not making any recommendations.

I don't eat before I work out in the morning. I don't like to have food in my stomach when I'm working out because I feel like I'm gonna puke and I don't like that feeling. So I don't eat before I work out in the morning.

I also don't take any pre-workout. I don't eat anything. I don't have any coffee. I have water in the morning. That's what I do. I go work out occasionally. I'll kick down a pre-workout. If I'm just really. I mean, once every two months I'll have some pre-workout.

But other than that, I'm just going in there and I'm going to work out. Then at 10 o'clock in the morning, I'll start feeling a little bit hungry. I'll have some, usually some mixed nuts. I'll eat some mixed nuts and that kind of tides me over for a while.

And then I'll have a protein shake. I make protein shakes. I have my protein shakes. They taste awesome and they're really gratifying to me to eat. So I feel great. I get done with that and I have plenty of time to digest before I go train jiu-jitsu, which is like 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

I'm going to train jiu-jitsu. I don't want to have food in my stomach when I'm training jiu-jitsu. So I've already digested what I ate at 11 o'clock or maybe noon. And so I've digested my food.

I go train, get done training, come home and I'm going to eat. I'm gonna eat a steak. I'm going to have another protein shake and a big salad. And that's kind of what I do. That's my eating pattern.

Another thing that I like about fasting is it recalibrates your hunger and it recalibrates your taste buds. So if you fasted, water tastes delicious. When you're fasting, it's awesome. Same thing like going in the field.

You're going in the field and you're short on water. When you come out of the field, you're like, "Water is the most beautiful, luscious, precious thing in the world. I love water."

And when you're fasting, water tastes really good because I drink water when I'm fasting. Water tastes really good food. When you get done with the fast, you're like, "Oh, this carrot is so good, it tastes delicious." Whereas if you're not fasting, the only thing that tastes good is a freaking Twinkie. You're like, "The only thing I want is a Twinkie."

Right. So fasting recalibrates that it also recalibrates your hunger.

This next one is one that actually blew me away. Not literally, but I was surprised, so I'm not gonna lie. Like, I knew that oxalates were somewhat problematic, but I was so tired of hearing people beat the oxalate drum that I needed to hear it from a kidney scientist himself.

So Dr. Jacob Torres at UCSB. Whoa. Did he blow my mind? So he blew my mind by talking about how oxalates are like a serious, real issue.

But he didn't say in a way where he wasn't like avoid oxalates. He's just like, "Hey, like, we're gonna have to live with them, so we need to kind of deal." So maybe like some calcium along with oxalates might help.

But the most important part, I want him to just explain what oxalate does and how they kind of build up. And I want him to explain in this clip how it's not like we just need to avoid them all the time.

We just need to kind of limit them. Because it's not a short term thing. It really is how they build up over time. The body can't clear them and they can become problematic. It's a problem. It's a very old problem.

As long as there's been kidneys and I think organisms that consume carbon, there's been oxalate and organisms have to deal with oxalate for that long. So it's definitely a problem.

"Yeah, for sure. How exactly is it a problem? What happens when we consume? Okay, let's just say, for example.

Well, first off, what are some examples of high free oxalate foods? I think the classic are spinach, rhubarb. Those are kind of like the big, big things. Anytime you eat something and you feel that grittiness on the teeth, that's the oxalate binding to the calcium.

That's just like in your mouth. So you can kind of feel like that kind of adherence. Dang. I like the grittiness. The grainy.

Yeah, that's my favorite part of spinach is that. So is that literally what you're feeling? Is the oxalate there?

Yeah. It's like binding to stuff on your teeth. Yeah. Holy crap. Yeah. Okay, so what is that? What happens when that is ingested?

So if there's nothing bound to it and you just have free oxalate, then it'll get absorbed into the bloodstream and then has to be filtered by the kidneys. I mean, oxalate will make its way into all the tissues.

So if there's any other place that it's in high concentration, it can cause crystals. So if there's calcium or magnesium, it can cause crystals anywhere if the concentration is high enough. People get a lot of them in their thyroid.

They get these crystals that form over their life. So like it's known to have crystals in other locations besides the kidney, but once it's in the kidney, if conditions are right, so if you have the PH is low enough and the calcium or magnesium concentration is high enough, you'll form these microcrystals and those can then turn into kidney stones if they're left unchecked.

I learned from Stephanie Van Watson, Dr. Van Watson, that the Sardinians consume a specific kind of dairy. A specific kind of cheese from goats or dairy from goats, cheese made from dairy from goats that has a specific kind of fat in it.

And like we've noticed the Sardinians have an extremely long life expectancy. So she talks about like these high altitude cheeses and it's just really interesting to hear that from a fat intake perspective that maybe some of these saturated fats are more important than some of these monounsaturated fats that we hang our hat on.

So much for longevity. She really explained this stuff.

Sardinia is, you're correct, very fascinating with regard to. It's one of the five longevity blue zones, as you mentioned, Thomas. So with Sardinia, the other thing that's unique about it, because it's called the island of centenarians, where people are most likely to live to 100 years old, and specifically men, this actually has the largest population or relative population of long lived centenarian men of anywhere in the world even.

Because normally women live longer.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, something, you're right, that something is very unique about what's happening in Sardinia. As we were going through the papers and working through, okay, what are normal levels of C15?

Because what we do in the paper is we help define nutritional deficiency. What's low, what's normal, and now what may be optimal C15 levels. So we have the opportunity here to maybe not just get back to where we were, to the healthy level levels where our cells keep us healthy, the way nature intended for maybe most of us.

But Sardinia is providing a clue that there may be a way that if we push C15 levels even higher, we can actually help support longevity.

And so with Sardinia they have levels. So on average, the average person today has C15 levels in their cell membranes of 0.2% of total fatty acids, which is, right, that breaking point.

It’s like you may or may not get disease, whether you're on either side of that point. 2% in Sardinia, even as you look at the older people and our C15 levels naturally decline as we get older. So we're talking 0.2% in your average aged population in Sardinia they looked at 60 to 75 year olds and they have C15 levels of 0.64.

More than three times higher C15 levels were like what? And so this paper came out from Bank et al. showing and where they called out, hey, people in Sardinia have very high C15 levels.

So when we looked into that, then even when they get to 80 to 100, it does go down as they age. But even the 80 to 100 plusers still have 0.4% when they compare that to a low longevity zone.

I shouldn't even put it in quotes to a low longevity zone. The low longevity zone had 0.2%. So basically the world is in a low longevity zone C15 level.

Lastly, especially for the guys, I learned from Dr. Andy Galpin that your testosterone levels don't matter as much as we think they do. It matters more about the androgen receptor density and how that testosterone is acting at the actual tissue level, not just in the serum, because it can change rapidly.

Your serum plasma levels of testosterone could change day over day, really, and you never really know. But what's actually active at the tissue and what's actually determining your androgen receptor density makes a bigger difference in how testosterone impacts you from muscle building.

And I think we spend too much time focusing on getting testosterone levels elevated and not the other things. I could hang my hat on that. I'm pretty solid that.

But Dr. Andy Galpin does a great job. The testosterone is simply a thing that's in your system. In this case, it's going to be kicking around in your blood.

And what you're referring to with the androgen receptors is in order for that testosterone to do anything on a cell, it has to bind to that cell. And so it's not just about how much testosterone is floating on the system, it's about how many can actually bind to the cells.

In this case, that's what the androgen receptor is. So it's the part on the actual cell that allows testosterone to bind. That's what activates all the benefits of the testosterone. That's not something you can measure in blood. You have to have a biopsy or whatever tissue.

But those receptors are everywhere. They're not just in skeletal muscle. So you can't go around biopsying every part of your body and figuring that. So you don't know that number.

What you're kind of getting at here is it possible, and the answer is yes, for someone to have like a lower total testosterone but actually not have any anabolic issues? Yeah.

And one of the reasons would be potentially their androgen receptors are super sensitive or super abundant, either and. Or a combination of those things.

The other thing you got to remember, too is like we've said earlier, physiology doesn't do just one thing. You have backup systems in other ways.

Testosterone is not the only anabolic agent you have. Now, I know I left some amazing things out. I interviewed amazing guests this year, but these were the ones that really I could remember that are just like.

This changed some of my thought process on this. So as always, keep it locked to here on my channel. Make sure you watch my interviews. Make sure that you also hit that subscribe button. See you tomorrow.