Dr. Michael Ormsbee: Food Timing, Nutrition & Supplements for Fat Loss, Muscle Growth & Recovery
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The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. Today I'm going to be talking with my longtime friend, Dr. Mike Ormsby. Mike is a professor at Florida State University. He is the director of the Institute of Sports Science and Medicine.

Mike is a world-renowned expert in all things exercise physiology, supplementation, sports nutrition, and a whole host of other important and interesting topics that we'll get into in today's conversation.

Mike has done a tremendous amount of work over the last 15 years, specifically in the area of pre-sleep nutrition. And I could promise you we're going to get into some things that are Mike's lifelong passion and career that are counterintuitive to what most people think about what to eat and what not to eat prior to sleep. In fact, I'll give you a little bit of a spoiler alert.

He has some pretty compelling evidence over multiple studies that eating specific items in specific amounts prior to sleep is advantageous for not only sleep and recovery, but multiple other things as well.

The conversation was wide ranging, but we'll cover many other things like a handful of supplements that people have not heard of that have interesting implications for a wide variety of performance and health related outcomes. And so it was a fascinating conversation. I learned a lot from it. I've known Mike for a long time. I've known his work for a long time, but there was a lot that I did not know about the work he's done and will be doing in the future. So here we go with Dr. Mike Ormsby. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Dr. Mike Ormsby, thank you so much for coming out. I know it was a long trip this morning and I have a bunch of stuff I'm excited to talk to you about. But first, thank you so much for coming out. You're welcome. Welcome. I've not been able to come over here and do some podcasting and hang out on this side of the country for a while. So for me, it's a pleasure. I appreciate the offer. I love your research. I love a lot of the stuff.

that you've gotten into. So when we decided to officially have guests for Perform, I was like, Mike has got to be on the list and stoked to have you out here. Appreciate it. I can't wait to get into some of this stuff because I love it. It's what I do day in and day out. And yeah,

Speaking to a bigger audience is a pleasure. Fantastic, man. We're going to go to a lot of areas, but where I want to start is actually with ultra endurance stuff. Sure. So you yourself, I know you played hockey and probably plenty of other sports, but then you not only have competed in various forms of ultras, and then you've done a lot of research in that. So tell me how you got into that background and then very specifically some of the studies you've done and the athletes you work with. So, yeah, I played college ice hockey.

through my junior year at Skidmore College in upstate New York, and then went to grad school in South Dakota.

coached the Pee Wee Bee State Champs. Oh, nice. Out there, which was a great opportunity to coach. So I was like my dip into that a little bit. And then coming back to go to more graduate school, I ended up being at ECU and they're like, I saw an email come across and it said, anyone ever play hockey before? And I'm like, well, I used to play a lot of hockey. So I remember emailing the coach and just saying, hey, we're, we're,

I'm here. I'm in my PhD program. So I don't know how much I can contribute Can I come out and say yep, you got to be on the team? So that was a lot of fun. They dropped me off to study all day pick me up to play a 11:00 p.m. Game And that was a great season That was the end of my eligibility ended up playing two more or coaching two more years at ECU But I finished and was like there's this void with being competitive and

that came out and for me in triathlon of all things. And I kind of got into it because of my master's advisor. I showed up for a, um, an interview basically in South Dakota and he put me on a bike. I'd never ridden a bike more than three miles. And we went for like a 20 mile, which doesn't sound all that long now, but it was excruciating. Yeah. And I'm out here trying to ride a bike and keep up. And I thought, um, if he can leave work and

and go ride his bike, then I better learn how to ride a bike so that I can go do it with him or get out of here and go train a little bit. So that got me into cycling. And then one thing led to another and I was training for short distance. And then my wife and I sort of got into some of the middle distance triathlon and ended up finishing my longest were like these 70.3 half Ironman events. And so that was it. I loved the training. I just, I loved setting it up, figuring out what I need to do to meet all the different

goals and demands I had in terms of increasing VO2 max or being able to push thresholds or what kind of pacing that I want to pull. And then nutrition played a gigantic role in triathlon, which I was obviously into nutrition. And it's often considered the fourth aspect of triathlon. Oh, right. And so I got to really put

the textbook recommendations that are given. Like, what is a cleaner sport than being able, in terms of like following a textbook to a tee? So many other sports you can't really do that. And clearly there are curveballs that can come in even with triathlon, but it's pretty

pretty specific. Like, you know, the distance, you know, the length, if you can get the temperature correct, you can pretty much eat according to textbook on these things. So I started making videos about it and trying to post those for my students and travel along with my first half Ironman experience. And those went over really well. And it was just an awesome experience to sort of feel what that was like.

And I love the idea of training and trying to get better each day and competing. It turns out I'm not very good at triathlon. Well, I mean, context here a little bit. If everyone was to see your physique, they would probably not picture you as a triathlon kind of guy. Yeah. You know what's funny? So I –

I lost about 25 pounds training for that. So I normally sit like— I don't believe 20 of that is muscle, probably. I lost so much. But I was like fueling. I was doing the creatine. I was doing everything to try to save what I could, and I documented it all. So I actually did okay. But when I was down, like getting real low, you know, my friends and my wife in particular were like, you can't get too skinny on me. Yeah. So that, you know, was a change. I was definitely—

My body type is not really built for triathlon, but I tried to force it that way for quite a while. Now, I know that I'm assuming that led into why you did some of your work in your lab in these endurance. I'll call them ultras and tries and things like that.

I know you've also done and still coach athletes in various of these sports. But before we get to that stuff, do you remember offhand any specific things you did, any food items or amounts or timings or fluids, supplements, anything that you took for your own personal performances that made you feel better?

Yeah. So I was targeting 60 grams an hour of carbohydrate, which is pretty typical. Typical, but lower probably. Yeah. I didn't want to go north 90, a hundred where they're starting to go now. Um, I knew I'm not elite enough to perhaps do it. I didn't also have the stomach training to handle it. Um,

Um, and it wasn't a priority for me at the time. I wanted to do textbook so I could show my students, here's a textbook, here's what we're doing. So it was 60 grams an hour. Um, and that, that was fine. So I was, I was doing that with like goos and guroctanes. They're usually 30 grams. I was taking two of those an hour. Um, then I had fluids on the bike and I used a product at the time that had protein in it as well. Not for anything other than maybe help save a little muscle over these prolonged periods of

training. So those were some common things that I was doing over that time. Today's episode is sponsored by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink mix that has an ideal electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, but no sugar. Hydration is critical to performance, both physical and mental performance. Countless studies have shown that even a slight degree of dehydration, even as small as 1%,

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I want to transition from there and talk about one of the areas you're probably most famous for, and that is nutrition prior to sleep. And it has stunned me that despite you talking about this and working in this area for 15 plus years, I don't know how many publications you have on this, but it's not a small amount. And very few people have either heard this or put it into practice.

I'm really shocked because of how effective, how well-rounded this has been shown, how many different populations you've done this with. And again, people somehow completely either don't talk about it or they give the exact opposite advice. So on the spot right now, tell me exactly what I should be eating prior to bed. And I'm being a little bit facetious there. So take this where you want. No, I tell you, at this moment, 40 grams of a protein-dominant food, that's less than 220 calories.

Okay. So what you're suggesting is about most of your studies have been 30 minutes, right? So 30 minutes prior to going to sleep, 40 gram bolus. And why on earth would I do that? Yeah. So let me tell you a story. And how does it not hurt my sleep?

Okay. So we'll get into all that. But let me first tell you the background on some of this. So stemming from those Ultraman studies and our sleep was sort of linked into this. So if anyone can remember, those old shows were giant weight loss shows on television that existed for a long time. The TV talking heads would always say, stop, there's a cutoff time, there's a cutoff time.

And I remember being a grad student at the time or even undergrad at the time and thinking, well, everybody I know eats at night and they're all very much fit and in shape and have no problem. And so this dichotomy is going on. I'm thinking –

I don't know. I've never seen a paper on it. I'd love to see that and started looking at it a little bit here and there. And then finally, you know, when I was independent investigator was started on that path. Was this your first study that you did? First one at Florida State.

At your lab. Yeah. First one in my own lab at Florida state. We, we got some small, um, funding for it and we decided, uh, let's see what happens. And then 15 years later, we're, we're designing two new ones right now. So let me, let me take you on that story. So please. Yeah. So, uh,

That was going on. People were saying, don't eat at this time. Don't eat. I'm thinking, I don't know. I know a lot of people. Plus, in the bodybuilding circle, the figure world, people would purposefully eat at night or they would purposely, if they had to wake up to use the bathroom, they'd have a protein shake sitting right there in the bathroom. I remember many days of having pre-made protein shakes in the bathroom. So not only if you woke up, but I remember setting an alarm to make sure that I woke up, smashed the protein shake and went back. And people...

constantly did this. This was a very common thing. It was super common. So there was just these different worlds. And so clearly there was like, we got to start somewhere. What's happening here? So we started looking through the literature and this was about 2010. And there was really nothing that existed in the way that we are thinking about pre-sleep feeding and what to eat before bed. There was some data in large mixed meals, like having your full on dinner before bed late at night.

that weren't very good. So 1993, Roman did a study where I remember they gave 544 calories and they gave you this in the morning, in the afternoon or in the evening.

And they just measured your metabolic response to the meal. And it was just a stair step. So if you had it in the morning, you had the best response. In the middle of the day, you had a medium response. If you had it at night, you had a very low metabolic response to that meal. So perhaps those that are a little bit less versed in science would be taking that study and saying, okay, therefore, you'll be better metabolically by having your calories earlier in the day.

Exactly. Yeah. And in reverse, they'd say, if you had your calories at night, you're going to get fat. Bingo. You're going to gain weight. So this is where that whole story started. That's where it all started, 1993. And then several other things have happened along the way. There was a study in 2004 from DeCastro, and that looked at like, when do you feel the hungriest and when do you eat the biggest meal? And they're always in the evening. And so all the data were lining up that your hungriest at that time, your ability to like

control your caloric intake. It's worse at that time. And so- So you'll be less metabolically healthy. You'll make worse choices. You'll probably overeat.

And so everyone says you're going to have trouble. But, you know, I'm thinking of a protein shake, right? And that's how we started. This is why meatheads need to be in science. This is a meathead thing. It really is. And it's like common sense is like, well, I don't need 600 calories. I just want a protein shake. What is that going to do? Or scrambled eggs or whatever it was that I was eating just naturally at that time.

So we designed a couple of studies at that time. Very simple. Great, simple design, simple answer. I give you a few options to drink before bed, like a whey shake, a casein shake, 30 grams apiece, or a carbohydrate or a placebo. And they all taste the same. They're blinded. And so you go home, you take this, you come back to me in the morning, and I measure your resting metabolic rate.

That's it. I see how your metabolism may or may not change some eight hours later. And so you come back in the morning and if you had nothing, so like the placebo, which was no calories, you had a response where your RQ was kind of low. So you're burning more fat at that period of time as you would. So not that you're burning more or less calories, but the percentage of your calories coming from fat. Correct. Versus carbohydrates. Exactly. And that's RQ, RER, same. And that was no difference from the casein drink.

So in both cases, in the first studies, if you had either nothing or you had casein, you still had quite a nice ability to burn a big percentage of fat.

The next morning. And then when we gave the whey, that was pretty close, but not quite there in terms of how low or the RQ was, how good the fat burning was. And then carbohydrate was a little bit worse than that. But nothing was bad. And everything seemed to show an improvement over having no calories at all in terms of the total metabolic rate the next morning.

But so many holes in that, right? Sure, sure. So we got hammered from reviewers. I remember, oh, I'm so proud of this. And then it came back. It's like, well, you didn't do this, this, this, this. As you were saying that, I was in my head going, okay, I'm going to have to – okay, okay, okay. So many problems. Okay, I got the comments section. I got you guys. Yeah. And so what we just – First study, first lab. It was the first one. Very first one, guys. And we wanted to see how that reacted. And that was in sort of young men.

Then we looked at this in different populations. So we started to go to different populations. We started to look at overweight women and then some women with obesity. And we repeated the study and had very similar outcomes. So casein and whey being quite favorable for metabolic rate in the morning. What the problem we had was we hadn't introduced exercise yet. So we didn't know what that was doing. And we have no idea what's happening from leaving my lab with a shake in your hand

to coming back to me the next morning. So we're a series of more studies we designed, I know, 15 more after that along the way where we ended up putting mattresses in the lab and having people sleep there so that we could just monitor everything. We ended up thinking about exercise in a way that was useful. So one of those studies with women with obesity in the beginning, they had actually a rise in glucose and insulin.

from having the shake before bed when we measured it the next mornings. And that's not a good thing. You don't want that to be. So we decided to introduce exercise minimally. I think it was two days a week we put in and we just did it for four weeks. But when we did even just a little bit of exercise with people who didn't usually do it, all of those negative things went away entirely. It just shows you how powerful exercise driving all of this stuff is.

Over the nutrition, I mean, any day that exercise base is going to be the main mover of the physiological needle. And the nutrition really just helps push it one way or the other. The other thing we didn't do well was that if you're sleeping at home or sleeping in the lab, how do I know how –

if that's like your usual way of sleeping and does that influence fat metabolism? So I remember a reviewer said, did you measure sleep? I'm like, never even crossed my mind. And I'm doing sleep, I'm doing pre-sleep studies. So at that time we just implemented like a survey. So you come in and we say, okay, how much, you know, how much did you sleep last night? Was it good or bad or usual? And then in that simple measure, we saw no differences. And then we brought them into the laboratory and like, oh, well, surely that's not going to be great for sleep. It's a different environment and all these things. And

And we made it, again, pen and paper, no difference in what we're finding in terms of just asking them that question. And so then we now, I'll fast forward to kind of what we're getting to in a few minutes, but now we're purposefully designing for an outcome of sleep where we've never done that before. We've always measured it for recovery. We've measured it for metabolism, not for the outcome of sleep as our primary aim. But we'll talk about that in a second.

One of the things that I think really helps us now is that we introduced in some of our studies a technique called microdialysis. Now, that's something that I learned in grad school from a guy named Professor Bob Hickner, great friend, excellent researcher, my mentor.

Just a phenomenal human. I visited his lab a couple of times a long time ago, but a ton of great work over the years. Yeah, consistently just excellent work. And you eventually drug him down to hang out with you in Florida State. I did, yeah. That's a whole other story. But it's fantastic because I have like the godfather of microdialysis in our backyard, and it's great. And that's a technique I learned in my PhD program as well.

So we started implementing this microdialysis. Walk us through what that is really quickly. Yeah. It's exactly what it sounds like, but it's good. Yeah, it is. But yeah, I guess it's a little complicated. So imagine like getting your belly pierced. So when we originally started this, it was you pinch a roll of fat in your subcutaneous fat on your belly, and then you'd put a small needle through and then pull it out the other side, and it's threaded with –

a tiny probe, a flexible membrane that you can slide underneath the skin. So then the needle is out entirely. You just leave this little flexible tubing under the skin. Luckily now they make these as concentric probes. So it's only one poke instead of two. So you'd only have to pinch and put one poke in there. And then what happens is there's an inlet tube and an outlet tube, tiny little micro tubes.

And then you can say – you can perfuse all kinds of stuff. But we perfuse saline and saline goes into the interstitial space and mixes around and then comes out the outlet tube. So what I measure should be saline plus whatever is coming out of the cells around the probe.

And so we measure in that probe real time all kinds of stuff. But traditionally, glycerol is the primary marker we're looking at for fat metabolism, so specifically lipolysis. Right. So what you're doing is you're putting a small needle in somebody's belly fat so you can measure exactly how much fat is.

is being burned. The other way to do it is you collect the gases that they're breathing out of their mouth. Yeah, but slightly different. But slightly different. So the oxidation piece is a little bit different. We're looking specifically at lipolysis. We have no idea if...

if it's actually being burned. It's just being liberated from the cell. Right. And so we'll pick that up in the probe. And we have to measure that. So adipocytes lack the enzyme glycerol kinase. And so glycerol can't go back into the adipocyte. And so it is a little more stable than measuring free fatty acids, for example, because they can...

a little more readily go in and out of the fat cell in certain conditions. So glycerol is the main marker of lipolysis. Really quickly, what does glycerol have to do with fat?

Right. So you've heard of a triglyceride. Everybody's probably heard of that. So the backbone of a triglyceride, tri being three, are three fatty acids attached to a glycerol. And so that's liberated through hormone-sensitive lipase as the adipocyte is stimulated to release fat. And that can be from all kinds of stuff, but exercise is typically what we do.

we use to drive that. And then they'll all be liberated from the cell and eventually glycerol will be also put into the intersocial space. And ultimately we can pick that up in the microdialysis dialysate that we collect. Right. So what you're able to look at is directly from the tissue, whereas if you're on a metabolic cart and measuring gases, you're

It still sounds and feels like you're measuring fat burning, but as you said earlier, you're not. One is measuring the entire body and how much actual carbon dioxide you're breathing out, and what you're measuring directly is how much, and if you're not familiar with this, this is lipolysis. This is the breakdown of fat, and you mentioned this quickly, but really making sure folks don't miss it. Fat burning...

And fat loss and fat oxidation are not necessarily the same thing. They sound similar. This is where we can get lost in science a little bit. But it's really important if you're going to make a claim about what happens to somebody's fat burning with, in your case, what you eat before bed, measuring directly in the tissue itself is going to give you a significantly different answer than...

- Right. - And resting metabolic rate or on a car or something like that. - Yeah, and what's nice about this technique is that we're describing it in the abdominal fat tissue. - Yeah, it's where people care. - But we also can do it right now, like we're running a study where we're looking at the abdominal and we're also looking at the gluteal. And men and women have different amounts of fat in those areas.

And it all has to do with the receptor type that's on the adipocyte in that space. And so we have like these beta and these alpha receptors that primarily drive what's going on in these different spaces. And so you and I will have a different concentration of the alpha and beta receptors on the adipocyte in our abdomens versus our hips and top of our buttocks, right? And so women will also have a different profile.

And that also changes to like, for example, the perimenopause-menopause transition. A lot of those things are really interesting for people to know, like what's going on in these different tissues? Can we fix it? And then we can also put drugs through the probe if we need to, and we can stimulate or inhibit those receptors and figure out mechanistically what's going on in the different tissues. But for our pre-sleep feeding studies, we weren't

perfusing any drugs. It was just simply looking at what was going on with lipolysis. And then we would measure oxidation with the breast samples as well. So you have to do both.

But it gives you a better picture of exactly what's happening. So we finally had this tool to measure glycerol, so lipolysis overnight. And I remember my doctoral student at the time, Amber Kinsey, was my first doc student running this study. And I remember she came in and she's like, oh my goodness, nothing happened. We didn't see any difference in lipolysis, no matter if they took carbohydrate, protein, placebo, whatever we gave. And I

I thought we'd see something. And I remember going through the data and we're like, you know what this means? You can have something before bed and it does not change lipolysis.

So you don't have to worry about the fat metabolism piece of this with a small, calorically small meal or protein shake and a protein dominant situation. So to tie that together, if the 1993 paper held true and –

the follow-up paper held true and eating before bed was going to make you fatter. What you should have saw in your study is you should have saw the rate of lipolysis go down. You should have seen less fat burning. We're going to refer to it like that. But when you saw that it didn't go down, it stayed the same, this is actually the powerful conclusion that that meal you had before bed was

did not make you fatter and did not at all alter your fat burning either ability overall or the rate at which you're doing it. Correct. I have had that scenario with totally different topics multiple times in my lab with my students when they come in freaking out, my thesis didn't work, my dissertation failed.

And you have to really step back and say, what is the data telling me? In your particular case, it was potentially, and one would argue, more powerful, the fact that it wasn't different. Yeah, and I agree. It's really hard in doing research in this space because everybody wants to find the magic pill or potion or situation. And

There are very few studies where we find some kind of amazing claim that comes out of it. Almost every time we're saying, no, that didn't work. That didn't work either. That didn't work either. And it's really, it's a fun process to be on. The beautiful thing is that that's equally as important in our field for people to know that.

There are some fields where sort of, quote, negative data would be a big problem. But that's not the case here because it's really important people know if something works or doesn't and depending on what outcome you're looking at. Yep. Let me go back to a little bit of the pre-sleep protein story. So

We were one of two labs doing this work from the early stages. So the other lab was Luke Van Loon's lab in Maastricht University, and their work is fantastic. Protein synthesis guy, big time. All protein synthesis. So what Luke's group was doing was looking at pre-sleep feeding all from a muscle protein synthesis perspective, where we're looking at it more from a

fat oxidation, fat mobilization, applied outcomes perspective. And so it was really fun. Several times I've teamed up with Luke to give talks at different conferences and things where we cover all aspects of this pre-sleep feeding. We probably do for a new one at some point. A lot of new data have come out. But for about 10 years, we were the only ones doing that work. Now it's like every week I find a new paper on the topic, which is really exciting. It's

It's rapidly expanding our knowledge base. I hope they're all citing your papers every time. They prefer the muscle protein synthesis ones for sure. But it's really good work. And what Luke found out was that for a while, we didn't even know if you could have muscle protein synthesis at that period of time. No one had ever done it.

And so he was giving young men and older men protein boluses. And then they were doing lines and biopsies through the night and in the next morning and things. And one of those had like nasogastric feeding to get the protein in that way in these older individuals. So study after study after study showed, okay, yeah, you can feed at that point and have an increase in muscle protein synthesis. And their studies are awesome. And they did so much good work over the time. And so mixed with our data,

It looks like we're in a place where it's either not going to do anything, pre-sleep feeding, or you could have an improvement in muscle protein synthesis and perhaps recovery in some of these other areas and maybe a change in metabolism that will be beneficial for some people. At the very least, you're creating an opportunity to meet your total daily protein goals. And almost every paper in the last six years that we've written ends with that.

It's probably most important as a feeding opportunity simply to hit your protein targets for the day.

Secondarily, and it's probably a big secondarily, is it could specifically be useful at that time of day, but it's primarily driven by total protein intake for the day. Minor benefits may come from it. The best example, that's from Luke's lab, Snyder's study, and they actually did 12 weeks of training with a pre-sleep feeding protocol. And they had carbohydrates and protein in a shake.

And they did this for 12 weeks and they actually had functional outcomes. So not just MPS where you're not sure if muscle will actually grow. Yeah. Instead of just looking at muscle protein synthesis. Yeah. Not just the marker. We're looking at the actual outcome. Did you actually get bigger muscle? And they found improvements in cross-sectional area. They found improvements in strength like 1RM. All things people would be interested in simply by having a pre-sleep shake.

The interesting part was that study was criticized because there were different total amounts of protein taken between the groups. And so the group who had pre-sleep protein had 1.9 grams per kg and the group who didn't take the pre-sleep protein had 1.3 grams per kg. So there was a difference. Now, both north of the recommended 0.8 grams per kg and they were criticized for it, but they're

The way they thought about it was, no, no, it's just a feeding opportunity. Take it. You're at home. You have access to these foods. You don't have to be afraid of it. And in their hands, it worked, increasing the total daily protein intake. You digested it. You absorbed it. And you actually laid on muscle with it. So you said quickly a second ago 0.8 grams per kg is the recommended. You mean as in what you recommend or in? No, no, no, no.

Okay. Yeah. So clarify, please. Yeah. So RDA, the recommended allowance is 0.8 grams per kg to stave off issues that can come from lack of protein. And so that number, you know, it's pretty contested by people who work in this space, although it keeps coming up because it is a number that probably will stave off problems. We typically – I mean, there's so much data on here. I'm sure you'll have –

speakers directly in this area, but it's just incredible. Like we usually recommend up to a gram per pound or 2.2 grams per kg. Most people don't hit it and they land right at 1.6, 1.7, which is right where I want them.

And so that number works for us. We've had success with that in our various other protein feeding studies. But there's a tangent I'd love to get on if we want to. So we've done a lot of protein feeding studies of people with obesity. One of the ones that I thought was very interesting, and I think your audience will like it too, that we were looking at morbidly obese individuals going for bariatric surgery.

So when they show up at the bariatric center, instead of going in and getting the consult and getting the surgery scheduled, they find our team of researchers in the front door. You know how many people wanted to join us? Not many. Not many. But some said they'd try. And so we had a few subjects trickle in over time that would give us a try. So the recommended subjects.

calorie intake on a medically prescribed bariatric diet is extremely low. They're rough. Very, very low. And now- A typical 1,000 calories? Yeah, at the time we did this, it was 800 calories. 800. And it was primarily liquid, but there were some options. And this was a few years ago, so maybe it's different now. I haven't looked at it lately.

What we did is we took these individuals, we put them into two groups. We actually put in the IRB that we didn't think was ethically responsible to not give both groups more protein. Yep. So we did. And they approved that. So both groups got added protein bowls, which bumped them up to almost 1300 calories, roughly. One of those groups got resistance training.

One of them had standard of care. And the standard of care was some directions on a piece of paper or you can come in here, move some tables around, do some calisthenics type exercise.

If you did 12 weeks of resistance training – and this was run by Eddie Joe, who's a professor now, and his major professor was Dr. – Oh, was this his dissertation? Yeah. Yeah. And his mentor was Dr. Kim, and Dr. Kim is a phenomenal man who just recently passed away. And they designed this whole deal, and we were giving him more protein. And what was astonishing –

was that before the study began, if you did off grams per kg, which how much protein they took in, they were down like 0.3, 0.4 grams per kg because their body weight is just a lot larger. After the study, both groups over 12 weeks lost a ton of weight, as you would imagine, not eating much.

But if you added resistance training, the amount of, according to DEXA, the amount of muscle or lean mass that you lost, or there's some issues with that. We'll just call it the same thing for now. It was 25% if you didn't train and was only 4% if you did resistance train. So translation, the group that didn't lift. If you didn't lift, you lost a ton of muscle.

And if you did, you lost almost... Almost nothing. 4%. You're going to lose so many on that kind of a diet. And you just think about like weight recidivism and the people who are probably going to struggle with this. And now you're at a place with lower lean mass.

And you still have trouble with these things and you're still working on being taught the right things to eat in this process. So to me, that was a fabulous study that really showed the powerful impact that resistance training with protein can have. You will see regularly strength training for folks that are trying to lose weight and to keep it off for a long time. So you said the retention recidivism of that body composition. Yeah.

You can't make a strong argument that strength training burns us a ton of calories. We were talking about that before we started going. That's not your way to go. One could even argue then, or people have used that argument then as a fodder to say that, hey, exercise doesn't help you lose weight. Completely ridiculous, of course. But from a strictly caloric expenditure perspective, it's not very high. However, if you look at that side of the equation,

who holds more muscle mass. And then because of that, the associations between strength training and successful long-term and permanent weight loss is really, really high. And we've seen this from a bunch of different lines of research. That paper specifically, I think, just absolutely crushed that conversation. If you want to lose weight and keep it off,

Strength training is a very, very, very good idea if you want that to last for a long time. Not going to be the thing that burns you your calories right now, but it's the thing that is going to arguably lead to longer term success. Yeah, I think if you skip that part of a weight maintenance or even a weight loss program,

It's just not setting you up for the ideal outcomes long term. But it is hard because you do. Like if you're going out for a walk or a jog or a bike, like you sweat and then you feel like maybe you're doing more work. And so then you get in your mind about maybe this is better for me, for my goals. And it's hard. I think you have to be disciplined in many ways, but to follow a program where you're training and maybe not as sweaty as you might be.

from doing, you know, a run or even a walk outside or something. So yeah, I feel like in our, in our environment now, we need to be probably medically prescribing resistance training at the root of all this. And that's just not happening yet in most places. I know some folks are, but I think that's the next step that's going to have to be taken. Today's episode is sponsored by Momentus. Momentus makes the highest quality supplements on the market, period. Many

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One of the things that is tough for folks not in science to understand often is how is the same response going from kind of low to medium, not the same as going from medium to high or high to ultra high and things like that. Like we see that physiologically consistently. So you're mentioning, I think Luke's study had a couple of different groups and neither one of them are what we would call maxed out on their protein. So neither one was at 2.2 grams per kilogram, which is what you said you personally recommend, right? Yeah. So-

What's important to understand, if you take somebody who's probably on a more traditional protein diet, 0.4, 0.5 maybe, and you increase that person to one, is that going to be the same response if you take somebody who's at 2.2 already and take them to 2.5? No, definitely not. Yeah, when you're under a certain threshold—

in this case protein requirements, right? Yeah, for protein requirements, you're going to be, you just have so many wins to catch by getting up to a number that's north of 1.1, 1.2.

And honestly, that's really hard for some folks. So we have to be easy on ourselves if you fall in that category, like really work at trying to fit these foods into your daily practice. And I get it. If you're busy, you got kids, you got jobs, you got things going on, like that takes some planning and that's a little bit of a headache at first, but it's worth it. It's

I'd say the juice is worth the squeeze because the outcomes are just really, really nice. I mean, we've done so many studies in my lab or in collaboration a lot with Paul Arciero, who's done a ton of this kind of work. We've shown time and time again that the higher protein loads help a lot with all these goals we're talking about, particularly weight management on that side of it. I mean—

Stefan Passiokas did a study years ago that was the RDA 0.8 or double at 1.6 or triple. And so when they did that, what was really nice to see was that double was far better for the outcomes that they were looking at in that paper, but three times was not.

And they landed on double, which is 1.6. And so that's kind of where we're landing with this. We've done work in our space where we did 40% of the diet as protein. And then we've done some that we looked at 25. And 25 and 40 weren't all that much different from each other.

Although I do think I've listened enough to like Don Lehman and these guys, I don't know that protein should be a percentage. It should probably always be a grams per kg and then just set that as your anchor for your meal planning and then work around it. Yeah, figure out your fueling of your carbohydrates and your fat based on how many calories you need, but keep the total amount of protein there as close as you can. Yeah, yeah. So when we kind of come back to the end of where we're at now, 15 years of research on protein,

or well all nutrients prior to sleep pre-sleep feeding yeah when we look at what luke's group has shown collectively and what your group has shown let me see if i can summarize this and correct me potentially a benefit to muscle protein synthesis which would potentially increase actual muscle growth actual muscle strength now that's probably going to have the biggest impact

If your protein intake is moderate to low. Right. Right. And this is where going from 0.4, 0.5 up to 1.2 or 1.5, we're getting closer to 1.6 and Luke,

and yourself have said, all we're doing here is there's nothing magic, there's nothing special, there's no growth hormone release, it's not a test. It's just the fact that you're getting another opportunity to eat and hit your protein mark. Yeah, no doubt. If you're already at those markers, though, you're already at one gram per pound or 2.2, then that pre-sleep additional protein may or probably won't add any additional to just luke side, the muscle protein. Right. Did I summarize that? Yeah, that's probably where we are at the state of it. And

I would say that's the first third of the story. Yeah, great. So let's finish that, Luke, and we'll talk muscle growth sort of later. Your area is more interesting to me right now, which is in addition to that, though, you can do that while not compromising fat burning. So you're going to potentially gain some muscle there, and then you're not going to there. So I have a handful of questions here. Specifically, I want to get into details. What type of protein?

What other stuff? What populations? Does this work in men and women, young and old? I want to get into other areas of, like I said, age. And then finally, one thing we actually haven't really talked about is you have said it doesn't hurt fat burning. Does it do anything good?

Do we have any data that suggests it does anything positive besides maybe helping me hit my protein goal? So a number of things I'm going to run you through here. Take me whichever one you want to start there, and I want to make sure you don't miss any. I think to summarize that first bit like you just did, I think everybody would agree that we should think of it as another opportunity for a protein feeding. In an athletic context, we've got to remember that sometimes –

Pre-sleep feeding isn't just a luxury, it's a requirement. It's the only chance we have. Yes. And that's what's missed. And I see a lot of times, you know, I'll comment on these if I ever see them, but it's like, don't eat before bed. Even still, you're getting it because it compromises sleep. And we'll talk about that in a little while. Yeah.

There's so much context and there's so many nuances that are needed to say that. So let's talk about Ultraman Florida. If you finish a race at 9 at night, 10 at night, and you got a race at 5, 6 in the morning, you better eat at night.

You're going to have no shot at competing tomorrow. So that's one. Also, we've got to think about day after day after day, athletes have to train or practice. So why not take advantage when a lot of times we're under fueled and have other issues around not eating enough? It's just another opportunity. I work with athletes in virtually every sport in America.

They almost all compete at night. And then you have to do something afterwards. And then you're going to bed. So yeah, so there's like that general context. I think the other piece of this that we started noticing over time, and we haven't even talked about it yet, were performance outcomes. That's what I'm saying. Tell me the benefits here. What good am I going to get out of this? You haven't sold me yet, Mike. Yeah, so the one that gets the most traction is...

It's studied by Abbott, and Abbott's group looked at professional soccer players, and they played an evening match. Oh, I noticed that. Yeah. Yeah. And then they had protein intake afterwards, and then they measured reactive strength index. So they were jumping off a 30-centimeter box and told to jump as fast as they could once they hit the ground. This is a standard metric a lot of sports performance teams will do as a test of daily readiness. Yeah.

performance. So it's not an uncommon test for them. They're probably doing it multiple times a week the entire season anyways, I'm sure. And the other one's real common too is a counter movement jump. Yep. So they did those two and these are professional soccer players, English league, I believe. And they were

They were able to demonstrate over the course of the next three days of doing these tests after just the one dose feeding after the game that they actually either maintain or came back to normal faster post game. And so for me, that was a recovery benefit. Totally. So in our data until now, we never looked at recovery. We were looking at metabolic outcomes and other things like that.

Several other studies have come out around this time that show a little bit of a benefit here, something around this same space, and then some said no benefit. And so I had one of my doc students, Pat Saraceno, look into this, and he started noticing in the literature a pattern. I looked at it with him, and we were like, you know what's happening?

Where it shows a benefit is when you exercise at night. Where it doesn't show a benefit is where you exercise in the morning. And those weren't the design of those studies. We just pulled the methods out and started looking at what time of day was this happening? This is why it's so important.

So important for students to read all the papers and organize them somehow. I'm sure you do this a different way than I do. This is the least interesting thing ever for people who are not scientists, but I can't pass this opportunity, right? You have these things in an Excel file. You have them and you have every variable you can in there. And I promise you, you open that Excel sheet up and you will see massive patterns going on. Every breakthrough I've had, every great idea I've done scientifically has become

because it's that exact thing. You notice a trend, you're like, oh my gosh, four studies, seven studies, nine studies. And oftentimes it lines up and that's where you can actually see things. You will never be able to notice that in a single study. You have to have a command in the literature. So kudos to you and your doc student for doing that. And that's really interesting. Yeah, Pat definitely drove that one home. And so we decided to design a study around it. And simultaneously, we were interested in protein type.

So that's what we did. We took middle-aged men, go figure, and we wanted to see how they responded to pre-sleep feeding after some damaging exercise.

You know, the classic studies where you do some eccentric exercises. Well, we took a protocol that— You get them as sore as possible on purpose. And we did. It's really fun. And we did. And so, yeah, they had, I think it was 150 eccentric-only reps of extension and flexion on their legs. Yeah. Is this on a dynamometer, too, so you're controlling? Yeah, this is a machine that's going to hook your legs up and force them. You can control the force output. So they can't—

The pattern was – so we trialed it. Everybody was sore but made it through. And then we had some people start the study and we ended up getting some people through. And then we had a couple of cases where people were like extremely sore. Yeah, yeah. And these were even very fit individuals for whatever reason. They had a couple of issues. And so we actually ended up stopping that study short because of the extreme amount of pain that they were having. And they had – we ended up finishing with only six people per group. And so the groups we had were –

like a whey protein, a casein protein, a rice and pea combo. So we wanted to look at a plant-based combo and a placebo. And then we damaged them, and then we controlled their entire diet, the whole thing.

So it was like 72 hours after the damaging exercise. You gave them all their meals. All their meals. You gave everything. Every single thing we gave them. Now, obviously, it's human, so you don't know what they're sneaking in or not. But that's a lot more control than most would do. We tried to control it. And, of course, then you get comments like, oh, that was too controlled. It's not real life. But we tried to control all these things. To answer the question you're trying to answer, that's how you deserve it. We're trying to answer it. So we damaged them so much that—

that their markers just dropped off, right? As you would expect, like nobody could produce a contraction that was anything. And then it just never recovered. 72 hours later, we were nowhere near back. And in almost every other study we had looked at, you were at least close by 72 hours later and we just never got there. And so what we found, again,

the type of protein didn't matter in that case. Everybody was too darn sore to actually get back to normal in this particular design. And so we just had to conclude again, like it didn't, we had no difference in protein type. So that was getting at your protein type question was plant-based didn't seem to matter versus whey. While we're here, let me linger on this. I know you don't know the answer because you haven't done these studies yet, but if you were to guess right now,

Yeah.

Or even food type. So if they have to have a protein shake, can they have cottage cheese or yogurt? What would you guess is going to—plant protein specifically is also very interesting. I love this question because we—I'll give you two stories here. The first one is the story of our cottage cheese study. Mm-hmm.

So we were always wondering these whole foods things. And at the time, it was still thought that casein would be the best way to go because of its slow digesting kinetics and everything that we see during the day. Our entire childhoods, we've been told casein is a slower releasing one. That's the one to take before bed. Yes. And so Luke and I have conversations about that because we think it might be different when you're sleeping.

Because you're laying supine and it's subtle changes in pH to your stomach and these different things that are occurring. We just kind of had a hunch on it. And I'll give you the answer because I actually ran this study recently. But the cottage cheese study was great. Went to the supermarket, pulled off a tub of it. And then I sent one to a manufacturer to exactly replicate it in a powder form.

All the profile. And so then I had a semi-solid cottage cheese and a liquid to compare it to and a placebo. Wow. And so that was a neat study where you get at like the consistency of the food and what is that doing with these outcomes. And what we saw in that one was, again, no difference. The cottage cheese was not different from the profile when you made it into a shake.

And so those two were not different from each other, all different from placebo and – well, not all. In some of the outcomes, they were better. And sleep, we did measure in this one. We put on some watches to measure sleep in this one. Again, we saw no differences in sleep. And so real basic design looking at if we have a semi-solid or a liquid, and there were no differences there. So it turned out casing maybe isn't the only one or the best one. And so –

Luke Van Loon, Jorn Tromelin, and colleagues put together a nice study looking directly at casein versus whey. And they looked at mitochondrial MPS and myofibril MPS. And there were no differences in pre-sleep feeding with taking either the whey or the casein. Yep.

In any of the ways that you can measure protein synthesis directly out of muscle. And they're very good at it. Yeah. That's just world leading. Yeah. And so that right there was it because some people don't like the consistency of cottage cheese. They don't like the consistency of a casein shake. They're different. Yep. And so mouthfeel makes a big difference. If you don't want to drink it, you won't do it. Yeah.

If someone says, I love casein, I'm like, go for it. Someone loves what they go for. It doesn't seem to matter protein type. It doesn't seem to matter whole food or supplementation. You've mentioned this a little in passing, but I want to be really clear here. You've done...

the assessment on men and women. You've done it in folks with obesity, folks that are young and well-trained, or you or other groups have done this. I'm going to kind of summarize the whole field here. It's been done in young 20, 25-year-old college age folks, middle-aged. Has it been done in older populations, like 60 plus? 70 plus. 70 plus. Any reason to think this answer changes with any of those demographics? Or is it generally consistently saying the same thing?

And generally it's saying the same thing from everything that I've been a part of or read. I'm sure there might be a study here and there that's slightly different. But generally it's the same.

Unfortunately, one of my own studies contradicted the time of day thing. We did that with Andrew McKeown in Australia, but we had some limitations to that study with time of day of exercise and performance. But in general, what you're saying is accurate. One of the interesting things about this is it keeps evolving. There's still a couple of things we don't know, and we're trying to work on it. So one of the things we've done over this time is given one-off feeding.

And we've usually had sleep as a secondary or tertiary aim, if at all. And so we finally designed one for sleep specifically. And the thing we've done this time is we're giving three nights in a row of the feeding instead of one night. So that if you have an off or an on night, just by chance, we're not picking it up as artifact. That we can hopefully get a better number of nights involved with this. And it's a lot of work because there's nighttime things involved. We can help you on that sleep front. Yeah.

Let's go. There's a lot better ways to do that. So we're doing that right now, and we're doing that in Division I female athletes, which is fantastic. So that's ongoing this whole academic year. So we should have some answers on that next year. We also put a CGM on them so we could continually monitor how glucose fluctuations are occurring through the day and through the night over this period of time. And then the last thing I'll say about that, which is really important,

I think the way that it's going, there's a new player in the protein world in pre-sleep feeding. Oh. Is this breaking? Are you putting it on? This is the first one. It's not been out yet. It's new to this space. So it's being marketed for sleep. It's called alpha-lactalbumin. It's, again, fractionated from dairy protein. Now, I was unfamiliar with it, and it's actually very common. It's in mother's milk, and so it's in infant formula palatine.

And it's high in tryptophan. And so linking those together, someone said high tryptophan, baby's sleeping, maybe adult's sleeping. Let's fractionate it, bottle it on its own and give that to people. And so there's already been two studies on it. And both of those were in Australian –

And both of those showed a benefit on sleep outcomes. So we're running that study now with our Division I female athletes. And Alpha Lac will be one of ours to see if it's actually doing it or will it end like our other studies where there's no difference in things. But right now we're excited about it because there was evidence from two other studies and we're just doing it a bit more controlled in our approach to it. So Alpha Lac is kind of the new player there. Okay.

I think we're kind of winding this story down. A couple of things I want to clarify. You've also mentioned ad nauseum. At this point, there is no reason to think a meal like this should interfere with sleep. Of course, if the individual person has upsets their stomach, gives them acid reflux or something, then stay away from that. That's a really good point. We have to – you have to know how you react to things. Yeah.

The other thing is you could potentially be taking a large amount of fluid right before bed. Oh, right. If that makes you wake up and urinate too much, then it's probably also something you would want to have a different form or maybe try to have your protein intake at different times. Folks, you don't have to fill the whole shaker with water. Right. You can fill eight ounces and shake a little bit. Yeah. And so, yeah, the sleep part of this is going to be sort of the next big story. And

We're currently in negotiations to try to run another study because there's two things we're still missing. I want to know if there's a difference between the quality of the food you're taking or not. So could you have a mixed macronutrient profile that's still relatively low in calories? And how does that compare to something that's like ultra processed? Yeah.

And so that's one we're trying to run next is to look at specifically what is going on with the quality of the nutrient profile. And the other one is, is there a calorie threshold? Okay, perfect, perfect. That's where I think we need to go because 544 in the first study seemed to not be good.

And we're going to try to do like a 0-400-800. And then the idea would be to, if we can pull it off, would be to mask it and probably put it into something like a milkshake. Okay. I got three final short follow-ups to this one, but you led me perfectly into here. Okay.

I think I know the answer based on what you just said, but at this point, is it something special about protein? You actually said your first study was protein. It was carbohydrate and it was multiple forms of protein. And you saw no difference between the carbohydrate and the protein for the most part in those measures that you had, right? Do you think it is the protein or is it going to just simply be the fact that it is a small, in your case, easily digestible protein?

You have pre-powdered, small amounts, easy to get through your stomach foods. If you had to guess right now, it's going to be clearly a combination of these. But is it the protein or is it the meal size and digestibility? Yeah. Tell me the answer to your new study that you haven't done yet. I think that we're going to have something to meal size and digestibility. Yeah.

However, we don't know the answer for sure. But just like some of the other studies I described, we sometimes think we know what's going on. And then you have to just do the study to show it. So I think we're going to find something to the calorie threshold theory. I would –

bet a lot on that. Yeah. Simply coming from it. Especially with sleep. Yes. So that's where we get mixed results. If you look at sleep data, if you do eat large calorie meals before bed, sometimes it does mess with sleep. And I don't think it's fair to say eating before bed messes with sleep. It's specifically, what are you doing before and after, before actually, before sleep? And what exactly are you eating? Because I can tell you right now, having done this a lot,

If you give people an easily digestible carbohydrate, high fiber, an easily digestible protein under a total amount of volume and calories, probably 300 or so, you rarely have sleep issues. In fact, many, many times you'll see enhanced sleep. And one of the things that you'll, the biggest things you'll see is the next morning inertia. So the grogginess you feel when you wake up the next morning.

is oftentimes improved. Not in every single person, but rarely have we seen that hurt people. Exceptional again, I may get a little heartburn from it, things like that. My stomach felt like a rock. Okay, fine. But you have very small meals like that. I know where I would put my money. I don't know what your day is going to find, but I think you're onto something there. I think we see it

Like you're saying in the people we work with, but when we're doing this in a study, we can really control it and find out exactly what's happening. So that's where I think we're going to go with it. There are data like –

I think it was the Falkenberg study. And they were looking at all types of macros before bed. And it was like lower glycemic, higher fiber and protein. Actually, we're all helpful with sleep. And so those are the things that we're really doing here. That's what we'll be looking at in these new studies if we can get them launched with our grant funding. And I feel like that's probably going to be the answer. We're going to have a threshold and probably a quality of food as well. The oddest question I ever got about this was, does it mess with your teeth?

Yeah, I can see that. And I thought, I've never asked that question. But normally, I think people would have it and then brush their teeth before bed. So we haven't gone down that pathway yet. Pre-post teeth brushing. Yeah. Yeah, not my area. Okay, last little one, and then I want to make sure we wrap this thing here. Have you guys actually looked at this?

in either a calorie-controlled, throughout-the-day fashion, or a specifically non-calorie-controlled for long-term fat loss. So, okay, I get it. You sold me. I might recover better. I might grow some more muscle. And my fat oxidation rate the next morning maybe won't change. Okay, you sold me. It won't hurt my sleep, blah, blah, blah. But am I going to lose more fat today?

Am I going to gain more fat? What do we know about 8, 10, 12 weeks long? Yeah. So it's a little bit extrapolated from other studies we've done where just by chance there was an evening protein shake. Okay. Yeah. So one of the earlier studies, I think it was a 2002 with R-C-Aero, we were looking at –

It was an old program called Body for Life that Bill Phillips developed. So we did the first study on that. So Paul got that grant, and I was the student in the lab helping on that study. And that one included six meals a day, and three of them were shakes. So you had a mid-morning, mid-afternoon, and an evening protein shake. And then we did that for 12 weeks of training. And that training was like three days a week of 20 minutes a hit.

three days a week of resistance training. So like six days of exercise, great. I mean, really good outcomes were coming from that.

When that was compared to something like the traditional American Heart Association recommendations, which were definitely more carb heavy, definitely less protein dominant, and mostly at that point, just physical activity like walking, getting some more exercise throughout the day. When you had the pre-sleep included in the total like regimen you were following, those folks had far greater outcomes in terms of abdominal fat loss, visceral adipose tissue loss, and pre-sleep.

strength and actual like performance outcomes over that period of time. Okay. So would this be fair to characterize the entire field, both your work and others as best we know it now seems to be pretty ubiquitous in terms of the groups, the population, it won't matter, post-menopause, pre-menopause, young, old,

so on and so forth. The type of protein perhaps doesn't matter in that if you're already hitting your protein targets, then this is not going to potentially have any massive benefit, but it doesn't seem like it's going to harm much either. If you're already doing it, probably okay. If you're already not doing it,

You don't necessarily need to go add this as long as you're hitting your total protein throughout the day. So this is not anything miraculous, but it is just another option. And it is perhaps most importantly something people shouldn't be afraid of. Absolutely. Yeah, that's the biggest thing. I'm always asked about it, and it's really just the exact thing. Don't be afraid of it. If you're hungry, you have an option. You can eat something.

And it's probably going to do either nothing or it will help you. Really, really, really beneficial when dieting. No doubt about that. If you know you can turn to a 25-gram shake at night and you're just – the hunger button is hammered to the bottom, almost nothing is going to happen negative in response to that. 100%.

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Well, thank you for giving such a fantastic breakdown of your 15 years of work in the area of pre-sleep and probably most importantly, justifying my, what is basically a nightly routine now, especially when I'm on the road of, I absolutely smash a David Barr.

Before bed, all the time. Literally never stop on the road. It's like dessert sort of thing for me, but I feel justified. And what I'm hearing you say is there's zero problem with that, so I can continue that habit. You got it from me. Appreciate it. I want to transition from protein and talk a little bit more about carbohydrate. You've done a lot of work in this area as well, and there are perhaps...

more things we can learn here that are counter to what other folks have talked about or seen in the past. So walk us through some of the stuff you've done on specifically these resistant starches in your lab. Yeah. So we got interested in the modified carbohydrate space a while back. And it started with a student who was hyper-interested in carbohydrate. Isn't that the best? Yeah. And they drive. I mean, my lab is so fantastic. They're all brilliant. Yeah.

They're so much smarter than me, and I love that because they just have great ideas, and we can weave it into stuff that we can get funding for, and it's just a really good mix. But I had this student at the time, Dan Bauer, who was a phenomenal student and hyper-interested in all things carbohydrate, and I was kind of protein-dominant for all of the work I was into. So it was a great addition to what we were doing there to round out sort of some of our macronutrient profiles that we were interested in. Yeah.

He started with a review paper that we sort of team wrote to just get the history of what's going on with these. And if you're unaware of these modified starches, well, regular starch, for example, has structural components of it like amylose and amylopectin. And they will dictate the rate at which it will be digested.

When you modify that starch, you do that. You can do it several ways chemically or we were using hydrothermally modified. So it was like water and heat and pressure and you can change it. It doesn't matter any longer what the amylose amylopectin ratio is. Right. That's out the window. It doesn't even matter. So that's what students get tripped up on a lot is that once you modify it, that's no longer a thing. Right. This is the heat it up, let it cool back down. Yes. Right.

And so the particular product we started with was designed for people with glycogen storage disease.

Oh, macartos. So there's a glycogen separate too. Outside of macartos, there's glycogen storage disease where you cannot store glycogen. And so what you have to do, what was developed was a version of this super starch that was slow drip, didn't raise insulin and kept glucose steady for long periods of time. And so that's how it was used for ages. A different problem than breaking down carbohydrate macartos, right? You can't store it at all.

Different enzymatic problem. Yes. Still genetic, I'm assuming. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. And so what athletes do, they hear about this. What I love is that the clinical goes to the athletes and the athlete kind of work also goes to clinical. So I'm thinking of cases like creatine in athletes over to clinical. And then in this case, clinical with the glycogen storage disease coming back to athletes. So athletes here, slow drip glucose. Sure. Here we go.

And some companies got involved and they made what was called UCAN SuperStarch. And so we decided to start testing it because there were a lot of claims around it. And it was just nice. We were able to really, over several studies, decide, you know, what design do we need? Because the SuperStarch folks would say that you would need less material.

of a serving than you would have a normal carbohydrate. So for example, if you normally have 60 grams per hour with the super starch, the claim was you could do maybe 30 grams per hour. You don't need as much of it. It's a slow drip. And then it wouldn't raise insulin concentrations either, which I don't know that's a good or bad thing, but it just wouldn't do it.

And there were a couple of studies on it, like Mike Roberts' group did a little bit with it, which was how we sort of knew about it. And we just sort of took it another step. We used the microdialysis probes again, and we started with cyclists. And so we brought in well-trained, they were very well-trained. They weren't elite, but they were very well-trained cyclists.

And so we put them through or Dan put them through this gnarly protocol where we made it as gut jarring as you possibly could with interval sprints and all these different protocols and a long duration. And we wanted to see.

30 grams of it, which would be like a low dose. And then we also gave 60 grams of it because that's what was recommended is 60 grams of carbohydrate. And then we compared that to what's traditionally used in a over-the-counter sports drink. So we compared it to other sports drinks as well.

And in the first study, we saw that when you compared 60 grams of the SuperStarch to 60 grams of a sports drink, the biggest trouble was that the SuperStarch induced more GI upset.

More. And unfortunately, the claims were that there was going to be less GI upset. But in our hands, we actually saw more GI upset. And it's a subjective reporting of cramping. It is. Yeah. It's like a visual analog scale and it's a 10-point scale. You mark a line with where you feel. And nausea, wanting to vomit, that kind of thing. It was a tough protocol. So that's not good. Yeah.

And performance, the outcomes we had were actually not different. You just felt terrible. So like if you're talking about rating a perceived exertion and that can really dictate or limit like how well you perform. For sure. You think it's harder. But when we compared it to the 30-gram dose, which is what was typically recommended, like a lower dose, you don't need as much. Yeah.

Worst performance. No GI upset, but worse performance. So now you're in a case where, okay, there wasn't any GI upset, but you weren't taking enough. So you got the worst of both cases here. Yeah, you got in this other case. And so at the highest dose, if you could train your gut, then perhaps it was something that you could use. But you could also just use another sports drink and have a similar response. I will say two things about it, though. A mistake that was made...

that we did and could do better was that we didn't familiarize people to taking it. People were used to the sports drink, the other, the comparator, but they'd never like had it before. So perhaps we should have given it for a while beforehand and then tried it. Were you giving this in the form of liquid shake? Yeah, liquid shake. It shouldn't be any different, but nevertheless, that's a comment that we received. I don't know about that. In that front. So haven't taken, the only reason I'm saying that is I've taken a lot of resisted starches.

in various forms. I've never noticed a first time or learned effect of it. Yeah. You wouldn't think so, but it's plausible. Sure. Yeah. Plausible. Good scientist you are. Yeah. It's plausible. It's plausible. The other thing we wanted to see was maybe we needed to jostle the gut a little bit more and do running.

So in a follow-up study for Dan's dissertation, he got two dissertations out of this. He went after runners, elite runners. And some of these runners were running like

14 minute 5ks and things very good very fast after running for an hour at a marathon pace you know so we it was a good protocol again and we also put microdialysis probes in their belly while they're running and doing all this which is a feat in itself because everything's jostling so you have to tape everything down pretty good because we're also interested in

what fuel were being used. And so Dan always would say like, just because you can change the fuel use should you. Sure. You know, so, you know, just like any other feeding studies where you limit a certain macronutrient or another, you can change what's oxidized because you're eating differently or you're exercising at a different pace or what have you. And this was the same thing with UCAN. Like we could change

The fuel that was being utilized and insulin, by the way, didn't rise. So that claim was right. It stayed low and glucose stayed quite steady. You didn't have any spikes or anything. So in the running study, it basically mimicked the cycling study, even though we were trying to jostle even more and make sure we had GI upset if we were going to see it. And it just didn't.

Ended up being fairly similar and the fat metabolism piece didn't add much to the story, unfortunately, in that particular study. So I could see a couple of uses. It does give you sustained glucose for a long period of time. If you're in a sport by which you cannot feed for a long time, maybe it's useful. Maybe long distance swimming? Yeah.

would be an example where you could potentially use it or sometime when you just don't want to carry a lot of fuel with you or maybe you're having, I don't know, some type of sporting activity where you're not able to eat a lot. But then we thought about pre-sleep feeding. And I thought, I thought we were done here. Can I take it before bed and then run a faster morning race without having to wake up and eat in the middle of the night like a lot of people who run endurance races would do?

So then we designed one where we took UCAN super starch right before bed, compared that to our traditional glucose drinks. Were those calorie match protocols? Yeah. Okay. Okay.

So you're just switching it out. Yeah. What did you switch it out for? So we would take just regular carbohydrate or we would take the UCAN Superstar. What was the regular carbohydrate? Just the sucrose. Okay. Yeah. We would mix it. And then one of the things I was like- So sugar, water, or this? Yeah. So calorie matched and we were doing- Macronutrient matched. Macronutrient matched and they-

I was hopeful that we would see maybe like, oh, you don't have to get up so early and it's lasting so long. So the only thing we did see, which was kind of neat, was that you didn't – that you did have an increase in carbohydrate burning in the morning, which theoretically could help with performance. It didn't translate to it in our hands. Well, it certainly indicates there's something physiologically happening. There's something happening. It's still going on in there, right? You've still enhanced it.

If you were to simply ingest carbohydrate right now, your carbohydrate burning goes up, right? Exactly. This is the whole premise behind why many folks got it wrong in saying, well, these higher fat diets or eating more fat helps you burn more fat. Anything does. If you eat more protein right now, you burn more protein right now, right? You need more carbohydrate.

But the fact that it lasted overnight indicates that the next morning the sugar water wasn't still around, but the starch was. In other studies, we fed chocolate milk before sleep and different things. And it's the same thing. You're still burning a bunch of carbohydrates in the morning. And

that may be able to translate to performance, but we just didn't, we haven't seen it yet. We haven't been able to tease that out in a running example. Yeah. So by default, then you would have probably lowered fat oxidation. Yeah. And that's, and that was exactly what was happening, but, but,

Perhaps we didn't have – something wasn't right. Maybe the dosing was wrong because even with protein, you have to do – the ideal dose is 40 grams, which is bigger than a lot of people are used to because you're going so long until you're using it again. Like all night long, you have to have it. So maybe with carbohydrate, we just needed a bigger dose. One of the things that I appreciate so much about not only the conversation we're having but your research line in general is you're not only a scientist, but as I mentioned at the beginning, you've run these races. Yes.

You're an educator. You have courses on this. In fact, I think I mentioned at the beginning that Florida State Educator of the Year, I know, is on your resume as an award. You're putting these things into practice. You have the literal textbook in the field. You wrote the textbook in exercise physiology.

And it's so clear that when you go after one of these studies, you don't just stop. When you're on here, when you're having these conversations, you're not just saying, okay, this is our answer. Because you know if you change one variable, maybe it changes. And why I'm bringing this up now is you just reminded me that as you said, well, maybe we had the wrong dose. Maybe it was the wrong time. Maybe it was the wrong combination. Maybe it was the wrong person.

That's a really hard skill. And you rarely hear scientists talk like that because they want to have a capture of an area and they want to have clear answers. The world wants a clear answer, but in, because you're such a practitioner, you know, that's not really how it works. So I really appreciate that about your perspective, the way that you teach and the way you run your lab, because you're doing 10, 15 years of the same kind of study with multiple barriers changed out to understand the real answer there.

This is not going to influence your funding. This is not going to get you promoted or bring more money. It's really honestly, I must, you know, jumping into your brain a little bit here, but you're generally trying to answer the question and you know that there's real life, there's multiple aspects of

There's just trade-offs. There's not simple answers. So another compliment coming your way for your approach. I appreciate it. It's great to do, though. I mean, that's the luxury of having a facility and a location where we can have the funding and the resources to do some of those studies. And a team. And the team's all about it. And I think everybody comes in knowing kind of the general areas we're going to go in. And we're all in. I told you earlier, we're trying to create this culture that you go into a research lab and

For example, if you go into an athletics facility, you usually see all the swag and all the things. It just feels good, right? And so I love that. And I want to replicate that as best I can in research where you come into the facility. You know here we're going to do great work, but it's also going to look nice and we're going to have –

things that make you want to be a part of what we're doing. And it works. I mean, the students buy in, the faculty that are present buy in, the research subjects want to be there instead of just, you know, stuck in a basement that's got no windows. You know, it's just a great, it's a great spot. Yeah, man, there's love for being in the basement. I get it. Like some of my fonder memories. I had a lot of years there. Yeah, but having dealt with that for most of my career and now having the exact opposite at Parker,

I get it, man. Having nice facilities and being able to do stuff, it changes everything. Yeah. So the Yukon, the SuperStarch didn't do much in, what, four studies you did in that area? Three, yeah. Three different studies. I have personally used resistance starches, mostly, candidly, pretty much used Vitargo for the most part, which is a slightly different –

But similar concepts here with a lot of success in totally different applications and totally different scenarios than you. So I think perhaps, I don't know, are you going to continue that research line or you feel like you got that answer already?

We haven't had any more pursuit of that answer. But with the product that you're talking about, I think that there are other things that could be done in that particular space because that's modified to be different, right? That's modified to be fast digesting. Uh-huh, 100%. But I don't believe all the data. Uh-huh.

And I'd love to do a study with it because I think it's got a lot of potential and I know a lot of practitioners love it. But it was the same way with UCAN Superstars. So there's something always to all these types of studies, especially with supplements. Like if you like it and you think it works, then it works. So we need to stay there. However, I'd love to do those comparison studies with Futargo because I know some of the data were like,

The first 10 minutes were extremely fast and everything stopped. And if you look at after the 10 minutes, then you have issues where it doesn't go any faster. But the net was still more. And so there's just questions I love to ask about in there. I'm sure you have plenty of questions about that. The post-extreme caloric restriction, so weight cutting scenarios in different sports, we've used it in as a very fast way.

if you will, as a part, it's not your first line of defense, but many different scenarios, other extreme, I will just say scenarios folks are in where fuel is going to be very limited and unpredictable. And these can be benefits, but I would agree. I would love to see you and Vitargo, I guess,

contact Mike and maybe you guys can come up with some cool stuff, but more work for sure is needed in that area. - Yeah, and honestly, everybody that I know uses it tends to like it. I just, I would love it because the studies that I've read on the modifications, it's not clear cut to me. - Ah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is the beauty of how our field works. You said this just a few minutes ago, clinical influences the science, the science sometimes influence the clinical. So you have a lot of clinicians and athletes and folks

Yeah. Making comments and great. Let's bring it to the lab. Let's see. And that's not to ruin it, to end it, to say it doesn't work, but it's simply to say maybe it doesn't do A, B, and C. Yeah. Or there's a different use for it. Totally. Yeah. So like these, the grants and the funding sometimes come from these companies and- Most of the time. And that's how you would get worked on on those. And that's a different conversation. If we want to have it, we can, but let's just say everything's kosher because that's how we run the facility. Yeah.

There's a lot of things you can look at with a different lens, like what sport works where you have not a lot of fuel for a long period of time. Maybe there's a use. Or maybe you're the age group athlete and you're not going to win and you don't want insulin spiking all the time in a race where you're out there for a long period of time. Then maybe that's a really good product. So there's different uses, different people. You got to really just know the individual. Yeah, 100%.

So we went from protein, we went to carbohydrate. Let's go on actually to a little bit of a different macronutrient-ish, collagen. I know you've done work in this area. In fact, you were telling me earlier, I didn't realize this, but your one study was the longest ever study done in collagen. Is that right? In humans, of course. Nine months. So there's a lot going on. And I'll actually always be honest, my answer has changed on collagen probably in the last nine to 12 months.

I know I remember, and I'll save names here, but people have been talking about collagen specifically for soft tissue injury. And work there initially came, of course, out of animal, mice, and urine models and other things. And I'm generally a person who says until it's at least somewhat shown in human. I'm not going to say it doesn't work. I'm just not really going to be concerned of it.

I think it's really important that people understand where they are at personally on that line. So you have kind of over on one end of the spectrum, unless it's been shown in five randomized control, double blind placebo studies, I'm not taking it. Right. Okay, fine. I personally don't live in that world. I deal with most of the athletes and clients are never going to have a randomized control trial on them population wise. Right.

Other folks, other than the spectrum, is if there's even a plausible cell culture study, like I'm all in. Right. Okay. I'm probably in the middle, if I would be honest, I'm a little bit hedged more towards the right, the clinical trial. Let me see it in humans at least. Ideally not in just like a case study only, a variable I care about, somewhat trained or whatever population I'm looking at. So my personal bias is I'm there.

What that means is I'm sometimes slow, sometimes behind. People are taking things before I would. But I'm okay there because on aggregate, I generally win in the sense that I avoid things, not taking things. I stop doing procedures and products where other people have tried because I'm like, well, eventually it turned out to sort of not work. Yeah, for sure. So I think it's fine. People can be wherever on the spectrum I want. I don't think there's any issue as long as they are either aware with themselves or

or they're athletes or clients or customers where they're at on that journey. For me, collagen was on that left end. It was very much, I don't see much here. I don't see which are plausible. Then some human studies came. I didn't see much there. It's changed.

Like it really has changed recently so much so now where I think, okay, I think there is something here, there, and there's enough for me to take action. So we have integrated collagen a lot more on this. So where are you at on that spectrum? Tell us about that study you did there, what you guys learned and in general your take. Right. So we began this work six years ago and it was originally for the purpose of looking at dosing.

When we looked at the literature before we began, there were a lot in like skin healthcare beauty space. And that dosing was like five to 10 grams a day. And I mean, they had like these fairly decent outcomes over many, many studies. And so I think there was some evidence in there, but then I was like, all right, I'm used to whey protein. What is going on with this? I'm used to like muscle outcomes or fat metab outcomes and,

body comp outcomes. There are one or two papers that actually showed that collagen had some benefit in that space, but they weren't compared to whey. They were compared to nothing. And it's usually at a very low total protein intake and things like that. And it's in one lab where it's showing this and that kind of thing. So we always wondered, well, maybe these should be not compared or we have to look at what the outcome is. If you're looking at muscle, I wouldn't use collagen for muscle. Right.

Right. And I think like Stu Phillips has said that over and over in some of his work and it's right. He says it a little more aggressively than that, but okay. Yeah. But for muscle, no, it's not where you want it. The amino acid profile isn't there. So we were specifically looking at joint pain.

That's what our outcome was. And it was in middle-aged and older, lifelong active people. And so it was a fun time recruiting these individuals. Some golfed every day, some ran every day, but some were elite CrossFitters. Some were triathletes. So all kinds of a range of people, but they're all active every single day or not every single day, but very active for recruiting purposes. Yeah.

And then we gave them either zero, 10 or 20 grams of collagen per day. And it was designed at six months. But as we were getting closer, we said, well, if we're doing it this long, let's see if we can keep them on and do nine months. So maybe we can look at bones.

And then we're like, well, we probably need a year, but let's see if we can get nine months and see what's happening. That's right around the number, right? Where if you see bone mineral density changes in six months, you probably have to be in a severe drug protocol, damage protocol, caloric restriction protocol or something. By 12, you'll see it. So I only want to flag that for people who

to realize if you're looking at body composition, muscle growth, performance, sleep, digest, those can happen in weeks. Bone takes a very long time. And I think you nailed it. Nine months is probably right on that tipping point.

Yeah, it was. And so we were still underpowered at that point, unfortunately, for Bones. So we were still primarily focused on... It's like a maybe we get it. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. And so we offered the opportunity for the people who volunteered for six months to stay on for three more. So this is they're doing the six-month study. And then along the way, you're going, hey, guys, if you want to keep going, by the way, we'll keep coaching and we'll keep giving you products. Yeah, like three months in.

We wrote to the funding agency and I said, I think we should extend this, but it's going to cost X amount to do that. Are you on board? And so they were on board with doing it. So we ended up extending it. And a couple of interesting things came from it. It was mostly questionnaires in our study because we were looking at joint pain and we tried to use like goniometers for range of motion and some of these other things. And we did some more high tech tools that we had, but

They weren't working. There was too much variability in making that happen. And also the researcher who was doing that was a doc student driving this work, Shloa Kiyokofsky. And she's at UAMS now. And anyway, she's still carrying on the collagen line. So it's carried on in her lab now. Anyway, when we were looking at this, the joint pain angles we were looking at, the bottom line is over nine months of time, we had subjective improvements in joint pain.

When you were in our study, but there were some caveats. 10 grams did better than 20. Interesting. 10 grams did better than 20. And when we dichotomized the amount of exercise you did, it was most helpful if you exercised for greater than 180 minutes per week.

of exercise. So with that said, in our hands, that was our outcome. 10 grams per day was the dose. Nine months was the timeline. We saw improvements in joint pain that were significant and you had to exercise more than 180 minutes to feel those benefits.

The cool relationship that we were maybe should have expected but didn't is they did some mood state assessments and such. And those people who had better knee pain actually had better improvements in mood, as you would expect, not in so much pain. So, yeah, that changed my tune on it because I was unsure of it entirely. And then what we didn't measure, you always wish you had a better questionnaire or something. And people just talking to you after these studies and they're like, changed my life.

Some of them, not all of them, but some of them were like, this was amazing. And I noticed that I came off of it for three months. Thing is, it takes a while. It's one of those things you have to take. And then we started seeing differences around six months and then they were sustained around nine months. So it took quite a while. Um,

But it's enough that as a middle-aged athlete, I've started implementing 10 grams a day. And in our study, we didn't even mix it with vitamin C, which is probably the way. Oh, really? Which is the recommended way. Yeah. Like all Keith Barr's work is fascinating. And they're the best at it. We were kind of late to the game and just wanted to have these joint pain outcomes specifically because there were evidence of it even in young athletes, like college athletes. Yeah.

of fixing joint pain. And they didn't even have joint pain to begin with. Our people all had joint pain, but no diagnosed osteoarthritis. And we saw these benefits. But even in young people, it was shown. So I think the benefit is there. I would take it separately from whey. I would use whey for my muscle building efforts. I would use collagen for my joint pain. Okay. Handful of follow-ups on you there. Number one, for anyone at home, collagen can be got very cheaply. So in fact, I think

Keith's initial stuff was just 50 cents at the store gelatin. So you can look up, I'm sure we could probably put some stuff in the show notes, but you can literally make this stuff for very cheap. If you want, you can, of course, get it from a supplement company. Most of them, I know the Momentous one is already made with vitamin C. 50 milligrams is the general dosage, I think, for the activation. The reason for that, in case you're wondering, is...

The quick way to explain this is the collagen needs to be actually absorbed and utilized, and vitamin C is an important cofactor in that process. So I skipped a bunch of science, and that's not totally correct what I said, but for the most part, if you're wondering, like, why the heck did he say vitamin C if that felt out of random for you?

- Perhaps we can talk at a separate time about that, but that's why you bring it up. And again, the collagen shots and other stuff from Momentous is already in there. But most other companies, if you have a different place that you'd like to get your supplements from, a lot of them are mixing with vitamin C for that exact reason. So I wanted to make sure we did that so I didn't forget, 'cause people are gonna ask, "Okay, where the heck do I get this stuff from? "And how do I get it there?"

But back to your study design question, did you do serial design or serial testing or was it simply the six-month, nine-month mark that you did it? In other words— No, they came in a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were seeing them regularly monthly. So you had your—and what all measures did you have there besides the joint pain, things like that? The cognitive surveys. Yeah. And at the time, we were doing body comp outcomes as well, obviously, with the DEXA and the bone. And then we also had—

The actual like goniometer measures, but we had to basically throw it all away because it was just useless at the end, unfortunately. Yeah. So you saw virtually no change until about the six month mark. And that was your first point of statistical difference was at that.

Yeah, not that clean, but roughly. Yeah. And it held on for the nine months. Yes. And again, in the people that exercise the most. Yeah. So yeah. Do I think it's the next thing? I don't know. It just seems to sway me a little bit that if joint pain is a problem for you, it'd be worth considering because it isn't that expensive. It's very easy to take. And it's worth trying before you go and have surgery or something. You might as well give it a go. Well, what are the known downsides besides cost?

Yeah, nothing. Yeah, it's not going to help build your muscle. It won't help, sure. But for a pretty reasonable, I don't know what, I don't know, probably $40 a month, like maybe at the most, something like that, relative to the pain you're experiencing, if it even has a 10 or 15% reduction in pain. Do you remember what the magnitude of effect was on the pain? Was it something like that? That's a good question. I don't remember. I would imagine it's not this insane life-changing, my arthritis is gone my entire life, but it's probably more of like a,

That went from a 7 out of 10 to 5 out of 10. Yeah, the mean was a significant increase, but it wasn't mind-blowing. But you had those one-offs that were like, my goodness, that's pretty cool to listen to. And, you know, that's not – it just drives more questions, you know. Now we want to see what else could we do. We took a ton of blood and we're still analyzing it. So we're trying to figure out some mechanisms behind it with some of the –

like osteoblastic or osteoclastic activities, some of the things around collagen synthesis and degradation. And so Shiloah now is working on those outcomes from that sample. And then there's other things we're working on too and had some momentum for potentially use in recovery from surgery like ACL repairs. And they're

I think some work needs to be done in that space. We have a real good relationship now with orthopedic medicine where I am, and then Shaloh works in a department that has that focus. So I think she'll be heading up a lot of those studies and be worth watching her profile grow here in the next couple of years on that topic. Okay. So we can assume very low downside for

likely plausible mild benefit, if that meets the criteria for you to take action, great. If it doesn't, that's fine too. All I'm assuming you want to do is just make sure people know what is possibly happening and then it's up for them to decide if that meets their action criteria. Yeah, no doubt about it. And I do think, based on the data we have, if you're not exercising a lot, don't do it. Like if you have knee pain and you're not active, I wouldn't do it. Last two questions on that. One, why do you think...

The ones that exercise the most are the only ones or the ones that saw the most benefit. Probably the most likely answer is blood flow. You get blood flow to the area, to areas that are hard to get blood flow to.

The other thing we didn't do was time, like purposely tell them when to take it in the day before exercise. Whereas like Keith's work that shows a massive benefit is when you take it before exercise so that you have it in there when you're going to get blood flow going. We just split it morning and night so that we could do 0, 0, 5, 5, 10, 10.

through the day. So those are some things that we could have done better. So you need to repeat that study and specifically give it to them in that 45 to 90 minutes pre-workout window, which is where most of these were. Yeah, it probably would be better to do a... Plausible because a bigger effect. Sure. And if we did like a training study where we actually controlled the exercise to get them to the minutes we need and then all these other factors. But I tell you, a nine-month study the way we did it, which is pretty free living, still took four years. Yeah.

And so if we redid it with all those other variables... How did I miss the math there? That's science, right? It is. I mean, you can't enroll everybody at once. So you trickle them in and roll them in. And because of that, it takes years. Yeah. But you mentioned it's free living. That's...

Going to have the most ecological validity, the most external validity, right? What that means is that's the most realistic to a real life scenario where someone just, they're taking a scoop of it. They're not doing it the best way. They're not having a perfectly designed training protocol. And you still see, in my opinion, as a, well, we'll just say fairly well-trained scientist at this point in my career, that's actually really powerful because you didn't do it at the right time.

you didn't control for those things and you still saw a statistically significant, albeit mild, benefit, I think most people listening would say, I will take a mild reduction in my daily pain. Yeah, yeah. And obviously...

50 calorie snack. And the cognitive side, like that's what was so nice is like the scales and subscales were all showing, you know, if you had the improvement in pain, you started feeling better in all these other areas of your life. So the last question I have for you on that particular study was, and I know everyone listening has been waiting for me to ask this or hoping I would, how did 10 work better than 20?

Yeah, I'm not going to have a great answer for you. Yeah, we don't really know. It didn't make sense to us. And it's one of those. Why did you even think to do 10 versus 20? So a lot of times the dose on a prepackage is 15. And when we were looking at those data, there wasn't a lot in the space. And then we were talking with some of the companies that produce it.

some saying that 20 was what they sell, but I'd seen efficacy at 10. And I thought, well, we should probably figure out what dose we should be taking. And so that's why we designed it that way. But I don't know, maybe 15 would have been the best if we didn't do it. Zero, 10, and 20. And 20 did some things, but the 10 just had kind of the most overall benefits. So that's what I would recommend at this point. Right. It's interesting because rarely with protein, and I'll be at

Collagen is not the same thing as whey protein. I just can't think of too many situations in which when you go more than, you had a lesser effect. It's almost always the more protein or protein-like, the more amino acids, the more anything in this space, either you get a benefit or you at worst get a, maybe not a greater increase in benefit relative to,

to the greater increase in substrate or volume or food or calories. But in this case, you actually see a dampered effect. Yeah, and I'll tell you, like, that's, we've been struggling with that for a while. And how do we interpret that? And, you know, the reviewers have the same comments. It's like, I'm sure that was comment number one. I don't get it. So, you know, that particular paper tries to outline some of the potential reasons, but in reality, we don't really know what happened. Struggling to answer a review question. Yeah, so we're not sure. I think that's...

It's honestly, no, and I don't mean this, I know you won't take it this way, but it's also very plausible it's artifact. No doubt. As in, it might not be a real genuine finding. Weird things can happen, right? And this is why another thing you said earlier as a passing comment that I want to pull out is another great sign of a phenomenal scientist. You mentioned a study coming from one lab before and you say, okay,

You would say the same thing I know you would about your lab. Oh, for sure. So don't over-interpret this nine-month study. Right. Right? It's like, well, let's see another lab. Repeat it. Let's do different circumstances. Yeah, without a doubt. Without a doubt. Yeah, I mean, that's the whole deal. What's so exciting about the field of performance nutrition in general for me is

It's not a dead science. It evolves constantly. And that's what's great. It's like stuff I taught five years ago is probably changing the way I teach it today and could change in another five years. And so, you know, taken as a whole, that like keeps us very interested and motivated all the time. Okay. Well, for the record, I'm going to keep taking 20. I don't care what your data says.

I'm not kidding. I'm not stopping it at all. It's too much of a potential win, but I'll be honest. One of the major reasons I changed my position in this field was your paper. Once I saw your name, that kind of a study on, I was like, okay, now I can start believing this data because it's not against the other scientists who were publishing earlier with you, but it's just the fact that I now saw it on multiple labs, a lab I recognize, and the data were believable. And what I mean by that is when you do real world studies,

You rarely see everything works every time. Right. It's like, well, maybe joint pain went down, but they slept worse. Or this marker in the blood went up and this other marker went up and then this one didn't. And anytime I see a paper where like everything gets better, I'm always like, no, no way. We don't suffer from that problem. Awesome. We've hit...

protein and carbohydrates and we went to collagen, I think actually would be helpful. And I'm sorry, I forgot this, but maybe let's take a real quick step backwards. What the heck is collagen?

We hear about it a lot. We talk about it. We've sort of been kind of saying that it's almost as interchanged with protein. It's not. But can you just give people a quick understanding of what collagen actually is? Sure, yeah. I mean, you think of it as a protein. It's just got sort of different amino acids that make up its structure than you would a whey protein. So it's all kinds of amino acids linked together. But the biggest sort of magic to it, at least in the literature, is that it's very high in proline.

and glycine. And if you can get these cyclic proline molecules, hydroxyprolines out of the structure, that's what makes it different.

The whey protein, for example, is very high in leucine, whereas this is basically absent of leucine. And so that's why it's not a complete protein. It's kind of thought of for years like the rubbish sort of protein. Don't even use it. Throw it away. Leucine is the amino acid that's the primary driver. Well, it's a large driver of muscle growth. Hence your comments earlier about whey protein being –

Hey, thanks, Stu Phillips. Great. That's the one for muscle growth. This one is basically absent of it. Yeah. And so that's the throwaway protein, right? Right. And yeah, so collagen in itself would be higher in these proline-hydroxyproline sort of linkages. It's thought, I mean, there's data in animals showing that as large of a nanopeptide, nine amino acids are getting through intact.

That hasn't been shown in other places. Normally, all the proteins will be sort of broken apart into individual amino acids and then brought in. These are coming in regularly in two to three amino acid structures, and then the largest I've seen is nine. And then there are these certain patterns that supposedly are what can help to drive that to be a part of the matrix for like tendons and ligaments and the structural components that it's supposed to be used for. Let me...

Make sure I understood that correctly. If you were to ingest majority of different types of proteins, you're going to have them go into your gut as that piece of steak, that milk, that yogurt, that whatever you're getting it from. Great. It's going to be in your stomach as a whole protein. By the time it gets into your blood, it is now in the blood not as the whole protein anymore, but as its individual amino acid components. So this is what your gut and your digestive tract are doing is they're breaking it down from the total protein into the amino acids.

But what you're saying is what's unique about collagen is it's not necessarily broken down the entire way. Yeah, and I'm skeptical of it. I mean, I've read all the literature on it. We didn't measure the tripeptides and the bigger molecules coming through, although we had plans to. It kind of fell through, unfortunately. Technical stuff, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah.

But that is what the literature base is saying, that that is what makes it novel and unique. So in your blood, you could pull it out and you'll see two or three of these amino acids still linked together, which would be insanely uncommon. If you were to, for example, put an IV line in me and you measured my blood and I had a meal, you could see how much protein I ate, but you would have no idea what I actually ate. In this case, it'd be different. You would, in theory, if this holds true—

be able to say, wow, you specifically ate collagen. Right. And I think where the breakdown is— This is very weird scientifically, by the way, if you're like, what are these guys learning about? I'm fixated on this because this is really, really odd. It is. And it should make you a bit skeptical about it because some of the companies, unfortunately, are saying if you take this type, then, for example, like type 1 collagen, it would go straight to tissues that need type 1 collagen. I've never seen that. I don't think that's actually the case.

To me it seems like those particular tissues are made up of certain types of amino acid chains. This particular type of protein has an abundance of those. And then if you can get it into the blood and then driven to the tissue that needs it, perhaps you'd see a benefit. There's a lot of ifs, ands, or buts in that statement. Sure. Okay.

So leucine is the one in most proteins that drives muscle protein synthesis. Over here, we're not talking about leucine. We're talking about a couple of other ones. Remind us of what those other ones are and quickly why they matter. Yeah, the components of collagen specifically that make it more unique because of their pattern is really the serine, glycine, and proline. And those repeating structures are

create these like helical structures that can actually potentially do good for you. Yeah. Okay, great. So I want to focus a little bit more on one of those amino acids because I know you've done some work. Tangentially, I'm transitioning here. I'm bridging a gap a little bit here and that is glycine. So you don't need to give me the structural details here, but we know why leucine matters. Why does glycine matter? What does it do? And then we'll get into some of your supplementation work here.

Yeah, so the context by which we used glycine was with a product called betaine. Betaine, also known as trimethylglycine. Trimethylglycine. Or also known as betaine, beteen, betaine. I've seen people mispronounce this. There's a thousand different ways. Spelled?

B-E-A-T? B-E-T-A-I-N-E. There you go. B-E-T-A-I-N-E. So the way we got started with betaine was I had a student named Brandon Willingham who was interested in heat and thermoregulation. And so we were designing some studies for him to try to tease out some potential nutritional ways to affect hydration and thermoregulation. And I was aware of betaine.

a little bit, mostly based from animal model research that I had seen.

So I shared those with Brandon and said, you know, start diving into all this. And he did a brilliant job in sort of coming up with various mechanisms by which betaine may be useful. And so the literature on betaine was quite fascinating to me because I don't typically read about sheep and cows and pigs. But these are – that's a standard product that's in the feed or the water supply of animals in hot human conditions that need to survive. Right.

And there were data showing improved mortality in these animals that have betaine supplementation. And this is probably, by the way, 10 years? Oh, more than that. Okay. Yeah. Because I know it's been in our field published for... It's fairly recent, I guess is what I'm talking about. In our field, 10. Yeah. Yeah, ish. Yeah. But the animal research was older. And so...

Brandon led a review paper that our group put out and just kind of describing why we think this might work and all this. And then he designed a really nice study that unfortunately COVID times hit and he was unable to do it. So we had to design it where we didn't do any exercise. And so here's the thing. When the betaine was in the product of the animals, they had good outcomes in the heat and survival.

The way it had been used in the one Thermo-Reg paper that was out there was in an acute dose. And so that was a mismatch to me. And so we said, well, why don't we try to load it just like you would creatine? So if I take this right before my heat exposure, potentially nothing's going to happen. Yeah, probably not going to do anything. In the one study that existed, it didn't show anything.

And so I reached out to the authors of that paper and I was just gussing it with Doug Koss that we're trying to figure out kind of what went wrong, what went right. And everyone basically dismissed it because it didn't do anything out of a really good lab. And so we said, well, let's look at a little bit different. Let's try to load this. So we ended up giving it in the first study for just a week.

loading and then we had to do passive heat exposure which means you don't exercise or do anything you just sit in a hot environment which was 40 degrees Celsius in our in our thermal null chamber okay so you got participants sitting in there yeah they're just sitting in a chair in the heat at 40 degrees at 40 degrees C that's cooking yeah it's hot it's hot but it's not enough of a stress yeah and so in that study we

Not surprisingly, we didn't show any benefits to doing passive heat exposure. So if you live in a hot environment, this isn't going to do anything for you. You need to start doing some work in that environment.

So then we were able to finally do the study that we intended to after we got through with the COVID restrictions and we started doing cycling in the heat. And so same design again, we decided to go ahead and load it for a week. And then we did 70% VO2 max in the chamber and we turned the temperature to 33 degrees Celsius so that we could keep core temperature in a range that wouldn't eliminate us or make us end the study early.

And we actually found some really cool results in that particular study. We're writing the study up now for publication, so it's not out yet. So you can't tell us the results of that. You can tell us that it was pretty cool, though. It was. It was pretty cool, and it was enough to drive another study. And then in the last one, we designed this study to be specifically in firefighters who are prone to all kinds of heat issues, obviously. And

Again, we're we're we wrap that study up. We're trying to publish that one sort of simultaneous here. And so in the next hopefully six months or so, I have both of these out and another direction for people to start looking at this particular product for heat. OK, I want to ask you about the results. That's faux pas. Right. You can't tell us that until it comes out. But I can ask you some things about dosages and things like that. Before we do that, you were telling me earlier about.

about a little bit of the protocol for the firefighter overheating. So that was not sit easy at 40 degrees. No, yeah. What was that? This was live. And so, yeah, my whole study team was, they were phenomenal. They all went to the fire training grounds that are near to us.

And they were able to convince the fire chief and everybody to get on board. And they have a connex box, like basically a large cargo unit that they- Shipping container. Yeah, that they light on fire. They put bales of hay in there and they light the thing on fire. And sometimes that's training in there, sometimes it's not.

So we were able to do a stair climb up and down several times and then go kneel in the connex block that's on fire. And then we had temperature gauges on the roof and on the floor. So they were kneeling, but the floor temp, which like was outrageous. It was cooking. And even on the bottom where they were kneeling, it was like being in an oven, you know, 500, 600 degrees. It was 4,000 degrees on top? The ceiling, yeah, the ceiling height.

So it gets a little bit gnarly. Just a touch. No longer impressed by your 200-degree sauna, by the way. So they kneel in there. They had to kneel in there for 15 minutes. And even in just that amount of time, I mean, you're talking about 20 minutes losing a liter, liter and a half of water. Yeah. Easy. I believe that. You get that hot, two, three pounds, you're going to be gone. So you—

The results will be what the results will be, but what you were looking at, in case this hasn't been clear yet, is, is that supplement helping them manage the heat better? Right, right. So the supplement had data, which is why we went that direction to –

basically help as an osmolite and as a cellular hydration factor. So water follows it in the cell and perhaps it keeps your cell hydrated longer. It also has some properties that are published in other studies that show that it might protect proteins from degrading in hot temperatures. So the combination of those two things

The increases in cellular volume, perhaps plasma volume, were intriguing enough for us to sort of go down this path for the last six years. So how much, what's the dosage? The original doses we were doing were 50 milligrams per kilogram body weight. We did it at relative. And then by the time we started the firefighter study, the doc student who ran that, Loli Renteria, she was...

kind of look through everything that was relevant at that point. And we decided to give a standard three grams for everybody, not based on body weight for the firefighter study. Yeah. Okay. So three grams per day. You mentioned really quickly there a couple of ways of how it could theoretically work. I know that this is early in the field. It's 10 years old at best. You got some publications you're working on. Surely others are. But outside of handling heat stress,

Can you think of any other known or plausible benefits of it as a supplement? I mean, in our work, we were strictly looking at it for these. I know other people put it in as a hydration factor in various drinks. So like pre-workouts and such. It is available in many, many supplements right now. Yeah, it's already in many different things. In fact, C-Low,

Some of the products we were looking at, we had to find in a way that we could just get the raw ingredient because it's mixed in everything. But yeah, it's usually in there. Sometimes it's like a filler, honestly. That's what it was used for. Cheap. Yeah, and it looks like a new nice shiny word to have on your label. But I think it is possible that using it in this manner could be helpful for those who are doing things in extreme heat.

What I'm curious about is if it goes beyond these extreme, extreme examples and maybe it would help even like migrant field workers, for example, and people who are doing labor in hot environments and we're just not there yet. - Yeah, so in theory, if it could keep your core temperature lower, but it enables you to have a higher sweat rate, there's lots of applications, or at least maintain your sweat rate

You wonder if it has plausible benefit for endurance folks, not even extreme stuff, the ultra stuff, which could be the case, but even a soccer game in the heat. A baseball game, probably not as much, but any real outdoor activity from a sporting perspective where you're going to be in a lot of heat. I don't know if there's any data on that, but it's plausible. Yeah, I think that's where we're going. I mean, so we've done doing nothing recently.

to doing cycling, to doing some things in a real applied setting with tactical athletes, these firefighters. And if that story holds true, as I think it might, then I think we can go at the next phase where it will be probably two aims. One would be

like FEMA kind of work. Oh, sure. And then I think another one could be like the migrant field worker side. And then I think we have a whole slew of work to do in athletics. Wow. Awesome. That's a super interesting one. I have RSS alerts on my PubMed for that. I'm like looking for something to come out in that area. So I know I'll see your firefighter study the day that it hits there. Maybe you can send me a reminder text, but I'll read it. No, either way, man. You got it.

Let's go from that to another similar sounding supplement that you've done some work in that people, again, lots of stuff out there, but people haven't heard about it. And that's Teocrine or Theocrine. So tell us about that, what you've done in there, and maybe even just start us off by telling us what the heck it even is. Yeah, so we got interested in that Teocrine supplement.

which is sort of the branded name of theocrine. Right. So it's spelt, by the way, here, so it's like one H versus the not. Yes. H in there, basically. Very similar. Like T, like T-E-A-C-R-I-N-E.

Yeah. C-R-I-N-E. Right. Teocrine. Teocrine. So a long, long time ago, I did some work in caffeine and ephedrine when you could do it. Oh, man, the days. Yeah. This was the late 90s. And we were doing these different studies in metabolism and performance with these things. And so caffeine was always sort of an interest of mine. And then

Teacrine came up as a possible caffeine memetic that may not have some of the known side effects of caffeine. So can I take it and get the benefits but not have the crash, the jitters? Yeah, they said the jitters specifically was sort of how it's marketed. And so we said, well, let's take a look because it was a product that we were interested. I had another student who was— Man, if you're making supplements, you got to block Mike because you can tell. Yeah.

He's on the hunt here. It's funny. We don't mean to. We're just trying to do what we can to put good work out there. But this particular one was interesting. We looked at caffeine at 300 milligrams, teacrine. Known effective dose. Yeah. Not crazy high, but... Not crazy high. And then we did...

Teacran at 300. So we were matching them. And then we did a combo where we did 150 and 150 of each and a placebo. So there were four arms to it.

In our hands, the people were well-rested. They came in. They took the supplement. They waited 90 minutes. And then they did a whole bunch of tests, 1RMs. They did some rowing. They did all kinds of different physiological, you know, battery of tests that we were running them through. And when we did this, the most effective one we had of all of those was straight caffeine. Hmm.

It beat Teacrayonet 300, it beat the combo, it beat the placebo. And the outcomes were specifically for perceived energy that they had for the event. It didn't actually change the weight they moved or their time in anything, but they felt better doing it. They had more focus and motivation to exercise.

Now, I think where I've seen the literature go, and we didn't do this work, was more in recovering from perhaps like sleep deprivation or cases where you're super run down and then tasks that are more cognitive in nature like marksmanship.

vigilance, you know, some cognitive skills. That's where I've seen this be shown more effective than the way that we designed it. Yeah. So what you'd see in general with caffeine is you have a cognitive benefit, right? People are aware of that, alert, focused, so on and so forth. But there's a

several decades of research on the physical performance benefits. So in general, endurance performance is enhanced and things like that. With tea cream, you saw many of the cognitive stuff, as you mentioned, but the physical stuff, I actually, I don't think I've seen a single paper that's shown a physical benefit yet. Maybe I've missed some, but none are there. So I've used it personally. I know I'm not a huge personal fan of caffeine. So tea cream was appealing to,

In that sense, I don't really like stimulants in general, but, meh. Like, I didn't have a huge thing there. I have friends, though, love it. Completely love it. They've gone completely off caffeine and are pure tea cream. And I know other folks have put it in a mix and combination, maybe 50 mg of caffeine and 150 of tea cream or something like that. My answer to them is always, like, if you feel great for those ones, if you're amazing, I just...

anticipate too much performance benefit from it. Not exactly sure why. I don't know if you have any thoughts on why caffeine does it, but tea cream doesn't. Well, caffeine's always the sledgehammer. Yeah. Right? You see all these products and it's touting this or that in it, but then you just look at the caffeine dose because that's driving the response that you're probably feeling. 500 mg of caffeine. Yeah, as you're feeling from it. So I'm not sure about...

About that, in our hands, I think perhaps we could adjust the dosages and maybe try something different. But, man, 300 is a pretty common dose. Yeah. You start getting past that, you start getting in the negative. Like there's a down slope with too much caffeine with performance. Yeah, and I don't know about, you know, now that we understand like genetic responders to it and stuff, maybe there's something like that for teacrine as well. I don't know. Yeah, we'll see. Okay, so we handled a couple of those ones. I would love to get...

I was hoping we'd get the chance to talk about some of the vascular work you've done in creatine, but maybe we'll save that for another day. Is there maybe...

You've done a couple of papers or you've worked on some papers in that area, right? Can you give us a quick response to that? So once again, looking at how clinical and sport performance nutrition crossover, creatine is a really good example of that. We have some experts at FSU in vascular health and blood flow dynamics and microvasculature.

And so we were actually trying to put creatine through microdialysis probes and see if we could get it directly to the tissue we want. Because you can put those in muscle as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how I'm familiar with it for the most part. Yeah. So there were some interesting things we were thinking through. And so a PhD student that was in the program, Holly Clark, she wrote a nice review on creatine.

the possibilities of it for vascular health. So it's not the actual study. Her dissertation was, and that's not published yet, but the paper she wrote was all review. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that one again is hopefully, hopefully that one will be out here. I had heard word on the street you were working on some vascular stuff with creatine. So I was hoping to pull that out of you, but okay, we'll have to use the review and the plausible mechanisms. I would be surprised if we don't see positive benefits there. Maybe not in your study because the study design or maybe it doesn't, it doesn't.

But having gone through that paper, and that's open access paper. Yeah, yeah. Anyone can go read that if you want. Right now. I would struggle. I think you guys are not onto something there. So oftentimes we talk about creatine. I've been as staunch of a supporter as possible for the well-rounded benefits of creatine, but rarely have I seen people talk about the vascular benefits.

benefits of that. Yeah. More, you know, with creatine, it's funny, it's pretty ubiquitous now, but it's like, it's helping with so many different realms. And I think you would probably have a lot of folks say that they don't even take it for performance anymore. Really. It's just a good side effect. By percentage, more people are taking it for non-performance based things. It's just really cool. I mean, I think it's fascinating how it's going. I love seeing all the updates in that space and brain health and all these other benefits of it. Isn't it wild, man? When we were kids, people were having protein shakes before bed and taking creatine.

Now, 30 years later. Now we know you should. We're right back here. See, meatheads run the world, friends. It's only bro science until it's real science. Okay. The reason I'm going to cut you short on that one, I know you have more to say on that, is I actually want to get to one more smaller, quicker question and then one more, a couple more areas I think of interest. People are aware of prebiotics. Prebiotics.

But what are postbiotics? You have these gut microbes that you can either feed with fuel or you can take what they produce, which would be a postbiotic. So you have a prebiotic. To feed them. And then you have a postbiotic, which is what they're producing. And a probiotic would be. Right. You have the actual food form of it. There you go. Yeah. So you have pre, post, and you're mid here. So what do we know about the postbiotics?

Yeah. So in our space, we're using this to look at, again, gut health, something that's being produced. The biggest one to date that we kind of know a lot about is like butyrate. You know, that's one that's really common as a postbiotic. It's one of the ones we have the most generation of naturally, but it's also one that can go awry with

different food issues, gut upset, different issues that could happen. And so we are right now, one of my doctoral students is going to be looking at a postbiotic that contains a butyrate and

And then we're going to look at gut health. We're looking at stool samples in this one in a collaboration with this great gut microbiome physiologist, Ravi Nagpal, who works with us. Yeah, Ravi Lab in your lab, right? Yeah. And so Ravi is going to help us with all of that. And then we're going to be exercising in the heat for people who are unaccustomed to both exercise and exercise in the heat to try to disrupt the gut to see if we can do it.

And then there are some papers showing a link between butyrate and sleep. And so we're going to see if there's any residual changes that are occurring in sleep. And we're going to do it as a time course so that we can take the supplement and then see when it shows up in the stool sample so that we know it's actually getting in there, which is a step that is –

easy to skip because it's harder to do and it's expensive but we're going to make sure it's actually getting to where we want it to be getting um so if that doesn't work then part two of the study is a little bit disrupted but i'm assuming it gets where it's going to go and we'll have those answers then we're going to look at um a little bit of performance just because i don't i always check performance but uh mostly gut health and then some of the sleep dynamics okay now uh

We should talk about that specifically. We can do some fun things in that area too. But have you thought at all yet, and you may not, that's okay, and you may not actually know it offhand, about how you're going to be delivering that and the dosage of it?

Your postbiotic? I don't know if you guys got into those details yet with your study design. Yeah, we do. Or maybe your grad student probably knows. Yeah, I don't remember the exact dosage that we're using in that one. Okay. I'm sure you guys get that figured out. There'll be another case, though, of you may have to tinker with a few –

types and styles and delivery formats and things like that. So you've got another 15 years or so for that one. Got too many lanes going. Yeah, no, I get it, man. That's pretty awesome. The company that produces that product that we are asking for a grant from, it's actually already a product on the market. It's called Corbiome. Okay. Yeah. So that's the one we're going to be using. So I don't remember the dose, but that's the product. Corbiome. Yeah.

Okay. Well, we'll see whether or not it works. Yeah. So maybe we'll start taking it. Maybe we won't. We know with your lab, it's a 50-50 shot. No doubt. No doubt. Okay. I want to give one more area here and we're staying in the lane of sports performance, but a paper that you published also, I'm pretty sure it was open access that your group was a part of rather, supplementation for muscle damage and recovery in females. I get this nonstop.

But tell me what you guys found in that and what do we know, what can we do for that population about supplements for – and I think it actually was specifically post-exercise muscle damage was for the most part in that paper. Yeah. So those were stemming from a series of muscle damage studies we were running, some in our lab, some were in collaboration with other universities. That particular one was with Anna McCune who was in South Africa and now is in Australia. But we were – we had finished a male –

of that paper and that study. Oh, I see how this went. Yes, and we wanted to get more data. As you know, females in all research but sports research are severely underrepresented in

And we're doing our best to move into that space as best we can, as strategically as we can, so that we get good data to come out of what we're looking at. And so that was sort of a start years ago. That paper is probably 10 years old now where we're going in and trying to get –

just pull any data we could from data that had female athletes and did any kind of muscle damage structure in their design. And it turns out in that particular paper, there wasn't all that much that was different. It was proper calories, proper energy, proper carbohydrates, proper protein as well. So we were looking at sort of, were there anything different? And then we started looking at things like creatine and, you know, what else might be in the mix?

The unique part about that paper is we just designed it to look at every study that had women to date in a damage study. So that was what was unique about that. And in our hands, we followed that with a couple of papers where we ran downhill at 10 or 15 percent, depending on the study, just to induce damage. And then we did that in men and women. And we were trying to see if we could use some of these multi-ingredient performance supplements there.

To fix anything. And did any of them work? No. Without...

ruining another supplement company's life there. What kind of multi-ingredients do you remember offhand, the type of things that were in these? Or were these kind of creatine, beta alanine, protein combination things? You got it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was taking all the ones that you know work individually and then you put them all together. And when I say no, I was being a little facetious. Like the individual products will do something, but we're not just not seeing a robust enough response to say you're going to mitigate this. You might like

come back to normal a tad better. I don't even want to say faster. We were misquoted one time when someone pulled open a, when we used to read magazines and like pull open a magazine and said, you're in there. It says you recovered like 300% faster. I'm like, we didn't even measure faster. Like it wasn't even part of the design. Yeah.

Oh, gosh. Yeah. Well, if you think the misquoting was happening before, just wait. Right. After this comes out, just wait. Anything we do know of that will enhance recovery? Maybe it was not from your paper or your research. But I'm actually most interested in knowing if there are things that are specifically more effective for females. Yes.

That we know of. Or is that not the case? Not yet. Not yet that I'm aware of. There's no reason to think females need to do anything different from a nutrition or supplementation perspective. Not at this point. But I'll tell you, like, it's really hard to distinguish because you look at the research in females and female athletes, particularly around like menstrual cycle changes and throughout the lifespan as well. And there's definitely things that could help with different problems.

life phases. And then there's some data that show like performance isn't really changed in the research that exists around the cycle, at least to date. But there's clearly a bunch of side effects or physiological effects that the women feel and all the literature on exists that could make you not want to perform, not want to go exercise. And I think that's sort of being discounted a little bit in what I'm reading so far. So

I don't know. There's a lot more work that has to be done there. If you look at it as black and white on a piece of paper, I don't think you can pinpoint one thing. I see. But I'm sure there are things that work for certain individuals and certain women that have a way to strategize their nutrition. So as a general answer, probably not. At the specific level, though, there may be. We just don't have those data yet. Yeah. I would even say there probably is. I'm not sure. We just need more work in that area. Amazing. Yeah.

You've been super generous with your time, but I'm not letting you off the hook before I get one more thing out of you. You were telling me about some upcoming studies you've got going on and you mentioned the travel one. I don't know if you can talk about that, but is there any other cool stuff you got going on?

Yeah. So one of our doc students, Tim Grease, is much more straight sport performance, sports science. He spends an inordinate amount of time working with FSU athletics in different spaces now.

about half time in there and then half time with us. But he's interested in travel and the effects on sleep and also on performance. And so he's gonna be able to travel with one of our women's teams in the spring and take three different trips with the team.

So we're in Florida. So an East Coast trip. And then he'll also do two West Coast trips all the way out here to California. And so he'll do one where they stay on East Coast time and then one where they switch to West Coast time.

And so then he'll have force plates he's bringing with him, so he's got force plates data, hand grip data, and then all the sleep metrics and a bunch of questionnaires that he'll be rolling through. So we can try to get a handle on how does that work in a team setting and does it even make a difference? We did a jet lag travel study with Bill Kramer at University of Connecticut. They did a bunch of stuff in stores.

We took blood performance. They flew out to LA, did a whole bunch of other stuff, flew them back out there, retested them again. We did that probably 15 years ago or something like that. And that was a very fun study. So I'm looking forward to see what you guys pull up. Yeah, me too. It's kind of a – it deals with things we're interested in. But again, we got a student driving the train on something that deals with human performance in an area that's relevant.

And I think people will be interested in it. Well, what's really interesting is if you follow college sports at all, you realize that a trip from Florida to California is now the same conference. That's ACC. That's ACC. We are now in the Big Ten. I'm like, my friend and I were actually my brother-in-law, Josh, we're joking. He's an Ohio State guy.

And he texted me something about University of Washington and USC just played in a classic Big Ten matchup. And I was just like, ah! He's rubbing it in. It's all changing. It's killing me. So this is a real part of collegiate athletics, and it's not just football. Yeah. All of them have to go there. The other thing to consider is they're doing all of that and then having to maintain classes. Oh, my gosh. And then play again at home. And I think the stress on these student-athletes is –

Pretty tremendous that we don't often give them a lot of credit for because you see them on TV or you're watching them play and it's like, oh, they just play. They don't need to go to class. But a lot of them do care about class. And it's a big, big stress to do that kind of travel. Folks that are paying attention are spending a lot of time at the collegiate level on sleep because of those things. And we expect them to go back and not make bad decisions and all that stuff despite the fact that we know what happens. Not only the lack of sleep, but just timing of sleep. So really cool stuff.

I'm going to finish on one point, and I'm doing this intentionally at the end here, because I think it's really important. A lot of people will talk about the current field of nutrition and supplementation and perhaps the conflicts of interest and biases. And can you trust the research? And that's probably fair, right? The general attitude is less trust in the institutions and perhaps has ever been, and that's fine.

But I really wanted to talk to you about this because I don't know necessarily anybody who has more industry funding. Your studies have been paid for by supplement companies and you have gotten money from the government, NIH and Plumlee and other places. That said, as we have shown the entire conversation here, you're 50-50.

You clearly don't hesitate to take funding from somebody and then tell them their product did not work. Yeah. You see that so much, especially with the rise of people bickering on social media and stuff. And it's – at least in my world of academics, I can't even take a grant.

from a company that we don't get full rights to publish every single thing we find. Those contracts don't happen anymore. Maybe that used to happen, but I don't know anyone who has contracts like that anymore. Not at a big research university. I mean, those are unfavorable terms. You cannot do that. Like, my job depends upon publishing.

And the university can't accept the money for me to administer the grant and carry it out if there's any terms that don't allow full rights to the data. And so I think that's largely – I understand it obviously. But in my experience, it's really hard to get these grants especially with a reputation like ours where it's like – I think they come to us because if it works, I think they can be trusted. Yeah.

And if it doesn't work, I'm going to tell you it doesn't work. And then my goal would be that a company would take that in stride and say, well, let me improve it. It doesn't always work that way. And, you know, some relationships, I don't know, they just amicably end. But, you know, really our goal is to just do the best work we possibly can. And then your intention of this question is good because you can trust the data that

But I think you also have to look at the lab and the university and the lead author and the corresponding author. And you have to have sort of a skill set to make sure that the data look great. And even then, you're not always 100% guaranteed for sure because there's biases that exist everywhere. But by and large, you can basically put to rest that someone's missing with all the data just to make sure that they publish what the company wants. I can't even take those grants at all. Yeah. So is it fair –

And I'm clearly asking this in a directional way here for someone to pull up a study, look at the conflict of interest statement, see that it's been funded by a company, and then immediately throw those data out to immediately assume that this was biased and bought and paid for by the study.

By my tone, you can clearly see my position there. Yeah. Yeah. Not at all. That is not fair. I mean, some of the best work that exists would never come. And if you want answers about these supplement questions— Every study you've ever done. Somebody has to do it and someone has to fund it. They're expensive. Yeah. And you're not going to get some of this kind of funding unless there's a disease state from some of the federal agencies. Right.

And even then it's harder to get in that realm. And so if you want those data, you have to get it from a company that has something that is invested in it. They make the product. They want to produce the product. And the best examples that I've been a part of, people have approached you early before something's designed, and that's rare. Most times it exists already. And then they make enough money to then fund research so then they can try it.

And then in some cases, these companies do really well. Sometimes they'll fold. Sometimes they change their marketing strategy. Sometimes they'll change a dosing strategy. I think what would be really helpful would be saying when you look at papers and you see that it's been funded by a supplement company, I know you're going to look at the lab and you'll know the people on there and you'll know the students and the faculty and the institution.

It makes it easy for people like you and I to quickly vet that. So I can look at things and go, yeah, I'm not believing that yet. I see it's funded by the company. Okay, one of the co-authors works at the company and I don't recognize that lab. Doesn't mean it's wrong or fake at all, but I'm going to have much more hesitation. For people that don't know labs, they don't know who you are. One of the most dedicated or published prolific people in this area, they don't know the labs. Are there anything you can give them to help

Because it is also real. If you see, there is people who have straight up fraudulent data. There are people who have made studies up. I use actually, I don't know, I'm not familiar with retraction watch. It's great. It's a great place where you can see papers that are retracted. Awesome service. So that stuff does happen. It's not really common. But it gets the headlines. But it gets the headlines, right? It makes people scared. So it's true. When I personally see a study that's been funded by a certain, okay, like I'm notching it in my brain as,

datum. That's an important datum. It doesn't mean anything, but it is a nice little datum. Any advice for people that are trying to navigate that? Because we don't want them looking at papers, not looking at conflicts of interest at all, or not looking at potential funding sources. We want them to. That's good. But how do they not overreact as well? Yeah, I think there's two approaches to it.

I actually don't know a ton of people who will be searching PubMed like you or I might for these papers. And so if you're looking at a whole – like a product, then I would look at how the product is tested, the label, the third-party testing that exists for some of the actual supplements. You probably have covered some of that before. It's like – it's an interesting place to be and you – the companies have to do a ton of work to get those certifications, particularly for sport. Yeah.

Certified for Sport, Informed Choice, NSF. Those are really expensive and really hard. And there's different uses for them. And so people can say what they want sort of about the back and forth. But those are what currently are trusted. And they're the ones that are getting into like universities and these other things. So that's an important sort of distinction. Yeah.

An easy way is some resources like examine.com where people can look up the individual ingredients, see what other papers have been published on it. They get sort of a grade on it.

And then if you're actually reading the paper, I think you're going to have to then say, okay, who wrote that paper? And just search that person's name again and see if you can come up with any other things that you're seeing as a pattern in that space. Yeah. Okay. So fair enough to say those things are important to pay attention to, but on its surface doesn't immediately throw out results. 100%. I mean, yeah. If you want these things to be researched, we need funding sources. Yeah. And if it wants to be 100% independent –

Then please ping our research account because we can run those studies. Yeah. Any philanthropic donor out there that wants to pay for all these things. Right. Mike has an account that you can send all $300 million to. Right. Yeah. Amazing, man. Anything else you feel like we've missed from earlier that you're going to go back and say or any other awesome stuff you want to share with people?

No, man, I think we covered quite a lot. I hope we didn't get sort of lost in the weeds on some of it. But for me, it's really important to share that you can have a pretty fulfilling career and fulfilling life doing what you love to do. And you just have to find the right outlet for it, you know. And that's sort of the passion we're trying to share with all of this is how can we sort of get human performance to a place that is mainstream, you know,

And how can we answer these questions that people ask? And I hope that if anything from this, you can kind of see that the work we're putting out there is, I hope, going to lead sort of the change in that sort of mindset and shift on how we view these types of studies. Yeah, I'm sure that will have the impact. I can tell this by the way that you've talked today.

You didn't have a direct path to your career. You bounced around a little bit. And I know you toyed with industry for a while and did some other things. And it's not always necessarily this. You woke up one day when you were 12 and realized you wanted to become a sports scientist. No, did not happen that way. A dietician, whatever else. But the way that you educate, I know that

As I mentioned a couple of times now, and I've seen you speak at multiple events, you're a phenomenal educator. You've earned many awards in those areas. You have courses? Yeah.

that are available for people? Yes. Tell us about that. Yeah. So we had a venture a while back to create basically an academic course, but for everyday people. It's 24, 30-minute lectures. It was put out by a company called The Great Courses at the time. Got picked up by Wondrium. But if you're interested in a classroom kind of a setting, that's what it is. It's designed for everyday people, but everything you want to know about

It's called Changing Body Composition Through Diet and Exercise. So it's not all that sexy of a title, but it tells you what you're going to get. Yeah. And so that's available. Anyone can go take that. Yes. Yeah. Don't have to be enrolled in Florida State University or anything like that. No, no. That's like on Amazon and other places. Yeah. Yep. And they can Google that around and find that. We'll have show links and show notes, of course, to all those things over there. I mentioned earlier, but please tell them how they can come to your lab and

offering metabolic testing and body composition, how all that works and where they go. Our pay-for-testing services, basically anybody can have access to the research-grade equipment that we use. It's sort of a win-win for everybody. You get a great experience in our institute. The equipment stays continually used, which is how it works better than worse. The service fees, as Andy mentioned, are reasonable. And so that's just all through our website. I think I looked and it was like $50. Yeah.

for some of the testing. 75 dot, like very, very, very reasonable. It is. It's quite reasonable. And they give great packages. And we have an outreach director, Kieran Patterson, now who's running that part of it. And we have students involved. So you give everyone kind of a good experience. Oh, right. Yeah. And it's just great. We even have like dietary counseling and services like that that are available. So a lot of the, I tell you, it's everybody. We've had 4%.

14-year-old athletes that are on their way up to Olympic caliber to 75-year-old individuals who heard they should add a little bit of muscle. And so everyone in between sort of showing up to see what we've got over there. It's a good spot. And where do they find that? Where are they going to see that? That's just on the website for the lab, which is issm.fsu.edu. Gotcha. Okay. And again, we'll have links to all that stuff.

Man, I can't appreciate and thank you enough for coming all the way out here. I appreciate the time. I appreciate everything you've done in the field and how much you've shared with us here today. I know that there's a ton of useful information here. I know that you shared a bunch of information that most people have never heard before or is counter to what they thought they knew. And I think we're going to hear plenty of stories of success after this. So thank you so much, man. You're welcome, Andy. Appreciate it.

Thank you for joining today's episode with Dr. Mike Ormsby. If you'd like to learn more about Mike's work or you're interested in supporting his research at Florida State, please see the links in our show notes. Right now, Mike and his lab have a dollar-to-dollar match going, so anyone who makes contributions will have it matched up to $50,000.

An excellent opportunity to support high quality and helpful research. Mike also has educational courses that anyone in the world can take, as well as social media. So you can follow him there on Instagram and Twitter as great places to learn more and keep up to date with the work he's doing and his institute.

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