Episode Summary
In this episode of the Empowered Nutrition Podcast, Erin is joined by Dr. Rachele Pojednic, a renowned expert in nutrition, supplementation, and muscle physiology. Dr. Pojednic is the CEO and Founder of Strong Process Education, the Director of Scientific Research at Restore Hyperwellness, and a Lecturer at Stanford University. With a PhD in nutritional biochemistry, she has conducted extensive research on the impact of nutrition and exercise on muscle health, performance, and recovery. During this conversation, Dr. Pojednic and Erin discuss the growing body of evidence around creatine supplementation for women, the importance of muscle maintenance for longevity, and how to sift through wellness trends to find what truly works. The episode also explores common wellness myths, the science behind GLP-1 medications, and why focusing on the long-term approach to health is key to living your best life.
Episode Highlights
- Creatine for Women: Dr. Pojednic discusses how creatine supplementation (3-5 grams per day) is showing promising results for women’s cognitive health and physical performance, with no need for a loading phase. The benefits accumulate in muscles and other tissues, including the brain.
- Debunking Wellness Myths: The conversation dives into common wellness trends and myths, with Dr. Pojednic pointing out that supplements should be viewed as tools for marginal gains, not miracle solutions. Foundational nutrition—getting enough protein, fiber, and healthy fats—remains crucial.
- The Truth About GLP-1 Supplements: Dr. Pojednic explains the difference between prescription GLP-1 medications (like Ozempic and Wegovy) and the herbal supplements that claim to mimic them. While some herbs may mildly stimulate GLP-1 production, they cannot match the potency of the prescription versions, which are GLP-1 receptor agonists.
- Why Muscle Maintenance Matters: Dr. Pojednic emphasizes the importance of maintaining lean muscle mass, particularly for women, to ensure long-term health and vitality. Strength training is key to improving performance and supporting longevity, especially as muscle loss accelerates starting in your 30s.
- Long-Term Health and Longevity: Rather than focusing on achieving a specific body image or trying to extend life by a few years, Dr. Pojednic talks about the importance of increasing healthspan—living a strong, active life well into old age.
- Avoiding Shiny Object Syndrome in Wellness: Dr. Pojednic shares her perspective on how wellness trends and quick fixes can be distracting. She encourages focusing on long-term goals and taking an evidence-based approach to supplements, exercise, and overall health.
Resources Mentioned
- Dr. Rachele Pojednic’s Website: www.rachelepojednic.com
- Strong Process Education: Dr. Pojednic’s education platform offering accredited, evidence-based courses on nutrition, supplementation, and more for wellness professionals. Visit www.strongprocess.com to explore courses on general nutrition, exercise physiology, gut-brain connection, recovery, and more.
- Use discount code: EMPOWERED50
- Restore Hyperwellness: Dr. Pojednic serves as the Director of Scientific Research at Restore Hyperwellness, an innovative wellness company. Learn more about their services at www.restore.com.
- Social Media: Follow Dr. Rachele Pojednic for more insights on nutrition and wellness:
- Instagram: @rachelepojednic
- Instagram: @strongprocess
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/strongprocess
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Subtitles:
Hello and welcome back to the Empower Nutrition Podcast, Erin Skinner here, and I can’t wait to share this episode with you from Dr. Rachele Pojednic, who is the CEO and founder of Strong Process Education, and the Director of Scientific Research at Restore Hyper Wellness. She holds a faculty appointment at Stanford University and is a research associate at the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She received her PhD in nutritional biochemistry from Tufts University, and her current research examines nutrition supplementation and physical activity interventions on muscle physiology, performance and recovery. She has a passion for science communication and has been featured in NPR, New York Times Time Popular Science, Oprah Daily, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Pojednic and I had a great talk during this episode about nutrition for women when it comes to both performance and longevity. We talked a lot about the specific myths that we see in the wellness space that tend to throw women off the specific drivers of results that we think are important when it comes to nutrition, and then we spend a fair amount of time talking about supplements, what we think are the most important supplements for women, and what supplements are important to make sure you avoid.
So I hope you enjoy this episode with her, and as always, please do check her out if you connected with her insights, which I certainly did. And go ahead and check out the links in the show notes, give her a follow and connect with her from there. Take care. Hi, Rachele. Welcome to the Empower Nutrition Podcast. How are you?
I am terrific, Erin. Thank you so much for having me on. I’m thrilled to talk to you today.
Same. Thank you so much for being on. I think we have a lot to talk about.
I think we have a lot in common too, which is pretty fun.
I think so as well. I mean, we, we just met, but I’m already getting vibes that maybe we’re both neither, so I’m also getting a doctorate and you have your doctor obviously, but I’m almost at the end of mine and, but yet also not. I, I think there’s like a whole world of kind of that’s more traditional, more conventional, more like ultra research based, which ties in well with conventional healthcare. Then there’s this sort of like other side of the coin that’s integrative medicine, functional medicine and all that world and non-traditional approaches. And I think some people are kind of like fully in one camp, and I see big problems with like both camps. So just a hater.
I definitely have always had a foot in both camps. Yeah. You know, my background is my, my more recent background is in the sort of more traditional academic space, right? So it’s, you know, really classically trained in human subjects trials and specifically I look at muscle and supplementation and performance and healthy aging. But before that I was, you know, a wellness professional. I was in the fitness and wellness world. I, I like to tell the, the story that I started, you know, as a personal trainer when I was 18 years old at Valley’s Total Fitness. And if you remember what Valley’s is, that means you are of a certain vintage. And then more recently, you know, have sort of pivoted my career back into having a part in both spaces again where, you know, my current work is with a company called Restore Hyper Wellness, where I’m the director of their research, scientific research arm, specifically a division called Restore Labs.
And this is a space where we’re really applying the traditional academic scientific, you know, inquiry into some more complimentary therapies. So things like IV micronutrients and, you know, complimentary therapies like red light therapy and compression and infrared sauna and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Really trying to figure out how all of these things work. And so, you know, I think people probably know me best if you were to ask them as kind of a myth buster, but I am an open-minded myth buster. And yeah, the idea that there are a lot of things that we just don’t know yet. And I’m excited to be a part of answering a lot of questions in that space.
Right? Yeah, exactly. I think it’s so tricky for just the everyday person to navigate the difference between what’s something that’s truly founded in science versus something that really hasn’t been thoroughly researched. So it could potentially be true and based off of this person’s experience, say in clinical care, in a research setting, this is what they’re saying is their belief of what’s real. And then there’s just straight qury that’s like, it sounds just as good as the other two things, but it’s actually, it has been researched. It has been studied. And what they’re saying does go against the research. I mean, it’s just so hard to suss that out. I think in today’s world
It is really hard for the general population because reading science is also really hard too, right? Yeah. Like you can’t get the, you know, real intricacies of the scientific studies by just reading an abstract, which is mostly what people have access to. And the concept that you were just describing there, I like to describe it as the absence of evidence versus the evidence of absence, right? Yeah. And so I think a lot of the therapies that, you know, we might talk about or that I am investigating right now, really do suffer from an absence of evidence. So this is the, we just haven’t studied that yet, or we haven’t studied it in a specific population. So if we look at, you know, the, the world that I come from, which is supplementation and muscle and performance, the majority of those studies have been done in young healthy men or in mice. Right? Right, right. And so applying those concepts to older women or to menopausal women, or to older men or to humans in general, gets really sticky, right? Yeah. And the opposite side of that is exactly what you said is the evidence of absence where, hey, we’ve studied that and that’s not what’s going on. And you know, there’s a lot of wellness myths that need to kind of be, you know, need
To dive.
We actually have studied it. And so, you know, we have an answer to that question. And so yeah, that’s, I spend a lot of time trying to sort of navigate those two spaces.
Yeah, same. It’s so important. I mean, we kind of work with all types of people, but generally our most common person that works with us is gonna be a woman sort of maybe between the ages of like 30 to 60, who gets exposed to so much on say Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube and magazines at the checkout counter. It’s just everywhere. And so I’m wondering maybe like, tell me, tell me your thoughts around that population in terms of they’re non-classical in terms of what, when you say performance, I think of more like, okay, an elite athlete or a special forces person. But to me I apply, I have a background in performance nutrition as well, and I apply that thinking a lot to this population because I find that they’re, they really do need to specifically, I think will often like increase their lean ma mass especially. So te but tell me your thoughts on that population in terms of what you think is like missing maybe in their big picture of their health.
Yeah, so I think the first challenging thing goes right to this idea of, you know, absence of evidence, right? So we have very little data on women between the ages of 30 and 60 and even less data on women that are postmenopausal usually after the age of 60. Yeah. And that’s really frustrating, I think, to a lot of women because, you know, I, I don’t know about you, but you know, the, the most I really had growing up on learning about my body was like in health class in seventh grade, right? Yeah. So between those two spaces of not being educated, then also not having good clear data, it leaves this gigantic hole with a lot of questions for women that are going through some really important physiological transitions in those in their life. Yeah. So having are smart
Menopause. Yeah,
Exactly. Exactly. They have questions, they recognizing, you know, that their bodies are changing. And because of this big hole we have, you know, people are searching for answers. And again, I come from the wellness background. I think that generally people are in a place of empathy and of caring, and they are trying really hard to help other people by giving answers. And 90% of the answers that we have right now are just not based in any evidence because the evidence doesn’t exist. So it’s a challenge, and I’ll, I’ll give you some sort of sobering statistics. When we look at the performance literature, only about 6% on last count of the performance literature. So this is, you know, muscle performance, physical performance, athletic performance in women, only 6% of all of the studies were done in women alone. And it’s funny because I, I’ve been, you know, submitting grants to study women and study women, and you know, when I, my population and my studies is just females, I will inevitably get reviews back from my reviewers that say, why do you wanna study just women? And I’m like, what? Because I wanna understand what’s going on in a woman’s body and, and half
The half the world population no be deal. Yeah. Right. Maybe we should research them.
And the second question that I always get is, well, are you gonna include men and compare them to men? And I’m like, no, no, I don’t want to compare it to men. I wanna understand what’s happening in women. And oh, by the way, you know, 94% of the data is in men. We’ve got a pretty good understanding of what’s going on there. Can we please look at these different, you know, transitions in life and these different Yeah. Physiological changes that are happening for females. And I’ll give you one more, even more sobering statistic. This is, this is one that I, I constantly go back to double check that this is actually the statistic because it blows my mind every time. 0.1%. Let me say that again. 0.1% of data in neurological studies, so in the brain are done in women. Really? Yeah. So there’s studies that look at men and women together, but ones that look specifically at women. And so this is really where, you know, when you think about all of the, you know, the, the social media posts or the headlines or whatever, that, you know, you’re at the checkout counter, it’s really hard to wade through that information, especially as a normal average human that’s just trying to get through your day. But even as a scientist, as a researcher, because there is no answer yet. Yeah. Because it hasn’t been investigated. And so I think that’s where women particularly in this space get really frustrated and rightfully so.
Yeah. Because
The data, it’s coming, but it doesn’t exist yet.
Yeah, exactly. What would you say are some by what you, what you just said that you might not be able to answer this, but when you think about the performance research that does exist that’s mostly been performed on men, what do you think are some of the main sort of like findings and recommendations that come from that that really don’t serve women? Like everything’s on the table? So is it some, I don’t, I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but maybe just go with that of like, what do you think are some of the things that really do differ between men and women in this space?
Yeah, I mean, I think in general the recommendations tend to trend in the same direction, right? So you think about the, the sort of foundational performance,
Like you need protein.
Exactly. So you need protein, you need lean skeletal muscle. And you know, I’ve been studying skeletal muscle for over a decade, almost 15 years now. I’m, I’m biased, but I’m Right. Skeletal muscle is the tissue of healthy aging, you know? So, so those things are going to trend in the same direction. When we start to look at things that I think are interesting that are starting to emerge right now is that if we stay with muscle for a minute, we see that men and or male and female muscle ages differently, then you would perhaps expect, for example, you know, we, we are all on these, the treadmill, if you will, the literal and metaphorical treadmill of, you know, should we be doing high intensity interval training? Should we be doing sprint interval training? Should we be doing zone two? Right? All of these things that apply, I believe differently to males and females. And this goes back to even animal data, right? So yeah, interestingly, when you look at females, we are endurance machines, right? We are built to endure when you look under skeletal muscle. Yeah. Right. All ways we are built to, I took that way too, like
When we look at skeletal muscle, and again, this is sort of, you know, conserved across species is that on average females tend to have aerobic, you know, endurance fibers, these type one fibers. And we have less, although still significantly a, a large amount of the type two power strength fibers that is oftentimes reversed in fail males and females. So males will tend to have more by proportion of these strength and power fibers. And so what we see, which is really fascinating, and this was from, from early data that I, I worked on when I was back as a graduate student, is we will see that as you age, that power and strength metric is a really important component to whether or not you are able to essentially function as an older adult. And by that I mean, you know, seventies, eighties, nineties, interestingly, when I was in graduate school, I studied skelet muscle and vitamin D specifically.
Hmm. And I remember sitting in a lecture with one of the professors that was talking about how vitamin D and calcium are so important for bone, right? And that’s what we learned way back in the day, is that vitamin D is calcium is so important for bone and for teeth. And the metric that could come coming up over and over again was, you know, if you don’t have enough vitamin D, you don’t have enough calcium that’s been absorbed when you fall, you break bones. And I raised my hand and I said, it’s interesting that we’re breaking bones and I understand why that is happening, but why are people falling in the first place? Yeah. Like, what is going on that is you causing them to make contact with the ground. And so some of my earliest studies when we were, and I was, you know, back in the sarcopenia lab at Tufts is we were trying to understand what goes first, the strength and sort of endurance of that muscle, or the ability to move that muscle very quickly.
And that’s what we found is that the ability to sort of move fast, and that’s a interaction between the nerve and the skeletal muscle. And it’s particularly pronounced in females as they get older. Interesting. And one of the suspicions here is, you know, if you are an endurance machine for your whole life and you don’t train that power, strength, speed element, when that muscle starts to inevitably decay with older age, those are the fibers that tend to go first. So these women might be able to walk around all day in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, but when they go their arm out to catch themselves, if they’ve slipped on ice or tripped, they’re not able to sufficiently, you know, stop their fall. And so they break their bones. And so this is something that I think is really important and different between men and women to come back to your original question is, yes, we know muscle is critically key for healthy aging, but what that muscle actually looks like and the makeup of that muscle might be particularly unique between men and women. And women as we age need to make sure that we’re paying attention to those strength and power muscles so that we have sort of a healthy trajectory as we get older.
So, interesting. It sounds like you maybe are alluding to you not only think about, okay, making sure you ensure that you have your needed amount of lean mass, but also you’re thinking about that neurological system that that controls
It. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And you know, interestingly as well, when we start to look at the women and, and the aging trajectory, this is also going to be dramatically affected as we were just talking about a moment ago, between the transitions that happen between perimenopause, menopause and then post menopause. And when we look at the changes of hormones that females have, you know, you go from having an abundance of a hormone like estrogen post menopause, you have almost no estrogen. And that’s critically important for making sure that your skeletal muscle is robust and overcoming that reduction in a hormone like estrogen among others. You know, that’s sort of the, the easy target. But that is challenging for women in a very unique way than men because they’re obviously not going to have that major transition in their midlife. And before we move on, you know, something to also consider is we think about this where, you know, people say, oh, I, you know, I’m 40, I’m 50 and 60. Should I start resistance training? Yes, a hundred percent. You should start resistance training if you don’t do it yet. 20
Yeah,
20%. Yeah. So when we look at that data and we start to see that decline of muscle with aging, particularly in women, we see that about every decade we will have a reduction of somewhere between three to 5% of our skeletal muscle mass as females. And it starts at age 30, it starts at age 30. So if we don’t have this reserve of these type two power strength fibers starting at a young age, when we start to see these declines, it’s gonna be exponentially more detrimental if we haven’t been doing these strength and power routines at a younger age. Yeah. So start with your daughters, like get going. I mean, you get everybody get going now. Yeah. You know, if, if, if 20 years ago was the best day to start, today is the second day. So
It’s the second to best day. Exactly. I mean, what do you think it is? I mean, I, I feel like it’s, so, first of all, so few women know about this problem. It’s like a truck coming down the freeway towards them. The science is there. We know you’re gonna lose lean mass. We know you have just by virtue of your gender, huge risk of falls, hip fractures, morbid and mortality related to that sarcopenia. They’re not strength training. They don’t seem to know. No, no. It doesn’t seem like people are telling them how important it is. Or even if they’re, they kind of catch wind of it. It seems like they have a really hard time getting going with it. Do do you think that’s the case?
I think it is. I think it’s a multifold. So I think yes, you’re totally right that the data is new, although incredibly convincing, right? So there’s something there. And because this data, particularly in women and strength is, is newer and we go back, let’s call it 20, 30 years, you know, again, dating ourselves as a certain, you remember like the Jane Fond is of the world, or Hey,
I remember my mom watching Jane Fonda. Yeah, how about that? I’m sure you do.
Suzanne Summers, I’m aging looking cute
On her VHS tape
The vs tape. Exactly. You know, women were told to do more sort of like gentle aerobic exercise, right? Yes. And, and that wasn’t based on any, you know,
It’s like a
Right. They weren’t saying like you do strength training, which is kind of what people did. And you know, there’s this whole diet culture component too where it was like, why are we exercise? We exercise to burn calories. Aerobic exercise is great for burning calories. But now we’re starting to also realize that exercise is critically important for things beyond losing weight. And this is where I think there’s gonna be a pretty significant paradigm shift where we’re seeing, oh, you should move your body for a million other reasons besides calorie burning.
Absolutely. Yeah. What do you think about, I’m just thinking more about like male focused research things like fasted exercise for women, time restricted feeding, intermittent fasting for women, low carb ketogenic diets for women. There isn’t a lot of research, but I’m curious if you had thoughts on it. Yeah,
No, there’s not a lot of research in general on everything that you just called out. I will say that there is, there’s interesting data that in for the majority of the, the research that you’re talking about has been done in a mixed cohort of males and females. So there’s been very little on, you know, studies that have done just in females or even comparing males and females so often with these, you know, like yeah, time restricted feeding or the ketogenic diet. These, you know, are not only new, but the studies tend to be fairly small. Yeah. And if you know about, you know, clinical trial research or working with, you know, doing some kind of an intervention like a diet or something like that, they have to be particularly powered, meaning that you need to have enough people to really run these statistical analysis at, at an appropriate way or in an appropriate way.
And so they, they haven’t really been powered to compare males and females, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t sort of infer physiologically what could potentially happen in a female that is different than a male. And so when we look at the time restricted feeding, for example, the way that or intermittent fasting is it’s sort of, you know, being tossed around in the world. Yeah. When we look at that data, we see that intermittent fasting is not being implemented on the street, if you will, in the same way that it is in the research studies.
Yeah.
So when you look at the research studies, they tend to restrict feeding. So it’s called time restricted eating or time restricted feeding TRE or TRF. And usually what they’ll do in the majority of the studies is they’ll have people actually eat earlier in the day and they will yes. Their feeding from somewhere around seven o’clock in the morning until about four o’clock in the afternoon. The way that it is being interpreted on
Skip breakfast,
You got it, is to skip breakfast. Right. And so, you know, there’s all these talk, this talk, yeah, I just mentioned, you know, estrogen as a hormone, but cortisol is another one where we really think about cortisol is a stress hormone. And if you add extra stress to your body, including not eating, you’re going to have detrimental effects downstream. And so this idea of skipping breakfast is probably not particularly great in general when we look at those studies. And we can tie it to circadian rhythms, which is really where that’s the strongest data is, and I’ll come back to that in just a moment, but when we look specifically at training with, you know, whether you’re fasted or you have eaten or something like that, we tend to see that there is likely differences in males and females where females tend to train better and also have better outcomes if they are training fed.
Just simply because of the differences in our ske of muscle and our metabolism. Yeah. They all tend to do all right if they are training, you know, let’s say early in the morning without eating breakfast. But it does seem to be particularly with carbohydrates that women do better with their training, better with their recovery when they have these fuels on board. The other thing, and I’ll pull it back to just a second, is I said a moment ago about the circadian rhythm. So what we’re seeing with time restricted feeding is everybody’s kind of using this as a weight loss strategy. It works, you cut out a meal, you cut out four or 500 calories weight, like that’s just, you know, math at the end of the day. But what we’re actually noticing in the literature is that if you have these, you know, eating windows earlier in the day, what it tends to do is to stop your feeding before you go to bed.
Right? So look at the circadian data and circadian loosely when you look at circadian rhythms means you’re awake in the light and you’re asleep in the dark. Right. And your body and your hormonal fluctuations are kind of paired to that light and dark exposure. Yeah. And so when we look at that time restricted feeding studies and we see that people start eating earlier in the day and they stop eating, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5 hours before they go to bed, they sleep better, they have better metabolic outcomes, they might lose a little bit of weight. Although the most interesting data, I think is in these other metrics that are so important for overall health and the number on the scale. And so when we see that, it’s really interesting because what it’s allowing you to do essentially before you go to bed, is to, rather than having to choose rest or digest when you, you know, are sort of in this relaxation phase before you go to bed, your body can actually choose, I’m gonna rest instead of digest your food. Yeah. Allows all of these beneficial outcomes to happen overnight. So I would say time restricted eating, think about it more as, you know, sort of like shifting your meals away from your bedtime. And I would say think about it more from a metabolic health perspective rather than a weight loss perspective.
Yeah, absolutely. I think so few people know about that body of research seems to be coming pretty clear that there’s this pretty tight communication between your metabolism and your circadian rhythm such that your, your body knows what time of day it is and it’s gonna do different things with exact same food depending on whether you’re eating it during the daytime versus the night.
Exactly. And, and they can,
Yeah.
You think about the, you, you know, you just nailed it completely where we think about how the, you know, your metabolism is tied to the, the light and dark people right. Now I, I mentioned cortisol just a moment ago and we know that cortisol is a stress hormone and you know, we wanna make sure that we keep our stress under control, right. We don’t wanna have too much stress. But actually it is really important for your body to recognize stress inducing molecules in your body like hor, like the hormone cortisol because it indicates you need to be awake, you need to be alert, you need to pay attention. And to your point of, you know, when we’re eating according to our circadian rhythms, all of these hormones are potentially pulsed throughout the day or the night according to a circadian effect. And cortisol is a beautiful example.
Yeah. So when we look at cortisol and we’re testing it, we have to be so careful about when we test it during the day. Yeah. Because it has really specific times when you test right. Thing, you know, first thing in the morning your cortisol is gonna be really low, you look 30 minutes later and your cortisol has a very natural and important spike because you’ve just woken up and it wants to be alert and it wants to be paying attention. And then eventually it’ll start going down throughout the day and I’ll have people that come to me and say, oh, I tested my cortisol, it’s so high. And I was like, well when did you test it? Oh, about nine in the morning. And I just got there and they were like, I was fasted and I woke up at, you know, like eight o’clock that morning and I was like, well yeah, obviously your cortisol is gonna be high because that’s what it’s supposed to be doing.
Right. And so this is something that we have to really pay attention to as well. And it is likely, again, coming back to your original question of the differences between males and females, while the pattern might be similar between males and females, depending on what we do earlier in the day, eating or not eating, whether or not we’re training or we’re not training, whether or not we’re doing strength training or aerobic training, all of these things are going to interact together. We wanna be really careful about being super reductionist about either the markers or the, you know, yeah. The patterns that we’re paying attention to because they’re all really gonna work together at the end of the day.
I really wish I had a dollar for every time. So we, we will collect like cortisol curves across the day. That’s what we like to see. ’cause of what you’re talking about, if you get a one point, it’s like who knows what’s going on. But when you get the curve, you get a good idea. We’ll often combine that with CGM data. So what’s the blood sugar across full, you know, several days of 24 hours, just a day to the blood sugar. And I just wish I had a dollar for every woman that is eating really low carb during the day, exercising, fasted time, restricted feeding, doing all the kind of like, like man research things and has really poor blood sugar control. Especially at night she’ll just be riding it like one hundred ten, a hundred twenty all night. Her hemoglobin A1C will be pre-diabetic, she can’t lose weight. It’s like, I just don’t think that that works. I think women do, like you said, do better with consistent complex carbohydrates. Maybe even starting before your workout that prevents you from having to get into gluconeogenesis where you’re mobilizing cortisol to make new blood sugar because of the lack of carbohydrate intake and Got it. It’s just not even what I wanted to think because I used to be like kind of hardcore, you know, man research world and it’s just like seeing hundreds of PE women in their data. It’s like I actually think women like carbs.
Yeah. Women love carbs, you know what else loves carbs? Your brain.
Yeah. Your
Brain uses carbs pretty much exclusively as a fuel. It might use a little ketone here or there if you’re making it, but yeah, if you are, you know, constantly having brain fog, like you said, can’t lose weight, you feel like you’re, you know, you are watching your numbers kind of fluctuate all over the place, you know, you’re probably tired, dehydrated, or you need some, some carbs on board.
Yeah. It’s paradoxical. ’cause they’re seeing all the the things, you know, and so they’re like, well what the heck? I’m already intermittent fasting, I’m already eating low carb, I’m already doing fasted exercise and I’m still struggling with my metabolism and my weight. And it’s like, maybe that’s not the right thing for you. You know,
And the alternative right now, you know, to your point, you just mentioned this idea of gluconeogenesis, which is, you know, for people that don’t know that term, it’s your body using different components of fuel to create or break down stores of glu of glycogen for carbohydrates because you want a certain amount of sugar, blood sugar, glucose in your bloodstream. And when we go on these super, super, super high protein diets, which everybody is on a kick on right now, and I, I’m all for the protein, like we gotta make build that muscle ladies. But there is but
Go preach. Go. I’m with you. Go. We
Gotta be careful because your body is, you know, I just mentioned a moment ago, your brain is gonna scavenge for glucose and your body has low, low, low blood glucose. It’s gonna start to use other fuel sources in order to create the fuel that the most important organ in your body needs your brain. Yeah. And so this is, I find this really interesting as well is if, you know, we’ve been on all these low carb diets forever and ever and ever. If for whatever reason you don’t have protein, which is gonna be the major macronutrient that will be turned into sugar, your body can’t turn fat into sugar, but it can’t use protein if for whatever reason you don’t have enough protein on board, you haven’t eaten enough today it comes right back to my favorite tissue is the place it’s gonna go looking for that fuel is gonna be your skeletal muscle and it will start to break it down.
And you might be in the gym working out as hard as you can. You’re like, why is my muscle not getting bigger? Why am I so tired? What’s going on? Why is my blood sugar all over the place? It’s because you are not giving the body the fuel that it needs. And when your body doesn’t have the fuel that it needs, it’s gonna go looking for it. And the place that your body is gonna go looking for fuel if you don’t have enough sugar on board is gonna be those muscles. So think about this, if you are doing fasted exercise in the morning, let’s say you are strength training, you are doing or doing those high intensity intervals, which are gonna be anaerobic, looking for that glucose for anaerobic metabolism. If you are strength training or working out really hard first thing in the morning and you haven’t eaten ladies and you’re like, I really wanna build muscle, I wanna make sure that I’m building that lean tissue and you don’t have fuel on board, particularly carbohydrates, your brain is gonna go looking for them. And all that work you’re trying so hard to do with your muscles is gonna be futile at the end of the day because your body is gonna go looking for fuel before it’s gonna start to build that tissue. So fasted exercise, not a good idea.
Yeah. And with you, so let’s say I am eating a a pretty balanced, like sufficient protein diet, complex carbohydrates distributed across the day, healthy fats, not a lot of refined carbohydrates or processed. So
You’re nail, you’re nailing it, you’re nailing it, you’re already nailing it,
Doing it. I’m, I’m getting in the gym, I’m lifting three or four times a week heavy to fatigue, I’m getting stronger. Let’s talk supplements. I know this is a big area of specialty for you. Should I just completely run away? Because they’re not DA, you know, the whole thing you always hear is like, oh my gosh, you’re not FDA like regulated. It’s like horrible for you. Or should I just like believe every Instagram ad I see and buy like 50,000 green powders? Like what should I do?
Yeah, this is such a good question and I think it’s super important. And the answer is somewhere in the middle, right? Shocker. Always. So I am a believer, I’m a researcher of and a believer in the use of strategic supplementation, right? So I don’t think you should be taking everything willy-nilly and you know, pounding down 32 pills in the morning. But I do think that there’s good reason to supplement the diet. So I always start right away with a multivitamin, right? So if you’re doing everything but you’re also exercising really hard, a multi is just a great way to make sure that you are topping off all of the nutrients that you need. And there’s really good literature. So in the last five years or so, I’ve been doing a bunch of work with war fighters and with, we call them tactical athletes. I know you talk about it a lot and you work with this population as well, specifically with females.
We see that a multivitamin during basic training, and this has been sort of shown a couple of times, is when you are ramping up that training like crazy helps with musculoskeletal injuries, keeps those rates lower, helps with recovery and performance. Hmm. So just making sure that you have enough nutrients on board as you are breaking your body down, I think is critical. Yeah. You don’t need to go crazy. A hundred percent of your daily value is gonna do the trick, right? So we’re just topping things off. If you’ve got your protein and you got your complex carbs and your, your berries and you’re making sure that you get all the things that you need. So I, I really like just a multi at the, you know, at the start of the day and then adding onto that some things, and we talked about a couple of them already.
I’m always a big proponent of vitamin D supplementation and I know that this is kind of, you know, the literature is a little bit all over the place and I sort of take a step back oftentimes with vitamin D and I have to look at the literature over and over again and really think about like who are they studying, in what context are they studying it? And so I think about myself, I, you know, I’ve grown up grow up, I grew up in New England and we know in the literature, if you’re above a certain latitude, you know you can’t make vitamin D in your skin during the wintertime. So between the months of about October to April, the wavelength of light is not strong enough to make the vitamin D in your skin. And so when we think just practically about that, right, like adding a D during the wintertime is a really important sort of fail safe to make sure that you are getting enough of this essential nutrient.
And we know it is critically essential if your body is able to make it all by itself, right? Yeah. So we wanna make sure, you know, you get your D particularly in the wintertime up to about 4,000 IUs per day. You pair that with a calcium if you are worried about bone. The other thing to pair it with, which I just think is awesome, is an Omega-3, right? Yeah. So make that unsaturated fat. We know unsaturated fat is essential in the diet. Essential means you must eat it because you can’t make it. Yeah. Omega threes are critically important for antioxidants, for brain health, for heart health. And the great thing about pairing it with a D is D is a fat soluble vitamin. So you need a little Yeah. Put together is that in the same pill? Yeah, exactly. Down it. And you are getting two really great things and making sure that your D is actually getting absorbed.
So that’s where I start with is like multi D omega. That for me is kind of like Yeah, the starter. The starter stack. Totally. I’m with you. Yeah. And then after that you can start to dabble a little, right? Yeah. So if you are somebody that is sore or you have an injury, we see things like, you know, tur cherry, beet root, turmeric can be really helpful. The TARC cherry could also be particularly helpful for, for recovery and for sleep. So that can be a nice one. The others that I look at for women particularly that are really interesting that are coming out right now is creatine. So we’re seeing some really, really interesting data. Creatine was sort of like the, the bro supplement forever, right? So it was the one that Yeah, all the, all the and
A day. Call me a broma. You could fry it on my well dead hands.
Yeah, totally. I, you know, like everybody, every female was so afraid to take it because they’re like, I don’t and I don’t wanna get bulky. It’s really hard for women to get big and bulky.
I’ve been trying for decades, so Yeah,
Exactly.
Still not there. So I don’t think it happens on accident.
Yeah, totally. And so we see with creatine, you know, again, it’s really, really helpful for creating those powerful fibers that we want early on in life for women. And we want to maintain through the lifespan. That’s what creatine does. It helps you to lift a little bit heavier and a little bit stronger. And the other thing that’s really fascinating that’s coming out right now about creatine is that it is used by the brain as well. Yes. As an resource. Yes. And so with women, we see that the phospho, creatine stores, which are where creatine is used in an energy metabolism in your body decline not only with age, but also more rapidly than they do in men. So they’re declining not only in your skeletal muscle, but also in your brain. And so if you are somebody that’s, you know, 30, 40, 50 years old and you’re like, oh, like I’m just, I can’t recall things as fast, I can’t, you know, my, I feel like I’m not moving, my brain isn’t moving as quickly.
We’re seeing some really interesting mental health and, and cognitive health outcomes with creatine supplementation in women. So three to five grams a day, no need to do a loading protocol. Something like that is something that’s making a difference one way or the other doesn’t really matter during the day when you take it, it’s an energy precursor. So it’s gonna sort of like accumulate in your muscles and your other tissues like your brain, regardless of when you take it. But I really like that one for women. And I think the data is becoming more and more strong.
We are so like-minded.
I told you, I said we were, I, I feel like we have a lot in common.
We could tell from minute number one. We just knew we had the same top supplement list. So somehow we thought in each other’s eyes
Good spirits, we can always find each other
Totally with you on it. Let and and go anywhere you want with this. But I love how I saw in your, on some of your content, you talk about like sort of like wellness bs. So like maybe still on the theme of supplements. What are some of the, the biggest hitters that you’ll see of like, you know, people keep getting sold on this and I really think it’s wellness bs.
Yeah. I think, you know, particularly with supplements is there is a lot that’s coming on the market right now that is making, they’re making a lot of big claims and you should be really careful about big claims with supplementation, period. Like anytime you supplement, you’re looking for marginal gains, right? Like you’re not gonna completely revolutionize your world with supplements here or there. You’re gonna get a little bit of a boost or a little bit of an impact. Yeah. But you’re not gonna be really changing the game in a major way. So I feel like that is number one, if you’re looking for a miracle, like start with the foundation, the basics first. Like exactly what you just said, Erin. Making sure you get the protein, you get the fiber, you get those essential fats during the day. If you’re not there, you know, the supplements aren’t gonna matter. There’s
No cheat, there’s no cheat code,
There’s no cheat code. I like to say you gotta make the cake before, before you put the frosting on. Right? Like yeah. Burn, you burn that cake. Or it’s like, you know, oh you
Could just eat frost.
Yeah, totally.
Just kidding.
It’s still soggy in the middle. Like there’s, there ain’t no amount of buttercream you can put on to make it better, right?
Yeah. Just a handful of buttercream doesn’t work. You need the cake.
No, exactly. Even the really good cream cheese frosting, it doesn’t work on a under bake or a burn cake. Yeah. So bake the cake first. If you’re looking for a miracle, you know, look somewhere else, supplementation is not gonna be your miracle. Look for marginal gains and supplementation. Yeah. One that’s driving me bananas right now. Bananas are these ones that are pretending to be GLP one product.
Oh yes.
Yeah.
Good. Yeah, I’m with you. I know, I, it was like for so long it was all the greens powders, but no, now it’s, it it is the GLP one bakes. They’re horrible
Fakes. Yeah. Yeah. So this is for anybody that has not been paying attention to this narrative. So GLP one pharmaceutical therapy is, you know, the ozempic. The wegovy is the Zep bounds and the Moon Charles,
The prescription medications.
Prescription medications, yes. Glide. If you’re talking about ozempic and if you’re talking about zep bound, you’re talking about tirzepatide. Yeah. So these are injectable medications. They are, you inject them subcutaneously and they work for, they were originally designed actually for type two diabetes medication to control blood sugar. And this is about 20, 30 years ago now. And people have been using these therapies consistently for if they have a diagnosis of type two diabetes. And what they found in the study of these particular pharmaceuticals was that weight loss was kind of a happy side effect for a lot of people. And we know that, you know, weight loss goes hand in hand with the controlling of blood sugar. And so they found that potentially through this weight loss we were having these beneficial downstream effects and you know, your body produces this GLP one in your GI tract.
So it’s a little peptide that your body produces and it essentially communicates to your brain and to your pancreas and to other organs to say that you’re full. So it, it increases this feeling of satiety. And so when you go on these GLP one injections, you lose weight essentially because you people say that it quiets the food noise in their brain, right? So they feel when they’re eating that they feel a little bit fuller, a little bit sooner. So they won’t overeat, they won’t sort of like put their hand into their Reese’s peanut butter cup. Yeah. You know, three or four times that they’ll stop with just the one little, yeah. And so of course there’s a whole bunch of wellness folks that are trying to make money that are doing these, you know, like Dukes on GLP ones and you can find ’em. I’ve been, you know, advertised too on my social media for all these new products that are coming along the line and it’s like, oh this is a GLP one. You know, it’ll say something like GLP one Yeah. Or something like that on the bottle. And if you flip it over, you look at what’s in them, it’s typically some herbal concoction that is not GLP one for the record. So it you, if you get the oral supplement pill, this is not the same molecule at all. It’s not in the
Yeah, well even the medication isn’t GLP one, it stimulates it. But, but, and and it is true that some herbs do stimulate GLP one but in orders of magnitude less than these medications.
Exactly. So the medications are the GLP one receptor agonists, right? Yeah. So it’s a molecule that looks exactly like GLP one and it binds like GLP one does. And so you know, you’re putting this like super, super mega high dose into your system when you take these pills. They might, as you just said, Erin, you know, increase a little bit your natural production of GLP one. But here’s the other really interesting thing and the difference between these two therapeutics as well is the GLP one that you inject is long lasting. So it’ll circulate around for about seven days. Yes. Yeah. Which is why you inject once a week on the seventh day when you produce the GLP one naturally in your body, whether it’s because you’ve just eaten which your body will produce GLP one you’ve eaten tells your brain, you know, I’m full stop eating. You produce it in tiny amounts and if you take the supplement and it naturally induces some kind of GLP one secretion, you produce it in tiny amounts, but the half-life of the GLP one that you produce naturally is somewhere between an hour and two. So you’re actually, you know, you’re not circulating around nearly the same amount of concentration and it also is gonna be gone within an hour after your body naturally produces it. So this is one that I feel like, you know
Yeah, don’t you such a scam
On this team. It’s such a scam. Exactly. It’s the right way. People are just hopping on the bandwagon. And it, again, it comes back to this idea, it always kind of grosses me out of I’m not, you know, a diet culture or an eating disorder specialist, but this it does, does always, it’s the one thing about the wellness industry that I’m just like, team, can we just move on from this please? This idea that we always need to be making ourselves smaller. We always need to be diet, we always need to be thinner. Yeah. When I think about muscle and training, like I’m thinking about like, how can I live to be like 80, 90 like really strong and, and yeah. Increase my health span, not my waist span. I don’t really care about that so much.
Spend the time sitting down with any grandparent, like what do they care about? Yeah.
You know,
They’re not like, Hey, how’s, how am I look in my bathing suit? They wanna be able to run around with their grandkids. They wanna be out of a hospital and mobile and able to do, you know, enjoy the retirement that they worked for decades to like make it to, it’s
Like able to actually walk on the beach and be in those Jeep Sands and play with their grandkids. A hundred percent. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I just really wish that women connected that future more to the need for really working at their lean mass because as you said, it, it, it’s hard to get and it will, it will like, and, and you’re gonna lose it like very quickly starting in your thirties. So if you don’t work at it, so it’s, it’s not something just like, you know, leave by the wayside. It’s critical.
Yeah. It’s this idea. The other buzzword right now that kind of drives me bananas and I, I work in this space. I actually, the appointment that I have at Stanford is in the center for longevity. But this word of longevity, right? It kind of like,
Yeah, it’s
A little bit like nails on the chalkboard for me because I’m like, do you really want more years in your life or do you want more life in your years? Right? Yeah. Like that’s something that I’m just like, how do we, how do we change the narrative from one of two places where we’re either like, I need to look good right now, like God, who cares what happens later on in life. Or like, I just need to squeak out two or three or four more years. I’m like, how can we, you know, change that narrative. This is, this is the way that I think about it and I feel like everybody needs to have this like long-term plan, right? If you’re talking about longevity, you gotta play the long, this is, this is what I like to think about. So this is how I wanna go out is I a sphere, right? And I love being outside in the winter. I’m like a cold person, like wrap me up, put me out in the snow. I love it. And so this is my, this is my idea. I wanna live to 96. I’ve got two great grandparents that lived in 96. Okay.
I like, that’s an all just specific number but okay. Very,
Very specific. So 96 is my goal. I wanna go down, I wanna go out on the mountain, I just wanna like take up this like ripper of a run. Like just really good one at 96, right When I get to the bottom I wanna have a beer. ’cause that’s like the best time of day. Like you finish at the, you know, the end of the day I
Basically ski for that reason for that hundred percent
This so good at the end of the day and then I wanna go back to my cabin and I wanna lay down and I wanna take a nap and I don’t wanna wake up, right? Like that’s how I wanna go down, right? And like that’s how I think about this when I think about the muscle and how I’m eating and what supplements I’m taking. Yeah. I’m not thinking about it from the perspective of, oh if I could just get to 104 if I could just, you know, fit into these jeans one more time. Like I’m thinking of the, I’m in the longevity space, right? Like I’m thinking about the long game. Yeah. And that’s the goal is how do I make it to that run at age 96?
Yeah. You know, the work you’re doing is so important because I think if everyone paints their goals, it’s something along those lines of like being healthy till the end, vital till the end and then like peaceful death and yet the actions you see people taking don’t align with that. And so I think there’s a lot to that lack of correct information is one of the primary issues. I think there’s also just our environment that kind of like pulls us away from what we even know is right. Is I think the other main thing that’s even harder to deal with, but at least you’re finding the good fight on like good information. So good job.
I hope so. I I have like a little tiny corner of the world where I’m trying a dent, but we’ll see.
Hey, all of us have to push a little or a little bout that we can and eventually it moves.
We all keep pushing the same narrative forward. Eventually people will get it. And you know, the other thing is we also need to like have fun right now and do things that are like interesting and, and you, you said it just a second ago where we’re kind of being led astray by all these like crazy things we do. You know, like I said with the supplements a moment ago, right? Like you can dabble in, in some supplements that you think could be potentially helpful in the pursuit of what your long-term goal is. I just wouldn’t get distracted by every new shiny object or you know, something that’s like spinning around in your periphery is just keep your eye on the long game and the things that you choose to do now. Like maybe have fun, try the tart cherry juice or try the turmeric or you know, do some kinda, you know, interesting new exercise that might be fun and you know, try that interval training or try the strength training or do your zone too, whatever, right? But do it in the pursuit of what your long-term goal is rather than sort of just, you know, like squirrel every time something that comes up, it’s never gonna end. We’re gonna keep going. There’s gonna be things forever.
Exactly. Rachel, I feel like the time flew by, I could listen to you talk all day but I know I have to let you go. So maybe can you tell people the best way to get more of your valuable insights? Where can they learn more about you and the everything that you have to share?
Well, I’m so grateful to have this conversation and to be able to share this information with your community. You can find me at Rachel Nik. So it’s just my first and last name on the socials. I’m most active on Instagram and threads. And you can also find me, I’m at my website www.rachelnik.com. And if you’re interested in more information, I have a small education company called Strong Process Education. So I’ve been a professor of nutrition and exercise physiology for the past 15 years and I’ve built out a bunch of courses for people in the wellness space. So if you are in the wellness space and you’re looking for good evidence-based information, you can check out strong process.com and we’ve got a bunch of courses that are up there that are all accredited for your certification. So if you are a health coach or you’re personal trainer, you can use ’em as CEUs. So we’ve got a general nutrition, we’ve got one on supplementation and exercise, we’ve got one on the gut brain connection, which is always hot. We’ve got one coming out on recovery, on allergies. So all of these things that are really hot topics, I just really lay it out for you and give you what the evidence is. So that’s at strong process.com.
Amazing. I can’t, I wanna take all those. I can’t wait to hear. I should get a IgG test and take all the foods outta my diet and how that’s not the thing to do. Don’t
Do it.
Oh my Gosh, you are a delight and you’re so brilliant. So we’ll definitely link everything in the show, show notes, and people can reach out and learn more. And I’ve already just followed you on Instagram today and I can’t wait to follow you more. And please, anytime if you wanna jump back on the show, if you have something else coming out or just anything you wanna chat about, come on back. We’d love to have you.
Oh, I’m so grateful. Thank you so much, and thanks for indulging me in my 96 year olds longevity plan.
You set the dream. Take care. We’ll talk to you next time.
Thanks so much.
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to the Empower Nutrition podcast. We love offering insight to help you optimize your wellness. If you enjoy this episode, feel free to leave us a rating on whichever platform you’ve streamed from and consider subscribing. Also, you can learn more about our practice at www dot Empower Nutrition Health, and that link is also in your show notes. Take care and talk to you soon.