The None to Run Podcast

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Healthinomics podcast. This is episode number 26 with registered dietitian, sports nutritionist, professional speaker, and author Jennifer Saigo. Some topics we'll chat about include surprising nutrition habits of professional athletes, how nutritionist fuels two little boys at breakfast time for their morning routine, time saving tips for families with busy schedules, tips for new runners looking to lose weight, nutritional timing, is it important, hot trends in nutrition and whether or not there's any merit to them, is it possible to run and rely on fat for fuel, simple steps you can take today to eat better and become a better runner, and much, much more. Before we get started, I wanna tell you about three other quick things.

Firstly, I have my free email series for beginner runners. You can find it at www.freerunningcourse.com. There, we cover everything from how to pick the right running shoes to running for weight loss, injury prevention, and you'll even get a free training program and strength and warm up routines. Again, the link to that course is www.freerunningcourse.com. Secondly, I'm currently running a thirty day none to run challenge, and I have about a 30 runners and walkers participating right now.

I'm giving away a none to run t shirt every week during the challenge, and one lucky winner at the end will win a free pair of running shoes. The next challenge starts 01/01/2017. To sign up, head over to www.nonetorun.com/challenge. That's n0net0run.com/challenge. Lastly, if you need any running gear, clothing, or a new pair of running shoes, Running Warehouse is offering Healthinomics listeners 10% off your orders.

Go to Healthinomics.com/gear and enter the code healthy 10 at checkout to save on your next order. That's it. Enjoy my chat with Jennifer Saigo.

Welcome to the Healthenomics Podcast.

Boosting your health and fitness IQ

one episode at a time.

And now your host, Mark Kennedy.

All right, Jennifer. Welcome to the Healthenomics Podcast. It's so great to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Yeah, it's great. Looking forward to chatting about, all things nutrition and, a little bit of performance and, and everything in between. Just to get started, I like to get our guests to, if you can give a little brief bio and background on yourself, you know, what you're doing with work. I know you've got two little boys as I do, so, you're, you're a busy, mom and I also, read in your bio that you're, you do some running yourself. I saw you ran the two thousand and four marathon in Toronto.

Oh, you're good. Yeah. And never again after that.

You're smart.

It was my husband and I have forever dubbed three degrees Celsius with howling winds and driving rain marathon weather because it was the one and only marathon that he and I both ran. We ran it together and it was about as bad conditions as you could create for a person. Tell me a little bit of myself. So I'm a registered dietitian and I practice and live in Toronto. I've been practicing in sport nutrition for over ten years right now.

And before that I did a master's degree in human biology and nutritional sciences from the University of Guelph. So I always had an interest in sport nutrition, although I've practiced in a wide range of different realms of nutrition. But in the last few years, I've really started to narrow my focus more into sport performance. So now I work Downtown Toronto at a place called Cleveland Clinic Canada, where I do one on one nutrition counseling for all sorts of people, especially those in the downtown area who are busy and trying to, like you said, it all in into busy lives. Then they might be a triathlete or someone who's doing some type of obstacle course race or they might be a runner.

And then I also work with a couple of sports teams. I work with Athletics Canada, which is the Canadian track and field team with the sprint and relay teams and jumpers and throwers up at York University. So we just came off preparing them for the twenty sixteen Olympics, which was a lot of fun. Was an experience, it was really fun. You get kind of burned out for a while.

Did you actually go to Rio yourself?

No, I didn't. My counterpart in the West Trent Stellingwerf, who's a physiologist with a nutrition specialty went on behalf of Athletics Canada and he's also a coach.

Okay, know Trent well. He was actually on the podcast about a year or so ago.

Oh, very good. Yeah. So he and I work very closely together and he manages the athletes out in the Victoria area including his wife who's one of our Olympians, Hillary Stalingworth. And then the last highlight where I guess would be working for the Toronto Maple Leafs where I do their nutrition for both them and their AHL team, the Marley's.

Okay.

And then I consult for some other sports teams and groups as well. So lots of sports on the brain these days.

Yeah, absolutely. Your marathon with those harsh conditions, which marathon was that?

That was what was then called the Toronto International Marathon and so it was run-in October. It's now the same weekend that Scotiabank runs their marathon. They've all kind of migrated around. I thought I lost you for a second. Still got you Mark?

I'm still here, yeah.

They've kind of migrated them around over the last few years. It ended up back on that same weekend and as soon as I saw that I was like, Oh dear. It seems like the weather has a bad habit of really turning right around then. I trained in shorts and so I was determined to wear shorts for the marathon and it was three degrees and like I think I almost died.

Yeah. It's funny October, that October, I mean, you're you can get great weather, like perfect running weather, or you can get, you know, that winter, almost winter like harsh weather. So, you were unlucky.

I still run, I still enjoy it, now I do it for pleasure and to stay healthy for my kids and as you know with kids you just try to stay active and I'm not training to win anything, I just want to take care of myself.

Yeah, that's fantastic. That's sort of my approach as well. Yeah, so well, let's just keep it going. So you mentioned your kids, I've got two little boys as well. What's your morning routine like, especially sort of from a breakfast standpoint?

I know it's sometimes a challenge but I'd love to hear sort of what a nutritionist does with their kids.

Sure. So my kids are early, get up around six. We've really tried to somehow change that but there's My older son is eight and he's just dialed in from the second he wakes up, he's just ready to go. So my husband actually gets up and runs before they get up. So he's out of the house by ten to five in the morning and puts in about nine k and then comes home and then the kids get up and I'm still sleeping.

And then I get up sometime after six and do a workout. The kids have a little bit of cereal with my husband and then usually while I'm doing a workout or running myself, I'll be making oatmeal for them. So they kind of get two breakfasts but you know, when they're up that early, they kind of need it. There's no way they could make it all the way to lunch.

Well, that's a long time. Yeah.

Yeah, sometimes they're complaining of being hungry by the time I take them to school on the days that I do walk them, you know, at 08:30 in the morning, they're already hungry again. We do oatmeal with blueberries. I put some seeds and like hemp seeds and pumpkin seeds and stuff in there and a little bit of milk and some cinnamon, a little brown sugar and we sit down and have a second breakfast together and it's one of my favorite parts of the day.

Yeah. Oh, I like that. Yeah. We we tend to do well, yeah, sometimes sort of a second breakfast, but they usually, like, they'll have, you know, whatever cereal or toast or sometimes oatmeal. But smoothies, we like to do a lot just because, get them some kind of greens in there.

Know you're not supposed to hide the greens for their whole life, but at this point, it's a good way to get them some greens.

Yeah. No, you're right. That's not a bad idea. My kids do love smoothies and they have learned to accept the green smoothies willingly. Oh, good.

That's a win.

Yeah,

but no, also, I mean for myself, I have a cup of tea. People often wonder, do dietitians take caffeine? And the only reason why I don't drink coffee is because it actually is just too strong for me, it just makes me shake and I get really, really strong reaction from it. I've actually done a genetic test for it and I am a slow caffeine metabolizer so I can tell you I can certainly feel that. Cup of tea, I managed to wean myself off the sugar.

I used to take it very British with milk and sugar and it took years but I finally got the sugar out of there so tea with milk now.

I didn't know you could do a test for caffeine sensitivity.

You can and it's something that is of interest to some athletes and individuals. There's this debate about cardiovascular risk factors for people who consume especially large amounts of caffeine that if you are genetically a slow metabolizer of caffeine like myself, too much caffeine could potentially increase your risk of cardiovascular disease whereas for other people who are fast caffeine metabolizers, in theory, they can consume upwards of six cups of coffee a day and it could be protective of their hearts.

Wow.

So it's an interesting little test. The company that provides it is based out of the University of Toronto and they're called Nutrigenomics. Okay. That's with an X at the end and you can pay for that. Anybody can get that test done and it's kind of fun.

I might have to look into that. Now before we dive into some more of the running related questions, I want to ask you, you say you work with a lot of professional athletes, do you have any interesting stories or sort of shocking nutritional habits you've seen for professional athletes? And before you answer, I grew up with Steve Nash in Victoria, BC. Grew up playing sports and stuff together. I remember when he started in the NBA and then going down to visit him, you know, he you know, he's a young player, just ate freaking everything.

He had the biggest bowl of M and M's in his place I've ever seen in my life, and that was constantly, you know, we're going into that eating it. So I'm sure, you know, it's more the younger guys, but I'd love to hear if you've had sort of any stories or whatever without outing anyone of course.

Sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, I think you've you've hit the nail on the head. I also do some consulting work for the Raptors as well.

So I've seen a little bit of both sides of the NHL and the NBA. And I've worked with other pro athletes as well on tennis tours and other NHL players and so on. So I've seen a little bit of of sort of the breadth of of pro athletes. And I'd say that, I mean, the main themes are the younger athletes are often or players are the ones that often have some of the crazier nutrition habits. But I have to say things are changing and they're changing fast.

Not all of our young come in well versed in nutrition, but it is really NHL players in general are getting a greater sense of the importance of nutrition at a younger age than certainly a generation ago, but even I would say even five years ago. There's much less work in convincing a player that nutrition matters, and it's really I think a consequence of all the discussion that's out there about nutrition these days. And parents are better educated and so then that feeds down into the kids. So kids are still kids and I actually am not a heavy when it comes to this. Perspective is not, you need to come into the league and be doing nothing but green smoothies all day.

You know, you have to be allowed to be 19. I know what I was eating when I was 19 and I was not taking good care of my diet. So I don't want nutrition to ever feel like it's a chore or that it's something that you dread going into the dietitian's office because you're going to get in trouble. You know, a lot of the guys are working on taking better care of themselves and then usually it's in their mid twenties that they often kind of something clicks and they kind of go, Oh yeah. Like you said with the Steve Nash story that all of a sudden they realize that when they're eating too much of whatever, people don't realize it is possible to put on too much weight as a pro athlete.

Yeah. There's no guarantees that you're gonna be ripped and lean all the time and always in the best shape. You do have to actually limit yourself at some point and especially if you're not playing a lot, which does happen to some guys, right? They're on the bench.

Yeah.

And and so there there are times where they'll have gone up five seven pounds from the start of the season and they gotta get dragged into the office and, you know, read the riot acts a little bit, but Right. They're it it's it's better than you might think. They all have their hiccups but it's better than you think.

That's good. I guess that makes your job a little bit easier as time goes on and these kids coming out are a lot more educated from a nutritional standpoint.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, that's good. Let's move or segue into running and, you know, as I mentioned earlier, I've got a lot of people that come to my site. They're beginner runners. They're either just getting started or perhaps they're coming back into running after a layoff due to injury or life just getting busy. Many of these people are looking to, to running as a way to help them, be fitter and healthier, but, also to help them lose weight.

So just, love to hear your thoughts on approaches for for people who are looking to lose weight, through running some, you know, maybe some strategies or or things that people, you know, often get wrong when they're approaching, you know, a fitness activity like running and looking to lose weight?

Sure. Yeah, I can relate to this very much. I sort of cut my teeth as a speaker and in sport nutrition doing a lot of presentations at the running room and other running stores. You do get those questions from the five ks and learn to run groups and the 10 ks's and up and weight is one of those things that would come up over and over and over again. And I think the main thing that people have to be aware of when they start running or return to running or really any fitness program that's new for them is that, I hate to say it but you don't burn as many calories as you might think.

There's a rough rule out there and it does vary but that you burn about a hundred calories per mile that you run and that's mile not kilometres. So do your mental math there. So if you think of it, if an average person needs say 2,000 calories a day and you're getting started into running and so maybe you're doing, you know, a two mile run which you know, maybe a walk run to start or maybe pushing all the way to three mile which is closer to the five ks mark. You know, you're looking at burning maybe an additional two to 300 calories a day. Well, that's the basically the margin of error for weight loss.

Usually when we recommend someone lose weight, we say whatever amount of calories you're consuming now, shave that down by two, three, four, maybe 500 calories a day and that will elicit sort of a slow and steady weight loss. So in other words, if you're doing a kind of a twenty to twenty five minute run or walk run, really in theory, if you want to lose weight, you wouldn't want to increase your calories from baseline at all. And I think what happens though, is that for better or for worse, activity, physical activity is very tightly regulated and associated with our hunger mechanisms that our brain and our body triggers for us. If you are increasing your activity level, your hunger is going to go up in parallel to that. So that's sort of the bad news of the story is that if you pick up running and you pick up eating to go along with it, you're going to have a hard time losing any weight and if you do even manage to get that small say two to 300 calorie a day gap, that's really only translating to about a pound every ten or so days.

So it's really important people be realistic and say, Hey, I'm not gonna lose 20 pounds overnight here unless I change my diet along with it. And so that's where the real win comes is if you say, hey, this is a jumping off point for my lifestyle and now I'm going to work hard on both taking care of my eating and I'm going to run. And if you do both and you don't restrict yourself too much, that could be the real sweet spot. One last thought on that that I think is is another hiccup or mistake that people make and I've so been guilty of this, is you go for those long runs with your running group, know, whatever that might be, whether that's seven k to start or 12 or 21 k and you finish it off and it's like guys, we're going for burgers. We're here we go.

Know, like I finished that eight k run. Is the farthest I've ever run. I am on fire here. We gotta go for brunch. I'm having the Benedict covered in a chocolate cake and I think that unfortunately that again I know I've done that, we reward ourselves.

Yeah, me too.

So you have to be mindful of that, do go out and have some fun but you know if you're eating back more calories than you burned then you can actually see your weight go up when you start running and I have seen that before.

Interesting so from a nutritional standpoint and actually eating, what are some like, your top tips then for these people who are starting running and looking to lose weight, like strategies to help them either curb that appetite, or whether it's timing of eating or how to some simple effective ways to shave a few more calories off.

Sure, there's lots of ways to go about this and I think one of the things we've now come to understand about nutrition and weight or nutrition and health is that there's no one system that works for all people and in fact the research supports this. It's not just I'm not just being sort of cute. We now understand that for example, people do very well with low carbohydrate diets. Other people do better when they have sort of a calorie counting approach or something where they're really monitoring how much they're taking in, keeping food logs and journals and things like that. Other people do better, you know, simply by making sure that they don't eat out as often and and you know trying to cook at home and prepare their own meals.

So you have to be very honest with yourself about what fits for your life, your lifestyle, your preferences and the people around you and start to grow into a diet pattern fits for you. Having said that, some of the things that generally affect us all, we do all get a bit thrown by portion sizes. It's very easy and in fact, there's really interesting studies on people who are nutritional scientists who actually study this for a profession, they work in the field and you can easily throw them off with portion distortion by taking for example a larger plate or in studies that have been done out of Cornell in The US, giving larger scoop sizes and they ask the nutrition scientists to scoop out an equal amount of ice cream to their friends using a small scoop and a larger scoop. Sure enough, they'll portion out a larger amount using the larger scoop even though they work in the field and know better. So we all get thrown by this.

Things like bigger plates, bigger bowls, ive us into serving ourselves more food. So simple act of just using a smaller plate or smaller bowl so that you're filling up all the space but on a smaller amount of plate, that your brain will think of as being a positive and it'll actually trigger you to feel more full. Those are some portion control sort of strategies and there's lots more of them out there. By the way, if you are interested in this area, there's a great book by a fellow named Brian Wonsink who studies this, Slim by Design that you can take a look at and he's a terrific researcher in the area. Other strategies during the day is it's really important to snack properly, to take the time to plan balanced meals and snacks and by balanced I mean things that contain protein and good quality carbohydrates.

It doesn't need to be a big plate of pasta. For some people, the carbohydrates might be more like fruits and non starchy vegetables like broccoli and asparagus and green beans. But don't feel like you can't have any carbs either. Absolutely do fit in a runner's diet but it's the key is to have it planned ahead and plan to eat every say three to four hours through your workday and bring those foods with you so that at 03:00 in the afternoon, you know you have some almonds or a little bit of cheese or some hummus for protein or maybe some Greek yogurt and you have an apple or a few whole grain crackers or some carrot sticks for a little bit of carbohydrate. And the protein, the crucial thing it does is helps us to feel full.

The carbohydrate gives us a little bit energy. And then that way, we eat those two foods together, middle of the afternoon in particular, or maybe on our way home, on the train or wherever, you come into your house and you've got your head screwed on right. And that means you can have the energy to go out for your run instead of going, I can't be bothered, know, I'm too tired, too hungry, or you gorge, and then you go, Oh no, I can't run because I just ate too much. And it also allows you to make a better choice when it comes to dinner time. So instead of you know picking up the phone and calling for dinner or getting Uber Eats or whatever is in your neighborhood, you'll actually have sort of the sense because you're not so starving to take the time to cook some food.

So again, portion control I would say, balanced snacks, those are just a couple of ideas but there are many many more out there that can help people to control their weight.

Yeah, I like your idea of getting some energy before the run. I think, you know, I've had it before where you you go on a run and you haven't eaten anything in hours and you you feel lethargic. You're just, you know, one of those bad runs where you're like, why am I doing this? If if you're new to running, I mean, that's gonna be compounded, I think. I mean, you're you're not really enjoying it yet as it is and you're, you know, you haven't fueled yourself properly.

So I think you might as well start with, you know, something in your tank and, you know, and cut down your battles there.

Well, know, there's a term that we use called which is breakthrough hunger. And basically, the idea is that if you're experiencing hunger during a run or any exercise, any sport, you definitely have not eaten enough beforehand. Exercise is a natural appetite suppressant while you're doing it and shortly afterwards. If your stomach is growling, then yes, you definitely needed to rethink your fueling beforehand. And for the record, if you're stuck in those situations where you're like, oh no, I think I'm kind of getting hungry and I gotta go over my run-in fifteen minutes, that's where those really easy to digest carbohydrates come in.

That's the ripe banana, that's where you know, a few orange slices, that's where maybe a handful of grapes or a few crackers or even a slice of toast. They're not, you know, they on their own, they're foods that won't keep you full very long but they're really simple to digest, they get into the bloodstream quickly and that will give you some instant fuel without leaving you feeling heavy or bogged down. Even just a few bites of those or maybe a granola bar, that can all be quick fuel so that you enjoy the run and I think that's the name of the game is nobody wants it to feel like it's a slog or you're gonna quit and we don't want that.

Exactly. So what about after the run? You know, if you're just going for a run that say, you know, twenty five to thirty minutes, is it important to get anything back into your body either, you know, hydrating or or some food right away or is it that not that important?

Great question. And the answer is yes to hydration and no to food. Now I'll put a bit of an asterisk on the no to food because it depends a bit on what else you have going on in terms of activity in your life. Let me explain a little bit. Unfortunately, for better or for worse, recovery is one of these things that people like me who work in sport nutrition, I think we've created a bit of a monster.

So we've created this impression that recovery is this massive issue for people you need to recover, recover, recover and get your protein shake. And the reality is for the majority of weekend warriors or recreational athletes, recovery isn't really necessary as long as you're eating a regular balanced diet. What I mean by that is that if we look at the two big factors in recovery, one is muscle tissue repair. So when you run or do any type of exercise, you actually induce small amounts of damage to the actual muscle fibers, called the micro tears. We need to repair that and make that muscle healthier and stronger for the next workout.

Then the other thing that happens is we deplete muscle glycogen, that's the storage form of carbohydrate in the muscle and if we start the next workout with very low glycogen and that run is long, we could end up bonking or running out of fuel. So those are the two big things we're trying to do in recovery. But the real thing that most runners or I said casual athletes need to bear in mind is both of those activities, repairing the muscle tissue and replenishing glycogen will happen naturally on their own within forty eight hours, within two days of an exercise bout. So if you're running three times a week and you're not pushing yourself to your absolute limit, your body will take care of itself. Now, if you're using running as a daily activity and it's still, let's say, twenty five minutes a day, even then I would argue your body is pretty much able to take care of itself as long as you go ahead and eat your dinner if it's the evening or eat your breakfast if it's the morning after your workout.

You don't need to be conscious of recovery. Where it becomes important to really start getting dialed in on recovery is when those workouts or those runs are graduating to being an hour or more and it's becoming back to back days most days of the week and or your cross training. So if you're doing this as part of triathlon training program and maybe there's a swim in the morning and a run at night or you go for a run-in the morning and then you play a hockey game at night, then you want to think about your recovery especially in that first workout that leads into the second one because that's where you might only have twelve hours to recover and if that was a hard workout, you bet you're going to start the next one feeling low. In that case, the key nutrients are protein and carbohydrates which it keeps coming back to. Protein again to repair the muscle and carbohydrate to replenish the glycogen.

People ask me a lot about chocolate milk and it fits the bill. It's a great combination of protein and carbohydrates and it's tasty. Yeah, it's got quite a bit of sugar in there but if you really have had a hard, hard workout that's been an hour or longer, your body can actually use that sugar right away to replenish glycogen. If chocolate milk's not your thing, there are many, many other options. I often recommend things like Greek yogurt with some granola, but you could certainly do even things like a banana with some peanut butter.

If you're, you know, gonna eat a meal, it could be some like chicken with rice or chicken on a wrap. All of those would work. Cereal and milk, eggs with toast. Again, it's some protein and some carbohydrates preferably in about the first half hour. After an intense workout, we're talking forty five minutes, that's really hard or an hour longer steady state and another workout expected the next day.

Okay. That's great because, yeah, I know that the chocolate milk thing that's been talked about for the last few years. So it's good to hear your advice on that one. You mentioned carbs, you mentioned protein, but you haven't said that much about fat. And I know there's still a lot of talk out there about athletes burning fat, basically becoming fat adapted, guess they Is there any research behind that or what are your thoughts behind that, the whole fat adapted camp of nutrition?

Oh, it's a great question and I've just come back from basically a think tank summit where this was one of the major topics of discussion and we're very lucky. It's a think tank funded by a group called B210, we're a big funding agency for athletes leading into the Vancouver Olympics and they're now funding a group of sport dietitians in Canada to sort of raise our game and allow us to tap into some of the cutting edge research. And we were very fortunate to have Louise Burke who's perhaps the best known and most revered sport dietitian on the planet come in from Australia and tell us about a fat adaptation study or a low carb high fat study that has been conducted on race walkers who are endurance athletes in Australia and they're working on the results right now and they're going to run a second arm of the study next year. So bottom line is that it is an area that is of great interest to a number of researchers right now. And I'll tell you what we basically know today and big asterisk here, we have more to learn.

So this is literally as of today. Okay. Is that so when you do basically, for lack of better word, starve the muscle of carbohydrate, you do see changes in the way that the muscle works. And you'll see a down regulation of certain enzymes that are related to turning carbohydrate into energy, and the body will start to shift to using fat as a preferential fuel. We do know that to be the case.

Here's the caveat or the asterisk to it. When you look at peak power outputs or peak speed outputs, no study to date has yet demonstrated that a fat adapted athlete, that's someone who is chronically eating a very low carbohydrate diet and switching to eating a lot more fat in their diet. No one has yet demonstrated through good quality research that you can run at top speed or generate top power on a high fat, low carbohydrate diet. So it's an area that there's a lot more we need to understand about the chronic adaptations to high fat, low carb, high fat diet in terms of endurance performance. There may be some instances where it can be appropriate.

In my experience, my recommendation at this point would be it might be something that an ultra endurance athlete would look at, like maybe somebody who's looking at sort of marathon and beyond, you know, fifty k runners, Ironman triathletes, if top speed is not their primary concern. So this is somebody who just says, look, I don't want to have to deal with all the sport foods. You know, maybe someone's very, they're overweight or they're insulin resistant and they want to cut the carbohydrates down in their diet. And in all these cases, I would approach this very carefully. I would work with someone who's an expert in the field, preferably a sport dietitian who's got experience in low carb, high fat diets.

You have to be really mindful because there are side effects to the diet that can be really challenging for some people. For the rest of us, what we're learning is that basically there's a sweet spot for carbohydrate intake. So just because you're running sometimes doesn't mean you need to eat buckets of pasta. And I think that's been a myth that we've got to really break free of. And the word we use a lot these days is periodization.

And what we mean by that is that you adjust your carbohydrate intake according to the training loads or volumes that you're doing. So if you're training a lot, a lot of miles, high mileage week, you're doing a lot of tempo runs, a lot of top speed runs, that's a week where you're gonna wanna put a bit more carbohydrate on your plate or maybe instead of just having veggies as your carb for dinner, you include some starches. On the other hand, if you got a low week, down week or you're injured or you're coming off a race and you're not running much, those are the times where you can bring your carbohydrate intake down. It doesn't need to be full on heavy duty carb intake. So that's not the same as fat adaptation, it's periodization.

You are still consuming carbs whereas in someone who's fat adapted, you're pretty much excluding them entirely. Although even the very low carb folks, a lot of them do still consume some carbs so that's another area to discuss some other day. But I think again, it's that idea of marrying the carb intake to the amount of effort that you're putting out there and not treating every day as though it has to be exactly the same.

Okay, that's great. That clarifies a lot of things for me. I read about is it Hailey, Jabrilassi, the Yes. Great runner that, in one of his world record marathons, or one of his top marathons, he was consuming something crazy. I think it was like 90 grams of carbs.

An hour.

Is that right? Or something around there?

I think this is something that gets so lost in the messaging out there is that all the world records to date in the marathon have been set by people consuming vast amounts of carbohydrate during their run. Yeah. I mean sports drinks, gels, all the stuff that's kind of getting a lot of flack these days is exactly what has fueled peak performance. Why? It's because the speed they are running at is so fast, you literally cannot burn or oxidize fat fast enough to produce a world record in the marathon.

As of the research, as we understand it, and physiology as we know it today, it is literally not possible to generate a world record without carbohydrate. Like I said, you want to go slow steady, that's a different animal. But if you want to be able to go and if you look at the speed that these guys are running at, I mean, there are a lot of people who cannot run even a hundred meters at the speed that a marathon world record runner is running their entire 42 kilometers at. You need to fuel it with carbohydrate.

Yeah, no they're flying. Yeah that could be a whole another topic for a podcast. What other hot trends are you seeing right now other than sort of the fat adapted? You know, I don't know if there's still people talking about paleo, low carb. See a little bit about the keto, ketogenesis.

Sure.

I guess that's low carb as well but what are the sort of hot trends you're seeing out there right now and is there any merit to them?

So yeah, think the paleo diet, you know, it's definitely still you know, in and out of sort of the nutrition trends and it marries into that low carb realm but it's not necessarily the same thing. Paleo is sort of short form for the Paleolithic diet which is not a single diet per se. And again, this could be a whole other topic but basically the idea being that our ancestors were not genetically adapted enough to the foods that we've introduced with the advent of agriculture in the past ten thousand years and that we need to eat more like an ancestral diet of meats, starchy vegetables, vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, eggs, fatty fruits like avocados and coconut, that that should be the primary food base of our diet and that we exclude things like dairy foods, whole grains, and legumes as well as all processed food. And you know, I mean, the bottom line is that the studies to date on paleo have all demonstrated at least some element of, I guess you could say positivity in that people tend to lose weight when they go on the diet, their cardiovascular risk factors look better. It's really important for athletes to understand there are no studies on paleo diets for athletes to date.

They do not exist. So for anybody, we have better research out there on low carb high fat than we have on Paleo. So I'm not saying don't go Paleo but I am saying just realize that because you've read something that says it might be good for X doesn't mean it is gonna work for you. And all of these diets are really restrictive. And remember what I said a few minutes ago, it really comes down to what is workable for you, your lifestyle and your family.

And so if you say, Yeah, that's great. I'm going to go paleo. Well, you have to understand that means you'll never have an ice cream cone with your kids again. So is that worth it? Is that okay for you?

You can't have a piece of cake on your birthday or you can but you're breaking your paleo diet at that point. And what I do see if you want to talk about trends is I see unfortunately a lot more what I would call health anxiety, know, sort of paranoia, dietary dogma out there where people are feeling an extreme pressure to adhere to a certain diet and they're feeling a lot of guilt and shame if they fall off that diet. Oh, I ate some refined sugar and I feel really bad about myself. And I think it's so great that we're paying more attention to nutrition and I think the messaging is obviously getting out there but I think you all have to also take that all with a grain of salt and just because some is good, more is not necessarily better and like I said, there are many different diets that can fit so as soon as you kind of get this religious adherence to one diet, be really careful because we have a lot more to learn and I'll bet you someone could come along and twist that conversation in the exact opposite way from what you believe to be right and as a classic case and point for that is paleo diets versus vegan diets.

Both have great evidence for health and they're completely different diets. Yeah. So you know, think we all have to find one that fits. The common themes I generally encourage people to pay attention to is just try to eat more whole food, prepare food at home when you can, plan your meals ahead so that you're not eating quick foods in restaurants, more food from the outside of the grocery store and less stuff in boxes. And doing that in a step wise fashion for me, you're better off than following sort of the latest fad or the latest trend.

That's great advice. So I don't want to take too much more of your time, but if you had to give someone sort of one piece of advice or one tip that's something they can easily implement tomorrow to help them eat better, what would it be?

Well, I would say one that I thought about mentioning off the top that I didn't, but works so beautifully, especially for busy people is at the beginning of your weekend or somewhere on your weekend, take five minutes with your family, your partner or yourself, whatever and write out what your meal plan or your dinner plan is going to be for the week. That simple act of just saying, you know what, on Monday night, we're gonna have the chili and on Tuesday night, I'm gonna make the chicken stir fry. Whatever that might be, changes everything because it allows you first of all to walk in the door and whoever comes in first knows what they need to make. So it takes away that whole thing of walking in, opening up the fridge or the freezer and like looking at it, you stare at it, you're like, nothing there. You like close it, you walk around the kitchen three times, you open it up again, you look at the fridge or freezer, it looks exactly the same but you're really hoping for a different outcome.

Like we've all done that like over the third time, still the same. So you take that out of the equation. You also force yourself to plan ahead so then when you go to the grocery store, you know you need to buy that feta cheese for that particular dish which you otherwise wouldn't buy. That takes away the frantic phone call of, Honey, you got to buy some fudge, you got to buy some on the way home which saves a whole lot of hassle and a lot of stress. The other thing it does is it reduces waste tremendously, reduces your grocery bills and basically allows you to enjoy a lot more stress free meals with your family.

And all of those things I've just talked about are much bigger keys to overall health than again a lot of the fattish stuff that's out there. So if you just took ten minutes, we have a whiteboard in my house, my husband and I sit down on the weekend, we map it out, we look at the activities, who's got hockey, who's doing this, who's got a meeting. And then we say, Oh, you know what? This is a crazy week. I better make some soup that we can just warm up every day or No, we got a bit of time that day.

I'll be home early. That will be a night that I'm gonna make the pork tenderloin or something. So it's a simple act but it's incredibly powerful and if you took five, ten minutes every weekend, I think you'd be amazed at the difference it would make in your life.

That's great, thank you for that. And so before we go, I know you've got a book, can you tell us a little bit about your book?

Sure, yes, so my book is called Unmasking Superfoods, The Truth and Hype about Acai, Blueberries, Quinoa and More. And it was published in 2014 by HarperCollins Canada. And it's a book that was it stemmed from, I used to write a column for the National Post for about eight years. And in that time, we amassed a lot of different topics, lot of different strands of sort of thought over various, whether it's sport nutrition or weight loss, but superfoods are something people are always asking about. So we took those columns, rejigged them and I turned it into a whole book essentially what it is, it's a chance to be sort of a critical look at the superfoods movement.

It's not meant to be, Everybody needs more goji berries. It's meant to be, Well, what do we know about goji berries and do you really need them and are they that much better than say a blueberry or strawberry that we can get locally for less money and supports local farmers and local economy.

Yeah.

So it's not meant to poo poo on super foods but it's just meant to be a critical look at it and I also talk a little bit about some super foods that don't get in my opinion enough attention. Some of the ones some of you guys might enjoy things like cheese. I talk about the value of cheese and how it's underrated. I try and liberate the noble potato which I think is actually a nutritious food. If that's the sort of thing you'd enjoy, it's a fun little read, it's pretty light and I know a lot of people use it as sort of a reference for future use that they can pull it out anytime they're having a fight at the dinner table about coconut.

Whip it out and win that Oh,

that's great. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. I'll also put a link to the other book you mentioned Slim by Design and some of the other items we talked about. So last thing, so where can people, if they want to follow you online or learn more about your work, where can they do that?

Sure. So, have a website which is just my name, jennifersigo.com. Sligo is S Y G O and you can find my contact information on there and link to me on social media. Probably the place I'm most active is Twitter and my Twitter handle is same thing, Jennifer Seigo. And I'd like to tweet about, you know, sport nutrition topics and nutrition trends and so on.

So you can certainly follow me on there. But again, you can find me on Facebook and various other LinkedIn and all of that through my website. So please visit me and I work downtown at Cleveland Clinic Canada and people often ask about, you know, do you need a referral? And the answer is no. You can just call up the clinic and ask for an appointment and off you go.

Awesome. So you're not snap chatting?

I literally just signed up and it was the most embarrassing conversation. There were about five of us around a table and we were like, so how do we do this?

Yeah, I still don't know how you do that.

And all we're old, it's not good.

Well, that's great. Well, thanks very much, Jennifer, and we look forward to hopefully talking with you again another time.

Thanks so much, Mark. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the Healthinomics Podcast

at www.healthinomics.com.