Jay Feldman 0:04
Welcome to episode 80 of the energy balance podcast, where we teach you how to live without constant hunger and cravings, fatigue, brain fog, poor sleep and other low energy symptoms by maximizing your cellular energy. I'm Jay Feldman. I'm a health coach and independent health researcher, and joining me again today is my good friend Mike Fave. Mike and I have been studying health and nutrition together for a long time now, and Mike also draws on his experiences from working within the healthcare industry. Today's episode is part one of our series discussing fitness versus health, and in today's episode in particular, we'll be discussing how much exercise is too much from the bioenergetic view. We'll be talking more specifically about the harmful effects of excess exercise. Why increasing exercise beyond moderate amounts is not effective for weight loss, the harmful effects of excessive endurance training on cardiovascular health, how excess exercise can drive degeneration and contribute to various health issues, and how much exercise is too much. This series was inspired by a couple of listener questions. If you have questions that you'd like us to answer on a future episode, you can send those in to Jay at Jay Feldman wellness.com that's Jay why at Jay Feldman wellness.com or feel free to leave those in the comments if you're watching on YouTube, to check out the show notes for today's episode, you can head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/podcast you can take a look at the studies and articles and anything else that we reference throughout today's episode. And if you are struggling with any low energy symptoms, maybe you're trying to find that balance between fitness and health for yourself, maybe you're dealing with chronic cravings and hunger, low energy or fatigue, joint pain, weight gain, digestive symptoms, hormonal imbalances, brain fog, poor sleep or various other chronic health issues or chronic health conditions. Then head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/energy, where you can sign up for a free energy balance mini course, where I'll explain how these different symptoms and conditions are really caused by a lack of energy, and I'll also walk you through the main things that you can do from a diet and lifestyle perspective to maximize your cellular energy and resolve these symptoms and conditions. So to sign up for that free energy balance. Mini Course. Head over to Jay Feldman, wellness.com/energy, and with that, let's get started.

All right, so we got a couple of questions regarding athletic performance and sports, more or less, and the intersection between that and health and the bioenergetic view, we've talked a little bit about this, especially in think we did in the Men's Health Series. We talked a bit about exercise and working out, but it's certainly a topic we can talk about a little bit further. So there's a couple of rather specific questions. The first was from Lindsay, and she says, maybe y'all can do a whole episode on athletes. My questions are, generally, how can athletes optimize their fueling and align with the with the bioenergetic point of view? And she has a couple specific questions. She says, specifically, many people in the peat community are fairly anti exercise, especially high volume. However, there are some folks such as myself who are athletes, who do a lot of activity, and instead of just not doing that, what are some ways we can eat or supplement in a way that is maximizing performance while also keeping stress low? And she has some specific questions in terms of lactic acid and its production during exercise, she says, on many generative energy podcasts, Georgie has mentioned exercise is generally stressful because you're out of breath and producing lactic acid, etc. I find this view a bit short sighted. Endurance athletes like myself, who are well informed, spend most of their time in zone two range. This is the range that supposedly increases mitochondria and that keeps lactic acid low. This is an effort that can be done with the mouth closed. So if we are just trying to avoid stress, and lactic acid production is zone two training in line with bioenergetics. On the other hand, zone two training is said to be fueled largely by fat burning, which I realize runs counter to the goals of the bioenergetic framework. So how can we navigate this train in order to still train at the high level we require, but also not kill ourselves prematurely? Thanks in advance. So there's quite a few questions there that we'll dig into. And then another very similar question, but more broad question was from Russ who asked, Where do health and athletic performance diverge so and I think Russ question again, kind of sums up the larger question here, which is, what is this relationship between athletic performance, Exercise and Health, and what is kind of the optimal range? What. And you know, in terms of Lindsay's question, initially, are the things she's describing beyond that range, and then also for things that are beyond that range, what can we do to prevent the harmful or damaging effects? Is there anything else you want to add, Mike, just as far as kind of that broad, general scope here, before we dive in,

Mike 5:20
nope. I think those questions sum it up pretty well. Where does the where does the health effects and the where's the divergence, I guess, between health effects and harming yourself from exercise, which I think there implies here that there's a there's a threshold. And I think that's important to keep in mind. It's not zero. I think a lot of times within the peat sphere, you see the idea that if you if one thing causes harm, or if one thing is good, then more or less must always be better. And I think that that's kind of a fallacy that you get stuck into in this camp. And I'd say the preface the conversations is a question of, the question becomes more of where, where's that threshold? What is the amount? And I want to be careful there with the amount, even, because we just came off our hormesis, our hormesis podcast. So it's a not from a hormetic perspective, from what we discussed as as far as specific effects and whatnot.

Jay Feldman 6:22
Exactly. Yeah, so it's a good point again, as a preface here, which is, we'll dig into this, but the benefits of exercise are not due to the stress it causes. It has specific effects that account for its benefits, whereas the and these basically occur despite the stress. And so what's kind of going to determine that threshold is how much stress are you causing versus how, like, what degree of specific beneficial effects are you causing. And for a more detailed explanation of that, I would go and listen through the hormesis podcast, just for the broader idea there between why stress itself is not beneficial and why, in this case, again, stress induced by exercise is not beneficial. And, yeah, it's, it's a, there's a long conversation there, but to dig into some of that context here with exercise. So there are, again, we can kind of categorize it into these two areas. We have specific and stress effects. The specific effects are unique to exercise, and they're going to vary between different types of exercise. But these include the basically the musculoskeletal tension and the musculo fascial tension, and the usage of those things throughout different movements and different types of training. And again, this is very, very specific to the type of training that's going to occur. You're going to have different tension, different stimuli on our musculofacial system, what, you know, depending on what activity you're doing, whether you're doing long distance running, short distance running, working out with, you know, weights or cables or something like that, or doing a sport, or on from there, walking, these are all going to have different specific effects, and then they're also all going to have different stressor effects. And so the stressor effect basically comes back to the amount of energy that is required by these different types of activity. And that's again, so that is the stressor effect, and whether that causes stress will depend on both the amount of the stressor the degree of energy that's required, which is another way of saying that is your energy demand compared to your energy supply or your energy availability. Where, anytime our demands exceed our supply, we have to start to dig into stress. We start to release stress hormones. And the degree to which that happens is, is, you know, in the degree to which the energy demand exceeds the energy supply is determining the amount of stress that's caused. And so, of course, running for an hour will have a greater stressor effect than running for 10 minutes. At the same time, running for 10 minutes will have a greater stressor effect than walking for 10 minutes. And so we can talk through some of the specifics there, but that's kind of the overarching view is going to be comparing the amount of stress that's caused with the beneficial specific effects, and finding that balance, finding that sweet spot, because the excess stress will come at a cost, and we'll talk about the specifics of that cost, but this is kind of the lens through which we'll be answering this question.

Mike 9:16
And I want to be specific here that the energy supply versus energy demand is not in necessarily regards to calories in and calories out. It's right, it's more and that's the that's the mainstream model that's promoted, and the main sense of that is you have to expend more calories than you take in, without really an understanding or a context of the fact that your body modulates the amount of calories that you expend, and that there's only a certain amount of calories that you can assimilate and also expend in a given period of time. So we you have to, you have to put into context the exercise effect on the system's ability to generate. That that energy in that unit of time, and then also the ability of the body to then take in that energy supply and or rebuild its energy supply in a given period of time. So it's always important to understand the context of time there and then the capability of the body, with the idea of the body having an upregulation or down regulation capability with only within a certain extent. It's not an endless process of just continually up regulating energy, assimilation of energy and expenditure of energy at a certain point. And that's what I think we'll get to with the threshold effect here, where at a certain point you start to basically move past that capability of the body, so it's important to basically regulate to that level. And this is, this is besides the point of calories and calories out, this is getting more and towards, specifically a hormonal perspective, where the body has to upregulate these backup processes to meet the demand in that given period of time. And then, depending on what, whatever, whatever else happens in the other context around that situation, you have the the amount of time required for the body to recover, and then whether you have the repeated exposures of the the energy demand on the system. So there can be cumulative effects. I hope that was clearer than than I sounded to me.

Jay Feldman 11:25
Yeah, so I guess just to clarify here, and again, I know you mentioned the hormones, and the hormones are kind of a layer separate, too. What we're really considering here is the energy that we're producing from the fuel we're taking in, and that energy being what's used for, for our energy demands. You know, everything that we do requires energy. A lot of times we talk about this in terms of ATP amount or levels, and that's what we're producing from the food we take in. And the difference there? Well, there's a lot of differences between that and calories in, right? There's a lot of factors that go into determining how much energy we produce from the food that we take in, where, again, as you mentioned, part of this could be hormonal, but whether it's endotoxin or polyunsaturated fats or nutrient deficiencies, any of those things are, if any of those things are present, we won't be producing all that much energy from the food that we're taking in. And then what happens is a lot of it ends up getting stored as body fat at the same time, which is how you end up with this high body fat, low energy state, which we've again talked about extensively, so I'll refer back to those episodes, but it is a really important distinction to highlight, and will certainly come into play as we talk through how our bodies distribute and partition energy when faced with high amounts of energy demands. And that will be a huge confounding variable is how much energy are we producing from the food we're taking in from our environmental inputs, and what are our limits there? Of course, as you mentioned, there are certain limits that just come about due to us. You know, by the nature of us being humans, like there's only so much energy we can produce in a moment, even if everything is in a good place, but that can vary again, considerably depending on all those other factors. So yeah, that'll absolutely be coming into play as we dig into some of the details here. Yep, so in doing so, I think we'll talk through, I guess, the application of different forms of exercise through this context later on. But I guess what I would want to say is kind of coming back to that question of where these things diverge, and what's that threshold. And there's some research that helps point us to those answers that I think is worth going through. And again, a lot of this is coming back to what our capacity is for energy production and availability, and therefore what is our capacity for energy demands. So as we were saying, the biggest factor here in determining that threshold and that sweet spot is going to be the amount of stress, and there's several factors that are going to affect it. So one is, one is just as simple as calories in, right? The fuel in, even though we don't think of it in terms of calories, but a lot of people would, and that, of course, is going to be a factor. But also there's all the factors that affect that conversion to energy. So the amount of energy we have available is going to be a major factor determining the amount of stress that we experience, and then the next is going to be the the amount of energy demand. So again, how much are we exercising in a week, in a day? Is it all at once, within 30 minutes or an hour, or is it spread out over an extended period of time? So those that's going to be another factor. But we there are certain things that we'll point to. Now. I'm going to bring up a couple of studies that kind of give us some indication of where that level is. And I will say again, in talking about the harms of stress and talking about the harms of excess exercise, this that's already a little bit blasphemous. You know, in. In, in the mainstream world, where the general idea is that there can be no car no harm from exercising a lot. You know, more is better, and less exercise more exactly, yeah, and there's no thought given to the to the fact that this is literally taking away energy from everything else that you could be doing, or that your body could be doing. And it can come with a lot of issues. There's quite a bit of research talking about and looking through the harmful effects of excess exercise. And sometimes this is looking at elite athletes or Olympic athletes. Sometimes this is looking at long distance runners or marathoners. But when there is excessive amounts of physical activity, you tend to see various issues. And the first that we would we have talked about this before, that what you would generally see crop up are things like lower thyroid hormones, lower reproductive hormones, lower libido, all the things that come with that. And that's going to be because there's literally less energy available to support those functions. And so our bodies will turn down that metabolic dial. They'll turn down their own energy production to conserve energy. And we've talked about this in the context of any other stressor, any other you know, pronounced or profound stressor, things like ketogenic diets, fasting and on from there, you know, any sort of low carb diet really is that this will cause those same hormonal effects because there's a lack of energy. But you also see some other things too. When you're looking at excessive exercise, you see excessive amounts of oxidative stress and damage to the mitochondria. See various increases in inflammation markers. You actually see something that you talked about a lot, Mike, which is the acute phase response, something that we see really in response to any stressor. Oftentimes it's it was used to describe our response to infections, but basically it's a generalized inflammation response. And so you see that in response to excess exercise, you also see, and again, we've referenced these studies before, increased intestinal permeability. You even see endotoxemia, see elevated serotonin as a result of excess exercise. And then you also see a lot of cardiovascular issues as well, heart attacks, yeah, atherosclerosis, you know, various like arterial stiffening and things like that. Fibrosis. What were you saying there in terms of the the heart effects,

Mike 17:21
the heart effects are specific to certain forms of exercise versus others. Where it's more the long distance running or heavy endurance exercise leads to those complications.

Jay Feldman 17:33
Yeah, I think you tend to see these things more clearly or more frequently in those in that population, right in the long term, long distance endurance training. And I think we'll talk about this, but I think part of the reason for that is because that is a type of training that tends to lead a lot more on the stress side and less so in the beneficial specific effects. And so you see these problems more frequently when you're looking at that sort of training.

Mike 17:59
I think the for me, the biggest example of what we're discussing here is the female athlete triad, where you see a complete loss of menstruation, which is essentially like overt hormone deficiency, and then you also see bone loss, and then you also see some degree can have disordered eating, but sometimes you don't actually have it, and it's essentially where your exercise in certain sports, the exercise essentially is taking over the other functions of the individual's body, where they their bones aren't able to maintain themselves, and their hormonal systems aren't able to maintain themselves. And it's very it's more specific to females, because I think the female reproductive system is a little bit more sensitive to these types of dynamics, because it's there to support an actual baby. So it's like the body will prior will move to a situation where it has to prioritize its own health, its own existence, over the ability to form a new organism. So it's, I mean, logically, it does make sense, but I think it's a great example, and it's kind of, it's like a known thing at this point. And as I said before, it's just some degree of disordered eating. It may or may not be present, bone loss, and then loss of menstruation, loss of the period in females who are exercising at a high level.

Jay Feldman 19:26
Yeah, yeah. And as you're saying, you see that a lot in, I guess, similar to, or parallel to how you see it in long distance endurance training, you'll see these things more frequently in women, as you're saying, because there's more sensitivity hormonally, due to the nature of being the being that needs to produce, you know, like in the reproductive sense, produces a new baby, which is intensely, energetically, expensive, expensive. Yes, exactly. So there's much more sensitivity. Because of that.

Mike 20:00
And you tend to see this in women in endurance sports, and that that's with the endurance sports. I think, if I remember reading correctly, that's where you it's less the the disordered eating in the endurance sports, and that's more from like the actual exercise issue, whereas in some of the other female sports, like ballet or gymnastics, the female triad comes from a combination of needing to maintain low body weight, so a lot of women starving themselves and then exercising. So essentially eating less and exercising more, you basically wreck your hormonal system.

Jay Feldman 20:36
How could that be? Mike, I thought that's the only way to health and weight loss.

Mike 20:41
Well, you know, it's just caloric restriction just leads to increased life spent, and you just stop for the entire time.

Jay Feldman 20:50
Yeah, yeah, of course, we're being facetious here. I'll link back to again those weight loss studies or episodes, and also discussing caloric restriction and in terms of hormesis, yeah, because we don't think these things are ideal, but, but I do want to so circling back to the exercise point, so that that's a great point with the female athlete triad. And I also want to bring some context to exactly, you know, we were talking about the cardiovascular effects, and we're saying, Oh, well, that's mostly endurance training and more intense training, but the levels there really aren't quite as high as you would think. So there's a study that actually evaluated this. I'm going to pull up a quote from that study. The title of the study is 25 year physical activity trajectories and development of subclinical coronary artery disease as measured by coronary artery calcium, the coronary artery risk development in young adult. Study. That's the cardia study. And so they describe here at what level you begin to see these negative heart effects, the association? Yeah, exactly. And so I'm going to read this quote. They say we identified three distinct physical activity trajectories. Trajectory one, which is below physical activity guidelines, trajectory two, which is meeting those guidelines, and trajectory three, which is three times the physical activity guidelines. And just for reference, so the Physical Activity Guidelines they're using are about 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity per week. So that's two and a half hours. So it's basically, what is that about? Like 50 minutes three times a week. Or if you're looking at four times a week, it's about, it's just under 40 minutes again, of moderate intensity activity. So this is really not all that much in terms of physical activity. Not that it's like this. This is, you could say enough, but it's just not extreme amounts. And so they look at the odds ratio in terms of calcium artery scores between these three groups, and they say that trajectory three participants, these are the ones that had three times the Physical Activity Guidelines had higher adjusted odds of coronary artery calcium scores being above zero versus those in trajectory one. So this is comparing the people who are doing three times the Physical Activity Guidelines compared to people who are doing below the physical activity guidelines. They then said that stratification by race showed that white participants who engaged in physical activity three times the guidelines had higher odds of developing calcium artery scores greater than zero, and then further stratification by showed higher odds for white males, and similar but non significant trends were noted for white females. However, no such higher odds of calcium artery scores over zero for trajectory three were observed in black participants. So an interesting note here in the difference between white and black participants, but not something we're really going to touch on. But to put that into maybe more normal terms, white males in this study who did three times the physical activity guidelines were 81% more likely to have increased coronary artery artery calcium scores compared to white males who were under the physical activity guidelines, and then for white white females, it was 71% greater. So they're basically looking at people who are essentially inactive versus very active, and finding that the inactive ones were fared much better in terms of heart health compared to those that are excessively active.

Mike 24:20
Well, I just want to point out what quarter coronary artery calcium score is. So the essentially a coronary artery calcium score is, one is it looks at the amount of calcium deposited in the coronary arteries, which are the arteries around the heart, and when you have basically the way atherosclerosis develops as you start with the fatty plaques, which is usually just oxidized cholesterol and immune cells. And then that moves to a fibrosis, which is the deposition of collagen fibers. And after you have a loss of some of the muscular fibers at the coronary artery. And the arteries are very muscular, so in the muscular layer, which I think is called. The intima, the media intima, if I remember correctly, and then after that, it starts to calcify. So calcification is usually the last step of and it's not perfectly linear in its process, but it is the it kind of moves into inflammation with the fatty deposit. After the fatty deposit, you have fibrosis, and then you have calcification. So the calcification is the last step. So when you're looking at a coronary artery calcium score, pretty sure they use a it's a kind of like an x ray or a CT computed tomography scan, and they basically look at how much calcium is deposited around the coronary arteries. And there's a certain score. I don't know the different scoring off the top of my head, but if you're seeing a positive coronary artery calcium score means those the arteries around your heart have been calcified. So what they're saying here is that with with increased exercise. So I think it was 150 minutes per week, which is like two hours and 30 minutes, versus 450 minutes, which is like seven and a half hours. I think you're seeing, if you're exercising at a moderate intensity, which, I don't know what they define that as, for seven and a half hours a week over the over the course of time, the core the risk, or the associated coronary artery calcium score, is actually higher.

Jay Feldman 26:18
Yeah, yeah. Basically, another way of saying it is in terms of coronary artery calcium scores as a reflection of of heart disease risk, you're at greater risk for heart disease if you exercise about an hour a day than if you exercise less than two and a half hours a week. Yeah.

Mike 26:34
So well, I'm curious too, like I'm curious what, what this type of exercise can I didn't read the study fully, so, because there's your study, so I'm just curious, like, what their definition of this moderate intensity is, right? Because, if I go to the gym and I do an hour of bicep and tricep, I don't think that that's, like, very taxing, you know, whereas, if you go to if you're gonna go do and you're gonna go run for an hour every day on the treadmill or something like that, which is, I think, a more commonly accepted form of exercise, I think that would be more likely to be the problem. And I want to differentiate that, because I think that there is a degree of, um, like, what are you actually doing? Like, are you gonna Are you gonna go golf for an hour? Is that moderate intensity? Like I I'm it's doubtful to me that that's going to be problematic, but I do think, at least, based on what I've read, and I guess from my personal opinion, that like going and running on a treadmill for that an hour every day, or whatever it is, would is more what they're leaning towards than some some other forms of exercise. So I think it's important that we know what that is well.

Jay Feldman 27:44
So just to from the study, they stated that, in their terms, modern intensity activities included non strenuous sports, walking and hiking, golfing and bowling, home exercises or calisthenics and home maintenance or gardening. And then vigorous activities were running, jogging, racket sports, biking, swimming exercises or dance classes, carrying or digging, shoveling or lifting during leisure or strenuous sports. And the way that they do this is they they weren't only looking at the moderate activity. It's just that the vigorous counts for more so when they're looking at the physical activity guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate intensity, that would mean that, for vigorous intensity, it would be less, I don't know exactly how much less, but maybe it would be 90 minutes of vigorous intensity. Uh, yeah, vigorous intensity activity would be equivalent of 150 of moderate so I don't remember. I don't know what the exact guidelines would be in terms of vigorous but when they were looking at it, they come, they used, they accounted for the differences in an intensity between those things. But yeah, 150 minutes of modern intensity, again, walking, golfing, uh, home maintenance or gardening. This is not intense activity, yeah.

Mike 28:56
Well, I'm definitely already over that myself.

Jay Feldman 29:00
Well, you better be careful, Mike, because the coronary artery calcium is going to get ya.

Mike 29:05
Yeah, I'll just have, I think I'm just going to need to eat more vegetable oil so I can keep my cholesterol lower. Yeah. So was there.

Jay Feldman 29:16
Is anything else you want to add with that study? I think it lent a lot of context in terms of what you know, how much activity is too much, at least in terms of heart disease risk, and where we're drawing that line, we'll, we'll talk through some specifics, but essentially here we're not talking about all that much exercise being in that optimal range. And it's, it sounds like, if you're doing an endurance sport, you're definitely going to be leaning toward that, that higher risk zone.

Mike 29:41
Yeah, yeah, no, I don't have too much. Just, I'm surprised by the amounts and what they were defining it as.

Jay Feldman 29:48
Yeah, yeah. It is less than than expected, for sure, yeah. So I want to, I think that's a helpful example showing. Result of what happens with too much exercise. But I want to dig into a little bit of the mechanism, why this why too much exercise is a problem. And so we've talked about this idea that this theory called the expensive tissue hypothesis, that I think is first a helpful umbrella, helpful concept to understand. And the general idea is basically that if energy is limited, we there is only so much energy that can be distributed to each organ system and to general functioning. And so they were looking at this in the context of guts versus brains in terms of size and energy requirements, and especially looking at apes versus humans, and essentially finding that if you have a limited amount of energy available, and your gut is using a lot of energy, there's a lot less energy available for your brain. Whereas if you don't need to use as much energy for your gut, then you have a lot more energy available for your brain. And to have a well functioning, or higher, you know, have more cognitive capacity because of that. So I'm going to share a couple quotes describing this. So this is from a study titled The expensive tissue hypothesis the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution. And they state, the expensive tissue hypothesis suggests that the metabolic requirements of relatively large brains are offset by a corresponding reduction of the gut. The spleenic organs, liver and GI tract are as metabolically expensive as brains, and the gut is the only one of the metabolically expensive organs in the human body that is markedly small in relation to body size. Gut size is highly correlated with diet and relatively small guts are compatible only with high quality, easy to digest food. The often cited relationship between diet and relative brain size is more properly viewed as a relationship between relative brain size and relative gut size, the latter being determined by dietary quality. So I'm going to pause here. This is something we talked about a lot in terms of why, especially real early on in the podcast, talking about why we want to really be favoring high quality, easy to digest food, very, very highly nutritious, also calorie dense. You know, the thing that we're told that we want to be doing the opposite of where we want to be eating very not.

Mike 32:16
Whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds, salads, salad. I mean, nuts and seeds are pretty calorie dense, but, but they're not easy to digest necessarily.

Jay Feldman 32:25
Right, right, right. Yeah, they're not easy to digest. They're not they don't have easily digestible nutrition that's very bioavailable. And then also, we're told that we want to be eating very non dense foods that are not providing a lot of energy. And so we, of course, have talked about one of the main reasons why this is not the case is because that energy is what allows us to have well functioning brains. And in the animals that require or rely more on those harder to digest, lower quality foods, they have to contribute way more energy to their guts, and that comes at the cost of their brains. Again, when you're comparing primate physiology, we see this, and so they then state that after they say, no matter what is selecting for relatively large brains in humans and other primates, they cannot be achieved without a shift to a high quality diet unless there is a rise in the metabolic rate. Therefore, the incorporation of increasingly greater amounts of animal products into the diet was essential. And the evolution of the large human brain, which that's kind of a side point here, I do think it's there's some validity there, but I think it goes beyond just incorporating animal products, but again, basically saying that we need to be eating easily digestible foods. But the bigger context here, in relation to exercise, is basically that we were limited in we can be limited in how much energy we can produce. Of course, there's a lot of things we can do to affect that, but if you're assuming the energy production is constant, there's only so much energy to go around, and so we'll get to this in terms specifically of exercise. But if you're in this case, they're talking about with the gut. If you spend a lot of energy on the gut, that means less for the rest of the body, including the brain. But if you spend a lot of energy on exercise, that's also going to be less for the brain, the rest of the body and the gut as well, which can cause some digestive issues, as we've seen, in terms of excess exercise.

Mike 34:08
Yeah, there's a there's a great, there's a great PowerPoint, or, I guess it was a YouTube video by Barry Dr Barry groves, yeah, where he goes through the changes in the gut between humans and primates. And then he also discusses the shift in the shift of from like a gorilla all the way to a human, where you see a gorilla has a much a very expanded colon, and they're able to eat extremely fibrous things that we would never touch, like bark and certain leaves and like pith and things, things that we would never eat, that we couldn't eat, we couldn't digest. They dump it all in their colon, and they ferment it, and then they're able to get short chain fatty acids from there. So they have a, actually a fat, rich diet, but all through fermentation. And they also have the primates, which I think. The other ones they looked at were chimpanzees, orangutans and then humans, which are kind of the most some the most intelligent of the primates are those, or at least some of the most intelligent primates are those four. And we're not technically a primate, but we have like we come off that lineage. Then essentially, as you go all the way up to chimpanzees, the diets, and particularly bonobos, the diet becomes almost entirely ripe fruit as a priority. And that's what they prioritize, very ripe fruits, whereas in gorillas, you have, you know, stems and bark and leaves and stuff like that, and not quite as much ripe fruit. And you see, as you get to the bonobos, the brains are larger, intelligence is increased, and the guts are smaller than the gorillas. And then the when you get to humans, we have the smallest colons of all, of all, and we have the largest small intestines. Our small intestine is significantly expanded, and then we also our stomachs have been adjusted. So there was a paper by Dr Mickey bendor which went around the whole paleo sphere. Everybody loved it. But essentially it was discussing the adaptations that humans made to be able to digest meat, where our stomachs are highly acidic, we developed the capability in our shoulders to throw and our jaws had been adjusted, and our small intestines had been adjusted and equipped with gallbladders and bile acids and things essentially the capability to digest meat and fat, but also just looking at our digestive morphology in general, the capability to digest easily, to focus on absorption and digestion of easily assimilatable foods rather than fermentation. So for anyone out there who's looking to like because there's been some historical study or anthropologic studies where different authors go out, and I hypothesize how much fiber different groups were eating from the hunter gatherers, and some of them are, are like trying to make a case for 150 grams of fiber, which is kind of been debunked and and quite a few people, and I think there was some discussion, even with Paul Saladino and some of the other, some other of these, I guess, ancestral or paleo or plant based, or whoever. Authors and Paul saldino had went and lived with the hats at one point. And some authors had estimated like, I think, ridiculous intake of fiber. And what Paul saldino saying was, then you live with them, they would chew on the fibrous pieces, extract the juice and sugars and whatnot, and spit out, spit out the rest of the fiber, which you also see happening inside the higher apes, where they'll, actually, they do something called wadging, and they'll, they'll, um, take some of the foods, they'll chew them up, and then they'll spit out the fiber. And just keep the juices and sugars, so that there seems to be a general trend in that direction. And if you look at most people's if you look at most people's cravings, they want high energy, dense foods that are easily digestible, and that's what most people care so, sugar, fat, things like that. And the reason i This becomes important, I think overall, in the exercise context, because there's only so much energy that your digestive organs are capable of assimilating in one period of time, and there's only so much energy that your body's able to store and muster up at a single unit of time. So when you dip it, when you exercise, to the extent that you are unable to effectively muster up energy from your stores, and also then assimilate that in a given unit of time, you start to see serious issues. And this is what, I think, why you see such deleterious effects in the body with marathons and things like that, where you see like drastic gut, uh, permeability and extreme inflammatory like inflammatory immune response and then subsequent immunosuppression and a like litany of problems, as you're essentially destroying yourself on an energetic level, and then it takes extended periods of time to recover because, because the body does have a restricted capability.

Jay Feldman 38:53
Yeah, and just to provide some context to what you were saying earlier, in terms of the apes and the varying gut sizes, the colon is where the fermentation is going on. And so these are in the apes that are relying more on fermentation, very hard to digest foods. They have much larger colons, and that tends to correlate with smaller brains, whereas, as you were saying, for us, we have much smaller colons, a much larger small intestines. And the small intestine is where we just absorb a lot of the nutrients from our food without any fermentation. Of of you know, very fibers, hard to digest foods, and so that's again, evidence that we want to be relying on that system, as opposed to the opposite. Another factor, another variable, that you see is a difference when looking at the comparative physiology of us and apes and looking at brain size, and this is something that the next study is going to talk about is musculature differences, where, obviously, while we have the largest brains, we also are by far the least muscular of the different apes. And if you speak for yourself, and if you've ever seen, I mean, some people don't realize, but you know, a lot of the ape. That have the real big guts. It's not that they're fat, it's that they have these huge intestines and huge colons that are fermenting a lot. But in general, apes are very, very lean and very, very muscular. And if you look up apes, like hairless apes, where they're shaved or something like that, you can see just how much they are. It is and the body fat percentages are at least under 3% maybe they're under 1% a lot. I remember, it's been a while since we looked at, you know, since we talked about that research. But very low body fat, very, very high amounts of musculature. And that's obviously something that we don't have yet societally, it's something that we strive for, right? There's this huge push in general, to be as muscular and as lean as possible. And I'm not saying that the opposite is necessarily ideal, but the assumption that that is ideal from a health standpoint, or from a brain capacity standpoint, or from a health like, like a health Evolver, or other organs or capacity of all of our other organ standpoint, I think, is a fallacy. And as we're talking about, when you're looking at expensive tissue, muscle is extremely expensive energetically, and if you're not supplying enough energy for that, it will come at the cost of other function. And so that's another factor to consider is, you know, if we are striving toward things like way more fermentation and hard to digest foods, or for striving to be incredibly muscular, then those are both situations that were likely going to be coming at the cost of of other tissues. And the same would also be the case if we're trying to become excessively fit in aerobically, where that will probably also come at a cost because of the amount of energy required for that.

Mike 41:40
Well, you see that in distance runners, they are a lot of very long distance runners are extremely emaciated. And the reason, and I don't say that in a derogatory way, I say that in like an objective way, where, if you look at the extreme distance runners in the Olympics, they their tissues are gone. Why is that? Because the less you carry and for running the better off you're going to be. So they're very, very small. And there's actually a lot of problems with that.

Jay Feldman 42:08
Yeah, and we talked about some of those, the health problems that come along with that state, suggesting that it's not ideal from the health state, from the health standpoint. And so again, looking at the expensive tissue hypothesis. In this context, there's a study titled effects of brain evolution on Human Nutrition and Metabolism, and they state that large brains are energetically expensive, and humans expend a larger proportion of their energy budget on brain metabolism than other primates. The high costs of large human brains are supported in part by our energy and nutrient rich diets among primates, relative brain size is positively correlated with dietary quality, and humans, Paul fall at the positive end of this relationship, consistent with an adaptation to a high quality diet. Humans have relatively small gi tracts, gastrointestinal tracts, and this is again, something we just described, and at the end here, they say, in addition, humans are relatively under muscled and over fat compared with other primates, features that help to offset the high energy demands of our brains. So again, talking about, not only does this energy does the expensive tissue hypothesis apply to gut versus brain, but also musculature, which, again, is very energetically expensive. And here they're suggesting that comes at the cost of brain function. And of course, people make conjecture about this as well, in terms of this idea that if we need to rely more on brawn, then, or if we if we rely more on brawn, we don't need our brain and vice versa, where we as humans rely more on our brain power, for us to get by, and for us to feed ourselves and live and on from there. And obviously you see that by our complex social structure and everything. So yeah, it's, uh, there is a potential trade off here, and as we'll get to and as we kind of talked about that, trade off is also mediated, like the extent of the trade off is mediated by the energetic availability. And they said that in that earlier study, where they were saying that basically, unless there's a rise in the metabolic rate, again, due to something like higher quality diet, you cannot have the best of both worlds. You can't have a better functioning you can't have a very energetically intensive brain and an energetically intensive gut and an energy intensive or expensive, uh muscular musculature, unless there's a high metabolic rate, which is why that's again, the main focus among uh like above anything is having more energy availability, which is what we talk about all the time, all the ways to optimize energy production. But again, it's important to recognize that there are limits there, and within those limits, we are then left distributing that energy, you know, with based on where we are forcing it or encouraging it to go, either with something like exercise, encouraging it to go toward the musculature, or otherwise, maybe more toward the brain.

Mike 44:58
I just want to say here that. I think the best way to achieve this is with 12 servings per day of whole grains.

Jay Feldman 45:05
Of course, of course.

Mike 45:08
Yeah, but yeah, I don't have too much to add. I think you summed it up pretty well on the back end there.

Jay Feldman 45:14
Great. And so there's some really great studies looking at these concepts, specifically in terms of of of exercise, not necessarily expensive tissue hypothesis, but they're just applying it into actually an entirely different model that just has a lot of overlap. And this has it's more coming from a weight loss standpoint, where they're most and we've talked about this in terms of calories in and calories out, where there's what's called an additive model of total energy expenditure, or something like that, something along those lines. And what the basically idea is, is that if you're trying to lose weight, let's say and you just pile on a ton of exercise, you just keep burning more and more calories based on however much you exercise. It just adds on to what you were already burning. And so it's an easy way to lose weight, if you were at baseline, burning 2000 calories, and you add 500 calories of exercise, or 1000 calories of exercise, or 1500 it'll just keep adding up, and you'll just keep losing more and more body fat. And that is not actually what happens. And so they've these researchers are talking about the alternative to this, which is called the constrained total energy expenditure model, or just constraint, yeah, constrained total energy expenditure model. And so they have a quote here. And this is from, this is from a study titled constrained total energy expenditure and the evolutionary biology of energy balance. And they state, rather than increasing with physical activity in a linear dose response relationship. Ecological and experimental data from several species suggest that total energy expenditure is constrained with respect to physical activity. In this review, I have proposed a constrained total energy expenditure model for metabolic physiology, in which total energy expenditure is maintained homeostatically within a narrow range, and the body adapts to long term increases in physical activity by reducing energy expenditure in other systems, the constrained total energy expenditure model is consistent with evolutionary predictions for metabolic physiology and with empirical evidence on energy expenditure and exercise. The constrained total energy expenditure model provides an integrative framework for investigating the protective health effects of exercise, the potential negative effects of overtraining and the difficulty in achieving long term weight loss through increased exercise. The next study is going to dig into some details here that I think will clarify a lot of these concepts. But again, the main idea here being that instead of it being this additive model where more exercise just causes more and more energy expenditure, as he's described, that doesn't happen. And the more activity you have, the less energy expenditure you have based on that activity, because it's constrained to a narrow range. And so again, we'll kind of, there's a diagram here that I'll share and kind of explain. But basically what what goes on is that the more like, once you pass certain thresholds, the more energy you're using for physical activity, the less energy you're using for all of your other organ systems and all of your general body repair and general body function. And that's why you see these negative, deleterious health effects when you go beyond those thresholds. And that's why this, I mean, that's why, of course, we're even having this conversation. But it's, yeah, it's a an extremely important concept to consider in this context.

Mike 48:25
Yep, so you have the beneficial specific effects exercise up to a certain point depending, depending on your individual body state or your context, how much energy your body can muster for in that given unit of time, and then how much energy your body can assimilate in a given unit of time to recover from whatever the insult was. So you have a couple factors to actually consider beyond, beyond just calories in, calories out, or eat less, exercise more, any other kind of ridiculous slogan that's been floating around at the time. So the goal here, as with pretty much everything that we've discussed, is to find that right, that Goldilocks level of exercise that's specific for your context, that provides the specific effects without dipping into an excess stress. And I think that that's going to be dependent upon the individual's context. And then we kind of laid an evolutionary framework to some extent, where the human body seems to have prioritized intellect and large brain size at the expense of gut tissue and then also muscle tissue, and then also maintaining a higher body fat mass to be able to maintain that brain function in in the long term, you're essentially providing more energetic reserve. So you're seeing a shift towards increased metabolic rate, increased metabolism, increased brain size, increased intellect, at the expense of these other things. And I just want to put out a very interesting extension here, but for all the aliens out there that everybody. Looks at the grays, where they have massive brains and tiny bodies, small muscle mass and little guts, that's what our essentially, our evolutionary goal is. No, I'm just joking.

Jay Feldman 50:11
Perhaps, perhaps that's where we were.

Mike 50:14
But it is, it is a it isn't as far as the energetic tissue hypothesis that that could be, I guess, a kind of a weird trajectory to look at, as far as it's decreasing body size and increasing brain size when and a less reliant in a smaller gut, smaller abdomen than the focus on just diverting energy to intellect.

Jay Feldman 50:37
Right? I mean, this is something that, uh, that Ray peats has talked about like a movement towards neoteny, towards more of like a baby, in in terms of these things where, of course, a baby has a huge head, huge brain, much smaller body, very pudgy, much higher body fat. And that actually potentially being the type of state that would result in in like, again, higher cognitive function and greater complexity, if it was continued along that same pathway. And as you're kind of alluding to, there are possibilities of branches of human species that have achieved that to some extent, and like the star child, yeah, yeah. I'll link to some interesting.

Mike 51:22
I think that was... Prana Rupa was writing about that, right? The star child and brain size and...

Jay Feldman 51:27
Uh huh, yeah, the, I think his website's now, Vishnu velta. I don't know if it's still up, but if it is, I'll link to it. Yeah, some interesting articles, some fascinating articles. Yeah, again, talking about all these things from this context of greater energy, allowing for greater complexity, greater brain size, and less reliance on our physical musculature and capacity.

Mike 51:47
Well, in the Prana Rupa stuff, when in the star child article, if I remember correctly, he was they were talking about like the composition of the actual skull and the bones having an increase, having a an increase in different types of minerals, and then also having an adjustment in structure, so that even though it was, like, lighter and smaller, it was actually, it was actually much stronger. So there was a there's like, it doesn't always have to be, you know, bigger is better. There could be, as you increase structure, you can increase complexity. And with an increased complexity, you know, you go from having the whole phone in a suitcase to having an iPhone in your hand. But the idea, I think also to some extent, applies with, and I'm not calling for any type of transhumanism, but what I'm saying is that as the human body is able to, or I guess, an organism is able to assimilate more energy over time given a quality environment, et cetera. You can move towards those states. You can progress the evolution in that direction of increased complexity and increased ability to stream energy through that complex structure.

Jay Feldman 52:56
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So. Circling back to the context of exercise here, I wanted to dig into the next study that's kind of exploring this, again, through that same constrained total energy expenditure model. And so this one is titled constrained total energy expenditure and metabolic adaptation to physical activity in adult humans. And so at the beginning here, they're just talking about how, for one, current obesity prevention strategies recommended or recommend increasing daily physical activity, assuming that increased activity will lead to corresponding increases in total energy expenditure and prevent or reverse energy imbalance and weight gain. So this is that additive total energy expenditure model, and they mentioned that this that this model is challenged by ecological studies in humans and other species, showing that more active populations do not have higher total energy expenditure. And then they tested it themselves. They used a doubly labeled water experiment, and what they found was that after adjusting for body size and composition, total energy expenditure was positively correlated with physical activity, but the relationship was markedly stronger over the lower range of physical activity. For subjects in the upper range of physical activity, total energy expenditure plateaued, supporting a constrained total energy expenditure model. And then they say that models of energy balance employed in public health should be revised to better reflect the constrained nature of total energy, energy expenditure, and the complex effects of physical activity on metabolic physiology. And this is something I have a an article talking about, basically the problems with the calorie equation, the calories in, calories out, something we talked about in podcasts as well, basically talking about how the this idea that you just exercise and burn more calories and lose weight like that is not how it works. There are these confounding variables of metabolic adaptation that prevent that from happening in it. And so they that's what they're describing here, where the more exercise you have, the less energy expenditure you have relative to that exercise, and you tend to see a plateau. And so they have a nice graph here. Uh, or figures showing this, and so on the left, this is the additive model, which they're saying is not accurate, where just you have more activity, and it just keeps increasing the total energy expenditure based on how much activity you have. And then the the amount of other energy expenditure, the amount of energy going toward everything else, stays the same, stays constant. But then they show this constrained model, where actually, as you increase physical activity more and more, the total amount of energy expenditure stays relatively the same and starts to plateau, and the amount of energy going toward those other areas of free body

Mike 55:30
Bone health..

Jay Feldman 55:33
Exactly, yeah, they get to that in a second. They describe all these situations, like all of the things that start to lose energy. Lose like an energy partition. And so again, I talked about this in terms of energy partitioning. But basically, yeah, the more that is forced to go toward energy or toward physical activity, the less goes toward everything else. And so yeah, they do describe, as you were saying, like some of those areas that get left behind in terms of of their energy and so they say, rather than increasing total energy expenditure linearly in response to physical activity, individuals tend to adapt metabolically to increase physical activity, needing the expected increase in daily energy throughput. These metabolic changes can be behavioral, such as sitting instead of standing or fidgeting less, but they may also include reductions in other non muscular metabolic activity. So just that, that first part right there, there's this, I mentioned metabolic adaptation before. There's also this idea of behavioral adaptation, or behavioral compensation, where when you exercise more, you're less active throughout the rest of the day, just small movements, as they're saying, standings, knee or sitting. What's that?

Mike 56:42
It's called neat non exercise activity, thermogenesis, something like that. I don't know if it's thermo thermogenesis. I forget what t is, but it's like non exercise activity increases. When you increase your caloric intake, you have more energy. You'll just start fidgeting, moving around more.

Jay Feldman 56:58
Yeah, yeah. Basically, non exercise activity, thermogenesis is, is the this for, yeah, okay, yeah, but, but basically, as you're saying, yes. So that gets reduced when you're more active. So that's a piece of it, but that doesn't account for everything at all, like very much, not, does not account for everything. And so they describe the other piece here, the metabolic changes, the metabolic adaptation that accounts for it, and so they say, for example, men and women enrolled in a long term exercise study exhibited reduced basal metabolic rate at week 40, and studies in healthy adult women have shown suppressed ovarian activity and lower estrogen production in response to moderate exercise. Other species have also been shown to keep total energy expenditure remarkably constant in response to increased physical activity, reducing energy expenditure on growth, somatic repair and basal metabolic rate, and even reducing lactation and cannibalizing nursing offspring, even when food is available, ad libitum and total energy expenditure is well within maximum sustained levels. So this is, were you gonna say something?

Mike 58:03
No, just you're cannibalizing your your nursing offspring.

Jay Feldman 58:09
Yeah, and how crazy that, that you introduce extra physical activity, and you have all these, you know, physical effects, reduced ovarian activity, reduced somatic repair, basically just the repair of your body. You're not healing and regenerating as well reduce growth, so you're not growing lower metabolic rate and then reducing lactation, meaning that the one of the main things that our bodies do is provide, especially for women, not as much men, is provide food for the young. And so not only is that reduced, and I'm not sure what species it is that they're looking at in a study, but that lactation was reduced, but they also started cannibalizing their offspring, and which is about as opposite of lactation as he could get, and, and, and this was even happening when food was available at libido and total energy expenditure was within maximum sustained levels. So this is a situation where, again, there's, of course, a lot of questions as to the type of food that's being given, and whether that is introducing limits on the general metabolic rate and how much energy can be produced. But that aside the amount of food available, which was Unlimited, the type of food available was not enough to prevent them from cannibalizing their own offspring. Which is just, I don't know It's remarkable. I mean, I don't know what, like, you know it's, it's basically suggesting that there's a point of physical activity where, when it's beyond a certain limit, there's almost nothing you can do without it coming at a major cost.

Mike 59:42
Yep, and it goes basically everything that we're discussing here, even though we haven't gotten to was it who was the first commentator's name? Uh, let's see Lindsay's question. Lindsay, so we're kind of discussing the background. Here with Russ question. We haven't gotten into the specifics of Lindsay's question, but this sets the grounds for the answer for Lindsay's question. But essentially, what it's coming to is is, again, the eat less, exercise more, first of all paradigm, and then the whole grains and beans and nuts and seeds and whatever kind of falls by the wayside considering the physiology that we discuss, or the anatomy and physiology that we discussed, especially in the terms of the expensive tissue hypothesis. And then now, as far as exercise go, it kind of throws out the window of exercise. More it's exercise. It the modifier becomes exercise within the amount that you are capable of tolerating without inducing an extent, and you reap the benefits of your specific effects without inducing this an excess level of stress. And so that's, that's really what the goal is. You don't want to be lowering and you know, even though the animals are cannibalizing their offspring, and it's animal studies, and humans don't cannibalize their offspring, they did mention and it's already known, and we talked about in the beginning changes in hormonal composition, changes in behavior, changes in mood, so loss of neat loss of ovarian function in females, and then actual loss in bone mass in females, and then decreases in metabolic rate in that 40 week study. So overall, that you again, it's not a just eat less, exercise more, which is probably some of the worst advice that you could give people from this context. The idea would would be to eat the right amount, eat the right amount, the right types and quality of foods, and then exercise the right amount. Not just the eat less. It just falls by the wayside. The mainstream advice, basically, as most mainstream advice winds up being, is garbage. So, yeah, I just wanted to put it into, like, applicable and applicable terms for people.

Jay Feldman 1:01:54
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it's hard, it's so hard, not to keep coming back to that eat, less, exercise, more the calories and calories out, because that's that is just the narrative that's so heavily pushed. And obviously we have some personal gripes with that. I know I certainly do, because it's and it's coming from a place of I think that, again, I don't want to keep rehashing points that we've talked about extensively, but I don't know of anything that's been more damaging to human health. Well, maybe a couple things, but then that, that advice, I don't know of more damaging advice, maybe than that that's been more damaging to human health, and it's and I still get pushback a lot on on this calories and calories out idea and why. I don't think it's valid really at all. And I know, I know you don't either, and we've talked about this a lot. The last quote here, I just want to share it again because of this personal gripe, because they talk about, they talk about exactly that as that same study, and they say energy balance models focusing solely on the effect of physical activity on total energy expenditure, while ignoring the interdependent and dynamic role of other organ systems, will miss a large portion of the variation in daily energy requirements and may provide a biased measure of total energy expenditure. Again, just talking about how this idea that you can just add in however many calories of exercise into your total energy expenditure, and that will result in the exact amount of weight loss that you determined, is ignoring this huge, huge piece in terms of how energy is partitioned, distributed, how we adapt metabolically to these things, and how it just kind of points to how irrelevant it is to be looking at things in terms of calories in and calories out well.

Mike 1:03:33
And I also think it points to another thing, is that the models with which they're functioning things are running under these assumptions already, and so the modeling is putting out outcomes with these assumptions in place. And if your assumptions are crap from the start, then your model is crap, and therefore your your outcomes are crap. And there's other models that I won't mention directly that have also had crap assumptions and have led to crap outcomes and have been crap models. And it's across the board in multiple areas there.

Jay Feldman 1:04:01
Well, one, one we talked a lot about, was hormesis. I know you're alluding to others as well, but that's one where you see it again, the people, the researchers, clinging so tightly to that lens, yeah, even when their own research is like, directly conflicting with it.

Mike 1:04:16
Yeah, and but I just it, I think it's important to understand that, like, because the models are discussing are actual mathematical models and and the mathematical models have these assumptions built in place. So it's, it's if you're already assuming the wrong things from the start, you can't have a correct outcome, or if you do get a correct outcome, like you were just really lucky. Um, but, yeah, essentially the, and this is what, this is something that we've been talking about extensively, and I, I still get questions on it too, all the time, is this idea of calories and calories out, and people like, oh well, it's like, you don't agree with calories and calories out. And it's kind of like I do, but not in the sense that it's generally on. Understood. It's not about, it's not about how much calories you're taking in your diet, and then how much calories you're you moving through energy expenditure you have to there's the that input and output are the least, least important parts to worry about in that system, that or I guess, at least in it, to really understand it, that's the least important parts to worry about. You want to worry about, what's the modifying situation going on in the center? What's going on hormonally, what's going on with your organs, what's going on with your gut, what's what's modifying your usage of those calories? What's modifying your ability to assimilate those calories? What's your modifying your ability to store those calories? Those are the important questions, I think, to look at in the current, modern disease states, not how much, how much calories you're putting in and how much calories you're putting out. And then the other question is, do you still have other modifying factors? What calories are you putting in? Are you taking in Fruit Loops? If you're eating fruit loops? Well, just, you know, it doesn't, I don't really care what your calories and calories out equation is, you know, you have a whole bunch of other problems that we need to consider there. Or if you're eating fried food, whatever it is. And then the modifiers like, are your calories out? Are they, you know? Is it like an anabolic response from working out? Is it having a joyful experience, you know, playing sports with your friends. Is it just, you know, existing on a regular basis from a high thyroid function? Not are you running on the treadmill two times a day, seven days a week? Because that is, you know, that there those modifiers become extremely important. And so the the general model that's proposed doesn't account for any of this, and it's the same. It's the same thing with eat less, exercise more. It doesn't account for any of that or what was the other the other one is like, like, eat, eat, eat plants, not too much, some, some BS, like that, yeah, eat mostly plants, not too much, or something. And Michael Pollan's his garbage recommendations, yeah, reductionism, yeah, yeah. Just those are all narratives that, and they give these like easy monikers, I guess, or people to keep in their mind. But the monikers are useless because they don't describe what really is going on and what the actual requirements are there. And we've discussed some before. We've discussed them at length before, so I don't know it's just more evidence. So this is Besides, this is specifically towards the exercise. So we've discussed the food and calories and calories out, but this one is specifically towards exercise. So it would be something again, exercise the right amount to gain the benefits without going too without going too much, and starting to get a stress right, right, which isn't as pretty as eat less, exercise more, but whatever, no, no.

Jay Feldman 1:07:53
And I will say also, again, with the calories and calories out, I know you're just trying to skim over some of the main points. Of course, even looking at it in terms of calories, is already such a huge problem, since that is not the currency that we look at things through. And calories are not equal. You know, calories of fiber are not equal to calories or protein or fat or carbs. It's all used completely differently and will produce various amounts of energy and will be more or less likely, stored as body fat. And from there, so so many factors there that confound that that equation.

All right, before we wrap up this episode, I do want to reference one more study discussing or potentially answering the question of how much exercise is too much. And this is a study titled The effect of endurance training on the ratio of serum cortisol to DHEA in inactive young women. And in this study, they took inactive young women who were aged 20 to 28 and had them start an eight week endurance training program where they would exercise three days a week for 25 minutes of the main exercise, not including the warm up and cool down. And for the workouts, they would be running on a treadmill with varying intensity and intensity that would increase over the eight week training program. So in the beginning, they were doing 25 minutes at about 60% of their heart rate Max, and then by the end, they were up to 85% of their heart rate max. And if you're not already familiar, 60% of heart rate Max is pretty low, whereas 85% is dipping into the you know, it's kind of nearing the lactate threshold, so getting more intense progressively. But again, 25 minutes of endurance training, three days per week in untrained women in their 20s. And what they found as a result was that this led to increased cortisol levels and a decreased DHEA to cortisol ratio, which is a basically a sign of catabolism, a sign of of stress in terms of the hormones. And this was in values that were measured 48 hours after the workouts. So there. Looking at the levels of stress hormones, essentially, and how well someone's recovering two full days after, you know, 4048 full hours after the workout. So the fact that there were considerably increased cortisol levels and considerably decreased DHEA to cortisol ratio 48 hours after suggested that these women were overtraining. Essentially, that was kind of the that was kind of the that was basically the conclusion that the researchers came to, is that they were overtraining, and that this was basically too stressful and coming at a cost. And this is not that much exercise, right? 25 minutes, three days a week, of of generally light endurance training. And I think that there's some value in considering this study, but I do want to make a couple stipulations here, the first being that, of course, this is this does not mean that this is always too much exercise for anybody to do, but it did seem to be too much for this individual group and again. So if we're considering what these hormones show. It suggests a lack of recovery. It suggests over training. And another point as far as the study goes, is that these women had also lost, you know, some weight throughout this eight week study. And so I think what we're seeing between those things is that this was probably too much training for these individuals based on the results, and that could be due to various factors. Of course, they were untrained. Of course, they considering that they lost weight. They may have also been under eating, you know, not eating enough to support the extra exercise that they were participating in. There's a handful of reasons, but I do think that what is clear from this study is that this went beyond what was ideal in this context. Now, another way of saying that is that the harms in this, you know, for this eight week period outweighed the benefits. But that doesn't also mean that this couldn't have had benefits down the line where as as these women adapted to this sort of workout and became trained, you know, and you know, trained in this way, and their running economy improved, and they were able to handle this exercise without as much stress it might have been beneficial. The benefits might have outweighed the harms down the line as they became accustomed. But what it does suggest is that this was probably too much, too soon for these women, and that was not that much to start with. A lot of people, when they just start working out, or they decide they want to run a half marathon or more, you know, they'll start with a lot more than 25 minutes, three days a week, at 60% of their heart rate max. So it does give us some insight as far as how much is too much in that situation, and it does essentially mean, like another way of thinking of it, is that 25 minutes, three days a week, can be too much exercise, that can be beyond what is ideal. But again, I think this only helps us so much, because there's so much individuality. We know that these women were untrained. We have no idea how much they were eating or what they were eating, and so you know this, this could vary considerably depending on whether it's men or women, how much someone's eating. How you know what else they do to improve their recovery where you know where their Hormonal Health is to begin with, and on from there. And so I definitely think somebody can be exercising much more than this and have it not be too much. But this, this study, does bring some context into the idea that a pretty small amount of exercise can also be too much. Just 25 minutes, three days a week, light endurance training can be too much. And so I think that there is value in in that recognition. Again, with the with the idea in mind that this is going to vary considerably based on the individual, how trained that individual is, and for somebody else, much more exercise than this might not be too much. But anyway, I thought that study was worth sharing, and I will stop rambling now. So if you did enjoy today's episode, please leave a like or comment. If you're watching on YouTube and if you're listening elsewhere, please leave a review or five star rating on iTunes. All of those things really do a lot to help support the podcast and are very much appreciated. This podcast series has been inspired by a couple of listener questions. If you have questions that you'd like us to answer on a future episode, you can send those into Jay at Jay Feldman wellness.com that's j, A, y at Jay Feldman wellness.com or feel free to leave those questions in the comments if you're watching on YouTube. To check out the show notes for today's episode, you can head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/podcast you can take a look at the articles and studies and anything else that we referenced throughout today's episode. And if you are struggling to find that balance between fitness and health, or you're concerned that perhaps your the amount of exercise you're doing is too stressful, and you're looking for way. Is to help support your body and prevent the effects of those stress of that stress, and maybe you're dealing with various symptoms as a result of that stress. Maybe you're experiencing chronic cravings and hunger, low energy or fatigue, joint pain, digestive symptoms, brain fog, poor sleep, hormonal imbalances, weight gain, or any other chronic health issues, chronic health symptoms. Then head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/energy, where you can sign up for a free energy balance mini course, where I'll explain how these different symptoms and conditions are really caused by lack of energy, and I'll also walk you through the main things that you can do from a diet and lifestyle perspective to maximize your cellular energy and resolve these symptoms and conditions. So to sign up for that free energy balance mini course, head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/energy, and with that, I'll see you in the next episode.