Dr. Andy Galpin
Appearances
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
No, actually, we haven't gone together, but we've just missed each other a bunch. We have a lot of the same friends.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I knew Joe before Andrew did. I knew Andrew way before. But I'm actually going this spring, I'm going on a bear hunt with Cam Haynes. I don't know if Joe's going to be there or not. He may be, but I haven't asked him about it. But we'll be up there together. Yeah, so we have many friends.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Depends on how you want to define quality. There's a lot of back and forth. Obviously, as we've just been talking about, I'm clearly a big fan of meat and animal meat. But I think there is ample evidence now that people can live a really high-performing life on plant-based stuff as well. I work with a bunch of plant-based athletes, and they perform fine. So we can get there as well.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I work with some really famous local musicians that they are plant-based. So you can get there. I'm not as bullish on that as I used to be. More evidence has come out that's like, okay, the only thing you got to pay attention to a little bit is, of course, limits options.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And you have to be really conscious of calories with that because you generally have to eat more of it or you have to get it in forms that are more calorically dense, right? So if you try to equate something like, you know, four ounces of Maui Nui axis deer to get the same amount of protein, as you get out of peanut butter, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You're going to be eating 150 calories of protein from the Maui Nui axis deer, and you're going to eat 700 calories from the peanut butter. So your overall calorie intake has to go way up, depending on how it's packaged.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Like, you know my opinion on that clearly, but it can be done well.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah. I have, at all times, I take... In fact, they were just around here a second ago. But those travel Momentous protein things, I always have like 20 of them with me at all times.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, I always take them. So if it's a... You know what's actually cool about Momentus, too? They just changed their whey protein formula. Have you seen this? Which, tell me. They took out... There's no gum anymore. There's no fillers. And there's no...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I mean, the artificial stuff in there. And they took the price way down. So it's way cleaner.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, no, I know this because, so I've been working with Momentous for a long time. Disclosure here, they are a sponsor to my show and I personally am on their advisory board. But I'm saying that because they asked me for many years and I said no for like several years. And then they changed leadership and these new people came in and they developed what they call the momentous standard.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And so every single product that they make is third-party tested.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It's tested also for heavy metals, for pesticides, for herbicides, for toxins, for lead, for a ton of different stuff, right? Which very, very few supplement companies actually do. And then on top of that, most of their products have what's called NSF certified for sport, which is something we have to have for our athletes. So it's all third party tested.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And then a bunch of it has all this additional stuff. So it's when I saw them doing all that stuff, I was like, oh, You're actually putting your money where your mouth is. Because everybody says their products are the cleanest.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Define high performance for me, but some categorical rules I can answer here.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, I could believe it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I have no idea. It's weird. Probably, if I had to guess, knowing what I know about the supplement industry and the food industry in general, a lot of the times, multiple companies are buying from the same distributor. So my guess is something like that is happening. Ultimately, I don't really care because the fact that the products that I use are all tested anyways.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And there are other companies that make good stuff too in the supplement world, but I just particularly prefer Momentus. So if you don't like them for whatever reason, great, find another one. But just whatever you do, especially for things like supplements and food-based products, just make sure that they're at the same kind of level of testing. If they do, then fine, go with somebody else.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
If they don't, though, be careful.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Cognitive performance is a different answer here, right? So you can go into the small details with examples like people like to bring up blueberries. Lots of research, a cup of blueberries per day is actually going to have statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in cognitive function. We use this very routinely. It's been very well demonstrated.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Well, okay, actually, number one, you don't necessarily unless your company's... This is ridiculous. It sounds like we're doing a giant ad for Momentus.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I swear. Companies like Momentous, though, will let that testing available. So see it. Show me the testing results, right? The other way is, and this is something we don't talk about very often, but we will routinely see heavy metals and other toxins in people's blood work. And then you go back and see, oh, they stopped taking...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
those supplements from non-tested places or places that say that they're tested, but they're not. And you don't know it's from them, right? Things like mercury could be from anywhere, right? Totally, right? Or even lead could be a thousand places, right? And so not every time, but many times, the only change we make is we stop taking those low quality supplements. And then guess what happens?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It's gone in their blood. Really? So there's many steps in logic. I jumped there. That would be a bad science experiment if I just said it that way. I didn't control for all variables. Generally, toxin in blood are acute exposures anyways. They clear. But it's happened enough times where I'm like, all right, you got to stop taking those crappy supplements.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I'd have to know exactly what the person said, but I can add a couple of things to that. Number one, if you're going to compare something like a whole food to the fruit juice.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I'm getting there. I'm getting there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So let's start where we all agree.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Everyone would agree with that, right? Why we're missing the fiber intake almost exclusively, right? Fiber is going to mitigate blood glucose spikes and elevation. Great. Second step then is what if I take that whole apple, banana, peach, whatever it is, eat it as a whole apple versus blend it up? Well, you'll actually see the same thing with meat. A steak versus ground meat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Ground meat versus actually blended meat because these studies have been done. You blend it up and you drink the meat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, yeah. For this exact reason. It is what happens if I pre-digest, basically, pre-break down the food item. There are differences. There are differences in absorption. The amount that you actually get from the gut actually into the rest of your system is kind of how you can think about that. There are differences.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
That said, how much of a difference in that particular example of if I ate that peach or if I blended it up, how much more would that cause my blood glucose to spike? I would probably, if they showed me data that said it spiked it more when you blended it, for those other reasons, I'd believe it. Does it do it to a magnitude that I care about? I don't know. Maybe. I don't know the data.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I don't know the specific study that they're referring to. My initial skepticism, you can see there. I don't know if I would care enough. But it's plausible based on what I do know from studies in a very similar realm. So I'd say plausible, but I don't know. I don't really do that very often, so I'm not super worried about it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It depends on how far up or down that priority list it is for you. If everything else is really dialed and this is the last little thing to figure out, then maybe this is making a big enough of an impact.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
But if we're still worrying about this over top of the other big rocks we talked about earlier, you're eating 20 grams of protein a day, you're having irregular sleep schedule, then I'd be like, dude, you're way focused on the wrong thing. So it could be real, but whether you need to focus on it or pay attention to it would be up to what the individual situation is.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It's all honestly super true. So if you then wind back to some of your previous questions on that, does it matter which format that you like to give yourself structure with? You're like, what the hell did he just say? You could have called that a diet. That's all diets are. They're just a different format that gives you structure.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Or missing a meal or whatever the case is, right? So would I rather have you blend your banana strawberry smoothie rather than just going to the store and buying a, yes, it's still whole real food. It's still better probably than adding additional processing steps to it. Totally, totally.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And I don't know, if it represents some marginal increase in blood glucose elevation, just go for a walk and it's all gone. So who cares? It's pretty easy to manage.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, it helps with, I mean, darn near everything, from short and long-term gut health to mitigating blood glucose elevation to nutrient absorption to helping manage cholesterol levels, a ton of other reasons to go after it. I would say, in general, we've probably increased fiber intake more than we've done the opposite.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And I say that because there actually have been, and we just had one last week, Young 32-year-old guy is just on top of everything. Lots of IBS symptoms, was just convinced he had something happening with gut health or whatever. Okay, run stool tests, things like that. Take a look at it and he's eating like 50 grams of fiber a day. Okay, what's that mean?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
The kind of rule of thumb we say is for every thousand calories you eat, you want to eat around 14 or so grams of fiber. So if you're eating 2,000 calories, you should be having, that would be 28 grams of fiber, which would mean, all right, somewhere between 25 and 30, like, you know, plus or minus. These numbers, like, don't get too specific with them.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
If you're at 3,000 calories a day, maybe something like 40, 50 grams of fiber a day. So when I saw he's like 50 grams of fiber a day, I'm like, oh, okay, you must be at a pretty high calorie load. Calorie load was like 1,800. And I was like, oh, well, I know why you think you have IBS. You have triple the fiber intake. And that's going to tear your stomach to pieces, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
We also see this a lot with people that are really health conscious or trying to be really health conscious. And they jack up insoluble fiber really high on accident. They do things like, okay, I'm going to cut out all my starches. I'm not going to eat any more pasta, no more grains. And I'm eating all vegetables and their broccoli intake. They're eating three cups of broccoli per meal.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And all of a sudden they're just like, damn, and I'm getting like all this bloating. And I'm like, well, yeah. Yeah. How about we switch out a cup of broccoli and put in a pizza?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Really?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And all of a sudden they're like, yeah, my GI problems are going away. I'm like, well, no kidding.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Because remember, there's two types of fiber. There's soluble fiber and insoluble fiber. Insoluble fiber, here's a clear difference. If you took a glass of water and put it on the table and you put something in that water, if it would get soggy and soak up the water, like imagine putting a piece of bread in water. Fill up, okay? That is a soluble fiber. If you put a piece of broccoli in water,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
it wouldn't do anything. That is insoluble, right? Well, the same thing happens in your GI tract. So both soluble and insoluble fiber are really healthy. They're really good for you, but they have different functions. So if you get a ton of soluble fiber, and you don't have insoluble fiber in there, like boom, things will shoot through.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You'll go, probably go like really constipated and then boom, diarrhea or like pretty new story, right? If you do the opposite and you jack insoluble fiber up way too high, you could just really have like tons of bowel movements. Maybe you're not watery, maybe not. Or you could, again, feel constipated.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
That's all it is, right? I don't even call them diets because it's nonsensical.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So both of these things could be causing either end of that spectrum, depending on where they're at. So when you just have way too much fiber intake, especially in a quick span. So you've just made this change. You went from eating like eight or 10 grams of fiber a day to now eating 35. You're going to just go bam.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Like your stomach is going to have one of two reactions and neither of them you want.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
That's the majority. I would probably say 90% of the time we've happened to give people more fiber. 10% of the time have been people eating like too much fiber. I would say if you had to pick one error on the side of 40% too much fiber rather than 3% too little.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Like really you want to make sure you're at or above the number, but if you're going crazy and you made all these changes and it's new to you, it's the change that matters, right? So if your GI system's not ready for that, And all of a sudden you're just like, man, I'm eating all these healthy foods and oh my God, my stomach is, I'm just gassy and like all these problems.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Then maybe tone down the broccoli, you know, for a little bit and get some easier to digest forms of fiber for a little bit. Then maybe work your way back up if you need to at all. But yes, most people are not eating enough fiber.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You can. We have used these a lot, whether they are things like FiberMend from Thorne is great, or Metamucil, right? Like psyllium husk, like lots of different things like that you can do.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
BioMe?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
We've used those in times probably most often when, and this is not me, we have medical doctors and things like that on our team that'll do, if you actually have a gut problem, let me fix your gut, right? That's a big part of those gut healing protocols, right? But where we have used them more are things like in caloric deficits.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
That's garbage, like almost all nonsense out of that stuff. Fasting is insanely overrated. I like it. Do it a bunch. But if you're thinking that skipping breakfast in the morning is going to solve almost any of your health problems, you're generally massively misguided. If it is helping you, avoid triggers. Then awesome. If it is helping you manage your calories, awesome.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So as calories come down, sometimes micronutrients, vitamins, minerals come down. This is when supplements and stuff start to come into the equation, right? And oftentimes, a lot of the athletes we work with or general population will go through phases of caloric restriction. And then if fiber starts to get hurt there, we'll bring in then fiber as a supplement.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I usually would rather get fiber from whole food, but we will turn to supplements in those particular cases. And it's really helpful, particularly during those last few weeks. and you're just like, man, not really regular right now, and you're like, okay, great, and we can take some psyllium husk or something like that and get your stomach to not feel so suboptimal, then it's pretty helpful.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Supplements should be thought of as supplements. have good relationships, drink water, see the sunlight, move. This is all the stuff that changes your life. Now, if we want to add some little ice cream on top, this is where supplements come in. And so we use supplements quite regularly. Supplements do work.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
When people say things like supplements are a scam, they don't work, I just don't think they can read. I'm generally considering thinking they cannot physically read.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, well, there are thousands of studies on supplements, right? They're being kind of jerks when they say that, but what they're trying to say is, Supplements don't have the magnitude of impact that most people think. And that's true. So they do work, but they generally don't work like people think. It's uncommon for you to take one supplement and your life changes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
That's not the kind of impact supplements tend to have. If you want numbers, I don't know, if I had to add every supplement in the whole world together, I'd probably say most supplements change whatever you're measuring by 3% to 10%. It's not 50%. Yeah, it's not that much. It's not 90%. But if you're at a certain level where you've done the big stuff, that does move the needle by 90% or 200%.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And you are looking for that last 5% or 10%. Well, now a supplement can potentially do that. Now, there are some supplements... like a fish oil. That will move the needle in those really big numbers, like fiber potentially. And then there are others like a creatine, where the impact is more gonna be in that three to 10% range, but the safety profile's high.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
They've been tested in every clinical population you can imagine, from brain damage to brain injuries to neurological disorders to pregnancy to kids to weight loss to young to old, right? And they very rarely have any negative side effects of any. And they generally improve a wide range of outcomes, like lean muscle, like brain health, like mood, like cognitive function. They're not doing a lot.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
They're not at the same order of magnitude as a drug would do. But this is a context. So if you hear that and you think, oh, I knew it, they're a scam. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
If you don't like breakfast in the morning, awesome. Totally fine. We actually just, this actually on the way over here, I submitted back revisions. Our paper should be accepted in the next couple of days. We ran a study on intermittent fasting in our laboratory. So I'm not against it at all, but I'm certainly against people thinking that they have to do it for any short or long-term reason.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You have to figure out a way to get yourself high-quality foods. You have to figure out a way to manage calories somehow. And if fasting is a way that checks those boxes on a positive, well, great. If it doesn't, then I don't care at all about it. I will promote a six meal a day diet as much as I will a one meal a day diet. Whatever is, those are not the factors that matter.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
The factors that matter are the other things. Now, having said that, We will use things like fasting a lot for cognitive performance with things like our surgeons and our firefighters and our other responders because they generally are going to go, hey, I can't take a break every two hours and go snack, right? I'm in a 16-hour surgery. I'm in a nine-hour surgery, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G. G.G gi, gi, gi, gi, gi, gi, g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g. g.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I need to perform really well given these constraints. Awesome. I don't want a surgeon then getting hungry every two hours and like scrubbing. They're going to be like, dude, no, zero chance. So in situations like that, or again, the firefighters are another example or military where you're like, hey, I need to be able to be on for these big chunks of time and then feed and then great.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You know what I love about it the most? other than like being happy for him. He's so punk. He only ever does things the way he wants to do it. And from the gate, like he didn't do any things of like, oh, you have to do this to optimize. You have to do this. He's just like, no. Like I'm just like, and if it works, it works great. Like whatever.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Not from an arrogance perspective, but just being like true to himself. And like, this is what he wants to do. This is a topic he wants to talk about. These are the papers he wants to read. I'm like, that's what he's going to do. I like knowing that. It's great. It's great. Like no one deserves it more than he does.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Well, get in line with all the other people that— I don't want to get in line. He promised. Why does he promise? He shouldn't do that, though. You know, honestly, people get mad at him about this, but this is a—
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
here's what will happen with him he will genuinely be excited like super excited to do something and want to do it and he'll say yes and then he'll look at his calendar and it is going and he's like damn damn damn and then it just gets buried on the thing so it's not disingenuous at all when he says yes to something he legitimately is very excited about it and then reality sets in of like travel schedule and other things and it just like can't physically happen
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So he probably should be better at being more realistic about his commitments. I will say it that way. But it's never like, eh, she's not popular enough or he's not cool. It's always like, yeah, he's super into it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I can't promise you. I don't know.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It's timing. It's fluke. It's...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It's all the lucky things, right? All right, because I see him on Joe Rogan.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So I'll, I'll eat that stuff.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I'll eat those things as well as always some fruit in the morning and then generally some starch. And I have a pretty big variety of what I'm going to choose for those categories. Okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You can have too much of anything.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Well, calories matter.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, it doesn't matter, right? Are calories the only thing that matters? No. Is it the most important thing? Maybe not. Is calorie measuring the best dietary system? Maybe not. That doesn't mean calories don't count. There are ways that it looks like the calorie in, calorie out system's not working for you. But that generally means a miscalculation on calories in or calories out, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Because the body does lots of adaptive things. to mitigate and manage what happens there. So yeah, calories matter. Anything past that is details now, but you can't make an argument that calories just don't exist or matter, right? So all of my supplements are very specific to either my goals at that time and or what's happening in my physiology. So it changes. I don't just take the same thing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
But I would never do that for a PGA golfer. Never, right? That would make no sense for us whatsoever to do that. We need to have different constraints and different performance variables. So those people generally eat way more frequently. If you have a personal preference, if you have anything. So it's always about precision.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Sure.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
somewhat high to none, right? So you're talking about a precursor for glutathione for the most part, right? So it has a, generally you can think of it as like a pretty potent antioxidant. Not something I would tell everyone to take. You have to be really careful, especially with timing of antioxidants, especially powerful ones like that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
If you're trying to induce any physiological adaptation, this comes in response to insult. So you cause an inflammatory response when you exercise. If you then block that inflammatory response with an NSAID, with NAC, with vitamin E, vitamin C, then you will mitigate and block adaptations. Really? This has been shown many times.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You have to take a pretty high amount, but if you're trying to cause stress and then you're stopping the stress from happening, you're stopping the physiological response. But I thought taking antioxidants is a great... Antioxidant supplements are something you should be very conscious of. High antioxidant foods are almost always okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So if you're eating more quality foods that are higher in antioxidants, this is almost always a good thing. But now when you're taking them in the form of a medication of a supplement, you're getting extremely high dosage in non-natural combinations, if you will. That becomes really problematic is almost a fair word to say.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
What I just explained. So if you're overly suppressing inflammation, inflammation is the signal for adaptation. It is the signal for blood clotting. It is the signal for cognitive change. It is the signal for neuroplasticity. If you're going in and smashing and maximally suppressing that, then you don't have any stimuli for adaptation. Like this becomes a problem.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So we do not just prophylactically take antioxidants of any kind. If we have a very structured reason for that, then we might put some in there. But then we're going to come off of them as soon as we've done. But we do not just put people on, especially high-powered ones like NAC, and just as like a, yeah, go take this forever thing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Because their tournaments are not at the same time. Sometimes they tee off at 6 in the morning, and let's say they're a West Coaster, and they're going to go play a tournament on the East Coast, they're teeing off at what's 4 a.m. their time. And then they're going to play a five-hour round in August in Florida. It's going to be super hot, right? And they've got to turn around and then play.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Astaxanthin?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah. It's great. That's your blueberry stuff. That's just like the ingredient down the list. And it's one of the many awesome things in blueberries, cherries, and things like that. It's phenomenal. Lots of research on it. It's great. Again, though, I would say the same thing. We're not going to take those unless we have a reason for that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Because you have to be conscious of what you're trying to do signaling-wise in your physiology. This is a potent one.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
No, definitely not the case. You can get away with higher than needed amounts of protein, of fiber. But you start getting into, here's a general rule. If it is a macronutrient, fiber, water, protein, carbs, fat, No big deal if you eat excess, okay? If it is a micronutrient, if it is a vitamin, if it's a water-soluble vitamin, you'll just pee it out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So not a big deal for over-consuming water-soluble vitamins usually, with some exceptions, vitamin C, things like that. If you start getting into fat-soluble, and if you specifically get into minerals- be really, really careful of high concentrations of exogenous minerals, iron, calcium, even something like potassium. These can cause real significant and serious issues.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So I wouldn't go to any of these things. Phytochemicals are in the same realm. Antioxidants, you really should be conscious of using those things unless you have a reason. If you are training super hard and you're peaking for competition, we might add in some antioxidant supplementation.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
If we're in a particular area of the world, let's say, or traveling with a lot of pollutants, or you're going to be interacting with a lot of people and you're worried about, you're going to be sleeping a lot less, and you have other things that are going to suppress your immune system, we might add in some antioxidant support there. But if not, we're not going to touch those things.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Oftentimes, if we're having any immune-related issues, there's something causing it, and we're going to go back and solve that problem, and then just let your immune system and your physiology do what it wants to do and get out of the way.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I wouldn't take them unless you had a real reason for it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Well, again, if you have a reason for it, then... That was three years ago, though. Oh, my God. Well, you're not the same person.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, no, that's... I'd say, like, if you're all, like, at home and you're confused, don't have blood or whatever, if you are leading... an inactive lifestyle, and or you eat a bunch of low-quality food, or you do something that is known to be pretty deleterious, like excessive alcohol or smoking, or you live in a place that has really low air quality.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So our energy demands are really, really, really high on those tournaments.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Right, exactly. Right. Then, then okay. But if you're checking most of those boxes, I wouldn't, without blood work or without some particular reason, I'd probably stay away from most antioxidant supplements.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You're too busy to coach me. No, no, no, there is. You're going to coach me yourself. We have a program called Optima that I personally coach. You, you're going to coach me. That's me, that's me directly.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I'm going to hire you. Yeah, it's, look into the program.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It's not a reasonable number that most people can afford.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
No, our coaching program, our full immersion coaching program is one program, one price. That's it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
10,000.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So if you want, what you can do
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I'm not embarrassed. It's just better this way.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So it's honestly, it's all the big stuff. You're going to manage calorie intake one way or the other, right? We're going to focus on getting high amounts of high quality foods. So we're eating mostly whole real foods. We want a variety of colors. We want a variety of preparation methods. We're going to use a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables, a lot of meats if we can.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You can look in the program and you can see if it's your fit. And you do it yourself. The Optima program, I personally coach. This is where I personally coach.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah. When I say like I coach, this is not like people in my company. This is literally the people I'm coaching. Then we have a more affordable program that I have built. And I did coach for years and years in. And now I don't personally coach in that line anymore. At the same time, you can do something like just our blood work. So our blood work program is called Vitality. Okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
This will, it's like about 100 markers, I think, plus or minus.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, and then there's, again, probably another several thousand that it's calculating after that. But that will not only pull those markers, it'll analyze, it'll interpret, tell you exactly what all these markers and combinations and cross-reactions mean, and then tell you exactly what to do to not just fix the marker that is high or low, but to fix the cause.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It's all automated in software.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So you'll run through it. Your results will come back in. You'll get an alert. You'll pop on and everything will be analyzed, interpreted for you. It can walk you through, hey, this number is high. This is what it means. This is what it's doing. And then do exactly this to correct, maybe not that number, but correct the cause of that problem. And it's all automated for you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Once, a one-time fee. Yeah, and if you buy, of course, semi-annual or multiple, it's cheaper.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You can go to a local lab car or whatever. You can do mobile phlebotomy. I think mobile phlebotomy is a separate charge on top of that, $1,200, but usually it's a couple hundred bucks or less or whatever. Or you can go to a lab car. So you can get into blood work. That's very affordable. Our Absolute Rest Sleep Program is...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It's not at a price where you're like, I want to try that. It's not like a pair of shoes? The blood work program may be like in the number that you're like, oh, okay, I'll try that. Yeah, this is probably more... But this is not, this is like, you better be very serious, because it's almost a year-long program, and so...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Define big.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
We've had the highest contract.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And we've had the highest contract in sports probably six or seven times.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Not LeBron. Patrick Mahomes? Not Patrick. Tom Brady. But we have had everything from Travis Barker. I still work with Travis. He's phenomenal. To Fred Warner, who's the number one linebacker in the NFL. Trevor Bauer, he signed the highest contract in Major League Baseball history, won the Cy Young. Jon Rahm. Behind Tiger Woods, you know, very likely the highest paid golfer in the world.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Probably a thousand that I'm forgetting at this point. I'm always terrible with remembering. But these are some of the big names that are like right now on the top of our list. But plenty of Hall of Famers, MVPs, Cy Young winners. Again, the highest contract at the time, at least six times.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Do you travel all the time? I do a little bit. And then, I mean, I lived here in LA for like 13 years.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So like Tatiana Suarez.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
my daughter knows her. They're like best buddies because she'd come to my house and like trains at my house.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, Brian Ortega, UFC fighter.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Like he lives here in LA, right? So hundreds of times.
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Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Well, sort of. Like strength and conditioning coaches I know, you weren't really- Generally how we- Like you're not like- But like if you're asking like if I'm in the gym taking them through their training programs, yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Four to six.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I did that for many, many years. I started actually, I first started coaching professional athletes like in the gym personally in 2003.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I've had a lot of pro athletes that like I have directly personally coached in my house, in the gym, in different formulas.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So I'm not in the gym with them as much anymore, like I said.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
But I'm still actively coaching many of them.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Which is great, too.
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Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And my interest clearly is in a little bit of all of them.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So, I mean, I didn't have... Honestly, I didn't have it in me to be a full-time only strength coach or a full-time only sciences. I much prefer doing kind of a little bit of everything.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And then having a whole bunch of legitimate experts that I work with to bring in, to be true experts in those fields.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So all of our stuff is like a team approach, right? So we try to bring in the best physical therapist, the best behavioral therapist, the best conditioning coaches, the best medical providers and say like, whatever you need, you're going to get a legitimate world-class individual in that category.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And I generally sit kind of like on the top is a bad way to say it, but I'm kind of the first filter that goes, yo, yo, this is where we need to go.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And fruit and starch. Almost always, a few hours into the day, I'm going to have like a 40-gram protein ingestion right now for probably two months straight. That means I'm going to do a double scoop of Momentous. Like, I promise you that's true. I believe you, yep. So I'll hammer that and then maybe another piece of fruit, which makes me feel great.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And then we always do lunch and dinner is the same thing. And so we'll make dinner and then double the thing and have it for the next day. So I'll explain to you lunch and it's the same thing as dinner. But it's always a combination of six to eight ounces of meat of various kinds. a giant serving, like an entire plate of vegetables. And this is an enormous variety.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
My wife is a tremendous, I won't say chef, but basically a chef. So she makes all kinds of things. Some serving of fat there, whether that's gonna be nuts or a cheese or an oil or avocado, whatever the thing is. And then depending on the day, some varying amount of starch. So quinoa to rice to sweet potatoes to regular potatoes to sourdough bread to like any number of things.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And then the meal in between that could be something like yogurt and nuts or some other thing like that. So you kind of run that thing out and you can see like 200 grams of protein is pretty easy to get to.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, like in the afternoons is when I like to train. Sometimes that gets pushed back a little bit.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yes and no. Here's what I'd say. Intermittent fasting affects different people differently.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
If I'm going to be lifting weights, I'm generally going to be doing full body. I don't do body part splits at all. And then what I do is I will oftentimes rotate like strength training, and then some sort of conditioning.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And the reason I do that is, and because my travel schedule is what it is, I would not have success doing like a, I lift legs on Monday, or I just do the next workout the next day I have a chance. That's however I do it, right? So if I have seven days in a row, I'm going to train seven days in a row. Because I might have four days in a row of like terrible travel, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Or nonstop media, blah, blah, blah, right? Where I'm like, okay, there's just no reality of me getting a 45-minute lift in because I got to take my Uber for an hour. Yeah. I don't have three hours of a break, right, because I'm on the road. Or my hotel doesn't have a gym or whatever the case is.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Well, like depending on where you're at, like you get, you know, depending on what city you're in and you're all over the place and timing and things like that, right? Yeah. So I'll just do the next one. So my conditioning could be anything from, you know, like 15 minutes of really high intensity sprint work, or it could be longer duration, lower intensity.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It could be, you know, like an hour walk. It could be all kinds of different stuff I do. And then my workouts are generally going to be, again, like I have a coach. I have a full-time strength conditioning coach for my program.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Tim DeFrancesco does my stuff. He was a former strength and conditioning coach for the Lakers. So really, really high level, but like I pay him to write my program.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I did my own stuff for decades and it's just, I will never do it again.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Never. Yeah. So he does all my programs and he's awesome about changing stuff up as I'm going or whatever.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Honestly, personally, when I train, I don't want anybody around.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Like my whole life is talking to other people for the most part. I know. Whether it's our companies or my students or whatever. So when I can have an hour to myself, I'm like, I'm out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So I love having a remote coach like that. But that's generally what it is. So my day, like that's what I'll eat. That's how I do it. The kids are home. Yeah. Usually like six o'clock, we're doing dinner and then it's like family time the rest of the day. They're in bed at eight o'clock. Eight o'clock is, you know, wife and I time to do whatever. And then it's wake up the next day and do it again.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
All good, all good.
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Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, I'm in LA somewhat routinely, so we'll definitely do that.
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Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah, well, yeah. I don't know about that, but okay.
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Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
My pleasure. Thank you so much.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Sure. I have coached world champion females in six different sports. And I have coached a countless amount of females non-athletes. I just, I can't honestly say, yes, women generally need to do more fasting.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I will say, like, of all the females we've coached, and this is 18-year-olds to 68-year-olds, right? I've coached the whole spectrum, a lot of them. It's just a person-to-person thing. Okay. More than it is a male versus female thing. Some of our... Women just do way better. when we eat more frequently. Some of them, it doesn't really matter.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Some of them, it's like, it's just, again, it's like an individual thing more than anything. So what we like categorically never do, and I'm trying to like triple check my brain, but yeah, I don't think there's anything we ever specifically do just because someone walks in and they're female versus male. Like there's no like, oh, automatically we train this way or we do this with our food.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
We do the same individualized programming every day. Like that's, it's a variable we pay attention to, but there's no buckets you just go into because you show up in your male or you show up in your female or you show up in your anything else, right? So we're really going to pay attention to that. And we test, we're actually doing a trial right now.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
My grad student Zoe is running a study where we're actually doing the first ever detailed sleep analysis throughout the entire menstrual cycle. So we're looking at blood. We're directly testing high-fidelity sleep every single day throughout the entire cycle. We're directly testing blood. We're directly testing ovulation. We're testing these things every single day for maximum precision.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And one of the things you'll see is things like menstrual cycle length is not the same from woman to woman. Everyone knows that. But it's not even the same within each woman. But let's say it is. Let's just say you're a 28-day cycle all the time. Great. Your ovulation cycle is not the same. And this really, if you test it every single day, cycle after cycle, you'll see this pop up.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You don't necessarily ovulate on day 14.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
When like men are like, what is he even talking about? But girls are like, no, dude, it's finally, right? This is exactly. Totally, yeah. So we're not going to make critical decisions about their nutrition or supplementation or stuff based on like a, well, you're a woman, therefore you should be ovulating day 14, and therefore, here we go.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
We're going to test these things and then go, okay, for you, this is what's going to go on. That's what we're going to do based on your physiology.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Calorie balance, whole real foods for the most part. We want a reasonable balance of macronutrients. By reasonable, that could mean some people do better on a really high-fat, low-carbohydrate. Some do the opposite. Really low-fat, really high-carbohydrates. Some don't care at all or are in a balance. So when I say reasonable, I'm just saying like... what is actually working for you or not.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And we can play games there. High performers, not high performers, lifestyle preferences, taste, digestion. We can mix and match, particularly fat and carbohydrates. We almost always, though, want a moderate to high protein intake. Almost always right there. And then we want a lot of variety. and our colors.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
We need a variety of micronutrients, vitamins, chemicals, phytochemicals, minerals in there. And so we like a lot of color. We like a lot of different sources of those things. That's basically what everyone does. The way that we get there, different.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Sure. So most of the time I'm walking around about 170 pounds. So I'm looking for 200 grams of protein a day, like plus or minus, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I don't weigh and measure at this point hardly ever anymore. So some days I'm probably 130. Some days I'm well over 200. Right. Most days, though, I'm probably going to be swinging within 30 or 40 grams of that number, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So in the morning, I generally wake up. When we get going, I'm going to almost always have eggs and some sort of wild game meat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I harvest my own. So I'm going to eat deer or elk or bear or like something every day. What?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
What do you mean, bear? Bear. Like the animal. You know, like Winnie the Pooh, the bear. Like a grizzly bear? I can't hunt grizzly bears very often, but black bears are pretty easy to get, so they're quite tasty.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
many times okay is it fatty is it like what is it it depends on what if you get them post hibernation like you do spring bear hunt they're going to be much leaner right you get them prior to like a later winter hunt and they're going to be much fattier it's not like any other animal though it's weird it is weird to me uh when people no offense but react this way because if i said like hey i ate a cow yeah of course
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
And then like I say, I ate a beer and you're like, like you can't comprehend.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Deer, people don't freak out. But then bear like, of course, right? They're like any other animal that we can hunt and eat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
The general thing you'll hear people say about bear meat is it's greasier, right? So it has this weird thing, and that can be off-putting. It's not gamey, though. If you get a whitetail deer, and it's not processed properly, or you get it during the rut, then you'll get that classic gamey taste. That'll smell weird. But a normal non-deer, or non-poorly processed deer, it was going to taste fine.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Bear will be the same way. So if you get it when it's been feeding on a bunch of rotten salmon, then it's not going to taste tremendous. But you'll know it pretty quickly. But on average, if we had lunch right now and I made it for you, you would have had no idea.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
You'd eat it, whether we're eating like the steak or the burger of it or whatever the case, you'd be like, you wouldn't have had any idea of what I just put in front of you. If I gave you something like axis deer, then you'd be like, that's the most delicious thing I've ever had. What the hell is that? But you wouldn't be like, oh my God, I feel like I just ate a deer. You would have no idea.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It's tremendous. I love wild meat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Every day? Every day, yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Of course. If my kid was right there and he'd be like, do you eat bear? They would be like, Yeah, like what? Like they wouldn't have any reaction at all to be like, of course, because they don't know any different.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Not everything, but we try to for the most part. Do you ever go to Whole Foods? No. I haven't been to a grocery store in many, many years.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Yeah. I mean, we'll eat, I don't know what a fair number is. Maybe, I don't know what percent. But we still buy grocery stuff, particularly if we want a specific cut or something that she's doing, she's making, where she wants a specific way it's prepared. Then she'll buy other stuff. But in terms of our general meat consumption...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
I probably have, I don't know, 400 pounds of frozen meat in my house right now between elk and axis deer. And I have some mule deer still. And then the salmon run just got done. So my nephew brought over a bunch of wild salmon. So we got a bunch of salmon in there. We got clams and we got a bunch of other stuff. What else do we have in there? Like, it's just like we're in the winter.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
So we just got done with all those, like the seafood season. So we got crabs in there. We got a bunch of other stuff. So yeah, we had a large portion, but we still buy... Like sometimes occasionally even buy cow and beef and things like that. Pork, of course.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
My wife's Jewish and my kids are Jewish too, but she's a bad Jew.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
No. Well, pork is more delicious. I will give you that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
It's just like not even a thing that pops up in my head is weird. It's just like so part of... That's just how I go.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Well, so the only thing about bear you got to be careful of is... There's a non-zero chance that it has trichinosis. And so you would not want to eat bear rare at all, or even medium rare. So even if you're, like very rarely, you don't do, the only part of bear that I'll eat a steak will be like the back straps or the tenderloins. which you can do, but you want to cook them well done.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
But outside of that, you're pretty much going to go to other cuts, stews or roasts or grounds or things like that. So you can make like stews are really easy. Grounds or soups and things like that are totally fine. And then the rest you'll do sausage and different grounds and things like that. So we eat a lot of- A bear sausage?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
Same as any other sausage. Take a bunch of meat, put it through a grinder, and then add any other stuff you want to add in there, depending on if you're trying to make bratwurst or breakfast sausage or spicy jalapeno or some other combination. You can make it however you want. We're out of bear meat right now, I think. We're pretty much done, but we're pretty loaded on axis deer right now.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work
We just got back. I got a really nice bull elk this year, so we got a lot of elk meat right now, too, which is tremendous.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah, I have many things to say about the topic. First and foremost, again, I'm not a medical doctor. Yes, but you just play one on TV.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
No, I think it's just fairness. People listening might have been like, oh, he's a doctor, and assume I'm a medical doctor.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I think actually that's a really good question, first of all, because we define performance quite differently. Ultimately, I'm not a metabolism guy. I'm not a sleep guy. I'm not a muscle growth guy. What I am is a physiologist. And why that matters is I actually don't really particularly care how you yourself define performance.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah, we do, but... I'm not a medical.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
That said, I'm very supportive of hormone therapy, particularly for women, especially post-menopause. There's even for men, lots of reasons why hormone therapy is great. That said, I will say in my personal experience, we have had many people come into our coaching programs post-TRT, many men, because they were given it flippantly or haphazardly.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And that is a real significant problem because you will feel pretty good for six weeks, for six months. And then things get really bad and generally are going to stay bad for a long time unless you do something about it. So there are real concerns about giving people exogenous hormones in a very poor, underdeveloped, unmanaged way.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If someone's really paying attention, taking you through it, it can be safe and highly effective. There are problems with it because of the way that you got into it. Again, did you have a 15 minute teledoc and you said, I'm tired and I'm sleepy and they just gave you testosterone. To me, that's a really poor decision.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
We can use these easy examples because we actually just got our, pretty recently just got all of our mid-season blood work back from our NFL players. On average, we're seeing about 150 to 200 increase in testosterone mid-season in the NFL. We can't use exogenous hormones there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So we're seeing now most Vanderbilt players are sitting like 700 plus testosterone, usually in the mid 500s at the beginning of the year. See the same thing with our baseball players and everybody else. So we are really consistently able to elevate people's testosterone without touching any hormones, any peptides, anything that's even close to this stuff.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
All we actually ever have to do is remove any major constraints from their physiology. What are the constraints? It could be suboptimal sleep, right? They could have a clinical sleep disorder, not realize it. You just get a small improvement in sleep and you will see 20% increases in testosterone really routinely. It might be something to do with their physiology. Good examples.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You look at somebody's testosterone on a blood test. Let's just say it's a male and we're talking total testosterone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And that number is low. Great. First stop is, is that normal for that person? Second stop is, do they have any symptoms? Again, are they fatigued, libido, recovery, like anything there? Awesome. If you haven't even gone to those two steps, we probably shouldn't be jumping to therapies and things. But past that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Before I'm even worrying about any of those things, I'm gonna look at this and go, okay, why is testosterone low? And then I'm gonna look at things, the easy one that's gonna come to people's mind is things like cortisol. There's an antagonist relationship between cortisol and testosterone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If your blood draw cortisol is super high, there's lots of ways to measure cortisol, that's why I specified blood. then before you go anywhere with testosterone, all you have to do is get cortisol back down and your testosterone will go up.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If we then start looking at things like sodium to potassium ratios, now again, both those numbers are probably gonna be fine, but that individual ratio itself will tell us a lot about acute versus chronic fatigue. So if I start looking at that and I start seeing, okay, resting cortisol is normal, but sodium potassium ratios are off. We don't have an acute stress issue.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You have a long-term stress management issue. Then I start poking around and we start looking at things like HRV, your respiratory rate, how often you're breathing, your CO2 tolerance, and some other functional categories there. Maybe we're looking at basic pH and we start seeing three or four or five signs of chronic stress. And what's key about this is that may or may not
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So the people that we coach, whether it's our athletes or our non-athletes, the science we do in my lab, the way that I communicate in the public sphere, it is designed to have somebody be able to come in and say, hey, Andy, I have these goals. I want more mental focus. I want to lose weight. I want to be strong. You tell me the goal.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
manifests itself in psychological stress. So the person may not be like, no, I'm not stressed. Depression, no, I'm fine. Anxiety, no, I'm good. Like, no, they may or may not have the symptoms, but we can look at it and see they are physiologically very stressed. So now all we do is resolve some or most of that physiological stress, and guess what happens to testosterone? It shoots right back up.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It depends on what the cause is.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Not really. Really? So what you're, what you're conflating, and I see the confusion, this is actually a really good question. You have to disentangle short acute with long chronic. So if you and I were to leave right now, go hit your gym right across the hall here, and we trained like crazy, did legs, did whatever, right? We would see a huge rise in cortisol right now.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
But by the time we got home tonight or tomorrow morning, it would actually be lower than where we are right now. So it's a short, really aggressive spike that comes back down to baseline and then typically goes lower than normal baseline. This is why chronic exercise is a stress reducer, but acute exercise is a massive short-term stressor, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So it's that small, it's called a hormetic stress, right? So it's a little bit of poison, makes you actually better.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It's not a myth. It depends on what you mean when you say increase. If you say increase in terms of if we were to go train right now and we took your blood before the workout and after the workout, yes, it would go up. But the question is— Not long-term. exercise generally does increase testosterone long-term if it is suppressed. If it's normal, then it won't.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And so there's always a difference in physiology for the most part going from suboptimal to normal, going from normal to super optimal. That's a different thing that gets you from normal to high. So if you were walking around and you were suppressed, then exercise would elevate it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
But if you're already super fit, your stress is managed, you sleep really well, blah, blah, blah, then working out is not going to make your testosterone keep going higher.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
That absolutely happens. We see that very routinely. It's not the norm, but we see that really commonly. Too much high intensity can absolutely lead to, it's not going to lead to adrenal fatigue. It can certainly lead to cortisol dysfunction though.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And from my perspective, I'm trying to make sure your physiology aligns with that goal. And so that's why I've had success with NFL players executives, actors, musicians rather, tons of regular people. It's because I'm not focused on that last end of the niche, which is how do I optimize hitting a baseball? Or how do I run the fastest? Or how do I mobilize my big toe the best?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And we see this typically when things like really high intensity exercise are dosed too often in combination with really high stress lifestyles.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
That's it. So if you are like, oh, I train super hard and then I have this other down regulation practice I do. I have this other, my lifestyle is great. I'm not living in these high stress areas like geographically and so on and so forth. then it doesn't seem to be as much of a problem. It's also very person dependent.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
We work with a number of like legitimately fortune 10 executives and they are doing billions of dollars a year and every decision they make is worth hundreds of millions and they train like crazy. They're on just loads of stimulants and they're actually like very fine. We don't see these issues like they're okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Other folks, the opposite, where they have like a middle to lower stress lifestyle, they train kind of hard, but it is too much for them. And so I don't want people to just think that like all of a sudden you have to do these things or you can't train high intensity. What I want, the message I would like to get across is just make sure it's working for you because sometimes it's not.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
In the same token, we've had plenty of of executives and high performers where the exercise is not servicing them. It's actually making their life way worse because it's doing things like this. And when we pull them off of that high intensity training, everything in their life gets better.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And so it's always not necessarily just about the person or the category of person, male versus female or middle-aged or executive. It's always about the individual physiology and their unique environment. So
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yep. Okay, great. Number one, I'm okay calling it cortisol dysfunction for the sake of kind of like learning, but it's not just that because your cortisol can be fine. And this is one thing to pay attention to is if you're like, well, I got my blood drawn or I did this cortisol test and it was fine. Great. There's many other physiological mechanisms that go into stress management.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Cortisol is just one of them. So just because your cortisol is bad, that doesn't mean this is you. And just because your cortisol is good, that doesn't mean you're free from this. either. So what are the symptoms? Things like reduced motivation to train, no more progress. You're not making any more progress in the gym. Another way that we will classically see this is delayed onset to sleep.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It takes me a long time to fall asleep at night. And when I fall asleep, I'm great or I'm okay, or I'm terrible. It doesn't matter, but it takes me a while to fall asleep. Awesome. What about in the wake of the middle of the night? If you get woken up in the night, do you have a really hard time falling back to sleep? Oh yeah. Never going to happen.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Hmm, great, another common thing we see pop up in people. Maybe they fall asleep really fast because they're exhausted, because they've been running on level nine all day, but if they wake up at all in the middle of the night, they'll never go back to sleep. If you look at their heart rate at night, if you look at some down regulation, we have a thing that we use in my sleep company,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
called a wind down index. And you'll see that number is just awful with these people, right? So you'll start to see some signs and symptoms like that. So sleep is a great way to go about it. Another one is, again, the big lack of progress. Like I'm training super hard.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I'm not making progress. Okay, great. And then the other more classic ones like libido, like follow through, like I'm just like not getting stuff done that I used to like, I feel like I'm delaying and procrastinating projects. I never used to do that before. I'd say those are generally like the four or five things that are probably most likely to tip with people.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Or the last one that is less common will happen is just kind of like the feeling of like, I always feel anxious. Like I feel like my heart's like going, I don't even know why. I'm like not even stressed at work right now or whatever. But your system is just so waxed all the time. It never calms back down.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So the solution is, number one, resolve what's causing the problem. If it is truly too much high intensity exercise, take two weeks down. Don't take two weeks off.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I don't care about that end. What I make sure is that physiology is running at its highest level so that you can then deploy those capabilities however you're defining perform in your unique world. So that's why we've been able to gear our laboratory and our coaching programs in that fashion. And we've had success in so many different areas.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Still train. But just don't go to level 10 every time. Can you give me 7 out of 10 for two weeks?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Give me 7 out of 10.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
This is one of the classic signs and symptoms of, there's different terminology than overtraining, but for colloquially what you're referring to, yeah, this is, you will see, for example, testosterone. Testosterone will go down with overtraining almost every time. And it's this exact same pathway that you're in. But let's just continue on your example because I've heard this a thousand times.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah, sure. Not like, okay, let's just say because mentally you won't allow it. Personality, you won't allow it. And by allow it, I mean backing off from training.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah. So a lot to dive into there. Number one would be fine. Again, I've heard this a bunch. And if, for example, you are an athlete, like our NFL players are in the playoffs right now. There is no, hey, let's tone it down for a couple weeks.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Not an option. So we have dealt with this, whether it's just because you're... You're being ridiculous and you won't back off a little bit. Or we have legitimate, we're two weeks from the Olympics. We're not going to back off. Oh, okay. Got it. Fine. No problem. So let's work backwards. What are you willing to do?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If you're not willing to trade off intensity with your exercise, will you trade off intensity somewhere else?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If you block that out, what are my other options? Are you doing something in your personal life that we can take to five out of 10? Are we doing something work-wise that we can take out of five out of 10? I'm not saying forever, again, short periods. Or if you're not willing to back down on stressor intake, you have to ramp up de-stress. Right? So you're not willing to reduce any stress intake.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You have to triple down now on down regulation processes. That's the only other side of the coin that we can play with now. Right. So what's that look like? Fine. You won't give up your training. You're not going to stop the work project. You're going to keep fighting with your friend or whatever you're in the middle of, and you just won't let it go for a week. Cool.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You owe me an hour and a half of focused down regulation every day. hour and a half, no, no, no, stop. Do you want this to get better or not? Like you have to pick something here. An hour and a half is like aggressive, but you get the point here, right? It's not like, okay, I'll do 10 minutes of breath work today. It's not going to be enough.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You have to legitimately do something that gives your system and physiology a chance to back up. What this could look like is maybe I'll give you some physical activity back and you can walk for 30 minutes twice a day with no headphones. No podcast, no stimuli coming in, no music, no talking on the phone. It is reduced arousal. You will have nothing but sympathetic drive coming in all day.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You have to give some processing time. Now, what's interesting that you said about that is if I took your exercise away, your mental health, whatever, however you want to phrase it, would tank. My mood. Sure.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
But you know what I just did in the second thing? What? I just forced you to deal with that. Because I said, we're going to go for a 30 minute walk and you don't get to distract yourself with podcasts and music. Which means what's going to happen in that 30 minute time? You're going to have to process. You're going to have to process things. And that sucks.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
That's why you want to train because you don't want to process.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
All the stuff you're doing in life is distraction. So you don't have to process either emotionally or subconsciously. You don't want to have to process those things. So you're just like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. If I just keep putting things in my ear, I won't have to deal with the things that are between my ears. Right. Now I'm taking that option away. And you have to go deal with it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
The fact that when you say that, and this is not my particular realm, I'm a physiologist, but we have a tremendous amount of behavioral therapists and psychologists and stuff on our teams. And we see this stuff so routinely. I feel a little bit fair to like go at it this way.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
This is exactly what that person, like if you came into our program, if you're in our chair right now, I would be like chuckling. I'd be like, Emily. You're on. Here you go.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Take her. Because we know this story. You've just seen it so many times. Like, I know the thing you're going to say. I know the next excuse you're going to say. Let me guess. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah. Great. We've seen it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
No doubt.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It depends on how silly you want to be here. Let's be really silly, Andy. Now, I'm a physiologist, so I'm going to offend people right now on purpose. It's a joke, everyone. It's just a joke. But I always say that psychology is just misunderstood physiology. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. What I mean by that is, again, it's a joke, okay? Okay, it's not just mental for some people.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
In this case, it can be. But if there are things happening in your metabolism, it can be causing this whole process. So you feel like you have to run all the time, not because you actually have anything going on upstairs, but simply because things like your respiratory rate is greatly exceeding your metabolic input. And so when you feel that mismatch, you don't feel normal.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
When you feel normal then is when you increase your metabolic rate to match your respiratory rate and things are balanced again. And so people that are really addicted to exercise, not always, but a lot of the times, they have this going on. So this is actually a metabolic issue. It's just sending signals that are screaming to you like, you gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go, you gotta go.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And it's not, it feels or can also be expressed as a psychological thing, but it is really at its core, in this case, driven by accelerated metabolism, if you wanna call it that, And you feel mismatched. That's what it is, right? And so what we can do is come backwards and go, yo, let's slow that thing down a little bit. And so you should feel normal at rest as well, but you're not.
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Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So we can match you there. And this is exactly why we see this routinely where people feel more calm, more focused. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Genetics always matter. They matter for everything, right? There is just no world or reality in which me or you could do any training or modality of any kind and all of a sudden be the top athlete in the world in any sport, right? So clearly genetics matter.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Right? Now, all humans have the same genes. We're 99.9% the same. We all have some very slight variations in one of those allele pairs, one from mom, one from dad. And that's what gives us our unique characteristics, right? So we can all have basically the exact same genome, despite the fact that we are all, a billion of us will never be the same person.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So what that means is, yes, genes are there. Genetic testing for the most part for performance perspectives is almost entirely useless. It doesn't tell us much of anything. Where we become unique, different people is at the next level down, which is what we call the proteome. So your genetics are just a potential to create proteins. What are you actually making? What proteins are made?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Thank you. , , , , , ,, in P. P. P. P. P. P,實, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , a a We take your sleep tracker away. We take your morning meditation away. We take your sauna stuff away because you can become hyper fixated on these things. Orthosomnia is very real, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
How are they functioning? That's what we're going to measure, right? That's blood work. That is performance testing. That's a hair sample. That's urine, saliva. It's a VO2 max test. Like all of these laboratory tests or emotional tests, like this is all at the level of the protein as a big kind of easy way to say it. So that is what's going to explain your uniqueness.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
They can. Some people, it doesn't matter. Some people, it's neutral. And some people, it's really deleterious. I've told this story a bunch, and I always tell people I have permission, but I coach a guy named Jon Rahm, one of the top golfers in the world. And he was pretty public about this. He threw that stuff away because it was very clearly making his stuff get worse.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
all other reasons so he's we've gone away from and he is one of the most highly paid athletes in the entire world he is yeah like insanely highly paid we can afford anything with his we can do anything we want technology wise with him and we don't use those things because he was just making things worse perfect yeah exactly right So what do you do with him?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Lots of different things that are specific to what he's doing. But the point I'm trying to make is it's not just about can you afford the technology? Can you afford the test? Because even those things that feel innocuous can be deleterious. I'll actually go back to the very beginning. And this is really important because of things like genetic testing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
There are ample data now that will show pretty clearly that when people have tests done based on their genetics, that they take the information more seriously and they have bigger follow through. Now this is a huge, huge problem because if that information is poor, which it almost always is, then we tend to drive a lot of negative behavior and a lot of problems.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And so the reason I'm bringing that up is people say things like, well, why not do that test? It's only a couple of hundred bucks. You'll get more data and there's no harm. There is harm. There is legitimately harm, even if it's a couple of hundred dollars in a sleep tracker, a couple of hundred dollars for genetic tests.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
That's why I care about that part, right? Because I actually don't really care what genetics you have because if the net genes aren't or not turned on or off, it's not gonna matter. So it's just a potential. It's sort of like saying, okay, I'm gonna invest in your company Well, you're in the space of protein powder. Okay, great. Well, therefore, I'm gonna give you a billion dollars.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Not gonna harm everybody, most people won't, but for some people, there is a risk here. It's not just a couple of hundred dollars. And so you need to be really careful whether you're coaching people or advising people or you're a clinician or it's you yourself. If the product or service is serving you, great, I'm all for it. Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for all I care.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If it is making things worse though, then you need to pay attention to that client. Pay attention to what they're saying and be really careful. Something as simple as a food tracker can really harm some people if they have poor associations and regulations with food. So it's not the technology. It's none of those things that I care about.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It's just you really paying attention and realizing what's actually happening and going, oh yeah, great, great, great. We're going to take the red light away from you. Well, I realize, but no, no, no, no. But just because you right now, it's bad. Right, right, right. That's all it is. That's coaching.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Of course it's okay. In fact, it's, um, I mean, geez, that is a really, I hope it wasn't actually teed up that way from people. That'd be a really terrible message.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Like, whoa, the company could be great, terrible. Like, just because you're in the protein powder space, it tells me nothing about anything else. Like, that's just a stupid level to stop at. So going to the next level of saying like, what's your revenue? What's your, like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Like, that would be what you actually care about. That is the protein level in our world.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah.
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Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I'm saying other people did.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
No, no, no. Okay. Okay. All right. Timeout here. Timeout here. Timeout. Okay. Exercise science 101 here. First and foremost, almost all forms of exercise are great, right? So I don't care what it is in terms of short and long-term health. Okay. In fact, if you look at any amount of data on longevity, lifespan, healthspan, strengthspan, wellnessspan, pick your terms here, you will routinely see
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
The best combination of all exercise over a long span is going to be the blend of something in the world of strength training and something in the world of cardiovascular training. That is unequivocal at this point. It is inarguable at this point. Now, can you hedge towards one over the other a little bit more? Sure.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Of course, if you like to do more endurance and conditioning and if you want to call it cardio work, great. But don't leave strength training off the table. If you're only cycling, only running, I would guarantee you, and as a scientist, I don't like saying things like that, but I would pretty much guarantee you, you're leaving some health and productivity on the table.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And I'd say the same thing about strength training. If you're only lifting weights and you're not doing anything else, I definitely would be comfortable in saying you are leaving health and performance in the short and long-term on the table. Like you're leaving gains there. So how do I blend these two? Well, there is a reality.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If you are trying to maximize any adaptation, you wanna get your legs stronger, you wanna get bigger shoulders, you wanna get more flexible, you wanna run your first marathon, I don't care.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I'm starting off on one side. Okay. Just making sure. If you want to maximize one adaptation, the more you focus on that and nothing else, the faster you'll get to that goal. So if you're like, wow, I want to run a marathon. great, I want to do a half marathon. Then I would say we are going to focus almost exclusively on running moderate to long distances.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Not entirely, but almost exclusively, right? I'm not going to be like, I'll run once a week and let's lift some weights. It'd be a terrible training program. Same thing if you said, I want to squat double body weight for the first time ever. All right, great. We're going to be squatting. This is not rocket science, right? That said...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
When you move past one individual specific goal and you're looking for well-roundedness, I wanna be lean and I wanna have energy and I don't want my joints to hurt and I want, fine, whatever those define you, then we're gonna have a combination of these two things. What you're referring to is what we would often call like a crossover or blocking effect, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Where if you do a bunch of strength training, it's not going to limit your gains in cardiovascular training. Very rarely are lifting weights or plyometrics or power training going to make an endurance athlete worse. Almost always it makes them better. But the opposite isn't true. If you do a bunch of volume conditioning-wise or endurance-wise, this will eventually limit muscle growth, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And so getting to that level is actually what allows us to create those individualized plans. And the way that we think about it, we have a program called Arete, A-R-E-T-E, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Bodybuilders don't run 20 miles a day, very clearly, right? That got blown out of proportion though. And I was as guilty as that many years ago saying the same thing, right? So then this sort of got portrayed as like, hey, if you do any cardio, it's gonna block all your gains. No, it's not. No, it's not at all, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If you're trying to maximize strength, and I mean like really maximize it, not get stronger, I mean like set a world record, get the strongest you've ever been in your life, then you probably don't want to waste a lot of your energy and your recovery capacity on running miles. or swimming miles. Like that just makes a lot of sense.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Save all your energy so that you can truly go in, put a maximum effort in. Any amount of energy you don't have in recovery that you wasted on the treadmill takes away from that goal, right? The same thing for muscle growth. But does that mean you can't jog a couple of miles here and there? Of course you can.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Energy expenditure is a huge component to it. There is a number of review articles that have been published on this My colleague and friend, Dr. Kevin Murak at Arkansas and Jimmy Bagley at San Francisco State published a great one. And it basically said total volume, overall energy intake, the type of exercise you're doing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So things like swimming don't have nearly as much of an interference effect on muscle growth as things like running, because it's an impact on your quads, right? You're trying to grow your quads, but then you're damp. You get the idea. So cycling doesn't have as much of an interference effect. It's not as landing. So all these factors go into it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
In terms of if you're trying to maximize muscle strength or growth. But that said, that running volume has to get pretty high for it to do any amount of interference. How much do you think you need to run to ruin your muscles? Depends on the person. If you don't run and I have you run two miles a day, that's going to crush you, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If you run a lot and you run two miles a day, it might not do anything at all.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
50 to 100 miles a week.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
No, I mean, that word arete has been used a trillion times.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
No, no, no, there isn't. I would say for you, three to four miles a day probably is getting on the line of limiting muscle growth and strength if you're trying to maximize that. So here's what I'd say to you. All right, you want to get, let's get jacked, right? You want to get as big as you can. Like you want to go, you want to put on some muscle right now.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Can we back that off to like two miles a day? Just for the next, say, eight weeks. Great. And after that, we're going to change our focus a little bit. We'll put some miles back in. We'll see if we can maintain this new muscle and strength for as long as we can. But I can't have everything pegged all the way up to the top and then expect progress.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
There you go. Right. Like, and then really was it a, was it this big molecular interference effect or was it the fact that it just took away your training quality? Right. It's not some big sciencey thing. You just didn't train as hard because of it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Of course. Yep. So what you can do in that scenario is a couple of things. Switch the order, train first, get your lift in first, and then you got any juice left, go for your run.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
No.
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Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Not really. Nope.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yes. The easy rule here is priority. Do the thing that is the most important to you when you're the most fresh. And now to be clear, I'm saying most fresh. I'm not saying first in the day.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Some people, a lot of our competitive athletes, they train, like in a couple of weeks, one of my athletes is fighting for a UFC championship in Australia. A girl, Tatiana Suarez, right? Now, she is a main event fighter. When she fights, she fights at like 8 to 9 to 10 p.m. So she doesn't get up and do six o'clock workouts. That would be a terrible time, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You find there's like construction companies and there's mindset books.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So not her specifically, but people like that, we will do their best, most important training session late at night because that's when they're the most fresh. You get up and they train in the morning, they will train, but they're not actually ready to go because they're physiologically peaking at 6 p.m., 7 p.m. Other people are the opposite, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And so it's not just first in the day, it is when are you at your absolute best and that's when we do the most important thing for you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Mentally, physically, all of it, right? Energetically, just like get through our mornings. We take them very slow. We're not up and going. And we are peaking in the evenings.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yep. NBA players, NFL players, like most of our performing athletes, that's how we operate.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It depends on the individual person, but oftentimes they're doing it after the game. After the game. Same thing. What's your priority today? Play the game. Like you're getting $2 million for that game, not for your workout. whatever you're making.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Right. Sure. There's like, no one owns that word. It comes from actual ancient Greek philosophy of reaching your full potential in all areas.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Totally. And now whatever you got left, we'll lift after the game. That's a really common thing in the NBA. Um, major league baseball, it's different. Nobody lifts for the most part after the game. Um, just cause it's, it's so late at night and other things. And, and baseball is a very easy, like physical sport.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah, exactly. Um,
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Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If they're a morning person.
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Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah, so that is when I train always.
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Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Two to three. If I train at six in the morning, I'm a very early riser. I get up really early.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If it's my preference in my world for foreign change in the morning, that's when I like to get up and get going.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
My morning routine is like six minutes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Now I sleep in later now because I have little kids.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And like, there's this different scenario.
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Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Well, but I mean, by that is now like I wake up at six and set it there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
That's all it really stands for.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So like I can have time with them and stuff like that. Right. But like prior to kids, I was definitely a, I want to be up at like four or four 15 most mornings and like, like going right. But even when I get up in the morning, if I train two or three hours after waking up, I can get through it, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to be that great.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I actually like to get up and I'm usually really on. When I wake up in the morning, I'm like ready to go. I'm ready to go. I want to get up. Like I want to, I want to get to work. Like I want to get going on things like knocking stuff out. Like I'm doing a bunch of different stuff. And then I feel great after that. So then I train and then my energy's high. I feel good.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Like everything's out of my brain two or three o'clock in the afternoon.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Okay. I've been obsessed with the word since I was a kid. Oh. Right. I've just loved it. I've used it my whole life and things. So other people have too, but nonetheless. Within that program, we get as detailed as possible with testing so that we can provide a simple, straightforward solution. Okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
No, I feel great.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Uh, if I'm going to get up at four, then I'm going to be a better day. Okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Like energy for different things. So I have a lot of energy at 10, but I'd rather get stuff done work-wise.
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Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah, so right now we are not getting up at four again because of kids.
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Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
My daughter's six and my son's four.
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Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I mean, as you know, it's a magical time that I don't want to miss. So I've changed my lifestyle.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Totally. To be around the kids, which is like fine. Okay, whatever. So I generally get up, always hang out with the kids for a solid like 20 minutes, make breakfast, do all that stuff, just mess around. Then they usually get off and go about their routine. I will take the dogs outside. I live up in the mountains. So I'm going to be in nature within 20 seconds. I'll be in the trees.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And like there's deer around, there's animals around, like there's coyotes, like They're a bear, elk around, like I'm in nature and moving for the most part there. I don't spend very much time out there initially. Like it's a really quick walk. I just get up going and then I get straight to work.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I don't do anything else in the morning, but then get right into work and I feel incredible and I'm usually stoked to get going.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I want to move a little bit. I want to move and I generally want to get like really cold or hot if I can or whatever, like just to get up and get moving. So I've gotten some family time in.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I've gotten food in. I've gotten moving. And now I'm ready to go.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Did you give me them?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
But what I'd say is one general mistake people make with exercise, if you're failing to make progress or hitting your goals, it's oftentimes just a few things. One, you probably don't have any structure to your plan. So people are kind of just like doing whatever they feel like that day and or what we call in the field program hopping.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So you're like, you did this kind of program for a week, and then you did this one or whatever, and there's not enough specificity and then not enough overload over time for you to actually drive any adaptations. So that's generally like problem number one. The second one is because of that or similar to it, it's lack of any true progression.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So you do the same workout at the same intensity, at the same repetition range, in the same range of motion, in the same order for years, and then why would you think you would actually make changes? Your body will get very adapted and accustomed to that. You'll be optimized for it. And because of that, you don't make any progress.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So without going into individual exercises and orders and things like that, because they can vary, the answer can be anything there. In general, if you're following a well-developed plan, at least kind of closely, and you're making some sort of intention for progressive overload, you should be seeing results. If you're not, then you got to go back to those things.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
The way to think about that is you can pick your goal. You want to get rid of your headaches. You want to sleep better. You feel fine. You just want to make sure you're optimizing for longevity. Like whatever the particular thing is you're interested in. Fine. No big deal. All right. The next step then is saying, well, what is the constraint in your physiology?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And if you're doing both of those things and you're not seeing progress, now we're probably at the point of consistency and effort. You're actually trying hard. You're working hard. You're like going hard. And are you doing it for more than a week and then falling off for a week and then doing it for two weeks and then you're missing five days?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
That's just going to be hard to make progress like that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah, this is actually a really cool question. I did an entire podcast on this exact topic.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It's like two and a half hours probably. So you can go into all the details. What are the signs? What are the symptoms? What do I measure? What do I pay attention to? Like, how do I know it? And then what do I do about it? I'll try to condense it into just a couple of minutes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Give me a one minute version of it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
In general, the reason for plateaus is lack of intentional progression. That is simply it. You don't have a plan for how you're going to add weight or reps or many ways you can do it. You just kind of are working. And sometimes you work really hard, but there's no intentional judicious plan of saying this is how we're going to get to that number. Second big thing that causes it is distraction.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And what I mean by that is you did that lift. Oh, and then also you popped into an extra Pilates class this week. And then you did that extra 16 mile hike. And you're like, okay, there's not enough energy reserves left to put the stressor in that intentional spot. And so the body just kind of recovered everything a little bit. There's no intentionality there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You have to train something hard, hard-ish, and then not distract it with other adaptations and other things that deplete energy reserves. So if it's not that, those first two things, then the third big thing that it comes down to is are you making some grand limitation in the other big rocks? You just don't have enough calories. You're not getting enough protein.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You're having big limitations in your sleep or something like that. So if it's not the stress input, which is those first two, then it is the stress output side of it, which is you're not allowing enough recovery capacity to actually build any structural change. So as long as you're taking care of those big things, most people will go right past plateaus.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Number five is if it's not any of those first four, it's just a time issue. The better you get, the more well-trained you are, the longer it takes to make progress. So when we hear people that are pretty well-trained and experienced and like, man, I'm plateaued, I'm plateaued. And I'm like, all right, how long has it been? Oh, it's been three weeks. Okay, that's not a plateau.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
What's the thing that's holding you back the most? What's creating the biggest limitation or problem? Well, you could just start by saying like, well, I'm gonna get really good at hydration or I'm gonna focus on food or I'm gonna do better with meditation. Like there's lots of things you can do. But how do you know which one is gonna make the most impact? You're just guessing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
That is a normal adaptation response time. Oh, it's been three months. How long have you been lifting? 15 years. Three months is nothing then. When we have our Olympic weightlifters and professional powerlifters, and the Olympic weightlifters, for example, are training for the Olympics, if we saw a gain every three months, we'd be breaking world records.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You plan the four years out and saying we're trying to get a peak at the end of this four years. So that's a pretty extreme example. But when you get really to the end of your strength spectrum or whatever you're after, it just takes a long time. And so you're probably not at a plateau. You're just at a level of where we can't perceive the progress.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
The increments are going slower than we realize, right? So if you want to think about it this way, you've gained a half a pound of strength. But how can I see that in the weight room?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
That's exactly right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yep.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
That's exactly right.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yep. So now you have to just be a little more patient in your progress and realize that, yeah, when you first started your journey, you were losing five pounds every week or every time you went to the gym, you were adding more weight. Well, again, did you think that that was going to last forever and you were going to break world records by year one? Right. Like just do the basic math there.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You'd be squatting 6,000 pounds by next year.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Not going to happen, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You know, people will always say this. You don't make progress in the gym. Your progress comes at home, which is the way of saying like nothing will change, whether we're talking about gaining muscle, losing fat, neuroplasticity, enhanced, like you pick the physiological adaptation and it does not happen during the stimulus. It happens post-stimuli. So how important is recovery?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Like it is the only opportunity you actually have to make a change.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And you might guess right occasionally, but we would prefer the method of saying, well, let's test everything, identify what the biggest constraint or what we call performance anchor is. And now I can give you a program that is hyper-specific to that issue. And so in this particular case, I might say, hey, Jen, you know what? Like meditation is great. It's awesome. We love it all.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It's a hard one to answer without saying similar things as I've said before, where it depends on what that person's limitation is. Could be sleep, could be nutrition. It could be down regulation. Those are the big ones that pop up. I'd say on aggregate, people just don't sleep as well as they think they do.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And I'd say the thing that will make the biggest impact in progress that is the most consistent problem is sleep. Generally, people even that think that they're sleeping okay are not. Or even I would say is okay sleep might be okay enough for regular people. But if you're trying to perform at your best, okay sleep is not enough.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And we see really big progress gains when people go from like okay sleep to really good sleep.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah. I mean, there's kind of like a handful of big categories for sleep. You can bucket it this way. You can think about physiology. This could be strictly a physiology problem. If you're not making appropriate neurotransmitters If any number of things in your physiology are off, high or low, this is gonna directly affect sleep. So it could be a physiology issue.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It could be psychological, of course, as you're alluding to. It could be pathology. There are a ton of people that have clinical or subclinical sleep disorders that don't realize it. In fact, the numbers are crazy. It's something like 30 to 50 million people have clinical sleep disorders and don't know it. Over 80% of sleep disorders go undiagnosed.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It's really, really, really problematic and people don't realize it. And then within that, again, there are subclinical ones, which means you don't qualify for a technical disease. This is people who have said things like, I went to a sleep clinic, I got testing, and they said I have like mild sleep apnea.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Well, almost surely you have a whole host of fixable things going on, but you didn't meet a clinical diagnosis for that clinical disease, something you didn't get much help, right? So there's a ton of things we can do that are super easy to fix that will change people's lives that fall below that threshold. The fourth component of good sleep then is your environment.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So there's a whole host of things in your physical environment that people do not even realize. Everyone knows about temperature. Everyone knows about light and sound. It's all the other stuff going on in your environment that people are oblivious to that can be the single thing that is tormenting your sleep and you just have no idea. The smell.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
the CO2 concentration in the area, the way that the air flows through your room, sounds coming from your partner. We have fixed an enormous amount of sleep disorders in people that had nothing wrong with their sleep. It is all because of a disorder in their partner and neither one of them had any idea about it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So that's the type of stuff where we can go, we can fix A, B, and C. It's a passive fix oftentimes. And they're like, I just, I thought I had this stuff going on and you didn't have it. I thought my testosterone was low. I thought I was going, I just middle...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You just had shitty sleep. Yeah, you just had this thing going on in your physical environment and you can do all the down regulation and meditation you want. It's not going to fix the fact that this thing is in the air in your bedroom and it's tanking your sleep.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yep, we do that. What the hell is that? So this is my company, Absolute Rest. Okay. We run full clinical grade sleep studies on people from their house. So you never have to go to a sleep hospital ever again. We can do the whole thing from your house and we can do 50 nights if you want.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And so is red light therapy and so is walking in age. All those things are awesome. But you right now specifically need additional B6 and 15 more minutes of cardiovascular exercise a day. Great. Everything else is good too. You can also do that, but you will get the most impact out of, and I just made those examples.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Instead of having to worry about like, you slept weird that one night when you're in the hospital and someone was watching, like, of course. Of course you're gonna sleep terrible in a sleep clinic, right? So it's super easy for us to just go in and send all this equipment to your house and run these sleep tests on you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So what happens with the full sleep test is we're running everything from, we're detecting if your mouth is moving at night to your chest, to your stomach, we're running EEG analysis, direct brainwave analysis of your brain. We're taking blood and saliva and doing a whole host of testing there. What you're referring to is in addition to all that, we're looking and we're scanning your environment.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So we have a full-time, real-time analysis of all the particulate matter that's in your air, any dander, allergens, pollen, CO2 concentrations, anything like that that's in the atmosphere of your room. And that's all synced up directly against your sleep data. So if we see things like, well, you're moving a lot at this particular time, we can look back and go, oh, interesting.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
We saw this particular matter got really high in the air, and this had nothing to do with bruxism or anxiety or anything else. This was an actual environmental factor that was stuffing up your nose, causing you to breathe through your mouth a bunch, which then looked like it was causing sleep apnea or whatever the case is, and it was just an environmental factor.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
No. The only way to do it is to go through our full absolute rest program.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Depending on your definition of expensive.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
A little bit more than. I mean, you're going to go through this. You meet directly with scientists. It's not a sleep test, by the way. It is a full coaching program. So you go through all this testing, and then we run experiments. We test things. We change things. We see if it's actually working rather than just being like, you have sleep apnea. Go do these things and sort of good luck.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It's a full coaching program.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
No, you can't. And the reason for that is a couple of things. Number one, it won't tell you anything because it's just telling you about your environment.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Whether that is actually making an impact on your sleep, you don't even actually know. Right, right, right, right. And then secondly, we actually did that for a little bit where we let people do that and it caused so many problems with people freaking out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And we were like, all right, like,
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah. So they're running, because we do this with our like athletes and stuff when they go on the road. It's like you test the hotel rooms. We take care of all these things ahead of time. Our performer, high performing, like executives are traveling, stuff like that. And when people didn't have that with proper context, they were honestly overemphasizing the environment thing and freaking out.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And we're just like, all right, no more of this because it's not always true. There can be things going on.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah. As you're seeing with all of our stuff, we generally just want to help people. And we don't want to upsell things and put people in this fear. And when we feel like something's doing that, then we're generally going to take it away.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
We don't have a physical facility. It's all remote.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Sort of, yeah. We actually just send people to you. So we send someone to your house and take care of everything remote. So it doesn't matter where in the country you are. We take care of it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Very reasonable tasting. Oftentimes these things taste terrible.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Right. Okay. So let me clarify what we're saying there. Number one, the amount of markers we take is a little bit dependent upon situations and scenario, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
This is basically exactly what all of our non-athletes say. Exactly. So our athletes will come in and have a very specific thing that they're after for the most part. And then all of our non-athletes are, you know, oftentimes your answer. Our analysis process takes about two months to get through. So we do, I said, an extraordinary amount of testing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
We come from, and this program was built on situations like the Olympics.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Yeah, beyond that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Professional athletes where you have one shot. I don't have, hey, go try this and come back in eight weeks and let me know how you're feeling.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And then we'll just run this for three or four years and eventually your career's over. Right, right, right. Exactly. Right. In addition to people saying, look, I have more... money than I have time. So I don't want to wait three or four years for these headaches to go away. I can't wait two years for me to stop having diarrhea all the time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Like I'd rather spend an extra a hundred dollars to do more testing that maybe we didn't need then wait six months and then come back and say, okay, now let's try this additional. Right. Like this trial and error thing. Totally. Right. We just said, what if we can go past all that and just get as much stuff as we can possibly get done initially. So it takes a couple of months.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Some people get done in two weeks, but on average it takes a couple of months. Now, what does that involve? It's a little bit different, but just making up as a direct example. It's everything from a ton of blood work, urine. How much blood work? Like how many markers are you checking? Directly, we're probably going to test 115.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
But off of that, we're going to run over 20,000 calculations on those. And why I'm saying that is it's not the marker. It's not, where's your free testosterone? Where's your cortisol? Where's your sodium? Blah, blah, blah. In addition to that, you have a whole bunch of calculations. You have relationships. You have patterns that you can recognize within that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And so this is when people have traditionally gotten blood work done, they'll look at a single marker and say that marker is high or that marker is low. Now they're saying that's high or low based on a number of problems. In other words, they look at the sheet and the sheet says that number is green, then I must be good.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Well, just be careful because I already speak a lot and I go quickly. So if you speak up at all, this might get worse for everybody.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Or that number says I'm red, like I must be bad. Well, there's a whole host of issues with this approach. First and foremost is the fact that what you're being compared against is called a reference range. So if you look at your albumin or your sodium, pick your favorite marker here. And it says, oh, your albumin is 7.0.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
They're going to be like, wow, you're really, really high because the average person, 95% of people will be within four to five. What's albumin? What is that? It's a protein. It is one example, but it's a protein that carries around carbon dioxide through your body. Cortisol has a whole bunch of transportation. It to me is reason I bring it up is it's my favorite marker of all things in the world.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
It's on every blood test you've ever gotten done. Almost nobody has ever seen their albumin out of normal, but it will still tell you everything that's going on in your body. So it's the one I pick because people go, oh, look, my albumin is normal. And I'll be able to tell them actually it's not. Like really consistently.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Because albumin is what's called an acute phase reactant, which means it's going to change in response to dehydration and inflammation. But it does it the opposite. So if you are dehydrated, albumin is going to go down. But if you're inflamed, it goes up. So guess what?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
If you're slightly dehydrated and slightly inflamed, albumin will be smack in the middle.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
This is what I'm saying. You can't just look at the numbers and go, oh, everything's fine. Because it's not. I can look directly at your albumin. It can be perfectly right within that reference range. That's not a normal population group, by the way. It's not a healthy group of people. You're not in the population database that we create reference ranges from, right? You're way above it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
But nonetheless, you'll still be right in the middle. And then this is exactly what happens when people go, oh, I got my labs done and I looked pretty good.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You have to then, in this particular case, look at things like sodium, potassium, carbon dioxide, a ton of other things that are all still going to be the way, by the way, within the reference range. But if sodium is trending a little bit low, still within the green, potassium is a little bit high, carbon dioxide is a little below, you can start to see these patterns are going
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You're actually A, B, C, D, E, and F. Plus we ask you some questions and you're talking about how sometimes you get a little bit constipated. Oh, and then on the afternoons, you feel like you're getting a little additional brain fog. We tracked your hydration markers and you're slightly dehydrated.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Now we know that being dehydrated by as little as 1% can have significant, both clinical and statistically significant reductions in physical performance and cognitive capacity, mood, arithmetic, retention, sleep, all things like that. So I can look within the labs and go every single thing on your labs is within the reference range. You don't have a clinical disease, Jen.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
You don't have a disease. But this is why you're performing slightly suboptimally.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
In that particular case, it might be you're just slightly dehydrated. But not that day. Because we'll see that, right? It's not like, oh, you didn't drink enough water.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
No, no. So we'll see that in your blood as well. We have a number of short term, medium and long term markers to let us cross reference and go, oh, you know what? Actually, we're seeing dehydration for her, but her medium and long term markers are fine. So she just didn't drink enough water that day. False finding. Don't worry about it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Some of them. Some of them change very acutely. Okay. Some of them are very chronic. And that's why you need to have a combination of both and be able to look at that independently and say, yeah, yeah, again, she's a little bit active. It could be sick. It could be trained or worked out really hard. Could be the food you had the night before.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
Depending on what you're looking at in any host of functional areas. Right. Then you have to be able to cross-reference, again, short-term and long-term as well as symptomology. So how are you feeling? We're seeing some signs here of poor sleep. Oh, my sleep's tremendous. Oh, okay. Then maybe it's normal for your physiology.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
So you have to be able to match this entire thing, which honestly kind of goes back and answers your original question. When you say you don't treat the individual markers, this is exactly what I'm referring to. So we will almost always look at somebody's blood And we'll hear this all the time. Again, I've had a bunch of blood work done. Nothing's ever showed up really great.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
And we can look at it and go, boom, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And we actually do this as like, I do it all the time in like live seminars. We'll just like pull somebody's blood randomly. I don't know, you pull it up or whatever. And like, just watch us start telling you about your life. And they're like, what the? Are you serious? It's right there in your blood. Like no one's ever told me that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
I'm like, yeah, because there's a different level of interpretation. from what we call high performance perspective. And so again, these are things that if you have a disease, I'm not gonna touch it. I'm not a medical doctor. I'm gonna say, you need to go talk to a doctor. Like you might have a disease. But this is high performance.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 431: Dr. Andy Galpin: Why Fitness Trackers and Bloodwork Are Misleading You
This is stuff that is still usually within the reference range or pretty close or subclinical, but it doesn't mean it's not affecting how you're living and feeling and performing. And that's what we do.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So we understand what we're trying to do with the nutrition or the micronutrient why they solve those problems, and then ultimately how that translates into reduction or elimination of these symptoms. So what's actually happening in the brain when we experience any of these three levels of a brain injury?
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
There's a couple of resources I want to give you if you want to learn more about this right now. I based a lot of this episode heavily off of these papers, so I want to give them their due credit. They will of course be linked and PDFs will be available in the show notes. You can find those at performpodcast.com.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
There are obviously many factors that go into getting your brain to perform at its best. But today I want to focus specifically on what you can do from a nutrition perspective to reduce your risk of, as well as recover faster from brain injuries, concussions, and TBIs. I think it's worth reminding you though, that if it's good for preventing and returning faster from a brain injury,
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But for those of you who want to write it down right now, a paper that I found particularly helpful came out just last year in 2023, and that is titled, Optimization of Nutrition After Brain Injury, Mechanistic and Therapeutic Considerations.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In addition to that, my friend and colleague, Dan Garner, has a product available for purchase on Amazon called the Brain Synergy Protocol, and I will talk about that a little bit later. And then finally, I honestly took the vast majority of this episode off of a paper that I co-authored, and that's, depending on when you're listening to this, either in review or potentially published by now.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
called Mitigating Traumatic Brain Injury, A Narrative Review of Supplementation and Dietary Protocols. This was led by Tommy Wood, the fantastic neuroscientist at the University of Washington, and was first authored by Federica Conti, another tremendous neuroscientist in her own right. So they did the bulk of the work here.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We contribute on this paper together, and I thought it was honestly so perfect. for a show that I thought I'm just gonna take this entire thing and make a whole episode out of it. But nonetheless, let's get into the paper right now. So what's actually happening in your brain when you experience an injury?
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Typically, we've been told that when you have some sort of injury, you have to go through this whiplash experience. So you have to say a sudden stop, your brain inside your skull continues to travel and then smashes up against your skull, and then therefore has a bruise on the brain. And while that certainly can happen, that's actually probably pretty unlikely.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Generally, what's going to happen if that occurred is you would see the injury site being on the outside. So you can imagine, let's just say the front of your brain smashes into the front of your skull. You would expect the injury to be right on the front, on the outside part of your brain. The reality of it is that's not where most... Concussions and TBIs occur.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It generally happens more towards the middle of the brain. Remember, the outside of the brain is where your gray matter is. That's mostly where your neurons are. On the inside is the white matter that's made of mostly fat, and it helps you conduct messages more quickly throughout the brain. See, what typically happens in brain injuries is you get more of what I call the accordion effect.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so you have so much fluid in your brain that if you were to slosh it around a little bit, there's not much room to slosh. And so it protects your brain from hitting the skull. But what can happen though is an intense pressure inside the tissue because it squeezes together and then gets expanded back out.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Picture the accordion here, me taking my two hands, putting them closer together, smashing it, pulling it back apart. And so you have this kind of egg-looking oval that is supposed to be your brain, and it gets smashed down into a vertical piece of paper, and then extended way back out and stretched, and so on and so forth.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So it's not the actual connection or contact to the skull that is always the issue. Sometimes it's that stretching and pulling and that pressure wave that causes the damage on the interior or various portions of the brain. And so the injuries are highly varied in the brain. It can be everything from a capillary or blood flow supply that is damaged or torn. The axon themselves can be torn.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
This then causes a host of issues that we'll get into step by step. But it's everything from temperature problems, energy problems, metabolism problems, inflammation, and physical structural damage. So many different options that can occur, but that's basically what happens for most, but not all. This is obviously a complicated area. I don't mean to oversimplify it.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's probably safe to assume it's also good for brain performance as well as long-term health. Now I'm particularly passionate about this subject having dealt with it a lot personally. I've had a concussion or two myself and I've spent much of my career working with athletes prone or at high risk of developing similar injuries.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
depending on if you had a single event, say a car crash or a single slip and fall, or numerous sub-concussive events. Think of blast injuries in folks in the military, small impacts with combat athletes or other people in professions that kind of bang their head a little bit, don't necessarily get huge symptoms, but they have a lot of these stack over time. All of it results in different problems.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I'm just trying to highlight a small example of what it can look like as a quick overview. That being said, there are some generalities and commonalities between different forms of TBIs, and I'll just cover them broadly right now. The top of our list here is what's called comprised excitotoxicity.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I'll explain what that means later, but this is arguably one of the bigger problems you will experience. There are ionic disturbances, so your positive and negative charges get all messed up. There are blood flow to the brain that's called cerebral blood flow, edemas and swellings, oxidative stress, inflammation.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And then, as I mentioned before, even damage or even death in the cells that are directly in the brain or related to the brain. That can actually be going on acutely for weeks or even months to decades throughout life. So I can't go over all of this. It would take me the entire show, if not many.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But I do want to cover a couple of very specific examples so you can start to grasp what this could look like. The first one is just if you've had capillaries burst. So remember, you have capillaries that surround all tissue in your body and that's where all of your blood exchanges happen. So you have this network and this bed of capillaries that surround your brain.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
When those burst, you can't get nutrients and fuel in, and you can't get waste products out. And so the most fundamental problem here is you don't get oxygen to the brain. So we lose cerebral blood flow, we lose energy production because we're not getting fuel in the brain because we've physically torn capillaries.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If this was on your arm like it is on mine right now, you might have a purple and black arm. Thank you, Cam Haines. But in your brain, you wouldn't see that. This goes right back to the invisible disease problem from earlier. More detailed example would be the following, though. Oftentimes, we'll break up TBIs into what we call the initial response and then the delayed or phase two response.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So let's say you had some sort of direct hit. Again, pick your example. It might look something like this. Your initial response would be an over-activation of the neurons. That's right. The nerves that are associated with the injury area become overly activated. Now this initial response is caused in large part by what's called over-activation of neighboring neurons.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So you remember all the nerves connected one to one to one, they're not actually physically connected. There's a small space in between them. And they communicate by releasing what's called neurotransmitters. So what happens in this area is you have a damage to one, it over-communicates to the next one, and you get way too much neuron activity.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
This includes football players, wrestlers, fighters, boxers, and so forth. That said, those are not the only people at risk of a brain injury. In fact, those things are quite common and not only in athletes. So I'm really excited about this topic because brain injuries are really common. They can be completely debilitating.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
That's called over-excitation, okay, or excitotoxicity, because you're excited so much that it comes to the level of toxicity. And excited being the neurons being too active. Now, this happens in large part because of a molecule called glutamate. You'll see this all over the TBI literature, supplementation, marketing. Very common to be talked about because it is very real and very important.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's the main neurotransmitter that's responsible for this excitatory activity. Now this gets released. In response to that, we have a whole downstream cascade of problems. And this starts off as an initial response, and then I'll show you how this turns into that delayed phase response later. So we have this overexcitation.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, if you go back to our episode on muscle, you'll learn more about how nerves and cells contract, why sodium and calcium and potassium and chloride are responsible for action potentials and so on and so forth. For now, sodium and calcium very specifically become overly activated. In fact, you literally oftentimes have damage to the plasma membrane.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So the little thing that surrounds your cells gets damaged, it gets broken. And so because of that, the things that are supposed to be in the cell and things that are not supposed to come in the cell start leaking everywhere. So sodium and calcium start coming in and out of the cell in inappropriate manners.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now this causes things that are eventually going to be cell death and degradation because of production of what's called ROS. ROS is R-O-S, a reactive oxygen species. So remember, oxygen is very reactive. It is good and bad. You have to have oxygen for fuel, allow you to create fuel rather. It's a byproduct needed to make aerobic metabolism.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
At the same time, excessive amounts of it are going to be damaging. This is how we break down tissue. This is how we create and clean out dead and debride cells. And so if we're generating way too much of this reactive oxygen species, this is almost synonymous every time with oxidative stress. These are kind of similar terms, not the exact same thing, but pretty close.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
This also activates several enzymes that damage the cell structure. These are everything from what we'll call proteases, so an anase is an enzyme that breaks down a protein, to lipases, these are enzymes that break down fats, nitric oxides, synthases, and endonucleuses, and other things like that. A whole cask of enzymes that start breaking the thing down.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
You don't know exactly what's happening here, but the cell thinks that there's problems, because there are, and so it just starts activating cell death. So we're having issues with that. In addition to that, that calcium specificity becomes a problem because it alone harms mitochondrial health and efficiency. And so the cells that do stay alive start getting really damaged mitochondria.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
This is, again, because of a membrane damage issue that allows too much permeability of things in and out. And that Of course, eliminates or drastically reduces mitochondria's ability to work, which means your ability to make ATP. Remember, ATP is the cellular currency. It's the only way any living cell can create energy. And so mitochondria is not the only way we can make ATP. Hold on to that.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We're going to come back to that. But it is a primary way, and it is the exclusive way in which we generate aerobic metabolism. So the way that we create fuel... with oxygen has to go for mitochondria. So damaged or ineffective mitochondria is going to directly lead to reduced ATP production. Reduced ATP production simply means we have way more cellular energy in our brain.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And there's actually a lot of evidence that nutrition and supplementation can have a big effect. And again, both reducing your risk of getting one as well as coming back faster once they've happened. And so I really want to make sure everyone knows what their options are from a supplementation as well as whole food perspective.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
This idea of brain fog or fatigue or can't remember things, recall, executive decision, if you don't have energy, your brain can't think. That's quite literally what's happening. This is why some of the supplements and micronutrients we're going to talk about later have such positive effect, is they help you restore what's called that energy balance.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
The damage occurred, you weren't able to get transportation of oxygen and things in, this allowed permeability of calcium, this allowed too much excitation, which means we're burning too much energy. At the same time, we don't create enough energy, and so we end up being in this really catabolic or negative energy state.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And now we can't think well, we're dealing with signs and symptoms, and overall, more importantly, our brain is actually physically unhealthy. And so because your brain is measuring energy production at all times, it knows this imbalance is occurring, it's going to try to alleviate it. And the best way to do that is to ramp up energy production.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But since it can't do it aerobically, it has to turn to anaerobic methods. And specifically what we're talking about here is anaerobic glycolysis. One more time, go back to our previous episode, I believe it was episode two on muscle, and we talk about the physiology and bioenergetics of how we use carbohydrates for fuel. It's the same.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We're in the brain here, we're not in muscle, but anaerobic glycolysis is still anaerobic glycolysis. It's still the breakdown of carbohydrates for the production of ATP. So in this particular case, since the ability to store glucose in the brain is quite limited, and the amount that we can get into the brain through the blood-brain barrier is also somewhat limited,
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If we're only or mostly relying upon anaerobic glycolysis, you can quickly see we're not going to be able to handle all the supply because not only does the brain take an enormous amount of energy, it's in fact, depending on the situation, our most energy costly organ in the body, and now it's injured and it has more energy demands to recover and it has less energy production,
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
we're going to be really running into problems with our energy deficit. So to summarize all that, effectively what's happening here is you've got this disrupted cell homeostasis. This leads to all kinds of problems like cell death or apoptosis, DNA fragmentation, necrosis, cytoskeletal degradation, and a whole host of other things that are short and long-term. And that's just the phase one part.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
That's the initial response. From there, and once we've dealt with that, we now have to handle step two or the delayed or second phase, which is generally associated with neuroinflammation and prolonged oxidative stress. So what we're talking about here is this pervasive inflammatory cascade that is in combination with our metabolic changes specifically to the blood-brain barrier.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now remember, that's the thing that keeps things out of your brain and in your body and kind of keeps the separation there. If we've got a brain injury, we potentially have damage to that membrane as well. And so we've got excessive inflammation happening, not even talking about the acute response. Now it's staying there and persisting for days, weeks, months, or potentially even longer.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
This causes a migration of what's called peripheral immune cells into the brain and releases a whole storm of cytokines. These are communication tools that come out of your body from one organ to the next. They're not necessarily good or bad, but in this case, it's so large and it's so extreme that it continues to exacerbate this inflammatory problem.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
on getting back and returning as fast as possible and minimizing the symptoms of brain injuries. Now, as I was saying, traumatic brain injuries, or what we'll refer to as TBIs, are really common. In fact, a lot of people in the field refer to them as the invisible disease because they don't come with a physical appearance.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
This also causes activation of things that are called residual neural cells. There's a whole host of these things like astrocytes, complement proteins, and so on. These things release reactive oxidative species, they release that glutamate again, and they release those cytokines. And so you can see how this circle just sort of perpetuates itself.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's not always a bad response, but in this particular case, since there's been so much structural damage, one more time, the cycle just continues. This is gonna really harm the brain's healing. It's gonna facilitate formation of what are called membrane attack complexes. You could just hear from that term.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
That's probably not a good thing again We're trying to clean out the damage, but it's gonna come with a lot of problems This is gonna create like very specifically pores in the membranes of the target cells Which means those are gonna often die now in the case of like a skeletal muscle from exercise. This is okay It's pretty easy to repair But when it's happening in your brain
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's a problem, right? So overall, we've got that oxidative stress response, and that's gonna start damaging fat, protein, and DNA, remember. A big portion of your brain is made of fat. So while we're typically not concerned about oxidative stress harming all the fat in the rest of our body, that represents a serious damage to our brain and one that potentially is not reversible.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now I know I got pretty technical there. So if I lost any of you, don't worry about it. Just think about it this way. At the highest level, TBI is going to involve some likelihood of a physical injury or damage. This could be your capillaries or any of your vessels, your blood brain barrier, your membranes of your cells, your astrocytes, your neurons are actually physically torn.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If you were a house, this would mean your windows are smashed, your door is broken, you got a hole in a wall. It's not a functionality issue as it is an actual structure is broken and has to be repaired. Now, in addition to that, we're going to be dealing with a secondary problem, which is now because we don't have the physical structure to get in nutrients and get waste out, we can't make energy.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So problem number two is a massive energy deficit. Your brain's going to try to get around it. It's going to start ramping up our less effective methods of producing energy, but it's never going to catch up. And so physical damage, number one, energy deficit, number two. Number three in response to number one and two is this prolonged inflammatory response.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so we're sending in molecules that let the inflammation continue and they exacerbate it and they start breaking down and killing and getting rid of actual tissue. And so the ones that maybe were not injured initially will be injured or removed entirely in the weeks to months because of this inflammatory response. So effectively, those are our three big problems.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
There's no cut, there's no bruise or joint sticking the wrong way, bone poking out of the skin. And so these things can happen and you don't necessarily know that an injury occurred. Other problems include the fact that the symptoms that are associated with a TBI or concussion are really similar to those generally associated with aging.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
which means now we can talk about what nutrition options we have to solve or mitigate or at least attenuate, slightly reduce some of those issues. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Momentous. Momentous makes supplements of the absolute highest quality.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Again, that's mauinuivenison.com slash perform for 20% off. Let's jump right into it with our very first nutrient compound, and that's creatine monohydrate. You're probably sick of hearing me talk about it because I've been doing it for so many years, but it's for good reason. There's so much data on it. It is by far the most widely studied sports supplement, and it's not even close.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's been studied in every population, healthy, diseased, young, old, men, women, kids, so on and so forth. And there's really very limited side effects, if any, that have been reported. Now creatine itself is a naturally occurring derivative of three very specific amino acids, methionine, glycine, and arginine. These are really, really common.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So you talk about memory recall issues, mood, sleep, and other things that people don't necessarily know are because of an injury, and they may think it's just due to normal aging.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Creatine itself, I typically have talked about how it's stored in muscle and used as a great fuel source. But many people don't realize it's actually also stored in your liver, testes, and brain. The last one, of course, is where we're gonna pay our attention to today. Now it's stored in the brain so that it can be used as a very quick fuel source. Your gears should be turning at this point.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Remember, one of the primary issues we have with the TBI is that energy demand problem. And so it made a ton of sense to scientists very early on to say, okay, we know that we have energy issues. We know that the fastest way any of our tissues can make energy is through creatine monohydrate. And we know it's in store in the brain already. It makes sense to try that.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
to both prevent or reduce the risk of and then treat brain injuries. So it's no surprise when we look at the research here on both TBI as well as aging and normal brain health research to find that creatine monohydrate often improves cognitive function in both brain injury and normal healthy aging folks.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, it's not the world's most powerful nootropic, but it is effective and been shown again in many models and many studies across many laboratories. So because it's so effective at giving energy, especially in low oxygen situations, you'll see evidence across injury and TBI papers, but also just normal cognitive function in healthy individuals out to see benefit, right?
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So creatine is effective in all of those populations, and the physiology, biochemistry make total sense. Now, specifically regarding TBIs and concussions, one of the things you want to pay attention to a lot is what's called the second impact syndrome. Many people have not heard of this, but this is the basic idea of repeated head blows cause more damage, as time goes on.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In fact, we'll get into this a lot as the episode progresses, but a lot of the research on brain health with aging, Alzheimer's, dementia, and other related topics come from the same data sets that we work on for TBIs and concussions, and the inverse.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so one of the things that's been shown with creatine is it is really effective for that second impact syndrome. More specifically, it's been shown that the repeated head blows cause more damage if the creatine is depleted prior to the additional impacts. Okay, so imagine you had one single impact, the more creatine depletion you have, the worse damage you get if you have a secondary impact.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
This is any athlete that's going to be in sparring or competitions where we're getting a lot of impacts. This is military or special forces or anything like that that is getting low impact repeated exposures or blasts. The more creatine depletion that happens, the worse the damage in your brain that occurs after the second or repeated impact. So right there,
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
we can see that if you've had an injury, making sure your creaking stores are replenished as quickly as possible is really important if we're going to continue in that exposure. Now, that's important because many people don't recognize or realize the first injury happened to begin with. Most of them are unreported. Most don't realize it. Hard to diagnose.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so prophylactically, it just maybe makes some sense to make sure that you're taking care of business, not necessarily just when you have an injury, but if you even think you're at risk or in high-risk situations or prior to high-risk exposures or competitions.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
All right, good example of this, there's a pretty famous study, I think it was in high school, football players, high school or college, but nonetheless, football players, American football, that is, that did indicate that creatine stores in their brain, I think specifically in the motor and prefrontal cortex, reduced over the course of the season.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, this is not a perfect study design, but you can see what this is alluding to. If you're in a situation, again, with repeated head impacts over the course of a season, The number of impacts, in fact, maybe I'll back up quickly. In this particular study, what they did is they filmed the games. And so what they measured is, for each individual player, how many head contacts they had.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But there was an association between those players that had more head impacts, not even necessarily injuries, and the level of creatine reduction in the brain over the course of the season. So again, we're making some assumptions here, but I think it's fair to at least say it's plausible
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
The more impacts on your brain, the more creatine is reduced, potentially the higher risk you are for second impact syndrome injuries. Now, before we go any further with the creatine research, I need to do a quick pause and explain to you what I mean when I say strong evidence or weak evidence. There's no perfect way to do that.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So there's a huge overlap or event diagram between the types of research, the study design, the actual papers themselves, the interventions, the models, whether we're talking about data from humans or animals and rats and ferrets and things like that. There's a large overlap between these two bases. They're different, of course, and we'll try to highlight those.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
but an easy way to roughly understand is called the strength of evidence scale. So I will abbreviate that and the rest of today's episode by just calling it the SOE, the strength of evidence. This takes into account research design, the quality of the relevant studies, the applicability to patient care, and a number of other factors.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's up to you ultimately to decide what is an actionable level of evidence or not. Some people that are maybe suffering from a brain injury consider a study in animals to be enough, and others wanna see a randomized controlled trial in humans. That's not for me to decide, that's up to you, but I do wanna share with you where the level of evidence is, and you can make your choice from there.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So the SOE is on a scale of one to five. A score of one is the best. That is the highest score possible. This means we see consistent results across multiple studies. You've seen it in both randomized control trials as well as systematic reviews and so on and so forth. A score of say four or five would be the opposite. That would be our lowest score.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Maybe there's evidence there, but it's from case studies or case control studies. Maybe it's mechanism only or some other model that's close. Maybe research from aging or dementia. Not the same as brain injury, but it shares some mechanisms. You get the idea here. So for example, the SOE for creatine monohydrate is a two. My opinion personally, that's pretty good.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Summarizing the collective evidence here, there's been a lot of research on everything from kids to rugby players to mountain bikers. And collectively, you're going to see it supports cognitive health. It's been shown actually in psychiatric disorders.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
There's, I believe, two randomized control trials that I'm aware of that have found five grams of creatine per day added in addition to antidepressant treatments improve depressive symptoms. So take that for what you will. Regarding TBIs and brain injuries, there's an argument we can make here for preventative use, specifically for neuronal damage and injury.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
There's been shown to reduce cortical damage following a TBI by anywhere between 35% to 50%. That'd be 5-0. Pretty substantial amount there. Should catch your attention. They don't know exactly how it works, but it's thought to prevent some of that mitochondrial dysfunction I was talking about a few minutes ago. Helps maintain the membrane health.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Certainly has a role in fending off that downstream reactive oxygen species, ATP, calcium. So a lot of those things we just got done covering. That's why we covered them. Creatine probably has a role, again, we need more information here, but likely has a role in either eliminating or at least drastically reducing some of those issues.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And finally then, what you care more about is the downstream TBI effects have also been documented. What I mean here is sleep, cognition, and actual mood seem to be enhanced with the creatine. Furthermore, there's actually some studies that have specifically been done on kids. There's one I'm thinking of, In detail here, that was everything from 1 to 18 year olds that had severe TBIs.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In this particular paper, they gave them 0.4 grams per kilogram of body weight. If you do the math there, that ends up being a pretty standard dose, but appropriately it was done based on body size. You have two year olds and 18 year olds, so we can't give them all just five grams. So a relative dose was given to them within four hours post-injury and done so for six months.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But these are some of the reasons why I want to get in today's episode, even if you're not an athlete. Because many of you are still at risk of getting a TBI. In fact, the vast majority of concussions and TBIs do not come from sports. They come from accidental slips and falls and other problems like that.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In that particular study, they found improvements in everything from amnesia to the length of stay in the ICU, improvements in communication, locomotion, and social skills. And more importantly, one of the things I loved most about this was the researchers were clear in the fact that the treatment provided costs significantly less than the standard treatment protocol.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And this is something I felt was really important because I know supplements are not cheap and many of you can't afford any cost whatsoever. But if you can, while creatine, I know, I know I hear this all the time, has gotten more expensive in recent years, it's still likely far cheaper than a standard hospital protocol. So if you can possibly afford it, seems to be a pretty good option.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Another thing I want to point out here, because it comes up all the time as well, in this study, again, remember, kids, six months of creatine, there were no signs of any kidney, liver, or heart side effects. So overall, we would deem creatine as a pretty strong chance of success in both the physiology as well as actual symptoms with a very low likelihood of injury or adverse effects.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
For me personally, I wouldn't hesitate to give this to one of my kids if they have it. It's entirely up to you to make your choice. I'm not advocating you do anything that you don't wanna do or are uncomfortable with. I'm just letting you know, for me, when I look at the research as a parent myself of two young kids, I would not hesitate at all to use this in my children.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So how do you actually use creatine? Well, you have a couple of options. One, you can try to get this from Whole Foods, and I'll present to you exactly what that would mean in amounts. Or you can use the supplementation route. I guess a third option would be to use a combination of both.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So most of the data on creatine monohydrate for brain injuries, they're typically using dosages of about 20 grams per day. Now that's four times the typical dose you'll see for performance benefits. So this is one of our major things we have to pay attention to. This is not a dosage that's just your standard five grams, five grams, five grams. It is much higher for the brain health benefits.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, oftentimes that's a little bit challenging. And so you'll see typical protocols instead of taking 20 grams at once are things like five grams administered four times per day, right? So the benefits are typically thought of as both acute and chronic. I know I've said many, many, many years now that creatine is not an acute thing. It's not caffeine.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In addition, they're still going to tell us a lot of indirect information about overall healthy brain aging. So the goal here will be to reduce our risk, of course, but if it does occur, to minimize the symptoms and return back to a healthy brain as fast as possible. Now, before we go too much further, I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors because they make this show possible.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
You don't take creatine right now and feel this big stimulation effects. It takes weeks or months to build up. However, One paper that came out recently kind of shook everyone's world, a 2024 paper. Just one paper here, so temper a little bit. I'm tempering my own expectations.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But a recent paper suggested that a very high dose, I think it was 0.35 grams per kilogram of body weight, was enough to attenuate the drop in cognitive performance after sleep deprivation. So you take people through sleep deprivation, the next day you give them this giant bolus of creatine, and those that took the creatine had less of a cognitive drop. from sleep deprivation.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I actually think the benefits started at about three and a half hours and lasted up to nine hours. So potentially say something bad happened and you didn't get a great night of sleep and you could take this maybe 20 gram dose in the morning and by noon or so or for the rest of the day, you might have some improvements in cognitive function.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
That's the first paper I've ever seen that I'm aware of to show an acute effect of creatine. But since that was so dramatic, I wanted to make sure I drew it to your attention. So to me, you have an option there for brain health. And now if we consider this in context of the episode of today, even getting this creatine in immediately potentially has a brain impact.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And that's why I wanted to bring that study up as it relates to the current topic. Other studies have found that that 20 grams per day for seven days enhances cognitive function. This is specifically the mountain biker study I'm referring to.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so generally, me personally, this is not the studies, this is me personally, based on the work that I've read, I think five to 10 grams per day is probably plenty for most people as a prophylactic. So kind of an ongoing option to be at that number.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
That said, and again, candidly, this is what I do for my athletes, seven days or so prior to a high risk situation, a competition, something like that, a race or an event, we're going to up that dose to 20 to 30 grams for that seven days. All right. Again, one more time, when I do that, it is hard to choke down 20 grams at once. That's a handful of scoops.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so we'll often try to get 5 to 10 grams in the morning, 5 to 10 grams at night, and split up the dosages throughout the day, simply from my practical perspective. Now, one of my favorite sayings is there are no free passes in physiology. Creatine is not perfect. It's not a panacea, and there are some potential risks. The biggest one is GI distress.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Some people have a gas or bloating or stomach cramps at even five grams a day. So taking them to 20 or 30 may cause some serious issues. It's not that frequently reported. I've never experienced it. I can't think of a situation where I've ever had an athlete or client reported, but it is a real thing. It is pretty uncommon, but it is reported. And so you will want to pay attention to that.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Outside of that, there isn't really any documented problems associated, even with high dosages, 20 plus grams a day, for years. There have been studies in kids, elderly, various we'll call risky or unhealthy populations, for many, many years.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
You can look all across basically all those studies and you just won't find really any other adverse events outside of the possible mild or moderate GI distress. Now, if the supplement does give you GI distress or you can't afford it, don't have access to it, or for any other reason, just don't like supplements,
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
You can theoretically get here with food, but it is admittedly very challenging, especially for those vegans and vegetarians, because the primary source of creatine from food comes from muscle or meat. The most common places of creatine in meat are gonna be things like beef, chicken, salmon, tuna, cod. And they mostly have somewhere between 400 to 600 milligrams of creatine per 100 grams of meat.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Not only are they on this list because they offer great products and services, but because I actually personally love them and use them myself. Today's episode is brought to you by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink mix that has an ideal ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium, but has no sugar.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, I know in America, you're thinking, what the hell is 100 grams? The rest of the world knows exactly what that means. But 100 grams is about three and a half ounces. A typical serving size at a restaurant is seven ounces or so. And so you can kind of double it.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In other words, beef specifically has 600 milligrams of creatine per 100 grams, but a typical serving is 200 grams, so you'd be getting 1,200 milligrams. 1,200 milligrams is also 1.2 grams, okay? Now, the average American at least eats about 350 grams or 12 ounces of meat per day. So if you did some basic math there, which would mean you're at about 2,000 milligrams or 2 grams of creatine per day.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So while it is possible theoretically to get all your creatine from food, it's honestly quite challenging. So supplementation just might be the better option in this case. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by AG1. AG1 is a foundational nutrition greens supplement.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
That means AG1 provides a variety of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens in an easy to drink greens powder. Initially, I was very skeptical of AG1. as I am with all supplement companies, frankly.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But after months of discussions with their lead nutrition scientists and the team at AG1, I've been impressed by their commitment to sourcing the highest quality ingredients and rigorous testing to ensure that every single batch is free of banned substances, allergens, heavy metals, microbes, pesticides, herbicides, residual solvents, and mycotoxins.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's even earned the prestigious NSF Certified for Sport third-party testing approval. Now, AG1 is not a replacement for eating whole foods, but it is a great way to fill in the gaps, and it's been a big help pushing some of my clients just in the right direction for eating more high-quality foods because it helps them with cravings, digestion, and many other benefits.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, not everyone needs to consume greens powders, but if you're going to do so, you better make sure it actually includes the ingredients that it claims to and that those ingredients are of the best sourcing. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3 plus K2.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Electrolytes are critical to proper hydration, which I've been harping on for years, but you can't do that by only drinking water. In fact, many of you will probably remember that I featured Element in my YouTube series on optimizing hydration all the way back in 2020, which is obviously long before this podcast even existed. So I've been a fan of Element for a long time.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Again, that's drinkag1.com slash perform to receive five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3 plus K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by David. David makes protein bars unlike anything I've ever encountered. They have an amazing 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. That's right, 28 grams of protein and 75% of its calories come from protein.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
This is 50% higher than the next closest protein bar. Honestly, it's the best tasting protein bar I've ever had in my life by a mile. Now, I don't usually talk about products before their launch, but these bars by David represent a meaningful breakthrough in both macronutrients and taste. And when you guys try it, you will know what I mean.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
After lots of research and development, these David protein bars are releasing to the public in September of 2024. The macronutrients, one more time, are 28 grams of protein, 150 calories, and 0 grams of sugar. And they do this with excellent ingredients.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If you're interested in trying these bars for yourself, you can go to davidprotein.com slash perform to purchase if possible, or be notified when they're available. Again, that's davidprotein.com slash perform to purchase if possible, or be notified when they are available. Our next topic is fish oil. More specifically, what I mean here is DHA and EPA. DHEA is accumulated in the brain.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In fact, it's about 10% of your brain or so. So it makes a lot of sense that this one's going to be pretty important. It's critical for everything from neurological function to injury risk, metabolic rate, prevention of neurodegeneration, aging and brain health, and Alzheimer's, dementia, and so on and so forth. Incredibly important to actual structure. EPA is a little bit different.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's mainly involved in vascular function, inflammation, oxygen delivery, nutrient delivery to the brain, and so on and so forth. So these are typically tied together, so I'm not going to really differentiate them as most omega-3s come with both EPA and DHA.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, while I said earlier that creatine is by far the most studied sports supplement, because it is, omega-3s are by far the most studied regarding traumatic brain injury. There are dozens and dozens of studies, systematic reviews, randomized control trials on omega-3s and brain-related injuries and various head traumas.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
However, you might be surprised to know I'm not aware of any direct evidence of omega-3s and TBIs. So this is a great example of me saying, hey, look, there's still a lot of good tangential or indirect evidence here, so much I feel like it's overwhelming, but not necessarily that much directly on TBIs. For the reasons we've described earlier, they're just hard studies to carry out.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In general, what you're going to see is, frankly, they work. They work for both pre and post impacts. The SOE is technically three here. And you generally see main effects and benefits from cerebral perfusion. So this is getting that blood and oxygen and flow of nutrients in and out of the brain.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Remember, the primary cause of injury there is that structural, that tissue and that axon shearing, that kind of ripping apart. And so what that does is cause that cascade of secondary insults that mismatch the blood flow and the metabolic demand. We talked about that earlier. Omega-3s land right on that problem for solutions.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In fact, astute listeners will also realize these hydration videos were the genesis of the Galpin hydration equation, named not by me, but by the legendary neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And the reason is it helps dramatically with what's called arterial pliability and compliance. And so when we're having issues getting blood in, the arteries can either be broke or damaged or stiff, and omega-3s really help it become more pliable and pliable. open and close more effectively is one way to think about it.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's also why you see so much evidence and research on omega-3s for heart health and blood pressure and so on and so forth has the same effect essentially in the brain. Other thing it does that's a huge benefit outside of that cerebral perfusion is it modulates inflammation post-injury by regulating that ROS, reactive oxygen species.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It interacts with all kinds of cytokines like interleukin-1 and TNF-alpha, if you're familiar with those. If not, don't worry about it. Even actually, there's one in particular called NFKB. Brain folks will know exactly what I'm talking about here. This actually, functionally, it affects gene expression of a bunch of inflammatory things, so it kind of cuts off inflammation at the genetic level.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So lots of ways that it has an impact. To give you a couple specific examples, one of the most common issues associated with TBI Long-term is called atrophy of the hippocampus. Now that's associated in one of the areas that's mainly responsible for learning and memory. And we know that those are problems, right?
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We know that higher omega-3 intake is associated with a bigger hippocampal volume, right? So we have cross-sectional studies here, longitudinal ones that suggest that people that consume more tend to have a larger hippocampus. And we also see a significant increase in these areas at the dosage of about 2.2 grams per day.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
2.2 grams of fish oil per day associated with a bigger hippocampus, therefore potential to improve or enhance our learning and memory. Similar things have been done with memory specifically. In fact, one study looked at, I think it was a combination of 900 milligrams of EPA plus 260 milligrams of DHA. And that resulted in greater accuracy and speed of recall tasks. So mental recall memory.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I featured Element in these videos because their blend of 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams potassium, and 60 milligrams magnesium really is different than any other electrolyte on the market and has great scientific support.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
EPA in general is often really associated with cognitive function, and the DHA is associated with axonal injuries. It works on a thing called neurofilament light, or NFL, and that's actually been specifically shown in college football players, I believe, again, at that two grams per day dosage of DHA.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so in general, to get to the end here, the dosage for brain-related injuries is somewhere between two to four grams per day, though... There's really little risk. The only adverse issue you're going to typically have here is potentially some loose stool. Again, there's not that much evidence of it, but if you consume a bunch of oil, that can kind of run through you a little bit.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Probably not going to see much happen there very often. The timing of it doesn't matter that much. You would certainly want to be taking it before the injury as well as after the injury. And the timing of the day is honestly totally irrelevant. And so pretty easy, pretty fast one to go through, very effective.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I personally will be totally honest, I take a lot more than four grams for other benefits, but very fairly, the available evidence on not necessarily directly TBI RCTs, but the other associated areas of brain health and injury and damage, pretty consistently show the effect happens at about two or so grams, and studies that have looked at higher doses don't see any additional benefit.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So I think it's very fair to say two grams a day or so is the effective dose, and more than that may not give you additional benefit. What's that look like from food? Another example where vegans and vegetarians really should honestly strongly consider supplementation here. We're going to get fish oil from fish, pretty obviously, right?
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Salmon, herring, sardines, mackerels, trout are generally the most highest concentration ones. Salmon being the most obvious example, that's got about two grams of fish oil per hundred grams. of cooked meat. Again, that'd be three and a half ounces or so, which is not an outrageous dosage at all. Unfortunately, the standard American diet is typically about 100 milligrams of omega-3s per day.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I personally use the citrus and watermelon flavors a ton to pre-hydrate before heading out on a full day of training or a long hike or a hunt since I know I'll be losing a bunch of fluids and won't have many opportunities to take things with me. Element has also just released a new line of canned sparkling Element. which I am all about.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And we need to get to two, right? So you're going to have to up your ante. It's totally possible, but most people just don't do enough of it. This is a really important one to go after. I know I just covered information, but I want to also highlight the fact that you can check
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
What I mean by that is unlike creatine where it's going to be really hard to measure your creatine monohydrate, especially in your brain levels, you as a preventative strategy should look at your omega-3 index and identify whether you have problems because there's a lot of evidence to suggest if you go into a brain injury with a better omega-3, the brain injury will be less significant.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So our starting place here is to actually not go into the injury with a problem. I mentioned this, but I'll be more clear. The omega-3 index is not a perfect way to measure it, but it is an effective blood test you can get done. And what that's going to effectively tell you is the percentage of EPA and DHA that's in the membrane of your red blood cells.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And there's been a handful of studies on this that are quite impressive, my opinion. Studies on football players and even basketball players have found that the mass majority of them have an omega-3 index of less than 5%. Optimal is like 8 to 10, maybe even 12. The overwhelming majority of these athletes are less than five.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In fact, I think the studies I'm thinking of right now, the two kind of combined, basically none of the athletes had higher than 7%. Again, eight to 12 is what we're looking for. In fact, the reason we're doing that is because there's been known and shown documented cognitive benefits at 10% plus, even as low as 8% plus. So in these studies, no athletes are there.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In fact, over 50% of the athletes in these studies had an omega-3 index of less than 4%. So it is really, really, really common in our athletes to see omega-3 status being really insufficient. And the same thing has happened in the general population. So you can 100% achieve enough for brain health through food if you'd like, you just need to make a considered effort for it.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And you can see and go back to hear the dosages. Or you can use supplements or a combination, but you absolutely want to make sure that you're doing this prophylactically as well as if you do experience an injury, getting right on the supplementation as quickly as you can. Next up is what's called vitamin B2 or riboflavin.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We're going into riboflavin next because it is a requirement for proper DHA utilization. Here's what I mean. There's some really nice studies showing that if you give people DHA, but they have insufficient B2, B6, B9, B12, and choline, they won't integrate that DHA into their brain.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So it's really, really hard technically to get the DHA to integrate into the phospholipid membrane without these B vitamins. And so part and parcel to our appropriate omega-3 status is making sure we're not vitamin B deficient. And specifically in this case, we're talking about riboflavin. So it is a coenzyme for ATP production. It's a part of many of our energy production cycles.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinklmnt.com slash perform to claim a free Element sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com slash perform to claim a free sample pack. Today's episode is also brought to you by Continuum. Continuum is a membership-only wellness club designed to help high performers reach their fitness and performance goals.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's also highly responsible for glutathione. You'll hear me bring this up again, but glutathione is our chief endogenous antioxidant. It's the big whopper, okay? So going back to our problems associated with injury, Riboflavin is going to play a role in two of those ones, energy production, as well as inflammation or antioxidant capacity. So really helpful from that regard.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Since we know TBI has metabolic problems, it makes sense that these B2 and other B vitamins are going to probably play an important role. The SOE on riboflavin is a three. Now, personally, that's enough for me to take action. You're welcome to choose your own level. I've actually not a score here, but I have utilized and will probably continue to utilize riboflavin for head-related injuries.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
There's great data in rat studies that have shown riboflavin helps with some of the behavioral modification issues associated with downstream TBI problems. Humans, there's not that much research, candidly. Again, that's why it has an SOE score of 3, not 2 or 1. And what we do know is there's kind of two studies in particular that are classic, and they both used about 400 milligrams per day.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
One of them is a bit older, 1998, I think it was published, and it was actually in migraines. And what it showed is that it was safe and well-tolerated. Now, interestingly, this was followed up in 2023, and they gave, again, 400 milligrams. I think they actually did it twice per day instead of once per day, starting 24 hours after injury.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I think they had 50 plus people in the study and they're all about 20 years old. Now in that, they found a significant reduction in the number of days of recovery by about half. So the group that did not get the supplement, the typical recovery day was 22 days long. The supplement group, it was cut down to 10. So this was a very, very, very impressive result.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so it seems to be a somewhat high reward, low risk option. Additionally, the other B vitamins like B6 and B12 have probably more limited research, but they're really plausible. They're also really safe. They've been studied a lot in a lot of unhealthy or risky populations, and they just don't really have that many negative side effects. So sounds logical to try these ones.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
There is a little bit of work here, Particularly what I'm thinking of is some rat studies in cases of things like folate deficiency. When that happens, a little bit of a background there, when you are deficient in folate, you have higher levels of what's called homocysteine. Homocysteine is highly associated with additional oxidative stress and a whole host of other negative health cascades.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So really high homocysteine is bad news. Homocysteine is often also elevated when B vitamins are too low in general. That alone is associated with neuropathy of TBIs, brain atrophy, cognitive decline with aging, and so on and so forth. And so the clinical trials that have been done in this area where they combine these B vitamins and omega-3s have been shown to reduce homocysteine.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And that has then also been associated with a reduction in cognitive decline. So if you can, pay attention to all those B vitamins, try to get them as high as reasonable, or at least not in those danger areas. Take a look at homocysteine and pay attention to that. And if you do that, that will give those omega-3s a better chance to work more effectively, and you should be in a better spot.
Huberman Lab
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So what's riboflavin look like in terms of supplementation and food? one more time the dosages that have been studied for migraines and headaches and brain health and things like that are 400 milligrams per day one of the studies did that dosage once per day another did it twice per day but those are really really common now you can look all over the internet and you will generally find
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Every multivitamin has riboflavin, but it's not very much. So multivitamins are not going to be the place you can go to to get enough B2 for this issue. You're going to have to go to companies that make B2 specifically. And in terms of timing, again, you want to take this...
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Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
after your brain injuries, certainly, but the better option is just to make sure your B status is high enough prior to going in, okay? But if you didn't do that or don't know, you'd want to take this post-injury. Time of day doesn't matter at all. Some people will feel a little bit of an energetic effect, so perhaps earlier in the morning. Others don't, but you might want to consider that.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I'm not aware of any risks associated with it, Obviously, everything has some risk of some dosage in some people. But for the most part, there's very little harm here. B vitamins typically don't have many issues if you overconsume them, outside of perhaps wasting your money, I guess, if you want to think about it that way. But there's really very little consequences at reasonable dosages.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So you should be okay there. If you want to get this from whole food sources, this is where things like liver come in handy or fortified cereals. Whey protein actually has a decent amount. Beef liver specifically has 3.4 milligrams of riboflavin per 100 grams. Whey protein is about half that. I think it's about two actually. So it's not a terrible source.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So you can run the math very similar to how we just did it before. I won't drag you through it again. But if you have to eat something like 15 times-ish, the amount of the serving size I just listed, to get to that 400 milligrams per day, that's going to be a pound, a pound and a half. Sorry, a kilo or a kilo and a half of beef liver per day.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So again, theoretically possible, but just pretty unlikely or pretty unrealistic for most people to get these at this dosage through just food. Now remember, these are not daily amounts you have to take. We're talking about the dosages specifically for a brain injury. And so it's actually not that crazy to think you're taking it if you've experienced something like this.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It's not something that you need to do every day your entire life. Next on our list is choline. Now this has a handful of functions. First, it's helpful in preserving that blood brain barrier. because it wards off membrane breakdown. It's critical to that cell membrane, so it has a handful of effects there.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
The second big thing it does is it is the primary precursor to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. You may remember that acetylcholine is the primary neurotransmitter. It's the signal, the molecular signal that goes from one neuron to the next that activates it. We talked about this in a little more detail in a previous episode on muscle. So you can go back to that to learn more.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But the third thing it does, it is a precursor to that important antioxidant glutathione. So a handful of functions here, both structural, damage, cellular communication and activation, as well as antioxidant.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We also know from a lot of research in the area of brain aging, dementia, Alzheimer's and so forth, that higher dietary intake of choline is strongly associated with decreases in several biomarkers that are associated with that Alzheimer's, dementia and other risk factors. So from a dietary perspective,
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
from a molecular and mechanistic perspective, is starting to line up as a pretty important molecule for both TBI as well as long-term brain health. To summarize the collective evidence, it is well tolerated and safe. It's plausibly helpful, like I just described. And there's even some minor benefits in both physiological and cognitive domains following head trauma.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
The most common form of choline in the research is what's called acetylcholine or CDP choline, as you'll see it sometimes. And it's been tested in multiple TBI randomized controlled trials. In fact, a recent meta-analysis indicated that there's about a 20% likelihood of success or effectiveness with acetylcholine for TBI treatment. So it's not perfect, but 20% is pretty good, in my opinion.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Getting into the research just a little bit further, there's a handful of animal and human studies that are worth talking about at a very high level. The animal research looked at 100 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day, and I'm bringing up those numbers intentionally. I want to put some context behind that, honestly, because I've just heard people misinterpret this paper a lot.
Huberman Lab
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So 100 milligrams per kilogram per day immediately after an injury, which resulted in significant improvements in what's called spatial memory performance. Now, you can't simply equate body weight here to humans. You'll get an absurd number that won't make sense. It doesn't actually work that way for details we don't want to talk about now.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But what this would equate to is something like 60 to 70 milligrams per kilogram in humans. And that is high. It's about three to five times the dosages used in human research, but it's not impossible either. So I do want to acknowledge that those numbers are, again, high, but it's not completely crazy either.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In fact, some of the studies at 250 milligrams helped with the blood-brain barrier breakdown and edema were largely reduced in those trials and also had benefits in hippocampal neuronal death, for the seven days following injury. So pretty good mechanisms from the rat studies. In terms of the human, you will see that the studies are mixed, okay?
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
One gram per day for 30 days has been found in at least mild TBI to produce statistically significant improvements in recognition memory, which is obviously an important downstream behavioral problem that's associated with TBIs. And that study was actually repeated about 20 years after the initial one. And they used a pretty similar protocol design and found actually no difference in TBI symptoms.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I think it was headaches, sleepiness, dizziness, and concentration and things like that. However, what's really important to note here is in this study, the majority of the participants had really minor TBIs, meaning their cholinergic pathways were probably not affected. This is a classic case of something I warned out at the beginning or earlier in our conversation.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If you're not actually giving a supplement or taking a food that the mechanism of effect is not the mechanism of injury, then you shouldn't expect a benefit. So I think this is really a case of that.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I actually do feel like the strength of the evidence for choline is okay and reasonable, but that 2023 follow-up study to me is not an indication that the original study was flawed or didn't work, but simply you had mild... injuries that didn't result in damage to that pathway. So the supplement provided very limited or mixed benefits.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In addition, I know of two meta-analyses that reported generally positive benefits here, regardless of TBI severity. So that's some more information on positive benefit. And the probably landmark study in this area came out fairly recently. It was called the COBRIT study. I think it stands for like cytokoline brain injury treatment trial.
Huberman Lab
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You know how scientists always like to make these acronyms for our big studies. Again, honestly, I feel like this is being misinterpreted in my opinion. And so I want to touch on this just really briefly. But in that, they found no evidence of benefit for cognitive function or cognitive status 90 days post-injury with two grams a day of acetylcholine.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, a lot of people have used that to say, we told you it doesn't work, it doesn't work, and that's fine. People can interpret how they will. My personal opinion on this study, though, is that it's highly flawed. And I'm saying that because in it, they considered adherence to be 75%, meaning if the people in the study took their acetylcholine 75% of the time, they were considered to be adherent.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Only 44% of their participants met that 75% mark. 40% were considered to be non-adherent. So that means they took it less than 75%. And the rest, they don't even know. So for me, it's hard to suggest that it didn't work when the vast majority of people didn't actually take it most of the time, and those that did was still only 75% of the time.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So, cool study, helped add a lot of information, in my opinion, to the database, but I don't think it should be interpreted as saying that choline then therefore doesn't work, or it's a myth, or any of those other more extreme interpretations of these data.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
More directly for the context of our show today, been done on football players where brain choline, specifically in the primary motor cortex, is known to diminish across the season, similar to what we saw earlier with creatine. Probably as a result of those continuous head impacts, so it couldn't be inferred directly from this study, but pretty easy to make a guess that's likely scenario.
Huberman Lab
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And this actually may contribute to that second impact syndrome and accumulation of damage. So, Similar idea here as creatine, to me, pretty strong case. So based on the different study designs, mixed results, and other limitations, the SOE for choline lands at a three. So what are we looking at in terms of food and supplements? Well, first of all,
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Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
you're not going to find choline supplements on their own very commonly. It's almost always going to be in the form of what's called alpha GPC or in the more direct version of phosphatidylcholine. Now, alpha GPC is immediately metabolized into phosphatidylcholine or PC. once you orally ingest it. So you can think of these as similar products.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Many companies make either PC straight or alpha GPC, or have a little bit built into oftentimes like B complexes. Dosages are usually a little bit lower, 20 to 30 milligrams. If you're getting the alpha GPC directly, And Momentous, of course, the sponsor for the show, as well as other companies, generally will make dosages 300 to 400 milligrams per serving.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So you need to take, you know, three or so of those to get to this dosage level. But you will find that fairly commonly. Okay, now, in terms of timing... you probably want to take something like 500 milligrams per day as a daily dosage prophylactically. However, if you've had a direct head injury, this might be the time to ramp up to one to two grams. These generally do have a nootropic effect.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so you would want to take these earlier in the day. So you certainly don't have any problems cognitively or with sleep later on. In terms of food, if you need to get up to that one to two grams after an acute injury, you're probably going to want to use supplementation. But it's quite easy to get to that 500, that baseline prophylactic dosage, straight out of food.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
A couple of eggs and some turkey will almost always get you right there. The most common places to get choline in food are meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, beans, cruciferous vegetables. Beef liver, for example, has around 400 milligrams per 100 grams of liver. Eggs, it's about 150 milligrams per egg.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so you can actually see, all right, three or four eggs in a day gets you really close to that 500 number. Most people, a couple of eggs, a little bit of serving meat, you're going to be right there throughout the day, which again will put you in a pretty good spot. The average person, though, doesn't get enough choline. Typical numbers in men is around 400 milligrams.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Women, it's about 300 or so. which is well below the AI or adequate intake, which is 550 for men and 420 or so for women. So you would have to probably do something in the neighborhood of like 12 eggs to get you to that two grams of choline per day. So like I said, Totally fine to get this from food as your normal baseline health strategy.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But if you did want to get those upper dosage with an acute injury, you're probably gonna have an easier time getting a little bit of supplementation rather than trying to eat 14 or 15 eggs in a day. All right, moving on to our next one. We're looking at branched chain amino acids.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
To clarify, when I say BCAAs, I'm almost always talking about three amino acids in particular, isoleucine, leucine, and valine. Now, leucine is the primary driver of muscle growth or muscle protein synthesis, which is why there's so much steam behind BCAAs for muscle growth.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We'll talk about those details later, but in general, if you get enough protein, BCAAs are not really needed for muscle growth. That said, it does something different in the brain. The human data do suggest that the severity of your TBI symptoms correlate well with the degree of BCAA suppression in the brain. Bigger drop in BCAAs, more symptoms. The BCAAs have two big effects.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
One of them is the fact that they are what's called a nitrogen donor. And the other is that they help transportation interference across the blood-brain barrier. So let me walk you through what those mean really quickly, as it's important to understand why they actually work in this case, but perhaps are not so important for muscle growth.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, when I say nitrogen donor, what I mean is they are specifically used as in broken down to give off nitrogen, which can be used for glutamate and GABA. I already talked about glutamate earlier and how that is a primary problem with extreme excitotoxicity. So getting too excited, turning too many neurons on.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, before we get started on the details, I want to highlight a couple of things. First, remember, I have a PhD. I am a scientist. I've published in this area. In fact, I have recently submitted a literature review as a co-author, and we'll talk about that later. But I'm not a medical doctor.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, both GABA and glutamate are heavily involved in TBI pathology, like we just talked about. From the transporter perspective, when you eat protein, the amount, or just as food or supplement, the amount of BCAAs in your blood goes up. Makes sense. But a bunch of proteins in your stomach, they get broken down into amino acids. Amino acids in your blood go up.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If you ate a complete protein, that will come with a bunch of BCAAs. The amount of those go up in your blood. Now, as the BCAA concentration goes up, two molecules called tryptophan and tyrosine. They happen to share the same transporters to get through the blood-brain barrier.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So if you have this big rise in BCAAs in your blood, the BCAAs will block up those transporters, which means the uptake of tyrosine and tryptophan are blocked. So they're not gonna get across the blood-brain barrier, not gonna get in the brain. So the amount actually in your brain of TNT, tyrosine and tryptophan,
Huberman Lab
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What that does is cause problems with things like serotonin because TNT act as precursors for serotonin, which of course is in a precursor for melatonin and various catecholamines. So this could be contributing to the TBI induced sleep problems. And so you can see the basic logic there.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
The current evidence does suggest that actually sleep is not compromised with BCAAs, but actually even potentially improved. I know of actually a study coming to mind right now that looked at 30 grams of BCAAs administered twice per day. found it actually improved insomnia and other latency-related issues. This study, I think, was in veterans with chronic TBI.
Huberman Lab
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And so we know some about the mechanisms that I just outlined. It has a potential to be influencing some of our sleep-related problems, and it seems to be causing a positive and beneficial effect for sleep, which is a huge concern and one of the biggest symptoms associated with a brain injury. The SOE on BCAAs is surprisingly a 2. Remember, 1 is best, 5 is worst on this scoring.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So the data are actually pretty strong here. It is pretty clear that it works as much as we can define work. There is extensive evidence in post-impact for both mild and severe TBIs. The benefits range from cognitive deficits, so reductions in cognitive deficits,
Huberman Lab
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what I just described, some of these sleep-wake abnormalities, with the main effects probably being correction of that excitotoxicity issue and some of the GABA and other glutamate problems that we have just described. Probably the most famous study in this area is called the HIT Heads Trial. I believe this came out in 2024, actually, so pretty recent. It was a pilot randomized controlled trial.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If you think you have any risk of or potentially have had or are suffering consequences from any type of brain-related injury, Please see a medical professional in this area. I want to focus this episode on nutrition and supplementation related to brain injury. But I also don't want anyone to think that I'm suggesting this is all you should do for your brain injury.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
They had, I think, like 10 to 35-year-olds in there, so teens, preteens, all the way up to normal age. And they followed them for three weeks or 21 days post-injury. And this was really cool. They had, I think, five arms in this study. So some of the participants just got a placebo. And then they broke up the rest of the intervention by dosage. So they got 15 grams a day, 30 grams, 45, or even 54.
Huberman Lab
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I'm not sure why it's only 55. But they wanted to see, is there an effect at all compared to placebo? And if there is, what's the optimal dosage? And they gave them five different dosages from low dose to more moderate to pretty high and scaled all the way up. And one of the things that they found was a pretty clear dose response such that the most improvements were found in that 54 grams per day.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
decreased symptoms of concussions, faster and better return to baseline. There were not benefits actually in what was called processing speed. So that had been shown in some of the earlier studies we talked about, but they didn't find that here for whatever reason. But they had all those other benefits.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
One more time, highlights the fact that not every supplement, not every food, not every nutrient fixes every problem. Okay, so benefits here in the concussion symptoms, but not necessarily the processing speed. But the effects one more time were dose dependent. And one more time, like we keep bringing up, there was no adverse effects reported.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
The data that we currently have suggests up to 55 or 54 grams per day, more specifically, is a dosage. You would want to make sure you're at that higher dosage past injury. You can be at a much smaller one. Just honestly make sure your protein intake is high enough. You can use whatever number you like. We've talked many times, though.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I personally like one gram of protein per pound of body weight. If you're at that, you're probably getting enough BCAAs at baseline, and then we would go to only this higher dose post-brain injury. To break this down food-wise... BCAAs, it's protein, it's dairy products, it's meat and poultry. Most meat's gonna be three to four grams of BCAAs per 100 grams of serving.
Huberman Lab
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And so similar math that we've done before, okay? This is gonna result in you having to have like 40 or 50 ounces of meat per day. Not something you need baseline, but in these small cases, again, I don't want you to feel like I'm pushing you to supplements, but it is just significantly easier here for small times and for specific scenarios of a brain injury to go to supplementation here.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Our next micronutrient is magnesium. Oh my goodness, could I go on and on and on about the physiological benefits of magnesium. It is involved in well over 600 reactions in your body from cell signaling, vascular function, ATP production, protein synthesis, neuroplasticity, learning, memory, and I could basically think of anything that happens in your body and magnesium's central to that.
Huberman Lab
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I don't have to draw this out then. It's pretty easy for you to assume this is going to be an important role in your brain pre and post-injury.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We also have very strong data if you are deficient in magnesium, you have associations with a host of comorbidities, health conditions, type two diabetes, metabolic syndrome, hypertension, headaches is another common one, migraines, heart disease, so on and so forth. We know that it probably inhibits receptors that are directly targets
Huberman Lab
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of antidepressants as well, and is a strong contributor to that brain excitotoxicity after injury. So you do not want to be deficient in magnesium. You can listen to, read almost anything in the sports performance realm, and you will see magnesium as a top tier supplementation. It is really robust and a strong line of evidence and recommended by, again, many people in this field.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I also don't want anyone to think that I'm suggesting this is enough to stop your chances of ever having a brain injury. So that being said, the landscape of the research and many of the scientists in this area are on the same page in the fact that there is emerging evidence that several micronutrients and what we'll call biological compounds
Huberman Lab
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But surprisingly, the SOE is only three here. There's a well-documented drop in magnesium, especially in your central neurons after a TBI. And the extent of that drop is associated with the severity of the injury and the level of behavioral disturbances. So not only the injury, but your symptoms as well. Animal and human research here from the animals, it's associated with edema.
Huberman Lab
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brain and blood concentrations, calcium problems, like we talked about earlier. These are going to result in those behavioral modifications, memory, cognitive function, spatial and working memory, and so on and so forth. From the actual human stuff, Couple of studies that are worth drawing attention to here.
Huberman Lab
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One looked at acute TBIs in kids and saw a significant reduction in post-concussion severity scores 48 hours after the injury when they used 400 milligrams of magnesium twice per day. Now, another study used a similar design and didn't find a benefit, but this was actually using magnesium from an IV for five days.
Huberman Lab
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Now, no one really actually knows why this one trial worked and the other one didn't. The obvious thought is maybe there's something that happens when you ingest it through your stomach that aids in digestion or makes it more bioavailable. But when you took it with the IV, it didn't. To me, that's honestly not a great answer. But I don't have any other reason to think that that happened.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So really honestly, to summarize here, it is very, very safe. It's very little harm. It has so many other health and performance related benefits. There's so many health consequences that are associated with magnesium deficiency. It helps with symptoms and behaviors that are hallmarks of TBI, like we've talked about.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So I know the SOE is technically three, but personally it's about as high on the list as I could think one supplement could be. The dosages we described one more time, 400 milligrams per day. The timing doesn't matter. You'll want to have some in there pre as well as post injury, and you could take it at any point in the day.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, depending on the type or form that you use, you might want to take it later in the evening. Some people report, and depending on the type, magnesium helps you fall asleep. I personally feel no effect at all, but most people do. I still then take my magnesium at night just because, just in case. There's all kinds of forms.
Huberman Lab
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You've heard of magnesium threonate at this point, bisglycinate, malate. And right now, I don't know of any compelling evidence to suggest one of those forms is any better than another. Obviously, magnesium threonate has become more popular recently. And that may turn out to be more effective. It may not. I'm not sure. There's just not enough data for us to have really an answer at this point.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so you can take whatever form sits best with you. The obvious risks associated with magnesium are the GI distress. Bisglycinate, malate, threonate are generally pretty well handled. And so you shouldn't have too many issues with it. If you want to get it strictly from food, you're looking now at things like pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, almonds, and spinach.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Typically, I think pumpkin seeds are about the highest you'll find. They've got around 200 milligrams of magnesium per 100 grams roasted. Again, you can do some math there and realize, all right, that's at least 200 grams of roasted pumpkin seeds I'd have to get to get to my 400 milligrams, which is honestly quite a lot. Not impossible.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
really do have the ability to reduce the risk, I hesitate to say prevent, but can help prevent and treat brain injuries, concussions, TBIs and related events. Now, over the course of today's show, I'm going to walk you through a bunch of different micronutrient and nutraceutical options you have. We'll cover the evidence, how much to take, the protocols and so on and so forth.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Some people eat tons of almonds and spinach and things like that, especially vegetarians and vegans. But it is quite a bit, given how cheap, effective, and easy to handle, and how many other things are benefited. Magnesium is a supplement. We use it pretty commonly. Our final food item to discuss is what's called anthocyanins. Now, these come almost always from blueberries.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So, henceforward, I'll call these blueberry anthos. That's how I refer to it. Now, these are phytochemicals in the flavonoid family. There's over 700 known anthocyanins. and we're honestly basically just learning about this stuff. So we have a ton of improvements needed, a ton more analysis and understanding of mechanisms and so on and so forth, but there's enough here to go on at this point.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We know that anthos are involved in cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, cancers, visions, skin health, inflammation, neurodegenerative disorders, and probably 50 more things. Really ubiquitous, really robust, and critical to a bunch of human functions. TBI specifically?
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Animal research here, blueberry supplements or blueberry extracts post-injury have been shown to improve what's called brain-derived neurotropic factor, or what you may have heard of as BDNF, which is inversely correlated with indirect markers of memory, performance, and cognition. Now, a similar study has found that blueberries also protect against oxidative stress, which makes a ton of sense.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
You've all probably heard about the antioxidant properties associated with blueberries and blueberry extracts. So this is no surprise for most people. The SOE for Anthos is a three. And in terms of human data, I don't think there's a single RCT, randomized controlled trial, that exists for blueberries and TBI at this point.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
That said, there have been studies, many RCTs, some in fact that range from developmental to aging to clinical populations, on brain health. And so this is a classic example of where we can infer some things from general brain health over to TBI at a pretty low risk, high reward possibility. The collective evidence indicates that it does help with attention, memory, executive function.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
There's a lot of evidence. Specifically, we use a handful of papers that have been done looking at blueberries prior to golf and enhancing brain performance in sport context. So there's a lot out there. We know it works, but we also know we're missing a lot of the details because of what I just described earlier. It's pretty new. A couple of examples.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
One study in kids in particular looked at 15 or 30 grams of freeze-dried wild blueberries and saw significant improvements in cognitive function in a dose-dependent fashion. The more blueberries, the better.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Other work has been done in older adults looking at things like 100 milligrams blueberry extracts and seeing better episodic memory performance, reduced cardiovascular disease, and so on and so forth. So what this would look like from a whole food source to get something like 500 milligrams Of the Anthos, you need 100 grams of blueberries, which is, I think, a cup has 150.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So I'll translate that for you a little bit. You have a cup of blueberries, and you're probably hitting your numbers. It's really that easy. I would actually say that of all the things we've discussed so far today, this is the easiest one to get out of straight food.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But before we do that, you have to actually understand a little bit of the terminology. Because depending on what type of brain injury you have, you may want to take a different route with your nutrition. So getting going with that point, what is a brain injury? You've heard me now say concussion, TBI, brain health, and a bunch of different terms like that. What is actually the difference?
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
You will be hard pressed to find a program that ever comes out of myself, our rapid health and performance company, or any other one that I'm associated with that doesn't have a cup of blueberries in it. And it's for these reasons and many more. So it's a pretty easy number to hit, pretty consistent and has a lot of benefits, right? I will also tell you,
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
People love to give blueberry olives a credit here, but it's not the only food item that's got the anthos in it. Strawberries, cranberries, they have it too. There's not as much data. I don't actually know if there's any data, but I imagine if they did those studies, you'd probably find the same benefits. So I'm actually not as particular on this one.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I don't have evidence to support myself, but I don't think it's that big of a stretch to think the same chemicals in this case that are in blueberries probably also exist in raspberries and strawberries and other similar forms. So we will spread our berries out. But if you want to stick to giving all the love to blueberries, you're not going to hurt my feelings.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
As far as I understand it, that represents all the evidence on food related items one can take for brain health, TBIs and concussions. The only thing I'm aware of that's actually detrimental for brain healing is caffeine. And there's enough evidence here that this is probably pretty bad news when trying to heal from a brain injury. It causes neurovascular constriction, it leads to less blood flow.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We know that caffeine consumers are more susceptible to diminished emotional health, bad sleep quality, depression, and somatic symptoms with brain injuries. And so what my recommendation here would be overconsumption. is the problem. Do not over-consume caffeine if you've experienced a brain injury.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I don't think there's any reason to think caffeine consumption is going to give you more risk to have a brain injury, but if you have one, you want to make sure you're really careful. Ask your doctor, check in there, but that's the only one on our list that we have reason to think that you should avoid. That concludes today's episode on nutrition for brain injury, TBIs, and concussion.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I think it's worth reminding you though that if it's good for preventing and returning faster from a brain injury, it's probably safe to assume it's also good for brain performance as well as long-term health.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
My goal of today as always was to provide you with a ton of information so that you can be excited, you can learn, you have some things to try, but to also be fair with the state of the data and you can make your decision about what you want to do or not do based upon that.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Given this was episode 10, not only are we done with today's discussion, but we are done with season one of Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin. I can't thank you all for the support. I seriously was overwhelmed with comments from people I know, don't know. It was... blew past my expectations. And so I really just cannot thank you all enough. If you're a new listener, this is maybe your first episode.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
You can go back and check out all previous nine episodes on performpodcast.com. You can check out the notes. You can go to YouTube and you can see the exact sections of a particular video if you're interested in that. And we've made it as easy as possible, hopefully, for you to go straight to the information you're looking for and not spend time on things you are not.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
I can also share with you another fun announcement, and that is that Season 2 has officially been confirmed. It's going to be coming out pretty soon. If you want to know more about when that does hit the radio waves, you can stay tuned, of course, on my social media. But also, I would recommend signing up for our newsletter.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Finishing us off here, I cannot conclude this season without some very specific thank yous. First of all, to all the sponsors, it was overwhelming your support. The people jumped on board quickly and were really, really helpful. So this show would not have existed without them. So I know ad reads are a thing, but please do me a solid.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In fact, do you even know the difference between a TBI and a concussion? It's been my experience that most people don't. And so we'll maybe just start right there. So a brain injury can mean a lot of different things. Honest answer here, there's not that much research in humans and randomized control trials on what to do to prevent or reduce an injury.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If you enjoyed any part of any of the episodes of the season, go check out the sponsors. They really are phenomenal products. I got to thank my special man, Vindog. You know who you are. Helped me a ton in preparing for this. He's not the front of the camera kind of guy, so appreciate it, Vince.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Natasha, of course, my wife, super, super supportive and all the time it spent to come up here and get this stuff done. My students, former and past and current, could not have done any of the stuff that allowed me to be up here without all of your support and truly doing all the work in the lab.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Same thing for all of my colleagues and fellow scientists whom helped me directly with this show or indirectly, and that I stole your research or read it at least and was able to have information to share with people. So science is not easy. And a lot of times people don't get the credit for it. And I thank you all for your contribution.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
All of my teammates and colleagues at my companies, Rapid, Health and Performance, Biomolecular Athlete, Absolute Rest, and Vitality. Again, tons and tons of support for everyone. So I appreciate that. And then finally, of course, my man here, my boys here at SciComm. And of course, Dr. Andrew Huberman. Love you all. Super appreciative of it. Thank you all so much for joining on this ride.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And I'll see you next season. Thank you for joining for today's episode. Our goal is to share exciting scientific insight that helps you perform at your absolute best. If the show resonates with you and you want to help ensure this information remains free and accessible to anyone in the world, there are a few ways that you can support.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
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Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Once you sign up, you receive access to all of our newsletters. I use my Instagram and Twitter also exclusively for scientific communication. So those are great places to follow along for more learning. My handle is DrAndyGalpin on both platforms. Thank you for listening. And never forget, in the famous words of Bill Bowerman, if you have a body, you're an athlete.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
In fact, if you think about research design, that's really hard to do. The only way to execute these kinds of studies in humans is to set up an enrollment center, say at a hospital, probably around an area that has a lot of kids playing in sports, wait for people to show up with an injury, ask them if you can enroll them in a study, and go on from that.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We can't go out and give humans head injuries and concussions. And so it's really challenging. It's hard to get an adequate sample size. And you're also relying upon those people coming into the study having the same type of brain injury. And we know that that does not happen. And so brain injuries themselves, there's a lot to learn and there's lots of different types.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
It would be foolish to think that we know how to prevent all of them or recover from all of them. Some types of injuries we know more about, other types we know way less. And so there's not one type, which means there's not one solution. And this is going to explain why almost always you will see mixed results. Easy example here.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. For the final time this season, welcome back, friends. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I'm a professor of kinesiology in the Center for Sport Performance at Cal State Fullerton.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
We're gonna talk about one of the major problems that are associated with brain injuries is sleep. So supplements that help with sleep, therefore, are going to be helpful for folks who are experiencing sleep-related problems with a brain injury. However, if you have a brain injury and are not suffering symptoms of sleep loss, then a sleep aid may or may not actually work.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
If both those individuals, let's say we had two people, one having issues with sleep, one not, both enrolled in the same study, you're going to see the magnitude of effect of the supplement or the nutritional factor gets a little bit washed out. So those are common themes you will see. I won't bring this up again, because honestly, I could do that with just about every single study.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
But it's something for you to really consider in the back of your mind. All right. Now, the goal then is to present to you information that I think has a strength of evidence, I'll explain to you what my criteria for a strong evidence is a little bit later. And things that I think kind of justify what we'll call low risk and high potential reward.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And we'll typically break those down into things you can do before the injury. during or immediately after the injury, as well as long-term post-recovery. So you can think about that as pre, peri, or post, or simply preventative, and then treatments post-injury. So in terms of terminology, I'm gonna try to be consistent with three basic phrases.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So a brain injury is often broken up into three categories based on the severity. There's mild, which is the lowest, moderate, and severe. Now fortunately, mild is by far the most common. In fact, some papers indicate that over 90 plus percent of brain injuries are qualified as mild. What that means typically is there is a 30 minute or less change in state of consciousness.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So if you were unconscious for a couple of minutes, you probably had a mild traumatic brain injury. This is often associated with things like confusion or post-traumatic impact amnesia. So you forgot what happened immediately afterwards or you had a little bit of a time travel, as I like to call it.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And this can occur for a couple of hours or even up to one day is the general line that we cross there. The overwhelming majority of recreational and sport-related concussions fall into this category. Therefore, almost always, though not always, but almost always when you hear the word concussion, you can generally translate that into a mild TBI.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
Now, not all TBIs are concussions, but all concussions are TBIs. Okay, so one more time in case I lost you there. Concussion is effectively a mild traumatic brain injury based on those categories. If you had worse effects, so you were unconscious for longer or your amnesia will lasted longer, then you may be actually be considered to be in a moderate category.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So far in the first season of PERFORM, we've talked about everything from muscle to the immune system to liver and lungs, metabolism, genetics, sleep, blood work. And so I thought we have to end this thing on what I hate giving credit to, because I'm a muscle guy, but probably deserves it. And that's the brain.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So moderate technically is defined as a loss of consciousness or amnesia for somewhere between 30 minutes to up to 24 hours. Symptoms associated with this are more severe. It is headaches, confusion, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, slurred speech, drowsiness, difficulty concentrating, so on and so forth.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And so another kind of back of the envelope way to differentiate between mild and moderate is mild, again, not always, but rough guidelines here. Mild is fairly acute. So in and immediately after the injury, you had symptoms, but then you're usually back to normal. Moderate often comes with downstream problems, not the injury themselves.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
So this is when you have behavioral changes because of the TBI. You've got, again, difficulty with memory that lasts a long time. That's, again, back of the envelope kind of distinction. If it is worse than that, we call it severe. That is technically a loss of consciousness or amnesia for somewhere between 24 hours to up to or more than seven days.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
And moderate and severe also have similar dementia-like symptoms. Now, I mentioned this earlier, but think about this. Severe TBIs oftentimes come with memory and attention problems, decision-making problems, learning impairments, mood, big sleep disturbances. And so you can imagine somebody who's in their 50s, 60s, or 70s who start experiencing things like that.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
They may personally just think, oh, this is, I'm getting old. Family members may think, oh, grandma's got, you know, starting to show dementia signs. Could be possible. Could also be possible that grandma's simply suffering from a severe TBI. And so this is what I was referring to earlier when I said there is actually a big crossover here. It's a bit of a gray area.
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
They can actually be the same thing. They can clearly be different as well, but there is a large crossover between them. So hopefully that helps you understand a little bit about what the difference between a concussion and a TBI is, what a mild, moderate, and severe traumatic pain injury are. And I started sneaking in some of the physiology about at least what's the symptoms?
Huberman Lab
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin: Nutrition to Support Brain Health & Offset Brain Injuries
What are the behavioral and actual consequences? That is important to understand because now that'll tell us what we do in terms of a treatment or prevention strategy. In order to finally connect that dot though, we got to walk through just a touch. And I promise this will be just a touch of the physiology or pathophysiology of each one of these categories.