Interview with Luke Leaman discussing Hyper Nutrition - Part 1

# Interview with Luke Leaman discussing Hyper Nutrition - Part 1

**Channel:** The ATP Project
**Published:** unknown
**Source:** podcast

Welcome to the ATP Project, interview with Luke Lehman on Hypernutrition Part 1. In today's podcast, Matt, Steve and I are joined by Muscle Nerds founder, Master Trainer Luke Lehman. We discuss why more is not always better, including some great stories from Luke and Matt about what has happened and what they've experienced when people use too much of a good thing. This is part one of a two-part series and both podcasts are more conversational in style than normal and differ a lot from our normal podcast format. As always, this information is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent or cure any condition and is for information purposes only. Please discuss any information in this podcast with your healthcare professional before making any changes to your current lifestyle. Stay tuned, the ATP Project is about to start. Welcome to the ATP Project, delivering the irreverent truth about health, aging, performance and looking good. If you're sick and tired of being sick and tired, ready to perform at your best, or somewhere in between, then sit back, relax, and open your mind as Jeff and Matt battle the status quo and discuss everything health-related that can make you better. Welcome to the ATB Project, here with your hosts Matt, Steve, and Jeff, and today we have special star guest star Luke Lehman back for the second time. This is the first time we've had somebody back for the second time. That didn't make sense. Welcome back. This is the first time for the second time. I feel like I should get a parking spot now because I have to park three blocks down the road every time I come here. There's a disabled one out the front. Didn't you see it? That's for the leg day. Yeah, leg day. So, Luke, your background, just for people who don't know you. Who doesn't know? Well, and it's interesting. I just saw that you're speaking at a conference. In Canada? Yeah. At Swiss, the Society of Weightlifting Injury Specialists. Which is cool. It's really cool. You are considered to be, in our industry, one of the world's board leaders in what you do. So can you explain just quickly what it is that you do and what your background is? Yeah, so I'll just go back to when I first started training. People, you know, when I was 18 kind of did the whole thing. All my education came from, you know, the Internet and Testosterone Magazine. This is the best name for any magazine ever. Yes. You know, and then started looking into people like Paul Cech and Charles Poliquin and Charles Staley and that type of thing. and I just kept going and never stopped. I was a competitive powerlifter in high school and throughout college and then got into bodybuilding. And as I kind of went through different transformations, I ended up basically mentoring under Charles Poliquin and at one point basically working at Poliquin Group for a number of years and one of their lead trainers, one of their lead instructors, I should say. So I started traveling about five years ago all over the world teaching people, and then I left Poliquin Group and started Muscle Nerds. and that we continue on with that. So we do online training, and then we also do education as well. Yeah, yeah, excellent. And I know a lot of the stuff, like us as well too, a little bit controversial at times, pushing the boundaries of the status quo, which is great, especially if you're right. It's not great if you're wrong. Well, you know, the thing is I had a quote somebody made into a meme a few months ago and basically said, science doesn't give a fuck what you think. You know, it either is or it isn't. You know, you can't, your anecdotal experience doesn't beat a dozen studies that refute what you think happens. You can feel good about something that doesn't actually make it true though. That's right. That's what my dad always said, practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect. Yeah, that's Vince Lombardi. I love that saying. Yeah, Vince Lombardi. That's my dad. Rod. Rod. Rod, yeah. Just said down the bottom, Rod. Bottom of the name. So we're talking about hypernutrition, is that correct? Yeah, yes. Okay, so I've done no prep at all for this, which makes no difference really because I'm just here as the normal guy talking to your experts, but what is hypernutrition, Matt? Oh, basically what happens is there's this idea that there's natural stuff is good for you, pharmaceutical and synthetic stuff is bad for you, and that if we take mega doses of natural stuff, we're only going to get better and better and stronger and stronger. In reality, there are times and places for us to use mega doses of vitamins and nutrients, in a naturopath clinic or as part of a sports therapy or sports performance sort of strategies. But in that instance, we're using these natural compounds more like drugs for a particular purpose. So what we're going to talk about today is the time and place to use megadoses, some of the dangers associated with using megadoses when it's not appropriate, and just reminding people that regardless whether it's pharmaceutical, synthetic or natural, you can get too much of a good thing. and we've got some crazy ass stories of things that people have done and yet we've seen and other common mistakes that a lot of people don't realize they're doing so that's what we're going to do is a time and place for hyper nutrition for hypertrophy excelling in performance correcting deficiencies or using or correcting disease states using natural stuff and then there a time for general wellness maintenance and just to make sure we covered the the basics so talking to luke before we started the other the other um uh title that we were going to call the show is uh dumb things that what was it dumb shit i've done to myself yeah with nutrition yeah yeah so and i wouldn't mind starting off with actually a couple of stories so that people might be able to relate to this So you were mentioning one about glycine. Oh, glycine, yeah. So, yeah, so I was at a seminar years ago, probably 2010, and I was rooming with a couple of guys, and what we were doing at the time was pretty brutal. It was like a lower body training internship, and we had to do 10 training sessions of lower body in five days. So everybody's over-trained, no one can think straight, and we were making our shakes every day after we trained, And we had a bar where you could do all these different types of workout, amino acids and shakes and all that. And one of the guys pulled down a tub of glutamine and a tub of glycine. And the tubs looked exactly the same. And so he thought he was doing 20 grams of glycine and 80 grams of glutamine, but he got it backwards. So on the drive home, he didn't look so good. And he's driving the car, and I look at him. I go, are you feeling okay? He goes, nah, nah, I don't feel good at all. he pulls over on the side of the road and starts retching and just retching and so uh good friends that uh we are that were with him we pulled our phones out try to record it but it was too dark and after he got done dry heaving we get in the car and we get back to the um apartment and you just hear him for hours in the bathroom just retching his guts out wow and it was it was pretty pretty nasty so what does what does glycine do if you overdose on it well this is a thing and it's the funny thing is it's not that hard to overdose on glycine with if you're a avid user of supplements because glycine is quite an abundant amino acid anyway in our food um but you know when you get chelated supplements like magnesium diglycinates they're 80 glycine you know 15 20 magnesium so you can get glycine in there remember there was that phase where people were spiking up protein powders like up to about 30 of the volume of the protein powder could be glycine it was significantly cheaper to waste so people taking 30 gram dose of protein sometimes could have been getting 10 grams of glycine and all that sort of stuff. So glycine is an important amino acid. A lot of functions in and around the liver for processes known as glycination, detoxify things like salicylates and other compounds. In fact, there's a whole school of thought out there of megadosing glycine for detox where you build up to like megadoses of 10 and 20 grams of glycine to strip out certain toxins. And I know some pretty hardcore people that have done some pretty full-on stuff to their body that have sent themselves blind after taking 10 to temporarily blind after 10 or 20 grams of glycine as part of a detox program. Yeah. The glycine's a very small molecule as far as amino acids go. Sorry to get chemical on you. Do it. Yeah. And so what it does, it has a very high osmolarity reading. So basically it pulls water into the GI tract like a mineral would basically. So it can cause huge amounts of nausea. But 80 grams is an extraordinary amount. That was an accident. Yeah, yeah. glutamine on the other hand is quite abundant in amino acids like it's the most abundant amino acid in way and so it's the body and your muscle and your muscle absolutely so body can tolerate more that's why he was going for the 80 i mean still that's huge still 80 20 though still makes me think 20 grams of glycine the madman yeah so yeah but and also so you have a look at glycine so a lot of people think oh it's cool it's an amino acid it's going to help detox um it's going to help have some effects on my nerves where it has it helps to the relaxing compounds to relax a little bit more and that sort of stuff. But if you're in a calorie deficit and you're taking supplements with mega, so you're in a calorie deficit because you want to burn fat and all that sort of stuff and you take mega doses of these amino acids such as glycine, they will have an effect of calorific action. So you might think you're mega dosing on something because detox is going to help me lose fat and detox is going to make me lose weight and stuff like that. But the glycine itself ends up going through as a source of fuel. Yeah. Things like alanine too, where people overdose on things like alanine and it stimulates gluconeogenesis in the liver and all that sort of thing. So they're the sort of common mistakes. Arginine's probably the most common one I ever saw. So in my naturopath clinic experience, I dealt with a lot of men in my clinic because I come from a country, the mining area and that sort of stuff. But arginine was something they all wanted to take because as far as they knew, it was going to drop their high blood pressure and give them erections. So they were all taking megadoses of arginine as a vasodilator to drop their blood pressure and have this erection effect, and it never worked. And there's all these products getting released, all arginines with antioxidants, all about vasodilation. And they're all using these studies showing that it can work. And then all the studies we realised were a bit bullshit because they were doing intravenous or they were doing megadoses. So the funny thing is if you have a look at arginine some people it easy to overdose on arginine as well because you get plenty in meats and nuts and seeds and you get plenty in your food You can flat out find a pre that not loaded up with mega doses of arginine and I don't care if it's attached to an alpha-ketoglutarate or something. We're talking about the same sort of process here. When you take arginine, what happens is the liver gets better at converting it into things such as urea and those urea compounds, it takes it away from its vasodilating effects down a totally different pathway. and those byproducts of that will actually shut down the enzymes that make arginine from citrulline. So to cut a long story short, the arginine paradox lists off a study where they gave people that had had myocardial infarctions, and they were using infarctions. I don't know if I can say that word. Infarctions. Infarctions. Where's my infarction? So what happens where they gave these people arginine after having heart attacks. That's a better way of saying it. So they had heart attacks, and they thought, oh, we'll give them some arginine to dilate their blood vessels, take the burden off their heart, and that sort of stuff, reduce the pressure. they had to scan that study because all these people were dying um and so they can and it created this arginine paradox and they realized that when you take it in high doses or moderate doses longer period time it actually works less and less and less and can start causing heart disease arginine is probably one of the most common ones i saw in my clinic for being weird ass overdose the rest of it would just be vitamins the about that arginine study the just to go in detail it was a 70 70 people in the placebo group 70 in the active group and in the active group the one that was given arginine, six of them died. Yeah, wow. And zero in the placebo. Wow. Nearly 10% of people participating in the study died. And they had to intervene and stop the study. They had to stop the study because it got to a... There's an acceptable level of death in any studies, but they exceeded that. Yeah. The only other study that was stopped early, quite in dramatic fashion, was of course the drug that's still on the market now. It's the HRT drug, Premarin. WIMS study, wasn't it? Yeah, WIMS study. And it stopped early because there was too many cancers and heart attacks. That product had been on the market for 50 years before they did the study to see if it worked. And it's still on the market now, by the way. And it's still on the market. Yeah, well, there's nothing wrong with that. Dear Lord, anybody talk about getting melatonin in Australia? That's something dangerous like that. Especially three milligrams. It's hard not to be a bloody cynic, isn't it? So, yeah, I'd love to hear some more stories in terms of it because obviously you're working with a lot of personal trainers. You're working with a lot of professionals that are coming to you. So you're like the master trainer. People come to you to learn about training, but a lot about nutrition, a lot about supplementation, a lot about getting the most out of their body. So what are some of the other crazy things that you've seen? I've got two great arginine stories. One of them was something stupid I did to a client years ago before I realized that arginine increases viral replication. And if you give someone a lot of arginine to make them more vascular while they're getting ready for a show and they've got something like herpes, guess what happens? They walk in one day and they've got this gigantic scab all over their face. I was going to say which type of herpes was it but obviously the one that gives you cold sores yeah well it was like cold sores on steroids it was one of those and at that point I went oh well where's the correlation here oh okay let's look in the research uh oh why don't you get off that and we'll give you some beetroot juice or something like that and add some lysine to counteract it I used to teach the students lysine for the lips so you just sort of remember it that way that's how I tried to get the students to remember it I give you a really good really good arginine story so years ago a buddy of mine that i was uh we had an apartment together and he went to uh see one of the girls that he was dating at the time and he had read in some research paper about 20 grams of arginine to increase growth hormone before you go to bed and so he took it and didn't realize that she was wanting to get a little bit fresh and so they got busy with it and he had a traumatic experience and he he comes over to the house and i'm sitting in a like in a lazy boy recliner watching TV, and he goes, hey, bro, I've got this problem. I go, what? He goes, I took 20 grams of arginine last night, and my girlfriend wanted to have sex, and we had sex. And I go, all right, what's the problem? He goes, well, look at this. And he whips out his ding-a-ling right in front of my face. I turn, and it's solid black, except that he's white. And so he's freaking out. He doesn't know what to do. He goes, what do I do? I go, bro, your wiener's going to fall off. You need to go to the hospital. So he goes to the hospital, and he's gone for a few hours. he comes back and he's like, oh man, I got a story for you. The nurse came in and she looked just like my grandmother and she asked me what I did and I told her and she goes, well, let's have a look at it. And he had basically busted a bunch of blood vessels and had a huge hematoma on his ding-a-ling. Which is a big bruise. And how do they fix it? They got to drain it. Yep. So imagine that. Someone coming at you with a 20 gauge. That reminds me, man, I had this other story. It's similar to that but kind of nothing like it In the sense that, so I had this idea once, you know, because I'm always like formulating and experimenting and I had this person, so I made, there was this research on fulvic acids, you know that a compound in shilajit that could help with erections and also help wrinkles and all that so it had all these amazing vasodilating properties So what I thought is I make a cream out of it So I made this fulvic acid cream, and it was kind of like a yellowy colour and that sort of stuff. Anyway, but I gave it to this customer, and he comes back the next day like, you know, you're having a joke sort of thing. And I go, what are you talking about? And he says, well, you've turned my old fella black. But is this a joke? Like, just because it's black, it's not bigger. you know and i'm just like well no no no like and anyway and then we're talking i said no no man seriously i didn't mean that you know like so we stained the skin black um with the it didn't really work because the fulvic acid compounds went black you know and that sort of stuff um the funniest thing though that was funny because we had the appointment we're having a good old laugh about it go no no no man it's not joker it was actually genuinely but you signed this waiver so let's just forget about it um clinical trial file yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um and then and And then the funny thing is his wife come to pick him up for an appointment at the end of the appointment. And she comes in and she's got these black marks down either side of her face. And I'm just looking at him and looking at her and just going, what's going on? And he said, no, you told me that when you mentioned that it might also be good for wrinkles. So I gave some to my wife. But automatically I assumed that he'd kind of used an applicating rod of some sort. Anyway. Actually, while we're talking about that, the guy that used to work for me, Oh, this is a better one. The original, you know, we make Block E3. The original Block E3, see, chrysan is bright yellow. Now, before we worked out how to get chrysan micronised and penetration properly, we used to just mega-dose the chrysan and hopefully, you know, the whole 80-20 principle, we'd just overload the bloody thing and hopefully some bloody gets in, you know, which worked and everything like that. But the problem, the side effect was it would stain the skin yellow. Now, the funny part about that is, is like most people were putting it on their chest and everything like that. so anyway stupid gyno and what have you yeah we put on gyno cries and blocks uh aromatase conversion so anyway um so one bloke asked me you know is there any other way of getting more out of this product and i said we can you know theoretically you can stick it up your date and affect the prostate and get it in maybe into the testes and areas and maybe have some systemic effects that way because it's not very bioavailable orally five percent sort of thing so anyway so this bloke blah blah i forgot all about it anyway i'll go into jeff's shop one day and i'm saying this bloke comes up and he's like poking me in the chest he's getting you didn't tell me that it was going to stain my arsehole yellow and then the first thing i thought i'm just looking and going how do you know how do you know and he just said did someone tell you are you looking in a mirror like how do you know you asked when your arsehole's yellow and this boy just looked at me just like and he and then he assumed off and the funniest thing is i went out the back because the bloke is working for us now that i tried to convince to do it yeah so jr i tried to convince him to walk out and say that, oh, you've turned my dick yellow. And I'll be like, oh, you too. But the interesting thing I love about the bodybuilders, and back in the day when I had the store and people coming in, they're always experimenting on themselves. They're always pushing the science. They're happy to take theory or maybe half an idea and actually see what happens with it, which obviously is where you get some of these crazy stories of people doing some amazing things. I mean, not always with good results, let's face it. I mean, some people are going to hurt themselves. but yeah there is a time and a place so we have to acknowledge that there's a time and a place for using mega doses but that's when we're not using them like vitamins that's not where we're not just doing things for performance so for example in my clinic with mega dosing so for example vitamin b6 i used to sometimes have to use big doses of that to correct certain things like for example behavioral problems in children where i've had a blood test and shown cryptopyrrolosis or mo factor just stripping out B6 and zinc and had a major deficiency we needed to correct. Or in other cases where I've had elevated homocysteine levels or something contributing to heart disease, I've used larger doses of folate, B6 and B12s in the short term. But in those sort of situations, we use megadoses in the short term to achieve the desired result, which is way out of balance. Meaning what we're trying to do is we try to create a massive imbalance to force a change. you know but if you continue doing that it's not one of those things where the body will only take the good things and then throw the bad stuff away so if they continue to take those doses long term without supervision then they get all sorts of problems and um and b6 for example was a really common one that people would overdose because you have a look at the fifa protocols and this weird stuff that people are doing now they're using mega doses of b6 so like the levels of b6 you need in a day is like 10 milligrams for example um maybe 20 30 milligrams depending on your demand but like for example during pregnancy to treat morning sickness people use 450 milligrams of B6 wow and that's like wrong and then with this fifa protocol in children people are using hundreds of milligrams of B6 in tiny little infants and the problems that we see in the clinic is you get people coming through telling in the prescriptions

and they're telling you why they need these mega doses of B6 and they're listing off all of these things like nerve pain and hormonal problems and brain problems and all that. So, Steve-O, what are the side effects of B6 overdose? The great thing about remembering the side effects of B6 overdose and B6 deficiency is they're identical. Because if you give too much B6, now I'll be specific here, pyridoxine, which is the common B6 found in supplements, it actually blocks the active form of B6, which is pyridoxal 5-phosphate. So if you take too much B6, the side effects of the B6 supplementation mimic exactly if you're deficient in B6. So if you take B6, you'll become deficient in B6 because you're blocking the active form of B6. And it's not easy to measure. So basically, and a very similar thing happens with synthetic folic acid. So when people overdose folic acid, it actually overwhelms the conversion pathways to stop and they get unmetabolized folic acid building up into their body. that it actually creates folic acid deficiency signs and creates a whole heap of other problems in itself. We've got to remember folic acid is not found in nature. Folic acid is oxidized, reduced form, and oxidized, sorry, oxidized, just oxidized, not reduced form, and it causes major problems in the body. Well, this is why, and again, I'll throw back for people and for our regular listeners, they would remember the vitamin paradox. It's a fantastic podcast that we did, and it was one of the first ones really to come out and shine a light on the fact that people are overdosing with vitamins and they think that they're safe, especially the synthetic forms. The amounts of vitamins that people are taking every day is actually doing them harm. And what's really cool, I should say this with a caveat, because one of the tribe members from ATPR Tribe who sent me a little link to an article recently talking about vitamins and the overuse of vitamins in Australia. And they're talking about how a panel of experts have effectively come out and said that vitamins are at best a waste of money and may be doing you harm. And the article goes through and talks about how a lot of the vitamins out there, people are just popping them down. They're not seeing any real benefit. And they go on to say, and, you know, potentially they could be doing harm because the body obviously has to, you know, remove them, you know, and that they can backlog, which is great because that's what we said. The nice thing in the study, and this is something I was in the news article, the thing that I was really surprised about is that they actually said, and they got a little bit wrong and a little bit right. They said, if your diet is adequate, then you don't need them. Well, we know that that's not true because of, obviously, the degradation of the nutrients in our soil. And we've got charts on our handbrakes to health. We saw, Matt, you put up all the charts showing the reduction specifically in minerals, but vitamins as well, too, processing, green harvesting, and we go on. But they also said that natural vitamins were far more effective. So it was really nice to see a balanced review there. But what they probably didn't understand is obviously with ADP science, because of the multi-food, we actually have got those with all of the bioflavonoids and all the rest of it. It bugs me because they don't specify synthetic multivitamins. And what even bugs me more is when they say compared to a balanced diet, they're actually talking about foods fortified with synthetic bloody vitamins. So they go through and say, oh, what it shows here is people that take foods fortified with these vitamins have got the same side effects as the people that take in the synthetic vitamins. vitamins from a capsule and so they they totally wipe out those group of side effects associated with folic acids and the b3s that they're fortifying the foods with um 10 years ago man i was watching sunrise antioxidant things they always they always do beta carotene and dialfatocopherol in mega dose and that's another common fault because in australia we have to use those forms if you want to make an austell listed product and in most other countries they just typically use those because they're cheap and easy and nasty but that is another common thing that we see people mega dosing antioxidants and what you've got to understand is if you overdose an antioxidant it becomes a pro-oxidant so it's vitamin c um iv vitamin c is one of the other ones that's most commonly overdosed and then vitamin a as beta carotene vitamin e as dl photocopherol when we have the natural variances with all of their like you're saying in the multi-food we'd have very small amounts of these vitamins compared to what you might get in the synthetic because the rest of the product is made up of all the cofactors the bioflavonins and all the different forms you know so 10 years ago i saw this and it really pissed me off at the time there was this expert that came on i think she was a um a dietician and she came in and she was talking specifically about iron for women and how important it was and and and she goes and of course you don't want to be supplementing with iron you know supplements because they can make you constipated but i've got a bread here that I've fortified with iron it's like and everyone like oh yeah no because it food yeah but you just altered it by putting in the supplement whether you getting it from a bloody capsule or whether you just fortifying it in bread what the freaking difference I tell you the difference The difference is the phytates in the bread block the absorption of iron. Yes. So you're better off with a bloody supplement. And the supplement they use is known as FIFOL. Yeah, that's why it won't bind you up. Yeah. Because it's not working at all. Exactly. Oh my God. Well, FIFOL is an iron sulfate form, which is completely inorganic. You wouldn't recommend that to your dog. It's terrible. and they just put that chemical in the bread. And it's just a train wreck. It's just wrong, wrong. But see, this is what annoys me when you've got these so-called talking head professionals on television, dietitians and nutritionists. Now, there are some great ones out there, but these ones all seem to line up and go, supplements are bad and what I'm going to tell you is good. Follow the food pyramid. Take this fortified bread and fortified baby food and effectively, it's just horrendous. They don't get a level of supplementation. When you talk about the ferrous sulfate and the constipation, and that's the exact pharmaceutical that doctors give people when they have low iron, and it doesn't do anything but make you constipated. It does not get your levels up. So when you try to talk to doctors about this and say, hey, my client's taking this, it's not working, I'd like to give them some ferrous bisglycinate or something that's actually going to absorb, they have no idea what you're talking about. No, they go into their computer and go, it's not on my list of my things, so that doesn't exist. So you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't, especially if you're dealing with a doctor that doesn't know anything about vitamins and minerals. And we just had three, I did probably the dumbest thing I've ever done. I had three, three day seminars in three weeks. I was home two days out of a month and it was just completely wrecked me. And I had a number of nutritionists and naturopaths in my, my courses. And we're talking about different vitamins and, and, and we're talking about like biochemistry and things, and it was just right over their head. And I'm looking at them going, Oh my God, you're writing people diets and like, I'm a college dropout. Like I taught all this stuff to myself and you have a dietetics degree and you don't even know the biochemistry of energy production or any of that. So you start talking to them about, about vitamins. I'm like, you guys got to stop telling people what vitamins to take because you don't know which forms to take. You don't know the right amounts. Then you, you know how it is with naturopaths in Australia. They put people on 500 pills a day and then they don't calculate out that there's oh there's b3 and this this this and this and now they're taking shit tons of b3 or shit tons of something else because they're not adding all the 10 products together they're giving them and figuring out that they're way overdoing it on a lot of the different supplements yeah exactly and now there's this weird trend of putting things like b3 into pre-workouts just to give that nice and rush that rush of blood there's so many other and the frustrating thing especially looking at something like b3 niacin nicotinamide nicotinic acid there's all these different forms of it that people are then like oh jeez i'm okay i can stack them or i got a one that doesn't create the flushing so you don't know you're over and one of the problems with overdosing in b3 is it actually is essential for processes such as methylation but the problem is it has to be methylated to be active and if you overdose on it you actually deplete your methylated such as choline and everything like that and it totally does the opposite effect and that's what we're finding when you overdose on things everything's better off in little bits um unless you're specifically trying to fix a deficiency but if you're specifically trying to fix a deficiency you only go mega doses until it's fixed yeah hey um how many people do you prescribe to um sip on branch chain amino acids all day because it tastes better than water yeah yeah no that's a super common thing when you're trying to get people to drink more water especially women they for whatever reason water's too boring to them. And so they'll just put five or 10 grams of powdered BCAAs and they'll sip on that all day. And what they're not understanding is that when you, when you influx the body with a lot of large neutral amino acids, they're going to compete with each other through the blood brain barrier. So the more leucine you take in, the more tyrosine, the more tryptophan, they're going to compete with each other. And in a lot of cases, people are inhibiting tyrosine and tryptophan from getting into the brain. So two and a half months after they've done, you know, 40, 45, 50 grams of branched-chain amino acids a day, all of a sudden they're depressed and they're apathetic. They have no motivation. It completely destroys their personality, and they get super flat. And then you sit down for a consult, and you go, okay, how long have you been taking high-dose branched-chain amino acids? And they look at you and go, how did you know? And I'm like, well, when did you lose your personality? And they go, two and a half months ago. When did you start taking high-dose BCAs? Two and a half months ago. And then they're like, holy shit. Then you give them some things that counteract that, and they feel normal again. and they're like, okay, well that was dumb. Do you want to- Wired but tired. That's the way I used to describe them. Then they come and say I'm wired but tired. Like, so they're sitting there, they can't switch it. They get no energy to do anything, but they're just running on nervous energy. It's a classic symptom of sipping on branch chains. Cause not even the tryptophan and tyrosine, which are the precursors to the brain chemistry but we know 80 of the serotonin is made in the gut It competing with that directly Absolutely For absorption through the blood barrier It actually a curse as well because the branched amino acids are actually formulated to take usually during or before a workout because it blocks serotonin, and serotonin relaxes you. And when you're wanting to work out, you don't want to be relaxed per se. You want to be, hey, you know, so that's when you take it. But people know that, oh, yeah, that's right. It also upregulates mammalian target of raptomycin complex 1, which means I can grow. so this great idea maybe one person in a thousand Steve yeah remember that bloke that time he said that yeah that's right so they're drinking this stuff going oh yeah it's going to make me pep me up and make me huge it's going to stop my muscle tissue from breaking down while I'm working out and it's going to help me to recover that's what most people say correct how does it do the muscle sparing effect your body uses it as fuel instead of your muscle so excellent so in a sense is there a place for mega doses of branch chains if you want to get massive? Like if you want to get big, would you use it? Or would you still focus on more protein? I would focus on more whole proteins. You're not throwing amino acids out of balance. And what people don't seem to understand, if you look at one gram of a nutrient, that's a lot. So when you start taking 45,000 milligrams of something, when you say it like that, then you're like, shit, that's a lot. And people don't think about that. If you're eating 300 grams of whole protein, it's nice and balanced. The minute you start throwing in a lot of single nutrients or two or three different nutrients, then it throws everything off. So taking five or ten grams of branched chains is not that big of a deal around your workout. But then when you're doing that all day, not to mention if you're stimulating mTOR all day, everything's anabolic. So if you want to get insulin resistant and inflamed, and if you want, fat gets anabolic. So you start ramping up mTOR, guess what? And you have girls that want to lose body fat, but they're drinking BSAs all day, and they can't figure out why they're dieting, but they can't lose fat. Yeah, because in those windows between meals when they'd be sipping on waters and as we deplete the whole purpose of the training for fat loss and that's like depleting the glycogen and getting that metabolism cranking, if they're then putting in an alternative source of fuel to their own body fat to be running as a muscle sparing, you know, because they don't want to get catabolic, I'm going to maintain that muscle. So that's what they're thinking, huh? They're thinking if I sip on this all day, I'm going to keep burning fat and preserve my muscle. But the reality is the body will use the branched chain amino acids as a source of fuel instead of tapping into your stored body fat that's in subcutaneous stores and that sort of stuff. That's the reality, huh? That's the reality. And then if you look at the converse side of guys trying to gain weight, when you go into, say, the old traditional bulking, you start bulking and you have all the best intentions, right? In the first three or four months, you're doing really well, you're eating all whole foods, and you stop gaining weight. And you're like, I just can't eat 5,000 or 6,000 calories in whole foods. So they start eating more junk, and then they start increasing that insulin resistance. The same thing happens if you're mega-dosing essential amino acids or branched-chain amino acids all day. Once you start tuning those insulin receptors down, you can't get sugar into the muscles, and then you start actually losing muscle, which is, if you look at diabetics, diabetics are insulin-resistant, metabolically resistant. What's the first thing that happens? Do they get fat first? No, they lose muscle first, then they get fat. And that's what they're basically doing to themselves. So you get a guy who's bulking, bulking, bulking. He's taking all these essential amino acids, all the branched-chain amino acids over time. they're going to systematically make themselves insulin resistant. So they're actually, they're getting bulk, but they're not getting the bulk they want. Then they wake up one day and they look at themselves in the mirror and they go, I look like a sloppy fat shit. Like how did this happen? Well, you've been eating Mac as an eating branch chains. Yeah. Right. So you, then they start, they go all the, all the way on the other side and they start massively dieting. And by the end of their transformation, they've put on maybe a kilo of weight and they don't look any different. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah. And it's weird. And so just when you talk about that insulin resistance and the first thing that happens is our muscles stop. So what people don't realise is insulin resistance is actually a muscle disorder, not a fat disorder. So people go, insulin resistance is obesity related. So, well, obesity is a consequence of insulin resistance and initially it's actually resistance to insulin-like growth factor and the inability for the muscle to thrive with training and diet. And then the end result is the fat goes, well, I'll never become insulin resistant, so send it over here. and this is the thing I like as well too from a very lay point of view is that everywhere we look and we talk about it all the time nature knows best right there's summer and winter and obviously the seasons there's night and day it's like people are trying to outsmart nature they don't want the waves you know in terms of feast and famine night time, day time, that sort of stuff they just want a constant wave the whole time which is a tidal wave which is an absolute wreck You need those sets of waves. You need the cycles. And once you start to tap into that, optimizing health, whether it be weight loss or muscle gain and all the rest of it, is really about optimizing the cycles optimizing the damage then optimizing the repair optimizing the growth hormone all those sorts of things And once you can really start to understand that with both your training and your nutrition and your supplementation then you really going to start powering ahead And I've seen it since I opened my supplement store in 2002, is that people just constantly want to, and Matt says it really well, just constantly want to put the foot flat down to the floor on the accelerator without removing handbrakes. Well, a couple of things. You're going to burn out your engines, you're going to stuff your brakes, and when you do need to stop, you can't. And this is the whole thing about balance. And this is the intelligence that, again, people like yourself and Matt are starting to give this holistic whole view of how to train, eat, and supplement, which is we need more of it. You get a lot of people that get caught in these endless cycles of dysfunction, and they do it to themselves. So we've got a bikini competitor, and she starts taking branching amino acids all day because her coach said to drink three liters of water, but she hates water, so she drinks this. Now she's becoming insulin resistant. Now blood sugar is rising because insulin can't keep the alpha cells from secreting glucagon, and then you've got an influx of sugar, and now that insulin resistance, what's going to happen to you? You become hyperinsulinemic. Sex hormone bonding globulin is going to go down. Now estradiol is going to go up. Now you're estrogen dominant. Now you've got increased thyroid bonding globulin. Now your metabolic rate goes down, and you cannot figure out why. Metabolic crash. You're eating like 800 calories and you have no idea why you're not losing weight. Well, 800 calories is now your normal maintenance because you've crashed your metabolism so hard because of taking stupid shit with vitamins. Can I actually make the story a little bit worse than that actually? Yeah, bring it on. Because a lot of branching mastids are artificially sweetened, aren't they? Yeah. I did a paper the week, I recorded it a couple of days ago. We talked about a paper from Nature 2014 where they took the artificial sweeteners. you give it to animal studies and humans, and it changes the gut microbiome, which independently, without the branch amino acids, causes insulin resistance on its own. And they gave, you know, they've given rats, for example, changed their microbiome, and they've changed it back by giving them an antibiotic, a polyabsorbent like vancomycin. And that kills the microbes in the gut, and their insulin resistance goes back to normal after, you know, an ingestion of sweeteners. So that's really interesting. that the sweetness and the branch stains cause insulin resistance. There's a really important point you've got to add on to that, though, for the Facebook haters. Oh, what? Because, remember in that study, but remember in the study, okay, so you know on Facebook, I've seen it in the forums, you mention sweetener and the whole world goes mad. Like you just said, I hate your mum. And these people go, like, man. I will defend my other people from sweetener to the death. Yeah, I know, I know. It's science. And that's the one thing that people go nutso over. And I guess I just really want everyone to know, good on you you're all actually correct because what this study shows some humans when they had the sweeteners with their particular microbiome did not get insulin resistance so when they had sweeteners part of their comprep and in their body they did not get these weird insulin effects some other people did yeah so when you see someone on facebook and that or on a forum or whatever saying i personally feel bad you know i get a bad reaction on sweeteners it has an insulin effect and my customers and my clients, I tell them not to use artificial sweeteners because I suspect there's a problem. They're right. If you're one of those people that goes on and says, oh, I can have sweeteners all the time and look at me, I'm shredded and I'm awesome and all my customers have it too because they don't like water and they're right as well. But just got to understand that some people react, some people don't. The crazy thing is people are different and their microbiomes are even more different. So just accept the fact that there's differences out there. Don't go hating on people because your body responds differently to their body. It's like, okay, two people smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. One lives to 105, the other one dies at 30 of cancer. You know, I mean, again, you say all things are equal, but you can tell some people's resilience, some people's makeup, their microbiome, which we're learning a lot about now, is as different as a fingerprint. Some people have got an incredibly hard constitution. Other people have got a weak one. So therefore, some of those things that people put in, I don't like artificial sweetness for a whole host of reasons, not just the way that it affects the microbiome for other things that it can do. And some are worse than others, which we did a podcast on. And some of them are actually cool. Non-nutritive sweeteners can be actually quite beneficial, like erythritol. It's actually got some great benefits for the gut. But you're right. We're all individuals. And again, so long as you can work things out. Sometimes you can't paint everyone with the same brush. But there are standards, I guess, that you can look at and work out. Is that affecting me? And then you can rule it in or rule it out. Exactly. And foods are different and people are different. You know, I drive up here with Mick from time to time, Mick Daly, who's Superman. Let's call him Superman. Mr. Southport. Yeah, he is too. And seven times Mr. Australia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But forget that. Mr. Southport. And, you know, his eating is questionable. Okay.

let's face it, and he still looks great. So he can have this beautiful resistance against bad food. And yet if someone else had that, that'd be huge. And this is a frustration, I think, a lot of time when people are doing the right thing. They're eating well, they're training well and all the rest of it, but yet they're not seeing the results of somebody who's putting in half the effort with half the interest in diet. And then they assume they're lying. That's right. You're not getting the results that I expect. You liar. You're cheating. You're stealing bickies. Yes. That sort of thing. Life's not fair. yeah you said it was supposed to be it's not supposed to be you know if you didn't pick the right parents then you're you're screwed you know so but the nice thing is you can always you can always take control over your own health that's the nice thing about i mean you don't have control of your genetics but you have control of the epigenetics to a certain point you can control the environment and a lot of people they don't control the environment enough and they think that after three weeks of dieting they should be seeing something but it's like you know it could take you it could take you a year to get better and a lot of the people i see are the physique athletes that mess themselves up doing really dumb shit. And I get girls coming to me that are training 21 hours a week. They're, they're eating like seven to 900 calories a day. Then they end up getting injured. They put on 20 kilos in a couple of months and they, they're like, they come to me and I say, listen, it's going to take at least probably 90 to 120 days just to get you feeling better. And you've got about a 12 to 18 month recovery. And they're like, well, I did it in 12 weeks before. And I go, yeah. And that's why you're in the position you're in now. somebody can screw you up in 12 weeks it may take me 12 months to get you even even halfway there one of the things that we're really passionate about and tony and matt have been working and steve actually have been working along this is that we're getting a lot more into theranostics providing people with the tools where they can actually measure and look at their their gut matt what else are we doing we're doing everything because we can pretty much we don't do most of the stuff but what the big problem that we're finding is that people go to their doctor or their specialist or naturopaths and want to take control of their health and their health's held ransom for consult fees and all that sort of stuff saying that you know or now pay a consult fee and then refuse to do the test that they went there for because they got their own agenda that's the thing that really upsets me when they specifically ask for something and the doctor says no you don't need that so what we've done is we're going to make it available for people to get their testing done and get their own results so they can turn up to your place for their first appointment with all of their results done everything ready to go and then turn up and you can actually assess these things and go, right, we've got something to work with. Fantastic. That makes it easy. And then they can go to the doctors. They can have their own results. They can do their own research. We provide a little bit of information, not interpret results, but we let people know what they're reading, what a high reading, a medium, and a low reading means. But they can then take that to their healthcare professional and have the, like we're saying, take control of their own health. Because we're really sick of people getting their health held for ransom. Well, the big thing is you've got to find whatever, whether it's a doctor. Like I've got a great doctor, Dr. Bradley up at Springwood there. Give him a plug, dear. You'll get a free concert of this. But what it comes down to is that I've got a great chiro, got a great, you know, we don't need them, you know what I mean? But no, no, I'm not giving them any more place. But what it means though is I've sought out, after years and years, I've gone to places where I know I can get the results. If I need a massage, I know where to go. If I need, you know, something to do with osteobones or what have you, I've got somewhere to go. I need a doctor. I've got and I've sought these people out of a period of time so they are professionals people that I respect people that I know whose belief systems are in line with mine in whatever I'm going to see them for what and what amazes me is how many times people stick with professionals just because oh that's my local GP down the road or you know that's my local personal trainer I had a friend of mine using a personal trainer who's just a dick like seriously this guy was such an asshole and he was telling um one of one of my friends to keep doing this and keep pushing through a change go find somebody who actually makes sense to you don't just stay with someone out of habit you know go find a professional because when you're doing stuff like the theranostics which is the ability for you to be able to you know look at your microbiome get the testing get the results yeah we give broad information but not diet you need to then take that to somebody who you can trust and sit down and go okay what's my plan of attack what's my game plan from here somebody who you know knows what they're doing no you want to take and try your own health otherwise you do whatever someone else says that's what drives me crazy about australia it's so difficult to get labs here even if you want to pay out of pocket it's it's like why does the doctor care who's who's the boss the the customer or the doctor like the dog i'm hiring you to help me get my health in order these are the tests i feel like i need i'm willing to pay out of pocket just take the profit and shut up there's some doctors so that's what we're setting up so you can do well and if you find those doctors love them kiss them you know but they're Like anything, anything that's decent, good personal trainers, good nutritionists, good doctors, they're out there, but they're bloody hard to find. And when you do, they're hard to get into. That's always a good sign too. And a lot of the doctors, it's word of mouth, right? So you've got to find the doctor who doesn't really advertise it. He prescribes the right pharmaceuticals like T3 instead of T4 and that type of thing And you know they so scared to put their name out there because they don want the government to audit them and come down on them really hard and then they lose their license. Exactly, and that's what happens. You can't use medical devices to fix body composition to prevent disease. You've got to wait until they're sick and then prescribe something for the disease. Let me tell you something really funny. Only bodybuilders know how to use the pharmaceuticals to get a body shape. You know what I mean? Probably true. I don't know why the doctors don't learn from the bodybuilders, use their techniques to fix their body, prevent obesity, heart disease, diabetes. Anyway. So Gail, that I went to see her at, what's that bio? He's going to get a free bio resonance. Gail bio resonance over in Asheville. Clayfield, actually. Oh, sorry. She's lovely. But she said to me, because I said, this is a great technology, how are you going? She's pretty much fully booked out all the time. I said, you don't advertise? She goes, no, I actually got in trouble. So this machine has been authorized by the TGA to talk about its effects on asthma. Proven, excellent, done really well. And apparently in Germany as well too and other places. This is standard. You go to the doctors and these places are all over the place. In Australia it's very hard to find them. She got in trouble with the ACCC for making claims that the TGA had said that she was allowed to make. So she had to stop all of that and effectively can't advertise. It just... Two government bureaucrats. Another classic one. Let me tell you another cool ACCC TGA story. There's a lady that did heat scan. What's that? I can't remember. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. She did, instead, as an alternative to mammograms, she had a proven technology that would do heat scanning and look for hot spots and almost exactly the same technology as a mammogram, just using thermal imaging and that sort of stuff. And it was approved by TGA as an alternative to mammograms for diagnosing breast cancers without the trauma. And without the trauma, the radiation, and all that sort of stuff that can contribute to cancer. But ACCC shut her down and said, you can't do this. And listen, this is the best bit in the letter that she's got. I've got to get this lady's letter. It's so cool. ACCC, sorry, what does ACCC stand for? Australian something. Consumer. So it's something to do with competition, hey? Yeah. She got in trouble by ACCC. She was not allowed to go into competition to mammogram. So ACCC said, you've got to shut down your business. it is illegal for you to go in competition to mammogram. You're not allowed to be there competition. Well, what's interesting with mammograms, obviously, and this is controversial, I don't know a great deal about it, but Tony's a huge fan of this other technology. I don't know what it's called. She's a huge fan of mammograms. No, no, no, she hates mammograms. From a point of view, and this is a personal thing, from a point of view that she obviously doesn't want to have x-rays done, which obviously there's a lot of controversy around having x-rays. A lot of people are out there suggesting, and again, I don't have a dog in this fight. I haven't looked into it, Steve. I don't know if you have. You don't even have boobs. But no. Well, not yet. It looks like you're holding one right now. Why are you doing that? Because I'm holding my boob. Do you want me to stretch it out and then we'll run over it and resemble a mammogram? Yeah, because they believe that the x-rays may actually be potentially causating. You know, causing. Well, no. It's bad English, but you know what I'm saying. It might actually be causating. It could be causating it. But the funny thing is, it's because the common causative factors are... There you go. There you go. are things like radiation, x-rays and trauma. So squashing something and radiating it, typically if there's something weird going on, they might not like that and get angry and grow. And I'm certainly not saying for anyone listening out there not to do it. You need to because, I mean, obviously that's really important. But if there's alternatives that have been shown to be safe, effective at doing it, it just annoys me that, again, I'd like to know more about this actually. Steve, maybe we can do an update on this next time. Yeah, we can do a radiation podcast. because it is an ionising radiation. Well, I just had a whole heap of X-rays done. And you know what? There's a time and a place. There wasn't a mammogram. It was from a shoulder. Shut up. You can't talk to your cross-dresser. Yeah, it's fine. Well, you know, there is a risk. And I think they acknowledge there is a risk. They say the risk is small. But how big is small? You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't know. It depends. Size dependent, isn't it? Size, you know, it's like... 5%, 10%? What's statistically significant? I mean, if you're an E versus an A. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Well, even E's. Steve wears a sports bra when he runs. Did you know that? A sports bra. Stop knocking myself out. I think I did say sports bra. But I meant to say sports bra. It doesn't want the nipple chafing. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's bad. I actually run topless, you know, when I run. Oh, you don't want those guys, are you? Oh, my gosh. What is it called? Topless when you're a bloke? Don't say I don't wear a shirt. When you go for a run, do you run without your shirt on? Yes. Oh, my opinion of you has just gone down. Why? It's nipple rash. And his Speedo's in Crocs. Yeah, yeah. It's nipple rash? Yeah, nipple rash. From running. I don't believe. Get your training bra on He wears a training bra in winter don you No look in winter I wear a cotton shirt I do I wuss out You wuss out No you become normal You're not like, oh, look at that guy without his shirt on. Because I've seen him with his shirt on. It's like he's smuggling peas. It's like he's running down the road. If I was as lean as Steve is right now, yes, I would run with my shirt on. Absolutely. But at 49, get a class up out there. I'd put on some footy shorts and I'd look like Baywatch. Yeah, like Steve. Like Pamela Anderson, mate. He gets out his cotton shirt. He looks like he's smuggling peas with his little nipple rash running down the street. Put this sports bra back on. You could cut glass with those things, Steve. Absolutely. Especially in winter. Oh, it's nice and cold out there, I'll tell you. They're like little pig's tails, those things. Yeah, it's terrible. They do unravel. Yeah. That's weird. Do you know what you need, Steve? You need some lube on your nipples. Lube? I was going to use some duct tape. Put your shirt on, but put some, well, yeah, go for tape. Or lube. Prototype 8. Prototype 8. That'll make it worse. That'll make it bigger. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Pump it out, yeah. Yeah, that's a bit weird. It's pretty bad. I mean, it's not a good look, a middle-aged man running out with a shirt on. I agree. Not when his nipples look like pig's tails. Especially, what about the windburn, Steve? The windburn, yeah. No, they flap. The nipples are just like tassels. When he runs, if he runs a certain way, they actually start to flip and spin. No, they are tassels. I've seen them running. You know what's worse about it? The fact that you choose to wear high heels. Who can run on high heels, Steve? It's good for your calf muscles. You know, you'd say that, wouldn't you? Yes, absolutely. Did you hear that? It's good for your calf. Did it. I'm doing it. You're doing it. I'm buttering up the place. I'm Oscar Pretorius here with the calves. Nothing from the knee down. Actually, you know what? He can't beach run because he gets stuck in the sand. I thought I was the worst. I thought Jeff's calves were the worst until I saw Brian's calves. Oh, yeah. How did you get to see them? He usually covers them really well. No, no. He had a pair of shorts on. Anyway, I'm not alone. You know what? our small our small calf people are going to unite and we're going to take over the world we're just going to go down to the beach and go come and get us and you're going to I'm stuck stuck in the sand you guys should start a support group for guys with no calves yeah you know what there's lots of us out there so yeah that's cool we'll start some donkey raises and get them bigger you know is that what they're called what are they called donkey calf raises donkey calf raises whatever they're called that's what I used to call them yeah no the only time that people confuse me with a donkey is when they're looking at me from the front Right, okay. Why the long face, Geoff? He always calls me that. Donkey or jackass? Hey! What do you call your donkey? He always calls me that. Okay, guys, we're running out of time again. We've got to get some FAQs. Steve-O, take it away. Well, time now for questions. What a great podcast. Luke, what a legend. Yeah, he's a good bloke. He's good value, isn't he? Wow, that's great. Well, here's a question from Lucy. And Lucy asks, hi, Jeff, Matt. And so where's Jeff, by the way? Where did he go? To Carrefour. After we obsessed him probably doing some Carrefour. Okay, cool. Well, Lucy says hi to us three, and there's two of us. Just before I get into it, Brooker and Elsa are shit. Oh, hang on. Awesome. Sorry, sorry. I misread that word. Sorry. Are they listening? They're listening. No, they don't. No. I've been binge listening to your podcast over the last couple of weeks, and you've reinvigorated me in the search for the natural solutions to some aspects of my life that I've learned to accept, live with over time. My stats. I'm a 42-year-old, weighs 52 kilos, exercise five to six times per week, strength, resistance, and cardio, and have a good diet. Whole foods, balanced fats, proteins, and carbs. no fast food etc but I'm no party pooper I'd like a wine or two I started struggling with migraines as a child diagnosed with pediatric stomach migraines at 11 and put on steroid medication 6 to 12 months and have the school photos to prove it yes I've had a doctor dispute this diagnosis recently so I don't know what to make of that the reason why she's saying this she probably got on weight because it was probably a steroid I've suffered with headaches and migraine since puberty and continue to do so. Sometimes they seem to be hormonal. Others I can find a cause. I can't find a cause to get this. I was put on the pill at 15 for severe menstrual pain and subsequently diagnosed and underwent surgery at 17 for endometriosis. Wow. After only three years menstruation, I continued on the pill to manage the severity of my symptoms. Continued to suffer pain through this time until I had two children in my early mid-30s. I've not returned to taking the pills since. After my second child turned one, she is now seven, I returned to work and exercised pretty hard for a period of time and felt in a bit of a heap. I lost energy in my libido My blood tests by my GP showed very very low testosterone So she referred me to a naturopath Well I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue and prescribed a vitamin of subs, can't recall what they are specifically. The naturopath also took a hand mineral sample and found high levels of hard metals, copper, amalgam, and others. Amalgam, I guess she means mercury, I think. And so we put on a high quality inline water filter into our kitchen conveniently we were in the process of renovating that's good i took these steps for some time reduced my exercise and felt a bit better but not amazing at that time my periods were every 24 days or so it normalized the 26 to 29 day average over the past few months my cycle has shifted 34 to 36 days i experienced period pain and sometimes spotting on the 27th day now but then it doesn't appear until 36 days. This month I've had the pain on and off and nearly two weeks of bloating but no spotting and I'm up to day 36 with no arrival. My GP has given me a referral to get an ultrasound which I'm yet to do as last month was quote normal meaning it was timely but certainly not without pain. I do suffer with a short temper premenstrual. I can feel very stressed and pent up at times, I'm not sure I'm not nice to be around. That was her words. I feel in the cold. My feet are always cold and I get under the doona even in summer. But then even when it's hot, not hot, I will often find myself dripping in sweat in the middle of the night. Thought I don't feel hot at all. It infuriates my husband. Okay. My most recent body composition scan had my body fat at 22.2%. Visceral fat scored a three. I don't know what level that is really. I have what I think are subcutaneous fat deposits. Yes, they're even cold when the rest of me is hot from working out. A small patch just below my belly button, my button hips, waist, where your knickers dig in. Yeah, my knickers dig in there too, actually. I've avoided environmental estrogen influences such as, what was that? Phthalates. Phthalates, yep, and BPA as much as I can control in the last 10 years. I really can't access organic produce cost and availability though we grow some of our own veg and I try to buy it from the local market where I can so I hope it's fresh and local as possible good on you oh some additional symptoms in my mid-20s I experienced a very stressful time and was diagnosed with depression I was on antidepressants for a couple of years but it's been about 15 years then and I suffered no postnatal depression all good for you so after all of that my question is what subs would you recommend me taking? I plan to live a long and healthy life as possible. I want to enjoy it. If I don't have to live with migraines and period pain until menopause, then I don't want to. Thanks for reading my much longer than expected email. Also, I want to compliment you on customer service. Your online team are awesome at responding to questions. It makes a massive difference to your customers. Thanks, Lucy. Well, thank you, Lucy. Cool. This is cool, man. It's a cool one. You've seen the pattern. It's a very obvious pattern here. It's beauty. So what we're seeing here is an estrogen dominance pattern. Basically, estrogen dilates the arteries to your head. Your skull doesn't expand. Hopefully, your brain's not shrinking. So you pretty well run out of room between your skull and your brain, and that's what causes a migraine, too much blood in your head. The other thing estrogen does is it makes your blood sticky and gluggy. You get less oxygen out of your blood, which means you get more likely to have throbbing arteries going into your head. um estrogen dominance is always worse with an androgen deficiency so if you've got low testosterone because the testosterone and progesterone do the opposite to the estrogen your blood tests say you got low testosterone i'm picking up that you got low progesterone because when you said spotting mid-cycle and that sort of stuff with the estrogen dominance the fact that your cycle's going longer still means that your body the problem is not just androgen deficiency your problem is estrogen excess um because you don't have your period until your body can clear that estrogen away. Otherwise, your period goes longer. If you were to have full androgen deficiency, then you'd be getting periods every two weeks sort of thing instead of every 36 days, every 14 days. So what we're seeing here is too much estrogen. When you've got a high estrogen, it inhibits your thyroid. Estrogen increases cortisol. That creates the depression aspects. Estrogen exaggerates and amplifies any thought process. So that's why coming in towards the end of your menstrual cycle, you're only supposed to have two weeks estrogen and then two weeks androgens, you've got full four weeks and more, five, six weeks of estrogen affecting your brain, making it harder to switch off and exaggerating your thought processes. If I was to do any more testing, I'd probably look for the motherfucker gene, the MTHFR gene, polymorphin.

So the MTHFR gene, poor Lucy would be thinking it's a motherfucker if she's got it, because it explains the estrogen dominance, the endometriosis. It's also involved in the detoxification of catecholamines. It's also heavily involved in the elimination of vasoactive amines. If you can't actually eliminate vasoactive amines, then you're going to have, there's a lot of foods that you might eat, especially aged and preserved things, things that taste good typically. but you know like the parmesan cheeses all those sort of wines chocolate so wine definitely full of vasoactive amines chocolates nuts and seeds a lot of those sort of preserved meats weird shit like avocados herring pickled herring vegemites a lot of those sort of things have got these compounds in it called vasoactive amines and they just make the arteries in your head throb and can create migraines anyway classic ones so the stomach migraine is a vasoactive amine issue stomach migraines are caused by vasoactive amines going through the first pass metabolism and making the portal vein throb. Yes. And they called them stomach migraines in the past. Now I don't know what they call them because this doctor thinks to think that didn't exist. An interesting feature is heavy metals increase cytochrome P450 enzymes. A couple in particular is aromatase and 5-alpha reductase. And what does aromatase do? Well, aromatase converts testosterone to estrogen. So she would have low testosterone. So low testosterone, high estrogen. The other thing is that we could explain the low testosterone levels in the blood is the other ones, 5-alpha reductase, taking testosterone to dihydro. And dihydrotestosterone makes you angry and irritable, but it doesn't show up on, or they don't test for it in blood because it's typically found in cells. So she's got a high copper, which means she's probably got a low zinc, and zinc is the one that regulates. Exactly. And so what happens, so many cadmiums and that sort of stuff, and even mercury, what happens? You get a buildup of these heavy metals. Your main chelator of those is the zinc and selenium. and both the zinc and selenium are not only involved in the enzymes. If you don't have zinc and selenium, 5-alpha reductase runs too fast, aromatase can't be controlled, but also you actually aren't capable of using the diiodinase that activate the thyroid hormone. Yes. So this big link is forming. The end result is you've got too much bloody estrogen. Yes. And if we clear away some of that estrogen, you're going to feel better. Yes. So before we do the MTHFR gene polymorphism test and look for things like homocysteine accumulation and all that sort of rubbish, we get straight into the multi-food because it doesn't change the treatment. And multi-food's the answer anyway. All right now. So we've got multi-food. You definitely need multi-food, three capsules daily, just to make sure your body's capable of processing these hormones. What I want to do is also throw in the Alpha Prime. Prime. She's a prime candidate. For prime. Absolutely. Look at that. Must-have segue. He's everywhere. He's everywhere. So with the prime, what happens is it takes two in the morning, two at night. It's actually going to lower the sex hormone binding globulin that's binding up all your testosterone and allow that testosterone to be more active. The reason why... I was debating, Steve. I don't know. I was going to... Originally, I wrote that we do Venus in the morning, Prime at night. Oh, yeah. Because I want to increase. But then as you kept reading, it kept getting to the point where the periods are going longer and longer. And I'm always fearful that when we use Vitex, it can actually help the periods to go longer. So I think we'll just stick with the Prime two twice daily and use the Multifood three capsules daily. And the other one's Blocky 3. Yeah, block E3. Hey, you know those cold fat bits? Yeah. That's a classic sign of estrogen. What happens in those situations is estrogen makes those fat tissue. That fat tissue, terrible blood supply, but in that fat tissue, it makes more estrogen. So we can put in a product called Block E3. It's got a compound in it called Cryzon. Cryzon will block the aromatase in that fat tissue and stop your body converting testosterone to estrogen in your fat. Absolutely. There's one other suggestion. Can I make it? No. Oh. Because we've given it too much. You sure? Well, I reckon T432 because of the zinc and selenium. You're actually really smart. And they're feeling cold all the time. Yeah, and also because there is a vicious cycle that can form, and here I am getting clever and smart because as running through your discussion, you start talking about reproductive hormones early. So my brain started that way, but down the end it's all thyroid. Now, if we flip that around, it is possible that an underactive thyroid this whole time could have manifested as estrogen dominance. Well, she hinted that she was overweight in school. Yeah, and cortisol slows down thyroid hormone activity, increases reverse T3. Huge stress at the age of 20. Yeah, so with your MTHFR gene, also do a full thyroid hormone profile with your doctor and measure reverse T3. He'll probably say it doesn't exist, so just get him to measure it anyway because the pathology companies know all about it even if the doctor doesn't, and we can help you interpret it. So good idea, Steve-O. T4-3, Jeff's not here. No, he spontaneously combusted earlier like Spinal Tap's drummer. Yeah. Each podcast he's not here, we're going to have to come up with a new Spinal Tap drummer style story about where he's disappeared. T432 plus take... T432 one capsule three times daily Multifood three with breakfast Alpha Prime two twice daily Butter Up Blocky three twice daily after shower finely tuned athlete before you know it Absolutely We not here to diagnose treat or cure add disclaimers like Jeff would normally do and then I'll just say you're going to be a finely tuned athlete before you know it. And the beautiful thing is that we recognize that you've suffered a fair bit with this, so we're glad to help you out, and thanks for writing in. Thanks for the kind words about us, except she said that to her shit. Yeah, yeah, we're in Bruco and Elsa. I'd probably, oh, they'll take all the credit because I'll send it. Here's a little note from Brooko and Elsa. Oh, this is specifically for me. Oh, you're so wonderful, Brooko and Elsa. God, that makes me sick. Absolutely. God, they are good girls, though. All right. Man, how cool. I hope this isn't anonymous. I want a name like that. Oh, it's a great name. My name's Matt. Actually, actually, look at the email address. Look at that. I won't read it out, but look at that. Isn't that a great email? It's such cool. This isn't anonymous, is it? Say his name. I'll just see if he signs off yeah oh well it's from Guy Ranger we love that name that's great you know it's you know what the worst name in business is off now Matt Legg in business I was trying not to get personal the worst name in business I think is Micro Soft I just think that's a terrible Micro Soft like I mentioned if I said you're Micro Soft yeah that is a terrible name Terrible name for the biggest company in the world. Probably not. Someone's going to fact check that. One of the biggest. We're the richest man in the world. Microsoft. I never even said it like that. Oh, I just... You might have issues to think about that. Just, you know, he was a nerd, obviously, and nothing against that. But, you know, Microsoft. Can you imagine coming up with a name like that for a company? Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah, large and hard. Yeah, that's what I would have called my computer business. Large and hard. We sell hard drives. We're large and hard. Yeah. Yeah, and they're the people that invented the floppy disk and decided to call it a floppy disk. And wasn't the floppy disk the hard one? And the soft, flappy one was not called a floppy disk? When I went to school in 1947, they were five and a quarter inch, right? They weren't centimetres, none of that crap. No one talks about quarter inches, Steve. People don't go, it's five and a quarter. It's just like, no, I mean a six inch. That's the size of them. They were floppy like that. You could twist them like that. And then they got hard and a bit smaller. So I don't know. They got hard and smaller. They got around that big and shoved them in. It should be micro hard. Yeah. Okay, micro hard, mate. Micro hard. Macro soft, micro hard. Guy Ranger. Guy Ranger. Guy Ranger. All right. Dear Jeff, Matt and Steve, what a revelation coming across your podcast. He probably doesn't think that anymore. No, he just hates us. Finding a company that is aiming to improve in the health and well-being and not worried about just looking after the bottom line. Well, you know, it's true. Since coming across your products, in brackets, I have been taking creatine monohydrate for a while, and podcast, I have been an avid listener trying to catch up, often listening to three to four podcasts a day. Holly Mackle. I apologize for the length of my mail, but any advice or insight would truly assist me so much. I have broken my question into three parts. So here's the first part. Do you want to address them in parts? Yeah, we'll see what happens. Yeah, I reckon. Shit, yeah, do point one. All right, point one. I'm 30 years old and I've always been very active. I grew up in South Africa but live in Brisbane now. I've always played sport, mainly rugby and cricket. However, over the past few years, I gave up rugby and took up running. Good on you, mate. I love it. I haven't completed about 10 standard marathons. Jeez, that all. And three ultra marathons. That's any marathon going more than 42 kilometres. About three years ago, I was diagnosed with high blood pressure. Fucking bad. and have been taking myocarditis, which is a beta blocker, a day since. I have a necessary blood test to go for a checkup every four to six weeks. My blood pressure has stabilized with my last reading being 116 over 72. That's pretty perfect. My question is, with my active lifestyle, I'm fairly clean. I stay away from white carbs, wheat, sugars, a balance of meats, greens, and fruits. Is there something I can do from a dietary point of view that I could add or remove? I enjoy two to three cups of black coffee a day with no milk or sugar. I have recently begun taking Multifood and Amp V in the mornings. Do you want to start that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because the next one's your wife. Yeah, yeah. So we'll just do this one first. So yeah, keep taking the Multifood and Amp V, of course. So when we're seeing this high blood pressure, I mean, there's quite a few things you can do. What we want to look at is there's some functional foods, but also we need to understand that most aspects of these cardiovascular disease, in particular such things as hypertension are inflammatory and oxidative stress predominantly meaning that you you're for example if your pleasure your arteries thicken up a little bit we get a bit of calcium and that sort of stuff which happens as part of stress and inflammation then you get an increased pressure because you lose that elasticity if that happens in through your kidneys then your kidneys send a message back to you your body saying that this bloke got no blood he possibly bleeding to death we put up his pressure And if it stress definitely having a couple of cups of coffee can increase it because it drives your stress nervous system and drives up that cortisol, and cortisol holds the fluid that puts up your blood pressure. Yes, that's true. If you were to switch a couple of those cups of black coffee to a particular herbal tea made on hibiscus flowers, you would notice a significant change straight up. If you did nothing else, if nothing else changed, because you're doing a lot of the good stuff. Oh, yeah. If you were to switch a couple of those cups of coffee to a big batch of hibiscus tea, the Rosella tea, because Rosella relaxes the aorta. It helps to get rid of that extra fluid that you might be holding. It doesn't interact with your medication. It also allows you to, it does a lot of good sports performance stuff. Also looks after your microbiome that's associated with these things. Very much so. I would definitely do that straight away. Yeah. I would also make sure that about 30% of your calories are coming from good quality oils. So raw nuts and seeds, essential fatty acids and that sort of stuff to make sure we've got the elasticity in the arteries, you know, immediately out of the heart that controls the top number and then typically in the kidneys that controls the bottom number to a certain degree. Also making sure you've got adequate diuretics and electrolytes, looking at things like magnesium, potassium. First thing I would do is throw in ZMST. Beauty. And I would recommend ZMST is basically a magnesium taurine supplement with a zinc and selenium to make sure those enzymes are capable capable of all working but it'll make sure you're capable of relaxing the arteries and making sure you're capable of having vasodilation and then i would basically throw in that hibiscus tea and the product that i would actually recommend that again that we can send out that'll go in his gut right yeah because you'll actually spin out if i help take the inflammation out of your gut you watch what happens to your blood pressure oh yeah it just disappears it's a good one and magnesium is a calcium channel blocker so we've got yeah it working in there that's terrific um Anything else you want to add? He's obviously exercising enough, isn't he? Yeah. No, no, no. I think that's pretty good, actually. Oh, I'll tell you one thing that would bloody work. What? And we should do this. What's that? I think we sell it. Citrulline malate. Oh, yeah, of course. See, citrulline malate is amazingly good. Citrulline malate. So citrulline malate gets absorbed. So three grams of citrulline gives you the same amount of arginine in your periphery as taking six grams of arginine, which is a very good vasodilator. Crazy shit happens when you take citrulline, though, because what happens is your body has to break down other things to make citrulline. So when you put the citrulline in, it backlogs all the glutamine and everything and maintains that in your gut wall. Also, there's a lot of research coming out of citrulline preventing gut-induced inflammation, for example, even protecting the body against sepsis. so using something like citrulline malate it's a very good state dependent vasodilator now you're a runner so you know you do not want to use a vasodilator before a marathon no otherwise you can't bloody move yeah everything gets too you know especially your lower back and your calves everything fills up but when you use a citrulline malate same as when you use like beetroot nitrates and that they have a state dependent vasodilation so they're not just going through indiscriminately dilating blood vessels if you have an area that wants more oxygen it'll tell the body to convert the citrulline to arginine that releases nitric oxide the byproduct of that reaction is citrulline yeah and that's nitrous oxide sits inside your arteries and this is important if you've got high blood pressure and that's released from the endometrium inside there and and that causes vasodilation now when you think of a hose and you think of it dilating it reduces the pressure and that's what we're after that's what i've tried to give a diagram of a something about that round i couldn't think of anything around but no not no definitely not yeah not brought out by bright Microsoft, eh, Steve-o? Absolutely not. So that's a good one. Citrulline malate, gut right, ZMST. Yeah. That's cool, man. Good one. And he's on multifood and amphi already. All right, let's talk about his wife. Well, let's talk about his wife, because my wife is also very active. Oh, active. Sorry. It says active. His name's Guy Ranger. Of course he's got a hot wife. Of course he has. My wife is also very active, but I've been diagnosed with thyroid issue takes 50 micrograms of thyroid or T4 per day. That's quite a low dose, by the way, just so you know. She battles with fatigue levels and battles to shift weight even when training hard and eating clean. She hardly drinks alcohol and also eats a balanced diet. I have her taking Mulder food now as well, but should she try Alpha Venus, Matt? Oh, yeah, maybe. The funny thing is I wouldn't go straight for Alpha Venus. No. I would actually use T432+. Because like Steve, I said, it's a very low dose of medication. So this is the frustrating thing. Thyroid granules, do they call them that? Because that's what they bloody look like, the tablets. You can't cut them in half easily. And they're 50 microgram jumps. So a lot of people that used to come through clinic they take like 50 micrograms one day or a couple of days and then they need to jack it up to 100 micrograms Most people are going 100 and 150s though So most people that I saw were on 150 micrograms So when you on a low dose like that what you got to understand for them to jack you up a little bit to get you in that thyroid window, they could only double your dose. And that might be too much. And they might have tried that in the past where you have a day where you're too fast, and then they go you slow for a few more days if you use something like t432 that enhances the conversion of t4 and thyroid hormones and improves the activity of thyroid hormones you can use a natural product like t you can keep your thyroid medication the same then you can use t432 take one capsule three times a day initially monitor your body temperature and look at your symptom picture or if you go to adbscience.com and you can we got a lot of um and you put in that little search bar thing thyroid or hypothyroid it'll show you some information list the symptoms of low thyroid the symptoms of high thyroid and also gives you a chart that you can use you measure your basal body temperature so if you take t432 in conjunction with your medication working with your doctors and pharmacists using the symptom picture and the body temperature chart you can then see how many t432 you need to add to your medication to get you in the thyroid window because if you're not in that thyroid window then you could not clear away estrogen exactly and so there's no point putting in an estrogen or you know like an estrogen progesterone modifier if your thyroid's outside the window yes so we start with the thyroid jack it up and then and so i do multi-food and t432 in this case absolutely and um just just on thyroxine uh is make sure you keep it in the fridge um because a lot of people keep it beside their bed and take it first thing in the morning it has a half-life of six days so you can take you know if the doctor asks you to take one you know 51 day and 100 the next that's not unusual but also when you get your thyroid levels checked yes they usually check monitor your tsh and they said oh once it reaches four you're within the normal range it should be below two to have optimal thyroid functioning so that's good so um all right so lastly my family has a history this is still a guy by the way last of my family history guy ranger guy ranger yeah it is lastly my family has a history of prostate cancer with my paternal grandfather having passed away about 18 years ago and recently my dad living with it. My dad was diagnosed about 8 years ago with a PSA level of over 600, should be below 10 or below 5 really, but has managed to bring it down to normal levels. Good stuff. Obviously with his history and his family I'm concerned about myself. I haven't been tested yet and intend on being tested this year, sooner rather than later. Good. Are there methods I can put in place now with regards to my diet, supplementation and medical tests to ensure I give myself the best chance of staying cancer free and before you answer that once again apologies for the long message but it's a long it's such a breath of fresh air knowing we have the likes of yourselves and ATP Science trying to better us all through natural means and products. P.S. Steve being an endurance runner should look at doing the two oceans Cape Town and Comrades. I think that's 50 miles. Yeah do it. Oh The marathon's 26th You know I chased my lions And everything In that one Oh jeez I'd love to Every time you just start Dealing tired You hear this Stick crack behind you Yeah You never really Slow down In a marathon You feel like giving up At about 30k You've had it by then You know what I'm going to do I'm going to come with you And I'm going to go On the side road And you know Everyone else has given out Like cups of water I'm going to come out Of the bushes with a lion And see how fast you go Well, that's what you need at that time of the race. Anything. Anywho. Now, let's answer this question before I forget, because this is a bloody good question. It is. For starters, before I forget, keep running and don't turn to cycling. Don't start doing triathlons if you're worried about your prostate. I know I'm not talking about the Lance Armstrong protocols. You'll get prostate for totally different reasons. But the actual process of sitting on a bike seat has been linked in with prostate. So keep running and don't sit. Ever. No. He does. so what's really important in this situation what's really funny about running and i've got some crazy odd case studies of the healthiest people i knew that were the sickest people i knew because they're constantly running next to the road and they're sucking in all those leads and mercuries and cadmiums and cadmium in particular massive link prostate yeah um and so what you need to do is make sure you always got heaps of zinc and selenium in your system to chelate these heavy metals before they get in and screw around your systems you also need good antioxidants because exposure to these compounds stimulate your cytochrome P450s because they're toxins. Those cytochrome P450s includes fofo reductase and aromatase which we mentioned earlier that will convert your testosterone to estrogen and dihydro and it's those things that cause prostate problems not testosterone which is why teenagers don't get it. So what you need heaps of zinc and selenium. Now this is what I used to say in my clinics. Any bloke used to come into my naturopath clinic around the 40s I would start doing this

Three to four Brazil nuts every day. Snacking on handfuls of pumpkin seeds, any chance you get. So pumpkin seeds, Brazil nuts will give you the zinc and selenium you need. And then what I used to tell them to do is get a tablespoon of organic tomato paste and mix it with about a teaspoon of turmeric and add that to a little bit of water and smack that every day. Or put that into something or try to cook with it. If you don't cook with it, then you've got to drink it. That's great. So the three to four Brazil nuts, the pumpkin seeds, the tomato paste and the turmeric. So the tomato paste contains a compound called lycopene. And in men, prostate is pretty much a lycopene reservoir. So the more lycopene you have, that's the red part in tomatoes and watermelons and that. It soaks up into the prostate and a very powerful antioxidant. In women, it accumulates in the breast tissue and can prevent... What the hell are you doing? I was just giving... because people don't know where breasts are. So when I mentioned prostate and your hand disappeared off the top of the desk, what the hell were you doing? I was showing him the prostate, you know. I was going to stand up and do it. But anyway so man it so much more fun when Jeff not part of the FAQs We give away a heap of shit and we carry on like pork chops Because you seen how pork chops carry on We giving away our naturopathic licenses I think Oh, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so yeah, do that. Tomato paste, turmeric, zinc and selenium. Otherwise, you can do things like multi-food or the ZMST for the zinc, selenium. And we don't have anything like lycopene, but anything red and colourful, we'll eat a lot of those. And quarter X for the turmeric. Keep off dairy food. Just do that. multi-food yep everyone needs to be on multi-food of course they do that's a new t-shirt keep off dairy the IGF-1 in dairy is very pro-cancer prostate yeah huge study in 2015 showing that so that was really cool yeah that was a good one thanks Guy Ranger love your name have we got time for one more no no no we haven't no alright well yeah because that was three I guess yeah so we'll do it next time yeah alright well thanks for having us and we'll see you next time thanks for listening And remember, question everything. Well, except what we say.