A limitless supply of things you can try. (Well, we're working hard to make it limitless)

The Biggest Lie of the Food Industry Calories In:Calories Out

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 08:31:14 GMT

The Food Industry Thinks You Are Stupid.

I had an interesting conversation at a dinner party last night. One of the women at the table was making a huge fuss over counting calories and, when she was challenged on it, she insisted, “Everyone knows it’s calories in, calories out”.

“Bullshit”, I thought out loud. (Oops)

The food industry has convinced the population that a calorie is a calorie; calories in, calories out. They say it's about "energy balance" therefore it's about two behaviours; gluttony and sloth.

And, because, as they tell us, it's about two behaviours; if you're fat it's your fault.

The food marketing guys insist that “(almost) any calorie can be part of a balanced diet so don't pick on our calories. Go pick on somebody else’s calories”.

All of that comes from this notion that calories are fungible; that it doesn't matter what you eat, it matters how much you eat. That's basically what they say, that it's personal responsibility. So what they've done in one fell swoop, with one concept, is put the onus on the victim and assuaged their own culpability.

It works for them.

The question is, is it true? Is a calorie just a calorie?

The answer is, we have a lot of data to show that this is biggest lie in the history of medicine. It is so wrong. It was wrong from the day it was ill-conceived and it will be wrong ‘til the day we finally get the message out. The challenge is that the food industry won't give it up easily because it is their protection. It is their gravy train. They have convinced us all that it's true.

But it is not true.

So, how did I explain it to our calorie counting dinner companion? I noticed that before dinner she had been hitting the bowl of almonds pretty hard. She didn’t think anyone had noticed. I figured she obviously liked almonds so it was a good example to use and I let her know that her whole calorie counting thing was for show. Almonds are relatively high density in terms of calories. If you have a typical handful of almonds you’re eating about 160 calories.

So, I asked her, “Assuming you ate a handful of almonds, how many of those calories do think you absorbed?”

The answer is that she absorbed around 130. She ate 160 calories and absorbed 130. The fibre in the almonds made sure of that.

There are two kinds of fibre; soluble and insoluble. Soluble fibre is like pectin and inulin; hydrogels. Insoluble fibre is cellulose - the stringy stuff like in celery.

Almonds have both.

The stringy stuff sets up a latticework on the inside of the duodenum like a fish net. The soluble fibre are globular so they plug the holes in the fishnet. Together they form an impenetrable barrier. You can actually see it on electron microscopy - a whiteish, secondary barrier that inhibits the absorption of simple sugars; glucose, fructose, sucrose - simple starches in the duodenum. This ensures they do not go via the portal vein to reach the liver and subsequently overwhelm the liver. The liver stays healthy . You are protecting the liver with the fibre in the almonds.

The liver doesn't get the excess. If it did it would turn the excess into fat through a process called novo lipogenesis (new fat making) which is what fructose does. And, you don't generate an insulin response because you didn't generate a glucose response. This all has to do with the concept of glycaemic load to keep the insulin down and keeping a handle on insulin resistance. That keeps you metabolically healthy because insulin is the bad guy in this story.

Insulin drives chronic metabolic disease because insulin drives growth - abnormal growth. It drives vascular smooth muscle growth - that's why you get coronary artery disease. It drives prostate and breast growth - that's why you get breast and prostate cancer. It’s because of the insulin.

“So”, I continued. “You didn't generate as big an insulin response because you didn't absorb those calories”.

Those 30 calories went further down the intestine to the jejunum. That’s where the bacteria are. That’s where the microbiome is. Those bacteria, they want those 30 calories. They chew it up for their own purposes.

You have 10 trillion cells in your body. You have 100 trillion bacteria in your intestines. They outnumber you 10:1. Those bacteria have to eat something to stay alive and, since they eat what you eat, the question becomes “how much did you get versus how much did they get?”

When she consumed all those almonds, and we all saw her do it, she consumed them with fibre. That fibre meant that those 30 calories weren't for her; they were for her microbiome. Even though she ate them, even though they passed her lips, even though they registered as a calorie eaten, they were not a calorie absorbed.

“Nobody cares how many calories you ate”, I assured her. “What matters is how many calories you absorb.”

Was that measured in a calorie-in, calorie out calculator?

No.

Therefore, a calorie is not just a calorie because if a calorie comes with fibre, that calorie is not for you.

Of course, there’s more.

Protein.

Protein is made-up of amino acids. There are 20 amino acids. Some of them are essential amino acids - you have to consume them. Some of them your body can make from those essential amino acids. If you are building muscle you need amino acids because muscle is primarily protein. Bodybuilders who are building muscle take huge scoops of protein powder and put it in their Vitamix to make their smoothies. They're building muscle and so they need those amino acids because they're essential - they have to consume them. Are they choosing wisely about what protein powders to put in their smoothies? Probably not, but that’s another topic for another blog post.

But, what if you’re not a body builder? What if you’re a mere mortal like me? And, what if you consume excess protein, excess amino acids?

Our host had barbecued steaks that evening and they were impressive. Grass-fed giants. An entire herd had given up their lives to feed us. Nice and big and juicy. So, I asked my calorie counting friend, “What if you end up eating that entire steak because it is so delicious and you end up eating more than you should? Where is the protein going to go?”

“Muscle!” She shot back at me imagining it to be game, set and match. “Muscle is a storehouse for protein.”

I don’t know which gym brochure she’d read that in, and, while she wasn’t wrong, she wasn’t entirely right, either. If you’re not building muscle then that’s not your storehouse.

So what happens to the excess? Well, that protein went to the liver. The amino acids went to the liver and the liver has to turn it into energy. The liver has to take the amino group and perform a deamination. Once that happens, that amino acid now becomes an organic acid. That organic acid can now enter the Krebs cycle (aka the citric acid cycle) which is the cycle that makes the ATP. You can generate energy from that amino acid once it's deaminated.

That process of deamination - taking that amino group off - costs energy. It costs twice as much energy as what your liver has to do to prepare carbohydrate for energy. There's a net deficit for protein versus carbohydrate when you are turning it into ATP.

Even though protein and carbohydrate are both four calories per gram, when you're burning protein you actually generate fewer ATPs than when you're burning carbohydrate. Therefore, a calorie’s not a calorie because you started with the same number of calories going in but ended up with different numbers of ATP's.

And, let’s not forget fats.

On one side we have omega-3 fatty acids. Heart healthy, anti-inflammatory, anti-Alzheimer’s, anti-depression, save-your-life fatty acids. The single best thing you can put in your body - without question.

On the other side we have trans-fats. The Devil Incarnate, consumable poison made in the lab. The reason that the food industry puts trans fats into food is because bacteria can't break the trans double bond because bacteria doesn't have the enzyme necessary to do it. The bacteria couldn’t grow on it.

Our mitochondria in our cells are refurbished bacteria. They even have their own bacterial DNA. Our mitochondria can't break that bond either. So when you consume trans fats you are basically laying down poison in your liver, and in your arteries, because you can't break it all the way down to carbon dioxide and ATP because of that trans double bond.

You do not want those trans double bonds in your diet.

But the food industry puts them there because they are afraid of bacteria.

The point is, on one side we have omega-3’s and on the other we have trans fats. They're both 9 calories per gram. One will save your life. One will kill you. A calorie is not just a calorie because different foodstuffs have different functions.

Last, but not least; fructose and glucose.

Glucose is “energy of life” and fructose is poison; chronic, dose dependent, mitochondrial toxin. They’re both 4 calories per gram.

So you see,” I continued. “It's not how much you eat. It’s specifically what your body does with what you eat that matters”.

Suddenly, with a quick comment about television not being allowed to say something if it wasn’t true, my new friend was much more interested in another conversation with someone else. I’m willing to bet she went home and stuffed her face while she watched “ 90 Day Fiancé ” or “ Yes to the Dress ” and yum’d-up the ads for ready meals and fast foods and indigestion medicine and diet pills starring impossibly slim moms giving shit to their smiling happy children (or for the medicine ads the kids are usually miserable which is more my experience with kids).

But the science tells us a different story that is counter to the “calories in, calories out” hypothesis. The food industry is still hitting it as hard as they possibly can to convince us of this lie and big pharma is complicit and television knows that what’s good for people isn’t really good for their revenue streams from the food industry and big pharma.

I shrugged my shoulders while I finished my steak and, when my wife stopped giving me the evil eye for engaging with another dishonest interlocutor at a public function, I quickly speared the steak my new friend had left on her plate and enjoyed that too.

I’ll do some extra exercise tomorrow.

Corn and the "Food v. Fuel" Debate

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 07:32:22 GMT

Find out why corn is better as transport fuel than it is as human fuel.

Thoughts on Corn, and the Great “Food v. Fuel” Debate.

There are many foods that are better than corn for providing nutrition to humans and they come with less of the negative effects of eating corn or cooking with corn oil. We prefer to do something positively awesome with corn.

So, what's wrong with eating corn or cooking with corn oil?

Corn is one of the most contaminated crops grown on our planet in terms of toxic mould . Corn is full of a mould toxin called Fusarium that grows in the roots of the corn and then spreads throughout the plant. Even if the corn kernels don’t appear to be mouldy, Fusarium is there. This toxic mould causes conditions in humans such as chronic inflammation, arthritis and brain fog. The major toxigenic fungi in corn are species of Aspergillus, Fusarium, and Penicillium. Members of each genus can produce diverse types of toxic compounds, but the most important mycotoxins in corn are aflatoxins, fumonisins, trichothecenes (especially deoxynivalenol), and zearalenone.

Even worse, corn contains phytic acid that literally sucks the minerals out of your bones. Phytic acid is a chelating agent, something that has a very strong affinity for minerals. It binds to them? It sticks to the minerals and then your kidneys have to excrete them.

Phytic acid is known as a food inhibitor which chelates micronutrients and prevents them from being bioavailable for monogastric animals, including humans, because they lack the enzyme phytase in their digestive tract. Phytic acid, also known as phytates, is one of the more infamous anti-nutrients, blocking the absorption of nutrient heavy-hitters like magnesium, zinc, calcium and iron, amongst others, so you ge precious little nutrition from the food you eat that is made out of corn or the food you cook using corn oil.

Equally disturbing, corn is full of a prolamin-rich protein called zein that puts holes in your gut causing IBS, Crohn’s, colitis and leaky gut syndrome.

Possibly worst of all - cooking with corn oil. Corn oil is high in inflammatory omega-6 fats . It is highly refined and corn oil produces harmful antinutrient acrylamide when heated . Acrylamide is a highly reactive compound that has been linked to problems with nerve, hormone, and muscle function. Acrylamide has been classified as a potential carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) .

Oh, almost forgot to say, corn is full glyphosate . You can read more about Glyphosate in our earlier blog post , " Another Reason You Should Really Avoid Grains In Your Diet ".

Corn as fuel is considered Net Zero by the IPCC.

Corn is, however, ideal for making ethanol, one of the net zero liquid biofuels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) considers CO ₂ emissions from the combustion of liquid biofuels to be net zero because plants cultivated for the production of the source biomasses, as they grow, absorb CO ₂ from the atmosphere (photosynthesis) in an amount substantially equivalent to that released through their combustion.

While it is argued that significant amounts of water, fertilisers, pesticides and energy, mostly of fossil origin, are consumed to cultivate the crops required to make ethanol (corn), our farming practices use low impact methods that reduce water requirement and eliminate the need for pesticides, weed killers and chemical fertilisers. It only takes a small amount of effort to correct these issues that are put forward as the “unsolvable” problem with liquid biofuels.

By 2030, the Net Zero scenario predicts three times more biofuel consumption than in 2021 , or 10% of total transport energy consumption. Consumption will be absorbed by road transport, with a small share for aviation and shipping. Looking ahead to 2050, things change dramatically. The lack of ambition of the commitments announced by governments for the electrification of road transport (APS scenario) would lead to a 50% growth in total biofuel consumption vs. 2030 , entirely absorbed by this sector.

Corn as food for human consumption is demonstrably and provably a bad idea - it really is unhealthy. Corn for use as a net zero transport fuel is good for our planet and the humans that live on it.

Another Reason You Should Avoid Grains in Your Diet

Fri, 19 May 2023 12:53:57 GMT

It isn't just about gluten intolerance. This is REALLY scary...!

Glyphosate: The Out of Control Weed Killer

Unlike phytates, lectins and histamines, glyphosate is an obstacle that we have created for ourselves. It's an artificial herbicide (weed killer) that is ubiquitous in modern farming. The agricultural industry insists that glyphosate is completely harmless to humans. Glyphosate is currently approved for use in Europe [1] and is approved for use in the UK until, at the earliest, December 2025 [2] .

In reality, glyphosate is a toxin that accumulates in fat and neurological tissues. Now we know that glyphosate disrupts the gut microbiome [3] , the healthy bacteria that live in your intestines, and has been tied to certain types of cancer [4] . Nevertheless, it is still used extensively.

More concerning is that glyphosate has been shown to modify your mitochondrial membrane and decrease your energy production [5] . Anything that lowers your energy level also reduces your willpower. Specifically, glyphosate can switch your brain cells from aerobic (powerful) metabolism to anaerobic (less powerful) [6] . Glyphosate harmed energy production in human kidney cells and is another anti nutrient that binds to essential minerals iron copper zinc manganese calcium and magnesium.

In other words, glyphosate decreases your energy production which increases your physical sense of anxiety and stress and leaves you with fewer resources to work with.

In addition to using glyphosate to kill weeds farmers spray it on crops near the end of the growing season because it causes the wheat to ripen early at a time that they can schedule. Glyphosate kills the plant, so the plant puts its last burst of energy into protecting its seeds by rushing to make all the wheat grains ripen before it dies. The problem is, the glyphosate then continues its journey into the foods that we eat. It also destroys top soil by killing the bacteria that normally cycle carbon and renew the soils organic chemistry. Perhaps this will stop at the end of 2025 but the companies that make glyphosate and the farmers who use it have a pretty powerful lobby and it remains to be seen if there will be another extension to the legal use of this product.

We can, however, make the decision now to steer clear of foods that were made with glyphosate treated crops. Unfortunately, glyphosate isn't easy to avoid. Choosing organic food is a good first step, but farmers spray so much that many organic foods contain concerning amounts of glyphosate. Since grains usually contain the highest amounts of glyphosate residues [7] , cutting down the amount of them that you eat is the most effective way to start. If a grain isn’t organic, don't eat it .

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_impl/2017/2324/oj

[2] https://naturaler.co.uk/is-glyphosate-banned-uk/?cn-reloaded=1

[3] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP6990

[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1383574218300887

[5] https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8859649/#R86

[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2157305

[7] https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/glyphosate-contamination-food-goes-far-beyond-oat-products

Protein! You Don't Need Those Extra Protein Bars and Shakes.

Thu, 11 May 2023 12:18:27 GMT

You Need Less Protein Than You Think...!!!

What is protein and why do we need it?

Unlike fat and carbohydrates, that make up most of our fuel, protein is more about our body’s structure.

All of our cells and our organs and our hair and our fingernails, all of that is structural protein. All the enzymes that are in our body that catalyse reactions and make metabolism move forward, those are all proteins. Many hormones are proteins.

A protein consists of one or more chains of amino acids (called polypeptides) whose sequence is encoded in a gene. Some amino acids can be synthesized in the body, but others (essential amino acids) cannot and must be obtained from a person's diet. There are a couple of proteins that are only three amino acids tied together, which would be called a tri peptide, but that would be unusual. The largest one I know of is 35,000 amino acids strung together in a cell. T hink about proteins like words and the amino acids like letters. The words can get really long and you need a lot of letters to make them but, fundamentally, you can make any word like any protein out of just a limited number of amino acids.

Y ou need all 20 amino acids for just about every single protein that you synthesize. Your body can make some of them but you also have to get the nine essential ones. “Essential” simply means you can't assemble the whole thing yourself. The nine essential amino acids are histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine. Proteins are in everything. All 20 amino acids are in all food - plant and animal - so if you're simply getting enough calories with a reasonable variety in your diet you’re getting enough protein [1] .

Foods that contain all nine essential amino acids are called complete proteins. These foods include things like beef, poultry, fish and eggs. Dairy is also included but isn’t the best choice as there are other issues associated with dairy. Foods that contain some but not all the essential amino acids are called incomplete proteins. These foods include nuts, seeds, beans and some grains.

A nd let me add one twist to this, which is pretty interesting. There are very few rare exceptions to this, but when you eat an animal protein or a plant protein and it goes into your digestive tract, you can't absorb those amino acids into your body until you break them down to their single amino acid levels. Once you’ve absorbed them, your body can't remember where the amino acid came from. “Oh, did this come from a cow or did this come from a pig or is it from broccoli”? No clue. It's just this amino acid. The body doesn't even care. If it came from a supplement or if it comes from food, your body can't tell. It's just the building block.

Having said that, plant proteins are less bioavailable than animal proteins are meaning your body can’t break them down and use them as well for building muscle or repairing tissues [2] . Probably the most important protein to avoid is any type of plant-based meat substitute. These are highly processed and full of ingredients that contribute to ageing and inflammation, including genetically modified soy, omega-6 oils, synthetic vitamins, refined sugars and flavours. Since they are mainly legume or grain based, they contain tons of mineral-sucking antinutrients, too.

Here's the interesting bit that flies in the face of the health marketing people. I f you've eaten enough calories for the day, you've got enough protein. You can stop obsessing about protein. 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight should meet your recommended daily requirement. For a lot of people that would be maybe 40, 50 or maybe 60 grams of protein if you're heavier. Most people eating a western diet are getting pretty much double the amount of protein they need, just eating food, without even trying.

T he first time I ever went to a gym, which is about ten years ago, one of the fitness trainers told me I needed to increase my protein intake after my workout in order to get healthier. How does this happen? A trained professional giving me advice that isn’t supported by any test reports that I’ve seen. Why is that there this controversy? Why is there this pressure that people need to eat more protein?

Most people get about 16% to 18% of their calories from protein. It's very consistent. It's just amazing. And then you look at how many calories people eat to maintain their weight.

Most people underestimate how many calories they eat.

Women eat around 2500 calories a day and men eat 3000. A lot of you reading this are going to say, “Not me. I only eat 1500 calories a day”. In feeding studies where they precisely track the amount of calories, it's really more like 2500 or 3000. If you calculate 16 to 18% of that amount of calories, people easily get about 1.5 grams of protein per kilogram body weight. That’s about double the amount of protein we need each day.

So, you’re already getting double the daily requirement of protein and it has already more than met your need for enzymes, hormones, fingernails and hair. Now, you’re going to the gym to lift weights and gain muscle so you probably want more than 0.8 grams per kilogram per day. How many extra grams of protein do you need?

Let’s take an ambitious goal of putting on ten kilograms of pure muscle in one year. 70% of your muscle is water. If you are going to reach your ambitious goal in a year, all you'd actually have to accumulate is three kilos of extra amino acids or 3000 grams of extra amino acids. Divide that into 365 days of the year and, just roughly, that means you would need an extra ten grams of protein a day in addition to meeting your maintenance needs to put on the 10 kilograms of muscle.

Now, it's not quite a fair number because when you're in the gym lifting and working out, if you're working out really hard, you're actually breaking down some muscle, you’re using those amino acids and you have to replace them. So put another ten grams on that to make it an extra 20 grams every day for a year to put this on. In the western diet, people are eating 30 or 40 extra grams a day over that 0.8 grams per kilogram we need every day just by eating food.

And, of course, one more thing to keep in mind. When you're working out hard every day, you eat more. You don't eat just 2000 calories or 3000 calories. You’re getting a lot of extra protein every day without trying. It isn't by having protein shakes. It’s just having food.

Is it bad if you actually got more protein than you needed?

Would it kill you to have all that extra protein? What would happen to all that extra protein?

On an average day, you probably eat more carbohydrates than you need. Once you've eaten some carbohydrate, the first thing your body says is, “Does my brain need it right now? Nope. My brain's okay”. “Do my muscles need it? Nope. I'm just sitting here. I don't really need my muscles”.

We have a storage depot for carbohydrate; it's called glycogen. There's some in our muscles and there's some in our liver. Our bodies will try to fill up our storage capacity of glycogen (stored carbohydrate) so that it is available later in the day. And, do you know how long it would take to deplete all the stored carbohydrate in the body? A good example is marathon runners. At 20 miles, marathon runners “bonk” or “hit a wall” if they don't have enough carbohydrate. It basically means they've used up all the glycogen stored in their body. We can only store about a kilo of glycogen.

Let's switch for a minute to fat. Let's say we ate more fat calories for the day and used it for various things, and mostly we burned it for energy. Where would we store that and how much could you store?

We can store an infinite capacity of fat. We can store hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds of fat. We store it in our butt, in our thighs, in our jowls. We even store it in the pads of our fingers. We have endless capacity to store fat. It would take an incredibly long time to use up all the storage of fat that we have in our body. So unlimited capacity to store fat, a very limited capacity to store carbohydrate. Where could the extra protein go?

We ate all that extra protein, we made our enzymes, we made our hormones, we lifted our weights, and it was a little more protein than we needed (or maybe a lot more) and now we're going to bed. So where do we put that extra protein in our body? Is it in our spleen, in our liver, in our big toe, in our elbow? Where is our protein storage?

There isn’t any protein storage. None .

At the end of the day, every bit of extra protein has the nitrogen taken off and it gets turned into carbs and fat. We can't store protein in our body. So the muscle heads who are having a lot of meat and regular meals and a protein shake and a protein bar - are turning all that excess protein into carbs and fats at the end of the day.

Think about it.

There are all these products that are on sale that say, “No carbs - Ten Grams of Protein” or, “No Sugar - Ten Grams of Protein” . It’s easy to think it’s healthy if there are no carbs and no sugar. But, we’re already eating more protein than we need so our body is just going to turn that into carbs and fat. And since we are already eating as much food as we need and we’re having protein treats on top, we're just basically turning those into body fat.

If we're eating a reasonably varied diet we wouldn't have to do what the trainer said. We’re already getting enough protein to achieve our goals.

Different protein requirements at different ages.

Kids, while they’re growing, need a bit more than 0.8 grams. At different ages they need 0.9 or 1.0 or even 1.1 grams because they're growing. Similarly, for a pregnant woman that's growing a foetus inside of her, she's not just maintaining, she's growing. And so those needs are higher than 0.8 grams per kilogram per day. The question is, can you get that just eating food or do you need to get these extra sources? As long as you get a reasonable variety of food in your diet, you would have to work really hard not to get enough protein.

There are possibly some issues with the elderly. There are reasons they may have lost their appetite. We have this issue of sarcopenia where they're losing muscle mass. There have been some studies suggesting that it's not really just the hormones; it's loneliness, it's depression. It's not eating. It could be that you have to make a special effort to make sure the small number of calories that they're getting are protein rich because they're just not eating very much.

Is animal protein better than plant protein?

When we look at the estimated average requirement of protein for a lot of people, it could be close to 40 grams of protein, which is pretty low but let’s use that number just for fun to make this one point. There are 20 amino acids. If we need 40 grams of protein, simplistically that sounds like it would be good to have two grams of each one. Two grams times 20 amino acids is 40. Right? Not even close.

We need lots more of glutamate, glutamine and aspartate while we need hardly any tryptophan, thiamine, cysteine.

All of the plants have all 20 amino acids. The distribution of the amino acids is almost identical in the plants as the animal protein. Almost .

Plants are lower in a couple of the essential amino acids relative to animals. Therefore, if we’re eating a plant-only diet and we’re going to eat only 40 grams of protein, we’re potentially going to have a low level of those two particular amino acids. It's not just that we need 40. We need 40 in the right distribution. If we only ate rice all day and that's how we get your 40 grams of protein., we wouldn't have enough. We could supplement with just those individual amino acids that are lacking. Or, we could eat 80 grams of protein a day. We would end up making up the deficit. But, here's what happens if you really only needed 40 and ate 80. We break it down and turn it into carbohydrate and fat.

Plants don't have the ideal distribution of amino acids. Some populations eat grains and beans together, because they complement the deficiencies with the excesses. It's still not the optimal distribution. But it's closer to optimal. But, it's still never quite as good as meat.

In his 2019 paper called “ Modernizing the Definition of Protein Quality ” [3] , David Katz wrote that there's one issue of the distribution of amino acids perfect in animal foods that’s less than perfect in plant foods. There is actually an issue of digestion and bioavailability, and it is a little higher for meat protein over plant protein. There is a risk when we are eating meats; sometimes we’re getting hormones and antibiotics that were used to grow that meat and there's no fibre in there. If you were eating beans and tofu and other plant foods, you'd be getting phytochemicals, antioxidants and you'd be getting lots of fibre for your microbiome.

Properly sourced meat – specifically grass-fed beef with a plate full of a mix of vegetables is going to provide you with sufficient protein to keep you healthy.

If you have any questions about this blog post and how you can use this information to improve your healthy lifestyle, lose weight, gain muscle or maximise your athletic performance, you can ask me on Instagram or get in touch using the contact page on the website.

[ 1 ] If you only eight rice all day, you wouldn't get enough. If you only ate cassava all day. You wouldn't get enough protein, but you also wouldn't get enough of other nutrients.

[2] Insaf Berrazaga et al., “The Role of Anabolic Properties of Plant vs. Animal-based Protien Sources in Supporting Muscle Mass Maintenance: A Critical Review,” Nutrients 11, no. 8 (2019): 1825, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6723444/.

[3] https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/10/5/755/5484791

Those Last Twenty Pounds

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 08:40:47 GMT

There is a reason you seem to be stuck in your weight loss mission.

I was doing a discovery session with a potential client and she was clearly very, very, very frustrated with her previous weight loss attempts.

Her husband was losing weight. Her friends were losing weight.

She told me, “I’m eating eating healthier than they are but I’m not losing the weight”.

“I'm doing everything right,” she added. “It's not working and I don't understand why it's not working.”

The first clue arrived almost instantly.

“Maybe I need to go back to another diet”, she said with a disappointing air of resignation in her voice. She was really frustrated that she was doing so much work and seeing so little result.

Start With The End In Mind

When we're evaluating something like this, we need data. We need to understand from the client what they're doing compared to what they should be doing. We need to understand the underlying causes to try to find out what's going on (or, what’s not going on).

Then she says, “I'm not losing despite having a good metabolism”.

“What makes you think you have a good metabolism”, I asked somewhat surprised.

“Well,” she said, “I eat a lot of food, all the calories, and I don't gain weight.” After a thoughtful pause, she sighed, “I just can't lose weight”

She's four kilograms overweight. Because she's eating a lot and she's not gaining weight, she thinks she has a good metabolism.

Our bodies have a “ setpoint ”; a certain weight that we struggle to get below. If we do, through sheer willpower, we just return to that setpoint weight after a while. Our weight doesn't necessarily go up, but it doesn't go down. Our body just loves to be at that certain weight.

If your focus is on exercising more or eating less and you don’t consider the underlying cause of your condition, you’re not going to get results.

What's behind the setpoint is insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is a situation where the hormone insulin is no longer working and the cells in your body won't let fuel in. One of the functions of insulin is to let fuel into the cells. If the fuel can’t get in, our cells will be starved of fuel and that extra fuel that you do consume is being stored as fat.

Then what happens is a compensatory thing; the body compensates and makes more and more and more insulin and, the more insulin you have, the more of a setpoint you're going to have. No matter what you do, if you exercise six hours a day, the weight just simply doesn't come off. You’ll plateau and just be stuck at a certain point.

The plan we set out for her was working to start with. And then she noticed that it sort of stopped working. Turns out that she was eating a lot of “natural” energy bars with fruits and nuts and with dairy as the fat.

We’ll come back to her story in a minute but I want to say something about a very large farmer who wanted my help. Now, when I say “large”, he was my height but probably three times my weight.

I suggested that our first step would be to look at what he was eating. I said to him that we could probably start off by switching his breakfast out for a Himalayan coffee.

“I don’t eat breakfast”, he said with absolute sincerity.

“Oh”, I replied. My shock was obvious. I wondered if there was something more seriously wrong with him for his body to be so far out of whack.

“I stop at the shop and grab a couple of energy drinks on my way to work and they keep me going until lunchtime”.

It was almost exactly what my frustrated plateau lady was doing - having small snacks that were labelled as “heathy” several times each day but not counting them as “eating a meal”. To really budge that setpoint it is critical to eat the right things at the right times.

We need to be very cautious about who we take advice from. We all have a friends or a personal trainer or even our doctor, all giving advice. What was happening to our frustrated client was she's getting data overload from too many sources. She doesn't know what's vital, what’s true or what’s trivial or what’s false. She was getting suckered by slick marketing with cool looking packaging wrapped around products with misleading words like “natural” and “organic”.

If you try to do research or find weight loss secrets on the Internet it is very difficult because you don't know who to believe. Even if the information is credible, those people on YouTube and Instagram have no idea about your specific details so might be giving good information but it might only be part of a solution for your own specific circumstances. Alternatively, they might be talking absolute shit.

Our first step is always to hyper focus on fixing insulin resistance.

Lots of our clients freak out and say they can't give up their energy drinks and “health” bars and dairy, especially long term!!! She was no different.

“It wouldn't be enjoyable,” she complained.

I said, “Don't focus on the long-term healthy eating plan right now. We have a big present-time problem. We need to fix that first.”

Once we fix the immediate issue, then we can actually think about what the client should do as a maintenance or long-term plan.

We need to fix the underlying cause. To do that we must do first things first. Bite-sized pieces, if you’ll pardon the pun.

There are tests that can be done to track your insulin resistance and for some clients this makes sense. The one simple way to know if you're on the right track or not is your hunger. Is your hunger going away or not. If your hunger is going away that means your insulin resistance is improving. If you can't survive between meals, we know you still have a problem with insulin resistance.

Again, insulin resistance is a situation where insulin is not allowing the fuel in so your cells are starving all the time. That's going to make it really hard to lose weight and reset your set point. All we're trying to do is switch from sugar fuel to fat fuel, step-by-step, so you're at a place where it's going to be really easy. Y our hunger will go away. You will have energy. You will feel good.

You will lose weight.

The Debate Over Resveratrol

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 08:34:43 GMT

Some studies are indicating that Resveratrol actually slows our metabolism. That sounds counter productive. Is it, though...?

Last night, after spending hours writing the blog post on anti-ageing supplements, I was double checking my sources and discovered a controversy about resveratrol. I couldn’t let that gremlin cast a shadow on the credibility of my blog post so this morning I have looked into it.

And, here’s what I found.

Some studies are indicating that Resveratrol actually slows our energy expenditure meaning a decrease in our metabolism.

Resveratrol has become a controversial supplement. One side of the debate shows resveratrol has positive longevity effects and can enhance fasting. The other side are saying it's possibly doing some things to slow our metabolism.

A recently published study on obesity indicated that resveratrol can potentially reduce our energy expenditure. Our energy expenditure is another way of saying our metabolism. A higher energy expenditure would mean a faster metabolism.

A slower metabolism sounds counterproductive. If we want to burn fat and lose weight. It is important, however, to understand the biochemistry if we want to figure out what all of this means.

An energy expenditure decrease is not a bad thing. The study took a look at obese individuals and put them on a randomised blind crossover design study. That’s a very robust scientific study protocol. Participants were given either a placebo or 150 mg of trans-resveratrol for 30 days. They saw a lot of really interesting things with this study. For example, they saw an increase in AMPK within the muscle tissue which indicated that their bodies were behaving as if they were in a more fasted state.

There was also an increase in SIRT1 levels. SIRT1 is what potentially triggers FOX03 and other longevity effects within the body. There was also an increase in what's called PGC-1a protein levels. Specifically PGC-1a is what affects mitochondria and allows our mitochondria to go through biogenesis, therefore creating more mitochondria. More mitochondria means more energy factories in our body which means more places to create actual energy.

When we think about it like that, it's not a huge surprise that this same study found a 2% to 4% decrease in postprandial and basal energy expenditure. One might interpret this as bad because that means that it slowed down metabolism. When we're fasting or when we're trying to induce things like autophagy, we're trying to trigger our body to go into a restorative effect by ultimately reducing our energy expenditure . A slower metabolism doesn't mean that were burning less fat, per se, it does mean, however, that our body is becoming more efficient.

There is data to demonstrate that doing endurance work can actually decrease resting energy expenditure because the body and the cells become much more efficient at using fat, and have so much more mitochondria, that the process is streamlined. When we look at the resveratrol situation, decreasing energy expenditure in this particular case, it's really the effect we're wanting. We're driving up AMPK and that is potentially creating more PGC-1a activation, creating more mitochondria therefore making the body more efficient at utilising fuel.

It doesn't mean that it's bad and it doesn't mean that it's going to slow your metabolism to a screeching halt. You actually might find it gives you the potential to leverage that efficiency through exercise so that your body uses more fat.

A decrease in energy expenditure of 2% to 4% is more than compensated knowing that the body is running efficiently and effectively. It is important to know that when you want your body to burn fat, it’s going to burn fat. Choosing to not use resveratrol so you don’t lose 4% energy expenditure is at a cost of mitochondrial dysfunction and reactive oxygen species.

Resveratrol might have the effect of slowing down your metabolism a couple of percentage points but when you look at the benefits it's probably still worth considering.

It can be tricky to work out which supplement might be right for you. If you want to talk about what should be included in your supplement stack, get in touch with us HERE ..

If you want to bring out your inner geek, have a read through this study.

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21772

The Two Follow-Up Questions Protocol

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 11:21:26 GMT

The ancient art of getting people to talk about themselves can go a long, long way.

While a bottom-line reason shouldn't be necessary in the case of being a likeable person, here you go: Likability helps drive success.

Research shows likable people are:

More likely to be more effective leaders,
More likely to be more successful in sales,
More likely to get promoted or hired,
More likely to build and maintain good relationships, and even
More likely to make other people feel better about themselves.

Direct, assertive, even aggressive stereotypes aside, in business, likability matters. (As Mark Cuban says, "One of the most underrated skills in business is being nice.")

Yet it's not always easy to be likable -- or possibly more to the point, to be broadly liked. If you have 100 employees, the odds all of them will like you are pretty slim. Different interests. Different backgrounds. Different perspectives. No one is universally liked.

But there is an easy way to ensure you're more likable, whether with people you don't interact with regularly or those you do.

It's all about asking two follow-up questions.

Talking About Yourself

First, though, some background.

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that approximately 40 percent of what we say involves telling other people about our subjective experiences.

Not facts or instructions or outcome-based conversations -- which account for another chunk of our everyday speech -- but what we think or feel.

For example, telling a salesperson that a deadline will be missed... and how you're frustrated about all the recent production delays, and tired of having to tell customers their ship dates will be missed, and how it doesn't seem like anyone in the building seems to care, and how the situation is keeping you up at night....

Again, not an outcome-based conversation, but a brain dump of thoughts and feelings.

While that sounds counterproductive -- and it usually is -- we often can't help it: The same study also found that talking about ourselves causes a spike in activity in parts of our brains associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction we get from money, food, and even sex.

Think about it that way, and it's no wonder it's hard not to talk about ourselves.

Unless you consciously shift the focus by embracing the two follow-up questions protocol.

The Two Follow-Up Questions Protocol

If you're even remotely shy and introverted, making small talk with people you don't know feels awkward. That's why people default to, "What do you do?"

But what do you do once you've exhausted "What do you do?"?

If it's a Sunday afternoon, maybe you'll ask, "What's your favourite football team?"

Lame, I know. Even so, if only because they think they should, most people have a favourite football team. (If they don't, shift gears and ask, "What do you do when other people want to watch football?") But let's assume they do.

"United," they say.

Now it's time for the two follow-up questions principle. Instead of talking about your favourite football team, ask another question.

"How did United become your favourite team?"

Maybe they'll say "it's because they grew up in ". Or "because someone (they're) close to is a United fan". Or "the first match they attended was a United match".

Use the answer to ask a second question. What it was like where they grew up, or what brought them here. Perhaps a favourite memory of watching a game with their father, (significant other, etc), or what going to that first game was like.

Tap into the fact people always enjoy and sometimes even feel compelled to talk about themselves to ask two follow-up questions that involve thoughts and feelings.

Do that, and according to a 2017 Harvard study published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, you'll dramatically increase how likable other people perceive you to be.

As the researchers write:

We converse with others to learn what they know -- their information, stories, preferences, ideas, thoughts, and feelings....

In particular, asking questions that follow up on the other person's responses cause and convey better listening, understanding, validation, and care.

The question asker's responsiveness, in turn, is likely to cause him or her to be better liked by the question answerer.

Imagine someone who listens. Understands. Validates. Cares. Sounds like the definition of "likable."

What Two Questions?

Even though it can be difficult, the key is to avoid the temptation to weigh in -- to resist sharing your thoughts, feelings, or experiences, and keep the focus on the other person.

As the researchers write:

Neglecting to ask questions altogether may happen because people are egocentric -- focused on expressing their own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs with little or no interest in hearing what another person has to say.

On the other hand, some people may think to ask questions... but it may be much easier to talk about themselves instead.

That's especially true if you're shy. Or uncomfortable. Or, oddly enough, trying to make a good first impression, a time when laying back can seem like the worst thing you can do. Even though, research shows, listening and asking questions is the best thing you can do.

And, fortunately, the easiest thing.

Say you meet someone new. As soon as you learn a little about them -- their occupation, avocation, whatever it might be -- ask the first follow-up question. Keep it simple: how they do what they do, or why they do it, or how it feels, or what they enjoy most about it.

When I find out what someone does for a living, here's my favourite follow-up: "That sounds like a really hard job."

Granted, that isn't a question, but still works a treat, because everyone's job is hard... and when you recognize and validate that fact, they naturally open up and talk about themselves.

And once they open up, the follow-up questions are easier and easier to find, because every person, once you scratch the surface, is interesting.

Try it. Ask at least two genuine follow-up questions. Show you respect the other person's experience, knowledge, opinion, etc. Show you respect them as a person.

Doing that will not only make you more likable, it could turn what would have been an interaction into the start of a relationship.

And if it doesn't, that's OK -- because for a few minutes, you will have made another person feel a little more important.

Can't beat that.

Understanding the Science of Supplements

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 11:04:37 GMT

Nutrients are a critical part of our biology. Simply put, If we don't have enough, our health degrades.

A popular question at the moment is, “Why do we need supplements?” We evolved for the last 200,000 years without any problem.

Didn’t we?

You couldn't always just pop down to your local pharmacy or log in to Amazon or visit your neighbourhood supplement store and buy yourself a bottle of instant health. It wasn’t that long ago that you couldn't buy Vitamin D ₃ or Vitamin C or any of this stuff. We didn't even know what it was and yet somehow we managed to survive.

From an evolutionary point of view, supplements are kind of irrelevant.

But, right now, we're living so out of sync with our evolutionary biology that we need to really look at the facts about what's happening with our food supply, with our nutrient levels - both in our food and in our bodies - and the consequences of that for our health.

So, under the following conditions, I don't think anybody needs supplements.

One. You have to hunt and gather your own wild food.

Two. You have to drink pure, clean water.

Three. You cannot have chronic stress.

Four. You have to exercise all the time as part of your lifestyle.

Five. You have to sleep nine hours a night - going to bed with the sun and waking with the sun.

Six. You cannot be exposed to environmental toxins.

and, finally,

Seven. You need to grow your own food on land that hasn’t been depleted of its organic nutrition.

Now, if that's you, then no , you don't need any supplements. But the rest of us? We need to pay attention.

After years of vigorously testing the nutritional status of our clients, I'm beyond shocked at the level of nutritional deficiencies I see. And, our clientele is generally well-off. They understand health and nutrition and are trying to do the right thing.

When I see a new client who eats junk food and fast food and processed food, who doesn't know anything about health and nutrition, the first stage of our process is to understand their health goals and then run some tests to understand their current nutritional status. The results are terrifying!

What we see is mirrored in the National Diet and Nutrition Study delivered by NatCen Social Research. This is a large, annual UK governmental survey where they look at the health of the population. They don't just ask questions and trust the patient’s answers. They actually go and test people to see what their nutritional results look like and, based on this really robust data, it is clear that over 90% of us are deficient in something. The most glaring deficiencies are; about 90% are deficient in omega-3 fats. 50% are deficient in magnesium. 25% in iron. Zinc is 40%. 89% of women in child bearing years are deficient in folate.

We've got major deficiencies in key nutrients that are really essential for biology. And, what people don't understand is, nutrients have a lot of functions.

If you take a drug, let's say a statin, it basically has one primary action; it blocks the enzyme that produces cholesterol. It also has some other effects. It actually induces something called nitric oxide synthase which is good for producing nitric oxide which may reduce inflammation but it blocks CoQ10 production making the patient susceptible to muscle injury.

Nutrients are different.

Magnesium has three hundred different enzymes that it regulates. Zinc. Same thing; it has 200. They have multiple functions throughout multiple parts of our cellular physiology. If we don't have them it's like our cellular machinery can't do what it's supposed to do.

Enzymes are the catalysts that change one chemical to another chemical in our bodies enabling them to do what they’re supposed to do. If one third of our DNA codes for enzymes, that's important!

To work properly, enzymes need coenzymes, or co-factors, which are usually vitamins, minerals and also phytonutrients. There's a little key that goes into the enzyme and turns it on. That key is usually a nutrient; Vitamin C, Vitamin B6, folate...

For example; to make tryptophan into serotonin, which is your "happy mood chemical", you take the amino acid from tryptophan which comes from food and that, then, has to get converted to serotonin. That process requires Vitamin B ₆ .

Or, the thyroid is another good example. In order for the thyroxine that your thyroid gland produces to be converted into the active thyroid hormone T3, you have an enzyme there which actually requires selenium. If you don’t have selenium, it can't work.

And, at risk of sounding really geeky, if you want to see the thyroid action on the nucleus where it actually does all its work to control metabolism, you need Vitamin D as a cofactor to help it function at the nuclear level to create the downstream effects which is to turn on different genes that regulate your metabolism (among other things).

Nutrients are such a critical part of our biology that if we don't have enough of the required nutrients our health degrades.

The great vitamin discovery happened around 120 years ago. The name “Vitamin” comes from a scientist named Casamir Funk who coined the term “Vitamine” in 1912 as something that’s needed for your health and vitality. The word comes from two parts; “vita” meaning “Life” and “amine” because originally vitamins were thought to contain amino acids.

All of this became important because humans started refining grains in the 1800s.

The grain mill was a great discovery. You could refine grains which allowed for a smoother and whiter flour product creating a “nicer” version of the bread people had been eating for thousands of years. What happened, however, was the refining process took out all the nutrients and all that was left was the starch. People then started feeding the refined grains to chickens and the chickens all got really sick. And, then they started feeding it to prisoners, and the prisoners all got really sick with terrible Vitamin deficiency diseases like Scurvy , beriberi and pellagra .

These are really terrible diseases that can kill you. Or, maybe they’ll just make you demented or turn your skin into a giant raw mess - just from a little vitamin deficiency.

The puzzle of each vitamin was solved through the work and contributions of epidemiologists, physicians, physiologists, and chemists. Research on the vitamins that are related to major deficiency syndromes began when the germ theory of disease was dominant and dogma held that only four nutritional factors were essential: proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and minerals. (Note the similarity to the dogma that is today’s NHS “5-A-Day” campaign) Clinicians soon recognized scurvy, beriberi, rickets and pellagra as specific vitamin deficiencies, rather than diseases, due to infections or toxins. The great news is, these conditions needed very little amounts of vitamins to have profound effects.

Imagine if there was a drug that cost pennies, had no side effects and literally worked in days to cure illness. Sounds pretty amazing, doesn’t it. Well, that's what vitamins do .

Take someone who’s vitamin deficient, someone who’s got scurvy for example, and give them Vitamin C. Within a few days they are better. and everything's good.

Everybody's got Vitamin C, right? Not necessarily so. Modern diets and the poor state of our food means somehow 10% of the western world are deficient in Vitamin C at a level that would cause scurvy.

So, long story short, our food supply has been hybridised to breed out nutrition. We can eat bread for starch, and maybe a little protein, but not for nutrients. Our food is also grown in soils that have very little organic matter and plants can't extract the nutrients from the soil. There are nutrients in the soil but the plants need the microorganisms in the soil to act as symbiotic helpers to extract those nutrients from the soil that then go into the plant.

Broccoli today is 50% less nutritious than it was 50 years ago.

Compound this with the fact we humans have increased nutrient needs because we're under chronic stress and we're exposed to environmental toxins. There were 80,000 new chemicals introduced into the marketplace since the early 1900s. Our bodies have to deal with all of the chemical reactions and detoxification and this all requires nutrients.

We are also under a tremendous amount of emotional stress in modern society. Our bodies use a lot more magnesium when combatting stress. A vicious circle starts because our bodies are much more susceptible to the effects of stress when we have reduced magnesium which was reduced by the stress in the first place. We need to supplement our diets with magnesium.

What about Omega-3 fats? We don't really get those in our modern diet because we don’t eat wild food anymore. Occasionally, maybe we eat some fish, but that's got mercury in it.

All of these problems have come about because of our nutritional environment. Now, more than ever, people need foundational nutritional support.

That’s not just a general opinion I chose to hold, but actually something based on hard scientific data.

"But, what about those scientific studies", I hear you say. "Aren’t they suspect?"

People go on about, “Oh, all the Vitamin studies showed that they don't prevent heart attacks. They don't prevent cancer. They don't do this, don't do that” or, “They may have side effects”.

I think it's confusing for people because there are loads of big studies and often they don't appear to show a result. That doesn't mean that a supplement is not effective or not important. All too often these studies are poorly designed or they don't take into account the biology of the nutrients.

If, for example, I give Vitamin E to a bunch of smoking, overweight, not exercising, junk-food-eating people, it’s not going to do anything. Supplements are not designed to replace a healthy diet and lifestyle.

Scientists did this large study called The Carrot Study where they gave beta carotene to smokers who were at high risk for lung cancer. Clinicians had observed that smokers who ate lots of fruits and vegetables containing beta carotene were healthier than their high-risk, smoking peers. But, when they actually gave the beta carotene as a supplement, the results showed more cancer. Now the scientists were like, “Oh, this is terrible! Something’s not working”.

This is a perfect example of what Michael Pollan calls “nutritionism”, which is reductionism in nutrients. What he means by this is you basically go, Oh, it's maybe this single thing. We'd better focus on (insert isolated nutrient here).”

It doesn't work like that.

Think about Cristiano Ronaldo, arguably the best football player in history. If you put him on the pitch by himself, even against Norwich City F.C., he could not win a single game. Nutrients work as a team. If you don't have all of them, your body chemistry kind of gets all gummed up and it can actually cause worse problems.

Basically, the Carrot Study gave high doses of beta carotene to the patients. If you actually understand basic biology and how antioxidants work in the system, they work as a team. The way they work is they donate an electron to some damaged tissue or free radical like an oxidised compound in the body. An antioxidant will actually help deal with oxidative stress or “rusting” in the body. But, the way it does it is it donates one of its electrons; then it becomes a radical.

Vitamin C is a great antioxidant - some would say the Cristiano Ronaldo of the Vitamin world. But to work, it donates one of its electrons and then it becomes an ascorbyl radical, which is highly dangerous. But, don't worry. You've got Vitamin E to donate an electron and give it to the Vitamin C and it becomes a tocopherol radical. That, then, has to be dealt with by all these systems like lipoic acid and that, in turn, is dealt with by glutathione.

So, you've got a whole system.

If you don't have all the antioxidants, and you don't have the final pathways of glutathione, you're going to get in trouble. You actually create more oxidative stress and more damage if you just give a high dose of a single nutrient.

Then, of course, we have to contend with how conventional medicine views supplements. This is really important. Many times doctors, and even our friends and family will say, “Oh, supplements. They just create expensive urine”. They insist supplements are a waste of time because “you'll get everything you need from food”.

We’ve already discussed the poor nutritional state of our soil and, provided you use supplements that are of high quality with high bioavailability, your body will take in what it needs and let go of the rest – which is exactly what it is supposed to do.

Basically, everybody should be boosting their diet with the right forms of nutrients in the right balance. In other words, it needs to be bio available.

For example. You can go to the supermarket or drugstore or online and buy magnesium oxide. The problem is, magnesium oxide is the cheapest form of magnesium and it's poorly absorbed. Or, you could be looking to buy folic acid. There’s a good chance your genetics won’t allow you to convert it to the effective form of folic acid called methylfolate. You need to buy methylfolate (5-MTHF) which is a stable and methylated form of folate. Methylfolate fulfils all the known uses of folic acid. Many supplements contain folic acid, however, folic acid has to undergo a number of steps within the body in order to be converted to the active form and some bodies simply don’t do the conversion very well. It's really important to know what your body needs and to supplement from a company that focuses on therapeutic products and these processes.

Fish oil is really important. There are many different kinds of fish oil and plenty to consider when you buy fish oil;

Where it comes from?
Are all of the toxins and mercury out of it?
Is it oxidised?
What's it preserved with?
What kind of animal is it from?

That’s a lot of questions.

There are also ways of processing the fish oil to make up the supplement that preserve a lot of the benefits of eating fish. This isn't used in the cheaper supermarket supplements.

What's so amazing about eating fish is that there are compounds that have been recently discovered that help regulate our immune systems. Our immune systems are very overactive and, as a result, we’re suffering with accelerated amounts of inflammation. There are techniques now that don’t destroy these pro-resolving mediators found in fish and actually retains them in the fish oil.

As we pointed out earlier, 90 plus percent of people are deficient in omega-3 fats. Individuals who are at the right Omega index had an extra three to five years life expectancy. We’re talking about essential fatty acids; they’re essential for life. Every cell membrane in your body is made out of them. Your brain is 60% made out of essential fatty acids. Your skin, your hair, your nails. All your body functions require essential fatty acids.

Essential fatty acids regulate inflammation including prostate gland inflammation. They regulate metabolism and blood sugar. If you’re deficient in them, you’re in trouble so it's really critical to get it right .

Vitamin D. 80% of us are deficient, or insufficient, in Vitamin D .

COVID highlighted the consequences of this because when you look at the data around COVID. If your Vitamin D level is higher you were actually 97% protected from ending up in the hospital or dying. At Vitamin D levels over 50 nmol/L, there were zero deaths. That is better than any vaccine out there. People are pretty much ignoring that for the most part.

A couple of important things to remember with Vitamin D. You need Vitamin D ₃ which is different than a lot of doctors are prescribing. An important consideration with D ₃ is Vitamin K ₂ . K ₂ is also a fat soluble Vitamin that works in conjunction with Vitamin D ₃ and helps with the improvement in cardiovascular and bone health. K ₂ should be made by your gut bacteria, but it's often not because our guts are messed up. And, one more consideration, K ₂ is available as MK-4 and MK-7 and it’s important to understand the different bioavailability and half-life issues of these supplements.

A couple other supplements to add for starters would be magnesium or, of course, magnesium rich foods and a probiotic because our guts are all so messed up. That is the stack that we like to start with.

Our The Possible You program is all about working with you to understand where you are today and where you want to be. Supplementation is an important part of that and we can help you make sure your supplement stack is made up of the right combination of quality nutrients.

So, you've got a whole system.

Basically, everybody should be boosting their diet with the right forms of nutrients in the right balance. In other words, it needs to be bio available.

Fish oil is really important. There are many different kinds of fish oil and plenty to consider when you buy fish oil;

Where it comes from?
Are all of the toxins and mercury out of it?
Is it oxidised?
What's it preserved with?
What kind of animal is it from?

That’s a lot of questions.

There are also ways of processing the fish oil to make up the supplement that preserve a lot of the benefits of eating fish. This isn't used in the cheaper supermarket supplements.

Vitamin D. 80% of us are deficient, or insufficient, in Vitamin D.

A couple of important things to remember with Vitamin D. You need Vitamin D3 which is different than a lot of doctors are prescribing. An important consideration with D3 is Vitamin K2. K2 is also a fat soluble Vitamin that works in conjunction with Vitamin D3 and helps with the improvement in cardiovascular and bone health. K2 should be made by your gut bacteria, but it's often not because our guts are messed up. And, one more consideration, K2 is available as MK-4 and MK-7 and it’s important to understand the different bioavailability and half-life issues of these supplements.

The Possible You is all about working with you to understand where you are today and where you want to be. Supplementation is an important part of that and we can help you make sure your supplement stack is made up of the right combination of quality nutrients.

You Try and You Try To Lose That Belly... It Might Not Be Down To Visceral Fat.

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 09:56:05 GMT

Why You Might Have a Big, Distended Belly When You’re not Actually Fat

Having a big belly when you’re not actually fat is a huge frustration for a lot of people. When you work hard to lose weight and you work hard to cut down belly fat and then, after all that work, you still have a big belly, it can be very disheartening.

If it seems that every time you eat you suffer bloating and look fat even though you're actually not, you may think to yourself, “Is just me” or “Is this diet working”?

The truth is, a lot of people face this issue. It can be something easy to fix such as intolerance to certain foods but left to its own devices, over time it can become something much more serious. Either way, it is important to get to the bottom of it.

As a matter of fact, I suffered from it and, through bio-hacking, I’ve managed to understand what is going on in my own body and I've helped a lot of people reverse bloating in their bodies.

What To Do When You Have a Big Belly But You're Not Actually Fat

There are a number of reasons why you might have a big belly that aren’t about visceral fat; the fat stored around your vital organs. Some people will have one of these issues, some people will have many of these issues; it really just depends on the individual. To understand what is going on, we need to breakdown the reason(s) you may have a lot of distension within your belly.

First of all, this bloating might come from irritation. If you have a lot of irritation within your gastrointestinal system then this will cause distension. This irritation is going to be caused by an inflammatory problem within the gut lining. This inflammatory problem is very dangerous because it can occur for years and years before being diagnosed as ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease or any of the major inflammatory issues within the gastrointestinal system. It starts as an inflammatory problem but eventually this can set off a cascade of many different events that cause a lot of distension in the gut.

If you're someone who is getting a lot of bloating you may have a lot of irritation within the gut lining and it's very important to work to reverse this.

Your doctor might suggest lowering sodium to decrease the fluid, or they might put a patient on diuretics. Sometimes they also drain out the fluid. Often, the problem is temporarily solved but, two or three weeks later, the patient is back for re-treatment.

The process within The Possible You helps to identify the causes of bloating. Together, we work through solutions to reverse this condition. Often it is something we can deal with through a nutritional approach but it is important to identify the underlying cause so we are choosing the best treatment.

The first thing we like to do is try a nutritional approach. The medicinal approach hasn’t proven to work as effectively and can present a lot of different side effects that you don't want.

Next we look at bacteria.

Bacteria is a problem that many people face and it’s really just because of an unhealthy lifestyle causing disfunction within the gastrointestinal system. Much of the bacteria that should be staying within the large intestine makes its way to the small intestines and as a result you get a lot of bloating. It seems that no matter what you eat, you get a whole bunch of bloating and distension. Simply starting to eat a “healthy diet” doesn’t necessarily fix the problem. Pretty much any starchy fibres, any vegetables, can cause this issue to become worse. It can be really difficult to reverse it even when you're behaving and eating “right”, it can take some time - it doesn't happen easily.

As a matter of fact, when it comes to any of these different gastrointestinal issues that lead to distention, they're not an overnight fix. We have to get the bacteria flushed from the small intestines and back into the large intestines where it belongs and keep it there to avoid fermentation of food in our gut.

One reason that bacterial bloating is really dangerous is because it leads to many different vitamin deficiencies. Even if you’re eating nutritious foods, the bacteria starts to eat all the nutrition so as a result you are not getting it and you’re suffering a nutritional deficiency.

Acidity is another important factor to consider.

This is a pH problem within the gut that a lot of people face. Some of the symptoms to look out for are excessive burping. If you're someone who, after you eat a meal finds that it just sits in your stomach like a rock, and it feels really heavy and you have this enormous full feeling for a couple hours and then it just goes away completely and you're hungry, this is due to an acidity problem. Your gut is having a hard time breaking down your food because your stomach is too alkaline. As a result, it causes a lot of distension and it also leads to many other problems because the pH of your stomach should be acting as a trigger to set off a number of other functions within the gastrointestinal system. When that pH's off, some of these functions don't occur and as a result you end up with a lot of distension and a lot of bloating; you don't feel well in that you can't break down your food. A lot of times people who have this issue have a hard time with meat; you eat meat and it just feels like a boulder in your stomach.

Another symptom may be that you're eating salad and, (Look away now if you’re squeamish) when your salad comes out, it basically looks the same as it did when it went in. You’re just not breaking that food down.

That naturally, brings us to digestion.

When we say digestion, what we’re referring to is the ability to actually breakdown your food so that it can be utilised in your body for nutrition. Some people don't have the proper elements within their gut in order to breakdown the food. What happens when you can't breakdown food is it sits in your gut and it ferments. That fermentation causes excessive bloating. What we have to do is make sure that we've put in the proper elements to start breaking our food down right. The entire digestion process is important from the moment the food enters your mouth.

The next possible cause of bloating is food sensitivity.

Some people have a sensitivity to food simply because their immune system decides, “I don't like that food”. It can be because you have an inflammatory irritation issue within the gut or it can be due to immune dysregulation.

It can be due to a lot of different problems but the fact is, your body doesn't like what your body doesn't like.

Basically, what will happen within 24 to 48 hours of consuming suspect foods is you will find that you have the discomfort of distension from that particular food. It isn’t only sugar or carbohydrates that cause distension. That cause can be something as healthy as a strawberry, a blueberry, a vegetable... Food sensitivities are confusing because they’re not obvious; we don't know immediately what they are. The best way to actually track what is bothering us is to chart what we’re eating and how we feel afterwards. A food chart makes it easier to correlate what food is causing distension and then remove that from our diet.

So far we’ve looked at the more common causes of bloating. A smaller percentage of people with bloating and distension are suffering from ascites. Ascites occurs when you have a severe liver problem. With Ascites you can have excessive swelling and distension in the gut simply because the scarring in the liver is causing the fluid to increase in the vessels in the liver and then push fluid into the abdominal cavity. If you get a whole bunch of fluid in the abdominal cavity it's likely that you have serious liver problems.

This isn't somebody who has a minor fatty liver. This is something to take seriously.

Many people today have fatty liver that is actually leading to severe liver degeneration. If you're having this problem you might have advanced liver damage.

Here are some different scenarios as to why you might be having this problem with some different symptoms associated with this. It is really critical to identify this is an issue for you because if you have these symptoms, you really need to go see your doctor.

If you have;

sudden weight gain
decreased appetite
abdominal pain
nausea
vomiting and then heartburn.

If you're having these different symptoms and then your belly is distended you need to visit your doctor. There is a good chance this is associated with some pretty deep liver damage and you need to work with your doctor to start implementing a lot of different nutritional protocols.

At an early stage, we can help reverse a fatty liver to help prevent cirrhosis of the liver. We can also coach you through adopting a healthier lifestyle to help with the problem.

The Possible You helps you identify the underlying issues of your bloating and creates a plan in order to fix the problem. We understand the complexity of these issues. Whether it's inflammation or it's pH and alkalinity or if it's a problem with bacterial overgrowth, we’ll create a plan and monitor it to make sure we’re resetting your system to prevent issues like this from are occurring.

It is important to remember that this condition doesn't happen overnight; it takes years to develop. Often it is asymptomatic; you won't even have any symptoms until it is well advanced. Another important thing to remember is, it took time to develop and it will take time to recover.

A couple of good starting points are:

Cutting out sugar.

Sugar pretty much just messes all of this up so we want to make sure that we're cutting out sugar. And, that pretty much goes for any health problems that you're facing.

Remove the food sensitivities.

Journal and chart your food. When you chart your food, you realise what particular foods are causing you to have a lot of distension. Once you remove them from your diet you can isolate whether they are a source of your problem. Once you remove them you're going to be way better off for it and you're going to feel so much better.

The gut is a very difficult thing to work with. There's so little understanding of gut issues because of years of incorrect information. What the television is advising you to use to correct your gut problems is usually the opposite of what really works.

It also can be very difficult to stay the course because treatment of these issues can take time. The Possible You is all about coaching you to help you have a much-improved chance of creating a new, healthier lifestyle .

The Possible You provides a pathway for you that will actually help you reduce bloating and allow your body to be more receptive to the nutrition you should be getting from your food.