Episode 433: Dr. Andy Galpin: Forget Diet Trends - Simple Nutrition Principles That Actually Work

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Livemomentous.com. Finally, I want to get to nutrition.
I've been dying to ask you about this stuff. Okay.
Optimal nutrition, optimal diet. I know there's so much, so much information, right? Like about intermittent fasting, fasting for 24 hours, whatever is 24 hours, keto, non-keto, paleo, vegan, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Can you talk about nutrition beyond just eat a lot of protein, right? Sure. What is the optimal, I know everything's very individualized based, but what is the optimal diet for high performance?

Define high performance for me, but some categorical rules I can answer here.

Okay. For optimal cognitive performance.

Cognitive performance is a different answer here, right?

So you can go into the small details with examples like people like to bring up blueberries.

Lots of research.

A cup of blueberries per day is actually going to have statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in cognitive function. We use this very routinely.
It's been very well demonstrated. Okay, I know.
Blueberries, wild salmon. Got it.
Right? All the stuff. It's all true.
It's all true. It's all honestly super true.
So if you then wind back to some of your previous questions on that, does it matter which format that you like to give yourself structure with? You're like, what the hell did he just say? You could call that a diet. That's all diets are.
They're just a different format that gives you structure. Right, right, okay.
That's all it is, right? I don't even call them diets because it's nonsensical. Do you think eating, I mean, I love breakfast.
Can I not eat breakfast? Of course you can eat breakfast. They're like, oh, well, you won't be in autophagy and you're going to be blah, blah, blah.
That's garbage. Like almost all nonsense out of that stuff.
Fasting is insanely overrated. I like it.
Do it a bunch. But if you're thinking that skipping breakfast in the morning is going to solve almost any of your health problems, you're generally massively misguided.
If it is helping you avoid triggers, then awesome. If it is helping you manage your calories, awesome.
If you don't like breakfast in the morning, awesome. Totally fine.
We actually just, this actually on the way over here, I submitted back revisions.

Our paper should be accepted in the next couple of days. We ran a study on intermittent fasting in our laboratory.
So like, I'm not against it at all, but I'm certainly against people thinking that they have to do it for any short or long-term reason. You have to figure out a way to get yourself high quality foods.
You have to figure out a way to manage calories somehow. And if fasting is a way that checks those boxes on a positive, well, great.
If it doesn't, then I don't care at all about it. I will promote a six-meal-a-day diet as much as I will a one-meal-a-day diet.
Whatever is, those are not the factors that matter. The factors that matter are the other things.
Now, having said that, we will use things like fasting a lot for cognitive performance with things like our surgeons and our firefighters and our other responders because they generally are going to go, hey, I can't take a break every two hours and go snack. I'm in a 16-hour surgery.
I'm in a nine-hour surgery, right? I need to perform really well given these constraints. Awesome.
I don't want a surgeon getting hungry every two hours and scrubbing. They're going to be like, dude, no, zero chance.
So in situations like that, or again, the firefighters are another example, or military where you're like, hey, I need to be able to be on for these big chunks of time and then feed and then great. So you're training them for what their lifestyle is.
100%. But I would never do that for a PGA golfer.
Never, right? That would make no sense for us whatsoever to do that. We need to have different constraints and different performance variables.
So those people generally eat way more frequently. If you have a personal preference, if you have anything else.
So it's always about precision. Why? Because their tournaments are not at the same time.
Sometimes they tee off at 6 in the morning, and let's say they're a West Coaster, and they're going to go play a tournament on the East Coast. They're teeing off at what's 4 a.m.
their time. And then they're going to play a five-hour round in August in Florida.
It's going to be super hot, right? And they've got to turn around and then So we have our energy demands are really, really, really high on those tournaments. So what kind of optimal diet would you put a pro golfer on? So it's honestly, it's all the big stuff.
You're going to manage calorie intake one way or the other, right? We're going to focus on getting high amounts of high quality foods. So we're eating mostly whole real foods.
We want a variety of colors. We want a variety of preparation methods.
We're going to use a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables, a lot of meats if we can. But are they eating more regularly? Generally eating very regularly.
Like six times a day or five? Four to six. Versus the surgeon or the firefighter or that makes perfect sense.
Also, is it true, I mean, again, this is, is it that women and men, intermittent fasting affects women and men differently? I, okay, yes and no. Okay.
Here's what I'd say. Intermittent fasting affects different people differently.
Okay, Not gender specific. The reason why I say

gender is because I found that for women, I've noticed, the response is different overall. Like some women think it's the best thing in the world.
There's a bunch of fasting experts, doctors, who think that like it's a Shonda if you don't fast. Sure.
I have coached world champion females in six different sports.

And I have coached a countless amount of females non-athletes. I just, I can't honestly say, yes, women generally need to do more fasting or do better.
Yeah, I say the opposite. I think it's worse.
I will say like of all the females we've coached, and this is 18-year-olds to 68-year-olds, right? I've coached the whole spectrum, a lot of them. It's just a person to person thing more than it is a male versus female thing.
Some of our women just do way better when we eat more frequently. Some of them, it doesn't really matter.
Some of them, it's like, it's just, again, it's like an individual thing more than anything. So what we like categorically never do, and I'm trying to like triple check my brain, but yeah, I don't think there's anything we ever specifically do just because someone walks in and they're female versus male.
Like there's no like, oh, automatically we train this way or we do this with our food. We do the same individualized programming.

It's a variable we pay attention to, but there's no buckets you just go into because you show up in your male or you show up in your female or you show up in your anything else, right? So we're really going to pay attention to that. And we test.
We're actually doing a trial right now. my grad student Zoe is running a study where we're actually doing the first ever detailed sleep analysis throughout the entire menstrual cycle.
So we're looking at blood. We're taking, we're directly testing high fidelity sleep every single day throughout the entire cycle.
We're directly testing blood. We're directly testing ovulation.
We're testing these things every single day for maximum precision. And one of the things you'll see is things like menstrual cycle length is not the

same from woman to woman. Everyone knows that.
But it's not even the same within each woman.

Okay. But let's say it is.
Let's just say you're a 28-day cycle like all the time. Great.
Right.

Your ovulation cycle is not the same. And this really, if you test it every single day,

cycle after cycle, you'll see this pop up. You don't necessarily ovulate on day 14.
That doesn't always happen. Right? When like men are like, what is he even talking about? But girls are like, no, dude, it's finally, right? This is exactly.
Totally. Yeah.
So we're not going to make critical decisions about their nutrition or supplementation or stuff based on like a, well, you're a woman, therefore you should be ovulating day 14, and therefore here we go.

We're gonna test these things and then go,

okay, for you, this is what's gonna go on,

this is what we're gonna do based on your physiology.

You said something though.

You said there are six things that are fundamental

in your nutrition for optimal.

Yeah, calorie balance, whole real foods for the most part.

We want a reasonable balance of macronutrients.

By reasonable, that could mean some people do better on a really high fat, low carbohydrate. Some do the opposite.
Really low fat, really high carbohydrates. Some don't care at all or are under balance.
So when I say reasonable, I'm just saying like, what is actually working for you or not? And we can play games there. High performers, non-high performers, lifestyle preferences, taste, digestion.
Like we can mix and match, particularly fat and carbohydrates, okay? We almost always though want a moderate to high protein intake. Almost always right there.
And then we want a lot of variety in our colors. We need a variety of micronutrients, vitamins, chemicals, phytochemicals, minerals in there.
And so we like a lot of color. We like a lot of different sources of those things.
That's basically what everyone does. The way that we get there, different.
So let's talk about protein, right? Different types of protein. What do you say would be the amount of protein someone should eat a day, basically? Gram and pound.
Gram and pound. Same as everybody else says.
Okay. So give me a day.
What do you eat? Give me what you eat every single day. Sure.
So most of the time I'm walking around about 170 pounds. So I'm looking for 200 grams of protein a day, like plus or minus, right? I don't weigh and measure at this point hardly ever anymore.
So some days I'm probably at 130. Some days I'm well over 200.
Most days though, I'm probably going to be swinging within 30 or 40 grams of that number. So in the morning, I generally wake up.
When we get going, I'm going to almost always have eggs and some sort of wild game meat. Wild game meat.
I harvest my own. So I'm going to eat deer or elk or bear or like something every day.
What? Bear? Yeah. What do you mean bear? Bear.
Like the animal. You know, like Winnie the Pooh, the bear.
Like a grizzly bear? I can't hunt grizzly bears very often, but black bears are pretty easy to get. So they're quite tasty.
You've, wait, you've hunted a bear?

Yeah, of course.

Of course isn't everybody.

I feel like I'm losing out.

I'm missing out on something.

It's quite tasty.

You've eaten a bear?

Many times.

Okay, is it fatty?

It depends on what, if you get them post-hibernation,

like you do spring bear hunt, they're going to be much leaner, right?

You get them prior to like a later winter hunt and they're going to be much fattier.

It's not like any other animal though.

It's weird.

It is weird to me when people, no offense,

but react this way.

Because if I said like, hey, I ate a cow.

You're like, of course.

And then like I said, I ate a beer.

And you're like, like you can't comprehend.

Cannot comprehend it. Deer, people don't freak out.
But then bear, like, of course, right? They're like any other animal that we can hunt and eat. How is it different than a cow, taste-wise? The general thing you'll hear people say about bear meat is it's greasier, right? So it has this weird thing.
And that can be off-putting. It's not gamey, though.
If you get a whitetail deer and it's not processed properly or you get it during the rut, then you'll get that classic gamey taste. That'll smell weird, but a normal non-deer or non-poorly processed deer is going to taste fine.
Bear will be the same way. If you get it when it's been feeding on a bunch of rotten salmon, then it's not going to taste tremendous, but you'll know it pretty quickly.
But on average, if we had lunch right now and I made it for you, you would have had no idea. You did eat it, whether we're eating like the steak or the burger of it or whatever the case you'd be like, you wouldn't have had any idea of what I just put in front of you.
If I gave you something like axis deer, then you'd be like, that's the most delicious thing I've ever had. What the hell is that? But you wouldn't be like, oh my God, I feel like I just ate a deer.
You would have no idea. It's tremendous.
I love wild meat. Wow.
How often do you eat this? Every day. Every day? Every day.
Yeah. Does your family eat this too? Of course.
Like my, if you were to, if my kid was right there and you'd be like, do you eat beer? They would be like, yeah. Like what? Like they wouldn't have any reaction at all to be like, of course, because they don't know any different.
So do everything you eat, you hunt yourself? Not everything, but we try to for the most part. Do you ever go to Whole Foods? No.
I haven't been to a grocery store in many, many years. How many years? My wife goes.
Oh, okay, okay. So it's not that because you don't believe in the grocery store.

Yeah.

I mean, we'll eat, I don't know what a fair number is. Maybe, I don't know what percent.
But we still buy grocery stuff, particularly if we want a specific cut or something that she's doing, she's making, where she wants a specific way it's prepared. Then she'll buy other stuff.
But in terms of like our general meat consumption, I probably have, I don't know, 400 pounds

of frozen meat on my house right now between elk and axis deer and uh i have some mule deer steel and then this the salmon run just got done so um my nephew brought over a bunch of wild salmon so we got a bunch of salmon in there uh we got clams and we got a bunch of other stuff uh what else we have in there like it's just like we're in the winter So we just got done with all those, like the seafood season. So we got a bunch of salmon in there.
We got clams and we got a bunch of other stuff. What else do we have in there? Like, it's just like we're in the winter.
So we just got done

with all those, like the seafood season. So we got crabs in there.
We got a bunch of other stuff.

So yeah, we had a large portion, but we still buy, like sometimes occasionally even buy cow

and beef and things like that. Pork, of course.
I mean, I'm Jewish, so I don't eat pork.

My wife's Jewish and my kids are Jewish too, but she's a bad Jew.

Yeah, she's a bad Jew. Most Jews don't eat pork, but I mean, I'm Jewish, so I don't eat pork.
My wife's Jewish and my kids are Jewish too, but she's a bad Jew. Yeah, she's a bad Jew.
Most Jews don't eat pork, but I mean, pork now sounds much better than bear, I got to tell you. No.
Well, pork is more delicious. I will give you that.
I can't even believe it. You just said it so matter-of-factly, like everybody eats it.
It's just like not even a thing that pops up in my head is weird. It's just like part of of that's just how i go what do you make with bear you said bear steak um well so the thing only thing about bear you got to be careful of is there's a non-zero chance that it has trichinosis and so you would not want to eat bear rare at all or even medium rare so even if you're like very rarely, you don't do, the only part of bear that I'll eat a steak

will be, like, the back straps or the tenderloins,

which you can do, but you want to cook them well done.

But outside of that, you're pretty much going to go

to other cuts, stews or roasts or grounds

or things like that.

So you can make, like, stews are really easy.

Grounds or soups and things like that are totally fine.

And then the rest you'll do sausage

and different grounds and things like that.

So we eat a lot of...

A bear sausage?

How do you make a bear sausage?

Same as any other sausage.

Take a bunch of meat, put it through a grinder,

and then add any other stuff you want to add in there,

depending on if you're trying to make like bratwurst or breakfast sausage

or spicy jalapeno or like some other combination.

So you can make it however you want.

We're out of bear meat right now, I think.

We're pretty much done,

but we're pretty loaded on axis deer right now.

I can't even right now.

Oh my God.

We just got back.

I got a really nice bull elk this year.

So we got a lot of elk meat right now too,

which is tremendous.

Do you go hunting with Joe Rogan?

I feel like he's the other one that does all that.

No, no.

Actually, we haven't gone together, but we've just missed each other a bunch. We have a lot of the same friends.
Yeah, well, the Huberman connection, I would imagine. I knew Joe before, Andrew did.
I knew Andrew way before, but I'm actually going this spring, I'm going on a bear hunt with Cam Haynes. I don't know if Joe's going to be there or not.
He may be, but I haven't asked him about it, but we'll be up there together. Yeah.
So we have many friends. That's crazy.
Okay. So, cause I was going to actually ask you about in the nutrition sense, like what kind of, I mean, in terms of quality protein, I think you're going to say obviously animal protein versus plant protein.
Depends on how you want to define quality. There's a lot of back and forth.
Obviously, as we just been talking about, I'm clearly a big fan of meat and animal meat. But I think there is ample evidence now that people can live a really high-performing life on plant-based stuff as well.
I work with a bunch of plant-based athletes, and they perform fine. So we can get there as well.
I work with some like really famous local musicians that they are plant-based. So you can get there.
I'm not as bullish on that as I used to be. More evidence has come out that's like, okay, the only thing you got to pay attention to a little bit is of course limits options.
And you have to be really conscious of calories with that, because you generally have to eat more of it, or you have to get it in forms that are more calorically dense, right? So if you try to equate something like, you know, four ounces of Maui Nui Axis deer to get the same amount of protein as you get out of peanut butter, right? You're going to be eating 150 calories of protein from the Maui Nui Axis deer, and you're going to eat 700 calories from the peanut butter. So your overall calorie intake has to go way up depending on how it's packed.
That's like with vegans, right? Yeah, it's tough. It's tough.
And that's why I don't understand. To me, you get the most bang for your buck with animal protein.
You know my opinion on that clearly, but it can be done well. Would you believe in protein shakes? I know you're a fan of Momentus.
I'm a fan of Momentus. I'm definitely going to drink this as soon as we're done.
Oh, yeah. This is late.
This is on the go. These are delicious.
Yeah. I have at all times I take.
In fact, they were just around here a second ago. But those travel Momentus protein things, I always have like 20 of them with me at all times.
That's the thing. Yeah, I was going to give them to you because I thought that they're very easy to take and travel with.
Yeah, I always take them. So if it's a, you know what's actually cool about momentous too? They just changed their whey protein formula.
Have you seen this? Which, tell me. They took out, there's no gum anymore.
There's no fillers and there's no. I did.
I saw that. I mean, the artificial stuff in there and they took the price way down.
I mean, so it's way cleaner. You know, that's funny.
You say that because I'm a big fan of momentous as you are, because I think that there's a lot of confusion, right? Because there's so many brands on the, this is by the way, way, not an ad for Momentus, but I swear, because they do something called triple test. Have you heard of this whole? Yeah, no, I know this because, so I've been working with Momentus for a long time.
Disclosure here, they are sponsored to my show, and I personally am on their advisory board. But I'm saying that because they asked me for many years, and I said no, several years.
And then they changed leadership. And these new people came in and they developed what they call the Momentus Standard.
And so every single product that they make is third-party tested. Yeah, third-party tested, yeah.
It's tested also for heavy metals, for pesticides, for herbicides, for toxins, for lead, for a ton of different stuff, right? Which very, very few supplement companies actually do. And then on top of that, most of their products have what's called NSF certified for sport, which is something we have to have for our athletes.
So it's all third party tested. And then a bunch of it has all this additional stuff.
So it's when I saw them doing all that stuff, I was like, oh, you're actually like putting your money where your mouth is. Because everybody says their products are the cleanest.
Exactly. It's hard to tell because that's the problem with all of this.
You don't know who to trust because everyone says everything and then you're overwhelmed. But then I heard, and that's why with Momentus especially, I trust their products.
I've seen a lot of come out, though, regarding chocolate versus vanilla whey. Is it true that chocolate has more heavy metals and lead overall, and it's less healthy than vanilla? Have you heard this before? No, I haven't heard that.
I'm not sure. Really? No.
I just read something about this yesterday, that chocolate has more, they found more toxicities or a lot of different things in protein powder. Yeah, I could believe it.
Really? How? Well, I mean. Why? Why chocolate versus vanilla? I have no idea.
It's weird. Probably, if I had to guess, knowing what I know about the supplement industry and the food industry in general, a lot of the times multiple companies are buying from the same distributor.
So my guess is something like that is happening. Ultimately, I don't really care because the fact that the products that I use are all tested anyways.
So I don't really care. That's why, guys, you have to be very careful what products you are.
Listen to trusted sources. Listen to Dr.
Andy Alpin.

And there are other companies that make good stuff too

in the supplement world,

but I just particularly prefer Momentus.

So if you don't like them for whatever reason,

great, find another one.

But just whatever you do,

especially for things like supplements

and food-based products,

just make sure that they're at the same kind of level of testing.

If they do, then fine.

Go with somebody else.

If they don't, though, be careful. How do you know that companies are telling you the truth? Well, okay, actually, number one, you don't necessarily, unless your companies, this is ridiculous.
It sounds like we're doing a giant ad for Momentus. I know, but we're so not, by the way.
I'm going to clip this and send it to them. They'll be very happy because this was not planned.
Yeah. Companies like Momentus, though, will let that testing available.
So like, see it, like show me the testing results, right? Yeah. The other way is, and this is something like we don't talk about very often, but we will routinely see heavy metals and other toxins in people's blood work.
And then you go back and see, oh, they stopped taking those supplements from non-tested places

or places that say that they're tested, but they're not.

And you don't know it's from them, right?

Things like mercury could be from anywhere, right?

Yeah.

Totally, right?

Or even lead could be a thousand places, right?

Right.

And so not every time, but many times, the only change we make is we stop taking those low-quality supplements, and then guess what happens? It's gone in their blood. Really? So there's many steps in logic.
I jumped there. That would be a bad science experiment if I just said it that way.
I didn't control for all variables. It can be a lot.
Generally, toxin in blood are acute exposures anyways. They clear, but it's happened enough times where I'm like, all right, like you got to stop taking those crappy supplements.
Right. No, exactly.
Okay. So while we're talking about shakes or protein shakes or smoothies, what do you think about the fact that there's been a lot of, someone came on this podcast recently, a while ago and talked all about how, when you have a shake and how when you blend the shake, the way your body digests the fruits of the shake is much different in the blending process.
Your insulin spikes way higher than just eating a fruit by itself. Is that accurate? I'd have to know exactly what the person said, but I can add a couple of things to that.
Number one, if you're going to compare something like a whole food to the fruit juice. No, not fruit juice.
Taking a banana. I'm getting there, I'm getting there.
And blending it, okay. So, but let's start where we all agree.
Okay. Everyone would agree with that, right? Why we're missing the fiber intake almost exclusively, right? Fiber is going to mitigate blood glucose spikes and elevation.
Great. Second step then is what if I take that whole apple, banana, peach, whatever it is, eat it as a whole apple versus blend it up? Well, you'll actually see the same thing with meat.
A steak versus ground meat. Ground meat versus actually blended meat because these studies have been done.
You blend it up and you drink the meat. Drinking the meat? Yeah, yeah.
For this exact reason, reason. It is what happens if I pre-digest, basically, pre-break down the food item.
There are differences. There are differences in absorption.
The amount that you actually get from the gut actually into the rest of your system is kind of how you can think about that. There are differences.
That said, how much of a difference in that particular example of if I ate that peach or if I blended it up, how much more would that cause my

blood glucose to spike? I would probably, if they showed me data that said it spiked it more when

you blended it, for those other reasons, I'd believe it. Does it do it to a magnitude that

I care about? I don't know. Maybe.
I don't know the data. I don't know the specific study that they're referring to.
My initial skepticism, you can see there. I don't know if I would care enough.
But it's plausible based on what I do know from studies in a very similar realm. So I'd say plausible, but I don't know.
I don't really do that very often, so I'm not super worried about it. Right.
Well, maybe not you, but other people who have to be more conscientious of their insulin or sugar. It depends on how far up or down that priority list it is for you.
If everything else is really dialed and this is the last little thing to figure out, then maybe this is making a big enough impact. But if we're still worrying about this over top of the other big rocks we talked about earlier, you're eating 20 grams of protein a day, you're having irregular sleep schedule, then I'd be like, dude, you're way focused on the wrong thing.
On the wrong thing. So it could be real, but whether you need to focus on it or pay attention to it would be up to what the individual situation is.
Right. And also, I guess, so in terms of just's better to have that than have That's exactly right.
You know, like french fries or something. Totally.
Exactly. Or missing a meal or whatever out of the case is, right? So, would I rather have you blend your banana, strawberry, smoothie rather than just going to the store and buying a...
Yes. It's still whole real food.
It's still better probably than adding additional processing steps to it.

Totally.

And I don't know, if it represents some marginal increase in blood glucose elevation,

just go for a walk and it's all gone.

So who cares?

Right, right.

It's pretty easy to manage.

How about fiber?

People don't talk a lot about fiber.

Yeah, super important.

Right?

People talk a lot about protein, and they're missing the fact that fiber helps with your whole nutrient absorption. If you're not absorbing your nutrients, you're kind of fucked.
Yeah, it helps with darn near everything from short and long-term gut health to mitigating blood glucose elevation to nutrient absorption to helping manage cholesterol levels. A ton of other reasons to go after it.
I would say in general, we've probably increased fiber intake more than we've done the opposite. And I say that because there actually have been, we just had one last week, young 32-year-old guy is just on top of everything, lots of IBS symptoms, was just convinced he had something happening with gut health or whatever.
Okay, run stool tests, things like that. Take a look at it, and he's eating like 50 grams of fiber a day.
Okay, what's that mean? The kind of rule of thumb we say is for every 1,000 calories you eat, you want to eat around 14 or so grams of fiber. So if you're eating 2,000 calories, you should be having, that would be 28 grams of fiber, which would mean, all right, somewhere between 25 and 30, like, you know, plus or minus.
These numbers, like, don't get too specific with them. If you're at 3,000 calories a day, maybe something like 40, 50 grams of fiber a day.
So when I saw he's like 50 grams of fiber a day, I'm like, oh, okay, you must be at a pretty high calorie load. Calorie load was like 1,800.
And I was like, oh, well, I know why you think you have IBS. You have triple the fiber intake and that's going to, that's going to tear your stomach to pieces, right? We also see this a lot with people that are really health conscious or trying to be really health conscious and they jack up insoluble fiber really high on accident.
They do things like, okay, I'm going to cut out all my starches. I'm not going to eat any more pasta, no more grains.
And I'm eating all vegetables and their broccoli intake. They're eating three cups of broccoli per meal.
And all of a sudden they're just like, damn, I'm getting like all this bloating. And I'm like, well, yeah.
How about we switch out a cup of broccoli and put in a pizza? Wow. Well, yeah, sure.
And all of a sudden they're like, yeah, my GI problems going away. I'm like, well, no kidding.
Because can you, so you can over fiber? Of course. Because can you also get constipated if you're over fiber? No question about it.
Because remember, there's two types of fiber. There's soluble fiber and insoluble fiber.
Insoluble fiber, here's a clear difference. If you took a glass of water and put it on the table, and you put something in that water, if it would get soggy and soak up the water, like imagine putting a piece of bread and water.
Yeah. Fill up.
Okay. That is a soluble fiber.
Yeah. If you put a piece of broccoli in water, it wouldn't do anything.
Right. That is insoluble.
Right. Well, the same thing happens in your GI tract.
So both soluble and insoluble fiber are really healthy. They're really good for you, but they have different functions.
So if you get a ton of soluble fiber and you don't have insoluble fiber in there, like, boom, things will shoot through. You'll go, probably go like really constipated and then boom, diarrhea or like pretty new stool, right? If you do the opposite and you jack insoluble fiber up way too high, you could just really have like tons of bowel movements.
Maybe you're not watery, maybe not. Or you could, again, feel a constipation.
So both of these things could be causing either end of that spectrum, depending on where they're at. So when you just have way too much fiber intake, especially in a quick span, so you've just made this change.
You went from eating like eight or 10 grams of fiber a day to now eating 35. You're going to just go bam.
Like your stomach is going to have one of two reactions and neither of them you want. Wow.
I thought most Americans or most people were not eating enough fiber. That's the majority.
I would probably say 90% of the time we've having to give people more fiber. 10% of the time have been people eating too much fiber.
I would say if you had to pick one error on the side of 40% too much fiber rather than 3% too little. Right.
Right. Like really you want to make sure you're at or above the number.
But if you're going crazy and you made all these changes and it's new to you, it's the change that matters, right? So if your GI system's not ready for that and all of a sudden you're just like, man, I'm eating all these healthy foods and oh my God, my stomach is, I'm just gassy and like all these problems, then maybe tone down the broccoli, you know, for a little bit and get some easier to digest forms of fiber for a little bit and then maybe work your way back up if you need to at all. But yes, most people are not eating enough fiber.
How about fiber supplements? You can. We have used these a lot, whether they're things like Fibromend from Thorne is great or Metamucil, right? Like psyllium husk, like lots of different things like that you can do.
I have one called BioMe here. Have you heard of that one? BioMe? BioMe.
It's very clean. It's like a fiber supplement that is supposed to be very clean and good for you.
But yeah. We've used those in times probably most often when, and this is not me, we have medical doctors and things like that on our team that'll do, if you actually have a gut problem, you fix your gut, right? That's a big part of those gut healing protocols.
Right, right, right. But where we have used them more are things like in caloric deficits.
So as calories come down, sometimes micronutrients, vitamins, minerals come down. This is when supplements and stuff start to come into the equation.
And oftentimes, a lot of the athletes we work with or general population will go through phases of caloric restriction. And then if fiber starts to get hurt there, we'll bring in then fiber as a supplement.
I usually would rather get fiber from whole food, but we will turn to supplements in those particular cases. And it's really helpful, particularly during those last few weeks.
And you're just like, man, not really regular right now. And you're like, okay, great.
And we can take some psyllium husk or something like that and get your stomach to not feel so suboptimal, then it's pretty helpful. How about others? Again, in terms of supplementing, what's your take? Are there supplements that you think are definitely like 100% you must take? Do you think supplements are overrated? What's your whole take on supplements? Supplements should be thought of as supplements.
Have good relationships. Drink water.
See the sunlight. Move.
This is all the stuff that changes your life. Right, right.
Now, if we want to add some little ice cream on top, this is where supplements come in. And so we use supplements quite regularly.
Supplements do work. When people say things like supplements are a scam, they don't work.
I just don't think they can read. I'm generally considering thinking they cannot physically read.
Really? Yeah. Well, there are thousands of studies on supplements, right? They're being kind of jerks when they say that.
But what they're trying to say is supplements don't have the magnitude of impact that most people think. And that's true.
So they do work, but they generally don't work like people think. It's uncommon for you to take one supplement and your life changes.
That's not the kind of impact supplements tend to have. If you want numbers, I don't know, if I had to add every supplement all the whole world together, I'd probably say most supplements change whatever you're measuring by 3% to 10%.
It's not 50%. Yeah, it's not that much.
It's not 90%. But if you're at a certain level where you've done the big stuff that does move the needle by 90% or 200%, and you are looking for that last 5% or 10%, well, now a supplement can potentially do that.
Now, there are some supplements, like a fish oil, that will move the needle in those really big numbers, like fiber potentially. And then there are others, like a creatine, where the impact is more going to be in that 3% to 10% range, but the safety profile's high.
They've been tested in every clinical population you can imagine, from brain damage to brain injuries to neurological disorders to pregnancy to kids to weight loss to young to old, right? And they very rarely have any negative side effects of any, and they generally improve a wide range of outcomes like lean muscle, like brain health, like mood, like cognitive function. They're not doing a lot.
They're not at the same order of magnitude as a drug would do, but this is a context. So if you hear that and you think, oh, I knew it, they're a scam.
Well, great, that's your interpretation. If you hear it and think, oh, that's what I thought they did.
Well, then great. We're on the same page.
So ultimately, I don't really care if you love supplements or hate supplements. As long as you know and have an honest understanding of what they will do and won't do, then you can interpret that however you see fit.
As long as we're on the same page with what the expectations are. And I think that is a fair way to view supplements is, again, that three to 10% is probably a normal impact range.
So you're saying, okay, you just say creatine. Yeah, creatine's fantastic.
Because it's the most studied, right? Is that overall? One of the most studied supplements in the entire planet. And again, across a range of people and populations, young to healthy to old to muscle to brain to immune system to sort of everything else, right? How about, is there any other supplement that you think is the same? Yeah, fish oil would fall into that category, right? So fish oil has just been so well documented in numerous areas.
If you want to look into things like protein powder, if you want to call that a supplement or... How about vitamin D? Vitamin D is very well established.
It's very hard to go toxic with vitamin D. It has a number of physiological benefits.
It's been shown to be effective in many, many, many things. I would generally put vitamin D in a little bit of a lower category than something like creatine and fish oil.
Really? It's like 1 and like 1A. It's not like it's level D.
No, only because vitamin D has been like, it's kind of become the panacea for like- It has. For optimal performance overall.
Yeah. Creatine is one of the newer things that people, it's very trendy that everyone now is talking about.
Yeah. The only reason, well, there's a number of reasons why I'm not like as there, I would probably say, you know, some large, I'm going to make this number up, but 95, 98% of people, vitamin D is either good to innocuous.
Right. I'm not really aware of really any downsides to vitamin D.
Again, the toxicity profile is enormous. You have to get way, way, way too much for way too long for it to generally matter.
There are probably three papers, but they're old and it's far from extensive evidence, but they do make plausible sense that, and we've seen this also like in our practice, you have to just be a little bit careful with vitamin D in the sense that vitamin D is a storage molecule. So it helps you put things away and store them.
So if you have had like moderate to low vitamin D and you've gone on say 5,000 IUs, which is a normal supplement dose or 2,000 IUs, something like that, and you did it for a long time and your vitamin D levels in your body didn't increase and you're really consistent,

probably one of two things is happening.

Number one, there is a long history

of vitamin D supplements

not actually containing

the amount of vitamin D in them

that is listed on the bottle.

And that range is enormous.

And so it is stop number one

on our logic train.

Occam's razor says,

you took a bunch of vitamin D

but your vitamin D levels didn't move.

You probably didn't actually take vitamin D.

I'm telling you,

Thank you. So it is stop number one on our logic train.
Occam's Razor says, you took a bunch of vitamin D, but your vitamin D levels didn't move. You probably didn't actually take vitamin D.
I'm telling you, not only are you going to be avoiding mercury and toxins and lead and cadmium and stuff in your supplements, but you might actually not be getting the ingredient. Very, very commonly seen with vitamin D.
Extraordinarily common with things like melatonin and other supplements. This has been well documented.
Actually, we published a paper a couple of years ago. Somewhere between 10% and 40% of supplements on the market are going to be either adulterated, mislabeled, or have some other fatal flaw that you would significantly care about.
So this issue is rampant. Now, in America, most supplement companies are pretty okay.
But when you get into India and some other countries, you just start to see the level of contaminations that are just mislabeling that are completely outrageous. So also with omega-3s or with everything, not just vitamin D.
Yeah, I think in our paper we covered 12 or 15 different supplements. And you can just see the mislabeling, the contaminants, things like that.
And there's a lot of papers on this. How about magnesium? What do you think of magnesium? Let me finish vitamin D.
Oh, I thought you were done. Sorry, you took a breath.
So a good chance that you just didn't get the vitamin. That's the most likely scenario.
Okay. Another scenario is because of what we know that vitamin D does, you may be downregulating it endogenously on purpose.
And that's because you're trying to clear a heavy metal. And so again, this is not, we don't have extensive evidence on this.
This is more of a couple of papers have been written on it 20 years ago, and nobody really followed up on it. So I don't want to falsely represent like, oh, this happens all the time and freak people out.
Again, 99% of the time, like we use it all the time.'s great. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But as a thought exercise, more than anything, if you're in the presence of a combination of some micronutrient insufficiencies as well as heavy metals, you don't want to ramp up storage molecules because you're trying to clear those metals. And so then when you're going in and smashing that vitamin D supplementation, you're making it harder on your own body to clear those heavy metals.
And so this is oftentimes what happens. And we have seen this pretty consistently where we will take vitamin D supplementation away from people and their vitamin D levels will rise.
And that's because it allowed them to clear a heavy metal eventually. Their body can get back to homeostasis and now they can actually get back to a normal, healthy functioning vitamin D status.
So wait, so vitamin D prohibits the clearing of heavy metals? It's going to have it to store because it's going to force things to be stored as much as you possibly can. That's what it's doing.
And it's doing many things. So if you're someone who eats a lot of sushi, like I do, and a lot of people do, and we automatically have high heavy metals, and we take vitamin D, the 5,000, the one that you're talking about, that most people do, does that mean that we are by accident storing heavy metals in us? Potentially.
So how do we know? Well, number one, we would say, let's look at your blood, yeah, and let's make sure that none of those heavy metals are there. And let's look at urine, let's look at a couple of different places.
Because depending on what heavy metal you pick, you may be better looking at hair versus urine versus blood. It's actually a fairly complicated science there.
It's also a very... It's a lot less straightforward of a science than people think.
So let's just sort of leave that aside. But number one, we would probably go backwards and say, you've got to stop eating so much fish in that particular thing.
That's probably going to solve your problem. We've seen that more than a few times.
And just down-regulating known heavy metal consumption products is a better way to go about it. If past that we have to go to level 3,000 where we're now taking vitamin D, fine, we can get there.
But most of the time, I'm generally going to say, unless we have a reason to take vitamin D, I'm not going to take it. If your levels are reasonable, then let's just come off of the supplement and see what happens.
If you come off of it and you stay where you're at, then we're good. If you come off of it and they start coming down, then maybe we go back on it.
What about magnesium? Yep. Magnesium is involved in, again, about every dang metabolic process in your entire body.
You pick your favorite thing, whether you like mitochondria or brain, like you pick the thing you're into, and I will show you how magnesium plays a critical role in that. If you also look at the research, and this is really hard to glean for some reasons I'll talk about in a second, but if you look at the research, historically, you're going to see pretty high numbers of the population having insufficient magnesium intake in their food.
Why? We're generally going to get it from foods that people don't like to eat. Like what? Dark leafy greens.
Other things like that, right? That are not common in our diet. Other not, like you can get it from animal products as well, but they're the uncommon ones, right? A lot of times we have insufficient intake in people.
In addition to that, the more physically active you are, the more magnesium you get. So you start combining all this stuff.
It's one of the really common ones where people just don't have enough of. Now, you can easily get magnesium tested in your blood, but you gotta be careful here.
Magnesium in your blood will tell you a lot of insights into a lot of different things in your body, but it won't tell you much at all about how much magnesium you have. Really? Because 60% of your magnesium is stored in your bones, not in your blood.
It's the same thing, but not as bad as calcium, right? 99% of your calcium is in your bones. So calcium levels in your blood tell you a tremendous amount about what's happening, but it doesn't tell you that much about calcium storage concentrations.
Magnesium is the same. Again, most of it's not going to be in your blood.
And so if you were looking at magnesium in your blood, you're basically looking at an incredibly transient marker. And so if you get your magnesium drawn one day to do it again the next day, those numbers are gonna be wildly different.
You get it done a week later, it could be wildly different. So I would not use a direct blood test of magnesium as your only marker of whether or not you're eating enough of magnesium.
You would have to do much more invasive testing, which is just not a realistic thing for the most part. So should people take it or not take it? Kind of depends on their physical activity.
If we would strongly prefer you to get more magnesium in your diet, if you can go there. That said- Not take the supplement.
We use magnesium supplements constantly, really constantly. I take it almost every day personally, and we recommend it to a large percentage of the people we work with.
But then why do you say that you'd rather get it from your diet? Well, we do both. We're going to double dip.
So you do believe in magnesium supplements? Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, they're super effective. What I wanted to be careful of is the fact that you didn't look at your blood levels of your magnesium.
But you said even if you look at your blood, it doesn't- You can use it for a lot of cool stuff, but just don't look, don't assume your- put it this way. If you look at your blood draw and your magnesium is really high, don't be like, well, I'm good.
I don't need to eat magnesium. Right, right, right.
That has almost nothing to do with what's actually happening in your body. So you still might need a bunch of magnesium in your food.
And by the way, there's a million kinds of magnesiums.

Yep, yep.

This actually used to be a wild area,

and it has toned down in the last five years a lot.

There used to be a lot of ineffective forms.

Those are mostly being cleared on the market,

to be totally honest.

Okay.

Most of them are pretty good. If you want to go with kind of the most common forms of it,

you're going to see are like magnesium malate,

magnesium bisglycinate. Those are like the most common ones.
The magnesium oxides and stuff are almost all gone. How about citronate? Citrus.
Yeah, you can do that fine as well. It just has a little bit to do with the chemistry of how they're brought in.
Obviously, you know, Andrew Huberman is, for the most part, popular as magnesium threonate. It's fine.
You can do that as well. What is that? Actually, I didn't even know he did, but what is it? What is that? Just a different form of it.
I'm probably one of the only people, by the way, who don't listen to the Huberman podcast on the regular. I listen.
I like your stuff. You're literally like the only girl.
You're probably the only person in the entire world who doesn't listen to it. I am.
I am the only girl. For sure, the only girl.
That's 100% true. Yeah.
I mean, that guy's become like a rock star. Yeah, he's the best.
He's, yeah. But yeah, I've listened to a few.
I've listened to yours, actually.

That's what I'm talking about.

Right?

So what you're basically saying is Andy Galpin, Andrew Huberman.

Exactly. Got it.

Exactly.

Cut me that clip. I'm going to take that to him right now.

Yeah, exactly. Listen, I like Andrew Huberman.
We were texting for a few minutes, like for,

I don't know, years ago. He was supposed to come on this podcast and he basically like ghosted me.

I don't know, years ago. He was supposed to come on this podcast, and he basically, like, ghosted me.
I don't feel bad about that. Oh, I feel bad.
Yeah. I do.
If he's listening, which I'm sure he's not. He's a very—I've known him for years.
We were really good friends before he ever had social media. And he ghosted me all the time, and I ghost him all the time.
You're right. I wonder, what do you think the X factor is about him?

Oh, he has the Conor McGregor package.

He has an unmatched intellect.

His retention is off of the charts.

His physical appearance is perfect.

He's Stanford.

He's a neuroscientist.

His energy, his delivery, he has all of those factors that go into it. He is himself fit and healthy and he interacts, his lifestyle.
If you see him behind the scenes, like he is the genuine person, right? This is like, there's no skeletons there at all. This is what he does.
So when you put that all together, you're like, oh yeah. Like he just has, he has all the other people that have gotten big.
Like you have a little, you have one or two of these. He just has it all.
You're right. And he hit fast.
Like it was crazy. Like I remember when I found him at 50,000 or something so small.
Yeah. And then like, I've never seen anyone track that fast.
Like he's at like millions and millions. Like he's become mainstream.
Like I think probably my mom knows who he is. You know what I mean? Like it's so bizarre.
Yeah. Right.
You know what I love about it the most other than like being happy for him? He's so punk. He only ever does things the way he wants to do it.
And from the gate, like he didn't do any things of like, oh, you have to do this to optimize. You have to do this.
He's just like, no. Like I'm just like, and if it works, it works great.
Like whatever. Not from an arrogance perspective, but just being true to himself and like, this is what he wants to do.
This is a topic he wants to talk about. These are the papers he wants to read.
I'm like, that's what he's going to do. I like knowing that.
It's great. It's great.
Like, no one deserves it more than he does. I like to, oh my gosh.
By the way, this wasn't an ad for Andrew Huberman either. It just seemed to be like, well, I'm glad he has a friend like you,

but you can tell him on the side,

listen, this girl,

you said you were going to do her show many years ago.

Well, get in line with all the other people

that he promised.

I don't want to get in line.

He promised.

Why does he promise?

He shouldn't do that, though.

You know, honestly,

people get mad at him about this,

but here's what will happen with him. He will genuinely be excited, like super excited to do something and want to do it.
And he'll say yes. And then he'll look at his calendar and it is going, and he's like, damn, damn, damn.
And then it just gets buried on the thing. So it's not disingenuous at all.
When he says yes to something, he legitimately is very excited about it. And then reality sets in of like travel schedule and other things and it just like can't physically happen so uh he probably should be better at being more realistic about his commitments i will say that way but it's never like uh she's not popular enough or he's not cool it's always like yeah he's super into it and then it's just then why is he showing up on other shows i can't promise you I don't know you don't know it it's timing it's fluke it's okay okay it's all the lucky things right like all right because i i see him on joe rogan he has time for joe rogan well fair enough you know i'm just i'm just saying i'm just saying okay well anyway andrew you're more than welcome to come on the show if you so so have the time um okay what was the other thing? Okay, so now I forgot what I was even yammering onto you about.
I was saying she supplements. Oh, yeah.
Let's just go with, okay, we're going to end with this. Give me the day in the life of what you do.
Kind of you're talking about your kids and your morning routine. You're kind of going into your nutrition, and then I cut you off with something else.
Tell me what you— You got all excited about the bear meat. I got the, yeah, the bear meat like threw me totally off and I was like very excited.
So we got the morning down. Okay.
And then you, then what happens? Yeah. So I'll, I'll eat that stuff.
And what supplements? I want to know everything. I'll eat those things as well as always some fruit in the morning and then generally some starch.
And I have a pretty big variety of what I'm going to choose for those categories. Okay.
Supplementation it is... Oh, wait, one more question about fruit.
That was what I had down here. I'm so sorry to interrupt you.
What's your take on too much fruit? It's unlikely to be an issue. Okay.
You can have too much of anything. Exactly.
Calories, is calories calories? Let's get this straight because is calories in versus calorie out? That is a real thing. Oh, yeah.
You can't avoid that. A hundred percent.
And people are like, it's not about calorie eating. Yes, it is.
And I will tell you something just quickly because you can eat fruit, but I will say I'm a huge fruit person. I can eat five pounds of grapes in one sitting, no problem.
And I will gain weight from it. Yeah.
It does happen. Sure.
Well, calories matter. Calories matter.
Yeah, it doesn't matter, right? Are calories the only thing that matters? No. Is it the most important thing? Maybe not.
Is calorie measuring the best dietary system? Maybe not. That doesn't mean calories don't count.
There are ways that it looks like the calorie in, calorie out system is not working for you, but that generally means a miscalculation on calories in or calories out, right? Because the body does lots of adaptive things to mitigate and manage what happens there. So yeah, calories matter.
And that's like, anything past that is details now, but you can't make an argument that calories just don't exist or matter, right? So all of my supplements are very specific to either my goals at that time and or what's happening in my physiology. So it changes.
I don't just take the same thing. You don't.
You're not just like... Have you heard of something called NAC, N-A-C? Sure.
How important is that? Somewhat high to none, right? So you're talking about a precursor for glutathione for the most part, right? So generally you can think of it as like a pretty potent antioxidant. Not something I would tell everyone to take.
You have to be really careful, especially with timing of antioxidants, especially powerful ones like that. If you're trying to induce any physiological adaptation, this comes in response to insult.
So you cause an inflammatory response when you exercise. If you then block that inflammatory response with an NSAID, with NAC, with vitamin E, vitamin C, then you will mitigate and block adaptations.
Really? This has been shown many times. You have to take a pretty high amount, but if you're trying to cause stress and then you're stopping the stress from happening, you're stopping the physiological response.
But I thought taking antioxidants is a great... Antioxidant supplements are something you should be very conscious of.
High antioxidant foods are almost always okay. So if you're eating more quality foods that are higher in antioxidants, this is almost always a good thing.
But now when you're taking them in the form of a medication or a supplement, you're getting extremely high dosage in non-natural combinations, if you will. That becomes really problematic is almost a fair word to say.
So be really conscious of it. What I just explained.
So if you're overly suppressing inflammation, inflammation is a signal for adaptation. It is a signal for blood clotting.
It is a signal for cognitive change. It is a signal for neuroplasticity.
If you're going in and smashing and maximally suppressing that, then you don't have any stimuli for adaptation. Like this becomes a problem.
So we do not just prophylactically take antioxidants of any kind. If we have a very structured reason for that, then we might put some in there.
But then we're going to come off of them as soon as we dump. But we do not just put people on, especially high-powered ones like NAC, and just as like a, yeah, go take this for forever thing.
Okay. I want to tell you about one thing.
I just, someone, I saw it on Instagram, and I went to buy it. It's called Ask, okay, hold on a second.
I'm going to show you on Amazon. This is very important because it was like, I thought it was like, they said it's the number one antioxidant, blah, blah, blah.
So important to take. And I was like, oh, okay.
I guess I'm missing out on something here. Okay.
And it's called Aztexanthin. Aztexanthin? Yeah.
Yeah. It's great.
That's your blueberry stuff. That's just like the ingredient down the list.
And it's one of the many awesome things in blueberries, cherries, and things like that. It's phenomenal.
Lots of research on it. It's great.
Again, though, I would say the same thing. We're not going to take those unless we have a reason for that.
Because you have to be conscious of what you're trying to do signaling-wise in your physiology. This is a potent one.
It is a potent one. So I thought because it's an antioxidant and it's supposed to be found in blueberries, it's great for your skin, and da-da-da-da.
I thought, wow, more is more, not less is more. No, definitely not the case.
You can get away with higher than needed amounts of protein, of fiber, of acylate. But you start getting into—here's a general rule.
If it is a macronutrient, fiber, water, protein, carbs, fat, no big deal. If you eat excess, okay? If it is a micronutrient, if it is a vitamin, if it's a water-soluble vitamin, you'll just pee it out.
So not a big deal for over-consuming water-soluble vitamins usually, with some exceptions, vitamin C, things like that. If you start getting into fat-ble and if you specifically get into minerals, be really, really careful of high concentrations of exogenous minerals, iron, calcium, even something like potassium.
These can cause real significant and serious issues. So I wouldn't go to any of these things.
Phytochemicals are in the same realm, antioxidants. You really should be conscious of using those things unless you have a reason.
If you are training super hard and you're peaking for competition, we might add in some antioxidant supplementation. If we're in a particular area of the world, let's say, or traveling with a lot of pollutants, or you're going to be interacting with a lot of people and you're worried about, you're going to be sleeping a lot less.
And you have other things that are going to suppress your immune system. We might add in some antioxidant support there.
But if not, we're not going to touch those things. Oftentimes, if we're having any immune-related issues, there's something causing it, and we're going to go back and solve that problem and then just let your immune system and your physiology do what it wants to do and get out of the way.
So I should get off of these things. I wouldn't take them unless you had a real reason for it.

Well, I went to get my blood taken by this guy who took 300 of my blood markers.

And he said that I need to take it.

Well, again, if you have a reason for it, then...

That was three years ago, though.

Oh, my God.

Well, you're not the same person.

Okay, I got to get my blood taken again.

Wow.

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

I'm glad you came just for that.

Yeah.

No, that's... I'd say if you're like at home and you're confused, don't have

blood or whatever, if you are leading a inactive lifestyle and or you eat a bunch of low quality

food or you do something that is known to be pretty deleterious, like excessive alcohol or

smoking, or you live in a place that has really low air quality. Here in LA right now.
So should I be taking it now because of the air quality? Right. Exactly.
Right. Then okay.
But if you're checking most of those boxes, I wouldn't, without blood work or without some particular reason, I'd probably stay away from most antioxidant supplements. Okay.
I need to ask you again, because I'm actually very serious about this now How much is it if someone comes to see, because you're so, you have all these labs and these tests. If I came to you and said, hey, I want to be your client, can you coach me? You personally, you're not going to coach me, don't lie.
You're too busy to coach me. No, no, no, there is.
You're going to coach me yourself. We have a program called Optima that I personally coach.
You, you're going to coach me. That's me directly.
How much are you? I'm going to hire you. Yeah.
It's looking at the program. Okay.
I want to know. I think people want to know.
I bet you people are curious. Like how much is it? It's not a reasonable number that most people can afford.
Is it a thousand dollars? It's, you're going to, you're pretty low. 5,000? Like is it by hour, by month? No.
Our coaching program, our full immersion coaching program, is one program, one price. That's it.
It's not a la carte. How much? It's more than you're thinking.
$10,000. So if you want, what you can do...
You can't be embarrassed. If you're actually charging this price, You have to be able to say it aloud.
I'm not embarrassed. It's just better this way.
Why is it better this way? Because people are going to be like, oh, this guy sounds really knowledgeable. You can look in the program and you can see if it's your fit.
And you do it yourself. The Optima program, I personally coach.
This is where I personally coach. Will you tell me afterwards? Yeah.
When I say I coach, this is not like people in my company. This is literally the people I'm coaching.
Then we have a more affordable program that I have built. And I did coach for years and years in.
And now I don't personally coach in that one anymore. At the same time, you can do something like just our blood work.
So our blood work program is called Vitality. It's like about 100 markers, I think, plus or minus.
Is it 115-ish? Yeah. And then there's, again, probably another several thousand that is calculating after that.
But that will not only pull those markers, it'll analyze, it'll interpret, tell you exactly what all these markers and combinations and cross-reactions mean, and then tell you exactly what to do to not just fix the marker that is high or low, but to fix the cause. Who does that? Who gives me that? It's all automated in software.
So it will tell me. So you'll run through it.
Your results will come back in.

You'll get an alert.

You'll pop on and everything will be analyzed and interpreted for you.

It can walk you through, hey, this number is high.

This is what it means.

This is what it's doing.

And then do exactly this to correct maybe not that number, but correct the cause of

that problem.

And it's all automated for you.

How much is that program?

That's $1,250.

Once, a one-time fee.

Yeah, per, yeah.

And if you buy, of course, like semi-annual or multiple, it's cheaper. Does someone come to your house and take your blood? You can do that if you want.
You can go to a local lab car or whatever you can do. I think mobile phlebotomy is a separate charge on top of that, $1,200, but usually it's a couple hundred bucks or less or whatever.
Or you can go to LabCorp. So you can get into blood work for, that's very affordable.
Our absolute rest sleep program is much more expensive again because it's. I'll tell you, I'll ask, because I want to know just in general, because this is, I want to try this stuff.
And obviously, I don't know why you're embarrassed to say it over here. It's not at a price where you're like, I want to try that.
It's not like a pair of shoes. The blood work program may be like in the number that you're like, oh, okay, I'll try that.
Yeah, this is probably more. This is like you better be very serious because it's almost a year-long program.
And you have like, who's like the biggest athlete you've done, by the way? Define big. Like someone who's like optimally known to be optimal.
We've had the highest contract. Patrick Mahomes.
We've had the highest contract in sports probably six or seven times. Like LeBron? Not LeBron.
Patrick Mahomes? Not Patrick. Tom Brady.
We haven't had him. But we have had everything from Travis Barker.
I still work with Travis. He's phenomenal to fred warner who's the number one linebacker in the nfl okay um trevor bauer he signed the highest contract in major league baseball history won the site young uh john rom behind tiger woods you know very likely the highest paid golfer in the world uh probably a thousand uh that i'm forgetting at this point i'm always terrible with remembering but these are some of the big big names that are right now on the top of our list.
But plenty of Hall of Famers, MVPs, Cy Young winners. Again, the highest contract at the time, at least six times.
Do you trade people personally? Yeah. Like in the gym? Yeah.
So you do the whole thing. But you live in Seattle.
Do you travel all the time? I bit and then i mean i lived here in la for like 13 years oh so like uh tatiana suarez my daughter knows her they're like best buddies because she'd come to my house and like trains at my house so were you a trainer too like you did this stuff yeah yeah like you did the whole thing yeah brian ortega uf UFC fighter. Yeah.
Like he lives here in LA, right?

So hundreds of times. So were you a trainer then? Like if I were to say, hey, I want a trainer.
Can you come over? Well, sort of. Like strength and conditioning coaches.
I know. You weren't really.
Like you're not like that. But like if you're asking like if I'm in the gym taking them through their training programs.
Yeah. Yeah.
So you do the whole thing from kit and caboodle. I did that for many, many years.
I started actually, I first started coaching professional athletes like in the gym personally in 2003. Wow.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I've had a lot of pro athletes that like I have directly personally coached in my house, in the gym, in different formulas, all the different things.
So I'm not in the gym with them as much anymore. Like I said, yeah, but I'm still actively coaching many of them.
Right. Well, I think you're different.
I mean, you're obviously so knowledgeable. That's the thing.
At a certain level, they need people like you. You can't just be a trainer doing squats and lunges.
You have to understand. It's great too.
But I'm saying everything serves a purpose, right? To get to the next level of these intricacies, right? You need someone who has a background in all of these things. And my interest clearly is in like a little bit of all of them.
So I mean, I didn't have, honestly, I didn't have it in me to be a full-time only strength coach or a full-time only scientist. I much prefer doing kind of a little bit of everything.
Yeah. Holistic approach.
And then having a whole bunch of legitimate experts that I work with to bring in, to be true experts in those fields. So all of our stuff is like a team approach, right? So we try to bring in the best physical therapists, the best behavioral therapists, the best conditioning coaches, the best medical providers and say like, whatever you need, you're going to get a legitimate world-class individual in that category.
And I generally sit kind of like on the top is a bad way to say it, but I'm kind of the first filter that goes, yo, yo, this is where we need to go. You're the quarterback basically of the program.
I get that. Okay.
Quickly in two minutes, give me your day to day. Okay.
I know you eat bear and eggs in the morning. Then what happens? And fruit and starch, Almost always, a few hours into the day, I'm going to have like a 40-gram protein ingestion right now for probably two months straight.
That means I'm going to do a double scoop of Momentus. I promise you that's true.
I believe you. So I'll hammer that and then maybe another piece of fruit, which makes me feel great.
And then we always do lunch and dinner is the same thing. And so the way that was like, we'll make dinner and then double the thing and have it for the next day.
So I'll explain to you lunch and it's the same thing as dinner, but it's always a combination of six to eight ounces of meat of various kinds, a giant serving, like an entire plate of vegetables. And this is an enormous variety.
My wife is a tremendous, tremendous, I won't say chef, but basically a chef. So she makes all kinds of things.
Some serving of fat there, whether that's going to be nuts or a cheese or an oil or avocado, whatever the thing is. And then depending on the day, some varying amount of starch.
So quinoa to rice to sweet potatoes to regular potatoes to sourdough bread to like any number of things. And then the meal in between that could be something like yogurt and nuts or some other thing like that.
So you kind of run that thing out and you can see like 200 grams of protein is pretty easy to get to. And then other habits, like you work out at two or three o'clock.
Yeah, like in the afternoon is when I like to train. Sometimes that gets pushed back a little bit.
Do you do push-pull? No, I do. If I'm going to be lifting weights, I'm generally going to be doing full body.
Oh. I don't do body part splits at all.
And then what I do is I will oftentimes rotate like strength training and then some sort of conditioning. And the reason I do that is because my travel schedule is what it is.
I would not have success doing a, like a, I lift legs on Monday or I just do the next workout the next day I have a chance. That's however I do it.
Right. So if I have seven days in a row, I'm going to train seven days in a row because I might have four days in a row of terrible travel.
Right. Or nonstop media, blah blah right where I'm like okay there's just no reality of me getting a 45 minute lift in because I got to take my uber for an hour like yeah I don't have three hours of a break right because I'm on the road or my hotel doesn't have a gym or whatever the case is where are you staying at the ramada inn now or where well like depending on where you're at like you get you know I know depending on what city you're in and you're all over the place and timing and things like that.
Right. So I'll just do the next one.
So my conditioning could be anything from, you know, like 15 minutes, a really high intensity sprint work, or it could be longer duration, lower intensity could be, you know, like an hour walk could be all kinds of different stuff I do. Um, and then my workouts are generally going to be again, like I have a coach, I have a full-time strength conditioning coach for my program.
Tim DeFrancesco does my stuff. He was a former strength conditioning coach for the Lakers.
So really, really high level, but like I pay him to write my program. Yeah.
That's by the way, the best, best in the world have coaches. That's that I did my own stuff for decades and it's just, I will never do it again.
Yeah. I agree with you.
Never. Yeah.
So he, he does all my programs and he's awesome about changing stuff up as I'm going or whatever. And you're, if you're motivated, then you don't need someone to stand with you, right? I don't know.
You just need them to kind of give you the program. Honestly, personally, when I train, I don't want anybody around.
Yeah. I mean, I'm the same way as you.
Like my whole life is talking to other people for the most part. I know.
Whether it's our companies or my students or whatever. So when I can have an hour to myself, I'm like, I'm out.
Yeah. I don't want anybody else around.
So I love having a remote coach like that. But that's generally what it is.
So my day, like that's what I'll eat. That's how I do it.
The kids are home, usually like six o'clock. We're doing dinner and then it's like family time the rest of the day.
They're in bed at eight o'clock. Eight o'clock is, you know, wife and I time to do whatever.
And then it's wake up the next day and do it again. Wow.
By the way, I'm so sorry. I kept you here for three plus hours.
I mean, I could go on and I'd be, you're probably, my leg fell asleep like four times. But okay.
okay, I'm going to let you leave because I know you're probably like,

when is this girl going to shut up?

All good, all good.

I mean, and I can go on and on, but I'm going to give you,

I'm going to let you peace out.

Okay.

Okay, you guys, this is, again, Dr. Andy Galpin.

Check out all his programs.

Check out his podcast.

Check out his six-part series with Andrew Heberman, who he loves.

And he's great. Like, you're great.
Would you come back? Yeah. I'm in LA somewhat routinely, so we'll definitely do that.
All right, because I would love to have you on like semi-regularly if you can stand it. Because, I mean, if I'm going to ask these questions, I want to ask them to someone who pretty much I can guarantee has the answer in, you know,

who knows the answer, not just making up shit as they go. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Well, yeah.
I don't know about that, but okay.

Okay. Well, just pretend.

All right.

All right. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

My pleasure. Thank you so much.
Bye, everyone.