Mikkipedia

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This week on the podcast Mikki speaks to Dr Mike Ormsbee about integrating research and the real world, with many of his projects in the exercise physiology and nutrition space beginning in the ‘real world’ and then over time (as funding permits) being refined and more controlled. We talk about the value of having the initial research versus being in a very controlled setting.  In the conversation there are some great take homes, specifically about pre sleep protein, the controversies of how useful collagen is, and his project on collagen for middle aged active people.

Michael J. Ormsbee is a Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Nutrition & Integrative Physiology, the Director of the Institute of Sports Sciences & Medicine at Florida State University, and an honorary research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.

He is also a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine, and the International Society of Sports Nutrition and is a Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist through the National Strength & Conditioning Association. His research expertise involves the interaction of exercise training, nutrition, and supplementation to improve metabolism and achieve optimal body composition, human performance, and health in both athletic and clinical populations.

Dr. Ormsbee was honored as the 2014 FSU Teacher of the Year, 2017 Nutrition Researcher of the Year (NSCA), 2018 FSU Graduate Student Mentor of the Year, 2020 FSU Distinguished Teacher of the Year, and the 2020 Sport Scientist of the Year (NSCA). His course, “Changing Body Composition Through Diet and Exercise” is available through The Great Courses, and his textbook, “Exercise Physiology for Health, Fitness, and Performance, 6th edition” is available online.



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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!

Transcribed using AI transcription, errors may occur; contact Mikki for clarification

00:00
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here, you're listening to Mikkipedia and this week on the podcast I speak to Dr Mike Ormsbee. Mike and I talk a lot about his research in exercise physiology, his background and integrating research into the real world with many of his earlier projects in exercise physiology and nutrition beginning in that real world context. And then

00:29
over time, as funding and experience has permitted, they've been refined and more controlled. And we talk about the value of the initial research versus that very controlled setting and why it's really important to understand how this research can be transferred to what people actually do. Because ultimately, or otherwise, what's the point if something's just going to be rolled out as a randomized controlled trial, but never able to be replicated in the real world?

00:58
then it is of little value to you as the individual. Mike's done a ton of super interesting projects and we touch on a few of them, but particularly we discuss the value of pre-sleep protein and his projects there. And also we talk about collagen, why there are some controversies around how useful it is in his project, particularly in middle-aged active people, which I think you'll find super interesting.

01:26
So Mike Ormsbee is a professor and graduate program director in the Department of Nutrition and Integrative Physiology. He's the director of the Institute of Sports Science and Medicine at Florida State University and an honorary research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. He's also a fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine and the International Society of Sports Nutrition and is a certified strength and conditioning specialist through the National Strength and Conditioning Association.

01:56
His research expertise involves the interaction of exercise training, nutrition and supplementation to improve metabolism and achieve optimal body composition, human performance and health in both the athletic and clinical populations. Dr. Ormsby was honored as the 2014 FSU Teacher of the Year, 2017 Nutrition Researcher of the Year, 2018 FSU Graduate Student Mentor of the Year,

02:24
2020 Distinguished Teacher of the Year at Florida State University and Sports Scientist of the Year. His course Changing Body Composition Through Diet and Exercise is available through The Great Courses which are free online courses. In his textbook Exercise Physiology for Health, Fitness and Performance 6th edition is available online. I'll put links in the show notes to where you can find Mike's educational resources and of course just Mike online.

02:53
Now before we crack on into it, I'd just like to remind you that the best place to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform. That increases the visibility of Micopedia, and amongst literally thousands of other podcasts out there, so more people get to hear from the experts that I have on the show, including Dr Mike Ornsby.

03:23
from New Zealand, very young country, we don't have a lot of history, is that you walk into any old pub and I do love an English pub. And there are people who are there seven centuries before you. How amazing is that? I'm just looking it up. So I see, yeah, so near London, Oxford and Cambridge. Yes, actually. And I've been to Cambridge on one of our trips here. And it is like,

03:52
It's very close to all of these just beautiful villages and things like that. That's really cool. Yeah, we know that next time I'm heading over there, this August, I may go to Sweden for the World Masters Athletic Competition. So I'm hoping to make that for a couple of days and then I'll be back. I'll be going to Spain in November for there's a FIFA has like a sports nutritionist group. And so.

04:20
going to give a couple of lectures for them. It's supposed to be in Mexico this summer, but I couldn't make it. It's in a couple of weeks. So instead, we're going to do Spain in November. Spain will be brilliant. And I actually, I was just looking at your paper on pre-feeding in female collegiate, I think, soccer players. So obviously, you have links with football and you do, do you work with a football team or? So

04:49
It was not with American football, but we do work with soccer. And so we've worked with women's soccer quite a bit. And that's been such an awesome experience. Our Florida State University women's soccer team is phenomenal. I mean, they are just unbelievably good. They win our NCAA championships regularly. They make it to the top four, the top eight all the time. And a lot of that's due to... Yeah.

05:17
their strength coach and their sports scientist, Elisa Angelis. She's awesome. She works with us so closely and she's actually our Associate Director of Athletics Research. And so she links everything we do with athletics into our Institute of Sports, Science and Medicine. So that's the team we get to work with most, but we do get to work with almost every team and that's just a huge advantage for the work we can actually pull off with elite athletes.

05:46
And I may as well just jump into our interview, Mike, because one of my first questions for you was, in your title, you call yourself an integrative physiologist. And is that referring to the way that your work, your collaborative with different fields and sort of building a, I guess, a research project and to make it translatable to sports, is that what integrative physiology is? That's my interpretation, and that's how I like to sort of speak about it. But...

06:15
That was actually just the title of our department. So our department name changed to nutrition and integrative physiology a few years back and since it's actually changed again. So now we're health nutrition and food sciences. So we just had that title for a little while but integrative physiologist sort of matches what we do. Our work in human performance is, it's pretty broad. And honestly, I feel so lucky for it because we've had.

06:39
most academic researchers, you have just one path and you have to be so streamlined in every project you're doing. But I sort of capture everything under human performance. And that allows us the freedom to move into nutrition, supplements, athletics, even clinical research and exercise science, which we have several projects. And all of that is under this umbrella of human performance. So if my

07:06
superiors are asking me what I do, I say human performance and I can do that sort of discussion about a streamlined approach, but it's really a lot of things underneath that. Yeah, I thought that was the case because when I was looking at a lot of your research projects and your publications, you appeared to have quite a broad research interest. So I saw things on different supplements related to performance, clinical work, etc. Yeah, to me that's...

07:34
that's the fun of this job is I'm interested in so many different things and the collaborations that I've been fortunate to form over all the years, both here in the US and internationally, everyone's got these different interests and some of the work we do lines up well with different spaces. So just due to the nature of me, aging and wanting to do different projects in different populations and different sports I'm interested in and then also, you know,

08:00
family and clinical issues with obesity and diabetes, I still have an inherent interest in that, those types of research projects too. Yeah, and how did you sort of embark in your career, Mike? Like I understand you were, like you had an active lifestyle growing up. Was that just a general sort of progression and wanting to understand your performance, et cetera, and then shifted into study? Like, how did that look for you? What was your background? Yeah, I mean, that would be in a nutshell, but you know.

08:28
more than that. So I was playing, I got, I was fortunate to be able to play college ice hockey. And so I was playing at Skidmore College, which is a division three institution in upstate New York, Starrotota Springs, New York. And I played there. And then while I was, you know, trying to be an athlete and, and do all these things, I, my older brother was at the university as well. And so I, he had taken some of these exercise science classes.

08:56
you know, recommended sort of taking it. Plus it just fit my interest. Since I was a young boy, I was always trying to train for sport. I was, I remember going with my parents and getting to a garage sale and finding an old weight set and bench in someone's garage and sort of we took it home. And that was still when, um, there was this myth about, uh, teenagers and even young individuals lifting weights being a problem. And so.

09:24
We had this set for just a short period of time before we got rid of it because my parents had heard that it would be bad and stunt our growth and all of these things. And so that sort of, I sort of remember that distinctly and shaping, well, why can't I do this? I understand progression and needing to start with light weights and understanding the movement patterns. And if you do that safely, it's a really good adventure to go on with children and my own children are now.

09:53
very much into fitness and doing some of these things. They're still pretty young, but we'll get them involved as early as we can. Anyway, that sort of progressed on and we focused on different sports, got into ice hockey. And then while I was in school, yeah, I think you sort of mentioned in your email, like we've got, there's people in our lives who literally like shift what we're going to do or just make such an impact on it. For me, that was a guy named Paul Arciero, who's also a professor.

10:23
in the same field. I just remember sitting in his class and just being, this is awesome. I love this stuff. And he introduced me to the world of integrating nutrition and exercise physiology. And not only that, like living that lifestyle. Being the person that actually does what you say and is all about not just saying things to help other people, but also living that lifestyle to show that it actually works.

10:53
And just seeing how healthy that can make you and how much of a well-rounded person that can make. So for me, that was it. I was taking these exercise science classes. I'm like, this is awesome. And it was selfish. I was trying to get better for sport. How can I get bigger, faster, stronger? And eventually, I wasn't going to be an elite, level ice hockey player and decided I can help on the research side and try to get more information out to the public about...

11:22
weight loss, diabetes, obesity, but also about strength and conditioning and nutrition. Yeah, nice one. I do want to just ask you, it's a bit of a tangent really, Mike, but you mentioned that your parents were a little bit concerned because of that myth that children shouldn't be doing strength training. There are just myths that pervade for decades, right? Where are we at on that one? Because I do still hear that from some parents who are just a little bit concerned that

11:51
their kids shouldn't be doing, well, they shouldn't be having protein powder. And of course they shouldn't be doing strength-based training with weights. Like are there still these myths that pervade that you are sort of, that you come across or are we largely now sort of moved beyond that and understand better at that sort of population level how important it is? What do you think? I think we've pretty much moved beyond it now. That myth was interesting because, you know, the,

12:20
late nineties and early two thousands, um, explosion of research was coming out around that space. And that was, a lot of that was led by a man named Avery Fagenbaum. And he's done some excellent work in childhood exercise, um, all types of recommendations that come out of his facility. And you know, he's on those boards and stuff. And I don't know him or anything, but his work is really cool and seeing how adolescents and children can use weight training or

12:50
exercise training at all to be, to sort of grow motor pattern skills and develop properly. The issue is still there if you're not doing the movement patterns correctly, if you're using too much weight out of the gate, you know, you definitely have to progress super slowly and have it supervised. But assuming you can have a supervision in place from someone who knows the movement patterns totally safe, very good for increasing range of motion and strength, appropriate

13:18
Again, those motor pattern skills and yeah, there's really no reason to shy away from that at all these days. Yeah, I know that's good. That's probably reassuring if any parents listening to this and they've had those questions about it. So Mike, as I said, I've seen your name on numerous different topics, which I'm really interested to understand better and chat to you about. And one of the first ones is the one that I mentioned that about...

13:46
pre-sleep feeding and how it influences both metabolism and thinking about it in terms of sort of population health, sort of health parameters, but also recovery and performance. And I understand that you've been involved in projects that sort of expand both populations, is that correct? That's right, yeah. So we can go back to sort of the historical perspective on this stuff. When I...

14:13
started out nearly 15 years ago as an independent researcher, there was still this pervasive notion that you should have a cutoff time for eating. Some of that was spawned from like these television shows, at least in America, that were like the biggest loser shows and people were losing a tremendous amount of weight and the people on television, the trainers and such were always saying like, stop eating at six o'clock, stop eating at seven o'clock in the evening.

14:41
But my experience as an athlete was showing me where sort of a different view on that. And I, the best athletes I know were eating at night. The bodybuilders and figure type individuals that I knew were eating at night before bed and, and even waking up in the middle of the night to have an extra protein shake, for example, or, or something like that. And I was eating at night and I was just thinking, my goodness, like, let's see.

15:09
let's just see if this is a thing, you know, I'd like to know. And so that was around 2008 to 2010. We started thinking about designing some of those studies. And at the time there were only two labs that were doing this stuff. It was my lab at Florida State University, and then also Luke VanLoon's lab, at Maastricht University, massive in the space and in protein in general. And so over the next five or six years, 2010 to 2016, a whole

15:39
bunch of information came out of our two labs. He focused on specifically muscle protein synthesis as a primary outcome point, like can we eat before bed? And if we do, can we metabolize it? We didn't even know if we could digest and absorb it properly. And then we wanted to see if that's a feeding window where you're normally in a sort of a negative protein balance.

16:03
where you have more muscle protein breakdown than muscle protein synthesis occurring because you haven't eaten in a while, then maybe it's a time you can eat to sort of spur this increase in muscle mass while you're asleep, but take advantage of that time. That was sort of the crux that Luke was going after. And he showed in several elegant studies that in different ages and such, you could actually take it. You could...

16:28
you could digest it, absorb it, and increase overnight muscle protein synthesis by doing this, by taking a protein dominant drink before bed. So that's an important point is there were drinks and they were protein dominant or solely protein. So the calories were low and it was almost 100% protein in most of the studies up to that time.

16:51
Yeah. And was it casein that he focused on, Mike? I mean, I know it's not your research, but obviously you're really familiar with it. So yeah, yeah. Casein has been the dominant one, but they've looked at all types of them now. In the beginning casein, you know, during the daytime, there were studies on the kinetics of whey versus casein. And so, you know, casein was this one that was a slow release protein then. So it made sense to try that at nighttime because

17:19
it would theoretically not peak as high but sustained for a longer period of time where you have, you know, seven to 10 hours of time while someone might be sleeping. So casein was predominantly used in that time. I'll tell you, like we can jump fast forward, there's probably no difference between those at this point, ways or casein in the outcome. So that was just what was pretty much used because of what was happening in the daytime. We don't, we're actually not sure the kinetics at night.

17:49
may not support that casings and ways are all that much different while you're asleep for a couple of reasons. The pH changes in your gut while you're asleep and also laying supine versus sitting up or standing up. Oh, interesting. Slightly different things are coming out of that. Luke and I discussed that a few years back and yeah, we weren't sure, but he's designed some new studies since then with some of other students who turned professors, Jorn Trommelin and others that yeah, really do a good job of showing.

18:19
It's protein bolus and you could do it with all types of different proteins, have a pretty good response. But as you know, muscle protein synthesis doesn't necessarily mean you're adding muscle. It just means you've upregulated the machinery to do that. And so, as we often say, those biomarkers are interesting, but they don't win you a gold medal. You don't know for sure if that's putting on muscle or not. And so they've done some longitudinal studies to work.

18:48
they were adding for 12 weeks in young men who were also with weight training, they gave one group a pre-sleep protein drink that also had a little bit of carbohydrate in there. So it wasn't solely, but it was like, I think it was almost 28 grams of protein in that drink. Or they didn't. And so after those 12 weeks, they actually showed an improvement in muscle mass and strength and some of the performance outcomes that you want, that you would want as someone training like that.

19:17
That paper was a little bit, was reviewed in a way that was a bit critical, but the review was, well, one group ended up getting more total daily protein intake than the other. So they had more total daily protein intake. And so it's possible that those changes were simply because they had more total daily protein intake, which ended up being about 1.9 grams of protein per kilo body weight.

19:44
versus the other group, which I believe was around 1.1 or 1.2 grams per kilo. So still over what would be commonly recommended at 0.8 grams per kilo, but a difference enough between the groups that you had to say, well, it was the protein, but we're not sure if that would have happened at a different time of day. It just happened to be convenient. Luke's group was quick to say, you know what, like, we designed it to say it's a time of the day where it's convenient to have an extra protein

20:14
And if you have trouble getting protein for the rest of your days, another chance to have a protein cheating to increase your total daily protein intake. So, use it as an advantage, use it to take advantage of a time when why not have this little bump. So, simultaneously, while that was going on overseas, we were working on a bit more of the applied angle to it. So, it was real basic. Our first studies were like tape...

20:44
protein or carbohydrate. We usually did a whey or a casein or carbohydrate or like a zero calorie, calorie placebo, a water in or like a flavored water. So they couldn't quite tell what was in there. And those were excellent studies. They were just very simple, which I love. And it's just sort of interpreted. We just gave that before they went to bed. And then the next morning we simply measured metabolic rate. We put them on a ventilated hood and

21:13
we were able to calculate out what's going on with fat metabolism. Are there any things with satiation or appetite that were changing by having that evening meal? And so we started to see some interesting findings with casein and the proteins versus the carbohydrates and the placebo is where our first studies, maybe it was really cool. We actually, I was thinking, my goodness.

21:41
having anything before bed actually improved metabolism some eight hours later in the next morning. Changes in metabolism that far after consumption of food hadn't really been shown to that point. Was there an uptick on RIMA? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, very small, but it was there, it was present. And so the small uptick, so you're working even while you're asleep, even eight hours later to digest and absorb those nutrients. So that's

22:09
That was an interesting finding for us. And then when we looked at fat metabolism, and originally it was just looking at like RER changes and gas exchanges and see where we felt for fuel use and like water, which you'd expect to be the lowest because you didn't have any calories, right? The most fat oxidation ended up being not different from a casein. So, and the whey was close behind, but the carbohydrate was different as you would expect. And so,

22:38
we're like, okay, it's increasing metabolism a little bit and it's not doing anything different than water, which means it's not making you fat, it's not making you gain excess adiposity. But there were a lot of holes in that work. We were brand new to starting that stuff and we wanted to add in some layers. And so originally we were using like overweight women and some of those studies. And out of the gate, we saw small uptick in glucose the next morning.

23:07
which for an overweight or obese individual is probably not a great thing. If it's chronic and we're only looking at one night, but you said, okay, there's something going on there. We, maybe that's not a great thing to eat before bed. And then, you know, because of this integrative physiology approach, we're like, well, we need to add exercise because right now we're just eating. Like, what happens when we just exercise a couple of days a week and have this pre-sleep protein or casing, whatever we were giving. And so,

23:36
At that point, we added just a small four-week exercise program to the mix, and just exercising a few days a week with the pre-sleep protein. The same women that had obesity and were probably predisposed to some issues with more food in the late evening, that totally ameliorated, got rid of the problem with glucose just by having a couple days of exercise in the mix with the pre-sleep protein. So that was a cool win for us too, again, showing the power of exercise.

24:05
that should be like the base layer of what we think about every day is where we're going to fit in that physical activity. And that was awesome for us. We were really excited. Mike, yeah, can I ask a couple of questions on that? Like, were calories sort of accounted for or was this on top of, did you sort of say, don't really change anything, just have this and assess what changed or was there some element of dietary control or anything like that?

24:35
Yeah, in these original studies, all it was was an extra protein drink or extra shake, and it was all liquid. So they shook a powder into water and then drank it. And so that's an important caveat. These calories are super low. We're looking at 150 to 220 calories or so. So it's small, protein dominant foods, at least up until this timeline of the history I'm giving you, showed no detriment and possibly an advantage for most of protein synthesis, a little bit with...

25:05
metabolism in general. When we got some feedback from these studies that we were publishing over that decade of time, we had all different populations too. We had young and older and men and women, fit and unfit. We were missing what was going on while they were asleep. So we did a good job of feeding them. And then sometimes they were sleeping at home and they'd just come back in the morning and we'd measure some stuff. Very much like a

25:34
a true environment study where that's real life. Yeah. But to get more control of it, we started having them sleep in our laboratory. Oh, wow. And when they slept in the laboratory, we still had the same types of findings, which was nice. It was matching what they were doing at home, but it appeased the scientific reviewers that we had so much control over what was going on. But they started to say, well, we still don't know about the metabolic things that are happening while they're asleep. So at that point,

26:03
we started using a technique called micro dialysis. And we added that to the mix where we put these small probes into the abdominal subcutaneous tissue, adipose tissue, and all night long, we were collecting samples from them so that we could see what was going on with glycerol, which would be an indicator of lipolysis or fat mobilization from the adipose tissue. And so we could measure that all night long. And so we did several studies with that. And we found...

26:32
zero, no changes in lipolysis versus a placebo when you were taking a caloric protein drink overnight. We did that in obese men. We did that in stiff women. Some of those studies out of the gate. So now we had more mechanistic things to show that there was no disadvantage to it in terms of causing fat gain, which is what everybody's worried about over those series of studies that we're working on. And that...

27:02
that sort of led to the next problem, which was the reviewers kept saying, what is it doing to their sleep? And originally we didn't design the studies to look at. Um, and then we got that comment from the reviewers and like, oh yeah, we should probably look at that. And so we, we didn't have the tools at the time. So we just did a survey and we just, at first we just said, how did you sleep? How many hours did you sleep? And that wasn't different clear. It also wasn't, um, quantitative enough to

27:31
to really know. And so there are some really good surveys and indexes now at the Pittsburgh Sleep Index and some others that are quite common. But we started using tracking devices like technology, GPS, like wrist and actigraphy type trackers. We had several different companies that we were working with to collect data in our most recent studies. And actually one that my students are working on today is

28:00
is where we're the primary outcome is sleep, quantity and quality, not performance, not metabolism. It's strictly sleep because people are so worried about that. Now it's sort of the new trend is don't eat before bed because it messes with sleep. Whereas 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, don't eat before sleep, but it'll make you fat. Those things have evolved and now it's about sleep. And honestly, there's some good

28:28
older data and other data to make people scared of it for sleep. I'll tell you the history of that as well. 1999, there was a really nice study where an individual gave subjects basically a 550-calorie meal, mixed meal, fats, carbs, and protein. They gave that meal in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening. The metabolic response, as a paper from Roman in 1999,

28:59
was different to the same meal. And you sort of like had a much-belunted metabolic response to the exact same meal in the evening. And so that was sort of the push where people were thinking, OK, well, maybe I shouldn't eat at night because I don't spend as many calories to burn that same food, that same meal in the late evening. And then you combine that with data that was more recent. There was a study in 2020 from the University

29:29
a goose lab, and that ended up basically saying the same kind of a thing. If you took the meal at 6 p.m. versus at 10 p.m., the 6 p.m. had better health outcomes over time than the 10 p.m. meal. And so what gets conflated and confounded in a lot of the media that people see on this is, what are we talking about when you say pre-sleep feed? Is it a huge mixed meal, like a full dinner of carbohydrates?

29:58
fats and proteins. If you have a giant meal before you go to sleep, that's where you tend to see perhaps some of these negative things coming to sleep, like sleep onset latency, how quickly you fall asleep, the number of times you wake up through the night tends to be a little bit worsened with that. And sometimes even total sleep time, the time you're sleeping while you're laying in bed trying to sleep, would be worsened in those scenarios.

30:28
We're quick to say from our perspective, it's like, what we define as pre-sleep feeding is two hours after dinner and within 30 minutes of going to bed. And it's also a protein dominant liquid drink that's like less than 200 calories. That's a different beast than an entire meal right before you go to bed. So you know, that's what we're investigating now.

30:54
not just one night, but three consecutive nights in elite female athletes, how casein weigh and sort of a new protein, but it's newer to be marketed this way, alpha lactal buen and a placebo are being utilized for sleep or not in these elite athletes. So we're real excited about that to figure out like, if it's messing with sleep, we need to know.

31:20
And so far, we haven't seen it. Luke's group hasn't seen it with the way we're doing it. Again, these low calorie, high protein, protein dominant snacks, let's say. They're not even full meals. They're pretty small. With all that said, you need to listen to yourself and the inter individuality of all this. So if you know that if you drink a protein shake before bed, you'll be up to use the restroom all night, then maybe that's not a good idea for you.

31:49
and you should avoid that. Or if there are trigger foods for you that give you heartburn. Or if there are trigger foods for you that, or even if you just think it's going to keep you up at night, it might do that. So you really have to pay attention to yourself. But the research to date hasn't really shown a sleep disturbance. In fact, there's evidence from Australian football and some other studies from Falkberg's lab that was able to show actually a benefit to having protein before bed.

32:18
with an improvement in sleep onset latency. Not just no change, but actually a benefit. I've got so many questions. If I start at the last one, on that last point, was it anything to do with the, I don't know, athletes, they extend so many calories, they struggle to get in calories. I know it's only an extra couple of hundred, but could that just be the difference between it's getting sort of nearer to an appropriate calorie amount for them that then helps with sleep? What do you reckon?

32:47
Yeah. So athletes are certainly different, especially elite athletes. And so when you, when we look at that population, I'll, whenever I'm doing talks on this site, I always say it's so context dependent. If you're an athlete that's had, uh, let's say you're a track athlete and you have several competitions through the day, right, several races in a day, you could be in a situation where you didn't really have time to eat enough because you were trying to time everything. So you didn't have like too much.

33:17
uh, energy in your gut or gut upset for your, for your racing. And so by the end of the day and the evening, you might be required to eat more food to make up the energy deficit you have. So we don't have those problems that could come up. So that's one number two is athletes tend to need more sleep and they tend to need more fuel. Uh, and then number three is like kind of related to one, but we've worked with ultra distance athletes. And then some of these athletes, you know,

33:45
It's a three, what I'm thinking about is Ultraman competition. That's a three-day triathlon. And they race all day on a Friday, swimming and biking. And if they're fast, they might have a few hours to relax and eat before bed. But if they're slower, they don't have much time. They have to finish, basically go right to sleep and wake up the next morning and do it all again and do it again on a third day. And if you're in that situation where you've been on a bike all day and you're not eating

34:15
you're going to be really in the hole for the next day's competition. You need to eat and you need to get food in. And so the blanket statement of don't eat before bed is kind of ridiculous. We really need to understand the context around what we're saying that for. Yeah, I completely appreciate. Mike, I'm curious when you mention an alternative protein source that we might not be familiar with but it's been around forever. Can you share us? Where are we going to find this?

34:44
I can't even remember what you called it, alpha-lacta? Yeah, alpha-lactalbumin is a protein that's found in mother's milk for their infants. It is a dominant protein that's added to formulas for infants, and it contains a high amount of tryptophan. Okay. And so if you think about like evolutionary-wise, that's...

35:12
fantastic. It's mother's milk to the child, high tryptophan, perhaps serotonin, perhaps sleep. You can see the connection there. Well, it can be fractionated and isolated just like other types of proteins. Again, it's added to insulin formulas. So it's been around, but no one really hyped it up for any reason. It's just now sort of gaining some popularity to take before sleep because it is complete enough protein and it's got this higher level of tryptophan which

35:41
may help with sleep. There's two studies on it so far, both in athletes, that show an advantage to taking it on sleep. And then we've sort of designed this next study to also be in athletes, but to shore up any holes that we found in those other studies to see what's going on. And so another six months to a year, hopefully we'll have some more data out on that topic.

36:11
No, it's not. Yeah, okay, interesting. No, I really like how your research has evolved, how you've sort of, you know, super simple studies because your real world. And I think that's the thing that's often, it's not missing, but you know, often I find when people critique studies, they don't think, they think about them from the, how much can you control the situation perspective? Whereas, I mean, you deal with real athletes, with humans, with people in the real world.

36:41
I think that's what's been missing when people think about this is like, well, you can have all the randomized controlled trials and they're really great for understanding mechanisms, but what really plays out in real life, which you almost begun there and sort of working your way back to understand better why what you're finding is actually happening. Yeah, honestly, it's fun to play in both areas. But if we can't apply what we're researching, you know.

37:11
There's a reason to do it, but why do that? We've got all of this opportunity to actually help people. I'm not putting down any other types of research where we need to find the mechanistic pieces to something for a drug discovery, for example. In our world, sports science and performance, if you're not improving the outcome that you want to improve, what's going on? We did work backwards in that sense. But yeah, we need to do both.

37:40
to appease some sort of idea you have or maybe it's to appease a reviewer but you still need to do those things. Yeah, so true. And then obviously, you know, you've begun talking about this topic, thinking about it, thinking about overweight and obese individuals. And I was curious to know whether you had data or actually, in fact, I saw an abstract that you had, I didn't see the year of it, so I'm not sure where this was from. But.

38:10
you worked with a bunch of people with overweight and obesity, and you looked at several markers, including glucose, which you mentioned, like the metabolic markers were not impaired. But also, I think I saw that their level of hunger and satiety improved the next day. Was that, am I right from that, from the pre-sleep reading? There's a couple of studies where we've, and others have shown, an improved morning satiation. But honestly, we're not exactly sure if that's good or bad.

38:39
So in some individuals, if they're full in the morning and don't want to eat, maybe that's not a great thing because then we miss that morning feeding if that's something that we want for their overall plan. Some people that they don't want to eat that. But in other cases, maybe it's more simple than that and simply they're not gonna not eat but they'll eat fewer calories at that meal and maybe that helps with long-term weight management. And so...

39:09
again context driven there in terms of if that's going to be a positive or negative outcome. And not everyone's shown it. We've shown it a few times. We've had other studies where we don't see that change and it's just really no difference. And then there was, there's one study to date that I'm aware of where like a buffet was laid out as well. So we just did like a survey that you feel hungry or not and they could

39:38
you know, check the box, but we didn't actually feed them. So even though they said they were a little bit more full, would they have eaten less at this situation? And so the ones that did the survey and left food out for them to eat, and then they would measure everything, again, showed no difference between taking it or not. So yeah, there's still more to uncover in that space too. I think where this is all gonna end up going is we need to figure out what is it doing to... I think our next one is...

40:06
probably going to carry on and look at is there a calorie threshold at which it becomes a positive switches to a negative? Like I was saying, 200 calories seems to be not doing much, it may be a benefit. And like 550 tends to be, depending on how you set it up, where it might be you start seeing negative outcomes occur. And so is there some threshold at which we need to know to eat or not?

40:34
We also haven't done much with like pure fat feeding or pure carbohydrate feeding. Or, you know, but people don't tend to eat like that unless you're having a protein shake. You have food, you have like mixed meals. So we probably need to be giving mixed meals and things that people would normally eat. We've lovingly been designing a milkshake study for years now where we can hide calories in a milkshake. Because people like to eat ice cream and milkshakes and things before bed or like...

41:03
in the evening anyway. Sometimes my students want me to do pizza studies, but we haven't done those yet. Yeah, you could get like a bunch of Ninja Creamies, Mike, and you could make different types and no one would know because they would all look delicious and like ice cream, but some could be protein, some could be fat. Right. Yeah, that's probably what we need to do is to really like hide calorie load and then figure out is there like is there a calorie load to it. The other piece we've added to some of these newer studies are continual glucose monitors.

41:33
So with the CGM and this new study we're running, we'll use that for a couple of reasons. We can tell compliance with it. So if they're having something else besides what we asked them to eat, we'll see that. And then we can also see what's going on with glucose while they're asleep, in real time while they're asleep. So that's some of the newer stuff that we're starting to add into the newer proteins, designing for sleep outcomes instead of performance outcomes right now, and adding some new tools and techniques.

42:03
to really see what's metabolically happening. Yeah, now that sounds really awesome, Mike. Now to pivot, I know I actually sent you a bunch of questions I knew I wouldn't actually make, there would be not enough time to look at all of them, but I would really love to ask you about the collagen study I saw you were an author on. Because collagen gets, it's almost like collagen seems to get a bad rep from a lot of protein metabolism people.

42:29
because it's not a complete protein and therefore this is hype around it that is unwarranted. Yet, I mean, I've seen several studies looking at collagen from a skin, hair and beauty and actual human clinical trials suggesting it's potentially beneficial. And then of course, you've got those case reports potentially showing that it may help accelerate healing. And so I guess, well, actually one of my first questions is, you know, one of the...

42:58
controversies around it is in fact almost related to what you mentioned before. Like is it the fact that it's collagen that's helping aid recovery and healing, or is it just the fact that it's increased protein overall? So is there something particular about collagen that you think is worth, well, obviously you thought it was worthwhile studying, but that could potentially have a benefit over and above just added protein? That's a great question. It does get a bad rap these days. I've seen it.

43:26
a number of times from some of my friends in the protein metabolism space as well. And sometimes we're on the receiving end of that because we've looked at it. I'll tell you, I think they have, I think like a traditional whey protein, for example, and a collagen protein should be used separately and distinctly. It's clear that collagen is not going to be your best bet for like muscle protein synthesis and muscle growth and I think some of the muscle recovery.

43:56
So, I wouldn't use it for that purpose. And that's what's usually in the social media area getting hit is like, why would you use this? Just use whey. I'm like, well, yeah, for that purpose, definitely use whey or definitely use these complete proteins that are higher in leucine, for example. We got interested in collagen, not from a muscle building perspective or even a fat loss perspective or any of that. It was mostly for pain.

44:24
joint pain and tendon issues. As an aging athlete, you know about some of this, and we work with a lot of very high level masters athletes, you know, and that's just 40 plus, like what's going on where we have some of these outcomes? And we went through the whole phase of like, what kind of supplements might you be able to use? Glucosamine was a big one for a while for...

44:54
potentially with joint pain that's largely been dismissed at this point. And so collagen was coming on and Keith Barr's group was doing a ton of work with this. I just thought it was pretty fascinating. He was showing like in these engineered ligaments that taking collagen peptides was actually increasing collagen growth in these engineered ligaments. And then there were some biomarkers like...

45:22
BINP and some others that are indicative of collagen growth, like connective tissue growth. That's hard to grow. The blood flow to those areas is really difficult. And so his work was great. They were, and they're still doing it, but showing, like you take it before exercise is probably best because it's in circulation. And then when you start exercising, you have the best opportunity that if you're going to get blood flow to those spaces, it would be during that time. And so I think...

45:51
I was looking at that and then there were several, bigger papers already existed in terms of showing reduced knee pain or joint pain. And a lot of animal work in that space. You mentioned beauty reasons and skin and the elasticity in hair. There's actually quite a bit of evidence in those spaces to use those products. It just takes a while. But we were not interested in that space. We were mostly interested in the knee.

46:19
the knee pain, the joint pain. And so we designed this study that was quite long. And my doc student at the time, Shalua Kievkoski, who's now independent and still in this college and space doing great work, helped to carry this out. I mean, nine months, if not nine months, in a research world, like nine months takes four years to pull off. And so she was in the trenches with this thing, working, working, and so.

46:47
originally was a six-month study. We got to six months. We're like, you know what, let's do a three-month addition for those who want to stay on because we need to see the time course of this. If it's not going to work, especially for like a bone outcome, you need more time to see if it's going to work. And so we looked at 0, 10 or 20 grams of collagen peptides. And just so like the folks know, collagens like arginine, glycine and proline are the big...

47:16
ones that tend to be higher than what you'd see in a whey protein. And so in that case, your question was, was it unique in any way? It is. Like those are our higher concentration than a whey protein. And when you ingest them, there's some evidence that like these proline-containing dipeptides that can come from taking the collagen and sometimes these proline hydroxy, proline linkages are...

47:43
perhaps the magic that's coming from taking a collagen. And there's animal studies and such where when you consume those, they show like an increased growth of fibroblasts that would be what you would want in a human. But in an animal model or in a fish, that's what's happening. You see the cyclic proline hydroxyproline is increasing and that's increasing growth of these fibroblasts. If that's occurring in a human, it could be regenerating some of that.

48:12
connective tissue, collagen in a joint, and maybe help with pain. So I don't think there's a really great clear cut, definitely this is the mechanism yet, but that would be the assumption of what's going on. And so, yeah, between our work and other people's work, it looks like after about six months of time, it was a long time to take something without seeing something happen. It looks like you could have some mitigation of joint pain.

48:41
and like masters athletes, masters active individuals was who we were looking at. Which is amazing because you're basically speaking to my audience and myself because that's who we are. It's interesting because I often always think about collagen in the context of glycine, whereas

49:02
with what you were just describing, the mechanism, I mean, which you're unsure about, but it's the proline potentially which is potentially having the impact rather than glycine per se. Although I know we can't be sure, but there's... Well, it's the linkages. So it's like the proline, hydroxyproline. They come out in these interesting amino acid patterns. And they also can... We thought that a protein would have to be digested and then brought in basically...

49:31
amino acid at a time to cross the gut. But there's evidence that show as high as like nine amino acids intact coming from that collagen. We're still kind of unsure about how that's going on, but it's for sure they're seeing like three at a time and I've seen as high as nine at a time crossing the gut intact. And those cyclic hydroxyproline combinations are what they think is enacting these benefits. I think it's important to also say that

50:00
There are some studies showing a reduction in inflammation, inflammatory markers by taking college. And those animal studies are showing like a reduction in some of the, like IL-6, some of these things that could be inflammatory. There's data in animals that had, like they injected their ears with something to make them swell and then they gave them college and they had this anti-inflammatory effect of collagen over time and a reduction.

50:28
in IL-6. And so it's probably a combination of like a reduced inflammation and possibly an increased collagen synthesis from like Keith Barsworth that is combining to do these things. There are some papers that show increases in strength and body composition with collagen. Those are the ones that get sort of slammed and repeating those is problematic. And most of that data is coming out of one lab. And so it's hard to say why others aren't repeating it other than what.

50:58
the main intact protein people are saying is like, it's junk. Like we can't really look at that. I don't know that it's junk. People worked really hard on those papers and I'm sure they're doing a good job, but I would take your whey proteins for certain purpose. Your muscle building, your total daily protein intake and collagen would be separate for the joint pain issues and perhaps to reduce swelling. In our hands, we looked at 10, zero, 10 and 20 grams and actually 10 grams per day.

51:26
seem to have the most overall benefit. I'll tell you that's what I take now after looking at that data. 20 grams is typically what's recommended on a bottle. But in our hands, 10 in Masters athletes was all that you needed for six months. So your bottle will last a little longer by taking 10 instead of 20. Yeah, for sure. And was that in combo with vitamin C? Because I've seen with Keif Barth, like small amount, like it doesn't seem to be a lot of vitamin C, but a small amount. Or actually it didn't really make a difference.

51:57
Yeah, we did not give ours with vitamin C. It's probably something we should have done to have an improved impact of it. We just didn't design it that way. Unfortunately, we missed that part. I would probably suggest taking it with vitamin C, but in our study, we didn't make them do that. And to be clear, they could take it any way they wanted. It was powder. So some of them may have put it into an orange juice or something.

52:25
and others did not. Most of them wanted it to dissolve, so they're putting it in hot liquids in the morning before exercise like coffee or tea or something. Yeah, nice. That's super popular actually. And the fact that you don't have to add vitamin C might be quite good for those people who like a collagen coffee because it's, you know, the flavor with a citrusy thing might not go down quite so well. Yeah. Yeah. You're, obviously you were looking at athletes and I think that your study showed

52:54
the people who did the most activity seem to have a bigger impact with the collagen peptides? Is it just because they had more need for collagen? What was your take on that? Yeah, so that was a really interesting caveat that came about from that work that again Dr. Kietakowsky found when she was looking at the data first. And for it to be effective in...

53:23
not every outcome, but in the main outcomes, you had to exercise more than 180-ish minutes per week. That's not a ton of exercise. So, that's really simple to get for most, well, actually, let me back that up. A lot of people have trouble getting 180 minutes. But if you can walk a couple hours a week, spanning the whole time, you'll be just fine. So it's not a ton in that sense. I think it could be two reasons. Either those people,

53:53
had more opportunity to have the collagen get incorporated because they had more blood flow. So maybe they're just exercising more so that when they take it, they've got more opportunity for the blood flow to be enhanced to possibly get it to the joint that might have the pain. So that's probably what happened. But to me, I like it's just even more simple. It shows again, the power of exercise. You need to be moving. Many of these supplements and things

54:22
Well, many of them don't work at all. But like this one in our hands, at least seem to be most beneficial if you are active. Just like protein, like the exercise is the primary mover of the physiological outcome. And the little bit of protein, it might add a slight advantage. It's small though. It's just gonna be that small cherry on top situation, just like college, and you gotta be moving. And then this could be something that would help. Like anecdotally.

54:50
I've talked to lots of people from our study over the years since then that continue to take it because they really enjoyed the outcomes and when they came off of it, they noticed a difference. And then there were other people just like anything where they didn't really notice a difference even though, you know, it might be doing something, it might not. So again, inter-individual differences are really important to pay attention to. But because it's...

55:16
relatively inexpensive and you can take just 10 grams a day for some of these outcomes. There's data that show positive outcomes between 5 and 20 grams per day. 10 seemed like the magic number for us, but we didn't look at 5 and we didn't look at 15. We did 0, 10, and 20. So 10 seemed to work fairly well for the people who exercise them. Yeah, nice. And I do wonder, you know, like with that into...

55:42
the individual variation. Like maybe people, maybe there are people who just need more, you know, like maybe they, people talk about non-responders and sometimes, and you often hear not an argument against, but just, well, no one doesn't respond, but potentially they just need maybe a higher dose or a different time, I don't know, different mechanism, I'm not sure, but that might be.

56:07
Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. And I'll say for like the skin and healthcare outcomes, that's usually five to 10 grams per day. And those studies are typically three months long. So you might see those outcomes faster. And the five to 10 grams a day for probably a year or more before you might see a bone outcome, but I haven't seen much great data in that space. And then joint health for us was like 10 grams a day for six months or so before you start seeing that. Like a sweet spot.

56:37
Yeah, nice one Mike. And just one last question. So obviously, I mean, I think that the information that your lab sort of putting out there with collagen is awesome. And anecdotally speaking, so many people I speak to take collagen for their joints and notice it as well. So it's nice to see that sort of alignment of anecdote and research. Yeah, that's great. Yeah. And then there's collagen. Creatine is something which one of your colleagues,

57:06
from the ISCC and Darren Kando does a huge ton of work in that. That's another supplement which is really seems to be worth its weight in gold. Is there any other supplement that you think is worth either athletes or the general population taking note of at this sort of time? And this might not be something you research, it actually just might be that you are across the research on something else, aside from protein powder, of course.

57:35
Yeah, I mean, the big hitters are going to be protein creatine and caffeine, really, as the ones that people will say there's so much evidence for it. And in most individuals, those would be useful. And then if I was to kind of layer in like the next layer of things that I think would be worth trying, I'd probably put collagen in there as sort of the next layer. And those are the ones that...

58:01
are tried and true. Our lab has studied multi-ingredient supplements quite a bit. And then it's hard to tell what's doing what. But it's like a preformed supplement that already exists. I think that's probably where the pre-sleep feeding space will also go to use different types of things that are already known to induce sleep. But maybe that those cocktails will probably come about soon. And we're actually looking at a supplement now for mitigating heat and thermal stress. So...

58:31
We've done three studies now and more on the way to look at the possible effect of using a nutritional supplement to reduce or to maintain core temperature in hot, humid environments. So we've done this, we did a review on the topic, which is B-tain as the supplement, and put a review paper out. Then we did a trial where it was over COVID, so we couldn't exercise them, but we staffed them in an heat chamber and we didn't see any.

59:00
Then the unpublished work we're working on is we put cyclists in a heat chamber and that added stress of cycling plus that supplement seems to do something beneficial. Not a huge change, but there's something going on. And the one we just wrapped up was from a doctoral student of mine, Lily Rentoria, and she was working on that with firefighters and a live fire, which is really cool. So hopefully in the next year, six months or so, we'll have the cycling paper and the firefighter paper invalidated.

59:29
There are some small things going on. So it depends what that matters to you for, um, if it's an elite athlete and it could get you a couple of seconds up a podium, maybe, uh, if you're a firefighter and you can fight a fire for an extra minute, cause it's, you know, 4,000 degrees. Um, yeah, you know, maybe that's beneficial. So, you know, a couple more things coming out in that space, which I would just, I'm just mentioning cause we're working on.

59:55
Yeah, no, that's awesome, Mike. And even if you're not an elite athlete, there are so many age group triathletes who go to places like Kona, and it's their once in a lifetime opportunity to get to that world, and they'll do anything to be able to perform their best. So that's always really great to hear of new research coming out. So on that, obviously, so before we go, I know that you do a course, I believe, is it on?

01:00:24
diet, body composition, through... Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, like a community-based course? Yeah. Yeah, so there's a course that we developed that it was made through a company called The Great Courses that now it's through a company called Wondrium. Wondrium took it over, but Wondrium has like academic lectures from professors and other people that give courses. So if you just want to continue learning, you could go on there and get any topic you want.

01:00:53
I did a course called Changing Body Composition to Diet and Exercise. So not all that of a sexy title, but it is what it is. And we made 24 30-minute lectures. And so that's a great space for anybody. If you don't have a biochemistry background or anything, you can go in there and learn about the science behind how to change body composition through diet and exercise. So that's through Wonder Room. You can get on Amazon and other places like that.

01:01:21
offer it. And that's real academic. It's more of like being in a class lecture. You know, it's not. So that's that's that course. Yeah. And then we have a textbook, Exercise Physiology. There's a sixth edition just came out. So if there's any academics on here looking for an undergraduate textbook, we wrote that one that came out last year. Yeah. Amazing. And I'm sure I've seen you across social media as well, Mike, obviously X.

01:01:49
I struggle to call it X actually. I still prefer to call it Twitter. But I believe you're on Instagram and places like that. Where can people find you? Yeah, the easiest thing is just at Mike Orsmbee. That's easy. I made it so it's my name. And that's just what our labs up to. You know, some of these podcasts and speaking gigs and stuff I'm interested in will come out on.

01:02:14
on at Mike Ormsbee. So yeah, give that a follow. And then our lab is at FSU ISSM, the Institute of Sport Sciences and Medicine. But yeah, so at Mike Gormsby is your best spot to see what I'm up to. Nice one. Mike, thank you so much for your time this morning. I really appreciate it. And enjoy the rest of your day. All right. Thanks, Miki. You too.

01:02:52
Alrighty, hopefully you really enjoyed that. It was super fun conversation and as I said, definitely a few take homes in there for us active peeps. Next week on the podcast, I speak to Vanessa Spina from the Optimizing Protein podcast and former ketogenic girl. Until then though, you can catch me over on threads, Instagram and Twitter @mikkiwilliden.

01:03:17
Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com book a one-on-one call with me. Alright team, have the best week, see you later.