Transcript
Emily Dow: Hello, everyone. Welcome back LabRat Radio. um if this is our first encounter, welcome to episode four.
Nathan Jenkins: Thank you.
Emily Dow: My name is Dr. Emily. i have a PhD in exercise and nutritional sciences. i'm a registered dietitian and a professor. And I'm here with my esteemed co-host who can introduce himself.
Nathan Jenkins: Hello. um appreciate that, Dr. Emily. My name is Dr. Nathan. I am a ah also professor of physiology at a medical school, a longtime nutrition and fitness coach, and um and a collaborator of yours, Dr. Emily, an honor to be here once again. This is our fourth episode.
Nathan Jenkins: And I think we've got some good momentum going here with this new podcast, this little project that we call LabRate Radio. um And excited to get into it with you today. What are we talking about?
Emily Dow: We're talking about my favorite topic maybe ever, which is...
Nathan Jenkins: I think it's one of your favorites. I think it's your favorite topic. Yeah.
Emily Dow: It's my favorite topic to talk about and my least favorite topic to see other people talk about. So we're we're talking about the gut.
Nathan Jenkins: Oh my God, that was, oh yeah, that was the best. It's like, who was the artist? There's a couple, there's an artist that I've heard on an interview years ago now.
Nathan Jenkins: But it's like, basically, there's some rapper. i don't know it, like, I might say it's 50 Cent or Eminem. It's like, basically, I only like my own stuff.
Emily Dow: Oh god, that's what I meant.
Nathan Jenkins: and That was the vibe. I know that's not what you meant at all. you're and You're like the most humble person. You would never mean it like that. But that's the vibe I just got. was like, yeah, I don't want to hear anybody else's like bars on this track. or on track like like I just want to hear my own stuff.
Nathan Jenkins: So here's the, this is our own stuff. This is your own stuff. This is your episode. Yeah.
Emily Dow: is our own stuff. We're not gonna talk out of our asses when it comes to this topic. We actually know our stuff and everything else is rage-weight to me at this point.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Well, I love it. and She's fired up. um i i If this was my own episode, I would be talking to my house. I don't i don't i don't claim to have any expertise in gut health. It's not my area.
Nathan Jenkins: It is decidedly yours and I'm super, but I also, I know enough to ask some questions. So I think that's how we're going to like kind of do this. ah we I mean, we talked before we started, we pushed record, like how we're going to set this up. But like, yeah, my vision is to like,
Nathan Jenkins: really let you have the, um an opportunity here to, wrap on like kind of what you what what you know in this area. And it's it's ah it's an area that you get asked about quite a bit.
Nathan Jenkins: um It's an area you published in, it was your dissertation. um And so like who better to speak on this topic? But also it's an area that so many people, like i our respectives with our respective audience, like your audience in particular, is interested in.
Nathan Jenkins: and I feel like so many women are interested in gut health.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: um It's like one of those things that they hear about, like, oh, absolutely so I think, i think I think once I've solved that, that's going to solve all my issues. And that may there may some elements of truth to that.
Nathan Jenkins: um And so it's ah it's a really cool thing. like And it's not a, this is the start of conversation. The other thing i would say is it's a start, it's our first episode on this topic. There's going to be, and we're still in our first season and it's a kind of a pilot experiment phase.
Nathan Jenkins: um Most likely this is going to be a long-term project, this this podcast in general. And so it's going to go beyond this, is most likely it's going to go beyond this season and we will be, we will have the opportunity to touch on this topic later.
Nathan Jenkins: time and time again, you know, on multiple episodes down the line. But it's the main one that we have planned for these first 10 episodes.
Emily Dow: Right.
Nathan Jenkins: Here we are at episode number four, so.
Emily Dow: Yeah, I think this being an ongoing discussion is almost certainly going to happen because that's kind of the issue with this topic is that like today we'll touch on, we're going to try to be as comprehensive as we can, but we're going to have to obviously start at the beginning and give a little bit of the more like basic quote unquote, none of this is incredibly basic, but some of the basic background physiology um will implement a case study the way that we always do.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: But there are probably some more specific and granular questions that we won't quite be able to answer today. And that is something that I would love to eventually hear from our audience so that we can elaborate.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: um
Nathan Jenkins: running
Nathan Jenkins: 101.
Nathan Jenkins: Let's start with like defining some stuff, as as I love to do, defining terms, and I know you do too. When people say gut health, you know that's a that's such a loaded term, is it not? Yeah.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: And in my mind, it's like, okay, and my like and I'm going to borrow a term from you that I've heard you say a lot. Like I'll wear my academic hat and my coaching hat, like or use both both parts of my my brain, the academic brain, my coaching brain.
Nathan Jenkins: Academic brain says, and again, I'm not a gut health expert, but that's that's like at least five to 10 different areas of gut physiology. But then the coaching brain says what the average person My sense of what the average person hears and understands as gut health is like the gut microbiome, right?
Nathan Jenkins: Are those two, that gut health and microbiome, are they the same thing? Or is there more to it than just the microbiome? Is the microbiome the most important thing? What are the different things? And what might people like be talking about?
Nathan Jenkins: What do these terms all mean?
Emily Dow: I know that's well that's like part of the frustrating
Nathan Jenkins: Like, let's let's start filling this stuff in.
Emily Dow: That's part of what I'm alluding to when I like talk shit about how other people talk about gut health because it's very nebulous and people mean different things when they reference it that way. So you kind of have several buckets and this is the case for the research and it's also the case for like public perception. But there's like the gut microbiome, which we'll get into, and it's more of like, okay, let's characterize this ecosystem.
Emily Dow: But then you also have like GI symptoms that people experience in their lives and associate that with when people are talking about the gut microbiome and sometimes they're not as obviously or directly related as you might think.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: And then you've got like Gut physiology related to, for example, intestinal permeability, which is kind of like my little subspecialty of gut health, which is a little bit more of like, and we'll get more into what I mean by this later, but it's more like a functional outcome as opposed to, um again, kind of like characterizing the gut.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: And then you've got gut training and like GI issues that are more commonly associated with endurance athletes and the way that they think about the gut. So you kind of do have all these different definitions and all of them connect in some way, shape or form. But there's a lot of different little subtopics within that very broad umbrella.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. um
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. There's like, there's so much to it. if It feels like so. I think you hit. So, okay. um Gut microbiome might be just one of the things.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: Let's, but, and and it's not just that, clearly, but let's start there because that's probably what most people are kind of have at the top of their minds. Like, okay, but i think My sense is that the current understanding in the general population, the the genpop the intelligent, educated, but non-expert population,
Nathan Jenkins: um has does now have an understanding, which is, which is let's be honest, like and and and and be positive about it. like It's a positive thing. that there's this enhanced understanding.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Like when I was a high school student, nobody understood, and then nobody was talking about gut microbiome, you know, even college and even in the 10 years post-college for me, no one talking about this.
Nathan Jenkins: But nowadays, like most fitness minded people have this general understanding. um Listeners, correct me if this is wrong in the comments or whatever, but like most understand that like, you know there's bacteria in the gut and some are beneficial and some are not, right?
Emily Dow: yeah
Nathan Jenkins: And the idea is to like maximize the beneficial ones and minimize the the bad guys. slash like But maybe that that's where it kind of ends or like there's an imbalance between the two maybe sometimes.
Nathan Jenkins: um
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: But so what let's use that as to then ask the question, okay, tell us as an expert, tell us what is the gut microbiome in simple terms? Yeah.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Like, how would you explain it to, like, if somebody's talking to you, like a, you know, a a summer barbecue or, you know, the family, the family gathering or whatever have you.
Emily Dow: yeah
Emily Dow: I think like the way that i I like to kind of introduce it when I'm teaching on this topic is that ultimately the gut microbiome, it's an ecosystem that exists inside of us and we have multiple of them.
Emily Dow: And there's the one that we commonly associate with this kind of conversation that's located in the large intestine primarily. So in the colon, but we also have microbiomes like orally we have
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: Basically, like so several different orifices in the human body also have their own microbiomes.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: So there's different versions of this that exist. But it's essentially a population of microbes and not just bacteria, but also like fungi and other organisms that aren't honestly as well characterized at this point.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: And I'm super curious to find out more about them also. But... It's this ecosystem, and in terms of like the number of cells, they actually outnumber human cells also.
Emily Dow: So it's actually fair to say that we're simply a host organism, and they are sort of they are sort of the organisms that mostly inhabit our bodies, which...
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Right.
Emily Dow: Sounds creepy, but because we have this generally symbiotic relationship with them, what's good for them is generally good for us, as long as we don't have that sort of dysbiotic context where the bad guys outnumber the good guys.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. ah two Two quick questions that come to my mind. Maybe they're not quick. One is you just mentioned the term dysbiotic. Like how do you, do you have a definition for dysbiosis? And then the second question is like the numbers that you just have alluded to.
Nathan Jenkins: Like what are, what kind of numbers are we talking about? Like, isn't it trillions of organisms?
Emily Dow: Trillions, trillions of organisms.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: Yeah. It's, and I can't remember like the ratio in terms of the number of those cells versus the human cells, but it's more than we've got. It's trillions of them.
Emily Dow: And in terms of characterizing dysbiosis, it is tricky and there might be a more up to date way of defining this that I'm not perfectly like privy to, but it's,
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: It's tricky because microbiome compositions, which is what we're talking about when we're discussing like which bacteria are present, they differ so much person to person that it's, and this is like my big issue with the way that the gut microbiome is discussed publicly because it's not really easy to define a healthy gut microbiome because one person's compared to another person's has been
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: Defined in the literature similar to a fingerprint. Like our microbiomes do not resemble one another's.
Nathan Jenkins: Right.
Emily Dow: um
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: There are some general patterns and there are some strains that we know have more negative attributes, more negative consequences than others. So there are certain themes that you can kind of glean from the literature, but we know less than we do at this point. So I think it's kind of putting the cart before the horse a little bit to assume that we have a perfect understanding of these things.
Nathan Jenkins: Right. And it's also putting the cart before the horse, again, going back to the original thought that we led this with was, yes so the microbiome, this micro microbial ecosystem, the presence of particular microbes, and and and it's it's really interesting to like, we zoom out even further, like you said, there's like,
Nathan Jenkins: multiple microbiomes in the body, every like, it's a funny term, but like orifice, like kind of like and he anywhere there's a moist environment.
Emily Dow: huh
Nathan Jenkins: there's a microbiome, right? And and it's things are living in it.
Emily Dow: Things are living in. yes
Nathan Jenkins: And it's a matter of like finding this symbiosis rather than dysbiosis between the two. um But like, that's just one component when getting back to the gut in particular, that's just one component of gut function and gut physiology, gut health.
Nathan Jenkins: um And so I think we need to start moving towards our our case study. But before we do that, like what are maybe some other, key areas that like, it' and you've, you've, we, you and I both looked at the case, but like, what are some things that we need to think about as far as gut physiology, gut health, before we dive into like some of the gritty of this case that we're going to unpack here in a minute?
Emily Dow: Yeah, so beyond the microbes themselves, like we we care to an extent about the microbes themselves, specifically in certain contexts. Like there are pathogens that are detectable and there's like a good common practice for eliminating them.
Emily Dow: um But a lot of the time, what I think is more valuable for people to think about are sort of the roles that those organisms play in communicating with the rest of our physiology.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: And that is what produces, that's part of what produces um downstream impacts related to like immune function and inflammation and motility and bowel regularity.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: um and even mood and mental health outcomes because of the gut-brain axis. That's a super cool and complicated discussion point also.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Dow: um Intestinal permeability, like I was mentioning.
Nathan Jenkins: leather
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: and and And real quick listeners, if you're like, there's a lot like kind of rapid fire right there, but those are all like really key, i think, topics and and physiological processes and phenomena that we might get into here.
Emily Dow: the
Nathan Jenkins: So like put a pin on that and we can come back to it as it comes up. So um yeah, that's all really good.
Emily Dow: Yeah, yeah let's introduce let's introduce a person.
Nathan Jenkins: So ah do you want to get into our case?
Nathan Jenkins: okay
Emily Dow: So we're thinking about like your, I don't want to say middle-aged, 30s, I feel like is younger than middle-aged.
Nathan Jenkins: here
Nathan Jenkins: best
Emily Dow: I don't know.
Nathan Jenkins: that's That's definitely fucking younger than middle age.
Emily Dow: I
Nathan Jenkins: ah God damn it
Emily Dow: ah you would hope i would hope so. I'm not there yet, so to me it's all the same.
Nathan Jenkins: No, but i'm but i'm and I'm past it. So let's just say it's 30s I guess, just normal.
Emily Dow: 30s, young adulthood,
Nathan Jenkins: 30s is still young. that's that's see that's there so yeah All Yeah.
Emily Dow: basically an adolescent. So 30s lifter with maybe some maybe some symptoms that they're worried about might be connected to their gut health.
Nathan Jenkins: Jesus.
Emily Dow: So like bloating, for example, is a pretty common one. um like irregular bowel movements, maybe sometimes they're constipated, don't understand why they don't have like the perfect daily schedule that we kind of look for.
Emily Dow: um they're confused by that. And there's a lot of like, and What always happens when that's the case is that there's a lot of food anxiety that kind of comes into the picture because it's like this constant analysis of am I intolerant to this thing?
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: Like what is producing these symptoms? And everyone always tries to tie that to a food when sometimes that is not necessarily the culprit. And let's say this person has kind of begun introducing all these different interventions that they've heard about. So like probiotics, greens, powders, all the things that are supposed to help.
Emily Dow: But they're throwing them all in the system at once. And we'll get into it.
Nathan Jenkins: Enzymes.
Emily Dow: That is problematic.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: Yeah. Digestive enzymes, glutamine, you name it.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: um And then on top of that, they're like...
Nathan Jenkins: Which is, yeah.
Emily Dow: afraid of consuming high fiber foods because they tend to produce symptoms for them. So they're like, oh, I don't even tolerate fiber.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: Well, that's what I'm supposed to be doing. What the what the fuck, basically. And so that is kind of kind of the question, like, what the fuck?
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: What am I supposed to do with this? Am I supposed to test this?
Nathan Jenkins: here
Emily Dow: What should I experiment with next? Et cetera.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. um And so, okay, so you get a client like this. um And i guess a couple of questions. One is,
Nathan Jenkins: Like I actually might, so first of all, we got to, as we always do now, we have a tradition here at Labratt Radio. We, we're not just like talking about generic, nameless, faceless people.
Nathan Jenkins: We name, we name our, we name our case. So first of all, so it's a
Emily Dow: Should this one be a man, you think?
Nathan Jenkins: i don't I don't think so, Emily, because I think later on, I think menstrual cycle stuff is going to come up. that um So I think it's, it's an I know we've had like two women a row.
Emily Dow: Oh, fuck. Okay. Yeah, you're right.
Nathan Jenkins: We're going our three third time's a charm. going to have our last female in the case study series. The next one will be a dude. um
Emily Dow: It's not inclusive of us, but you're right. This makes sense.
Nathan Jenkins: This one does like, so yeah, menstrual cycle is going to play into this particular case here in a minute, I think. ah But, but all right. So it's so it's a female and ah call it early thirties fitness oriented, but potentially for sure, but really coming to, to, to somebody like you or me to help with the quote unquote, clear up my gut, my my gut health, my symptoms, like get my gut, get my gut right.
Nathan Jenkins: And that'll be the unlock that I want for everything else in my life, which is such a common archetype, right?
Emily Dow: yeah
Nathan Jenkins: Like, so I can't tell you how many times I've had that on my like intake questionnaires. So yeah,
Emily Dow: yeah and like first of all if this is you we're definitely like i just want to empathize with this person for a second because like
Nathan Jenkins: Oh yeah, that's why we're doing this. Yeah, exactly.
Emily Dow: you're not stupid for like drawing these conclusions and it makes sense because like the cool thing about the gut microbiome, it's such a cool topic. It's why I fell in love with it. It's like brand new on the scene.
Emily Dow: And i think it does provide people that don't have answers with like hope that this might be the answer to what they're, they're dealing with. Um,
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: And GI stuff is the worst to try and figure out. It does require a lot of detective work. um
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, elimination.
Emily Dow: And then nobody's clarifying like all these different buckets of gut health and which ones actually might be relevant.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: So that is what we're aiming to do here.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: um So that you can ideally be a little bit less confused. But where do you think we should start with figuring this out for this person?
Nathan Jenkins: um
Emily Dow: Or if you want to force me to start, I can't.
Nathan Jenkins: Well, I think we should... ah You know, would start with, right, so the thing that stands out to me in the case is like the, as I look at the bullet points that we have, and we can imagine this is a questionnaire, it's like,
Nathan Jenkins: avoids fiber because high fiber foods cause symptoms, but also worries that low fiber means that her gut is unhealthy. So there is this understanding that low fiber is a problem and needs she needs more fiber.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: But then whenever she does increase her fiber intake, like or like goes and looks for fiber high fiber foods, that is in itself a trigger for symptoms.
Nathan Jenkins: And that stands out to me because i think it's common. And two, and you and I have talked a little bit about this, Whenever like my person, like we talked about your fitness a second ago. Let me talk just quickly about my personal diet journey here lately.
Nathan Jenkins: I have been actively working on increased, like I'm, people who know me, there's like all 10 of you that know me well, uh, listen to this know that I'm like classically, we talked about it a few episodes. Like I'm classically like, I freaking love so like barbecue, like steak, like grilling and all that kind of stuff. I'm a, like if carnivore was healthy, I would fucking like lean into it. But I, as I know that it's not. So I,
Nathan Jenkins: eat other ways. So I've been actually been interested more in like getting more and more plants into my diet in general and including plant proteins. But really mostly above all, like I went about a year ago and I posted this on my Instagram.
Nathan Jenkins: I think it's just in my stories, maybe in my, actually no, I did post an actual post on this um in the last couple of months or last six months or so, I would say six months to 12 months.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: The two things I've been tracking really are fiber and protein and not really worried about calories, carbs, I kind of vibe it, go higher on carbs, like at least 300 a day for most training days. Anyway, the point being when I have actually, when I started trying to track my fiber and increase it and hit certain targets. Like I read somewhere that like 50 to 60 grams a day was good.
Nathan Jenkins: But honestly, Emily, and we you and I have talked about this, I was probably like at 15 to 20 on a normal day. And if I were trying, I would get 30, which is like kind of like roughly normal for a guy, but still little bit low.
Nathan Jenkins: And then I was like, oh, then I went hard on the pain on fiber. And my God, I was debilitated. like It was awful. So like I went to this, like and I get so i get what, um do we do we name it do we name this case yet?
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: No, it's a woman.
Emily Dow: We didn't name her. done Cheryl.
Nathan Jenkins: okay Name her, name her now, and then I'll finish. I think i we get the gist of it, but it's your term i was
Emily Dow: we've done cheryl We've done Diane. um She's 31 though, so I was going to say a very elderly sounding name.
Nathan Jenkins: your turn. That's what we've done is the elderly sounding names.
Emily Dow: Let's go with Julia. Julia sounds reasonable.
Nathan Jenkins: you I love that one because it evokes Julia Child, which is sort the most famous, the but the the original um celebrity chef, which I'm a big, you know, follower of all the celebrity chefs.
Emily Dow: That's perfect. That's not what came to mind for me.
Nathan Jenkins: If listeners, nobody but nobody even even knows. ah That is a deep cut. I love it. julia So Julia is, I resonate with you, Julia, because when I try to increase my fiber,
Nathan Jenkins: I was miserable. Like anytime I do it, like, and it's like, ah it's in the form of like a heroic fiber bomb. Like, like it's the same way that like, oh people think they need to hydrate. So they like chug the full, like 32 ounce thing of water and they pee all night long. Um,
Nathan Jenkins: Got hit the protein. So you like get a hundred grams of protein in one sitting with like Fairlife and like a protein bar and whatever the fuck, you know what i mean? With fiber, that's a, that is a disaster.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: um So i so that's maybe like to answer the question, where should we start?
Emily Dow: It's a bad idea.
Nathan Jenkins: Maybe start there. Like how do we like, maybe like what's the education piece when somebody is like misunderstanding that disconnect of like, okay, fiber is good for you, but it also fiber is producing symptoms.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: And it's probably because of the intake patterns.
Emily Dow: Yeah. i Yeah, I see this all the time too, because especially i love that fiber has become popular now. I was like screaming this from the rooftops for like the last like six or seven years and it's finally popular.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. Yeah.
Emily Dow: And so everyone's fiber maxing.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. It's like people are getting into it. Yeah.
Emily Dow: Which is like conceptually great because that's like 10% of the population consumes enough fiber. So it's actually worth caring about.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: However, the problem is the problem that I found is that people, if they start tracking it for like a week or whatever, and they see that they're getting like nine grams a day on average,
Emily Dow: They panic and then they immediately either ask someone like us or they ask ChatGBT and they're like, what are the best fiber sources? And people by default seek out the foods that are going to have the most fiber thinking that that makes the most sense, which understandably, yes, but there's a couple of things to consider with that.
Nathan Jenkins: Most, yeah. I put it in every single meal.
Nathan Jenkins: That's exactly what
Emily Dow: Um,
Nathan Jenkins: I All the beans, all the lentils, all the vegetables.
Emily Dow: Right. And those are wonderful sources. It's the the conclusion that they then come to a lot of people. I don't think you did because you were able to sort of like work your way through this.
Emily Dow: But um a lot of people will then think, well, I don't tolerate fiber. Like, why am I increasing this?
Nathan Jenkins: Right.
Emily Dow: It sucks. I'm not going to do this. And first and foremost, like... It's normal to experience some slight change in symptoms when you're doing this because one of the one of the strongest benefits of fiber is that the microbes within your gut are going to ferment it.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: And, fermentation is noticeable. And so if you, especially like when you're consuming large amounts, and so ideally you're consuming a little bit more fiber.
Emily Dow: Some of the the fiber is fermentable, not all of it, because ideally you're not consuming all of your fiber from the same couple of sources, which we'll get into. but Therefore, like any potential side effects like bloating, gas, etc. are totally manageable and super mild if it they're present at all.
Emily Dow: And so you want to titrate your fiber dosage, for lack of a better term, up gradually.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: And ideally, we're not really looking for like one fiber bomb that we can add to a meal. We're looking for options like we're kind of looking to microdose a lot of different sources that's the most ideal scenario um yeah
Nathan Jenkins: That's what's worked so well for me. It's like getting just a, and every time I eat, just get a saw. Like, is there fiber present here? It's just like I do with protein. Like, get I get 30 grams of protein and like maybe five grams of fiber every time I eat. I try to.
Emily Dow: yeah and that's
Nathan Jenkins: And that kind of covers it. Yeah.
Emily Dow: That's especially like, okay, the target, ideally people go even higher than this. For the audience's brains, I consume an entirely plant-based diet plus eggs.
Emily Dow: And because every plant, I'm only consuming plants essentially, and they all contain fiber. My fiber on a daily basis is like 70 plus grams, and I experienced no symptoms or issues from it.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, yeah.
Emily Dow: That's been obviously built up over time, but...
Nathan Jenkins: okay
Emily Dow: Generally, there's not really like an upper limit that's consistent across everybody, but you will have an upper limit for you at a given point in time in terms of tolerance.
Nathan Jenkins: For your body, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Dow: But that said, like most people... like, let's be honest, we've all seen the dietary recalls. Most people are not consuming the minimum five gram or sorry, five servings, give or take of fruits and vegetables on a daily basis that I would normally recommend.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. Not even close. Yeah.
Emily Dow: And most people are under consuming fiber. So if we're aiming for 25 to 30 grams a day of fiber, there's our five combined servings of fruits and vegetables throughout the day where we can get five grams and then cover our asses from a fiber point of view.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Easy. Easy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess I probably misspoke second ago. like Each time I eat, it's a minimum of five grams, um five to 15.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: that kind of like tracking it for, I hate the term tracking, but like, anyway, like paying attention to it measuring it, being mindful of like how, like in putting some numbers to what my consumption is.
Nathan Jenkins: um
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: And there's actually two things. One is the daily total, which is like 50 to 60 is like my sweet spot where like the symptoms are like not there and, and you know, normal patterns and and and just like generally feel good, like inflammation and all that kind of stuff feels good and recovery.
Nathan Jenkins: My brain feels sharp. I don't know if you can attribute it everything to one variable, but like there's that whole gut-brain axis. I feel like that's kind of, I definitely notice a difference in sharpness when I'm being, when I eat more vegetables and things that contain fiber, lo and behold, imagine that.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: ah But then also the the other thing, like, so one is the total amount, the two is the distribution throughout the day.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: And so that's really like, because again, previously was like, oh crap, I'm at the end of the day. I'm going to have i'm gonna have like to like a plant-based protein with a salad and a bunch of beans.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: and and then And then before I go to bed, I'm going to have my like ah ah a protein bar that has a bunch of fiber in it too. That's the other way I get fiber too. right or wrong I don't know people are going to, like i I posted something on my Instagram with a protein bar in it with a lot of fiber.
Nathan Jenkins: Um, and people like lost their shit over that. Um, so most people liked it, but some people were like, Oh my God, that's so unhealthy. Anyway. Uh, I, I, I rely on that also for fiber and I think it works pretty well.
Nathan Jenkins: I think I really think it does work pretty well. So no.
Emily Dow: It's fine. and you're not relying entirely on that because you're also...
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. So it's,
Emily Dow: you're so you're surpassing like the 38 gram a day target for males, probably surpassing that from Whole Foods before the protein bar even comes into play.
Nathan Jenkins: tests
Emily Dow: So that's the other thing.
Nathan Jenkins: That's right. So like, yeah, 38 grams a day for men and what's the number? 25 for women?
Emily Dow: Give or take, yeah. Ideally, that's obviously like an oversimplification because not every female is the same size, is consuming the same amount of calories.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: So a better framework is 14 grams per thousand calories that you're consuming.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: 14 per 1,000 calories.
Emily Dow: um But like give or take 25 for females.
Nathan Jenkins: Okay.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: So 28 for a 2,000 calorie diet. um Yeah. And so like my – yeah, okay. We don't need get to get too personal or whatever. But – I'm around 2,500 to 3,000 calories a day.
Nathan Jenkins: So that's pretty easy math. And I try i try to, if I'd say that said that as my benchmark and like get a little bit, plus like 10% above that, that feels pretty good for me. But I've worked up to that.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: So so we might as point Julia in that direction as well. um And kind of like just do an audit of like what she's doing with her diet, like the seven day intake process, like just document everything, see where she's at
Emily Dow: Yes.
Nathan Jenkins: And then be strategic about like, okay, here's what you, and then like the other thing, and Emily, maybe you can talk for a second about like how you work through this with clients. Like when you see somebody's, you get their their their seven day log, right?
Nathan Jenkins: That you do before you change anything.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: What are you looking for as like, as far as the the parameters of their diet, like the time they eat, how much they eat and when, and then based on that, when do you like suggest strategic introductions of fiber?
Emily Dow: Yeah. So usually like first pass, I'm just looking for, I'm looking for what I understand to be sources of fiber sprinkled throughout the day, because a lot of the time it's like, okay, I can identify one vegetable or like,
Emily Dow: maybe you had some beans in your tacos. It's usually so sparse that it's easy to just pinpoint like, OK, these are the only sources we've got right now. Let's start there. And typically, like people really struggle to get fiber in at breakfast.
Emily Dow: That's a super common one where it's an easy it's an easy add in where I'm just like, hey, let's throw some fruit in here.
Nathan Jenkins: Okay.
Emily Dow: Let's add some oatmeal.
Nathan Jenkins: So easy.
Emily Dow: um
Nathan Jenkins: Yep.
Emily Dow: Something to that effect that's a very easy switch to make. um But especially when we start bringing into the equation like GI symptoms, because I don't even get this grainular granular with 80% of people at least, but when symptoms are at play that we're trying to sort of sleuth our way through, that is when I will start having them record when symptoms are taking place, ah their meal times,
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: what their meals consist of, because sometimes there's relevance for like certain types of ingredients that do tend to produce more symptoms for people than others. Um, but that's usually the first thought for a client like this is like, Oh, am I intolerant to eggs or like, I react every time I eat X, Y, or Z food when sometimes it's not actually about what's present in the diet.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: It's more about what's absent.
Nathan Jenkins: moving
Emily Dow: So yeah, I'm kind of scanning for both of those things. And usually I see a huge deficit of, broadly speaking, color. Like, I'm not seeing much color in these food logs.
Emily Dow: It's a lot of beige. And that's about it.
Nathan Jenkins: A lot browns. Yeah.
Emily Dow: yeah So that's honestly where I start most of the time.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: Because even if we get more targeted than that, even if we try to, like... Like this this client is, you know, at least thinking about introducing probiotics and greens powders and all these things.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: None of that is going to help if we're not doing the behavior, like the fundamental behaviors that are going to so support the microbiome that we're trying to establish regardless.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. um Yeah. Real quick on the, on the, on the probiotics and the, like to think like magic dust, you know, um we have, well, the time that we're recording, i guess it's probably tomorrow that post is going to go up that we, ah we, and we, it's funny.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: We didn't actually necessarily plan this, but we like, wrote this post and recorded this podcast like in the same week. um but this this this The podcast is not decidedly a probiotics post, but the or the podcast is not decidedly dedicated to probiotics, but since you just brought it up, like let's link the two.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: like what if What if Julia is like asking you about probiotics, then we point her to that post that we're going to put up tomorrow. um What do we want to her to take from from that?
Nathan Jenkins: you know Because there's a lot of content in that in that post. that And listeners, if you haven't seen it yet, go look for Well, you have to scroll back probably by this time because it's like a month or two from now. um Anyway, ah like, yeah, it'll be back in the archives for the real ones that go back and find.
Emily Dow: Yeah, it'll be there somewhere.
Emily Dow: Easier to scroll through your page because you post a little less often.
Nathan Jenkins: Oh, geez. Thanks for that fucking dig.
Emily Dow: yeah
Nathan Jenkins: Jesus.
Emily Dow: so
Nathan Jenkins: I'm working on it Okay.
Emily Dow: Less often.
Nathan Jenkins: I'm working.
Emily Dow: That's objectively true, but...
Nathan Jenkins: it it Well, it is, but it's also, it is, hold on, i'm going to defend myself for a second. It is it is true in the grand scheme of things, but the last couple, like month or two, I've been posting about the same cadence as you have, like about two to three times a week.
Emily Dow: You've been on it.
Nathan Jenkins: It's, the real comparison is like, I get fucking 30 likes per post and you get 4,000 or 10,000.
Emily Dow: All
Nathan Jenkins: That's the difference. But frequency not that different. but ah but frequency is not that different
Emily Dow: her
Emily Dow: right. Fair. Well, okay. So anyway, you can find this post, but I'm going to give you guys... ah Here's my general opinion on ProBadix. Because ultimately...
Emily Dow: Like the literature is cool. And I think like, I don't want to sound, i think I maybe sometimes do sound very dismissive of probiotics just broadly. um
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: The literature is really cool. Like there are definitely certain probiotics for certain circumstances that appear to be like to have a net positive impact. But I have several issues with
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: applying that to a case-by-case situation that probably differs from the context in which that literature is published.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: So couple of things. First, like I would said earlier, everybody's microbiome is very different from one another. It's like a fingerprint. There's a ton of different um characters in there and a bunch of different types of bugs.
Emily Dow: And If we don't know what that ecosystem looks like, and then we take a probiotic that contains a few specific strains that are like generally understood not to be harmful,
Emily Dow: we introduce them and we don't know what ecosystem we're introducing them into, that may or may not be helpful. And the example that I use all the time is I had a GI map run on myself at one point when I was dealing with some mystery GI issues.
Nathan Jenkins: and
Emily Dow: And if anything, I had an overabundance of the exact strains that you find in most probiotics.
Nathan Jenkins: Right.
Emily Dow: to the So to that point, if I started mega dosing probiotics, it could have potentially made things worse for me.
Nathan Jenkins: ah you Exactly. Yeah.
Emily Dow: And I never would have known that if I hadn't tested my gut first.
Nathan Jenkins: Right.
Emily Dow: There's also the fact that they don't tend to colonize very well. So especially if you're not doing the behaviors in the background that are supportive of them colonizing well.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: So typically...
Nathan Jenkins: And, and
Emily Dow: They're detectable. If you were to measure your gut while you're taking the probiotics, they would be detectable.
Nathan Jenkins: you
Emily Dow: But a lot of the time, if once you stop taking them, they also stop being detected.
Nathan Jenkins: yeah.
Emily Dow: So they don't necessarily stick.
Nathan Jenkins: ah they don't say That's such a good point. And I don't know that we, even in the post that we just created and it's going to go up tomorrow. I don't even know that we spoke to that in the post.
Nathan Jenkins: I'm really glad we talked about it here. um like it's it's like ah it's like it's almost like It's almost like, and this is not a shade against a particular profession, but like almost like the chiropractor model where you got to keep going back to keep your back...
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm. That's lot to talk about.
Nathan Jenkins: like if you if you go to a chiropractor, get your back adjusted, it only works so long as you keep going every two weeks.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: you know um' Most chiropractors that I know don't operate that way anymore. But like when I was growing up, like my dad would like have to, he was roped in and he had to go to the chiropractor.
Nathan Jenkins: Otherwise his back was hurting. um It's almost like that with the probiotics, is it not? like You got to keep taking it for, like ah get on that monthly subscription for 70 bucks
Emily Dow: now
Emily Dow: no
Nathan Jenkins: And then um unless, like, and then when you stop, they go away, because you said, like you said, they don't colonize very well. they But they're like it's dependent on the exogenous input, um which is which is really problematic.
Nathan Jenkins: So, so yeah, like, that, it's...
Emily Dow: And there's a whole There's the whole bigger picture problem that I've spoken to a few times that, like again, doesn't undermine this entire field of research. But when even when we test the gut, we're not effectively capturing what's happening in the gut.
Emily Dow: We're capturing the end product because we're still testing.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: We're looking at what's exiting our physiology. We're not able to actually get a snapshot of what's happening as it's happening. And so that snapshot from fecal samples may not even be representative of what is going on elsewhere. And it would be very cool. And I bet someday this will be realistic.
Emily Dow: You would need to like biopsy the large intestine or I can see some sort of like tracer technology that passes through and analyzes things.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. Something that you ingest. Yeah.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Something that you ingest. that What I've done to get around this in my practice is get, I've had clients do a stool test and a blood sample and get some some correlated biomarkers.
Emily Dow: Yeah, that's.
Nathan Jenkins: It's still not perfect. It's still very much a correlation. And then Along with that, do a full detailed dietary assessment and also a questionnaire that really probes carefully. You got to have like really well-designed questions in your questionnaire to like get at their, what is what are they looking for? what are they What's bothering them? What are their symptoms?
Nathan Jenkins: Tell me about your brain fog. So if I can see all of that and collate all that data, then I can get some insights um a lot of times.
Emily Dow: Right.
Nathan Jenkins: and and And then there are times, but a lot honestly, Emily, a lot of times, the gut with having looked at a bunch of these with clients, like the gut, the GI analyses, they either don't correlate that well with the blood data a lot of times, or what they do is like a lot of them tell you the same stuff.
Nathan Jenkins: Like almost everybody, depending on which vendor you go with, whether it's GI map or a couple other ones out there, um they kind of all show a dysbiosis of some form.
Emily Dow: Right.
Nathan Jenkins: Like everybody's got something wrong. um And then it the the bottom line, and we can kind of get to this, and then we did speak to this in the post that we just that we're going to post tomorrow, is that it really comes boils down to the unsexy you know, fundamentals of focusing on fiber, which is probably where we would really direct Julia too. It's like, let's, okay, fiber has been like, to kind of close the loop on the fiber discussion with her case is like, okay. When it turns out like ah upon further interrogation, the fiber has been either and like the pendulum swung one way, which is too low to way too high.
Nathan Jenkins: And or along with that, like in our, the sources maybe are like, maybe it's all from one's one place or like maybe there could be some more variety of sources there and also spread it out out throughout the day a little bit more.
Nathan Jenkins: It gets them at breakfast, like you said, like, which is, I think for me personally too, that's a big, makes a huge difference.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: It gives, you know, satiety, fullness, energy, just like, just feel better.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: you the more The more I get in the morning, the better I feel. And I think we might point Julie that same way.
Emily Dow: yeah
Nathan Jenkins: The pills, the magic dust, you know, pending like – if she's somebody of means that can spend $1,000 on the blood work and the stool sampling to like correlate all that, when you when you add it all up, it probably gets close to that if you do like really comprehensive.
Nathan Jenkins: um then maybe we do that, but you could probably get it, that you pull some of the big levers without even getting to that with most people. So um yeah, maybe that's how we leave her like with that.
Emily Dow: Right. That's a thing. like oh Yeah, that's kind of like
Nathan Jenkins: And then and then you you work with her for a few weeks and months and monitor progress, however you define it, you measure it and all that.
Emily Dow: It's not a very sexy take, but a lot of the time, you know, people want to do all this testing. They want all this data. They want to have like a complete understanding of what's going on. But as a practitioner, you see so many of these and you recognize that a lot of the time your recommendations coalesce on the same stuff, regardless of what you're seeing.
Nathan Jenkins: see That's right.
Emily Dow: And so it's like, how much how much value are we actually getting for the amount of money spent on those extra tests? And I know that sounds like, that's probably like the most boring sounding answer imaginable, but it's just unfortunate.
Nathan Jenkins: It's so boring. Yeah.
Emily Dow: like And actually, I was about to say unfortunately, but like ultimately that is good news to all of you. That is great news that there are so many opportunities that that you don't have to spend any money or any more money.
Nathan Jenkins: It's such great, yeah. have
Emily Dow: Like you're going to buy groceries and stuff, but in order to solve a lot of your problems and to kind of like, I want to add two small little add-ons to close the loop on Julia.
Nathan Jenkins: Right, right.
Emily Dow: um Whenever people are dealing, cause we talked about like the bowel irregularity and stuff too. Whenever people are dealing with weird things, like weird bowel movement habits, behaviors, et cetera.
Emily Dow: And this is always relevant when people travel. So just like quick takeaway, i always think of the two F's because both are important.
Nathan Jenkins: ah Yeah.
Emily Dow: You've got your fiber and you've got your fluids. And the more you increase your fiber intake, you also have to increase your fluid intake. Those in combination really keep things moving. And again, that sounds very boring, but if you actually think about it, when you go on vacation, you almost always under consume both and then wonder why you're constipated.
Emily Dow: So that's sometimes a good use case for something like a fiber supplement or even just like bring some Metamucil with you or something, because that's just psyllium husk.
Nathan Jenkins: Sure.
Emily Dow: That's a high quality fiber source.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: um That's always an option. And if you are someone like Julia who deals with symptoms related to your fiber intake, it's It's worth thinking about the fact, because I didn't explicitly say this earlier, but like fiber isn't one thing.
Emily Dow: There are so many different types of fibers, and some of them are more fermentable.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, we um you got this soluble involved. Yeah.
Emily Dow: Some of them are more viscous. like They all have these different characteristics. And so and i'm sure a lot of people who care about gut stuff have heard of FODMAPs, which are like a group of, it's fermentable, oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides.
Nathan Jenkins: Sure. Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: all yeah and i' I'm missing letters and polyols essentially. So it's this category of fermentable, um, types of carbohydrates. And those do tend to produce more symptoms for a lot of people because they're fermentable. So they're producing gases, byproducts and whatnot.
Emily Dow: And so if Julia is consuming predominantly a couple of sources of fiber and they happen to fall within that category, it might be worth just diversifying so that they're not all producing the same exact effects.
Emily Dow: And there are like low FODMAP sources of fiber, um like berries are good examples. Kiwi is a good example. Honestly, that would be a good, you can Google that and easily find that information too.
Nathan Jenkins: I do.
Nathan Jenkins: Sure. Yeah. um No, that's awesome. And actually, Emily, that's it I love it. that's say you you You did a great job of closing the loop on Julia. And also, um kind of along the same lines of like, you know there's multiple different types of fiber, and then there's fiber and its effects on
Nathan Jenkins: Gut health are are kind of many and varied and kind of ripple-ish in nature. There's an element of like what the the impact, like, so that's the that is the the substrate for the the beneficial bacteria and the fermenters, right?
Emily Dow: Yes.
Nathan Jenkins: So the so that they can ferment. There's also this connection with um intestinal barrier physiology and fiber is a component of that, but like, and so are so too are the bacteria, but then there's also like the mucosal lining and, know,
Nathan Jenkins: you know that was and And that's ah a whole area of physiology that's like of gut physiology is super important and that you happen to know quite a bit about. um
Emily Dow: so
Nathan Jenkins: let's let's pivot Let's pivot to that. it's not It's not a huge pivot, but let's let's start there. like that's your you know It's a good place to like pause and talk about it and think because that's that was your major focus of dissertation work, correct?
Emily Dow: Yeah. And it's like, it's so under, ah people don't care about it as much as they should. It's like a very important functional measure of of gut health, that nebulous term that we hate.
Nathan Jenkins: sort It's your pet project. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: Especially because like, this is just an example of how it's actually, I'll give two examples of how it's relevant.
Nathan Jenkins: Thank you.
Emily Dow: One, if you're especially an endurance athlete and you deal with significant GI distress, this is part of why. um And two, there's a lot of really interesting data when it comes to the gut-brain axis especially, but like the way that the breakdown of the intestinal barrier or hyperpermeability, leaky gut, as it's referred to um by some by some folks, um in terms of how that can promote downstream inflammation that can actually affect the nervous system, specifically the brain, there's a lot of interesting stuff looking at like
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: Alzheimer's and dementia progressions. And there's a lot of associative data related to the intestinal barrier. So it's worth caring about, but also don't panic.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: Like leaky gut is not like some horrible thing that everyone needs to worry about. But the reason that we care about this is because it is a
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: to some extent a function of the composition of the gut also. Like those two are very much related to one another. And the gut barrier is something that we can support using the same sort of behaviors that support gut composition. But it's also very interesting because it's trainable, which is part of what I looked at in my dissertation.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, so, okay, perfect. ah What... um What are some of those behaviors that affect gut, the intestinal barrier and the the permeability?
Nathan Jenkins: And of those, like, what did you look at with your dissertation? And tell us about the tell us about the study. what did what a What did you learn? And you've talked about this on some other podcasts, but this is this is your slash our podcast.
Nathan Jenkins: Like, this is the time to, like, teach teach the people ah based on what what you what you actually, like, really fucking deeply know about.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Emily Dow: related
Emily Dow: essentially my question, i was interested going into both my master's and my PhD in the relationships between exercise and the gut-brain axis. So we know that like exercise is a healthy behavior. And we also know that exercise tends to be associated with exercise.
Emily Dow: better gut health, like a ah more diverse composition, fewer symptoms, that sort of thing. And we also know that exercise associated with better mental health outcomes and even just neurological health when it comes to cognitive function and things like that.
Emily Dow: So my question essentially was, is is the gut microbiome or specifically what I investigated was the integrity of this intestinal barrier. Is that a potential mediator for the beneficial effects that we see of exercise on cognition, mental health, mood, et cetera.
Emily Dow: And so what we looked at, because we know that exercise acutely, so like immediately after a bout of exercise, and this has been shown for both aerobic and resistance training, that and nobody panic when I say this, but like acutely exercise damages, the intestinal barrier, it's a stressor on our physiology and that, that spans multiple systems.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: And so we see acute damage, but the sort of hypothesis was that over the longterm, similar to other stressors and their adaptations, that that physiology might also adapt and become stronger in response.
Nathan Jenkins: like um Just like in muscle muscle mitochondria, for example, any pick your muscle adaptation of choice.
Emily Dow: Okay.
Nathan Jenkins: It's the same way. By the way, i'm back. um
Emily Dow: So my question is basically like, can you strengthen your gut barrier?
Nathan Jenkins: Is that how it works?
Emily Dow: um And then is that, if if so, is that associated with better outcomes related to the brain?
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: And so what we looked at as kind of our primary outcome was something called lipopolysaccharide binding protein or LVP, which sounds insane.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: LPP, yep.
Emily Dow: um That first part of the acronym, lipopolysaccharide, it's a component of gram negative bacteria. It exists within the cell wall of certain bacteria. and so when the intestinal barrier becomes weakened, it's able to translocate across that barrier.
Emily Dow: And so we can kind of think the analogy that I used in my dissertation defense was that like the gut barrier is sort of like the entrance to a club and you've got bouncers and you've got people with fake IDs trying to enter and all that nonsense is happening. So
Nathan Jenkins: yes
Emily Dow: LDP is like a fake ID, and sometimes, you know, when the bouncers are busy or when there's some sort of, like, lapse in surveillance, um the fake IDs can get get in.
Nathan Jenkins: if you
Nathan Jenkins: Or it's ah it's a real it's a real cute girl and the fake ID gets...
Emily Dow: or is you service
Nathan Jenkins: ah
Emily Dow: Everyone turns a blind eye for a second. Yeah, exactly.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. So are we talking about gap junctions here? because the The way, as I understand it, I'm not a gut physiologist, but like the colonocytes are epithelial cells lined one after the other.
Nathan Jenkins: And in between them, there's there's gap junctions that are like tightly regulated ah where things can can filter through
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: when they're supposed to, again, I'm not an expert, but things that are supposed to get through, like nutrients and whatnot, get through to from gut from inside the gut to to the blood, to the circulation or whatever, go to the stomach or go to the liver or whatever have you um for for the processing.
Emily Dow: her
Nathan Jenkins: But then when the when it's too leaky, like things that like maybe it's big chunks of food that are not fully processed yet or like things like,
Emily Dow: Right. Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: like like bacteria like things that bacteria produce like lps for example inflammatory agents cytokines um those things get through the barrier and through that's what's leaking in the leaky gut and then that has like systemic effects including with the brain which is what you were looking at what we're talking about
Emily Dow: yeah
Emily Dow: Right. Yeah. So exactly. So essentially, right. The like between the epithelial cells of the intestine, you've got those tight junctions. They're supposed to be selectively permeable, meaning they allow the right things to get through and they keep the other things out.
Nathan Jenkins: Right, that's the word, so selective. fip Yep.
Emily Dow: And that's actually that's relevant to why when we talk about like the immune system mostly residing in the gut, 70 percent of our body's immune cells exist in that in that specific realm.
Emily Dow: And that's part of why, because we have all of these bacteria inside of our body and there has to be some sort of barrier so that all those bacteria aren't also exposed to our entire bloodstream. So generally speaking, that wall is very effective at keeping the letting the right things in and keeping other things out.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: But under stress, the wrong things can pass through. And lipopolysaccharide is an example of that because it's also referred to as endotoxin.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: So if you ever heard of endotoxemia or endotoxin, um, that's referring to LPS because if it crosses that barrier and if you're confused as to why we measured LBP, which is its binding protein, it's because once it crosses that barrier, it binds almost immediately.
Emily Dow: So it's very difficult to detect LPS in the blood because it's almost never alone. Um,
Nathan Jenkins: i'm sure every I'm sure every listener is waiting for that clarification.
Emily Dow: I'm sure people are like, wait a second.
Nathan Jenkins: Wait, why the fuck didn't you measure LPS and why did you measure the binding protein? Oh, of course.
Emily Dow: I'm preparing for questions from the committee.
Nathan Jenkins: I love a love it. um No, that's awesome, Emily. um So, okay.
Emily Dow: and they they can cross the blood-brain barrier, which is where it becomes really problematic and can induce like neuroinflammation.
Nathan Jenkins: That's right. Yeah.
Emily Dow: And so that's where it's relevant.
Nathan Jenkins: Well, and for you and i've I've read your paper.
Emily Dow: to
Nathan Jenkins: And as ah if i if i wear my if I wear my peer reviewer hat, like that's the strength of your study is that it's actually a very biologically relevant outcome for your key, for your, it's it's something that's relevant for both the gut and the brain, the LBP, right?
Emily Dow: yes
Nathan Jenkins: um And that your interest was in both of those variables. So that makes a lot of sense. But tell us to like, okay, why, but like why, and I, this audience will be very like receptive this, I think, and maybe like,
Nathan Jenkins: um The bias is there, I think, like but why resistance training? Why strength training?
Emily Dow: Well, okay, so...
Nathan Jenkins: and then And speak to the bias for the field as a whole because it's not the same as the audience, I don't think.
Emily Dow: Yeah. So few reasons. a I come from that background. So I was like, well, i because I came from that background, I identified that there was a huge gap in that specific exercise modality because part part of that's because it's so easy to do like aerobic exercise interventions in comparison to like a full strength training intervention, which was an undertaking I was unprepared for.
Nathan Jenkins: Absolutely, yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: this Oh, I'm
Emily Dow: But there's also...
Nathan Jenkins: if oh i sure you haven't talked about that. I'm sure you were. Yeah. It's it's it's crazy. Yeah.
Emily Dow: Yeah, fit I did an eight-week training study and then a 15-week training study. And those those are my two big dissertation pieces.
Nathan Jenkins: You did a fucking 15 week training study.
Emily Dow: So, yes, I sure did.
Nathan Jenkins: I knew about this study. The, Is that the unpublished one that I've also read?
Emily Dow: a
Nathan Jenkins: But we're not going to talk about though that. That 15 weeks. i forgot that was 15 weeks.
Emily Dow: It was 15 weeks in total. it was technically 12 weeks of training, but there was a three-week, like, washout period.
Nathan Jenkins: And with the supplement that we can't talk about.
Emily Dow: Well, okay, so...
Nathan Jenkins: Was that the same study or different study?
Emily Dow: Technically it was like a baseline. So we took two baseline measurements to account for variability um over a three week period.
Nathan Jenkins: Okay. Yeah. yay Oh, yep yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. And that was a good idea. i remember the data. That was like, I'm so glad you did that because that, that probably saved saved your study. Um, even though you, even though you didn't want to do it, uh, that's goddamn, we're like inside baseball and being, being vague when that study is published, we'll talk about it.
Emily Dow: It was real buzz.
Nathan Jenkins: Um, but for this one, the eight weeks, you did two training studies, Jesus Christ.
Emily Dow: Yes.
Nathan Jenkins: Um,
Emily Dow: But the reason, so yeah I never fully answered your question.
Nathan Jenkins: sorry.
Emily Dow: So the reason we looked at resistance training was because we have less data on how that, there's data supporting that it acutely it acutely stresses the gut barrier, similar to endurance exercise.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: And
Emily Dow: But there hasn't been the same like chronic intervention in resistance training to demonstrate that
Nathan Jenkins: and
Emily Dow: Maybe over over time, the adaptations resemble those that we see in the muscle.
Nathan Jenkins: yeah
Emily Dow: And because there's so many like cognitive and mental health benefits of resistance training, that it was a strong hypothesis.
Nathan Jenkins: and
Nathan Jenkins: And real quick, I want i want to just like give some much bigger picture context as like why that's so important. um I've worked in a lot of different areas in my career, in in my academic career in research. um I've done things in the effects of exercise on like fat metabolism after a meal, glucose metabolism after a meal, ah novel cardiovascular risk factors in any context.
Nathan Jenkins: And i've done both I've done all different flavors of exercise stimuli. And by my origin, this is over 20 years ago now, was in the like the effects of exercise in the academic space was always the default assumption without defining it further was always endurance. Like you just said, the entire field, like it doesn't matter what your outcome variable is, the the assumption is that it's going to be endurance protocols.
Nathan Jenkins: It is some moderate intensity, steady state protocol at some like fixed percentage of somebody's VO2 max.
Emily Dow: Yep.
Nathan Jenkins: like 60 to 80% VO2 max. And then in the last 15, 20 years, people are starting to get acute and do high intensity interval type protocols. and we And we've done some of that.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: I've done some of that too. Resistance training is probably, i'm beennna I'm going to shoot from the hip and call it 5 to 10% of the overall literature. And there's there's multiple reasons for that. One is that it's I don't know the act, like, i think people come from a personal bias and most academics, like personally, I think they like are a bunch of runners. And so, and you and I are both runners, so no shade on that.
Nathan Jenkins: Um, but that's just like the history.
Emily Dow: But I'm also me head.
Nathan Jenkins: If you,
Emily Dow: So that's where that came in.
Nathan Jenkins: That's right. And then like the meatheads have only like relatively recently gotten you know the their opportunity to step in those sandboxes. And and it's it's changed a lot. And like again, Instagram is much more... represent like the The research on Instagram is much more representative of like that space, of that like um resistance training space. like You've got the...
Nathan Jenkins: you know the Brad Schoenfields and the, the Blaine Nortons and the Mike Isertells, they're very prominent on Instagram.
Emily Dow: hello Yeah, it still makes up a small percentage of research.
Nathan Jenkins: Those people are not fucking prominent. If you look on PubMed and look at the, like, they're just not. um And they should be. like It's such a small percentage of the overall, like the, but and I think I would love to like chat with Mike Isertel, who's a, you know, somebody I know personally, he would say the same thing.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: like, no, no, no. The literature is so inordinate. Like ah the volume of research of of, words expended in research literature on endurance training is so much more in any topic, in any field.
Emily Dow: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: it's like probably It's probably 10 to 1, honestly, like endurance.
Emily Dow: yeah
Nathan Jenkins: for so Especially in something new like this. like and so like That's why I think your study is so novel. like That was like a lot of words to set up, like the the kind the broader context for the listeners. so like Your study is so niche, but but also broadly applicable.
Nathan Jenkins: Niche in the sense of like people aren't doing it, but... broadly applicable in sense that everybody, if you live and breathe and have a warm a warm body and a pulse, you should be lifting weights. And you also have a GI tract. And therefore your study is very relevant.
Emily Dow: And of brain. And...
Nathan Jenkins: And the brain. Yeah. And and and the, and, and, and, and the GI tract talks to the brain. Yeah, exactly.
Emily Dow: One is funny, because I kind of like, you know, in research... I don't know, maybe I have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder, but like, a I was pissed off about the underrepresentation of resistance training and b like resistance training is underperformed by the majority of the population.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: Only like 20% of adults in the United States meet to the ACSM guidelines, which are very generous in terms of what they should be doing from a resistance training perspective.
Emily Dow: And then... women are so underrepresented as authors on that research and also as participants.
Nathan Jenkins: Oh, hell yeah. Hell yeah.
Emily Dow: And so we also happen to be an entirely female research team, only three of us, but an entirely female research team and um almost our entire participant demographic was women also.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Oh, fuck. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah.
Emily Dow: And so that was a really cool opportunity that wasn't even intentional.
Nathan Jenkins: um The participants, which were, were they all women or mostly women?
Emily Dow: We had two men and like eight women. it
Nathan Jenkins: at
Emily Dow: Uh-huh. Oh Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: More or less the same, all starting out, body weight. Like I'm looking at the group the groups. Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: The deltas, so the the resistance exercise group got stronger, and the profile of mood states, which is basically their mood, their happiness, they' theirre their their affect, mental health basically, is ah I'm not describing it properly because I'm not a psychologist, got better got better and improved better in the resistance exercise group versus the control group.
Emily Dow: Yep.
Nathan Jenkins: um And then so too, there was this interaction effect or like ah the delta in your resistance exercise group. was more favorable than it was. There was a negative, ah there was a reduction in LBP in the resistance exercise group compared to the control group, which was there was no change.
Emily Dow: Yeah,
Emily Dow: that was
Nathan Jenkins: um Meanwhile, there was multiple inflammatory cytokines, anti- and pro-inflammatory cytokines. None of it seemed to change that much.
Emily Dow: Yeah, that was kind of...
Nathan Jenkins: So let's to talk about that.
Emily Dow: and that
Nathan Jenkins: Well, like so like your main outcome variable changed, but all these other supporting kind of ancillary variables did not.
Emily Dow: her
Nathan Jenkins: So there's maybe a bit to unpack there too. So you know talk to us about it.
Emily Dow: Yeah. Well, part of that is, i' going to say, my fault. It was discussed in the limitation section somewhere in the sense that we didn't do a great job with the inflammatory cytokine...
Emily Dow: and we did a specific assay for those and I, this was my first doctoral study, so I just didn't think through all these things, but we did not, We did not provide any instruction for like the timing of the most recent bout of exercise with when the participants came to the lab.
Emily Dow: So the problem with that, as you understand fully, is that if they train the day before, their cytokines could have been all over the place from the training stimulus or from a number of variables.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, who the fuck knows?
Emily Dow: So...
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: And the the relationship between those different cytokines and exercise is like always, it follows like an interesting um time course and like the adaptations are favorable, but sometimes acutely it looks bad.
Emily Dow: So again, didn't control that super well. So that data was almost useless, um but we obviously still put it.
Nathan Jenkins: I'm glad you included I'm looking at the panel again. I've looked at this before, but like i love I love, first of all, that you got IL-6 in your anti-inflammatory panel and not the pro-inflammatory panel because people think IL-6 is like a bad guy, but you did you categorized it correctly.
Emily Dow: yeah
Nathan Jenkins: IL-10, yeah, like a lot of these. like It's basically interleukin panel and TNF. like so Oh, gosh. It's P of 0.07 is seven for your TNF. That was close. Damn.
Emily Dow: It's close.
Nathan Jenkins: ah
Emily Dow: don't remember the effects side.
Nathan Jenkins: I'm going to say, ah well, it's your effect size based on the stats 101. If your effect size is, it was probably low to moderate since the P was like, and the statistical metric was close.
Emily Dow: Yep.
Nathan Jenkins: It looks like, yeah, anyway, it was like a favorable change in the resistance group that was, you know, there's just a little bit too much variability for it to be quote unquote real. But like, okay, so, but the cool thing though, the cool thing, ah so you had this whole panel of like inflammatory markers and your main outcome is LBP thing, which is the gut barrier marker
Emily Dow: Yeah. yeah
Nathan Jenkins: And that, what like, amidst all the other, like, that's actually really cool. Like, okay, you just, like, led with your weakness. And I want to, let's talk about your strengths of your study. ah The strength of the study is that you picked a marker that's actually robust against whatever weakness you just said, which is fucking real life, is it not?
Nathan Jenkins: Like, that's my whole thing It's like a researcher is like who like, oh, we didn't control for this. We didn't control for that. Well, you know what? Life doesn't control for any of these things because people are just, like, alive and they work out and they eat and they sleep and they' sometimes they don't sleep and they eat too much fiber and they're shit in their pants.
Nathan Jenkins: And in the midst of all that, you still found significance with your main outcome of interest.
Emily Dow: Right.
Nathan Jenkins: And that is telling, is powerful, is interesting.
Emily Dow: right
Nathan Jenkins: So what do what do you make of this LBP finding that's actually, it looks like it went down in the resistance group, but didn't near as much, no difference in the control group?
Emily Dow: and her
Nathan Jenkins: And that has implication. And then there's also some changes in the profile of mood states as well. And there's a it's correlational and in this kind of study. You can't show cause necessarily, but speak to the speak to that main finding and speak to the correlation.
Emily Dow: Yeah. So, yeah. So, and we, this was very much like, kind of it was meant to be a pilot ultimately for like my next my follow-up study in the sense that we had no idea lbp is used sometimes in the literature but like these blood markers of gut barrier integrity are still somewhat new on the scene so the issue with them is that there aren't reference ranges there's like some you know demographic data that we can point towards to like this is generally normal and healthy people but the challenge with that is that like
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: We don't know what people are coming in with at baseline in terms of these values. And if it's even possible to see a reduction, we would want to see a reduction for LVP. um So we were kind of lucky in the sense that like our population came in with relatively high levels.
Emily Dow: Comparatively, because, and I say that because in our second study that was a follow-up, spoiler alert, this isn't published yet, but we didn't necessarily see the same change in LVP, but our participants showed up with like half, like 50% lower levels at baseline than we did in this initial study.
Nathan Jenkins: Oh, so you saw, we call that a floor effect, yeah.
Emily Dow: Yeah, we had the floor effect at play. So this population came in with elevated, so to speak, LBP. And we saw that even though we didn't measure this acutely, we can assume based on other literature that acutely the gut lining would be stressed by the exercise bout.
Emily Dow: But we saw that as people got stronger, because we were testing strength outcomes also, their gut barrier also got stronger.
Nathan Jenkins: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Dow: And that also aligned with mental health improvements.
Nathan Jenkins: That's right. Yeah. Did you guys run that correlation, Emily? Like I see, I see the table one, your strength, that like the strength changes were profound, right?
Emily Dow: her
Nathan Jenkins: Because as, okay, they did a, they did a eight week, four at four and eight weeks, they got stronger. No shit. And the control group did not. Did you run that correlation with the changes in LVP?
Emily Dow: don't know if we did, actually.
Nathan Jenkins: Well, God, well, God damn it.
Emily Dow: we ran...
Nathan Jenkins: If I was a reviewer on your paper, I would have made you like do that correlation and put it in the figure.
Emily Dow: I'll go back and and run it.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, no, that would be cool to look at.
Emily Dow: I think I did look at that in the second study, so I'll have to look at that data eventually, especially once it's published.
Nathan Jenkins: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And you did, okay. It looks like you did a six RM, which actually totally agree with. That's a good way to do it. um Yeah. So like, it looks like, but but like on the mean level, it does correlate.
Nathan Jenkins: We didn't run, you didn't necessarily run the individual correlation, but on the mean level, you see this not necessarily statistically tested, but like observationally a correlation with the the change in strength, the change in LVP and the change in mood.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Emily Dow: Yeah. So we were the first to demonstrate that those changed in the same direction.
Nathan Jenkins: So that's really cool. Yeah, that's really cool.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: So, um and okay. All right, then let me, let me, let me put it this way and then we can start to close the loop on this. um Some, some listeners and some people like, just imagine like the the typical Instagram commenter here, like, well, no shit.
Nathan Jenkins: Like, duh.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: Obviously, obviously when I get stronger, my gut health improves and my mood improves. You know, why do we need this research? Because we already knew that. What's your response to that
Emily Dow: Well, my response would be, it's always valuable to understand like the why and how of these things.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: And because it's also relevant to like the other gut microbiome discussions that everybody is having, the this is actually looking at, this is capturing the impact This is capturing the impact of a separate intervention from the dietary interventions, which is what the public like generally associates with gut health.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: It's like, what do I need to do with my diet?
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: Blah, blah, blah. But these systems systems are all so interconnected, and exercise obviously influences our health from so many different angles, and this is demonstrating that an exercise intervention, and one that you should be doing anyway, is also going to result in favorable adaptations at the level of the gut that will...
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: augment, like it it will also, it will be in addition to whatever favorable changes you can induce through the diet. And there's probably also like,
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: some relevance because similar, similar like outcomes are relevant to like the endurance exercise conversations and the gut training conversations and like GI symptoms related to exercise.
Emily Dow: And so there is, when it comes to a stressor like exercise, there's going to be some sort of like dose response curve where, okay, this amount of stimulus is favorable to the adaptations.
Emily Dow: But if we go to extreme with it in one direction or another, it could be,
Nathan Jenkins: Yep.
Emily Dow: not so not so great.
Nathan Jenkins: that's right.
Emily Dow: And so this was an example of an appropriate stimulus to induce positive change.
Nathan Jenkins: For sure.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. your Your study definitely like, as it was one of the first for sure, but one of the things it does is like you were just talking about is to define define some of the parameters um of of like a healthy, of a other a beneficial physiological um you know magnitude of the stimulus for sure.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: More broadly, what I would say too is like, you know i I gave you that like hypothetical criticism criticism, the one that I hate the most and like triggers me, which is, ah yeah, we didn't need the study to show this.
Nathan Jenkins: like the the The keyboard warriors on Instagram that always like talk about that. It's like, first of all, that's ah that's a telltale sign that you've never done a research study in in your life if you say that in response to a paper.
Emily Dow: Yeah. No.
Nathan Jenkins: um to until Until such time that that data is out there, then it's all just conjecture.
Emily Dow: yeah
Nathan Jenkins: And now you you produce a body of work, like a piece of evidence that like somebody can very concretely refer to to say, yeah, resistance exercise in this kind of like pretty standardized protocol that you did produces this outcome, these two outcomes. One is at least at least two, hold on.
Nathan Jenkins: the The gut barrier biomarker, um The strength is actually three things. The strength is the gut barrier biomarker and the and the and the mental health outcome. and Which, by the way, the POMS, the POMS score is a very, very, very well documented psychological questionnaire that's used in thousands and thousands of studies as a good indicator of like mental health and mood. It's a profile of mood states.
Nathan Jenkins: Basically like
Emily Dow: It's got seven subdomains. Yeah, it looks at all sorts of different.
Nathan Jenkins: it' a big It's a big deal. um So that's the biggest thing. And the other one, I'm looking at your data in figure two of your paper. And this is the most interesting one to me. is And yeah know you haven't looked at it probably in a while.
Nathan Jenkins: it's been little bit free.
Emily Dow: yeah like I never want to look at that again.
Nathan Jenkins: But it's it's fucking, it's you both no, you should look at this, Emily. It's so good. um What I'm seeing, it's a really powerful finding. And it's kind of independent of the effect on the gut stuff.
Nathan Jenkins: But it's also, maybe there's a correlation here to worth worth exploring, but like, not only did the, what you call them the Rex, i love it, I think of dinosaur. um And i've i've kind of I've got a four-year-old, as you know, that i think he loves dinosaurs, so it makes me laugh.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: But like, ah like the T-Rex, the dinosaur participants, the resistance exercise protocol participants, they had a beneficial change in profile of mood states.
Nathan Jenkins: your control group actually deteriorated. Not only did they not change, but they got their mood got worse by being sedentary over that eight weeks.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Emily Dow: Yeah. I forgot about that. That's true.
Nathan Jenkins: like so I'm looking at the error bars. they're there they don't They do not overlap the X axis, right? Meaning it's not zero.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: That is ah that is a positive, an increase in and bad mood. um
Emily Dow: no
Nathan Jenkins: That's a big deal. unless you train Unless you strength train for eight weeks, you're going to feel shittier is the take-home.
Emily Dow: You're going feel shitty. It's true.
Nathan Jenkins: Uh-huh. Shittier than when you were at baseline. And if you do shrink trains for eight weeks on average in your study, you're going to improve.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Emily Dow: Mm-hmm.
Nathan Jenkins: Um...
Emily Dow: And I think like to zoom out even further, like, I don't know how, I don't know how powerful this would be, but I think especially with resistance training that like we know statistically that it is under, under executed by the majority of the population. I don't think it hurts to give people one more reason why it might be beneficial to them they're If like the gut outcomes sell somebody on it in a way that the strength outcomes wouldn't, that's a win for me also.
Emily Dow: And I don't know, it was like a very fun project for me because we did recruit.
Nathan Jenkins: anything
Emily Dow: So untrained individuals, they really had no exposure to resistance training. It was predominantly like middle-aged women.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Emily Dow: And...
Nathan Jenkins: The did the the the percentage gains and strength suggests that they were very...
Emily Dow: Untrained. And middle-aged...
Nathan Jenkins: edge Oh my God. They've got the... You've got some real like... It's sort like raining PRs for days. Those newbie gains...
Emily Dow: crazy PRs. And that was so fun though.
Nathan Jenkins: 48 to 83 kilograms what of your total total strength.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: the Jesus Christ.
Emily Dow: and Everyone got so much stronger, but like, this is not, they loved it.
Nathan Jenkins: They loved it.
Emily Dow: They were having so much fun. And like, after the study, they, they were telling me all sorts of things. Like, this is the non-publishable, the non-publishable part of research, but they were telling me things like, oh, I got like, like I brought three friends to the gym.
Nathan Jenkins: Right? Right?
Emily Dow: We all did it together this entire time. And we're going to keep doing it now that the study's over.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Dow: Like it legitimately got these people hooked on strength training. And that was like, so rewarding to me beyond actual data.
Nathan Jenkins: yeah yeah yeah yeah Yeah. the the the The little, like i but you've you and I, like I've been involved in research a good bit longer than you, but like you and I have probably been in the same number of of training studies because I hate them because of the, i but i I hate them.
Nathan Jenkins: I love them. I would love to be able to do them for the same reason.
Emily Dow: They're inconvenient.
Nathan Jenkins: with Well, they just like, they they're debilitating.
Emily Dow: yeah
Nathan Jenkins: Like you can't graduate, like as a former PI, like I tried to graduate students and like I would, never have been able to graduate ELISA or anyone else with if their dissertation depending on training studies. So I have more power to you for being able to do that, Emily.
Nathan Jenkins: um
Emily Dow: in three years, ladies and gentlemen.
Nathan Jenkins: yeah you did and you did yeah ah Yeah, you did it fast as you did she's fast as fuck, boy.
Emily Dow: yeah
Nathan Jenkins: um
Emily Dow: pass for
Nathan Jenkins: But ah yeah so but but but like to to to that point of like the the stuff doesn't make it in the papers, oh yeah. When I went to University of Maryland for my PhD, there was a strength training study, and like a massive one, and another massive endurance training study going on, both in older adults, and I got to be tangentially involved in those studies.
Nathan Jenkins: And they're just these older, middle-aged older adults, they were, their quality of life was profoundly impacted. and And this is pre, this is like even pre like era of like the current, what we understand now is like fitness industry, like group classes, CrossFit and whatever else have you, boot camps.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Um, hit classes, whatever have you. That was not a thing back then. um And so like it was it was it was unusual. like we none of us really none of us and that We were all physiologists.
Nathan Jenkins: We weren't psychology people. um but we know it But we definitely noticed it as as human beings, as and especially the students who were involved in the recruiting the subjects and like getting them into the lab and like helping them, you know like overseeing their training, like supervising their training.
Emily Dow: yeah
Nathan Jenkins: this the they it was life-changing. It was life-changing for them you know as individuals.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: And that doesn't make it in the papers a lot of time too. so
Emily Dow: No, that's such a cool part of re research.
Nathan Jenkins: um but But you did, the it is, and you did get that into your paper a little bit with the with this book. but the with the surveys that you that you gave them.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: And that data that I just was like losing my mind about was like the mood got better and the training participants and got worse in the controls. Who you probably didn't see the controls as much because they came at the beginning, and came at the end and that was it right?
Emily Dow: Yeah. Yeah.
Emily Dow: No. Yeah. and And like so many of our, so many of our, our subjects too, like we, we paid them to participate. It was like 50 bucks or something trivial, but most of them participated because they were like, well, I've been curious about learning how to do this, but I'm scared to do it without any sort of guidance.
Nathan Jenkins: By myself.
Emily Dow: So it was a really cool opportunity for them to like receive training and cool opportunity for me to like distribute training to a group that I would never encounter otherwise.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: yeah,
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: I don't know that these these like sub-analyses made their way into this paper. I know they will make their way into my next one. But within the POM survey, you have the seven different mood domains.
Emily Dow: And the way that it works is there's six positive ones. So you think like energy, like vigor, like enthusiasm for life, those sorts of things. And then you've got one negative one.
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: And so the score is like cumulative in the sense that the positive ones contribute like plus however many points, and the negative ones are subtracted. and Within the group the group, and then in the second paper, the groups that were training, they saw positive impacts on all the positive outcomes and then a reduction in the negative affect piece, which was tension is the way that it's described.
Emily Dow: But you see not only like the obvious like mood elevation, but also a reduction in like frustration and negative aspects of mood.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Dow: I think it's really cool for it.
Nathan Jenkins: yeah That is huge, yeah, yeah. ah Basically, if you train hard, lift-heavy shit, you feel better. um
Emily Dow: Groundbreaking.
Nathan Jenkins: And you're gutting.
Emily Dow: and i'm I'm stepping into the shoes of the keyboard
Nathan Jenkins: Um,
Nathan Jenkins: ah
Emily Dow: And there will be more. so like that dissertation, the second dissertation study, which was similar, but it was better. It was more rigorous. It was a better executed version.
Nathan Jenkins: ah it's a it's a
Emily Dow: a
Nathan Jenkins: It's a cool paper. i've yeah like i've read That's a really cool paper.
Emily Dow: There's some added layers of intrigue. So that one's coming. And then the project that I've been working on for my postdoc also implements like we're looking at a lot of very cool outcomes, to be honest, even though that was a monster. of It still is a monster of a project.
Emily Dow: um We're going to be able to look at short chain fatty acid production. We're going to look at the gut microbiome composition. We're going to look at LBP. and also another marker of gut barrier integrity as it relates acutely to exercise and then also to supplementation with a prebiotic um prebiotic fiber and fermented whey protein supplement.
Emily Dow: It's going to be a really interesting couple of papers once those come out.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: So that'll add to the also, even though it's a different protocol.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: For sure. this is probably what, like what you just said is like of two to three year timeline of papers coming out.
Emily Dow: Yeah.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, for sure.
Emily Dow: Yes.
Nathan Jenkins: At least. Yeah.
Emily Dow: We're looking at a long time horizon, but that is that is the world of research, folks.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's cool. That's how it goes. Yeah. um Awesome. Well, this is our longest episode for sure. Emily, we should probably start wrapping up. um
Emily Dow: I know.
Nathan Jenkins: This has been really awesome.
Emily Dow: Oops.
Nathan Jenkins: This has been so good. Yeah. Well, listen, ah we're both, we're both long winded college professors. You come here to learn and probably listen to this and not just one sitting unless you got a long commute or something.
Nathan Jenkins: um But how do we want to wrap this up?
Emily Dow: You guys all asked for long-form content, so we're going to keep long-form content.
Nathan Jenkins: people people People do ask for it. People definitely to ask for it. And you can always play stuff with like 1.2x or whatever and it'd be fine.
Emily Dow: Yeah. Shave it down.
Nathan Jenkins: ah how do we How do you want to wrap it up?
Emily Dow: um I think... Oh, man. I feel like key takeaways, TLDR, you can probably, like...
Emily Dow: shut out a lot of the noise that you see on social media related to the gut microbiome. But now hopefully if you consume that content, you are more informed on the subject and you can kind of parse through some of what the fuck people are talking about.
Emily Dow: And
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah.
Emily Dow: What I think the majority of people need to focus on in their day-to-day lives are things like fiber, overall dietary diversity. um
Nathan Jenkins: Mm-hmm.
Emily Dow: if there are more complex systems or, sorry, symptoms at play and you've done all of that, you're legitimately checking all the boxes that we've talked about, then it might make sense to do some further testing with a very...
Emily Dow: I think a point that you made in terms of like looking at the gut and the blood work and the symptoms, like that speaks to the fact that you need a very well-trained practitioner to be looking at that sort of information.
Emily Dow: So don't just find some guru on the internet.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, yeah.
Emily Dow: um But generally speaking, you can cover a lot of the bases that we know right now with very simple lifestyle modification, which is great news.
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, it's i think it's it does come back to the boring stuff, like the simple
Emily Dow: Lame. Oh,
Nathan Jenkins: like yeah and and it's isn't it funny like how people like you and i can like wrap on this stuff for hours literally but it all it all comes back to like the the basics always um almost doesn't matter what the topic is it's like the the the boring basics always um but no but but that being said though emily i learned a lot by talking about your work with you um And even though I'd read this paper before, to be frank, I was actually looking at it again for the first time in a little while while we're talking and i'm like, oh wait, I see this data again. You know, that that was really cool. That was fun. And i always do like, that always happens when I read a really good paper and in then like in a journal club kind of setting ah can in real time, like look at it and talk about it with the author. That's really cool.
Nathan Jenkins: um So that was fun.
Emily Dow: Well, I feel great because somebody actually read my paper, so that...
Nathan Jenkins: And, and,
Nathan Jenkins: Yeah, well, and you've had the chance, I think, to talk about this stuff on other podcasts you've been on, but I don't know that, you know, there's always that, like, people who, like, would actually read it. um You know, like, it's pretty cool to be able to have that conversation with you. So so hopefully the audience enjoyed that, and we'll do some more of that.
Nathan Jenkins: if you yeah so but anyway, all right. This has been fun. Lab Rats, thank you for listening as always. um i always make you close it out, but I'll do it now. ah Like, subscribe.
Nathan Jenkins: um By the time you're hearing this, we do have a, I'm sure, I'm certain we'll have a live Instagram page. So follow that. Follow both of us. I'm at Dr. Nathan Jenkins. Of course, you already know at Dr. Emily Dow on Instagram.
Nathan Jenkins: Follow us and follow at Lab Rats Radio, which is, or at Lab Rats Radio, labratradio pod on Instagram as well, which is the official Instagram for the podcast. And all of this will be like cross posted between all of our accounts and whatnot.
Nathan Jenkins: And you'll get clips.
Emily Dow: We'll have stuff in the show notes that you can easily access.
Nathan Jenkins: And we'll have yeah stuff in the show notes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever the hell you get your podcasts, which as of this recording, we have no idea how to actually publish that, but we're going to figure it out here soon.
Nathan Jenkins: We're going to start publishing some of these episodes, um and then they'll be coming out on a week-by-week basis. So yeah, we're if we're we're having a fun time getting this stuff started.
Nathan Jenkins: So yeah anything else to add, Emily?
Emily Dow: Nope.
Nathan Jenkins: Okay, awesome. Lab Rats out.
Emily Dow: Loretta's out.
Nathan Jenkins: See you guys next time.
Emily Dow: Bye.
Nathan Jenkins: Peace. Bye.
