A

This week on the Training Science podcast, I speak with two living legends in our field. Dr. Philip Maffhtone and Professor Tim Noakes. So this podcast had it all, but mainly we speak on the topic of challenging our beliefs. It's something that Tim and Phil have both done in theirs, and we hit on a number of them, from carbs and fat to salt and health. What the science tells us today and where we still need more work in the future. I don't think I really need to say much more than that. So without further ado, I now bring you Tim Nokes and Phil Mashtom. I'm here with Tim Noakes and Phil Maftone. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast.

B

Lovely to be here with you. Thank you so much. Fantastic.

C

Thanks, Paul.

A

Perfect. Well, this is a real honor. I mean, I was thinking about this beforehand, and pretty much everything I'm known for in the world, I've pretty much stolen from the two of you. So it's a real honor to have you here together again doing work with both of you. And in the work I was doing with Phil just recently, we were recently catching up, and he was saying, well, you know, maybe one thing we should do is get in the room with Tim as well, and flicked him a message and he agreed. And so here we are. And Phil, why don't you just start things off where we left off last? Like, when did you, yeah, when did you first meet Tim or come across his work?

C

Yeah, we've never met. Tim and I and Paul, we've never met either.

A

No.

C

But it's the age of, you know, of doing everything online, so sometimes I forget that. But I first heard about Tim when I first got into practice in 1970s. I'm not sure, Tim, but you can tell me the date. But it was your, I think, your first published piece on marathoners who, who had heart problems. And, and I was, I was impressed by that because I had, I was learning more and more about this difference between health and fitness and, and often related athletes who were sacrificing their health to, to impact their, you know, getting injured because of it. That was the common one. But an injury can take place in the heart or the brain or anywhere else. And so I was impressed with that. And, and I, I, I, I looked at, you know, the, the, the other articles that were published afterwards and eventually heard about the lore of running from, from athletes I was training. And there it is. And I was impressed with, with a lot of the philosophy in particular, but the, the whole approach and especially the, the idea of, you know, of kind of breaking tradition in a sense, which, which got even more intense when you. When you announced that you. You're. You're no longer recommending so many carbohydrates to. To athletes, which was a wonderful thing. And I. I've never done such a. Such a thing publicly. I've done it one on one with patients. And I certainly want modified my approach over the years based on what I've learned. So. So that's a short, short preview.

A

Yeah. Well, maybe go back there, Tim, and just like, you know, I'm like. There was some cardiology conference that you presented in at first, right? And people. People weren't really giving you, I don't know, too much airtime or were they? What, what was. When did. Where did it sort of start for you there?

B

So I. I graduated in medicine, 1974, 1975. I worked in a hospital. And then I realized I'm not cut out for this medicine practice. I realized I was much more interested in the science because, I mean, Phil will tell you that to become a physician you just have to learn this massive textbook. So you can explain 100 causes of fever. So patient comes in and the doctor who can say, here are the hundred causes, he's number one. If you only know 99, you're number two. And I mean, that's what it comes down to. I can remember I had such a patient who happened to be the father of the doctor I was working with. And every day we'd go in and draw blood, because this. You have to exclude all 100 causes. And after about the fifth day, he said, no more. He said, no more blood, but we don't know the cause. Anyway, he got better and he left. We never found out what the cause was. So anyway, so that's 76. I start my research and I go into laboratory with Professor Lionel Opie, who's very well known in cardiological surgeons, but mainly in biochemistry. And he had published a paper the year before discounting a hypothesis called the Basler Hypothesis. And Basler came along. He was a pathologist in California, he said, because no marathon runner has ever been shown to who have died from coronary artery disease. Therefore, marathon runners are immune from coronary artery disease. And we knew of a guy who died in South Africa who'd run the Comrades marathon, which is 90 kilometers, 56 miles. And he'd gone out surfing one evening, and he developed chest pain and he died. And so Lionel Opie reported that in the New England Journal of Medicine. Unfortunately, there was no Autopsy. So Basil said, but where's the autopsy? There's no autopsy here. So you proved nothing, you see. So Lionel was a bit embarrassed. And so when I went in and started in his laboratory, we would scan the newspapers for deaths amongst marathon runners in South Africa. And I think we had about four or five. And I would literally. It would be reported, let's say, on the Saturday of the. The Monday, I'd fly to wherever the death had happened and try to get the heart of the patient, because they always would have an autopsy. And I'd bring the heart back to Cape Town and where we had the experts who would then dissect the heart and look at it. And we could never. We always found all, everything but coronary artery disease. And so, anyway, at the end of 1976, they had this amazing conference, the New York Academy of Sciences Conference on the marathon. It was unbelievable. Every top scientist was there. It was a magical event. It was the best conference I ever went to in all the years. So I went and Lyle, by this time, I had looked at three people who'd had heart attacks and were marathon runners. And we tested them. We'd done ECGs on them, and we even done coronary angiograms, so we knew what their arteries looked like. And they all had coronary narrowing, so they had atherosclerosis. So I went to the conference and Lionel Opie said to me, you take your slides with you. So I took them, and then he said, you speak to the organizer and you tell him that I have to be able to speak because Basler's speaking. I must be able to count to him, you see. So I go up to Paul Milvey, who organized the conference. And, I mean, I'm 26 or so. I'm from South Africa. He hasn't a clue who I am. I don't know who he is. And I go up to him and I said, my boss, Lionel Opie, says, you've got to give me time to speak. That was sort of what I said. So he said, well, who are you? And he said, oh, but I know Lionel Opie, okay? And he gave me 10 minutes, I think, in the one tea break or lunch break, because he said, I got up there and spoke. And then I was surrounded by people who were really angry because 1976 was just the year that the marathon was taking off. It was just taking off because Frank Short had won the 1972 Olympics. And now 1976, where they were. They'd had the. That had the Olympics, but then they had The New York City Marathon, sorry, they were going to have it. In fact, I think it was, I think the conference was after the marathon. So, so Frank Shorter had run and he'd been beaten by Bill Rogers, and that would become a major event in 1976. So anyway, I gave the speech and then I was surrounded and these people were so angry with me. That was the beginning of it all. But I made a great friend with George Sheehan then, and he became.

C

Oh, George, George was a good friend. He was a patient of mine. And we, we, you know, in fact, I, I, I talked to him early on, which would have been 1977 or 78, about this idea that athletes could be healthy or can be very fit, but not healthy. And he thought that made a lot of sense. And so it, it's, yeah, I, I, gosh, I miss George.

B

Yeah. Now, he was wonderful to me and in fact, I won't reach for it now, but I have. You know, he sent me every week, he wrote a column and he sent me that column. I kept every single one of them.

C

Oh, wow.

B

Because they're some of the best writing that there is. In fact. No, no, that's not the one. But over there I've got half of them and I'm having other half put in a, in a book form. Yeah. And reading them today, 40 years later, they're just as fresh as, as ever.

C

Oh, they are. It's amazing. He, he wrote a, a short forward for one of my books quoting some of the Greek philosopher. I mean, it was just a wonderful, very holistic piece of writing that. Yeah, I looked at it a few months ago, I think, and I thought, wow, this is today.

B

Yeah, it is. And no one has come close to writing like him in the next 40 years. No one's come absolutely close at all.

A

It's awesome. I mean, it's lovely here. You're just listening to you guys. And that's mostly what I'm going to do in this podcast. Podcast, which, which is great. But I'll keep steering, steering a little bit. Tim, I'm, I'm reading Laura Running four right now. And it is, you know, it's a, it's a fantastic read. But there every so often in the book, actually, quite often we certainly have a carbohydrate biased, you know, muscle glycogen driven model, which is, which is quite remarkable. And I don't know where I kind of go with this question, but maybe I'll actually start it with Phil and then you can kind of come back in. But Phil, somehow you've known for much longer than the rest of us. And I remember this cause I was reading as a young triathlete, I was reading your books about the stories of Mark Allen and the importance of fat oxidation and the importance of kind of keeping stress at bay. How did you, how were you such an early adopter on this? How did you know all along?

C

I'd like to say it came to me in the shower or in a dream or something, but I grew up as a track and field athlete, a pretty good one. And so I had that experience. And then in college, from high school into college, you learn that glucose is the fuel for humans. We are a, a glucose based animal, especially the brain. And you know, we don't, we don't question that. And I started questioning it, but I didn't even know how to ask the question. And, and one day after a physiology course was completed, I was looking at some other exercise courses I wanted to take. And I got a book that, I think it's exercise physiology by McGardell. And in that book he talked about these different energy systems, you know, the immediate energy system, but the short term energy system that he called the anaerobic system and the long term energy system that he called the aerobic system. And, and I never heard about the aerobic system. And I, I not only took the course materials that I had to study, but I spent a lot of time in the library kind of expanding that, that information. And there was, there was the, the question and the answer, which was sugar and fat and, and some combination. And then I can, I can't remember, you know, how much there was at the time on, on our Q studies and that kind of stuff. But it was, it was, you know, it got more and more clear to the point where when I got into practice and started working with athletes, real live athletes, I had this, this approach that I wanted to focus on their aerobic system and their anaerobic system. And I even divided athletes, some sometimes into, well, this is an anaerobic sport or that's an aerobic sport, knowing that there was overlap all the time. But that was, that was really the beginning. And then practice gave me a chance to experiment on guinea pigs. And some of the early athletes I worked with, well, all of them really were guinea pigs. And you, you, you reduce. You know, by the time I got into practice, I already knew that junk food was junk food and we need to not eat it and sugar was a problem. And you know, I grew up in the 60s and into the 70s when there was a fringe element of nutrition that was anti sugar. And everybody made fun of us, especially the, the doctors and. And then my professors as well. But suddenly I had all these athletes and was able to show that, you know, eating less carbohydrate, especially the refined carbohydrate in the daily diet, helped them run faster at a. At the same heart rate, which was like. I thought, well, this is nice. Let's keep doing this. If you're an endurance athlete, can only help.

A

So, yeah, no, and you've been on the podcast before, Phil, and the stories with Mike Pig and Mark Allen are pretty legendary. They're in Tim's book as well. He does a great job of kind of describing those two. What it's remarkable to me. We'll get to you now, Tim, is. I'm reading Laura Running and I'm reading about, you know, you're very well aware that these athletes are sort of slowing down to go faster. You're also very well aware that it's impossible to do these feats like Ironman on solely carbohydrate. Right. Like the math just kind of isn't lining up. And this is. I think I forget the publication date, but this is maybe like 2004 or something like that. But it's like. But you're not kind of fat. Doesn't really kind of come into the play. So some. Somehow your blinders are on, Tim. So maybe, maybe take. Take us. Take us away there.

B

So, you know, Mark. I met Mark Allen and at a conference in Finland. And so I thought, well, I think I'll talk about the Iron man and why the Iron man is impossible. And when you do the calculations on the metabolism we had done, people, we'd cycled them for four hours and measured their metabolism, and they'd run out of glycogen after four hours. It was very clear. So then I made the calculation that Mark Allen had to burn 1.2 grams of fat every minute during the Ironman. And it turns out it's just been measured in the guy who set a record. And guess what he was measuring. They had him run in the laboratory and out of doors and he was burning 1.2 grams of fat a minute despite.

A

That's right. That was Magnus Ditlov. And we had. We had Magnus on the podcast.

C

So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, after Mark's races, I would be there and the. And the media would always ask me, how many calories did he take in during the race.

B

Yeah.

C

And I'd say, I don't know, maybe about this. And they said, no, it's impossible because he's burning that much. I said, well, he burned stored body fat. And they were just. They had no idea what that meant.

B

So what happened to me was that I was sent this. Sorry, I saw an advert for the book that new Atkins for the new you. And it arrived on a Saturday or a Sunday morning. And I happened. I'd just been out for a run and it was the worst run of my recent career. So I came back and I opened my email and there was this book, lose six kilograms in six weeks or something. And Phil, I know, will tell you I got very fat. And Phil was telling me, you know, I wish you'd stopped eating those carbs earlier in your life. And so do I. So he'd spotted the problem, but I was too arrogant, of course. Anyway, I read this and within two hours I'd read there were about 20 studies, no, there were 120 studies that they'd reviewed of low carb diets and the benefits. They weren't all about athletes or about health benefits. And I said, oh, my gosh, I got it wrong for 33 years. And I immediately said, that's it. I've eaten my last carb. So from lunch that day, I started. And then I suddenly, my running just took off again. I mean, I was like 20 years younger. It was astonishing. I went from being 60 and very slow to 40 and being as fast as I had been at 40. I didn't have the endurance, but I had the. The speed. I could train quite reasonably. So then I realized there was something in it. And about. About six months later, I wrote an article and I was funded by the main insurer, medical insurer in South Africa. They funded everything we did. And one of the reasons we were successful, because they were so good to us. And unfortunately, they promote a high carb diet. So in their magazine that they send to all their clients, I said that I'd stopped eating grains and the title was against the Grains. I was never asked to write another article. And I lost my funding like that. The funding just disappeared. And so that was now 2010. And then I retired in 2014 and by which time I'd now started reading a lot. And then I started. I think most people will know that I've gave this famous tweet, seven word tweet, which became the most expensive tweet in history because I had to go to court to defend myself for four years on that. And all I said was that you should Raise children on real foods, a low carb diet, the low carb foods. And that was enough to spur the whole of South Africa onto me. So that's. And then eventually I got through it and fortunately I had. Now I'd learned a whole bunch of stuff about nutrition, which I never knew before. And then Philip Prince, I'm not sure if he's been on your podcast yet, but you should really have him, Philip.

A

He has, yeah, a couple episodes ago. Fantastic.

B

So he went to the high school, which is next to my high school. They were the two great competitors in Cape Town, but he was obviously a lot younger than me, so he. He knew about me. I think he'd read Law Running and he was on a scholarship in America and he decided to stay and he's got this really great lab. And he said, what should we do? I said, well, let's do some low carb studies on performance. And so we've done these studies and he would have told you that. It took us seven years, but finally we did the definitive study to try to differentiate between muscle glycogen and blood glucose as the regulator of exercise performance. And unfortunately for the rest of the world, we discovered that the muscle glycogen is irrelevant and it's all the blood glucose. And at the same time that we were doing this, I was personally. And then I asked all the guys to work with me. I looked at every single study of carbohydrate ingestion during exercise. Every single one. And the paper is now about 600 pages. And it's been incredibly well received by the reviewers. And in fact, it's so. Well, except that I have to tell you, so the authors have meticulously. No, that wasn't the. This was started soon. I found this manuscript to be exceptional in its clarity, depth and scope. It delivers a meaningful reinterpretation of the role of carbohydrates in endurance performance and calls for a paradigm shift that deserves serious attention from the field. Now, this is one of the top journals in. In the field, and we were just knocked over by. By that. Because firstly, the article is far too long. It's much over their limits and they haven't mentioned it. So I think of everything I've done, this I think will be the most important thing. So that's what it's come to. And I've just been so fortunate that I had the opportunity and if I hadn't gone on the trial and if I hadn't changed my diet, this would never have happened. So I'm incredibly Thankful for it.

A

Hey team, if you're serious about getting better results as a coach or athlete, this is the offer for you. The Hitscience VIP pass gives you lifetime access to every course we've ever created and everyone we're building next. That includes deep dives into high intensity interval training, anaerobic speed reserve maximal sprinting speed and AI assisted endurance training and much more. The total value over 5k for right now, it's yours. For just $1995 you'll get access to our private community and support from the Hitscience team, including me. This is a one time opportunity to lock in the full library of Hitscience for life. Learn more@hitscience.com Tim, is it okay if we continue on that track? Because I think it's, I'm aware of, of this review that's coming out and I do believe it will be landmark. But can you've been, you know, you've been tweeting about the small and large glucose pool. Could you, could we just go into that, could you try to describe what you've relayed in this, in this important review coming out.

B

So you know the beauty. So as you know and Paul, thank you very much for helping me with the revision of Law of running version 5. So I'm very proud to be able to announce that the training section is going to be completely rewritten by Paul, by yourself. And I was so honored that you would agree to do it because I've, I'm trying struggling with nutrition, I can't be struggling with training as well. So. So I've left it to the real experts to, to revise that section and that's allowed me to.

A

My honor.

B

No, thank you. It's going to be great. So that's allowed me to look at the physiology again. And so see one of the things, when I started teaching in the sports sciences, one of the people who trained me was a chap called Villain Gevers. And he was meticulous on looking at quantifying things and he started with a paper in 1971 called the Banting Lecture on Insulin. And that article looks at 24 hours. Where's your energy coming from if you're sedentary and fasting or eating whatever. So they traced and it's written by Cahill and it's just a classic paper. So I was always involved in. He gave us the way you work these things out. So I can take a paper and I can work out, okay, that's how many grams of carbohydrates you're burning, that's how many grams of fat. And so when I started working on this review, that's what I did. I went and looked at all these papers to see how much fat was being oxidized. Because guess what, it's exactly what Phil said. No one bothered to look at how much fat was being oxidized. They all looked at the carbohydrates. So Eddie Coyle, who is a great friend of mine and did some fantastic studies, but he was completely blinkered on carbohydrates. He did One study, for example, 1986, which pipped us because we were all trying to find what would prolong performance. And he found it was carbohydrates ingested during exercise, prolonged performance. And he didn't bother to calculate fat oxidation. He just calculated carbohydrate oxidation because everyone was so committed to carbs. So I went back and I looked, and at the end of the exercise, people are burning more fat than carbohydrates. And even how. It doesn't matter how much carbohydrate you took, they're still burning more fat. So which is a more important fuel during prolonged exercise? By any rule, it would be the fat. And by the way, we've. That, I don't think we've told you, but that paper you mentioned, written by Christensen on the athletes, you mentioned his name. I'm. I'm not aware of him.

C

Yeah.

A

Magnus Ditlov. Yeah. World record holder.

B

That's right. So. So we looked at him and guess what? He shows what's called the, what we've called the reverse crossover point. He shows that after, I think it was after an hour of the run, he's burning more energy from fat than carbohydrate despite ingesting 80 grams of carbs an hour. And so we've defined this and we can't get it published at the moment because there's some resistance. So there's. The other crossover point is when you go, with increasing exercise intensity, you go from fat burning to carbohydrate burning and everyone's happy. Oh, you see, that's why you need lots of carbohydrates when you're doing high intensity exercise. That's that crossover pool. Now we come along and say, well, actually, when you do long exercise, it's the opposite. It's the reverse crossover. No, no, no, no, that's not possible. That's not true. That can't be possible. And it turns out that the first paper showing the reverse crossover point is from 1923 by Edwards and two other people.

C

Yeah, yeah.

B

Where they. They had a runner called Runner Y. And I think he's actually in law of running. It's interesting. He's probably in law of running, but completely missed it. And, oh, he does six. He runs on the treadmill for six hours. After four hours, virtually 80% of his energy is coming from fat. And they explained that. They said all his energy is coming from fat. And so there. He clearly showed this reverse crossover point. And ironically, when you look carefully at Eddie Coyle's work, it shows exactly the same. They all show the reverse crossover, even though they're ingesting carbohydrate during exercise. So that's a phenomenon that exists, but it's been completely missed. So what this rewriting law of running and writing that chapter made me look back at some of the work we did and some of the work we did with John Hawley was in charge and Andrew Bosch. They infused glucose into the athletes when they were exercising or they had them ingest glucose. And it is very clear that there has to be two glucose pools which are differentially regulated. It is as clear as day. This is 1994. It took me to 2024 to realize what it meant. So we are told that when you take carbs, you spare muscle glycogen. That's the key. That's why you can run faster. So it turns out when we infuse glucose, the rate of muscle glucose, muscle glycogen went. Shot up. It went up enormously. It was the exact opposite of what's meant to happen. But liver glucose was spared. So therefore you had a difference effect. Liver glycogen is spared. If you take glucose, you spare liver glycogen, and you increase muscle glycogen use. But no one could admit it because that would destroy the whole argument. But it's very clear. And if I can take you further, this is what I think happens. If you look at Cahill's article from 1971, he says the most important metabolic response in the body is to protect the blood glucose concentration. That's it. That's the number one driver of everything. Everything else comes secondary to that. So when you take carbohydrates, the response to the body is, we've got a problem, guys. We've got to get rid of this glucose from the bloodstream. And so what you do is you immediately turn off fat metabolism and you increase your carbohydrate metabolism, and you store the carbohydrates somewhere, either in the Liver or in muscle. And to me muscle glycogen is simply a dump. It's where you chuck the glucose when it's in the bloodstream and you can't get rid of it. And the other way you use the glucose, you turn it into fat and that's where full comes in. And both of you come in because that causes non alcoholic fatty liver disease, which you both described in athletes. And you recognize that's the problem, particularly when you eat, drink fructose as the solution. So that's what's happening now. Why do you burn muscle glycogen when you start to exercise? So what we'd also shown in other work with Sandy Welton, two other brilliant papers where she started People, we wanted to explain why can't you exercise when you've got no muscle glycogen? And of course we discovered something quite different. And she found that the amount of muscle glycogen you have when you start determines how much muscle glycogen you burn. If you start with lots of glycogen, you burn that glycogen. If you start with no glycogen, you burn fat right from the word go. And it's the muscle glycogen that regulates fat metabolism, which, which everyone ignores. They all say, oh, you must go and train and then you can burn fat. No, if you really want to burn fat, just don't eat carbs and you'll burn lots of fat. So anyway, it's when I read when I finally realized that they're differentially regulated, I then realized there have to be two pools, a large pool and a small pool. And that's why we set up the last trial that we published. And that's why we designed it to deplete the large glucose pool by having people live on a high fat diet for six weeks. And then to deplete the liver glycogen, we had them fast before exercise and then to replete that we gave the glucose during exercise versus placebo. And to remind you what we found, we found that what you did before exercise made no difference. So if you started exercise with lots of glycogen or little glycogen, your performance was exactly the same. But if you took in carbohydrates and only 10 grams an hour, that's just enough to keep the small glucose pool filled. As long as you took in your 10 grams, you could you increase the duration of exercise by about 22%. It didn't matter what you'd ate before, it had the same effect so we showed, therefore it's a small glucose pool. And then just to make the final point that the review gives us 16 lines of evidence, we discovered 16 lines of evidence which show that hypoglycemia is the factor influences influencing exercise performance, not muscle glycogen. And just to make that point, I was the first guy to go and look at all the trials in which people had either carbohydrate loaded or taken carbohydrate during exercise. And I looked at the control group because the key was the control group, it wasn't the intervention group. And I looked at the control group and 88% of the studies in which there was benefit from carbohydrates, it was because they prevented hypoglycemia in the control. As soon as you got hypoglycemia in the control group, the other group looked better. And it didn't matter what you'd done, whether you'd given them carbs before, carbs during, they looked better. So it was the hypoglycemia that was causing the problem, not what they'd done to the muscle glycogen. So that's the paper that they were so well reviewed and will be hopefully accepted in a few weeks time and then it'll come out quite soon.

A

That's amazing, Phil. Sorry, Tim. And yeah, it was, you know, it totally makes sense now, right, when you kind of get your head around it because. And it kind of comes back nicely to the central governor model as well too. Right. You're trying to, trying to. The mind, the brain is, is trying to kind of protect the homeostasis, you know, all around. And just to be clear for the, for the listener, remember that, you know, typically we are taking on carbohydrates to spare muscle glyco. This is what I've always thought. But what, you know, just to reiterate what Tim has said is that you're taking in more carbohydrate and we're hearing about these massive amounts of carbohydrate being ingested by the elite athletes. That's actually spinning out more carbohydrate oxidation in the form of muscle glycogen burn. You're actually, you're not sparing it, you're turning it over faster. And this loops back nicely into Phil's area, doesn't it, Phil? Because it's such a nice. The body's trying to protect its health. At the end of the day, it doesn't like this hyperglycemia that's going on and it's trying to protect the body. So I don't know. Any thoughts from you, Phil, as you're hearing these sorts of things that Tim's saying.

C

Fascinating to, to quote Dr. Spock and I, you know, Tim, I, I, I've always enjoyed it. I've always appreciated your, I guess I have to say it, Challenging Beliefs, which was the title of one of your books, and Paul's gonna show it. I think I wrote a, I think

A

again, everything I've done, I've stolen from the two of you.

C

Right. So, hey, we stole it from I don't know where. But, you know, I, I, I, I think I did a book review on that book as well.

A

You did?

C

But, but it's, you know, we, we, we are always challenging beliefs because we want more out of our patients, out of our athletes. We want to understand more. And we can only do that if we keep moving forward rather than sit back on our whatever and accept the, the belief systems that are out there in exercise physiology or any, any field. It's all the same thing. So we need to, we need to keep moving forward. And so this paper is going to be wonderful. So you're, you're thinking still a few weeks away, Tim?

B

Yeah, we just had to revise it and send it off, I think this week or next week. And I'm hoping that it'll get very rapid acceptance and so it should be out.

C

And I, and I hope that somebody does a press release, because the problem is, is quite often taking something that someone does in research and is published in a journal and translating that information to the runner in the street, And a, a good press release would do that. It's basically a, a simple, you know, high school senior article about this research. If one can synthesize all these hundreds of pages of information into, you know, 800 words or 600, however many words the press release would be. Yeah, but, but people need to know, okay, what do I do now if I can't believe that, you know, what do I do with this information? And that's a very, I've always, I've always been really hung up about that because I'm, you know, I'm a slow reader and I'll read something and then I'll read it again and then again and again, and I'll finally say, oh, I see. I wish somebody had told me that. And so I'm always sympathetic about the, the athlete who wants to take real scientific information, even though they're challenging beliefs, and say, hey, this is the way it is. Not that way. It's like the fat sugar thing. And, and you know, we, we've both been badgered our, our whole life because of those beliefs that we had in the beginning. I had those beliefs because I saw it, I appeared to see it in athletes and it seemed to make sense if you looked in the literature enough. And I didn't care if I could explain it scientifically yet. But my, you know, my, my whole thing was helping this athlete perform better. And I've had this conversation in great detail with, with, you know, the people I worked with, Mark Allen, Paula. As you know, we've known each other through the years and you know, all the, all the other athletes in all those different sports, not just running and triathlon. So, you know, hopefully the, the information will get out without income interference from the industry. Yeah.

A

Hey team. Looking for smarter training with less guesswork. Athletica AI is your personal AI coach. Built on real sports science, not just black box algorithms, Athletica creates a dynamic personalized training plan that adapts to you, your fitness, your schedule and your feedback. Whether you're training for a triathlon, cycling event or just just looking to improve your endurance. Athletica gives you the structure and insight of a real coach backed by data and decades of science. Try for free at Athletica AI and see how good your training can feel when it's built around you. So we're on the training science podcast here and the goal that Martin and I always have is to kind of swing back and forth between what the science says and of course the practical application. And I think what Tim has sort of laid out with this, with this new model, if we can accept this, is really that you only need the, in terms of the practical application, you really only need to ingest as much carbohydrate or glucose as is necessary to maintain your blood glucose. The small glucose pool. And that. And as Philip Prins and, and, and Tim and others have shown, that can be as small as only 10 grams an hour. As Phil was saying. Sorry, Phil Prinz was saying, that's only. It was actually like 3.3 grams every 20 minutes. Like it was so minuscule just enough to keep up the blood glucose. And remember also that that preserved performance, improved performance by 22% relative to placebo in both carb adapted and fat adapted athletes, which is, you know, again, it's a remarkable study. So that is the practical message.

C

Yeah, that' that's an interesting component.

A

And, but that's not the message that is being, you know, just rammed down our throats in the, in the mainstream media. I mean the last one I saw was the, the last, you know, a massive world record performance the athlete was getting. You know, it was claiming the 200 grams an hour was the special carbohydrate solution that was, he was pinning it all on basically. So this is, you know, and this is, this is what we're seeing. It's just getting higher and higher and higher. What are we missing, guys?

C

Yeah, the amount of gut dysfunction from that amount of carbohydrate in an athlete, I mean, must be horrendous. I mean, years and years in the beginning. For me, one of the things that was really quite amazing was that when we trained someone and build their aerobic system and eventually realizing that they would be burning more and more fat even at rest, they, their requirement during a race for, for added glucose became less and less almost to the point where in a lot of races athletes who were, well fat adapted didn't need any carbohydrate consumption for like a half marathon or even. I, I've had some age groupers that would be able to run a whole marathon without anything. Yeah.

A

So just, just to support that, even in recent days, you know, we have a, we have a colleague and a friend, Dan Plews, who set the world record for the Ironman. He, in the age group he went under eight hours and you know, he's, he put out in the social media. He was maybe having a gel an hour like he was. So, you know, and, and he's, he's going fast.

C

Yeah, yeah. I mean they're almost doing it thinking, gee, just in case, I'm going to do some, you know, but I think the, the, the, the thing that gets people's attention is that if they consume less, if they, if they're not needing to consume so much carbohydrate, their gut is going to feel so much better because gut dysfunction is a very common problem and it's often a problem that impairs the race or increases their, you know, the dropout race rate. So you know, that, that makes people think, gee, well maybe, maybe if I did that I wouldn't have to drop out every other race because my gut's so screwed up. Yeah.

B

The latest report, the guy who said that the, the Ironman cycling record and claimed it was the 200 grams, firstly he only completed the cycle, but then he did a bad run. So he was, he changed his pacing strategy completely. And no one recognizes that. That's, that's point one. But point two, if you're Going to set your record over four hours. How does the carbohydrate do that? Because you've got to go recruit more muscle. That's the only way you can go faster. So how do you recruit your more muscle when you've already got plenty of glycogen from the start of the race? So how's that doing it? And of course it doesn't. There's something else. We're taught that the carbohydrate works because it provides a fuel once you run out of glycogen. But now his test showed that he believes it helped him before he ran out of glycogen. So how does that work? And so they've got to come up with another novel explanation for that.

C

Well, the industry has a lot of money to come up with the right wording, so it'll, it'll come along soon for sure.

A

Yeah, I'll be the devil's advocate on, on that. And I've, I've kind of been thinking about this. I mean, I, I want to understand too. Right. Like, clearly the metabolic data is not supporting this. But what about, you know, in the, you know, with, with respect to the recruit recruiting of more larger muscle fi. Fibers, motor units? Could that be central nervous system recruitment that's, that's being enhanced potentially by, by the sugar itself is like, just like caffeine kind of does. Could we, could there be some sort of mechanism there?

B

So one of the things I was reading up over the last weekend or so was, did you know that the VO2 max falls at 300 meters altitude? So if you go from sea level to 300 meters, your VO2 max falls. If you go to 600 meters, it falls and there's this linear fall. So that tells you how sensitive the brain is to something. And obviously in this case, it'll be the oxygen partial pressure of oxygen in the inspired air. So if the brain can detect the difference between sea level and 300 meters altitude, it means it's acutely sensitive. And so then your question is very real. Could the brain be responding to a glucose of 5.5 or 6 or 6.5? However, we did a trial where we had guys with glucose up to 10 and they didn't go any faster in 100k race. But maybe that was too much. Maybe a little bit. Because to, to keep your glucose at 6 during exercise is really difficult. You have to pile in the carbohydrates. So you're quite right. It could be that the, the, the blood glucose is, these guys are keeping the Glucose higher and that's just high enough to kick in some sort of central mechanism.

C

Yeah, we certainly know the brain can enlist more muscle fibers in a muscle. I did that with biofeedback for years where we enlist the motor cortex to send more messages to a muscle for rehab or for additional strength. And we can get significant additional strength out of a muscle by enlisting. We do that in stroke patients and kids with brain injuries from birth who never moved a muscle. You can often get that muscle moving in, in a couple of minutes because you're through biofeedback, you're enlisting the motor cortex to send messages to the, the muscle to contract more fibers. And they've known this for years. In the gym, bodybuilders, coaches would shoot off a, a starter's pistol behind a, you know, a guy lifting a big barbell to, you know, and then there's the story which are true. These stories about mothers lifting up a car because their kid is caught underneath it. These are, these are kind of rage. These are stress reactions from the hypothalamus affecting the sympathetic nervous system and contracting more muscle fibers. So the mechanism is there. It works really well. We could, we can help it along with, with different things. But the glucose, you know, the fuel factor is, is got to be a big part of that as well.

A

Him and Phil, I guess one of the questions, practically speaking that a lot of athletes have is around, you know, it's around nutrition. And if we take this model in our head about this large glucose pool, small glucose pool, the large glucose pool, in terms of topping it up, it's probably an, an overnight process. Right. Like it's, it's not. We certainly do know that that glycogen depletes. We, we do lose, you know, we do burn that glycogen. Of course it never goes to the level of, I think that what, what's the lowest it potentially gets to Tim in terms of like maybe 25%. We can't go much lower than, than that. Right. Because of rigor and which would happen. There's a protective mechanism there. But, but nevertheless there's, you know, athletes have concern about what they eat in the pre race period in terms of their dinner and they are also concerned about the race morning. And I'm wondering if this thinking around the small and glucose, large glucose pools can assist us with, with developing practical solutions in terms of, or confidence at least in our, our decisions in the, in this, you know, the, the meal before and the, you know, the three hour period before, before performing an Endurance event. Any thoughts there?

B

Okay, so we've kind of exclude the muscle as being important. So you can start with low muscle glycogen, you'll be fine. The problem is that if you eat a low carb diet, you also deplete the liver. And so technically you do want to start with reasonable amount of liver if you're not going to drink carbohydrates during, but if you are going to ingest carbohydrate during, then that's fine, you can start with a, with low liver glycogen. So and the other thing is that the carbohydrate is very rapidly, can very rapidly reverse hypoglycemia. So if you tell people to beware of the symptoms and I suffered hypoglycemia quite badly in two ultramarathons. And the thing that happens is you just suddenly you, you very. Over a period of a short time, you suddenly think, I'll never finish this race. And the last thing you want to do is eat food. I mean, it's astonishing. I'll tell you one story. So I was training for the comrades and then in a, in a pre training there was a race of, I think it was 56km and I had trained right up to the Friday and the ran on the Saturday. Completely carb depleted when I started and I told the lady who was helping me, I said, if I get rude, etcetera, here's what I want. And it was a bottle of, full of high carbohydrates. I said, you just give that to me and I will take it and I will feel better immediately. And eventually I got into that state and I said, I'm not going to have that, I do not want that. She said, you told me to take it, I took it. And within 15 minutes I was flying. I mean, I was going twice as fast as I had before. It was an astonishing thing. I never, I never did that again. It was an amazing moment. So that reversing the hypoglycemia suddenly allowed me to run much faster than I had before. So, so then I realized it's very quick and it takes almost nothing to do it. My point is that if you get those symptoms where you're starting to feel a little bit funny, you can't quite concentrate and you get this feeling, I'm never going to finish this race. And the brain's telling you, listen, you stop or else you're going to get brain damage. And that's what it's trying to tell you. But you release the break by taking a bit of carbs and you reverse your hypoglycemia. And the feeling is dramatic. It's just astonishing.

A

But, but Tim, are you, are you saying that the muscle glycogen pool is almost irrelevant?

B

But yes, I am saying that. I know and I appreciate your, your uncertainty and your disbelief. But I mean, we showed it. We had these guys eating these high fat diets and their V2 max was the V2 max. Taste was the same, 5k, time was the same, 1 5k was the time was the same. But most importantly, Phil said, I said, the next trial we want to do is a mile, a treadmill mile. And then the results came. There was no difference. And I said, I know, you know what they're going to say? They're going to say, well, you see, it's because they had so much glycogen anyway. So I said, okay, we've got to deplete the glycogen. And the way we do that is do six times 800 meter repetitions. And I don't think there's any physiologist in the world would say that muscle glycogen is not important during that 6 times 800 meter and they wouldn't be glycogen depleted. Their performances were exactly the same whether they had eaten the high carb or the high fat diet. And it was in that trial we burnt the, we discovered these fat oxidation rates of over 2 grams per minute, the highest ever recorded. And that there, I said, well, there it is. You know, that's the truth. The muscle, the muscle just is always ready to burn fat, but it's hidden because we eat so much carbohydrate. And then I went and looked at Louise Burke's work and you know, she, she did, she did some very good studies because she measured fat oxidation in athletes as they're adapting. And in one study, in five days, high carb athletes were burning 1.5 grams of fat every minute within five days. So what had happened? How much training had they done in those five days? Nothing additional. In other words, the body was always just waiting. It's just waiting. Please stop eating those carbs. And we can burn fat. And that's what she showed you. Just take the carbs away and you burn fat. And, and that's where. What I didn't explain, which we kind of got to, was muscle glycogen determines its own oxidation rate. Muscle glycogen regulates its own use by determining what the insulin level is. It's as simple as that, so when you've got lots of glycogen, you have a high insulin and insulin inhibits fat oxidation, so you have to burn carbohydrates. If you start with low muscle glycogen, you start with low insulin, you burn fat because the insulin is low. The insulin is the key problem. And in our studies we found that you had to have about five. Your insulin values had to be below six micro units per milliliter. And that almost never happens except in people eating low carb diets. Everyone else has an insulin above that. And as soon as you start to exercise with that insulin, you're going to burn carbs. Get it below that and you can do anything you like by just burning fat. So that's my opinion. That's what our data seems to, It's

C

a great, I mean, those are the ideas that I've worked with for a long, long time. And I, I have to kind of step back and look at the bigger picture here for a moment because people are going to listen to this podcast, they're going to read about your, your paper and they're going to, you know, they're going to focus on what am I going to do before the race or during the race, how much do I, you know, you, you have to, you have to have a healthy lifestyle going into this thing to begin with, like the keeping your insulin low. So you've got to have a healthy diet where you're not allowing insulin to come up, where you're allowing your, your fat burning to go up and your glucose burning to be at relatively lower levels at rest during, you know, all the time. And so if you go into your pre race routine and your race day being healthy, it's, it's often, you know, a big part of, of your goals being met.

B

Yeah. Now that's very good advice. That's excellent. And you know, when you look at the Tour de France cyclists, when they show you what they eat, I mean, it's just junk food. It's unbelievable. One of the local doctors here who can't stand me and can't stand my ideas, who happens to be a doctor for one of the Tour de France teams, and he came home and he said what they eat is appalling

C

even today. That's amazing because I, I worked with them back in the early to mid-80s, I think, and. Yeah, and it was you. You know, the, the team doctors wanted to have arguments with you.

B

Yeah.

C

About, you know, making that recommendation of not eating refined carbohydrates. You can't get enough carbohydrate if you only rely on natural carbohydrates, blah, blah, blah. And it was just.

B

Yeah.

C

And it hasn't changed. That's really sad.

B

Not one bit. We had one. One South African I heard I'd helped and he. He went almost carnival and was doing very well. Good enough to qualify for one of the international teams. As soon as he got on that team, they said, you will stop this diet. You now start eating cough. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A

We've had Christian Meyer and Swain, tough two former pro tour cyclists, on the podcast. And they. They confirm. Exactly, exactly that. And they. Both of them, they just kind of. Yeah, they. They couldn't handle it. They couldn't handle sort of what they were. They were feeding them and they had to kind of sneak out, sneak away and find the unhealthy food for themselves. Along. Along that. So

B

what is really interesting was. Yeah, the guy we were talking about, the triathlete who set the record for the.

A

The Magnus.

B

Yeah, for the. Yeah. Now the other guy, the other guy who did it last week, a few weeks ago, just the snack Cam Wurf. Yeah, that's right. He tweeted a picture on Instagram of what he ate the next morning. It was a massive steak. Biggest steak I've ever seen. But he wouldn't admit to that, I'm

C

sure, especially because of his sponsors. You never know.

A

That's right.

C

And I've encountered that as a problem.

B

Which reminds me of the most successful South African running coach is a guy called Nick Besta, and he won the Comrades Marathon and he had some very close seconds as well. But he's a native South African Africana and they're always raised on. Probably raised on a farm. So he was raised eating meat. And once he tweeted, tim, I was eating Carnivore before you were born. But anyway, he's the most successful coach every year in the comrades of the first 10. He probably has five or six athletes in it. He's astonishing. And his last athlete who beat the record, there's a picture of him eating the night before an enormous steak. An enormous steak, and plus other stuff on it. And that's what he ate the night before. Completely different.

C

And as we know, as the anthropologists have told us, and Paul and I have written about this more than once, is that the. The human diet for millions of years was just that meat and fat. There wasn't a lot of carbohydrate. And so. And with the advent of fire, cooking with fire, humans are able to digest and absorb these really tough steaks that we don't realize how tough they must have been.

B

Yeah.

C

And brain size increased and, you know, all kinds of interesting things happened. And so that's a, that's a something to, to look back on. How did humans get to be who we are today? I mean, that, that was a turning point in our evolution back when fire was controlled for cooking.

A

Yeah.

B

And just, you know, the other thing is when we test for the effects of a diet, we put the athlete in the laboratory for one day, for one test, as if that's going to tell you everything. And I think a lot of us are working with other team sports in which there's a lot of physical contact. And we will tell you that if you put the team on a carnivore diet, things change. They start amazing.

C

And I've done it in pretty much all sports, including some of the macho, you know, the, the, the like motorsports, especially the endurance events in motorsports. But, you know, you, you, what you just mentioned is interesting because with this, with this idea that we want to challenge these, these, these traditional notions, especially in sports, it's, it's a really tough thing to challenge those. How, how, how many other things are there out there where research has shown definitively here is the way it is. You know, just, just the idea that we have otherwise healthy runners who have good metabolic function where they're burning high fat and lower glue. Then we have other runners who are also otherwise healthy and they're studied too, as a group. And their fat burning is way down here and their sugar burning is way up here. Metabolically, they're night and day. Are those studies really skewed? Are we needing to repeat a lot of things in the coming years?

B

Okay, so I think I can help answer that question. What we forget is the selection process. Now if you, let's just take an example. The Kenyan runners, you know, we all told that Kenyans all survive on high carb diets and that's why they're brilliant. What they don't tell you is what about the guy who came 4th and 5th? Was he different? He's eating the same diet. Why was he different? And the key, I mean, as everyone who follows this podcast will know, if you're eating a high carbohydrate diet and you're insulin resistant, you're going to have belly fat. But it will be hidden. It'll be in the gut and it'll be in the kidneys and then the liver and that 1 kg, that 1 kg is going to kill you. It's not going to be, you're not going to win the Tour de France. And I think what happens is on these high carbohydrate diets we select out those athletes who are profoundly insulin sensitive and they don't get visceral fat because of this high carb diet and therefore they leaner. And the guy who's not quite so insulin resistant, insulin sensitive, he puts on 2 kilos but no one can see it because it's hidden in his gut.

C

Yeah.

B

And then he's got to go up all those hills in the Tour de France and he doesn't make it. And he's cycling on the second team or the third team. And the guys are in the first team are the ones who are incredibly insincensitive so they can cope with that, that diet. You know what I've noticed now as you, you change the diet of team sports, they become more muscular and they lose their subcutaneous fat. And so I watch the sports now to see how much subcutaneous fat's present. I mean if you look at the world tennis girl, the girls that, that most of them are quite obese and no one worries about it.

C

It's terrible. Even, even the professional ranks. Yes.

B

Yeah. You can't see their muscular development until. And it's all covered with this fat.

C

Yeah. That's why in, in so many people, their normal weight, they're non obese, yet their body fat is, is high. They're over fat. And it's interesting what you said about they get more muscular. They look more muscular.

B

Yeah.

C

More than they are more muscular. And I can't tell you how many, how many times I've heard, especially after I, I've got an athlete, I'm gonna take him through the winter, the off the down season and I'm going to help them build a good aerobic base, increase fat burning, reduce their carbohydrate intake, blah, blah, blah. And they come out in the spring and, and a lot of people comment at the race, gee, you must have him lifting weights because he looks so muscular now and. No.

B

Yeah.

C

It doesn't take much body fat to, to, you know, burn off much body fat to, to, to demonstrate the musculature underneath.

B

I look at teams out last word and, and you can tell who's eating the carbs and who's eating the, the carnival diets.

C

That's why I saw it in you so long ago. I, it was the second, it was the second photo I saw of you. I don't remember where it was, but I said, yeah, he's insulin resistant. And the game with, with that clinically is to say, okay, this person's insulin resistance, but what was this person like five years, 10 years earlier, 15 years earlier, could we have known that this person was becoming more and more insulin resistant? And I think the answer is yes. And that's the clinical. The art of clinical assessment is we look at those little factors and when you start seeing two or three of them, you, you play Sherlock Holmes and aha, this is going to be insulin resistant.

B

So, So I don't know how much time we got, but another few minutes. So three of us, myself, Bernard Rose, who was the top marathon run in South Africa, ran a 208 marathon in 19, in the 1990s, 1980s, I should say. And Bruce Fordyce, who won the Comrades marathon nine times. We were the first to produce a squeezy for use during marathon running.

A

Lapin or something, right?

B

Yeah, called FRN Len.

A

I used them, I used them as an athlete.

B

So I developed type 2 diabetes. Bruce Fordyce becomes pre diabetic. And the same with Bernard r. Now Bernard, a 208 marathon. And Bruce was what, about 216 marathon runner? We all became insulin resistant and we all had to change our diets. And, and Bruce said to me, tim, you know, if you hadn't put me on the high carb diet, I would have won 12 Comrades, not just nine. He said, I would have gone 20 minutes faster. And Dave Scott, who, who I have such a high regard for, he said, tim, you know the problem with Law of running is you only spoke about Mark Allen. You never spoke about me. But anyway, he said, he said, I'll forgive you because he read the book Real Food, Real Meal Revolution. And he said, I adapted that diet. Yeah, there we go, he said. And it made a massive difference to me.

C

Dave and I had some heated discussions for years about this. And you know, I mean, he, he would be on NBC before the Ironman. They'd show him draining his cottage cheese to get rid of the excess fat. He doesn't want to eat any fat, just carbohydrate, you know, all of us, you know, I mean, it's, it's so great to see people jumping on the bandwagon. And, and it's, it's still, there's still not enough people doing it. The, the, the grip fast.

B

Sorry. He said he would have gone half an hour faster in Iron Man. Yeah, yeah. So, and, and, but the other thing, and I don't think I don't think he minds me saying it, but he said the emotional balance was quite different once he started eating more fat. He became much more emotionally stable. Etc.

C

Yes.

B

Oh yeah, well that's, you know about that.

A

Phil and I are writing right now on, on brain health. Right? And there is something, there's something there on, on the, the brain health and

C

health and your change, the neurotransmitters. You, you know, I mean your, your brain energy, if we can just call it that or goes up, you think? I mean it's a great treatment for depression and all kinds of other brain related issues that aren't even related. So yeah.

A

Hey team, you've heard us talking About Sports Science 3.0 Taking research out of the lab and into the real world. Well, the future's now and we're putting our money where our mouth is with the field study that's fueling influence on endurance, load and development. So if you try, train with a wearable and follow any kind of fueling routine, high carb, low carb or something in between, we want you in spend 15 minutes on a survey, start a free 2 week Athletica trial and your existing training data does the rest. Together we'll uncover how everyday nutrition affects performance, fatigue and recovery at scale. Join us@ athletica AI fieldstudy. Your data, your performance, real world science. Thanks for listening. So yeah, this is an incredible conversation and the other one I've been thinking about, you guys keep talking about insulin, right? And just remind the listener, insulin is kind of like the lock and key mechanism for the cells. Insulin comes in, opens up the door and the glucose can go in there and be burned. Now a lot of people will say that, you know, you do not have to worry about high carbohydrate consumption when you're exercising because there's a different lock and key mechanism, right. I think calcium comes to the door and opens it up. So what are your thoughts there, Tim? Like, can you still have a problem with insulin secretion when you're exercising under these enormous high carbohydrate consumption rates? Is there any evidence for that or is that case closed, you can eat as much carbohydrate as you want without health problems during exercise as long as you're moving, what do you think there?

B

You're quite right that if you start with a high insulin, it's amazing how quickly it drops during exercise. So it drops absolutely vertically and blood glucose levels normalize very quickly. So if you give someone a glucose tolerance test and you start the exercise while they're peaking on the insulin glucose, they both normalize very, very quickly. So that sounds fantastic. So you're quite right. I don't think the damage is not done during the exercise. It's done with your habitual diet. And it's the habitual diet.

C

That's why it's so important to go there as well. But yeah, I've always assumed that with exercise the insulin production is minimized and so we don't need to worry about it. Who knows, we may show that that is not always the case.

A

But could it be almost a gateway drug towards a less healthy diet? I wonder. I'm not sure.

B

Yes. So let me tell you the next story. So the, one of the reasons why I did medicine was because of a guy called Professor Christian Barnard who did the first human heart transplant in Cape Town in my, in the hospital I trained in. And I had no clue what I wanted to do. And I woke up one morning four months after he'd done the operation. And I said, I'm going to study medicine. So at the time I was 18 and I really didn't have a clue what I wanted to do. So many years later, when I was, when I changed, as soon as I changed to the low carb diet, I was on television and I was shown talking about carbohydrates. And I mentioned the word sugar addiction, which I didn't know too much about, but I knew that it was something, had something to do with it. And immediately his granddaughter, Chris Barnard's granddaughter phoned me and she said, I'm sure I've got sugar addiction. She said, you got it. You described it perfectly. And she describes how her father used to come home after work with a Coca Cola and a chocolate and he would give that to her. And she recognized it as a love, that was a love donation. And she said I became addicted to that. And ultimately that led to other addictions which she's open to describe. But she said it's the gateway drug.

C

Yeah, it sure is. And it's tough to scientists who are listening, it's tough to talk about sugar addiction because for a variety of things, I think it's best referred to as addictive behavior. But it's clearly a gateway drug. And it's clearly in, in the brain, similar to cocaine and, and tobacco. Clearly an addiction that needs to be dealt with. Whether the, the mental health book says it's addiction or not. It is. And, and, but it's certainly a behavior that has clear strong addictions. And people who have ever tried to get off Sugar. Already know that.

A

Yeah.

B

No, And I would say that the main driver of obesity globally is sugar addiction or food addiction. Yeah.

C

And they do such a good job in perpetuating that the industry does on all levels, including in sports. They want you to think that if you're a couch potato and you eat this so called energy bar that's full of sugar because athletes do it, you'll be athletic too. And they believe it.

A

So I hope, you, hope you guys don't mind, I have one, one more question and it relates to, you know, changing beliefs, challenging beliefs as Phil kind of mentioned there. And you know, what is kind of next. And you know, I had Sean Sako on the podcast. Now Sean is a carnivore athlete. He does these, you know, eight hour long fasted rides and he just does them on water. And the guy's pushing like 250 watts. It's just a beast. He's, he's amazing. And he, he has a similar background as he described really back to Tim's where he started in the, ultimately the supplement industry. Right. And then had an awakening. So he does these amazing feats. Now the only thing that he does have on those rides with water, and this is where I'm wondering if our beliefs need to change, is he has salt. Because when I look to Waterlogged and Tim's other important book here, and you know, Phil gave a great background on humans evolving and these sorts of things. Is there any role potentially for salt? Because I've been taking, taking Tim's words and I've been telling athletes don't have these salt tablets either. And maybe, maybe I'm wrong and any thoughts there? Tim, in the context or Phil in the context of the, you know, the animal that we are doing these amazing sort of feats in the, in the heat, in the heat of battle.

B

Will you start?

C

I've used sodium, I've used salt tablets with athletes from the beginning. And it's often a challenge. It's often a challenge in that. Let's try this in training and see how it works. And for some people it worked really well. And so we would use it during the race. It corresponded to me measuring sodium urine levels in my clinic, which I don't know. Tim, you may remember the old, what's it called this, the, it's not the so called. It's a simple clinical test you can do and you get a good sense whether your, your sodium in the urine is low. Moderately.

B

I think it takes.

C

And I, I, it became obvious, yes, it became obvious that Athletes who were more and more over trained would lose more and more sodium. And then when it got concerning, I would do a blood test. But, but so I've used it. Did I need to use it long term? Probably not. I didn't, I didn't use it long term because people, as they corrected their diet and as their brain worked better, they were able to metabolize things like sodium much better. And so plus they use salt in, in their meals and then they wouldn't over train. So that's, that's my experience with it.

B

So Sean is one of the people who promotes the Nokes foundation. And so we work very closely with him. And I mean I was on a discussion with him for an hour today on this very question.

A

How timely.

B

Yeah, and, and whether we should be developing a high salt drink for use during exercise. So I think you'll find that things are on the, on the development stage. The, the reality is that the best studies were done in the 1940s, in the Second World War. And there the scientist who I'll have to, Jerome Kahn. When the war started, America knew they had to fight in the Philippines and in Asia and they knew it was going to be very hot and they were concerned that they would take their military there and the guys would collapse on the first day because of heat exhaustion and so on. And he was an endocrinologist and so they said you must sort the problem out. So they, no one knew if it was an endocrinology problem or not. But anyway, so he did what he could and he did exactly what Phil said. He started measuring the sodium and chloride content of urine and sweat. And he had these people who didn't want to fight the war, the religious objectors, and they were totally committed. He could do whatever he liked to them. And we could never repeat these experiments. And he'd put them in a heat chamber for six hours a day, every day for months. They'd wake up and they'd go into the heat chamber. And what he did was he reduced their sodium intake and he showed it was impossible to make them sodium deficient. He wasn't measuring performance, remember, he was just measuring sodium balance. And he couldn't produce sodium deficiency because they would conserve the sodium first in the urine and then in the sweat. And so eventually they were just passing pure water as sweat. So he said it's, you know, it's very difficult to get a sodium deficiency. So that's, the physiology is clear, but that's not performance. And I, I, I realize that it's Something that we have to consider. And in fact, I think there was a paper published in the last two days showing that in some women, females eating high sodium diets during exercise, they actually improved their performance. I need to look at it. There is another study in the, in the literature which has gone missing, but if you look at the reviews, the meta analyses, they say, no, you don't need extra sodium during exercise.

C

So, yeah, I think there's an individuality issue that needs to be addressed, especially in this case with sodium, because some people are more sensitive, others are not. If you're, if you're insulin resistant, you're. Your, you know, your blood pressure may start to rise until, and you may be sodium sensitive too, but until your carbohydrates are reduced and your soda, your insulin comes down, your blood pressure will normalize and your sodium metabolism will normalize. Typically.

B

Yeah.

A

Nice. Yeah. There's some important contextual points, probably for you, Tim, coming into your final lore, running, you know, book that'll, that'll emerge eventually, which is, is super exciting. Guys, I'm, I'm way over time and I'm so appreciative of, of everything. And time flies. It does fly. It does fly. Maybe just, just on going, guys, is there anything that we've missed that you want to put forth? Either of you either asking the other or I guess any. Anything that you want to. Want to mention to, to our audience before we close down?

B

Yeah, I'll just make this point that, that, you know, we've all assumed that metabolism and fuel is the driver of performance. And it, and it all comes from this graph where if you, if you're doing this is duration and this is the intensity you can sustain and this lovely exponential curve like that. And A.V. hill was the first to describe it in 18. Sorry, in 1924 or something. And he said, well, it's obviously, it's all metabolic. You see, you're running out of fuel. But tell me, how does the body know that as it's running out of fuel that you've got this perfect exponential curve? No one says that. They say, okay, if you run out of glycogen, you go like this and you stop. You don't hit this curve. So why do you go just slightly slower every half hour if you were to run a race at those different intensities? And I think that this is genetically built into us because animals show it as well. If you look at horse races and so on, they show the same, same thing. And I think that's genetically built into humans. That's how we exercise. And the best athletes just do it better than others. And they respond incredibly well to training. So they, their curve shoots up and the rest of us sit at much lower levels. And then we say, oh, it's because they eat this carbohydrate or that carbohydrate. I don't think, I think it's genetically into your brain and you can train it and you can improve it, but it's it, it. We've only got a small range that we can change it in. And they're talking now, this is resilience and so on. Well, that, that's a mental phenomenon. That's not really metabolic. So my point is that we've, we paid far too much attention to metabolism because we could measure it and with the things we can't measure. Like Phil was talking about how the brain drives your performance. So we've just ignored it and pretended it doesn't exist. And then industry, yeah, industry comes along and they promote the carbohydrates and so on.

C

Yeah, we're waiting for your paper to come out. We're waiting for your book to come out because athletes need to understand more about their body. And I've been saying this from the beginning and people just look at me funny. You know, the most important body part for athletes is their brain. Bill Bowerman said something like, it's, you know, it's, it's not the, the, the, the, the athlete who works the hardest, who succeeds, is the athlete who's most intelligent. Yeah, you know, very, very, very important. You know, we've lost our intuition and instinct because the, the industries have bombarded us with bad information to sell their products and we need to get that intellect back.

B

I'm currently reading a book about the top Australian runners because Australia was producing and New Zealand producing great runners in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. And one of them, I think it was Herb Elliott, he said, you know, you train for your mind. That's why you train. It's not to develop yourself physically, it's to develop yourself mentally. So there's one quote like that, guys,

A

that's just been absolutely incredible, honestly, a dream come true for me to have you both in the same room. And I think we've given hopefully the listener lots of food for fodder and potentially for challenging beliefs. Tim, you mentioned that maybe Laura running might be the one, but I, I think you'll need to actually come back and do a, at least a second version of, of challenging beliefs as well, because I think your, your beliefs have even come since you wrote this one.

B

No, that's fine.

C

Yes, Tim, I have. I have said the last two books I wrote that this is the last book I'm writing. And so I just. I just want to share that with you.

B

I'm sure you know, this is the last.

C

Paul, this is the last paper I'm writing also, just so you know.

A

Yeah, no, probably not until the next one.

B

Exactly.

A

Guys, I. I so appreciate you both for your contributions to the field, to my own. My own development. You know, we both have our stories and whatnot, and it's. It's just. Yeah. Just so much respect and admiration. Thank you once again. And we'll. Yeah, we'll include the. The show notes as usual if people need to find you. But, yeah, again, guys, over and out from here and look forward to work in the very near future with you both.

C

Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Jim. It's great seeing you guys again. Keep in touch.

B

Thank you. It's been fabulous. It's flown past, and it's been an amazing hour and a half, so thank you both, very, very special evening. Thank you so much.