Hello, we are at the end of 2025.

What a whirlwind of the year.

Now to mark the end of an amazing year of doing live.

I'll be Well.

I've looked back at some of the top moments in nutrition and fitness because you might be thinking about this right now, what you're going to implement into your new year.

And I thought this might be really helpful for me as well.

We get so much amazing content through the show and it gives me a moment to look back at those episodes and put the best parts together for you.

So we're going to kick off with the highest rated episode of 2025, Doctor Stacey Sims when she flew to LA to record this episode with me for Part 2.

We're also going to speak to Doug Evans.

If you do not know the nutritional powerhouse of sprouts, get ready to be amazed.

We're also going to speak to Andy Galpin, who is the godfather of human performance, and then Inego Sam Milan, who created Zone 2 Training.

And lastly, we're going to kick off with one of our second biggest episodes of this year, Jason Van Blurt, who talks to us everything about how the body stores emotion and the fascia.

So we're going to take you through lots of stages of some of our best episodes.

It's one of my favorite moments of this year to really reflect on just how much we have learned in 2025 and just making sure that we're taking some of the best parts away.

So I hope you enjoy.

And you have Part 2 coming on New Year's Eve, so make sure you subscribe and see Part 2 dropping very, very soon.

Enjoy.

Hey guys, I am very bad at asking for this but I wanted to stop for just one minute and ask a huge favour.

If you want to hear more diverse conversations from female voices such as myself, I would love if you could hit subscribe.

We work so hard on this show to bring you some of the best guests in the world, and having a female voice sometimes gives a different perspective, and I really want to elevate more of that on this channel.

So please hit subscribe if that's important to you as it is to me.

We've got gut health issues, maybe.

Do you have blood sugar issues?

Yep.

Is that a thing?

We've got brain fog, we've got mood changes, maybe depression, anxiety.

Anxiety I think is quite a big one that I hear a lot of people speak about.

OK, so this could be happening from 32 onwards.

So before we get to the menopause stage, which which hormone therapy we know HRT is speaking about a lot, what do women do in this phase?

Like if we're not getting an SSRI because we've not got an imbalance, how can women support themselves through this, through this change?

Yeah.

So exercise physiologist, I look at that and I look at environmental stressors before we go down a pharmaceutical route.

So if we're looking at all the systems in the body that are affected and we see from a metabolism standpoint, we are more insulin resistant.

We also have changes in our blood lipids where we start to have an elevation in our LDLS.

We start to see an increase in total cholesterol.

We also start to see an increase in visceral fat and esterified fatty acids.

So as an exercise physiologist, the first thing I think of is high intensity, because if we do true Sprint interval work or true high intensity interval work, then it's such a polarized stress.

The body's like, whoa, OK, I better be able to create these changes.

That's going to allow my mitochondria to work better, to be able to pull a blood glucose in, to be able to have these esterified fatty acids reduced into free fatty acids that I can use.

So the liver is not sending it as visceral fat, it's actually sending it to be used by the mitochondria.

So we look at exercise as a powerful stress, but not modern intensity and low intensity, because that's not a strong enough stress to be able to take the place of what hormones used to.

Right.

That's why we spoke so much about Zone 2 in our last conversation, which is why it's not the most useful.

Exactly.

That's why we want high intensity.

OK, So can you say exactly what high intensity is?

So people were like, really?

Really dialed into it, yes.

So if we talk about high intensity interval training, there's a subset in there called Sprint interval training.

And I don't mean running sprints, it's just the intensity.

So it's 30 seconds or less, as hard as you can possibly go with two to three minutes recovery between each of your intervals.

So when you first do it, you might do two of them and then you're completely gassed out.

So we don't want people to go, oh, I can do 8 of them no problem because by the time we get to the third one, you're not truly in your Sprint, you're dropping in your intensity.

So it's about the quality of the work.

Not the quantity.

Exactly.

So we're doing that kind of Sprint interval work.

It's such a strong stress to the body that we start to see these epigenetic changes over time within the muscle that allows more of our glute 4 proteins in the cell wall to translocate faster to be able to pull more glucose in without insulin.

So it becomes this is the same reason why people who are diabetic are encouraged to go for a walk or a light jog after a meal to enhance this epigenetic change within the muscle.

So it helps lower their glucose, OK, because there's more uptake into the cells.

Exactly, exactly.

We also see that there is a greater release of myokines from the skeletal muscle that then feeds forward to the liver.

That tells the liver we don't want visceral fat, we don't want these fatty acids become estrified.

We want these fatty acids to then go to the skeletal muscle to be stored near the mitochondria, to be used as fuel at rest.

So we start to see all these little changes through all the systems of the body just by doing some true high intensity work.

So how many times a week should we be doing this then?

For Sprint interval training too.

OK.

But then the other one is what we call high intensity interval training, which is slightly lower in the intensity, but longer.

So instead of 30 seconds or less, we're looking at 1 to 4 minutes of 80% of your Max or a little bit higher.

And then you have variable recovery.

So this would be something that someone could say if I'm in a CrossFit class or I'm at F-45 or some of these other classes where we have every minute on the minute for 5 minutes, we're doing one exercise and then we quickly transfer to the next exercise.

So every minute you're doing something different and the 5th minute's full recovery, and you might go through that three or four times.

That gives you your 20 minutes of high intensity work.

But it's true high intensity because it's 40 seconds of a blast of about 80%, twenty seconds, slight recovery as you're transferring to the next exercise, four of those and then one full minute off.

So this is true high intensity.

It's not actually doing an Orangetheory class.

It's not actually doing an F-45 because those movements are so rapid and you're going so quickly for 45 minutes that you are just sitting about that 70% mark, which makes you feel smashed.

And people think they have a really good sweaty workout, but it's not truly high enough of intensity to invoke the change that we want.

Right.

Gosh, that's so interesting.

I think we had this conversation last time where we're talking about how women feel like they have to be smashed every time they go.

Training.

Yeah, and that's not what we're after.

No, because then also I think when you're super fatigued, you just feel, you just don't feel great in yourself, right?

Right.

So how long should these workouts be lasting?

So we're looking at a Sprint interval.

I mean, I often piggyback them on with a strength training session because strength training is the other thing that we have to really be conscious to incorporate.

If we were to choose between high intensity work and strength training.

The big rock is strength training for women.

So I tell women, look, if you have 30 minutes and that's all you have and you have warm up and cool down, then you go, you do one compound movement of heavy lifting.

So it could be a deadlift, it could be a squat, it could be a bench press, something like that.

So you're using total body for these movements.

And then you finish it off with a couple of 32nd high intensity sprints.

There's two of your exercise sessions of the week done in 130 minute block.

If we're looking at having only 10 minutes, which I work with some people who are breakfast show hosts and they get up at Oh my God, it's early, be on set.

By the circadian rhythm, yeah.

Exactly.

And I'm like, OK, well you can get up and you can do a couple of 32nd blasts and then get on with your day and then at the end of the day, that's when you can do your lifting.

So there's ways of breaking it up and we want to really polarize, but doesn't take a lot of time.

OK, so they're the things that we want to be looking at.

Does this change when you go into menopause?

So this formula, so this is a thing, we want people to set up all the habits in perimenopause to help them with all the hormonal changes, but it also benefits postmenopause.

So if we start the habits early and then we're setting ourselves up for better bone, better muscle, better brain health.

And so then when we get into post menopause, we already have the strong bones and muscle integrity to keep going.

What changes is the load and the relative intensity because that's more of an aging factor.

It's not a physicality of all of a sudden I'm 60 and I'm post menopause, I can't do this anymore.

If you're 60 and post menopause, and I've never done any of this, it's not too late to start.

It's all relative.

It's all relative.

But when we look at bone health, we look at muscle integrity especially, we look at the sex differences of cognitive decline and we are.

We see there's a greater incidence of Alzheimer's and cognitive decline and dementia in women.

Well, it's also the biggest killer in the UK.

Right, right.

So we look at what's happening there and a lot of it is a combination of metabolism in the brain of a lack of lactate metabolism.

Because if we talk about our Zone 2 training from last time and we know that women have more of the endurance fibers and have more of the capacity for using free fatty acids and we start to lose our fast twitch fibers that produce lactate as we age.

This is another reason why we want to do that high intensity Sprint work, so that we maintain them because the brain needs lactate to work well.

If we don't have lactate and the brain doesn't understand how to use it, we're losing a key metabolite for brain health.

And this is one of the things that we're seeing as a precursor for cognitive decline.

The other thing is strength training.

As I mentioned earlier, yes, it's really great for bone and muscle, but it's the neural stimulus and neural growth patterns that we get from strength training that really does help reduce the risk factor for cognitive decline in Alzheimer's.

So when we look at what are we doing in perimenopause to benefit our bodies and our minds while we're having such severe hormonal shifts, we're also looking at the eye of longevity because if we start the high intensity work or we're doing the high intensity work, it's great for our brain.

We do the strength training that's great for our brain, our bone and our muscle.

Creatine.

It's the best thing out there.

I knew you'd say that.

OK, how should people be looking at creatine and how much would they be taking?

Yeah, so your body naturally produces around 2 grams a day.

If you have a diet that is meat oriented, then you're also ingesting a lot of creatine that way.

Most women don't eat enough to actually provide as much as the body actually goes through.

We see there's a change across the menstrual cycle of how your body uses and regulates creatine.

So we see that there's a increasing creatine kinase, which is your breakdown in the high hormone phase because again, progesterone is trying to provide all the building blocks.

So really having the availability of more creatine helps with that too.

If we're looking at supplementing with creatine, we want creatine monohydrate.

And I don't get any kind of kickback from this company, but the company that produces Crea Pure, this is a German B to B, meaning business to business.

Crea Pure is patented and so it uses a water wash.

There's no real side effects from using it.

It's pure and it's in almost every high quality creatine monohydrate product that's out there.

So if you're looking at something that has Crea Pure on it, you want to start with 1 to 3G and work your way up to 5G over the course of about 3 to 4 weeks.

And that's going to attenuate any possible side effect.

If you're looking at a cheaper version of creatine monohydrate, it comes as an acid wash because it's cheaper to produce it through acid, evaporative and other things in the lab than it is to use a water wash, which is really specific.

And This is why we start to see a lot of bloating and stomach discomfort and some of the other side effects that we see.

So again, being consumer, be aware.

Be aware and a lot of people talk about creating with DOMS, yeah.

Should people be having it a specific time after they exercise?

Where should we be consuming it now?

No, because it doesn't have an acute effect.

It takes about 3 weeks for the body to be saturated, so you need to.

That's why you're building it up.

Yes, yes.

And once it's saturated and has enough, that's when you start to see the performance effects.

We see that over the course of three to four weeks of consistently using 3 to 5 grams every day, you get that full saturation.

Muscle works better, brain works better, guts better, because anything that has a fast energetic requires creatine.

So we see that, you know, the brain fog starts to be attenuated with creatine use.

We start to see gut issues with women who I go for a run.

I had to find a bathroom every time I go for a run using the three to 5G over the course of the month, then that starts to dissipate as well because it maintains the gut integrity of the intestinal cells.

You don't have as much of that separation because now you have creatine that's going to work in those energetics to hold it together.

And then also we see from mood and mood health, creatine is really beneficial for that too.

So actually most women are perimenopausal.

They're all women.

But I'm just really thinking about the things, side effects that we were talking about or you know, the physical sides that we might see in oneself when they're perimenopausal.

This could be an amazing supplement.

Absolutely, Absolutely.

Gosh, it's interesting how it's not spoken about more.

It's very much spoken in the sports domain, I think, but just general health for women, it's just not spoken about.

Yeah, so Kriya Vitalis and Creatine for Life, Creatine for Life website has all the stuff that creatine does for health.

And there are a lot of my colleagues in the sports science and supplement world that also are doing research on creatine for health.

And so all the peer reviewed studies that you can find are on Creatine for Health website.

Crea Vitalis is offshoot of Crea Pure that is designed specifically for health and not bodybuilding.

So it's a lower dose and it's a very high quality protein or high quality creatine supplementation.

So there's definitely stuff that's coming out and it's a push to get into the health space for both men and women.

But yeah, it's slow coming.

As someone who has spent a long time studying the mind body connection, I'm constantly asked what do I use to track my health since April?

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With its stress recovery metric, it doesn't just show you how long you were stressed for, but also how long you recovered.

It shows you your homeostatus.

And that to me is where real health begins.

And I think it's all something that we're craving.

And most importantly, it does this without dragging you back to your phone, because that motion just depletes you.

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And this little gadget helps you on your journey.

One thing that's a massive topic of debate when we get to nutrition, food and fat loss is seed oils.

Oh my God.

OK.

I can't not have this conversation.

Go ahead.

What's your thought and take on seed oils?

Because honestly, it's probably one of the most trending, polarizing topics in the health space right now.

All right.

Love the deep breath that you just took.

I'll try to avoid banging my head off the microphone here.

You can probably tell by the context of which I'm approaching this question my overarching feeling on this one.

Much to say.

Like anything, nuance and context is the most appropriate and fair answer here to say that though.

Good grief, are people wasting time with seed oil?

The research of potential negative effects of seed oil are so weak.

That doesn't mean there's nothing there.

If you go OK and you give 6 caveats to that, you can find some examples of seed oils being concerning.

OK, so if it was left outside for seven days in the sun and it's gone rancid and someone's in a hypercaloric state and they over consume these things in the presence of alcohol.

OK.

Yeah.

Like, all right.

The other only semblance of an argument here that makes sense.

There's there's two they're they're bad, They're mental gymnastics.

And for the record, I have many, many people who I deeply respect and friends who are as far into like the seed oils or the devil camps as possible.

I would name them my names, but it it doesn't matter.

That's one argument that they can make.

The other second argument is it's not that the seed oils are that bad, but they are so commonly consumed in the presence of other really bad behaviors and actions that they're, it's the old gateway, gateway drug sort of thing.

Again, in my opinion, that is enormous mental gymnastics.

Like, didn't say that if that's the true case, say sidos aren't bad.

Say that this is the problem, you're consuming too much bar food and so on and so forth.

Don't bait and switch though.

Don't be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sido, sido, sido, sido, sido, Sido's a problem.

Oh, but they're not really the problem.

They're just putting people in a bad position to eat other things that are the problem.

OK.

That is not at all what you're saying.

Right.

So that's my push back on there.

And then #3 the other ones in the States, at least, because of what's happening with the Maha movement.

The the third argument that they'll generally make is it's not necessary about the sedos per SE is showing how though, when the people speak, we can make changes to massive food conglomerates again, then just don't lie about the fact that the sedos are so detrimental.

And OK, so that there's a lot of nuance and complexity to that thing, but overwhelmingly I, I just don't think that's a good approach.

And there's so many other things you could do to demonstrate that when the people speak and the people are interested and there is financial rewards for companies who make healthier products.

Those are good things.

But to ban an oil like that and to then come out and say things like, Oh yeah, beef tallow is perfectly healthy.

So as long as you fry your burgers and beef tallow, I mean you have to have a special level of like nuts.

But there is a lot of nuts online.

But like you, how can you cogently say that and be like, yeah, that makes sense.

It, it just like does not.

So it's unfortunately one of those things where I understand marketing enough and I understand public health messaging.

You can't speak a nuance in those positions, or at least people traditionally don't.

And this is the one of the problems this introduces is when you have the speaking heads, the same person as a scientist, you force the scientist into a marketer and that leads to problems because then that person has to say like you have to say 1 clear message, the message to the public.

Seed oils are danger.

Seed oils are danger.

If you have any nuance, 2 stories mean no stories.

And, and I hope we made it through COVID with the realization of like, OK, enough of that.

Like enough of that.

We have to treat adults like adults.

And this is one thing I will say what the Maha people are doing is that is one of their principles that I fully endorse and support and thank them for.

Yes, give the public more credit for intelligence.

I don't care that if you feel like you're going to lose them, we should know as close to the truth as there and don't whitewash it over because you think everyone is a, you know, low intellect person.

So tell people the truth and with as much reason as possible as you can and and as close as you can tell us the truth.

So I appreciate the fact that they're like trying to do that.

But yes, the seed oil push.

And so, to my dear friends on that side of the aisle, your your arguments are terrible as plainly as possible.

How do you have this conversation off air with your friends that are like very against seed oils?

I don't.

You don't.

It's like politics.

You just don't do it.

I generally this is the most political thing I've ever done in public probably in my life.

So you're welcome that you pulled that one out.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Because I, I, I generally hate to do it because I'm just going to get a onslaught of Commons and I don't think any of them will beat those four general positions that I just said.

But we're still going to get it.

And it's just not helpful.

Like this is the thing we're talking about of all the other interesting ways and things and tools and stuff we can do for improving humankind.

Like what we're going to spending billions on is fucking seed oils.

That was our shot.

Like you had one shot to change how healthcare works in America and the bullet you've toes to fire was seed oils do.

You know where it's actually like this mental height because I've just see, I see it everywhere.

Where did it start from?

Well, I'm not.

I'm not going to answer that question.

I know the answer, but I'm not going to because it would involve name calling and and like putting it on people and that's like I don't like to do that positive or negative.

That's something I never do and I'm I won't start that here today you.

Can tell me you can tell me off.

I'll answer it this way.

My something, when I hear and see people do these things, I actually assume it's good intention.

But my issue has been if you look at the breadth of things that people are doing, it's a terrible sleep, mental health, the environmental stuff we got going on, water and seed oils were your shot.

Like, Oh my gosh, there's just like the food quality and kids like.

So they are doing some really awesome things.

But for whatever reason, they chose seed oils as that big flag to fly to get people's attention.

And I'm like, oh man, like so many other cooler ways you could have approached it.

So last thing I'll say is I'm not in those rooms, so maybe my tune would be different if I was in those rooms.

And I understand like public messaging is very difficult thing.

But yeah, I just wish they would like find a more interesting thing to hang their hat on to gain attention with SO.

I'm interrupting for one moment to ask one small favor.

Please subscribe to the show.

This helps it grow more than you know.

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Thank you.

I think something that people might be surprised about is that the protein quantity of sprouts, because I think the first thing that people think about and maybe not from our show because we speak a lot about plant based diets here, is the protein quality.

And I think I read in your book that sprouting increases protein by 20%.

How?

I mean, it's nature and it's science.

So what happens is when you have the the legume or you have the seed and you cook it, you're basically making it edible by removing the starches and the lectins and the like.

When you're spouting it, you're partnering with the natural process of nature.

So by activating all of the biological metabolic processes, it's making the the the amino acid profile expand and it's making it bioavailable and it's increasing in the journey.

There's nothing else like sprouting in the world, like the fact that you could take some seeds.

You got some broccoli?

Some broccoli seeds, you know, we can hear the answers.

Right.

Here we go, you can take these seeds.

Yeah.

Right.

The fact that you could take those seeds and when you soak them, you reduce the lectins, the enzyme inhibitors, the phytic acid, but you're triggering this metabolic process that is literally greater than the transformation of a Caterpillar into a butterfly.

And if you think about a little Caterpillar and it builds A cocoon and it bursts its way out of the cocoon and these wings flow and it can fly, that's a pretty magical natural process.

Every one of those seeds contains that level of energy and that level of life force.

It's interesting because as I'm looking at this, what's coming into my mind is I know the UK are five years behind America and I used to live in New York for I lived there for five years.

And I always remember when I lived there, which was about 15 years ago when I first moved there, Chai seeds were coming up, flax seeds were coming up.

There was a lot of these types of seeds.

And I remember people all of a sudden were making Chai seed puddings and soaking them a note.

And that was like one of the things that now is abundant and it's on a lot of menus and a lot of healthcare stores.

But you don't have to be in the health circle to have heard of a Tri seed.

Now.

15 years ago, you had to be kind of in that health circle to know about it.

I'm looking at these and I'm thinking, are these the next choices?

Are these the things that are going to be coming up?

It, it, it's really beyond like sprouting is a time that has come.

And so what's what's happening now is there's never been a greater need for high quality nutrition.

And now with the new administration in the US like going after additives, preservatives, food colorings and going back towards a more simple plants, you know, centered diet, like there's, there's a need.

The average leaf of lettuce in the United States travels 2000 miles till it gets to the grocery store.

So sprouts are traveling 2 feet like they're fresher, they're more nutritious.

And strangely and oddly enough, like, how did I become the sprout guy?

I am nature's greatest miracle.

I have the energy, I have the intelligence, I have the experience.

And I had the unique perspective of being a raw vegan living in a food desert that was uncompromising in my standards of what I would eat.

And out of all the possible solutions, like I could grow oyster mushrooms, or I could grow microalgae, or I could grow a garden.

Like it's not too difficult to do a complete analysis like a McKinsey study and come up with sprouts.

And now anyone could do this analysis quickly with ChatGPT or Gemini or AI and all answers will lead to sprouts.

I love that.

Well, I'm just thinking, you know, like if I think about sprouts, I'm thinking about an old lady like my grandmother, like standing in her greenhouse, you know, sprouting.

That's like the image that I get.

Yeah.

And I think.

Well, that.

But now it's going to be you, Sarah Ann.

And you are young, vibrant, vivacious, educated, you know, goddess with a platform and a megaphone.

And that's what's happening.

And we talked about this before we started the show.

I didn't pitch you and send you emails.

Like all of a sudden you show up, you know, in in my messages and I'm like, oh, do you want to be on the podcast?

I'm coming in.

I'm like, yeah, of course.

So, so that's the power.

And it's not me.

Like I am just in the ether.

I'm doing my part.

But the sprouts have taken over my microbiome and they've taken over my intuition.

And now I'm in the place of just following the divine order of this.

Well, your name came out twice.

Do you want to know who said?

Yeah, please.

So I was in London and I was interviewing Dr.

Gemma Newman, and as she was coming to the studio, she was like, I just bumped into Doug Evans and I'm like, he's Doug Evans.

And she was like the Sprout guy.

This is why now I call you the Sprout guy because that was the first thing that came into my mind.

And I was like, that's interesting.

I haven't heard of the Sprout guy.

Who is this?

Obviously I'm a nutritionist, so for me, I'm like, I need to know who this person is.

Then I'm coming to LA to record the show and I'm speaking to Doctor William Bolswich, who's been on loads.

2 New York Times best selling books fibre fuelled fibre fuelled cookbook.

He's like the American sweetheart over here is how I would like to describe him.

You know, everyone loves him.

I love him.

And he mentioned your name and he was like, it will be great for you to talk to Duck.

So it was interesting in the space of like a couple of weeks from you were kind of coming into my vicinity and I was like, I want to know more about the Sprout guy.

And it's interesting because it's a very rare that I sit down and do a podcast on nutrition.

I mean, we do a lot on live Well, Be well.

But you know, we had Dan Buettner here yesterday talking about the Blue Zones.

And that's someone who, you know, I've known for a long time and followed his work.

We had Stacey Sims come on and talk about Women's Health.

And that's something I'm very well versed in, especially being a nutritionist.

And I was like, I need to think about what are the kind of scientific studies that I know apart from broccoli sprouts that I like.

I really know about sprouts being a nutritionist.

And I was like, this is the first time when I really know actually quite little about this, which surprises me because it's in my field.

That's right.

And it shows actually how there isn't as much conversation.

And I was thinking, well, where where are we going to go for an hour on Sprouts?

And the amazing information that you're coming out of is just how powerful and nutrient rich these are.

Yeah, it's interesting.

Do you know Doctor Robin Burson from Parsley Health?

No.

So Parsley Health is a functional medicine health program in the US where they have functional medicine doctors, nutritionists, dietitians, health coaches and nurses and they believe food is medicine.

And they have 10s of thousands of patients that say I am interested in food as medicine, I don't want to go down the normal path.

So prior to getting any insurance, etcetera, they paid with their own dollars to be part of Parsley Health.

So I met Robin nine years ago.

We reconnected recently.

I sent her a sprouting kit.

Her seven-year old son loves it and is spouting and she loves the spouts and she loves that the son is spouting.

And so now we have 30 of their practitioners.

So a little less than half all have spouting company kits and seeds.

And I'm going to do private zooms and webinars with them on educating.

And all of a sudden the each of them have 500 patients that they they serve.

So it's a matter of literally using the technology that exists today with ancient technology that makes sense and get it out there because it's this is an idea whose time has come.

But if you were to go to Japan and I was just on the phone, you know, with the Japanese executive this morning in Japan, sprouts are broccoli sprouts are a billion dollar business.

They have one company that sells sprouts to 20,000 retail stores.

So like little 7 elevens are selling little, you know, 200 gram packs of broccoli sprouts in 20,000 stores.

So they're selling about 500,000 servings a day of broccoli sprouts in Japan.

So you know, and, and you know, Okinawa, it is a Blue Zone, but other parts, but just in general.

So I think it's just a matter of, you know, having a vision and then executing on the vision.

And you know, I met I met Will Bolstovitz online, I met Simon Hill online, I met Rich Roll online.

I met all these people online, Darren, Oleen, Gemma and I'm.

Sprouting.

Yeah, and now I've met all these people in person too.

So these offline relationships become online relationships and the fact that the people who are in the know, like in Fiber Fueled, Will Bolsowitz talks about sprouts in the in the Fiber Fueled cookbook, he talks about sprouts because he understands the microbiome.

And so it's very easy with sprouts to increase the microbial diversity that you have.

And the US guidelines, I don't know what it is in the UK, but the US guidelines recommend between 4 and 13 servings of fruits and vegetables every day, and sprouts fit right in there as a vegetable.

So you can have a really healthy gut microbe microbiome with sprouts.

I love that they're reckoning between 4 and 13 different vegetables a day.

Here in the UK we only recommend 5A day, although we know that scientific studies show that you need at least nine a day to kind of have a good diverse microbiome.

But I think we're too scared to say that in the UK because we can't even keep to 5.

People are struggling to make to five.

So if we say 9, I think people might just give up.

Well, in America, the average doesn't, you know, there's no shame in the UK, but in America the average person is having one and that could be French fries or potato chips.

So the, the standards don't mean anything, but I think they're going to make a big change.

And I really think that's where entrepreneurship comes in.

That's where social media comes in.

That's where like, you know, having that The Alchemist comes in.

I love The Alchemist.

I mean, broccoli sprouts are kind of the one that would come to my mind, but do you have any kind of like what some interesting research has come out recently about sprouts that you could share with us?

I mean they're probably the most recent ones are the continuing of how they open up the NRF 2 pathway and how they're anti-inflammatory.

So that's a big part.

Explain the NRF 2 pathway.

So the NERF pathway is something that controls how the body detoxes and if the body doesn't detox, it gets inflamed and it affects all of the internal organs in the structures.

So doctor Rhonda Patrick did a lot of work, you know, on looking at the anti-inflammatory components of that.

So if you were to look at what is the cause of heart disease, it's inflammation of, of the arteries.

And so the, the, the work that actually how sprouts are anti-inflammatory is 1, how sprouts can detoxify benzene and air pollutants is just another one.

How interesting research, like there's no cure to autism, right?

But there is research that says that when someone who is experiencing symptoms of autism experiences a fever, their symptoms get reduced.

So there's something in the brain that the fever shifts the brain chemistry.

So someone will act less, less raging less, you know, erratic behavior in the.

Life.

They have sprouts.

Well, this is if they have a normal fever, like a fever, like a heat fever and the like.

The broccoli sprouts through their hermetic effect create heat shock proteins in the brain, which are similar to the behavior of a fever, which lessens the the behavior and effects of the of the autism.

So lots of research if you want to go down that rabbit hole, right type dementia, Alzheimer's.

Biggest killer in the UK?

Right, AKA type 3 diabetes is totally an impact of you know, being overweight, obese, the calcification of the brain and that there's no reversal actually things that you could do to mitigate the benefits.

So one overall just whole food plant based diet is one.

Well, the the research on the broccoli sprouts is they actually can penetrate and have greater and faster results because of the enzymatic parts and the glucosinolate effects things.

So it's very fast reacting.

So in general it's well known that cruciferous vegetables have glucosinolate in them that can have these chemo protective and effects on brain chemistry.

So when they looked at all the cruciferous vegetables, broccoli had the most of the glucosinolate.

When they looked at what kind of broccoli, was it broccoli, Rob?

Was it Calabrese broccoli?

Was it this broccoli?

It turns out it wasn't the type of broccoli as much as it was the stage, and the stage was the sprouting stage.

So it has to do with, not.

Only the varietal, but it has to do with the stage and so the broccoli seeds that you have on that table.

There every seed is given a finite amount of the glucosinolate and as it grows the amount actually gets diluted.

So theoretically you would eat the sprouting the seeds to get the most, except the seeds don't digest well.

I was going to say that.

Like how is that going to react?

With my gut, not very bioavailable.

You could grind.

Those you could crush, them you could.

If you cook them you can make them more bioavailable.

But then you end up killing the enzyme myrosinase, which is required to trigger the conversion of the glucoraphanin into sulfurophane.

So you need both the enzyme and the compound in order to get a sulforaphane.

So that's where the best and easiest and most scalable form is, to consume them in the sprout form.

So many of us are confused about how.

We can improve on mitochondrial health.

So we, we started at the beginning about talking about VO2 Max is looking as A1 predictor, but you talk so much and you've pioneered this whole sector with exercise to help support mitochondrial function.

So although we're in a bit of an explosive of chronic disease right now, there is a lot of things that we can do.

We've got to have hope to get our mitochondrial health like pumping back.

So you have pioneered and I know that you know, there's a lot more to it, but you have pioneered zone 2 training.

So I thought it's important to start there.

Why is zone 2 training so important for our mitochondrial health?

Well, I mean everything.

Starts with professional athletes, they have taught us a lot, right?

I always say we cannot understand imperfection.

It wouldn't understand perfection in the 1st place.

Those are the the, the Formula One cars, right?

Those are the gold standard of what a human should be, right, Metabolically speaking, right?

And This is why I've been fortunate for almost 30 years to, to be able to work with these kind of humans and be able to understand them very well.

So they have taught us a lot in order to understand other concepts in, in different, and pathologies characterized by these functions at the metabolic cellular level, right.

So performance on one hand, right, it's about as I mentioned, about producing ATP fast, producing energy fast and lasting as long as you can.

Competition is that being as fast as you can for as long as you can, right?

That's whether whether we're talking about swimming or rowing or cycling or football, basketball, you need to be fast and you need to sustain that effort, right?

So for that, you need to produce ATP at very high levels and have a very metabolically efficient engine, right?

Which is what happens at the cell and that furnace, that powerhouse, that central part of that engine, the cell is mitochondria, right?

So what do we need to do with athletes?

Improve their mitochondrial function?

So for that, back in the days, I, I developed these methodologies to try to understand how we can translate what we were learning about cellular metabolism into training.

So we know that different exercise intensities elicit different metabolic results.

It's not the same result when you go for like an easy spin on the bike, for example.

Then if you do a 32nd Sprint, you're mobilizing different energy systems, right?

So that's what I saw in the laboratory with this methodologies with a metabolic card with the lactate and I start to define different training zones because there were different metabolic events.

If you do a maximal, I mean an incremental exercise intensity, you see this beautifully.

And anybody who has done this test or performed this test as an as an operator, you can see these events happening in front of your eyes, right?

And therefore we're talking about from very low intensity all the way to maximum sprinting, right?

So if you, if you put together the dot, the dots, you're going to see these metabolic events.

That being said, that's why I, I created different training zones because I couldn't tell an athlete, hey, you're in a, in a high glycolytic intensity or you're in 100% oxidity phosphorylation state.

That's why you have to train, right?

You cannot speak that language, right.

So I, I had to do something that was very easy to understand.

And that's what I decided in zone one through zone 6, right?

Then I started by trial and error.

OK, now let's try the next step.

OK, what is the intensity that elicits the best effect?

That's just for mitochondria, but for other intensities, right?

Because we, we always have to remember that when it comes to for athletic performance, you always win competitions at the high intensities.

I have never heard about any athlete or seen any athlete winning a, a competition that in the zone 2 or low intensities never happens.

So but unfortunately, people are taking to the, to the extremes now and all of a sudden high intensity is gone.

It's worthless.

Well, it depends.

If you're an athlete, you must train high intensity.

And my athletes train very high intensity is in fact, you know, like about 50% of all the best times that PRS happened during training that competition, right?

So it's very high intensity because you need to stimulate that.

So anyways, that's why you set up all these training zones and that's what I started to see people in the responses back in the laboratory where you can study that metabolic response very closely and see which trainings have improved the most.

So what I saw is that that's zone 2.

That was the one they improved the most, 2 parameters that I mentioned earlier, fat oxidation and lactate clearance capacity, which both are surrogates of monochondral function.

I was seeing this over 25 years ago and and then obviously working with athletes, you saw that also in the competition.

That's where you saw that the action, right?

And so that's why the zone 2 came along.

But of course you have higher intensities from 4 some 5, which are you know that that turbo, you need to improve that, that turbo, right?

The important thing is that you also have to train the turbo, which are like the high intensities that zone 5, zone 4, because you need to stimulate that tour because that's where you're going to improve the competition as well.

But then you need to stimulate also the Sprint because sometimes you need to Sprint, you know.

But anyways, but when it comes to mitochondrial function, that's important.

But when it comes to VO2, right, which is the cardio respiratory adaptations, training high intensity is very efficient.

That's probably more efficient, if if not more efficient than training at zone 2.

But as I said from the beginning, that's, that's the how you express your cardio respiratory adaptations to exercise and right.

And, and, but another thing is like how well my kind of function works.

So anyway, so this is what now from from the lessons that we have learned from elite athletes, then I started working with people with from different pathologies, right, and chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiac rehab patients, oncology patients and metabolic syndrome.

And that's what I saw in this, in these people also improved mitochondrial function the most that, that training.

And also people, yes, that's what I was seeing.

And also with people who just wanted to get fitter, typical person who hadn't has been struggling forever because they only did heat, for example.

And at first they see results, but eventually they get injured or they get discouraged or they lose patience with that because it's it's not sustainable for many people, not for all, of course.

So I am not saying that you have to disregard high intensity at all, but I think that you need to reduce the amount.

And this is what we know very well, again, from the lessons we learn from athletes that you cannot sustain high intensity training all the time.

And we don't see that, I mean, in that, well, any of us who has been working with athletes at the high level can confirm this.

You know, you don't see, let's say like very high intensity sport, you know, like swimming, right?

It's under a minute, OK, It's under a minute.

OK, what do we have to do to training?

What's, what's your intuition tells you?

Let's just do 4050 second sprints all day, right?

OK.

We can't be so naive to think that the best coaches in the world and the best swimmers have thought about this, right?

Of course they have.

Does it work Well, just go around any swimming pool around the world with the best swimmers in the world.

They spend hours a day, two, 3-4 hours a day, swimming up and down, up and down.

And of course they do intervals, but it's not sustainable.

And you can take this to any sport out there, right?

So the same thing, you know, for, for regular life, high intensity is important, but but it's not sustainable.

And, and the zone 2, the characteristic that has had is that it works and it's sustainable.

So when we think about zone 2 and tell me if.

I'm wrong, but I think I always think about zone 2IN training that I can just about talk, but not in a comfortable way.

How can someone understand if they don't have a wearable?

How can they understand where zone 2 is?

Yeah, that's a good question.

And and this is this is about about it.

And it, it resembles closely to what we see in the laboratory when we establish the parameters for for that zone 2 and the other the rest of the zones, right.

Yes, that's an intensity where definitely we cannot keep this conversation.

This would be arresting as we are, but it's a conversation that you can't sustain.

I mean, you can't sustain, but it takes an effort, right?

It's a forced conversation that you have to breathe.

We have to talk, but you can't sustain it.

But with an effort, if you can't sustain, if you cannot sustain that conversation for for more than a few seconds, right, That you're already in very high intensity.

And this is due to glycolysis, which is another event that you see very well in the laboratory when when you're working in zone 2, you're burning glucose, but you're burning fat.

And that's the intensity of the one you burn the most fat, which is another concept not getting very popular, which is the fat Max, right?

That's intensity of the one you burn the most fat.

I've been using that concept for 25 years at least and, and using for weight loss purposes too.

People would come to the laboratory and because they've been trying to lose weight through exercise and, and they can't.

And then when you do the test, you see that they've been, they've been exercising too high intensities where you burn 0 fat and you show that to them because in the laboratory you see very well when you burn the fat, you see the grams per minute, the fat oxidation in grams per minute and carbohydroxidation.

So there gets to a point that you get to your fat Max and then as exercise intensity increases, the fat disappears and you would burn 0 fat.

And why is that is because as you go on to a higher exercise intensities the the cells the.

Muscles.

Need faster ATP, faster energy, and that energy cannot be supplied by fat anymore because while fat can give you more overall energy, it's slower.

It's like a diesel gasoline, right?

It's lower away.

It takes more time to give you that energy, which when you're at lower intensity is great, right?

This is part of the evolution, right, of humans, because we can only store about half a kilo, 500 grams, like 2 lbs of glycogen.

No, 1 LB of glycogen, sorry, which is how we store glucose, carbohydrates, right?

So the body tends to preserve that tank very well and for that starts using other fuels, mainly fat, right?

But when exercise intensity is very high, fat cannot be cannot give you energy fast enough and you need to switch to carbohydrates and then and sorry, I've been going the long way.

This is what happens is like you suppress fat and This is why a lot of people were not burning fat because they were always in in carbohydrate burning.

They were not burning adipose tissue.

But then through the talk test, to your point, the fact you're speaking fast is because you're burning a lot of carbohydrates, you're producing a lot of lactate and you start buffering that lactate and that CO2 that's part of producing, of buffering the lactate and that forces you to breathe faster, right?

So when you're breathing faster, you're at a higher metabolic stress and you you start decreasing significantly the amount of fat burning.

So when you can't stop at all or when you can't speak at all, you're not burning fat, you're burning glucose.

So if people are suffering with, you know, stress, poor mood, depression, how should they be thinking about daily movement in relation to their fascia if the body is not able?

To move.

It stagnates and we're not able to produce the feel good hormones anymore.

And one of the other things is like, if I squeeze your rib cage really tight, if I squeeze it, you're going to start getting anxious because your body feels threatened.

I'm threatening your ability to breathe.

Well, what are bras doing?

Squeezing the rib cage slightly, which drives a stress response.

And so if we can reduce the tension on the body, then the body starts to calm down.

If the body calms down, the brain calms down.

Because if I'm in stress, my body will take all of its resources, all of its energy to try and solve the problem.

But if we can just give the body more space, reduce the tension, reduce the stress, then all of a sudden the thoughts calm down.

Like when people do this practice, they say I don't have any thoughts.

Like they go complete it.

It completely empties their mind.

And it's because if the body's in stress, it drives thoughts.

We're trying to solve depression through the brain.

It doesn't work that way.

It's not a chemical issue.

It's an issue with the body.

The body's not able to flow.

We're blocking the body's ability to perform.

And if we can get the body moving, it will start to heal, and then our thoughts calm down.

Stress calms down, anxiety calms down.

Yeah, I think somatic work has.

Been massive for my own kind of self experience.

This is obviously completely anecdotal, but for me, when I felt the most disconnected to my body, it's not talking therapy that helps me.

It's not journaling my thoughts down.

It's actually a connection back to to my body and and my emotions.

I guess because I think we can all live in a world, but we're very disconnected from that.

We're kind of drawn away from our body.

And also I do think if we can have a flux of emotions in our body, I mean, we quite like the happiness ones and the excited ones, but they're also very related to fear, the excitement emotions, also very related to the the fear emotions.

It's very similar chemicals, really.

Similar chemicals, but I don't think we're.

Taught to, I guess, feel comfortable with them.

Well, look, I was a guy growing up in the.

World As an athlete, everything I've been taught is to suppress emotions.

So for me it was like anger, maybe a little bit of happiness with my friends, but I didn't really have the different flavors of emotions.

It took me a long time to become emotionally aware.

And what I realized when it comes to really helping the human body is there's three paths.

One is talking, which we just talked about.

The other one is the emotions and the other one is the body or talking or thoughts.

Let's let's put it that way.

And when we're helping somebody, you know, I, I work with a lot of people and they say, you know, I've tried everything.

I, I've done talk therapy, I've whatever.

It's because their body's not moving.

So we got the body moving.

All of a sudden, the emotions and the mind change as a result.

So if we want to access and help the body or help somebody transform their life, you have to hit all three.

You can't just hit one.

When you work on the body, the emotions come up.

When the emotions come up, now you can change your narrative, your thoughts, or your story about it.

You have to hit all three levels.

Otherwise you're not completing the loop.

So people will do emotion therapy, but they're not changing the way that they see the situation.

They're not moving their bodies.

So it's incomplete.

You have to hit all three in order to really help somebody.

So for people who are like, OK, so it's.

Rotation, it's movement.

I mean, I know you gave us one exercise already in the pre interview, but to give people an understanding of these rotations, can you just give us some examples?

You want to do one?

Yeah, Can I do?

It I mean like for anyone.

Who's watching this?

I literally have heels and a black long skirt on.

Can I do it like this?

Yeah, absolutely.

Is this the most?

Is this the?

Most interesting dress sense that someone's come to you in You know, it's it's funny because you can really.

Do this anywhere, at any time where so it's accessible for anyone.

Yes, OK.

Great, I sometimes do it when I'm in the middle of a meeting.

Nobody even knows I'm doing it.

I can do it right now on this podcast and nobody would even know that I was doing it.

And there's different movements based on different scenarios.

So let's do an easy 1.

So if you take your your right, your left hand and place it on your trap and your right hand, just grab your elbow and you're going to twist the elbow outwards.

And normally you would bring it above your head, but just keep it here for a moment and twist as much as you can out and lock it in place and just hold it there.

And we're going to hold this for about a minute.

What we're doing here is we're taking the bone and we're torquing the bone outwards.

As you do that, it creates almost like a vortex or torsion pattern in the fascia that we saw there, and it starts to unwind the tension deep around the bone all the way into the shoulder joint.

So somebody's dealing with shoulder pain if they do something like this while they're sitting in a meeting, while they're sitting in traffic, while they're waiting for something.

You do this for a minute, we'll unwind the tension.

And have you seen I mean?

It's very hard because we saw that YouTube video, but have you seen the differences of fascia where there's a lot more stored tension and a lot more release tension?

Yeah, when and you can relax.

And you might feel tingling in your fingers, might feel lighter in your shoulder, a cold or warm sensation.

What you feel is totally.

Based on your awareness.

The more in stress somebody is, the more disconnected from the tiny little subtle changes.

Once the body comes out of stress, you start to really notice the environment around you.

Like right now, if somebody walks into a room and they have an emotion, I can feel it.

If I walk into a room, I can smell 30 feet away that there's a chemical that's in the air that's a threat to my body.

But if I'm in stress, I'm so narrowed in my focus, I don't even realize the things that are happening around me.

That's what stress does.

Stress literally diminishes all of our senses.

So if we look at aging as an example, stress accumulated over time.

That's what aging is.

You lose your sense of smell, you lose your touch, your hearing, your feeling.

Everything starts to diminish.

So if somebody's in a lot of stress and they're doing a movement or, or a practice to take care of their body or take a supplement or whatever it might be, they might not be aware of the changes yet.

We could probably scientifically measure it with data, but from a sensation perspective, they're so disconnected from their body because they're in stress.

And I was there.

So doing a movement like this, you know, if you do this for three or four days, just this one movement, you'll start to notice a significant shift in the shoulder in the tension that you're holding.

And it's important to to bring that up because when we're in stress, it narrows our focus.

We can't see other options.

We can't sense the world around us.