← BETTER! with Dr. Stephanie Estima | Strength, Body Composition & Perimenopause
BETTER! with Dr. Stephanie Estima | Strength, Body Composition & Perimenopause
How Gut Health Affects Muscle Mass: A Masterclass on Digestion with Wade Lightheart
01:22:13
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We're the only species on the planet that cooks its food, radiates the food, pasteurizes the food. And what does that do? It destroys the natural enzymes, microbes and bacteria that might be present in that food in a way to eliminate the food, to store it for longer periods of time so it has shelf space, et cetera. Now we're robbing an element that most nutritionists don't ever address, and that is the enzymes in bacteria cultures that would normally be present in that food have been eliminated. And so we've altered the digestive process of humanity throughout all of history.
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It isn't about being perfect, it's about being better. Hello, My name is Dr. Stephanie Stima and I host expert discussions with thought leaders in all facets of health, including nutrition, fitness, hormones, stress management, performance recovery, longevity, health span and energy production. On this show we discuss complex science, but then we also alchemize it into actionable everyday living. The ultimate goal with the show is to assist you in making informed decisions about your health and to catapult you into being the hero in your own life. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to better with Dr. Stephanie. It's me, your host, Dr. Stephanie Estima. And today we are talking all about digestion, midlife and magnesium. Yes, we're going to make all three of those completely part of our personality today. My guest is Wade Lightheart. He is a three time Canadian natural bodybuilding champion. He is one of the world's premier authorities on natural nutrition and training methods. He majored in sports science at the University of New Brunswick and he is one of the co founders of Bio Optimizers, one of my favorite magnesium supplements of all time. So what we are talking about today is some of the different components of digestion. So Wade does a beautiful job going through each stage of digestion, what is required at each of those stages and then if we are deficient, what we can do about it. So we talk about enzymes, we talk about probiotics, we talk about hydrochloric acid and low stomach acid and high stomach acid and how those things change as we age. And then we talk about compounds like calcium and magnesium and how we often run magnesium deficient in midlife and what we can do about it. This conversation I don't think we've had on the show before. Somebody described digestion in the way that Wade and I described it. So I think this can be really, really useful for you, especially if you're somebody who is now trying to consume a higher protein diet and maybe noticing, you know, I'LL say politely, GI distress from consuming so much protein. You're seeing the gassiness, the bloating, the digestive upset that can happen with a higher protein diet in midlife, especially if your microbiome and your body's really used to consuming that. So there's going to be a lot of helpful and actionable takeaways here. Share this far and wide with your protein girlies, your gym going girlies, and with that, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Wade Leart. Ladies, if you are exercising a lot and in perimenopause, minerals are going to be required to optimize your hormones without sending them for a loop. Have you ever hit a wall in the middle of the day? Like it's 2pm you're feeling good and then out of nowhere you're exhausted, you're hangry, and then you end up raiding the pant? Well, there's a simple reason for why this happens. And the good news is, of course, it's an easy fix. You need to give your body more minerals. If you struggle with fatigue, cravings, headache, hunger, brain fog, or any of the other very common side effects that can happen during perimenopause, I recommend trying Beam minerals. They make one of the best mineral supplements on the market and all you do is take a single shot of the mineral rich liquid every morning. And that's exactly what I do on an empty stomach. It just tastes like water and contains every mineral that your body needs. Needs. And they don't contain fillers, sweeteners or any of that other stuff, so it won't disrupt your gut or add any hidden calories to your day. Head over to beamminerals.com and use code better for 20% off your first order. All right. Wade Lightheart, welcome to the Better Podcast. So happy to have you here today.
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Great to be here.
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Yeah, let's, let's dive into digestion. We've had people who've talked about the microbiome for sure on the podcast before. One of the things I wanted to really explore with you is, and this comes from your muscle building background is now, of course we see this like protein forward protein centric recommendation that I myself follow. You know, I'm also a former figure competitor, so I totally get it. I've been having high protein for a long time, but now that it's sort of reaching mainstream, we have these beautiful women in midlife, right? They're 40, they're 50, they're, they've been eating like little rabbits, you know, like 20s and 30s they were having salads and the kale and the macrobiotic diets and all. Whatever it was is they were consuming maybe having 40 grams of protein, protein, 50 grams of protein, 60 grams of protein a day. And now in this sort of new era of, of high protein diets, they're going from that to like 120, 130, 140 grams of protein daily, which of course shreds the gut. GI distress will politely say, causing lots of distension, bloating, gassiness, this kind of thing. So walk us through maybe the interplay or what is happening with protein digestion and how that changes and our capacity to digest protein changes as we age.
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Yeah, it's interesting because I've probably worked with more females than I have men. And I, for whatever reason, I'm becoming popular in the, I would say the middle age, menopausal crowd for a couple of reasons, because of largely in part, the traction that you referred to is that suddenly women are heading into a part of their life where they're falling apart essentially and they're like, what's going on? I was doing this and I was doing fine and all of a sudden I have no muscle tone and I have these flabby arms and I want sugar or I want wine at night or I can't get enough coffee and I'm running around and I feel like I'm trying to do too many things at once and my physiology and my physique is falling apart. And why I think there's such a move to protein for females and for other people is because when it comes to esthetics, first and foremost, there's nobody that has figured out looking good, better than the bodybuilding and fitness market. They've established the parameters of how to master your metabolism, hormonal optimization, all of that stuff was figured out by bodybuilders and fitness competitors and people in that athletes like 70 years ago. And so finally it's having its day. One of the challenges that most females I think come into this as like, oh my God, I have to lift weights and eat all this protein, I'm going to get too big. Let me tell you, that's not going to happen. It's really hard to build muscle. It's even harder to build muscle as a middle aged man and it's harder to build muscle as a middle aged female. Okay. And so I want to put that to bed. You're not going to get too big, you're not going to be some bodybuilding champion. It was that easy like everybody would look like that. And it's just not going to happen. So let's get that aside. Second, one of the reasons that people are able to master their metabolism in that market is because of satiety. Protein creates satiety. There's two essential ways to focus on satiety. Satiety means feeling full protein because it's slow digesting and fiber. And so what typically happens, you talked about like a lot of females that were on maybe the complete plant based diet or macrobiotic diet, or eating very low amounts of food that was okay, maybe in a optimized hormonal environment. When you're in your 20s and you can get away with a lot of things because you have the hormonal capacity to offset your suboptimal diet and it kind of works. But then as your hormones start to shift, then all of a sudden that diet doesn't deliver, you get the food cravings. You might not be as energized. You might be relying on stimul, stimulants, et cetera, in order to get through the day. So the other way to get satiety is through fiber, and that's an unknown aspect. The problem with fiber is a lot of people have challenge digesting that as well. So either you have a trouble with protein digestion or fiber digestion. Those two elements are most common. Now some people are more carbohydrate rich. And you can do a simple genetics test and you're gonna see how well you metabolize either carbohydrates or fats. For example, my business partner's a keto gu, he does really well on fats. I'm a plant based guy because I don't do very well on fats, right? I do really well on carbohydrates. My business partner doesn't do that way. And I've seen every variance of that. So I think having a doctor such as yourself to be able to do some basic genetic testing and hormonal testing and see the cross correlations between your hormones and your DNA is going to really be helpful. Get an expert, because what's working for your friend might not be right for you. Let's talk about the challenges of when you up your protein. What typically happens when you go from a low protein diet to a high protein diet? Number one, your microbiome probably isn't in the optimized aspect for that. Two, you might have some other areas to address. And that happened to me. I learned this way back when I was 31 years old. I competed at the Mr. Universe contest. I came out of that contest, I gained 42 pounds of fat and water in 11 weeks. Don't do that at home. And the reason was I was trying to adapt a bodybuilding style diet to a plant based program. There was no plant based proteins. It was really, really rough. And so I looked good on the outside, but I was a disaster on the inside, unfortunately. I met a guy by the name Dr. Michael O', Brien, learned about enzymes and probiotics. It's like almost 20 with a slight 21 to 22 years ago. No one was talking about it then. And I started implementing enzymes, hydrochloric acid and proteolytic probiotics. And I'm going to explain that in a second what that is. When I did that, within six months, not only did I recapture my physique, but I had a new level of energy and vitality. My hormonal optimization went through the root. I was like, okay, this is really, really working. And that led me to really focus on what's going on with our digestion in particular and how does that relate to diet, aesthetics, hormone optimization, satiety, all of those things. And I broke it down into essentially five stages if I was to break them all down. There's like millions of different things happening in digestive, but there's five general aspects. Number one, the taste, touch, sensory element of food. What's interesting, if you go to, say, India and you study Ayurvedic medicine, they believe in eating the food with their hands. And part of that is an electrical aspect, but it's a sensory aspect. So we smell the food, taste food. And if you think about what are the most popular foods in North America? Finger foods, pizza, burgers, fries, tapas. We're actually interacting and touching and tasting and feeling, sensing the food. And in order to optimize that state, you need to be in what they call the rest and relax phase of digestion. That's why when you go to a nice restaurant, they're playing soft music, they have a nice lighting, it's very calm and centered and you're having an enjoyable time in order to set the body up for rest. Now how many people are doing that with kids and school and career and all that stuff? You know, it's like if they have babies, it's like, you know, the one arm, the one arm meals, you know, you got one kid on your side and you're on the phone and the other thing and you're trying to eat something with one arm, you know, now you can Structure that in a way that's good, but the rest and relax part, like really taking the time out for your food to. For the sensory experience sets your body up for the rest of the process. Because if you're in a overly caffeinated adrenaline, you know, you know, suboptimal, like stress physiology. Exactly, which most people today are, then you're already setting yourself up for disruption. It's going to exaggerate those conditions that we're going to talk about next. Once you masticate the food, which is a fancy name for chewing, your body actually looks at it and says, okay, what enzymes do I need to break down this food? And it starts to manufacture in those liver and either they'll release it in the pancreas or the gallbladder later on. That's not actually how we were naturally made for digestion. We're the only species on the planet that cooks it. Foods, radiates the food, pasteurizes the food. And what does that do? It destroys the natural enzymes, microbes and bacteria that might be present in that food in a way to eliminate the food, to store it for longer periods of time so it has shelf space, et cetera. Now, I'm not against all of the modern elements that allows us to store food or to cook food or any of that sort of stuff. What I can say, though is we're robbing an element that most nutritionists don't ever address, and that is the enzymes in bacteria cultures that would normally be present in that food have been eliminated. And so we've altered the digestive process of humanity throughout all of history. And that's a big awareness factor. Like, if I'm a tiger, I eat my zebra raw. If I'm a bear, I eat my salmon and my blueberries raw. If I'm a horse or a cow, I eat the grass or the hay raw. And so there was a whole raw food movement. I did that for two years to explore the avenues of that. And it's. It's a great way to live, except you don't have a social life because you're the weirdest person in every room all the time. And it becomes very difficult to do that. So what can a person do? Because in that when the food travels down the esophagus into the stomach, it's divided into two categories. The first half is the first 30 to 60 minutes of digestion where it's in the upper cardiac portion of the stomach. This is where the enzymes present in the food is supposed to start breaking down, especially key amino acids. And some of the simple sugars. The second, the next part that happens, this would be the third phase, is where hydrochloric acid is then released 30 to 60 minutes after you begin digestion. Now, hydrochloric acid has two distinct functions. One, it is a substance that will kill bacteria, microbes, viruses, bugs that might be on food, etc. So it's, it's your first stage of your immune system. And keep in mind, it's a thing like when you eat food. And this is a big concept that people don't get. They think that it just automatically goes into the system, but it has to go through this digestive process. It's a single canal from your mouth to your butt. So the food's in that canal, but it's not in your cells, it's not in your tissues, it's not in your bones, it's not in your muscles, it's not in your blood. It has to go through this process. And if any element of this is disrupted, then you are going to experience digestion. I'll talk about the symptoms. The hydrochloric acid serves a second part, and that is it changes the ph of your food from either an alkaline or slightly acidic element to a higher and higher level of acidity that deactivates some enzymes and activates others which are ph sensitive. Okay, so as the, for example, if it starts, if you look at the proteases, an enzyme family that breaks down protein, you'll see on a really good enzyme formulation, It'll have like 6.0, 4.5 and 3.0. Why is that? Well, that means that it shows the center point of a bandwidth from which those enzymes actually work, what ph they work. And if you don't have all of those proteases in an enzyme formulation, forget it, it's not going to work. And I'll talk about enzymes in a minute. The next phase, you release what's called, as it enters out of the stomach into the intestinal tract, your body releases what's called bicarbonate minerals. It's a fancy name for alkaline minerals, you know, so magnesium, calcium, et cetera, like that, which buffers the acids that would damage your intestinal tract. So you only have this hydrochloric acid in your stomach for a short period of time during that, you know, initial stages of digestion. And then it has to be buffered, otherwise you'll end up with a dual denal ulcer or something like that. If that, that food leaks in and that happens to some people, which is a serious, serious condition if you have like hyperacidity or you have an H. Pylori infection, for example, which is a lot of acid reflux and heartburn issues before it gets into the, into the intestine tract.
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Here's where the magic happens in your intestinal tract, which the market is now starting to understand. But they kind of, they're here in this fourth stage and they haven't even talked about the three stages. So you hear all of these things about your microbiome, probiotics, suboptimal bacteria, etc. Basically, it works like this. The microbiome is the collection of all the bacteria in your intestinal tract. I would say 10% of them are really good, 10% of them are really bad. And 80% are kind of like opportunists based on what you're eating, they will grow and respond or they will reduce and kind of go dormant until things change with your diet. So if you make a dietary change, oftentimes there's three to four weeks before you, your, your microbiome gets used to, and that's really the changing of that micro or microbiome. And then the final stage is the removal of all that, which is your waste, which is, you know, you eat. If you have problems there, you're going to either get constipation or diarrhea, one of the two, okay. It's because you have a suboptimal excavation that's all controlled through what's called peristaltic movement, smooth muscle contraction that goes through the entire digestion system. And if that's working properly, you eat, you go to the bathroom regularly, you don't feel gassy, you don't feel bloated, you don't have heart dang, you don't have that little poofy feeling over top of your jeans after you eat and go, what the hell happened last night? So let's break down. What are the symptoms to understand and what is some way to figure out if you're having that challenge, Especially if you just go from one side and you start increasing protein. Number one, you probably don't have the proteolytic enzymes inside your digestion to start. And a lot of people, if they just take a few caps of a really good proteolytic, I would say multi strain enzyme. So what I mean by that is protease break down protein, amylase enzymes break down carbohydrates, lipase enzymes break down fats, and cellulase enzymes break down fiber. So depending on your style of diet, for example, if you're on a keto style diet where you're having very low vegetable matter, you probably don't need to really address the cellulose issue, right? You're just not eating a lot of plants. If you're on say a more vegetarian or plant centered diet, probably a little bit of cellulase in your diet would also be helpful. If you're dealing with protein, you really want to focus on protease. And of course, if you have suboptimal carbohydrate metabolism, some amylase enzymes, and if you have trouble with fats or you have a high fat diet, you want to make sure that you have some lipase inside of that. And there's four different types of lipases that would address suboptimal fat digestion. Now keep in mind, people that struggle on hormonal aspects often have incomplete digestion of really good fats. Either they don't have the really good fats in their diet, or they're not able to break down those fats. And that was a condition that I had when I would experiment with a ketogenic diet. I would just get fat in my stool because I wasn't able to break down. So genetically I'm not optimized for fat metabolism. That's why I moved towards more plant carbohydrate. So I use protein, carbohydrates and fiber primarily as my food sources with a little bit of essential fatty acids. Where my business partner goes, high fat, high protein, low, low plant, low plant, low carbohydrate. So you have to get those nuances down with what feels right for you, what keeps you satiated, and what keeps your hormones optimized. A simple way to test that is take fresh lemons and squeeze out maybe like 2 tablespoons after a meal and just put that after a meal, just take the spoonfuls or put it on your food or whatever. And if you notice that you don't have that reaction to that food, just probably means that you need enzymes. Almost everybody needs enzymes. But that's a good chance to putting.
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Some type of acid on the food, like the citric acid that you're talking about.
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Yeah, there are some enzymes, yeah, there's also some enzymes in lemons and limes in particular, that can advance some of the breakdown of proteins or advance hydrochloric acid. Hydrochloric acid, as we get older, tends to diminish in its production. Now, why is that a challenge? Well, if you go into that first, that, that stage where the food drops into the, into the, into the stomach and inside the stomach, you have this production of hydrochloric acid. You don't have sufficient enough. What happens is the food begins to ferment in the stomach and not breaking down in properly. And what happens, you have a little sphincter on the top. It's a little fat on the top of the. Your stomach, and that flap pops open. And when that pops open, you get some of the acid and some of that food charm coming up into the, into your esophages. And that's not good. First off, it's felt as heartburn, acid reflux, burping, all that sort of stuff. If left unchecked, that is a pathway to esophageal cancer, which is on the rise dramatically in the modern world. Now, there are some elements like, you know, various chemicals in the food that can contribute to that, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it's usually you don't have enough hydrochloric acid and hydrochloric. And you can test this. Simple way to test this is just take 4 ounces of water, it's like little cup, and take a quarter to a half teaspoon of baking soda, mix it in the water, drink it on an empty stomach. If you burp within five minutes, You've got enough hydrochloric acid.
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The famous burp test.
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Yeah. If you don't burp in five minutes, you probably would benefit from a hydrochloric acid tab that's, you know, relatively inexpensive. Inexpensive. And for most people, I would say on the digestive side, hydrochloric acid is amazing for a lot of people as they age and what it does for them, you know, and it's, it's, it's pretty inexpensive. It's like one cap will usually do the trick. If that's left unchecked, you start getting what's called an H. Pylori overgrowth. And that can be very bad for your immune system and cause a whole host of orders. I won't go into all the details of that, but you really want to check that that little digestive test will be sufficient then as the next stage. And this is where people get gas, bloating, constipation, and diarrhea if you are not breaking down your proteins properly. Now, most probiotics on the market today and will focus on either they'll, they live on either fiber or carbohydrates. And there is a test called the infogest test, which is the gold standard of determining how bacteria operate, what mediums they grow on, are they resistant to pharmaceuticals, are they resistant to genetically modified foods, if something is genotoxic, cytotoxic, in other words, disruptive to the genes or disruptive to the cells, what mediums they live on, what bacteria cultures they work with, what are they opposed to, et cetera. And we use that in our lab. We have a microbiology lab in Bosnia with 20 PhDs and master students working and literally testing. We've tested, I think, every bacteria culture that's available out there. We've tested all the mediums that they grow well on. We test what happens when food hits it. It's really cool stuff that they do, and then whether that food crosses the intestinal bar and gets absorbed by the cells. So we do that for all our products, everything that we develop and all of those elements to see if you're actually getting what you're supposed to be getting. Because it's not what you eat, it's what you digest, absorb, and utilize. So when you go to these high protein diets, if you don't have, and you've been living on, say, a low protein diet for your life, you probably don't have the bacteria cultures inside your intestinal attack that break down proteases because they're so rare and, and they're very hard to get. One of the best strains out there is a strain called L. Planterum. And L. Planterum is one of the few bacterias, it's a very aggressive strain, it's very robust, and it has proteolytic capabilities. In other words, it feeds on proteins. Ironically, what causes most of the cognitive distress and body distress is undigested proteins that leak into the systems. If you heard of leaky gut, basically what happens is undigested proteins leak through. If you want to say gaps or holes in this little thin. This little thin layer on the edge of your intestinal tract. And then these proteins get into the bloodstream and you have an immune system response saying, oh no, I have an enemy. And you get this hyper response of white blood cells. Or in worst cases, you get allergy functions. But what you feel, I feel bloated, I feel gassy, I feel tired. You can wake up in the morning with crusty eyes. If you get crusty eyes or you have bad breath chronically in the morning, those are good indications that you have unsavory bacteria in your intestinal tract. Like I would say part of the 10% of those bad guys which are breaking down that protein and creating a bunch of toxins inside of the system that your body has to deal with. And this, over time, weakens your immune system response. So how do you optimize your digestion? For people who are switching over to a high protein diet, I would say get on proteolytic enzymes and get on a probiotic that is proteolytic. We actually developed one called L. Plantarum M Strain, which we took L. Plantarum. The medical doctor that we worked with, Dr. O', Brien, who instructed me on all this 20 years ago, he took this bacteria culture, put it through a toxic soup which is kind of like Navy SEALS training. It's like it just beats the crap out of it, Runs a little sine wave through it. I don't even know how they figured all this stuff out. About 2% of those bacteria survive, but during that process they mutate and they were able to get a patent that I can't even state what. The patent is online under the current FTC guidelines, although there is a US Patent given for this particular strain of probiotics that are proteolytic, but it's extremely robust. We've tested every single bacteria culture against it. There's nothing tougher, more durable, or that replicates faster than L. Plantarum Omstrin. We actually have a product that we have that product. Dr. O' Brien before he passed, gave us access to that, which was really nice because he was the only guy that had it at the time. And then we got to get it. So it was those two elements, proteolytic enzymes and, and proteolytic probiotics resolved all my digestive issues. And it's resolved almost every single digestive issue that I've seen in the last 20 years. Those two elements now we focused when we got into the enzyme world, we make several different enzyme formulas. One which I call, we call mass signs, which is enzymes for the masses. It's 17 enzymes, high level protease. It really covers the whole bulk of whatever you're 80% of the people would take that product, fixes all of that stuff. If you're a ketogenic style person then, or you have a high fat constitution in your diet or have trouble with fats, then you might move to something like Capex. And if you're a plant based person, you could use vegzymes, which is focused for plant based digestion, a lot of cellulase and stuff like that and a little bit more amylase. But mass times for most people fixes that. So those two elements will optimize your digestion and then that allows you to transport what you're eating into the cells of your body. That's the key. So if you understand those five stages, then you can troubleshoot. If you have acid reflux, heartburn, probably need hydrochloric acid. If you are opposed or having challenges with your protein, proteolytic enzymes, proteolytic probiotics, and you'll correct that within a couple of days. It's really remarkable.
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B
So I love this idea of. So here's the five stages of digestion that you've, that you've described. And then for the women who are like, yes, I want to be the muscle mommy now, like I want to build the muscle. This is also, if we're optimizing for digestion is also going to optimize our capacity for muscle hypertrophy. Right. And strength, which as we know we've talked about this on the show, a thousand, like two different outcomes are often, they often go together. But your ability to build muscle, like you said, is not. You're not just what you eat, you are what you digest, absorb and transport. So if you're able to get more of these amino acids being broken down by these proteolip proteolytic enzymes and these proteolytic probiotics, then you're going to be able to transport this substrate, these building blocks for the muscle to the myocyte or to the muscle cell and you're going to be able to build more muscle and you're going to also, you know, to your point, you know, reduce some of that GI distress that so many women, that so many women suffer with. So, and I'm assuming that was your. When you were kind of fixing your own digestion, did you notice a change in your ability to put on mass and understanding you're a male, but you know, men and women, we both, you know, we both have the capacity to put on muscle just to the degree obviously is different because of a variety of different things. But did you, once you sort of fixed your, your own digestion through the use of these probiotics and these enzymes, did you notice that your ability to put on muscle was easier? Like what, did you notice any difference there at all? Or am I, or is that, is that incorrect, an incorrect line of thinking?
- [32:39]
A
Yeah, thanks for asking. Most people don't ask that question. Absolutely. And I have actual documented proof of that. So. When I had my first digestive distress area, I was 31 years old and I worked on this for four years. We coached over 15,000 people. We developed a proteolytic based enzyme ourselves, which is what we were talking about. We still have people on subscription for 20 years on that product, if you can believe it. But.
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Well, that's a testament to the product, which is fantastic.
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Amazing, amazing. And to understand that I came back four years later and was so successful with it, not only did I have more muscle, but I did world championships again at the Natural Olympia on a raw food diet to prove even though I took in less protein than I was, I literally took in a third of the amount of protein I did. When I blew out my digestion. I was able to put on more muscle in four years than I was than I competed at 31, even though my hormone level was starting to drop off at that time. Because, you know, performance for athletics, you're at your peak physiologically around 28, and you can still build muscle, but there's certain elements that are just not as great. And then stayed on that protocol two years ago at 50, went back to the Natural Olympia and I had the same, actually a little bit better muscle mass than I had when I was 31 years old, 19 years later and went back to the world championships again, beat kids in my own category. And I want to also put something out there too. None of those conditions were hormonally Enhanced. So I was not taking steroids, I was not taking trt, I was not taking any hormone augmentation because the contests I were competing in were natural based. And that's an important aspect.
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B
You're a natty.
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A
Yeah. And I have nothing against hormonal optimization or any of those aspects. But what I wanted to be able to create as my mission to help people get healthier is I wanted to replicate an environment that was more compatible with the average person. Because when you are taking a variety of hormones, you improve protein synthesis at the muscle site and you improve nervous system response to build muscle, et cetera. There's a variety of things that anabolics and you know, the things that bodybuilders or strength athletes will use to augment. And unfortunately the challenge with that is you don't know how much of that muscle growth is attributed to the hormone optimization or the hormone maximization, I think in the sport versus what's actually working over time. Because let me tell you, my hormones are not the same in my 50s as they were when they are in the 30s. And this is even more pronounced for females because females hormonal physiology runs on a 28 day cycle. Men's run on a one day cycle. You know, give or take. Depending on what your, what your period is, it could be, you know, a little bit less or, you know, 35 days or whatever. And then it starts to get even spottier as you go through menopause. And these elements which you start to adjust to those massive fluctuations in your hormonal, your, your endocrine system.
- [35:51]
B
Did you know that Collagen levels drop 30% in the first five years after menopause? So if you are noticing your skin becoming drier, duller or less firm, there is a scientific reason why this is happening. As estrogen levels decline during perimenopause and menopause, it is going to impact your cell's ability to produce collagen. Not only is that going to affect the appearance of your skin, but it's going to weaken your skin barrier so it changes how your skin functions as well. One skin's topical supplements are proven to boost your natural collagen supply and strengthen the skin barrier. Unlike other products that focus on surface benefits, one skin works at the cellular level. In lab studies, their eye cream was shown to improve collagen by 130%. Not a typo, 130, 130%. And their face cream increased collagen by 40%, similar to what you'd expect from a retinol and they are powered by One skin's proprietary peptide which will improve skin barrier and function. If you want to try their eye cream or their face cream or any of one skin science, use code better at Oneskin co better and you are going to get 15 off of your first order. That's oneskin co better and use code better at checkout.
- [37:07]
A
I'm pretty confident. And then that's one of the reasons why I became so popular on female podcasts. Because, okay, yeah, I'm a bodybuilder, I'm a dude, I'm kind of coming from that place. But I figured out this in a natural environment and in a suboptimal hormone environment, applied it to females and it works the same thing for females. The one thing I would say to accelerate the understanding, because you touched on it briefly, but people think they need protein for muscles. They need amino acids. That means the protein needs to be broken down and converted into amino acids and delivered across the intestinal bar so that your body can utilize it. Any disruption in the digestive process is going to be counteractive to your goals to look your best and feel your best. And I didn't understand this. I was classically trained as a nutritionist and stuff. And they just give these little briefs on enzymes and these little briefs on probiotics. Oh yeah, there's 25,000 different enzymes in the body and they're responsible for thinking and blinking. But you know, you got two paragraphs in it like a 500 page textbook. And when I dove into it, I went to. And I would encourage people who really want to get and understand this from a longevity and health optimization aspect, read Dr. Howe's Food Enzymes for health and longevity or enzyme nutrition. And he took all of these different species of animals, rats, cats, dogs, horses, cows, you name it. And he did these experiments. This is way back in like the 40s. And he said what we found was if we fed an enzymatically deficient diet to the species, they didn't live as long and they developed a higher amount of diseases. If we fed them a raw food diet, they lived a little longer and they didn't have as many diseases or didn't get them as soon. And then if we sub, if we optimized it by adding exogenous enzymes to their food, whether it was cooked or raw, guess what? They lived longer than the other species. Now when you started tracking generations of species on an enzymatically deficient diet, it here was the shocking results that he was able to produce by the third generation, all of the species. Notice three characteristics. One, the inability to procreate, Two, strange sociological behaviors not native to that species. And three was a dramatic rise in genetic mutations because enzymes are really critical in a lot of DNA, RNA transcriptions, etc. And he predicted back then that the human population, because of mass production of food and non excessive and a high highly deficient enzyme diet and a bunch of chemicals that also eat road or enzymatic capacity, that we would be running into a lot of genetic diseases in our third generation and an inability to procreate and strange sociological behaviors in humans. Now I only have to go on the Internet for a few minutes and I'm convinced about the strange sociological behavior.
- [40:28]
B
And you can find, yeah, you can find the strange social behaviors and look.
- [40:32]
A
At the rise of fertility clinics and look at the rise of genetic based diseases in the last four years. Like one of the encouraging aspects is Robert Kennedy is now addressing the chronic disease condition. And our medical models have primarily focused on treating the symptoms of diseases, which is about 8%. But the bulk of the problems are happening into, you know, people are getting sick or they're getting cancers, or they're getting all of these, or they can't procreate all these things because of chemical overload in their foods, because enzymes also are what's required to break down toxic chemicals. So I said it's not so much you can't control all the toxins in the environment. You're just getting so much despite your best eating. Everything you're trying to do, what you want to do is increase your capacity to manage the toxic load that you're having. And as you start to age and you get into that menopausal aspect now you have a real problem because one of the elements of a woman having a period, it's actually also, it's, you know, it's to get pregnant, but it's also to detoxify the system so that you have an optimized state for that embryo to produce. And a lot of people just don't realize that. And so when women start losing that, well then it's, it's accelerating the impact of toxicity inside of the system. Because they never addressed this in maybe in their lives. And it's even more impactful for women who had really great hormones because they could probably get away with a lot more things than they could when they get older. And then all of a sudden they can come to me and they would come to me back when I was a personal trainer 20 years and they go like, wait, I've been fit all my life. I've been working out all the time. I eat really good, and suddenly I've hit my late 30s or my 40s, and I feel like I'm falling apart. I feel like my skin doesn't look the same way. I feel like my butt starting to sag. You know, I can't build muscle. I find myself not feeling kind of depressed or not feeling up to par. And all of that comes down to amino acid transfer to make the neurochemicals, the polypeptide chains to detoxify the body. So enzymes are really critical in, like I said, 25,000 different enzymatic processes. And any one of those are suboptimal, we'll experience as a symptom.
- [42:51]
B
I love everything you're saying here because I think one of the things I've talked about this on the show before, like, we are fans of hormone therapy here at the Better Podcast. However, hormone therapy is not going to lift the weights for you. It's not going to set boundaries for you. It's not going to fix, in this case, your enzymatic degradation. That's a natural consequence of aging. And so you can get on hormones because you're feeling changes in mood and affect, maybe changes in sleep, changes in body composition, but you still have to fix your digestion. Like, the hormones can maybe mask that for a little bit, but they are not going to. You cannot outrun bad digestion with hormone replacement therapy. And so I talk about that in the context of, like, you know, I sort of joke. It's like, it's like, sorry, not sorry, joking, not joking. Like, you know, hormones are not going to lift heavy weights for you. Hormones are not going to set boundaries with your mother. Like, only you can do those things, right? Like, hormones are not going to make you have sauerkraut and, you know, healthy proteins and all that and digest and be able to absorb those things. Only you can do that, right? So talk a little bit about why, you know, or maybe sort of the. Maybe the right word is confounding, you know, because someone might go to their doctor and say, I'm feeling like my digestion is not the way it should be. My body composition isn't the way that I should be. And then she, you know, and now we're starting to see more and more practitioners say, okay, well, maybe we need to consider hormone replacement therapy. And I think that that's definitely. Every woman should have the ability to have that conversation with her pcp, her primary healthcare provider, and figure out whether that's the right next step for them. And I also like to think about hormones as a, it can happen in step with the other lifestyle levers that have to be mastered. Like the hormones are not gonna fix, like I said, lack of lean muscle tissue, poor digestive capacity, overloaded, chronic low grade stress and inflammation, and constantly being in the stress physiology. Like only those are the things that are within your control. Certainly the degradation of the progesterone and the estrogens and the, you know, the testosterone that we've been talking about over the arc of a woman's hormonal life. She can replenish those with mht. But we are not going like your digestion's not going to get fixed if you go on estrogen replacement, like if you're going on estrogens.
- [45:06]
A
I have the same attitude in the supplement industry because I say you can't supplement your way out of a bad lifestyle. You have to do the foundational aspects. I gave away a whole course on our site called the awesome Health Course, which addresses the seven different pillars, what I call to a healthy lifestyle. And the first three are air, water and exercise. Getting deep breathing, high quality air, hydrating properly and daily physical exercise with an emphasis particularly earlier in life. I think you really want to build as much muscle as possible because you are going to start to lose it and that's osteopenia and osteo. What was the word? The word? The loss of bone. Yeah, there we go, osteoporosis. I forgot that for a second. And those are go hand in hand. As you lose muscle, you'll start losing the bone structure because you know, if you look at, if you were to look at a cross section, who has the most densest bones in the world? Power lifters, because they have very, very heavy loads that they lift and they have extremely dense bones. If you're just working out a few times a week, it's more than enough to maintain your muscle mass and your bone mass. Now there is a good argument, especially as you age, you would want to make sure that you're getting some cardiovascular training in there because that's what's going to keep brain function going, oxygen to the brain. And women are more susceptible for brain and cognitive degenerative conditions and making sure you have sufficient oxygen and blood flow to the brain. And there's nothing that beats cardiovascular exercise for that. And so bridging the gap between part strength training, part cardiovascular training and you can really extend your high quality of life. And guess what? You're going to look great too. The only thing that's going to shape your body is muscle. The only thing that makes your glutes look good or your shoulders or your arms defined or have a nice tight waistline. That comes down to weight training. And you're not going to get too big. You're not going to get too, you know, all jacked. And you know, because a lot of women will say, I don't want to look like, you know, Miss Olympia. Don't worry, you're not going to.
- [47:19]
B
Oh, I wish I could.
- [47:21]
A
Yeah, right.
- [47:21]
B
I mean, that's like, that's something I have been, I've been lifting weights for decades. It's like, like hasn't happened yet. But a gal can continue to dream.
- [47:29]
A
No doubt. Yeah, no doubt. So it's a big issue. And you know, it's interesting because I'm actually friends with Natalia Coelho, one of the Miss Olympia champions. Yeah. And she has said that she's a big advocate of our product because of. All bodybuilders run into the same problem that women are experiencing when they go to a high protein diet. Now. They maximize protein intake. They're doing like five, six feedings a day, oftentimes 40 to 50 grams each. And I know some bodybuilders on the men's side go higher and she's like, if I didn't take your digestive suite of products, I would not look the way I would. I wouldn't keep my, my stomach tight. I wouldn't have the definition I have. I wouldn't be able to consume the diet that have. And she's as meticulous. She's taking her nd. She's a very smart woman. She's really intelligent, positive, and she understands the mechanics. And her whole life is built on how she looks and how she shows up. And even with all the hormone augmentation that, you know, Ms. Olympias and Mr. Olympias tend to do, they still have to optimize their digestion. And a lot of bodybuilders run into the same problem that other people do on a high protein diet is they end up with digestive distress. I also want to note that a lot of bodybuilders who are on the high end side, they don't like, they're using a lot of hormone, like maximizing hormones. And you have to realize there's a difference between, you know, HRT hormone replacement therapy, which is optimizing your hormones versus what professional athletes use to get a performance outcome. They don't live that long. But people who work out and do a little bit of cardio, live, live longer and have better lives. So there's the optimal amount, not going too far, not going too heavy. And you know, that's where your, your nd, your practitioner who is practicing functional medicine. As a medical doctor, you need someone who understands the nuances of not just the hormones, but also the dietary and lifestyle elements. Because if you just go to a doctor and they say, oh, you know, just take these hormones and everything's gonna be okay. It will be for a while. And then you haven't addressed the what I call upstream, upstream causes, which is your lifestyle.
- [49:38]
B
Yeah. And yeah, I, I still follow the. I competed back in 2008 before I had children. I was in, I competed in the NPC figure class which now would be like by today's standards would be like bikini, like 2008 competing versus 20, 25 competing. Very different. And certainly I, I still follow it and you know, friends with people in, in the, in the physique building community. And it's the, the hormones like the, like the sarms that they're like the, the different kinds of like things that they're taking. Yeah. To your point, not the same as hormone replacement therapy like HRT for a woman in midlife. We're just trying to alleviate some of the symptoms like the hot sleep changes and the mood and affect changes and of course like replace not to fertile levels, like not to, to replace your fertility because God, who wants to get pregnant when you're like 65 but just to like, just to sort of ameliorate some of the symptoms that can be associated with that menopausal transition. But it is very different from what the physique community is taking for sure. And in many cases they, you know, and you can, you can certainly comment on this probably more than I can, but they're in many cases like destroying their fertility. Like I can't tell you how common. And even when I was competing, it's like the girls on that gone on, none of them had their periods and like it was very, very common for them to be so lean even through the year in the off season where they were not menstruating. And these were women that were in their 20s and in their 30s, you know, et cetera. So yeah, just want to, just wanted to kind of throw that out there as well. Like the hormones that these, these women are taking and men for sure as well, like in bikini and wellness and all of that far supersedes what, you know, you know, a 43 year old mom of three who's like, having trouble sleeping might be on as well.
- [51:21]
A
Exactly. And people need to differentiate the difference between the two. And thank you for illustrating that because I think a lot of people think of hormone optimization and they think, oh, I'm doing Mr. Olympia Stack. No, you're not. Yeah, it's like saying, not at all. You know, it's like I got my little sports car and I'm gonna go and F1, you know, it's not. No, no. It's a totally different world.
- [51:46]
B
Well, I wanted to actually build on the digestive story that we've been talking about. So we spent sort of the first half of our conversation talking about. Well, you really beautifully outlined. And I've just been taking notes as you've been talking about digestion, the importance of enzymes. You know, the first half of digestion, where, you know, the 30 to 60 minutes we have these enzymes that are being released and then we have the hcl, which is killing bacteria and viruses. And then the next step, you said, is when we get into some of the minerals, right. So like the bicarbonate, the magnesium, the calciums, these are things that are going to neutralize the acids so that we don't have these ulcers perforating through. Perforating through the digestive tract. And I wanted to maybe talk a little bit about magnesium in particular. Like, you know, as a, as a woman myself in perimenopause, I'm 47, you know, I have made, you know, magnesium and pickleball like my entire personality, right. It's like weightlifting, pickleball, my magnesium, like those are like my three loves, right? So let's talk a little bit about magnesium because obviously most women who listen to the show know it's a very important co factor in some of these enzymatic reactions. So maybe we can talk a little bit about why magnesium becomes important not only for the digestion that, that you've, that you've outlined, but then some of the other really common things that we see in midlife, like the hot flashes, the hypertension, the osteoarthritis, the osteoporosis, all of these different things. Let's talk about why we need to be thinking about magnesium. And before you start answering, I will just say that the magnesium product from bioptimizers is Magnesium Breakthrough is the name of it is my all time favorite magnesium supplement. Like literally I have bottles and bottles and bottles. I have bottles I stash away. I have some in my, up my counter, upstairs in my bathroom. So I take it in the evening, I have it in the morning. You know, I love this product. So I also would love to maybe highlight, because we have the opportunity to have you on the show, maybe we can talk a little bit about magnesium product as well. So let's talk about first, let's talk about why magnesium is important, and then we can kind of get into. We can get into some of the details there.
- [53:46]
A
Yeah, I call it the miracle mineral. And the reason being is because if you live in North America, you cannot get enough magnesium for your diet. One of the indications that you are in need of magnesium, and this will be funny for a lot of ladies, is chocolate cravings. Chocolate actually has magnesium in it.
- [54:07]
B
100% of us are like, what?
- [54:09]
A
Yeah. And one of the things that I learned a long time ago is that when you have a craving, there's usually some element in the food that your body is not getting. And it's trying to get that in whatever way it knows and will do whatever it needs to do to get that key element. Now, magnesium is involved in over 300 processes in the body. It's involved in vasodilation. It's essentially the relaxation molecule. So vasodilation is the increasing or the expansion of your arteries and your veins so as they open up. So someone that has a migraine oftentimes has vasoconstriction that reduces the blood flow to the brain, and you don't get enough oxygen, you get a headache. An inflammatory response, like an allergic response, can cause that, as well as excessive tension, reactions to medications, et cetera, et cetera. Then we also have magnesium is involved in heartbeat regulation. It also is involved in the relaxation response for muscles. So if I contract my biceps, my triceps has to relax, and then if I contract my triceps, my biceps has to relax. Well, magnesium is a key element in that transaction. So it controls all of the nervous system, particularly the relaxation response. Now, that's relative to digestion as well, because we don't control our digestion through the contraction of physical or our muscles. It's smooth muscle tissue, which is on the autonomic nervous system, which contracts. So if you're having problems with constipation, particularly oftentimes you have suboptimal magnesium and you're not able to relax. This also is what leads to, you know, the. The racing mind at night when you sleep, muscle cramping, restless leg syndrome. Magnesium is involved in blood sugar regulation. Virtually all enzymatic transactions require magnesium as well. The production of neurochemicals that make you feel happy and healthy. Like serotonin production involves magnesium and we can't get that from the diet. And we also tend to have an excess amount of calcium. So you've probably heard, oh, you take calcium for bones. Well, calcium is stored in a two calciums to one magnesium in your bone tissues. So when you don't have sufficient magnesium levels in the body, your body will actually dump calcium as well. So if you take a high amount of calcium and it's not balanced by magnesium, what happens is you'll accelerate bone loss. It's actually the inversion of what you're trying to achieve. They need to be hard. Now we get a lot of calcium typically in our diets, but in North America we just don't get magnesium. And that's a whole, I go into a whole story about that, about as we move to conventional farming and we went to fertilizers and we grew crops better or faster. We didn't do the fallow and put all the things that put the reconstituted the soil. Then that's what led to magnesium deficient foods that we consume. And so the easiest way to do that is to supplement your diet with a full spectrum magnesium. People don't understand like people go, oh well I taking magnesium and there's all different kinds. There's citrate, orotate, malate, bisglycinate, sucrosomil, you know, tor, you could just go down the line, there's all these different magnesiums. And what happened and how we discovered this is years ago. I was in a really stressful period of my life. I was working three businesses, traveling around the world. I was using stimulants to keep going, like, you know, drinking caffeine, you know, working 14 hours a day, seven days a week. And eventually and you know, doing my fitness stuff and everything else. And eventually I just couldn't manage my moods. I was like, I'd get angry or frustrated really quickly or I feel stressed and it was disrupting my sleep. And I hooked myself up to an eeg which is a brain reading and we do a lot of neurofeedback stuff. My, my wife, she's a psychologist and neurofeedback and we do a lot of training. Basically what it is is looking at how the brain functions, which is correlated to how well our systems works. And as we age, brain related degeneration can be actually monitored on an EEG. And sure enough, I had the brain of a 70 year old and it felt like it. I had short term memory was going, I would Feel. And then you could create the reactionary stuff. I was like, where is that? Where did I put my keys? Blah, blah, blah, that sort of thing. So I had. And then I also found I was magnesium deficient. And I'm like, I'm taking magnesium. Why is this. Why am I having this problem? And so Matt and I, being the crazy experimenters that we wanted to do, we. We said, well, which magnesium is better? We don't know. So let's just buy all of the magnesiums and start taking them. Take them until we get the run. So we try each element. So there's a thing in orthomolecular nutrition that was developed by Linus Pauling, Abram Hoffer, and Dr. David Hawke Hawkins, which is you. They treated. They use this in psychiatric medicine, treating psychiatric conditions with mega dosing of vitamins and minerals and stuff. Broke the. Broke the. The whole psychology world in the 70s. And one of the things that they do, they would take the A dosage. They would keep increasing the dosage until they got the runs, because they called that breaking the GI barrier. In other words, your body could not absorb more of that nutrient. And so when we took different magnesiums, we would go through that process, and different magnesiums had a tolerance threshold. The worst one would be citrate, which is the most common magnesium, which draws water into the intestinal tract, which can be great if you're suffering from constipation. Oftentimes that's related to hydration as well. Citrate will bring water into the intestines, but if you have too much of it, you just get the runs and you don't absorb the magnesium. And then, you know, we went through all of the different ones, and then we found there was about seven magnesiums that if we combined them in a balanced approach, a little bit of this, a little bit of this, not only could we tolerate more magnesium, but we needed less magnesium to get the results. Fast forward, you know, six months later, I got my brain back, I got my cognition back. I feel great. I've got, you know, I dropped one of the. Those companies that I was running at the time because I was like, okay, I got to make some lifestyle changes as well. And it's been off to the races. And then we tested all these magnesiums in our lab in Bosnia. We did the microbiome test, we did the genotoxicity, the cytotoxicity, the amelin. So how much goes into the cells, how much gets carried by the blood, all of that stuff. And we landed on magnesium Breakthrough. And when we released that product to the world, it exploded. And we're now the, I think we're, you know, we've magnesium products have been around for 30 years. In a couple years we went to number two in Amazon and we're the fastest growing magnesium in the marketplace and we probably sell more magnesium than any other country company in the world. If you combine both offline online sales and the reason is you take a couple caps of this a day, your life changes. Like, it's like, oh, wow, I sleep better. Oh, I'm more tolerant to caffeine. Oh, I can go to the bathroom regularly. Oh, I don't have cramping in my muscles anymore. I don't have that tension. I feel more relaxed. My blood sugar regulation is better. All of those areas are directly tied to having significant magnesium. And a couple caps of magnesium breakthrough. You get a dosage that you could not replicate in your life and people find it. I get so many testimonies on it and it's became a hero product for a company and it's great. So I'm very happy about that.
- [61:46]
B
And you should be. Omega 3s are one of the heavy weight champion supplements for women over 40. Listen, if you are noticing more sore muscles and achy joints, reduction in your exercise performance or poor recovery, more brain fog, poor memory, trouble concentrating, even more anxiety, chronic stress, frequent colds and skin problems like brittle, dry nails and hair, you need to add a high quality Omega 3 to your roster. BioAvail Omega 3 Plus is formulated by Chris Kresser, one of the most respected clinicians in the functional medicine and nutrition field. He uses the freshest and purest fish oil on the market and it also includes more potent and bioavailable forms of curcumin and black seed oil. Biomega3 avail has ultra pure fish oil with 510 milligrams of EPA and 330 milligrams of DHA per capsule. It also has 500 milligrams of curcumin, which is the Novasol curcumin, which is 185 times more bioavailable than standard forms and 500 milligrams of thymoquin black seed oil. And it's also made without gluten. No GMOs in a CGMP facility. Head over to adaptnaturals.com drstephani and save 15% off of your first order when you purchase a bottle of Bioavail Omega 3 + that is adaptnaturals.com D R S T E P H A N I e and save 15% off your first order. I would like to just point out about the, the magnesium breakthrough product is that you actually have a clinically relevant dose of magnesium, which I know is really, you know, kind of weird to say, but it's like sometimes you look and I've tried other magnesium products, so we've, you know, we've tried other magnesium products. I've tried personally other magnesium products and they were good, but I would have to take so much of it and literally I can take one cap of the breakthrough and I get 500 milligrams of magnesium in the different magnesiums which we can talk about in just a moment or I can get up to, if I take two, I can get a gram. And it's like, how easy is that? You know, certainly when, you know, for women, like I'm still, you know, you know, for transparency, still a regular cycling woman. So I actually feel like I need, you know, a, a, a gram, up to a gram of magnesium kind of in the second half of my cycle because we have that increased metabolic activity, we're building up the endometrial lining, blah, blah, blah, blah. I actually feel like I need more of it. It helps my sleep, helps my anxiety, helps my mood regulation, all of that. And in the follicular phase, first two weeks of my cycle, I take one, you know, I just sort of cycle it like up and down like follicular phase one cap, luteal phase two caps. Like it's so easy. And you know, to your point, like, like that GI tolerance, like I don't, I don't surpass that GI tolerance. It's very, very easy for me. And so I think that that's really important is the clinically relevant dose because you're not. I don't want to take seven caps, I don't want to take seven caps of anything. You know, like if it's like I want to take one or two and I want to know that I have like the, the proper amount that has been studied in the literature to be significant. That's going to make an impact on my physiology.
- [64:59]
A
Yeah. And that's, that's the key element. I think a lot of people, this is, this is my kind of pet peeve in the nutrition industry is why we started BiOptimizers over 20 years ago as I'd worked at every single level of the nutrition industry. And what I saw was a check out between what maybe was done in a peer reviewed research to, to provide an efficacious dose. And then you'd see these companies that would put magnesiums that you couldn't absorb or utilize by the body but they were benefiting for providing a cheap product that the, the customer didn't understand the difference. Didn't understand, you know, what's the difference between bisclycinate versus taurate for example or, and that's just a fancy name for how the bonding and elements. And what was interesting when we did our own research why we created a seven form magnesium is because when we covered the seven forms we just got better results with a lesser dosage. And so there's some elements of I would say cellular either bonding or absorption with different parts of the body. That's the theory behind it. We don't actually know what that is, but the anecdotal evidence and the response to it and you know where I feel better is much better when you use all of the magnesiums as opposed to just a couple of the magnesiums or one magnesium which is what a lot of companies will do for. Because it's, it's hard to, you know, acquire all the raws, go through the lab assays, then do the cyto. Most people don't do cytogenotoxicity tolerance. They don't do any of that stuff. They don't have the capabilities to do it. So we do all that stuff to make sure that we're providing something that works. And that's why we also do money back guarantees on everything we do. It's like, like 365 days. If you don't feel different on the product, we just give you your money back, redeploy it somewhere else in your life. Because we want to be one of the good guys in the industry because I know what it's like. You have a certain amount of budget for your diet and there are probably a few key supplements that could really make a difference based on your diet and lifestyle. And so you're only going to devoid you want to put your money on those things that are going to work. And if for any reason a product that we sold someone didn't work for them, well, why should, why should I keep that person's money? I made a promise, I made a suggestion and said we are backing this up. You don't feel the difference and if you don't, we just give you your money back. It's really simple. And it turns out we have the lowest refund rate in the entire industry.
- [67:28]
B
I love that. Let's, let's, let's talk A little bit about some of the different magnesiums in the formulation. You mentioned. Citrate already for people, people who. It brings water into the intestines, if that. Which is really great. Often for someone who might feel constipated. Can we maybe move through another. And I'm, I'm like, oh my gosh, what are the seven I now have malate, taurate, glycinate, citrate. And I'm dropping them.
- [67:50]
A
I'll run through them. Yeah, I'll run through them.
- [67:52]
B
Talk about the different ones, what they do and what they do in the body as well.
- [67:56]
A
Yes, we talk to them. Citrate first. Intestines and acid indigestion, things like that. It's good for that. Dysglycinate, high blood pressure, blood sugar regulation, helps break down sugars, osteoporosis, migraine headaches, depression, and I use that word colloquially. I'm not a doctor or whatever, but if you look at what are the biochemical causes of low mood is related to serotonin production. So if you go on pharmaceutical intervention, they're doing SSRIs to regulate serotonin so that you feel good about yourself. Magnesium. And there's actually a few strains of bacteria cultures that work in unison. We actually have a product called Cognibiotics which focuses on those bacteria strains. Oftentimes people that have suffer from low mood or dysregulation of their moods, et cetera, or, you know, just not feeling good, getting the blahs, that sort of thing is because they either don't have the. They don't have the protein and amino acids to make the peptide chains, they don't break down their protein properly, or they don't have the bacteria that actually manufacture the neurotransmitters because 95% of serotonin is made in your gut. So I've said so many people that have fixed their gut and all of a sudden, oh, you know, I feel good all the time. I don't have the blahs. I don't have those things anymore. So. And then magnesium is a key element of that neurotransmitter as well. Malic, this is one is really good on chronic fatigue enzymatic activity. So chronic fatigue is connected to the mitochondria. And oftentimes you need. It's an enzymatic dysregulation. For whatever reason that your. Your mitochondria isn't producing enough energy. Magnesium often can accelerate facilitate those transmission, those activities that make your mitochondria work properly. Also interesting enough, it's been used when I went into the literature for removing aluminum from the body. They would use high dosage of magnesium malate. That was going way back to orthomolecular medicine in the 70s. How they figured that stuff out, I don't know. Then there's things like taurate. So Taurate is a really cool one. It's great for cardiovascular health, migraines and cognitive function and memory. So when we started experimenting, going back to my EEG stuff, we felt that taurate particularly was really good for making your brain feel good. And that's what does that translate into the real world. Usually addressing the feeling stressed to feeling like, oh, I can't get enough or you know, anxious. Those type of. Those type of feelings usually are rate to neurochemical dysregulation. Taurine helps what's called brain derived neutrophic factor. And if you learn about that and I'm a big fan of bdnf using things like lion's mane and other mushrooms and high dosages to create that allows for neural plasticity, the ability to learn new skills, the ability to develop and to maintain the. The neural networks that make you function in your life. And of course that becomes more and more of a focus as we age and as our hormones drop off. And because the precipitous drop off for women can be really fast and really radical, oftentimes, you know, they're like, I'm losing my brain. I don't seem to have that aspect. This is where it can happen. It's also involved in pms. So a lot of the menstrual pain that comes from PMS is the tissues contract and it's like getting a muscle cramp on stage because you're too dehydrated. Right. It's like ah, if you've ever had one of those, it's nasty. And that's the same thing that's happening. And so magnesium helps that relaxation response. We've got orotate. This one is really good for heart regularity. And if you look at the research around athletes who have had sudden cardiac events a lot of times is that they lose some of. They're losing an excess of minerals because they sweat so much and they become really deficient in magnesium and it creates dysregulation within the heart heartbeat. So then you have things like aspartate cardiovascular support. We do oxide. It's. We do. You'll see on the. This is one of the labeling issues I have. We have a product, it'll. It'll be listed as magnesium oxide. But it, that's the only designation for magnesium sucrosomyl, which is a sugar amino acid that's put into it. This is delivered into the body and gets an acceleration of the delivery of magnesium. It's a really cool molecule. We put that into, it'll be listed as magnesium oxide. Now I want to be careful about that because magnesium oxide in a lot of products is just a useless magnesium. We can't get the magnesium sucrosomial designation because of FDA regulations and what it's got to go through and for that comes to, so they just classify it as an oxide. So I just want to put that up for the, you know, the deep divers and they go, well, why did I got magnesium oxide? And it's actually magnesium sucrosomul. So we also combine another element that is really important here is we add humic and fulvic acid to the delivery system along with B6. This allows it to accelerate the absorption and utilization actually humic and fulvic acid, A, there's a war on it right now for some other reason. But I mean it is a great upstream molecule to just optimize the trick. Yeah, yeah, I've been on that for years. Yeah, I've been doing it for 25 years. And when we got the lab it was just remarkable how profound humic and fulvic acid is. And that's, that's what plants use essentially to break down inorganic matter and turn it into bioavailable manner. So B6 as well is a transport molecule as well. And then we also add manganese in it. And what manganese does is it offsets if you take too much of a dose. So we just put a little, you just need a little bit of manganese. And this will reduce any of the suboptimal aspects that someone might take from too high of a doses of magnesium. So when I share with people to try that, start with one or two capsules a day. Some people like to take it before sleep because they feel that it helps them sleep. But it doesn't matter if you divide the dosage, you can do it throughout the day. And if you're a hard training athlete or if you're under a lot of stress, start to titrate up. Take one in the morning, one in the afternoon, one in the evening and see how your body feels. Usually you'll go through anywhere from three to six months where you'll respond to a higher dosage to kind of get the till you feel the difference. And then I Suggest to titrate down. Most people, one or two capsules a day is sufficient to maintain their levels once they've kind of, I call it filling up the bucket. You want to operate from a full bucket of nutrients. And if your, your lifestyle is like a hole in the bucket, so you're exhausting all of your key elements that you need on a is what's going out of the bucket. And most people, if you go to RDA recommendations are just saying, okay, we're just going to fill the bucket up to what keeps the, what keeps running out of the system. But I'm like, no, no, no, you want to fill the bucket up. And once you have the complete reserve of a vitamin, mineral, nutrient, whatever it happens to be, then you only have to put in what you're using at that point because you have a reserve. If you go into a suboptimal state, if you go to a trip and you're not eating your normal diet or having your own, you don't crash and burn like you would before because you have a reserve of these elements inside of the system. So your body can manage it because your body is super efficient and either using what it has or going to some secondary or tertiary element to, even if it's suboptimal to, to manage that, but you're going to lose some function. And as your hormones drop off, you have less and less margin of error. Like dieting when I was 30 is not as easy. It was a lot easier than dieting as I'm 50, like, like if I look at food the wrong way or just go off my thing too much, I just gain weight faster now. And, and that's because of that sub optimal hormone state. We're going to kick the hormone therapy bucket down the road as far as I can. Because once you go down that road, then you're on that, you're on that pathway. And of course that would change my designations as an athlete. And so not that I'm against it, I just want to see how far can I go just pushing all these other elements most as an experiment so that I can speak legitimately without masking the fact like, and this is what drives me crazy about a lot of the people in the biohacking world is they're talking about vitamins and minerals or this or that. What they're not telling you is all of the peptides, all of the hormones, all of the drugs that they're using in the sidebar and it's like, so which is working? Is it the nutrient that you're taking, or is it the hormones that you're taking or the drug that you're taking? And that's oftentimes not revealed. So I wanted to share that insights because that's where most people are at.
- [76:55]
B
Yeah, I really, really appreciate that. And I think that this overview of digestion, I actually don't think that we've talked about it quite in the same way, especially with the focus on the enzymes and the CO factors like magnesium. So this has been absolutely fantastic. I guess my final question is, are you gonna continue to compete? Is that something that's in the. In the. In your bucket list? Or you're like, I'm good. I'm hanging up my hat, and I'm just gonna continue to rock out some of these great products like what. What is in the. Is it. It's still in your bucket list to continue to compete, or are you done with it?
- [77:27]
A
It's a great question. I've retired from the sport three times, so one of my mentors, Corey Holly from the Corey Holley Institute, we actually competed at them. Mr. Olympia, the natural Olympia in Greece in 2007. And he had a policy that he did natural competitions every five years as a point to see, just to measure where he was at. And, you know, there's no value in me winning another trophy or getting another title or anything like that, but it is a great way to test yourself to see where you're at. So I did the Olympia and then ran a marathon for the first time, like six months later, two years ago.
- [78:11]
B
That's awesome.
- [78:12]
A
And I said. I said, then, okay, I'm done. I'm not doing these things again. Now it's a couple years removed. And I'm like, maybe I'll do one when I'm 55.
- [78:21]
B
Getting the itch a little bit. Yeah, just a little bit.
- [78:23]
A
Just. Just because I find I need that level. I need that outcome to real. You have to realize that competing in a competition, you're. You, you. It takes a lot of effort, energy, and time, and you're actually moving your body into a suboptimal body fat state. And I think a lot of people don't understand that it looks cool and cosmetic and stuff, but you cannot maintain that level and be healthy for a long period of time. But pushing yourself in an area to get a new level of capacity and then titrating down from that, that's not a bad idea. So I'm toying with the idea.
- [79:00]
B
It's so funny. I'm also like, So I competed once And I said, I'll never do it again. And I probably didn't do it the right way. Like, Coach sort of came from this, like, old school. We did the whole water thing and like, you know, it was, it was really, really terrible. But now that I sort of see that the Arnolds are coming up, I'm like, oh, maybe the Masters one year. Maybe I'll do the Masters, I don't know. But I, I, I, I too look at it. And I'm like, it would just be really fun even if I never got up on stage again. It would just be really fun to push the finite limit, like, just to push my comfort zone a little bit in the gym. And I certainly work myself to, like, I work hard in the gym. I love to, you know, approximate muscle failure. I love, love, love working out. It's part of, again, it's part of my personality. And I derive a lot of pleasure from redefining my relationship to failure. But I think it's also something, it's a, it's a virtuous, in a way, endeavor to think about how far you can push yourself because that's where all the growth really happens. You don't maybe, and maybe you don't do the dieting down and maybe you don't do all that stuff.
- [80:01]
A
Stuff.
- [80:01]
B
But the, but the, the training for the strength and the Prof. And the, and the, you know, the peak, you know, building the muscles, like the maximal hypertrophy, I think is something I don't know. I, I, I too find myself flirting with the, flirting with the idea. I find myself drawn to it. So I'm like, well, maybe Masters, I don't know. So I, I totally get that feeling as well.
- [80:20]
A
Yeah. And the benefit, you know, whether a person competes or not, the benefits of what's so ironic about the sport is going to failure or pushing yourself beyond your limits is a requisite to the performance elements. And I think what is part of the addiction to the sport is you're continually testing yourself. And I think we live in a world that's really, really easy and comfortable. And putting yourself in those strategic, uncomfortable positions actually correlates to so much in life. Your resilience, your stress, your capacity to overcome the pain train which is coming for everybody in your life. Everybody's going to go through really challenging elements of life. It's, you know, I always say life is fatal. But your resilience that is built up internally and psychological from the sport of lifting weights is incredible. And the physiological benefits are extraordinary as well as the psychological Benefits and having that outlet where you can, you know, I say, no matter what's going on in your life, the iron saves you. You go to the gym, you're upset, you're not happy, you're not feel good. You walk out of that gym after work and you're like, well, at least there was something I could control today, and I did something good for myself. And if there's anything that I think a lot of women suffer from is the guilt about doing something that's good for themselves, and I encourage it, I salute it, and I celebrate it. And it's nice to see that you're promoting that for females, because I think it would. It would certainly reduce a lot of the suboptimal elements of aging and degeneration and things like that by going in there and reversing that trend and then developing all the physiological capabilities to be a total badass and kick ass in life.
- [82:12]
B
Totally. And you totally figure out who you are too, right? You totally learn about yourself. Yourself at the bottom of a squat, like, when you're in the hole and.
- [82:19]
A
You'Re like, you're right. Yeah, no doubt.
- [82:22]
B
You know, like, I do not want to. I do not want to get up from here, but it's like, I have no choice. So let's. You know, we got to push through it. I love to. I don't think I've actually shared this ever, like, publicly, but sort of one of the things that I like to tell myself is, like, get really uncomfortable, but don't die. You know, it's like, get as comfortable. Like, push that as much. I mean, we're all going to die eventually, but I mean, in the gym, specific, specifically, like, get uncomfortable. Don't die. But that's sort of the feeling that I like to sort of bring to the gym is like, how far can I actually push it today? What are the limits that I have with, you know, the. Whatever life is throwing at me? Like, life is lifing, right? So, like, the kids. I didn't sleep well last night. I have. Whatever, soccer mom, Pratt, whatever that is, you know, what can I. What can I do today? What can I leave on the gym floor? So, yeah, we are very kindred spirits, you and I. And I just. I. I'm so excited about this. This conversation that we've had, because the digestion piece for women. Like, I have women that are, like, silently, like, sort of, you know, telling me in Instagram dms, like, I know you're talking about protein, but my husband's gonna divorce me if I continue having this amount of protein. Right. And it's like the enzymes and it's the, you know, it's all these different things that are sort of deteriorating that's, you know, provide like you're creating this environment where she's like gassy and bloaty and all, all this kind of stuff. So I think that this is going to be super helpful. Of course we know I, you know, very, very proud to be affiliated with Bio Optimizer. So we will definitely have codes for discounts for anybody who wants to pick up some mass Zymes or the magnesium breakthrough or both. Highly recommend, both. But just wanted to thank you so much for your time. And where can people find more about you? Drop links where you'd like. If people want to interact more with you, your work, buy optimizers like Telemarketer the places that they can find you.
- [84:03]
A
Yeah, so they can go to bioptimizers.com and you know, we're on Facebook and we're on Instagram and all those social things. My team does all the work. I, I don't spend a lot of time up there, but they cut up little videos and promotions that we do so that people can get it. And if you put in the word better, they get a 10% discount on their initial order. And also there's deeper discounts if they go to bigger volumes. Everything has a 365 day money back guarantee. And yeah, it's a lot of fun. We have a lot of free education courses that are available on that. I have an awesome health podcast, radio libraries. I'd love to get you on that. That'd be great to follow up on that as well. Yeah. And again, part of the reason if you want to stay in those conversations with people that you admire, respect and are doing good things in the world is that you now become part of that mindset. And I think that's really important as you go through life is even if you don't have the personal interactions with everybody that you'd like, if you're listening, you, it's like when you went to church, you had to sing from the same hymn book every week, the same songs. Why? Because it puts the values and concepts and the beauty of podcasts is now you can listen to the greatest experts in the entire world talking about the things that are relevant to you. It's never been a time like this. It's a great time to be around. The solutions are there. And again, you want to go to someone like yourself, that is a doctor that has the biochemical understanding and credentials to go down that road of hormone augmentation and these elements, because there are nuances that are individual to you. There's some general practices, but get those nuanced ones and get a second or third opinion because sometimes you want to be able to have a counsel to give you those suggestions to, to make those optimal decisions. So thank you so much for your support and having me on the podcast is really great. I love being here and I love sharing. And if you want to get any of the free stuff at Biogemize, we just give a lot away because we just, we're on a mission. We're on a mission to make people, you know, to live stronger, live longer, better lives. And I believe that we can extend the quality of our life by a good 20 years. So why not?
- [86:14]
B
Fantastic. Thank you so much, Wayne. All right, all right. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and I must give you the obligatory legal and medical disclaimer here. This podcast, Better with Dr. Stephanie, is for general information only and the advice recommendations we discuss do not replace medicine, chiropractic or any other primary healthcare provider's advice, treatment or care in the consumption of this podcast. There is no doctor patient relationship that has been formed and the use and implementation of the information discussed are at the sole discretion of the listener. The information and opinions shared on this podcast are not intended to be a substitute for primary care diagnosis or treatment. In other words, guys, be smart about this. Take it with a grain of salt. Take this information to your primary healthcare provider and have a discussion with him or her to make the best choice. That is for you. Remember, I am a doctor, but I am not your doctor, and these conversations are meant for educational purposes only.