Cliff Harvey returns to dispel the myths

This week on the podcast Mikki chats to Mikkipedia regular Dr Cliff Harvey, researcher, naturopath, PhD and all around awesome dude on some common myths in the nutrition space. They discuss whether drinking coffee in the morning is going to tank your energy later, if cold water immersion should only be the domain of males, what Cliff is doing right now with his supplements, and a ton more. As always, this is a great conversation that brings a lot of practical tips along with it for the listener.

Cliff Harvey, PhD, is New Zealand’s expert on the effects of a ketogenic diet in a healthy population, but so much more than that. He has been  helping people to live healthier, happier lives, and to perform better since starting in clinical practice (way back...) in the late 1990s. Over this time he has been privileged to work with many Olympic, professional, Commonwealth and other high performing athletes. He has also worked with many people to overcome the effects of chronic and debilitating health conditions. Along the way he has founded or co-founded many successful businesses in the health, fitness and wellness space, including the Nutrition Store Online and Holistic Performance Institute, NZ’s leading certification and diploma for health, nutrition, health coaching and performance that has many of the world experts teaching on the course, so students are learning from the best.

 

Cliff has  over 20 years experience as a strength and nutrition coach and, in addition to his PhD research, he is a Registered Clinical Nutritionist, qualified Naturopath (Dip.Nat – NCNZ) and holds a diploma in Fitness Training (AUT) and Health Coaching in Patient Care.

You can find Cliff over at https://cliffharvey.com/

Holistic Performance Institute: https://www.holisticperformance.institute/ 

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Creators & Guests

Host

Mikki Williden

What is Mikkipedia?

Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!

Transcript generated AI transcription services, errors may occur. Contact Mikki for clarification.

00:03
Welcome, hi, I'm Mikki and this is Mikkipedia, where I sit down and chat to doctors, professors, athletes, practitioners, and experts in their fields related to health, nutrition, fitness, and wellbeing, and I'm delighted that you're here.

00:24
Hey everyone, you're listening to Mikkipedia, and this week on the podcast, I bring back one of my favorites, Dr. Cliff Harvey. Researcher, naturopath, PhD, and all around awesome dude. And we talk about some of the common myths in the nutrition space that are floating around right now. Like, do we need to avoid coffee first thing because it's going to tank our energy later on? Should woman avoid doing cold water immersion? Is green tea?

00:54
going to be toxic for our liver and a ton more actually. We discussed what Cliff is doing right now with his supplements and his nutrition and all around this is just a great conversation that brings a lot of practical tips along with it for you the listener. So you can just get a handle of what the lay of the land is right now. For those of you unfamiliar with Cliff

01:19
He is a New Zealand expert on the effects of a ketogenic diet in a healthy population. But he is so much more than that. Dr Cliff Harvey has been helping people to live healthier, happier lives and to perform better since starting in clinical practice way back in the late 1990s. Over this time he has been privileged to work with many Olympic professional, Commonwealth and other high performing athletes.

01:45
He has also worked with many people to overcome the effects of chronic and debilitating health conditions. Along the way he has founded or co-founded many successful businesses in the health, nutrition and wellness space, including the Nutrition Store Online and Holistic Performance Institute, New Zealand's leading certification and diploma for health, nutrition, health coaching and performance that has many of the world's experts teaching on the course. So students are learning from the best.

02:14
Cliff has over 20 years experience as a strength and nutrition coach and in addition to his PhD research he's a registered clinical nutritionist, qualified naturopath and holds a diploma in fitness training in health coaching and patient care. You can find Cliff over at www.cliffhavi.com or over on the Holistic Performance Institute website which is pretty much holisticperformanceinstitute.com

02:43
And you can also find him on Instagram at Cliffy Dog. He's not as active on Instagram, I gotta say. You'll definitely find him on Hellasic Performance Institute though. So just a reminder before we crack on into the interview that the best way to support the podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform. This increases the visibility of the podcast out there and amongst literally thousands of podcasts that anyone could listen to. So that way more people get the opportunity to learn from guests like Cliff.

03:13
that I have on the show. All right team, please enjoy this episode with Dr Cliff Harvey.

03:23
and it's my favorite thing anyway.

03:27
We should just record all the time. I know, I know. Had those little road mics on. We should have done that at the HBI catch up the other week. That would have been interesting. Had some good conversations there. Too much opportunity for cancellation, I reckon. Oh, actually right. You're quite right about that. I did say some things which could have raised eyebrows, to be fair. Cliff, how are things going with you? Pretty good, Mickey.

03:57
how very busy, but that's good. It's good busy at the moment. I feel like I'm learning things and I like learning things. Yes, I 100% appreciate that. And do you know, I used to rally against the use of the word busy for myself. I would never like to say I'm busy because it almost has this sort of self-important. I used to, I had it in my head that it was, I'm making myself to seem too important compared to everyone else.

04:26
I'm busy too, actually, and I've been saying it a lot, but like you, it's fun busy, which is always good stuff. Yeah, you're right though. I think people do default too much to that idea that busy is good and busy means productivity and all that kind of stuff.

04:46
All busy is some kind of sort of virtue signal for people where we should feel sorry for. Yeah I know. It's like early morning, like if you're an early morning person we should all strive to be this way because there's a lot of virtue signaling with that as well. I of course, I'm alright on that respect, I'm definitely an early morning person but you often see that that's sort of the more favoured productive being in society. Yeah.

05:13
And I think that speaks to the absolutism, which we'll probably delve into a little bit today. You know, people sort of see one way as being the way, but it could just be a way to, you know, create a better environment for your day, for example. Yeah. If you wake up at 430 in the morning and you go out for your run and you make your bed and all that kind of stuff, that's all awesome. Those could be lynchpin actions for you, but they might not be for another person. 100%. So I think it's more about the context, right? It's looking at, well,

05:42
That's really cool because that's an example of a lynchpin action that works with that person. What kind of lynchpin action would work well for me to live healthier and happier? And it might not be that thing. Because you know, the making the bed thing, I know a lot of people get on board with that and it makes sense. But for me, I don't care. Like, if I don't make my bed, it's got no consequence whatsoever to my life. Yeah, yeah. That's funny. And I wonder whether that was a Tim Ferriss thing, actually.

06:07
Cause I remember, and not necessarily a Tim Ferriss thing, who maybe, I remember listening to Tim Ferriss back in 2013, him talking about making the bed as a, the first thing you do. And I remember my head, in my head, I'm like, damn Tim, you were right. And I do that every morning and I, ah, I am awesome. Yeah, yeah. Well, and cause it works, right? Yeah. If it works for you. Yeah. And I think Tim got that, I'm pretty sure, from some influential military

06:37
people who had left the military and were pretty influential in that space. Not Jocko Willink per se, but I think there was another, I can't remember his name now, but there was an admiral who gave some talks on it. He might have even done a TED Talk or a TEDx on it. Oh, nice. But yeah, I can't remember exactly, but yeah, that's where it's... Because obviously Jocko Willink's famous for his getting up at 4.30 and that's one of his linchpin actions. I know. Yeah, I love it.

07:02
I love seeing his little Twitter feed and seeing his 432 and then everyone else like putting their little, and I've actually done that before as well. I tweeted to Jocko and oh look, 432. Tell you what I've been doing of late, which has been phenomenally successful for my appetite, for my energy and the ability to sort of work undistracted in the morning. So I've always been, you know that I'm a big protein person and

07:29
particularly in the last couple of years, I've really bumped that up and have ensured that I get a certain amount in the morning, because that's what works for me. And, but what I have done recently is switch my breakfast. So instead of trying to make up protein with little bits of protein bar, which I still include sometimes, I actually just had a little bit just before as part of my breakfast, but, and protein cereal and whatnot, I've started just to have chicken alongside my smoothie, like air fried chicken.

07:56
and it's about 130 grams I have in addition to my smoothie. And with the collagen that I also include, I'm getting about 60 grams of protein. And I have to say, it makes a big difference to how I feel in the morning. I'm really, like, cause I'm pretty impervious actually when it comes to supplement changes, switches and other things, which I know other people feel different when they do things differently, but I.

08:24
generally don't, but the things which make me feel great are now I've recognized as actually getting the animal protein in the morning and of course training in the morning really helps for me. That's interesting. Well, I mean, it's one of the big things, right? And so I think we can often wonder whether the supplements we're taking or small things we're doing are giving us that much benefit because they're not so apparent. But, you know, if we start talking about an extra hour of sleep or extra two hours of

08:54
and extra 30 grams of protein or something like that. It's pretty big shifts physiologically, you know? Yeah, totally. And that reminds me of what, you know, Daz used to say this years and years ago, why do we see breakfast just as breakfast? I'm paraphrasing, he didn't use those terms, but he was sort of saying, well, why couldn't breakfast be a steak? Or why couldn't breakfast be some chicken or whatever? I don't really like having that stuff for breakfast, so I don't, but I completely get it.

09:21
Do you know, and I didn't think I did either actually. And it was only when I started doing it. I don't mind a steak for breakfast. That's good. No, I appreciate. And I just, I think I just thought I'd just, I think I did it by accident one day and went, whoa, that's made a huge difference to how I feel. And then I just have rolled with ever since. And the only unfortunate part of this is that I do enjoy the protein cereals like the Catalina Crunch and the perfect keto cereal is up there. Delicious, but.

09:49
Actually, it does, despite the fact that it's still got protein in it and contributes, and it's not that different actually in terms of the amount of protein, like the amount of protein I'm having isn't that different. But just, I just think it's that additional, I don't know, something about that animal protein just really does it for me. I wonder, I'm wondering how you accidentally ate a chicken breast. Like did you, did you stumble and fall?

10:16
That's a good question actually. I'm not quite sure how I accidentally stumbled. I think, I think I didn't have anything else at the time. I think I'm like, what else am I going to have? Oh, I might try this. And I'm like, shoot, that's delicious. Actually I can do that. Um, interesting though, Cliff. So at the minute I'm doing a series of workshops and around the anatomy of fat loss, right, and I'm talking about protein and one of my workshops, and this is something which I find this is, this is a tangent a little bit, but.

10:45
I'm talking about the importance of protein with respect to fat loss, obviously, and someone who was in the webinar asked a question. She said, look, my colleagues are really worried about protein from an end-to-end perspective, and a cancer-causing perspective, and the damage it can have on kidneys. And look, I think you and I are probably over the science enough to know that these are not.

11:11
Concerns of people who actually study in protein metabolism and have looked in the literature, there are meta-analyses done on kidney function. mTOR signaling being dysregulated is largely due to insulin and not protein. It's tissue specific. These are the things which I understand from that health perspective, but what surprised me was, she's a doctor and her colleagues who are doctors are still thinking like this, like, why aren't...

11:41
other people on top of the literature.

11:45
I think it's because it's the literature that you're exposed to. And unless you're basically conducting, you know, systematic or, or at least sort of scoping reviews fairly regularly of the research, you're not necessarily going to be across it, right? You know, you certainly will be in your particular area, but I do think that there is a bit of a lingering.

12:10
There's sort of a lingering mindset within medicine that higher protein could be dangerous, and that's enough to sort of suggest caution for clients, for patients. But as you see it, it's not really evidence-based because there's been enough now. We would say that sure, in the presence of pre-existing kidney disease, there should be some caution. We need to weigh that up against other long-term health outcomes and short-term quality of

12:40
So there's still some gray area there because I still don't agree even in the situation where we have pre-existing kidney disease that necessarily should be a very low protein intake, but it should obviously be lower. Similarly for like Parkinson's disease, right? We don't wanna have high levels of protein co-ingestion with aldopa medication. But that doesn't mean either that we should have a really low protein diet because we know now, because there's enough research on it that that's gonna negatively affect someone's quality of life and probably long-term outcomes.

13:09
So there's a lot to it, but I think you're right. I mean, that ship has sailed. There's plenty of research showing that a higher protein intake is not an issue, especially with regard to the kidneys. And I think once people start talking mTOR, I kind of fade out a little bit. Not that it's not important, just because I think that we really start to ignore

13:35
bigger impact research that has functional translation to what we're doing, how we're living, how we're performing for really fine aspects of mechanisms. We're really going down the rabbit hole of biological reductionism. At the end of the day, what we're really relying on in that instance is rodent research. As we've discussed many times, it's very difficult. For some things, it's wicked.

14:03
For some things, we need that animal research because it backs up what we know, it helps us to provide better models of plausibility, better explanations for the mechanism that's happening. But in some instances, it's not very translatable because different animals are very different in terms of their physiology. And especially when we're looking at mice and comparing that to humans, there are some really important differences metabolically.

14:33
And so while for some things they're cool, and they also provide really interesting initial models, we always need to look, obviously, at what's been shown in humans. And that's where things become a lot different, because humans have a very good capacity for assimilating and utilizing protein in a very efficient way. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I just, that mTOR IGF-1 story, like it's, I've heard a few, so,

15:00
A year ago actually I wrote a blog on it and I thought I'd published it and I hadn't I haven't as yet but I remember I listened to both Lane Norton on Peter Atiyah and Don Layman on Peter Atiyah like both particularly Don he is he's like he's one of the world expert in protein metabolism and they gave such clear. Explanations as to how the mTOR research is misconstrued and I just like I feel like that should be 101 now for people who are out there sort of.

15:29
client facing or patient facing, and particularly because when you remove, if you're told protein is harmful and you shouldn't be eating it, then it's always opportunity cost for the person, for the, you know, N equals one. So take protein out, what are we going to eat? Yeah. Well, can't be fair, can it? Cause hello, facts still considered, you know, not great. So it's all just the six grains a day. Six plus serves of grains a day.

15:57
Exactly. And I think most people who are involved in either sports performance or maybe body composition outcomes or health, typically, I'm just sort of thinking of the people I know, almost all of them to a person would prioritize protein in terms of their macronutrient distribution when they're providing for clients. So it's protein first. And then most of them are pretty pragmatic. They're kind of like, well, it probably doesn't matter that much.

16:27
The rest doesn't matter that much. 100%. Whether you get more of your calories from fat or carbohydrate, whatever, it doesn't matter too much. Of course, there's a big range as well within those supposedly optimal protein intakes, but what we're really talking about here is this tendency to drift under maybe 1.2 grams per kilo body weight per day or getting close to 0.8, which is obviously still the RDA. And I think anyone who's read the research

16:56
would know that that's just not adequate. Yeah, no, I know. And I think that's where the problem lies, right? Because if I'm thinking about doctors who are out there, and this is no disrespect to, it's not, every doctor is different, but I definitely know of clients who have doctors who still are in the camp of that, you know, red meat will kill you, lower, don't eat more than three eggs a week.

17:25
Honestly, things like this, and these aren't doctors who are necessarily our age or older, either. These are sort of like younger doctors as well, which surprises me somewhat. It's a really important avenue because I think we need to be really careful about the messaging we're putting out and being more discerning about differentiating between the big impact stuff.

17:54
and the very small things. Yes. Because I'm not 100% convinced by the, even though I'm in that sort of space, I'm not 100% convinced by the low carb idea or the idea that's very prominent within low carb that saturated fat is completely innocuous and you can just eat as much as you want. However, I do think based on the evidence that it's certainly not a nutrient of concern because it's not the priority.

18:22
You know, and so if we're taking care of the priorities, in other words, hey, make sure you're prioritizing protein, vegetables, eating mostly unrefined foods, you know, avoiding where you can the ultra processed foods, but they're okay as treats as well. You know, so basically, we're talking about a context and a framework of an overall healthy diet, which most of us would agree on. Then it becomes a very limited concern. So we don't really need to worry about it because we don't want to distract people. We don't want to confuse them.

18:52
And that's even more apparent when we start talking about things that cause minor alterations in IGF-1 or mTOR, you know, or you should reduce your sodium from 3,500 milligrams to less than 3,000 milligrams. I mean, really? We're talking about very, very minor things here. Which are very difficult to measure as well, right? Very difficult to measure. And, you know, what we're starting to see now is a lot of the

19:21
that the negative effect that we see, which might have a very, very, very small overall effect in terms of on a population scale. We're talking about odds or risk ratios of sort of 10% over norm. So we're talking about sort of 1.1 kind of thing. Is that really meaningful on a personal level? Probably not.

19:45
But what we can see if we dig deeper is that yes, some people are probably gonna be much more affected by a high sodium intake. And there would be genetic underpinnings to that. Just as some people might not respond well to a very high protein diet, they're gonna be out there. Just like there are gonna be genetic proclivities towards a lot of other things, which we'll probably talk about today, right? Yeah, yeah. But a lot of it does come down to

20:11
Really pulling out fairly extreme effects from a very, very tiny subset of the population. Then that gets extrapolated across a population. And for most of us, it's not really an issue if we're taking care of the big stuff. Yeah. And, and I was listening to something the other day and they were talking about how, and it's so true as well as that often we work on means, you know, mean intakes, mean sort of values for.

20:40
data and nutrition, but we are not just a population mean. Like that's the thing, like there is, you know, it's only sort of, you know, it's a guide, but you have to make those individual sort of decisions. Exactly, and that's where, again, we can get, we can almost get fooled into thinking that because something is best practice,

21:06
And we're talking about best practice as far as what the evidence actually tells us, not always what the position stands tell us of various organizations, but what the evidence tells us there is best practice. And we should use that as a guide, but we should also deviate from it immediately for the individual. Yeah, 100%. So if we're working with clients, you know, we know that the person's not going to be this mean because there's actually no one that is the mean. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, a really good example is with my Monday's matter plan, right? So it's a...

21:35
it's because I have to give guidelines as to things around say exercise. Like on average, most people benefit from having something before exercise in the morning when they're in a calorie deficit because they're actually they're already sort of in the space of having less calories than what they need to support their current body weight because you need to have a calorie deficit to lose weight. So they get a little bit more from their workout when they have something beforehand because

22:02
it will help improve their metabolic output for the session. They'll feel better and will likely have, or potentially have implications for how they feel later in the day as well. But, so that is my general guideline and I'm quite clear on that. But there are definitely people where it actually doesn't make that much of a difference to them and they prefer to go and fasted. This is women of reproductive age as well, like these are women who are potentially where you

22:31
always hear that women shouldn't train fasted, but actually some women are fine training fasted. You know, it doesn't impact on biofeedback markers, which are very easy to sort of pinpoint, like their sleep doesn't impact negatively on their hormones doesn't impact negatively on their energy or cravings. So actually being across those markers for yourself gives you some indication as to what you know, how you or how you should go into that session. But

22:58
you know, as a person putting together a plan for several hundred people, I have to sort of start with a guideline and then, you know, chat to people and get a bit nuanced when I'm on that individual level. Yeah, absolutely. So we thought we might talk a little bit about myth busting today. Cause last time you were on the show, Cliff, we talked about sort of, well, we've started off with trends and then I think we just went on tangents, which is why I really love doing these podcasts with you.

23:27
But I did, I was very interested and very pleased when I saw your piece on caffeine and caffeine in the morning, because I had heard on several occasions, Huberman say that we shouldn't have caffeine in the morning because it's going to create an energy crash later in the day. Not only Huberman, but then of course, everyone else on my social media feed started putting up posts about when you should or shouldn't have caffeine in the morning. And I tried to do...

23:55
dive in the literature. I tried to figure out why he was saying this and I could not find it. And then you did a good old, maybe not position stand article is what I'd call it, on caffeine. So can you give us a rundown on what the scope, how you interpret the data? Yeah, so I'd seen a lot of those posts as well. And, you know, having a general understanding of that area of the literature, it didn't seem

24:24
to make sense in terms of an absolute. And this is the problem is that if we say to people that you shouldn't have a coffee first thing in the morning, you shouldn't have a coffee before breakfast, or you should never have a coffee until X amount of time or whatever, there needs to be pretty strong evidence, I think, to support those types of absolute claims, because no one is saying that everybody should have a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. It's gonna depend on the individual. So anyway,

24:53
I like to take an inductive approach to these things. So instead of having a pre-confirmed bias and going out and finding research for it, I like to think, well, I'm gonna try and, as much as possible, leave my biases at the door, go to the research and just do a systematic search and try and find all of the relevant research that speaks to that particular topic. So what I really focus down on is the cortisol.

25:18
Effective of coffee in the morning and the effect on on lead on sort of catecholamine stress hormones And because that's often what people are talking about Yeah, you know you have a coffee first thing in the morning. It's gonna spike your cortisol that's gonna lead to all these later effects in the day and Here's the thing. I think it's very easy to

25:39
to misread or underread research. Because if you start to do a quick look, you might easily draw the conclusion that, yep, if you have a coffee in the morning, it's likely to spike your cortisol levels, that could well have some issues down the track. But if we start to read a little bit deeper and we start to read more widely, we'll see things like, well, that's typically shown with pretty high doses. As you know, most of the research on caffeine

26:09
or a lot of it is done in the performance realm. Yeah. And a lot of the research on caffeine uses fairly standardized doses. Mostly it's the six milligrams per kilo dose. Okay, I'm a 90 kilo dude, right? 54, 540 milligrams then? Yeah. Yeah. So put that into context for people, that's around five espressos. I'm not gonna wake up and have five espressos, but what we see pretty consistently in the research is that yes, if you're having those fairly common

26:38
studied doses, you will have a big cortisol release and that might potentially cause some effects down the track. However, we start to see equivocal results under that dose, and especially so when we're starting to look at sort of three milligrams per kilo or less, there may be an effect in some studies, but in others, there's none. And in the majority of studies, we're not really seeing much at all. So again, for me at 90 kilos, that's...

27:06
270 milligrams, it's still a pretty big dose. It's nearly three cups of coffee. So if you're the average person getting up and having a coffee in the morning, or even two coffees, you know, it's not likely that there's gonna be an excessive or meaningful cortisol spike. Yes, it will wake you up, but people have got to remember as well that the actions- They've got to wake up anyway. I'm just kidding. You gotta wake up anyway. And there is gonna be some natural, you know, increase in cortisol in the morning. And for some people, that's a bit underactive.

27:35
Now, why might that be underactive? Well, it could be a number of things. It could be fatigue, it could be all sorts of stuff. But one interesting aspect that came out of that as well is there was research looking at people who were sleep deprived. And in those people who were really sleep deprived, they actually had fairly aberrant cortisol responses in the morning anyway. So their cortisol levels were spiking, right? Interestingly, those who were taking caffeine in the morning didn't have those same types of spikes. They had a more normal cortisol response.

28:05
which actually makes sense. Because when we think about the actions of caffeine, we can't just think, well, caffeine causes a big release of stress hormones and that's how it stimulates us. It's a little bit more nuanced because initially what caffeine's doing obviously is it's a adenosine antagonist. So it's basically blocking that neurotransmitter within the brain that is associated with sort of sleepiness and the sleep induction cycle, all that kind of stuff, or relaxation. So it's having some primary effects through that mechanism.

28:34
Now, generally it leads on to also, you know, co-release of cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine, those stress hormones. But that may not always be the case if it's already achieved some of the stimulatory effect in a sleep-deprived state. So there is some mitigation there. So anyway, the short end of the long story is that really it doesn't matter, again, on a sort of population scale.

29:04
If we're looking at what people generally do, which is to get up, have a cup of coffee or two, get into their day, that's fine. But obviously I always want to spin this in terms of any information I put out, how is that relevant to you as the individual? If you're finding that having a coffee in the morning is stopping you from eating, maybe you're not so hungry and you don't have breakfast, but otherwise you would, maybe that's not a good thing because you might be someone who benefits from having breakfast.

29:34
If it's affecting how much you eat at lunch and you tend to be under-fuelling, that could also be an issue. You know, if you're a very high caffeine responder and it's affecting your sleep, or if it's creating anxiety or nervousness or any of those things, then obviously you're using those semi-quantitative come qualitative measures of yourself to tell you that maybe you shouldn't have as much coffee or maybe you should wait a little bit or not have coffee at all. Yes. Yeah. Right. So.

30:04
What we're really breaking down is this absolutist idea that you should not have this. It's like, well, it depends. And it's making people scared of something that is on balance, a healthy thing. And I agree. Cheers. Well, first, I've got a number of points. So the first one is I'm really interested in how you approach the literature because I typically have a question. I want to back up my bias and then I just go cherry picking. So

30:33
I'm super interested to hear that you do the opposite. I don't know if you actually do that. No, no, but I didn't think that was quite funny. Um, but also I think that too often we like to, um, give it's almost like what we were discussing with the doctors. Like doctors are a voice of authority and we sort of give over our own personal, uh, responsibility maybe, I don't know if that's quite the word, um, to doctors because they know best. This is what's happened with.

31:03
I remember listening to Andrew Huberman for the first time. I came across him on a Rich Roll podcast. Maybe this was before the Huberman podcast, obviously. He was the first, it was before he was on Joe Rogan too, I think. And maybe it was just after Joe Rogan. And he was a neuroscientist, you know, he was just a neuroscientist. Not just, but you know, like he sort of dealt in the areas with which he had spent his career in.

31:30
And now he's just reached this guru status where he speaks on any number of topics. And I'm not saying he doesn't have a really good deep understanding of science literature and methodologies and how to read studies, but it just, there are just some things that are almost taken as, is taken at face value in the literature without a really deep understanding of the field.

32:00
It's almost dismissing all of the experts in the field who may come to a different conclusion than what he comes to. And if I just sort of continue, it reminded me actually of earlier this year when that study headline came out about erythritol. And of course the headline read, erythritol increases risk of vascular dysfunction and stroke or something like that. Whereas, of course, when you looked at the study, it was our own endogenous erythritol levels, which...

32:29
in a large part influenced by the amount of sugar we consume. So it wasn't the, they didn't even mean, they didn't even measure erythritol intake. However, after that headline came out, I saw a number of people who are really smart people who then just, who announced to their following that they were absolutely not gonna have erythritol anymore in their diet because of this finding. And didn't even really backtrack after they did a deeper dive

32:59
could actually read the study itself. Like, I don't know, it's like, some people just like to climb up on a hill and die on it. Yeah, well, I mean, that's easy to do, right? You take a position and then the tendency is psychologically for people to defend that position. Yes. Even when they know they're wrong. Yes. Right, they're gonna have that implicit tendency to defend it. But I think one of the reasons that occurs is it's kind of twofold that...

33:26
what's probably threefold actually, that studies are not always easy to read. And I'd like to think that I'm relatively intelligent, but I still struggle with a lot of the studies that I read. And I need to go back and read them a couple of times and really figure out what they're saying, how they're saying it. Then there is the presentation of the research. And I think this is one of the challenges of the modern era is that it's very important for scientists to get some visibility in the mainstream.

33:56
And so you can see it right? A study comes out and I know a lot of these studies that come out because as you know, I perform living reviews. So I get these alerts. I know the following day or even the same day there's going to be PR releases. Yes. And I start to see articles coming out and there might be 10 or 15 articles and pretty big distribution outlets trumpeting the headline of the study. But the headline often miss, really misconstrues what's actually been found.

34:25
So we've got that issue there. And I've completely forgotten what the third issue was. No, the third issue actually is that sometimes, I almost hate to say this, but sometimes we do have scientists, and some of them are pretty well known for it, who have a particular agenda and publish voluminously around that agenda. But they do so in a way that is quite

34:54
difficult for the lay person to read. So again, it goes back to that first problem of the study being hard to read. Good example of that is the team of Gary Holson, Albert Reiss, who publish a huge number of studies on the dangers of cannabis. Ah, yes, okay, okay. Their work has been very comprehensively rebutted by a number of great scientists in that area, but they continue to get headlines.

35:22
You know, particularly that one that came out, I think earlier this year, it might have been into last year, which showed I'm using quotation marks for anyone who's listening, that cannabis was causally associated with more cancers than tobacco. So using cannabis was associated with more cancers than smoking tobacco, which is

35:47
You know, in contrast to every shred of evidence we have, if you start looking into the study, it was very peculiar. The methodology was weird. The analytical techniques were somewhat peculiar. The data sets were probably misapplied, but it took quite a lot of reading to really figure that out. Yeah. And there's also then there are things that people need to understand about this stuff, right? When you're reading a study, they just published another one the other day, which came up in my feed, so this is why I'm sort of- It's top of mind. This is on my mind.

36:18
I recently published another study suggesting that cannabis use is causally associated with pancreatic cancer. Very strong claim because to look at observational data and suggest causality, you need to have very, very strong evidence. Anyway, here's just one problem with that, which sort of gives people an indication of you need to look at the nuances sometimes or the complexities of what's going on. There was basically a fairly big uptick, which is now...

36:46
plateaued or declining in cannabis use around 2010 in most states in the US, probably because they were starting to legalize or decriminalize. You also saw at the exactly the same time, a fairly sharp uptick in pancreatic cancer rates, right? So there is, according to their research, a very, very strong association. Like if you're just looking at correlation coefficients, it's really strong, it basically tracks.

37:14
Now as a scientist, you're looking at that and saying, well, that doesn't make sense because cancer development takes a long time. So we wouldn't expect for if rates of usage start to go up of one thing, that immediately we see the same trajectory of increase in a disease outcome, which should actually take many years to see the increase. So it doesn't make sense temporarily. But most people aren't necessarily going to look at that. They're gonna see the graphs which match up.

37:43
they're gonna see words like significant association, and they're gonna say, oh shit, that's scary. Or you see a headline, I know we'll talk about this a bit later, like green tea causes liver failure, and you're gonna go, whoa. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's interesting. So a tangent, but related to the presentation of data, is so you know I'm not a fan of the,

38:13
like food guidelines, you know, like the, you know, the food pyramid or whatever you want to call it. It's all actually still referred to as the food pyramid. Yeah, that was very eighties, but essentially, you know, like, um, sure. If you were to follow a follow the guidelines of that, if you were a healthy person, you'd probably actually be fine. You know, you'd probably be a bit low on protein actually, but you know, you wouldn't, that wouldn't necessarily cause a lot of the chronic disease issues that we have in today's society. If you're thinking back into the 1980.

38:42
But the graph that I do see time and again is that when they put the food guidelines in in 1980 or 1977, there's this, at the exact same time, this immediate uptick of obesity. And so the graphs, again, they align very nicely with regards to, this is when we saw that the guidelines be put in place and look at the increase in obesity, but obesity itself takes a while to develop also. So it's the same sort of thing.

39:11
And I'm not saying this would defend the food guidelines at all, but it is interesting the way that... I'd be interested to sort of have a deeper look into that and go, well, I wonder what happened 10 years earlier. Maybe 10 years earlier we started eating snacks. I don't know, you know. And that's a really good example because I would have used those graphs probably 15 or so years ago to sort of say, hey, well, maybe the guidelines don't work, right? But I would now know that the use of those graphs in that way is...

39:41
is at best imprecise and probably spurious, actually. And I don't think the food guidelines are necessarily the problem. I don't think they're great for several reasons, but I do think that if people followed them religiously, they would probably be okay. They would probably be pretty healthy. The problem is that I think the food guidelines are confusing and they distract from the real issues.

40:10
So it's not that the food guidelines are bad or wrong, as a lot of people say, per se. I think it's just that they create a lot of unnecessary distraction, demonization of food, and they're kind of missing the point, or maybe they're getting better. I think they are getting a lot better, but in the past, I think they've missed the point on what's most important. And I think we've got bigger issues. Nutrition-wise, I think one of our biggest issues currently is undernourishment.

40:38
And I know I hammer on about it all the time, but it's just because I see more and more research emerging to support this and more and more case evidence within, you know, our students within our clients, you know, all sorts, anyone we could basically get food data from. We're seeing fairly consistently that most people most of the time are in some cases drastically unenourished.

41:01
And it's, I think, a bit of a silent epidemic because people can function pretty well in the presence of subclinical deficiencies, but they certainly won't be in optimal health. And it will lead to problems down the line. Well, it's interesting. So I, as you know, I'm running my mentorship and we did a block on basic biomarkers. So I just sort of presented on the things that you often get tested when you go to your doctor, if you're just getting like a basic markup.

41:29
plus some additional extras which I like to add in but the doctors don't, the public, the person doesn't always necessarily pay for them so they don't sort of go through. But I did a big sort of explanation on what all these, what all the sort of biomarkers mean and what you can sort of glean from them. And of course the difference between reference range norms versus optimal sort of functioning. And one of the girls in there, she's a friend of mine who's doing the course as well which is really cool.

41:59
She was like, you know, before we had a conversation about my biomarkers, I hadn't been to the doctor in years and years and years, but she had, you know, reached a significant age and she's like, right, I've actually got to look at, I really should just sort this stuff out. Like what, you know, just make sure that I'm okay. So she wasn't particularly feeling bad in her mind, went along, got her blood tests done and was below optimal in ferritin, B12 and vitamin D.

42:26
Again, didn't feel overly bad, yet 12 weeks later after taking supplements, she was like, I just cannot believe how much better I feel. I thought I just had an attitude problem. But actually, I actually feel so much better. And these, her below optimal numbers were not flagged at the laboratory test or the doctor's office. You know, like, if anything, she said it was ridiculous. Her cholesterol was...

42:55
slightly higher than the range at the lab with which she got it done. So that's the only thing that her young doctor flagged her on was her slightly high cholesterol and she is as healthy as anything other than that undernourishment. So I think people normalize a type of how they feel, like suboptimally they just normalize that thinking, well, I don't feel as bad as my mate over here is having XYZ problem.

43:22
And you literally just don't know. Yeah, you literally don't. Because you live in your own skin every day, right? And it's not until we make changes that we realize, because I think I've told you this before, but I haven't done it for many years, but I used to ask a lot of my clients just a snapshot question when they came in, like on a scale of one to 10, how do you feel? Yeah. And often they would say something like, oh, I'm about a six, but I want to be higher. Then a month later, when they come back for their second consultation, you ask them, well, how are you feeling now? It's just snapshot, like off the top of your head.

43:50
Like, oh, you know what, I'm probably about a seven, but before I wasn't a six, I didn't realize how crap I was feeling. I was a three before. Yes, interesting. So when they actually think about where they were at previously, we just don't know often how tired we are, how low we are, you know, how much poor sleep's affecting us, how much we're being impacted by things we didn't even realize, like those nutrient insufficiencies. Yeah. And the reference range stuff is interesting because I've got clients up.

44:18
I've got clients all around the world and some of my clients in Canada, their reference ranges I'm pretty sure now that they get back from their docs say that sufficiency of vitamin D is over 75 nanomoles. Oh, interesting. Right, and ours is 100. Yeah. And a lot of the research you... Oh, no, ours is 50. Sorry, ours is 50. Yeah. No, sorry. Sorry, ours is 50. What I mean to say is that a lot of people suggest the optimal is over 100, so 100 to 150 or 100 to 200 rather than 50 to 150.

44:48
And in a lot of the research you read around vitamin D, they might state, you know, 50 as being, under 50 as being deficient, but they still use often over 75 as being sufficient. Yeah, interesting. So we've got a bit of a lag there because it's not, I don't think it's anyone's fault, but a lot of practitioners, whether they're doctors or not, will just see the results and just default to the reference ranges, which I think you can do for some things. Yeah.

45:14
But for others, you need to be a little bit more circumspect and just saying, you know, within range is not always the best thing. Yeah. And so a couple of things. One is it's interesting that with B12, so our reference range is very wide. And and I see a number of people below 200 and B12 and that and also have significant symptoms, because that's the thing is that you always want to you always want to measure up the symptoms that you're experiencing with a biomarker if you can, because

45:44
We have these sort of optimal numbers maybe in our head, you and I may be similar, maybe different as to where we see our clients might feel best, but ultimately it's quite an individual thing as well. But in Japan, I think the cutoff when you convert the units, the cutoff in Japan for insufficient is anything below about 369, which for us it's 170 actually. And it's not flagged.

46:14
unless it's, or sometimes it's flagged if it's sort of below 200, but I've had seen so many people that have their B12 visit like below 200 and it's not flagged. And they have significant brain fog and just real energy problems. Well, here's a cool one for you. This just came through probably a few weeks ago because it's part of the living reviews that I'm doing. One of the elements we're going to add into our folate info is that...

46:41
A recent study has shown a six times greater risk of preterm delivery when serum folate levels are less than 28 nanomoles. And when we consider that our reference range is 5 to 45, we're really talking about you actually for optimal outcomes in pregnancy need to be in the top third of that reference range. So this is where one of the things we're doing at the Institute is starting to...

47:06
slowly, slowly, we're starting to put together functional reference ranges for various sort of condition outcomes and what's indicated in the research, just so that the practitioners can go back to that and very quickly see, well, is this actually an optimal result for my client? Yeah, nice. I've leaned quite a bit on Rachel Arthur's work, and that- She's working. She is so good. I'll send you my little resource that I did, if you like, if it's helpful at all. Just, I mean, you may or may not agree with a lot of what I've-

47:33
got for my sort of what I've had with optimal ranges and stuff. Just so it'll be interesting to get your input actually. Well, you know, not detailed input because then I'd have to act on it, but at least if you could have a look and go, yeah, nah, I don't really agree with that. Or, okay, that's interesting, but that, you know. Rachel's stuff is really cool. She's a very good practitioner. She's put out some really cool research. I bump into Rachel quite a bit at conferences where we're both speaking.

48:03
And I remember at one conference I was, what was I, oh, someone asked me about zinc taste testing. And I said, look, here's my opinion. But if you want to ask someone about it, Rachel's sitting right there. She performed the research that I was quoting, right? That's funny. Hey, actually on that Cliff, while we're in the realm of, you know, myth busting or whatever, people always, people still look to things like hair testing, hair testing, mineral analysis, as

48:32
as a marker of nutrient sufficiency. Now you and you, we are talking about an undernourished in the undernourished space. Like can people rely on that as a marker for insufficient nutrients? Is there any validity in it at all? I mean, there may be some, right? Or not at all. I'll start with the validity. There hair testing is, is very, um,

49:00
or it can provide some interesting insights for forensic pathology and for toxicology. So basically if we're looking at someone who's been poisoned or if someone has been exposed to a lot of toxic heavy metals, then yeah, there can be validity to it because it will show in the hair. And it can also give interesting temporal information. So it can sort of, because of the rate of hair growth, they can see when someone might have been exposed to a poison or whatever. However, if we're talking about validity for clinical practice, it's basically useless.

49:29
The reason being that, I'll explain this for the audience because I know you understand all this stuff, but when we talk about accuracy or validity, what we're basically saying is that it's accurate according to our intended result. So for this, we would have to see from hair tests, we would have to see that there is a high degree of accuracy when we compare it to tissue or blood levels of these nutrients, and we don't see that. The next metric for testing is reliability.

49:59
And reliability is basically that if we have the same sample tested multiple times or even at multiple locations using the same analytes and same methods, we should get basically the same results, very, very similar results. And we don't see that either. So what we basically see is inaccuracy of the test itself when we compare it to what's happening in the body. And we see a complete lack of reliability when it's tested at different labs, at different times, whatever.

50:29
studies on this where they've taken the same sample of hair or basically from the same area, same sort of length of hair, all that kind of stuff, send it off to different labs or send it to the same lab at different times and they get different results. So yeah, there's not really a lot there and it's also very subject to conditions within the hair. So if the hair is drier, more moist, if someone shampoos regularly or doesn't, someone uses conditioner, someone bleaches their hair, someone colors their hair, that all...

50:57
plays into the results as well. So in a nutshell, hair testing is nearly useless, except for forensic pathologists. Yeah, interesting. And alcohol intake too, I think, is one which it's used clinically. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. See, what I tend to just ask my clients. Yeah, but how truthful are they gonna be with you? You're like, hey, shall I give me a sample of your hair? Interesting with the lab analysis stuff, because I remember,

51:27
when back when measuring salivary cortisol as a marker of adrenal function was the thing that we did. And I remember that you would send away, like almost everyone you sent away to this, wherever it was it was sent away to, came back with a low salivary cortisol. And then it was sort of came into question, like, actually, is it the lab that's the issue? Or is it?

51:54
that everyone has low salivary sort of cortisol, which, which, you know, in the saliva, I believe that you might get 3% of actual free cortisol as a, as a, um, or available to measure it or I don't know how that works, but I do know that saliva is not the best indicator for, I mean, for cortisol awakening response taken at the right time, that's one of the sort of markers for it, but not as a general rule in terms of the overall sort of cortisol function. But yeah.

52:23
Labs are interesting. Yeah. And I mean, a lot of the, the labs that aren't your standard, you know, medically certified lab tests, you know, that kind of stuff, the stuff that's not being done through primary health organizations, it is very much up to them to determine what the reference ranges are for their particular outcomes.

52:49
And often that's one of the challenges because often those reference ranges aren't validated. And so, you know, for some tests, like I'll throw it out there and I'm probably gonna get some blowback. The Dutch test. Dutch test. You're not a fan. Dutch test, well, the thing is they're interesting because they're accurate. Yeah. So in terms of the translation to what we would otherwise see in blood or the accuracy between dried urine versus liquid urine, it's pretty good.

53:18
So as far as a test goes, it's sound. But one of the challenges is that the reference ranges to my knowledge are not validated, they come back with. And the bigger issue as I've written and will publish soon is that I just don't think it's all that clinically useful. Now I'm not saying it's never useful, but I don't think it's clinically useful in probably 99% of cases because we will easily see.

53:43
the outcomes in terms of the functional outcomes in a client, or we'll see anomalies with standard blood tests. And we'll also typically see if we do a thorough case take the likely causes for that. And I don't believe for a second that a Dutch test can show anything causative. Because by nature, it's a test that shows outcomes of what you're doing. Changes within the body, yeah. Yeah, I know. And I saw your little piece in HPI, and I think I might've commented on it as well. It's like, cause I know

54:12
Because there are, like I've had, I've absolutely used it with clients who wanted to know. And I'm like, yeah, cool, we can do a Dutch test. Having said that, my usual stance on anything with testing is, hey, I don't know that the test right here and now is gonna change what we're gonna do, to be honest. So let's do what we do. And then if down the line, we're not, you know, maybe you'll glean something. But I do know though, not to push back, but I know that there are clinicians who use it.

54:39
very regularly, because this is what they do and they see great value in it. So I certainly, you know, and I think, but I think also what you're, you're not dismissing that, but you're just, you have questions over how useful it is in that clinical setting and how, you know, what it might do, how it might change. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm not, I'm not 100% against it because like I say, it's accurate. And so it can give some interesting insights, but whenever I've had a client who's given me Dutch tests that they had performed elsewhere, it's kind of like, oh yeah, that's

55:09
But we kind of knew that anyway. Yes. And I'm not being flippant. I promise I'm not. No, no, no, I know. But the bigger reason is that it's a pretty big cost. And I find that for some clients it can become a real distraction because they become, like I wrote in that little piece, they become very pathologized. So that's the reason I wrote about that because I've experienced that where they're like, but I've got low dopamine levels. We need to fix this. And it's like, yeah, but.

55:38
you really want to fix it with these herbal supplements or these other things you've been prescribed by someone. Let's look at the reasons why we might have some of these expressions, and we can see that you're sleeping five hours a night and you're really stressed and there's some other stuff psychosocially that's playing into it. And hey, if we look at the food data we've analyzed, you're insufficient in...

56:03
B1, B2, B6, B12, calcium, vitamin D, and potassium. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So all the things. And protein and essential fatty acids. So let's take care of those things first and then see where we're at. Yeah, yeah. Because I always leave the door open to tests like that that have accuracy and reliability because they might provide some really interesting additional information for a particular client.

56:32
I think my main point is that those ones are overused. Yeah. And other tests like hair testing, I just don't think we should be using it all because they're not valid. Or zinc taste testing, same thing. Yeah. You know, notoriously inaccurate. Yes. So yeah, there are certain ones we should just leave at the door and others we can sort of leave as a potential for use where necessary. Yeah, yeah, no, that's great, that's good. With regards, Clif 2, what was I thinking? Oh, I've got a question actually.

57:01
that I had with a client this morning. So she's celiac and she's had really bad responses to things like wheatgrass and something else that's in greens powders. Because I suggested to her, because she's just not getting a full spectrum, well one she can't have a lot of fiber in her diet because of her gut and she's done a lot of gut work but I just suspect that she's just one of these individuals that...

57:28
if she gets too much of that sort of vegetable bulk, that's just really upsetting for her. So I don't know that that will ever be something that she goes down. She's also vegan, which does make it a somewhat of a challenge with regards to food intake. But, and I suggested, said, well, you know, I'm not as concerned about the fiber, if I'm honest with you, as I am maybe about the antioxidants and the phytochemicals, you might be missing from the vegetables. So what about a greens part? Or what about the good green vitality? Cause you know, I'm a massive fan of that one. And...

57:56
She said, look, it's got wheatgrass and I just know that whenever I have something like that, I'm gonna vomit and it's gonna make me really sick because she's celiac. Now, what is your, I mean, you are the clean, lean guy. Like what's, how much, I said, look, I'll ask Cliff because I know that he's not gonna try and sell you something that he doesn't believe is gonna be useful for you, but can people with celiac have something like good green vitality? Yeah, because any things that are in there like barley grass, wheatgrass,

58:26
any gluten in them. Okay. But the, you know, the sprouted elements, so the actual plant per se doesn't have the gluten, it's only in the grain, in the seed. So generally that's okay. But obviously if someone is, you know, throwing up every time they have a product, then it could be lots of things. And it would be very hard to say. Some people will have, you know, there will always be strange.

58:53
strange with respect to the norm. You know, I'm not saying that people are strange, but there will always be peculiar reactions to certain foods in some people. Like I've never seen a, I've never seen a client who was allergic to meat until I did. And I had a client who was allergic to lamb, verified allergy. And usually that doesn't happen, but it can. So people can be allergic to all sorts of stuff. You know, people can be allergic to mushrooms. Mushrooms are an incredibly healthy food, but some people are severely allergic to them.

59:23
And so we always need to consider that there could be something like that going on. And I would never dismiss someone's, you know, literally visceral reactions to a food or a supplement because it ostensibly should be okay for them. Now, I will just clarify, she hasn't tried it. So, so when she sees that she's had this vomiting reaction to something like wheat grass, it's wheat grass itself. It's not what's been, what's in GGV, which is why I said.

59:50
I said, oh well, I'm sure DGV is fine for celiac people actually, but I would double check with you. And typically it is, so I mean, she could probably try it again. And if, obviously if she gets any sort of reaction, then she should stop taking it. But typically for most people it's completely fine. You know, there are weird things that can happen that I don't think we entirely know enough about because it just hasn't been researched enough. And one of those things is like crossover allergies

01:00:20
And it may not be an allergy per se, it might be a psychoneurophysiological response, where if someone has eaten wheat and had a bad reaction to it, probably because of the gluten, but they might begin to autonomically associate some of the reaction with other components from that food as well. Oh, totally. And so that, and this is potentially why we might be seeing more combined milk protein allergies. Where people who might be sensitive to casein end up exhibiting sensitivity to whey.

01:00:48
Now it might just be some sort of allergy response. It might be an immunological thing, or it might be more of a psychoneuroimmunological reaction or just a pure psychoneurophysiological reaction. So there's a lot of weird sort of stuff that goes on there as well, and it becomes difficult to unpick all that. No, I know. And it reminds me of when I was about eight, because everything happened when I was eight in my head. I had like this one epic year, cannot remember the rest of my childhood. But anyway, when I was eight.

01:01:14
I didn't want to go to school on the Friday or Wednesday. And so I pretended to be sick when I got home from school and I'm really sick, really sick and I don't really feel like anything to eat, which was rubbish because I was actually starving. And then mom's like, we'll just have this apricot yogurt. And had the apricot yogurt, was that the fresh and fruity and had the big fruit bits in it. And I vomited it up because I'd convinced myself that I was sick. And I honestly could not eat apricot yogurt for like 20 years.

01:01:40
Even though I wasn't even actually sick, I was faking it, but they ended up throwing it up because I'd convinced my body. So yeah, that's a bit of neuro, neuropsychological response right there. Yeah, I remember seeing research and I hope I don't misrepresent it, but I do remember seeing research years ago in which they were looking at non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Oh yeah. And they were giving people sort of.

01:02:07
food that had gluten in versus placebo, telling people it had gluten in, and a lot of people were responding to the placebo, obviously, as you'd expect, as if it contained gluten. Conversely, though, people who were told that they weren't having gluten and there was gluten in it often didn't have those reactions. So, you know, there's quite a lot going on there. And we talk about the power of the mind, but that sort of...

01:02:34
simple oversimplifies it a little bit because it's not really the mind and the way we usually think about it because then it's it's almost like it's all in your head. Yeah, when it's not because it's not a physical response. Yeah, that's not a conscious thing. It's below that level of consciousness. And so it is a semi autonomic reaction. So in that sense, it is psycho neuro physiological. So it's outside of our control. Even if we patterned it over time through controlled responses, they become reactions rather than responses over time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:03:03
So interesting. Hey, and speaking of interesting, you did mention that green tea was gonna kill us, was it? What was that? Which, if I'm honest, I'm actually not a fan of green tea. I've never been adult enough to like it, unfortunately. And I feel like this is a real failing. It's actually a personality failing on my part, and I'm not quite sure how to get over it, to be fair. Yeah, it's an interesting area because...

01:03:28
It's popped up a few times and there was obviously a lot of articles published on it, probably just even, what was it, a few weeks back or a few months back. So it got a lot of headlines and in a nutshell, what happened is some researchers out of Israel performed a review. They found, I think, around 100 case studies of liver failure that apparently resulted from green tea consumption. So there is

01:03:58
It's not a myth because there is an indication in the research, but I think we need to take it in context. Typically, while some of those case studies were related to what might be considered fairly normal intakes of green tea, like three cups a day kind of thing, most were either related to really excessive intakes.

01:04:19
or really high dose green tea extract supplementation. So we're talking about something there where there's a need for caution, I think when we're talking about supplements, just because something's good, we don't wanna take an enormous amount. And would people take the supplement from a fat loss perspective? Because that's a lot of those, is it the EG, CG, what I can't remember what that actually, but the extract is often used in a fat loss context. Yeah, and it may not even be that effective for that.

01:04:50
Right, you know, a lot of the effects, I mean, there are probably some entourage effects, but a lot of the effects of high doses of green tea on fat loss are probably just related to the caffeine, to be honest. Yeah, interesting. But yeah, I mean, green tea is a healthy drink. There are other antioxidant effects associated with all those various catechins we get from the green tea. So I think a lot of people are taking it from maybe a fat loss perspective or maybe just a general health perspective. But if we consider that, that we're really talking about

01:05:19
And even the research, as I said, I think said that, you know, for almost everyone, just having drinking green tea is not an issue. We're talking about the more extreme things. I have also seen that there are particular gene markers that are associated with liver failure and green tea. And even that, though, the researchers said that it's not, this is not likely unless you're taking really high doses. So generally drinking green tea is completely safe.

01:05:48
It's usually when you're taking really high doses through supplementation. So there's a genetic component, there's the dosage aspect, and we also need to look at what does it mean in terms of the overall numbers. And if we consider that tea overall is the second most consumed beverage in the world, right? After water. So it's the most consumed additive beverage in the world. The rates of tea drinking are massive.

01:06:17
Although green tea is a little bit lower in the Western world and in Asia and other places, it's very high. So we would probably consider that, you know, that there's probably in the region of two billion or more tons of green tea drunk every year. So you would expect that if this was a real issue, we'd see a lot more people dropping of dead of liver failure because of it. Yeah. Even I just did some, you know, back of the...

01:06:45
pamphlet calculations before and they could be completely off. But I was making some estimations because it's actually quite hard to get consumption data or worldwide consumption data on green tea. There's there's decent stuff out of the states, but to get it worldwide sort of numbers is quite difficult. But we probably think that there's an under say one in five million chance. But that understates it as well, because that's just looking at how many people on average

01:07:14
probably around the world drink green tea, right? Compared to the amount of cases. But considering the cases have been drawn over a long period of time and people drink green tea over a long period of time, if you include the temporal aspect to it, you're probably talking about a one in several trillion chance. So it's incredibly rare. Okay, so we don't need to worry about that right now. Or at all, probably. We don't need to worry. Well, the other thing is, you know, when we see isolated cases of things like this,

01:07:44
We need to consider the things that I mentioned about dose, what people are doing, but also, there are typically other confounding issues and they might be different between the different cases, but where we have familial history of liver disease, where we have other factors that precipitate liver disease, like obesity, being with metabolic disorder, blah, blah, blah, drug use, hepatotoxic drugs, which are very common and often not corrected for in research.

01:08:12
Because if you just take, if you take paracetamol every day, people aren't going to necessarily worry about that. But long-term use of that is definitely hepatotoxic in some ways, you know, and depleting glutathione and things like that. So the other interesting element to something like that is that if we look at the evidence overall, so let's just say we look at big observational data, the association between green tea consumption and health is pretty clear. So overall, it's beneficial for health.

01:08:42
You know, it tends to be related to reductions in body fat and improvements in insulin sensitivity and cardiovascular disease and all sorts of things, right? Sure. They're probably quite small effects, but overall we would consider based on the totality of research. It's a healthy drink. So unless there's a good reason to not drink it, um, like you've got a familiar history of something, um, or you don't like it. I'm sure it's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Just don't overdo it. Yeah. You know, don't go crazy with anything. Yeah. Oh, that's, uh.

01:09:11
That's like good advice to live by. And, and actually one last thing I know, Cliff, I'm so sorry. I aware over the hour, but I would love to just get your in. We never stick to an hour. Yeah, that's true. I know that's every other person that I interview. I'm like, Oh, I just want to be mindful of your time. I know I'm not actually that mindful of your time. Um, cause I know you love it as much as I do. Uh, now cold water immersion and females. So listening to a podcast and heard the statement that.

01:09:40
Women should not do cold water immersion down to these extremely cold temperatures that men do them to because we can't cope. And therefore it's dangerous. I don't know that it was that danger was what was said, but it was certainly advised against because we're female. Now, I've never seen any differentiation in the literature with...

01:10:08
cold water immersion. Having said that though, Atiya just did an AMA on it, so I haven't listened to it yet, but maybe he's going to bring up something. But is there anything that you are aware of that might suggest that women cannot tolerate the cold as well as men can? Yeah, there is. I mean, I'm not an expert in the area of cold immersion, but I did look into it quite a lot. I have continued to look into it quite a lot, mainly because of the

01:10:38
ketosis, ketogenesis, fatty oxidation, stuff like that. So it's been sort of tangential to the research that I've done. And what I've seen in the literature, and this seems to be fairly consistent, is that going by some measures, because it's not always entirely accurate to make absolutes, but going by a lot of the common measures, the tendency is for women to probably have slightly higher pain thresholds overall, and that can be a bit domain subjective.

01:11:07
but lower cold tolerance overall. So that tends to result in some physiological things like earlier shivering and a little bit more discomfort and things like that. Now, the way I look at it is how meaningful is that? And I don't know the answer, but I'm also very, I become immediately very resistant when people say that women shouldn't do something.

01:11:37
because they can't handle it. I find that very, actually very demeaning towards women. And I think that, as you and I have seen with a lot of the research around sex specific elements of say, nutrition or training, there can be some differences, but they're usually either very small and or there's a massive overlap with men. So although we might see some differences on an individual level,

01:12:05
they're not really meaningful. We need to look at the individual themselves. And I think someone sitting in an ice bath, I don't really see how that could be dangerous or damaging to the person unless they're doing it to the point of hypothermia. And so if that's not the case and someone enjoys it, they experience benefit from it for whatever reason,

01:12:32
I just don't think people should listen. I don't think women should, and I'm a guy saying this, so I'm gonna get lambasted, but I personally don't think that women should listen to messaging which says, you should not do high intensity interval training. You should not fast, you should not do keto, you should not do cold immersion. Because I know women who do all of those things and thrive. I also know women and men for whom some of those things are not appropriate.

01:13:03
But we also need to go back to the research and say, well, why would someone say that? And if we look at things like fasting, why shouldn't women fast? Well, there's a very good reason for some women that if it drives their total energy intake down too much, yes, that can be detrimental. But if you do a quick scope of the research and the messaging that we hear that there's no research on women fasting is wrong, there's a lot. Yeah, there is, yeah.

01:13:31
And if you look at that research, it tends to show, albeit most of it's conducted in women who are with overweight or obesity, there are considerable benefits, and there don't seem to be a lot of downsides. Well, actually Cliff and just on that, and I don't know how this will sound, but if we look, if we step back and look at a population, 67% of the population is overweight or obese. Exactly, and I was thinking that exact thing earlier this morning.

01:14:01
you know, that if we're talking about over two thirds of the particular population being with that condition of excess adiposity, and we see fairly consistently in the research that either fasting or low carb or interventions that help to bring down energy intake are effective and are safe, that doesn't seem to be an issue for me. But again, we need to stop making absolute statements and focus on the individual.

01:14:30
because I've also had clients who come to me and they're very committed to the whole combination, right? They're doing excessive exercise with extreme fasting and they're doing keto. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're pulling all levers of what's required actually and that's excessive. I love it, the levers, right? The levers are what's important because if we're an under consumer as those particular clients are and they're continuing to pull those levers

01:15:00
suppress their energy intake even more and increase their energy expenditure, they're going to be in trouble at some point. Whereas if they tended to be someone who was an overconsumer, who didn't do so much exercise and fasting helped them to auto-regulate their energy intake, to my mind, there's going to be no decrement to that whatsoever. I'll throw one other thing in there. I think some of the research is being misrepresented as well, particularly around the low-carb.

01:15:29
Yeah. Probably in the same way that the caffeine research is misrepresented to some degree because we're talking about excessive doses of caffeine in that respect are really the only things that drive issues. I think with some of the low carb research, we're extrapolating from studies that aren't actually looking at low carb. You know, like it was the Luxemtherma study, wasn't it? Was it that one? I don't know. Talk to me about it and I'll pretend to know.

01:15:58
I can't remember exactly, but I have mentioned it before. It's brought up a lot around the conversation of particularly keto slash low carb in women. And it basically, the study seems to suggest that with a low carb intake, there is a big effect on- Luteinizing hormone possibility. Luteinizing hormone possibility, exactly. But the study wasn't looking at a low carb diet. Was it low Cal? There was low-

01:16:27
there was low carbohydrate availability because yeah, it was an extreme calorie restriction. And they were also taking into account with the carbohydrate availability measure how much they were estimated to expend in terms of carbohydrate during their exercise. And so if you actually look at what they were consuming, it was liquid feedings that were, I think, from memory around 60 odd percent carbohydrate.

01:16:53
So proportionately actually a high carb diet. Yes, but just overall very low calorie. Exactly, and so when we see, and this is, it makes complete sense. When we see extreme energy restriction, yes there are hormonal ramifications. And we need to then look at, well what does an energy restriction actually mean? Because why don't we see with fairly extreme calorie restriction some of the same negative effects in women who are with overweight or obesity?

01:17:21
Well, it's simply because there's more available energy. So they're not necessarily in, when we look at calorie deficit, it's an interesting way to look at it. It is right, because we're thinking about the calories that they're taking in, not the available calories for energy. Exactly, and the closer we get to our low body fat set points, which are obviously integral to survival, the less available reserve we have that we're prepared to free up. And so that then compounds the effect of

01:17:49
calorie restriction. I think that's why in some instances, absolutely, we see negative effects in women who are very lean from some of these interventions. But again, it comes down to pulling those levers. You pull the levers of energy down regulation if you need to. And if you don't, you don't pull them. So you might add another meal back in if you tend to be an under-consumer rather than fasting.

01:18:16
Or you increase your carbohydrate because typically that's not going to be quite so satiating. So it might drive a little bit of extra energy intake. Great. That's cool, right? But it's all about the individual and it's not about making absolute statements or treating women as glass objects that we need to put on a shelf and that can't be resilient. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas we're anti-fragile. That's what we want to be. And interesting, interesting actually. Well, I hope so.

01:18:42
And on that, I was actually looking at some research for the female specific nutrition in my course. And I remember seeing studies looking at that luteinizing hormone sort of pulsing. And despite that there was a complete drop of energy, actually, there was a diminishing LH sort of pulse, yet overall didn't actually change estrogen, the amount of estrogen that was in fact released.

01:19:11
So and I found that interesting and it was probably a time course thing probably, you know It was a short I believe it was a short term sort of study, but it's But I I think it's I think you're right I think it's so often there's this over reliance on studies that have been misrepresented To then push a narrative which isn't then Which isn't actually the truth for everyone so it's it always comes back to the individual to the

01:19:39
available biofeedback, but also with people who are experiencing issues with low carb, low energy availability, and things like that, they actually have to also acknowledge it themselves because this is where I see clinically is the issue when you've got very lean woman who are very set on extended prolonged fasting, a lot of training, and actually really struggle to eat more.

01:20:09
those women need to, and it's not just a woman thing, but I see it more often in women for sure, you have to acknowledge some of that other biofeedback that's available, like what your sleep's doing, like what your energy's actually like, what your cravings are like. Like you might have a mind of steel and be able to overcome those cravings, but it's not really doing you any favors. No, and you know, most of the clients that come to me where that becomes apparent, they actually come to me for IBS. Oh yes, of course.

01:20:39
And yeah, because as you know, when you're, you know, extreme energy restriction that, um, you know, red S type situation, there's a lot of gastrointestinal effects from that. And so often they come to me thinking that, you know, they've got everything more or less on track, but they've got these IVS symptoms. And then we look at it, you know, under consuming, usually because of fasting, keto, they're often undernourished because of that as well, because the less food you eat, the less likely you're going to get microbes, blah, blah, blah.

01:21:09
from there. I'll throw one other element in there as well, because I think it's important, is that we need to be aware of the temporal gap in research. Yeah. What I mean by that is that if we want to look at long-term outcomes, we're pretty much limited to observational evidence, which I still think is very important. I know a lot of people harp on about how bad poor it is, but it still gives us a good overview of likely effects. Because as you were saying, if green tea was really dangerous,

01:21:39
we would see the effects very clearly like we do for smoking from observational data, right? But we don't see that. But on the other hand, the stronger evidence being randomized controlled trials are always gonna be a little bit limited in terms of adaptation. And I think that that can be overstated by certain people as well as we know, where they just say like, if a negative effect for example, is shown for a keto diet, they'll say, oh, it just wasn't long enough. Which could be the case.

01:22:08
you know, the sort of design to fail trials where you get someone doing a keto diet for three days and then give them a performance test. Of course, that's not likely to be a good result. But it is still valid because as we know from the fasting research, for example, people often talk about, well, the catecholamine release is gonna be a lot higher. So you go on, you start fasting, you know, you've got excessive cortisol response, all that kind of stuff. You know how long that lasts? Two to three weeks?

01:22:36
Yes. With adaptation. Yes. Catecholamine release, our cortisol responses, epinephrine, norepinephrine, those types of things, they adjust. And so we typically don't have higher stress hormones if we're used to fasting. Yeah. Yeah, because it's no longer a stress, we've adapted to it. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that's such a good point. Yeah. So I think the take-homes from today are, be wary of absolutist statements. Yeah.

01:23:05
And anything published by Gary Holson Albert Reese, because they are deeply embedded within anti cannabis movements that are rooted in arch conservatism. Yeah. And, uh, and also, um, be your own best investigator and be honest with yourself about how something's affecting you because that's going to give you way more information than a supposed guru giving you their absolute advice.

01:23:34
on any such matters? Us included. I hope that we don't make absolute statements because I think we're trying to be a bit more objective about the research, but there will be things that we say that we believe and someone might say, you know what? That doesn't meet my sniff test. And so I'm gonna look a little bit deeper. And I love it when I say something that's wrong and people contact me and say, dude, you got this wrong because that's a chance to learn.

01:24:01
Yeah, actually, I hate it when people tell me I'm wrong. So never do that to me. So everyone just contact, don't contact me. I might cry. No, I'm just kidding. No, I look, I completely agree. And I think as I do, it is actually interesting though, because I love following the line of research when someone sees something absolutist. Cause I'm like, oh, is that real? Is that true? Cause I, because it's not because I want to prove them wrong. Cause I actually want to find out more about it and how I might apply it to me. And then I just start getting a little bit disappointed that the research isn't there to support.

01:24:30
what I hear and I'm like, oh, okay. So they weren't right about that. Yeah. Well, it might be there. There's no research. You just don't know. That's true. And to be fair, the only guru that I look up to is you Cliff. So you better be right. Cause otherwise everything that I've built my knowledge around is completely wrong. So is that. Well, that's very kind of you Mick, but I don't really like the guru status. No, I know. I only did that to make you feel uncomfortable. So Cliff, let's just finish up.

01:25:00
I just got a couple of quick questions for you. One is could good green vitality be a good supplement for someone with gastric bypass? Absolutely. I thought so too. I actually looked at GGV and I looked at something like Mitums, which is all the rage right now in my gastric bypass clients. And they designed specifically for gastric bypass sort of patients. And I'm like, oh, GGV is way better actually.

01:25:28
So that's good, I'm glad you can agree. My understanding is that there are some gastric surgeons who prescribe it to their clients post-surgery. Oh, excellent. That's good, well I'm glad about that. Two, are you still doing your usual supplement routine? Has anything changed in your diet, in your supplements, because then that might have to make me update what I'm doing. So let me think about what I'm doing at the moment.

01:25:54
No, nothing much has changed. I generally get most of my supplements in, no, I have a, you know, big protein shake as per usual in the morning. And that's by big, I mean, it's got about 80 grams of protein. I chuck into that tropical fruit, berries, some MCT, NAC. I have some nicotinamide riboside, creatine. And that's basically it. And then in the afternoon, I have good green vitality with collagen.

01:26:24
and pea protein. No, what's in your- And fish oil. Okay, so do you have a mixture of whey and pea in the morning? I have whey in the morning just purely because I, pea protein's thicker. Yes. And so after training, I like a thinner drink. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I really like to load in the protein and not have it be too thick. So I have whey protein in the morning and then for all my other shakes, I use pea protein. Yeah, okay, that's interesting. And are you still on the Mitre Q?

01:26:54
No, I'm not taking my tokyo at the moment. I've had a bit of a break from that. To be honest, I don't notice that much from it. Yeah. I know that Paul was mentioning a little while back that they sort of just had some anecdotal evidence that people really notice higher doses. So I think I might have to go back and maybe up the dose a little bit. Well, it's an expensive one to do that with though, isn't it? That's my problem with that.

01:27:22
But yeah, no, I hear you, okay. I kind of figure that I have two supplement, I have two real food meals a day and two shakes. So my shakes, I kind of think, well, you amortize the cost across them. It's probably still cheaper than buying a lunch out or something, so I'm not too fast. Oh, that's good. I like with the pea protein, because it is thick, I like adding water and making it into a pudding, and then just having it. Yeah, that's- It's good for that, because it is so thick. Yeah, yeah, I love that. Okay, that's good. And...

01:27:51
My final question is, is that we're coming up on time with a baby being due, aren't we? A couple of months still, but getting close. Couple of months away. So we're just getting things sorted out and drifting into a bit of a routine for that. I'll have to organize some time off work. Yes. Awesome. And maybe have to have someone take over doing the living reviews for a month or so. That sounds great, Cliff. But they're so cool, Mickey. I'm so...

01:28:20
amped up about the living reviews. I'm excited to know more about this actually, because I think I must have missed the fact that I was in fact reading a living review when I was reading something. They're only just going live now. So everything previously were, you know, periodical sort of reviews of various things, but now they're live and they're living reviews. So as the research comes in, we update our position stands or whatever. So I'll send you through a couple of the ones that we've done already, because we're just going through.

01:28:47
more or less alphabetically. So I'm performing living reviews on everything all the time, but we're publishing them because some of them, we need to backfill a little bit of the background information. Yeah. So we're pretty much publishing one a day though now. Well, that's amazing, Cliff. That's so great. And that sounds to me a little bit like examine then. It is. Obviously, and you know that, you know, Sol's a good mate of mine and I think the team there are fantastic. They do a really good job, but they're probably a little bit more focused on performance at this stage, whereas we're more clinical. Yeah.

01:29:17
And I don't know if they're doing regular updates, but I don't know if they're doing living reviews per se. Yeah, yeah, I don't think they are. As soon as the research comes in, it goes straight into the document, and the document is live on in our member section anyway. Oh, it's amazing. So as soon as it's updated, bang, it's done. Yeah, cool. And I think it's a bit more specific because we're going into the nuances of everything that you can think of,

01:29:47
I'm just using vitamin D as an example because there's so much literature on it, but vitamin D for metabolic disorders, for cancer, for cardiovascular disease, for various autoimmune conditions, I mean, it just goes on and on, right? Yeah, yeah. So it just grows just constantly. Oh, that's amazing. Well, I'll be... It's a good, it's going to be a good resource. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm super excited, Cliff. Well, then finally, can you just remind people where they can find you? Yeah, they can find us at holisticperformance.institute.

01:30:16
Easy as that. Yeah, it is that easy. Awesome Cliff, always great to chat to you. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks, Baxter.

01:30:34
Alrighty, hopefully you enjoyed that conversation. I just love chatting to Cliff. He is a wealth of information. He's always so fun to have on the show. And he just gives you some real solid advice. And sometimes that is hard to come across when you're out there on the interweb. Alright team, next week on the podcast, I have the pleasure of talking to Simon Cochrane, who is an absolute legend in this endurance space. And it is not about his racing. So...

01:31:01
I know Simon's been on a number of podcasts now that sort of do the blow by blow account of the Ultraman Australia. But we talk about a whole range of things actually and very little of it is about the racing so I think you're going to love that episode. Until next week though you can catch me over on Facebook at Micky Willardin Nutrition, over on Instagram and Twitter at Micky Willardin or head to my website.

01:31:28
nickywilledon.com where you can book a call with me or sign up to one of my meal plans. Alright team you have the best week, talk soon.