In this episode, we take a critical look at the longevity movement and explore the most valuable—yet elusive—biomarkers for athletes.
Episode Transcript
Chris Case 00:05
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of fast talk. Your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Chris case here with Trevor Connor, Griffin McMath and Jared Berg. This is our second installment of a new format, fast chats, which we see as a discussion of what we’ve been thinking about and the things we’ve found ourselves discussing at fast talk world headquarters are two topics today, longevity and biomarkers of performance. The human desire to live long isn’t new, but the language, the science and the market forces around it are longevity isn’t just about survival anymore. It’s about turning aging into a customizable lifestyle, if you will, which is what makes it both culturally magnetic and ripe for critique. We look at what the science community sees as the likeliest factors in longevity and disease, and then we bring it back to how this relates to human performance. Then we move into a discussion of the biomarkers of performance. And while we covered a lot of ground in Episode 323, with Dr Lauren Rudolph in this chat, we advanced the story by discussing what might come next and which biomarkers we’d like to have access to, if only we could. Finally, you may have noticed that we have had more advertisements on fast talk in recent months. For nearly 400 episodes, and over almost 10 years of creating these podcasts, we’ve brought you fast talk for free, and we want nothing more than to continue to do that. So in order to keep all of our science and training conversations free and to execute on our broader business goals, we’ll be partnering with brands we respect, in which we know our listeners will benefit from learning more about which brings us to our supporting sponsor of this episode, training peaks.
Trevor Connor 01:41
Yeah, I think this episode is a really good example of one of the things that I do appreciate about training peaks, which is they are very careful about what they add to their platform. They could watch the news, see what the new big marker is, what the new thing everybody’s talking about, and add it to the platform. That’s easy to do. It’s actually harder to say which ones should we add, and I really appreciate and respect that. So today we talk about biomarkers, and one of the things that we’re really going to talk about is be careful about a lot of those new biomarkers that are out that people are talking about. They might not have as much value for your training and health as you think they might. Training peaks has a daily report, which I use myself to track the things I want to see. And they do have a lot of biomarkers in there, but they don’t have every single one. They have the ones that have proven to have some value. So in today’s episode, we talk a little bit about insulin resistance and blood glucose, and they have those as markers, because those are important markers that people need to track, but some of the new, really fancy ones that really haven’t been proven you’re not going to find those. And I think that’s a really valuable thing to see in training peaks that they are being selective. They’re going where there’s proven value, and they’re trying to add features that can help so things that they are really focusing on, they have a whole new strength training part of their platform, so you can now go in and build a strength training plan and training peaks, which I will tell you that’s not as common a tool or a feature as you would think. I’ve been trying to build strength training plans for my athletes for years, and I use something that is designed for chiropractors, because I couldn’t find any other software that does it likewise, they’ve introduced their new virtual cycling feature, which I’m really excited about, and done a bunch of rides on myself.
Chris Case 03:27
Training peaks has been fast talk proved for many years, and we want other coaches to check it out to start your free coach trial today at trainingpeaks.com/fast
Trevor Connor 03:36
talk. And in other exciting news, fast talk is now on YouTube. Did you know that YouTube is now the largest podcast platform in the world. We are there not because we feel we have to be, but because we want to offer our content in as many ways as possible, and we want to expand our audience.
Chris Case 03:51
Not only that, we will release more video content in the near future, so you can see if Trevor has shaved or not before any given recording. So please check us out on YouTube and be sure to subscribe to our channel and like our videos. Okay, it’s time to quickly talk about what we’ve been thinking about. Let’s make you fast. Well, let’s start with longevity. This is a topic that I feel like over the past five maybe 10 years, that word has just become incredibly popular. Makes me wonder, haven’t humans always wanted to live a long time? So Trevor, I know you’ve done a lot of writing about this topic. Give us the more scientific definition of longevity. It isn’t just about living long, it’s about living a better life for a longer period of time.
Trevor Connor 04:40
Yeah, so couple things to know about this, and it is becoming, obviously increasingly popular in the research of, how do we improve longevity, but just as importantly, how do we hold off disease and loss of strength and all these other factors as long as we can? So that’s kind. What’s called that age of morbidity versus age of mortality. And right now, what they’re really trying to figure out is, what are the things that contribute to longevity? For anybody who’s interested, there’s a great review called the hallmarks of aging. This was written not too long ago. It’s in the journal Cell and it really goes into what are all the different things that contribute to longevity? And so I’ll just quickly rattle off a few as they write it. You have altered intracellular communication, genomic instability, telomere attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis. And I can keep going. They have a list of nine, but what you really see, what the research is focusing on, is there’s a couple things they say these seem to be the big contributors to aging. There’s arguments over whether it’s just one versus whether they all contribute and are a factor. So for example, I actually have an email thread going with a group right now that is researching telomere length, and they are convinced that’s it. This is what causes aging. And when you see telomere length shrink, so that’s very quickly, all of your DNA has what’s called telomeres on the end of it, and it’s basically a waste material, because as your DNA reproduces and splits, you always lose a little bit of the length. And so if you’re losing wasted material, essentially, your genes remain intact. Once those telomeres are gone and genes continue to split, then you actually start losing genetic material. Then you start seeing signs of aging and dysfunction. So you want to maintain that telomere length, and they really feel that’s it, that’s a cause of aging. Ignore everything else. But other factors that people really look at are oxidative stress. There’s a big belief that contributes to aging, and we can go into why that is, we became creatures that needed to use oxygen for energy, which allowed us to become multicellular organisms. But oxygen is actually very damaging to our bodies, so we need to deal with it. So one of the beliefs is the cost of becoming multicellular organisms was that we had a lifespan. So you look at a lot of this anaerobic bacteria, we were finding anaerobic bacteria. It’s 30, 40,000 years old and still happily moving along. That’s essentially immortal, immortal, right? Thank you. Good word. There’s a few other factors that contribute to aging. One is mitochondrial health. So we just talked about oxidative damage. Remember that it’s in our mitochondria that aerobic metabolism occurs. That’s basically where we’re using oxygen. So if the mitochondria aren’t functioning well, then we can see a lot more oxidative stress, a lot more oxidative damage in our bodies. Another really big one is epigenetic changes. So let me give a visual to explain this. You’ve seen pictures of our X and Y chromosomes, and they look like these nice, small x and y’s. That’s not actually the case. When our chromosomes unfold, they’re actually extremely long. They’re actually longer than the size of the cell. So they can’t live inside the cell unfolded. Instead, they get kind of wound up into a ball. So I like to think of it as one of those balls of elastics. When you go to grab an elastic, you’re going to use the elastics on the outside. You’re not really going to use the elastics deep inside that ball. So the same thing happens with our genes. When it folds up, the genes that stay closer to the outside, they’re going to express a lot more. The genes that are in the inside of the ball are going to express a lot less. One of the great examples of this is the gene for lactase, that’s the enzyme that breaks down the sugars in milk. When we’re infants, that gene expresses towards the outside of the ball. As we get older, we still have that gene, it just folds differently so that gene is deep inside the ball and essentially turns off, and other genes are going to turn on the outside of the ball. So the theory here is, as we age, that elastic ball is going to fold differently, so different genes are going to express, and we’re going to see genes that we need later in life expressing, and some of those genes that we loved when we were younger are going to go deep inside the ball, and they just aren’t going to express as much. And there’s really nothing that we can do about that. That’s just, what are the facts of aging? There are other factors, but those are really the big ones that you see again and again and again in the research about aging.
Chris Case 09:31
Okay, so we’re producing a podcast that has to do with performance in endurance. So how does this subject of longevity relate to performance on the bike, on the trail, in the swim. Jared thoughts,
Jared Berg 09:45
well, I guess if we look at the idea of, I guess mitigating or decreasing some of these effects that have to do with aging, we’re going to keep a sort of younger, stronger physiology, and that younger, stronger physiology. Is able to perform at a higher level. So I guess it just goes hand in hand. So I think that’s how we would tie it to performance. And one
Trevor Connor 10:07
of the big questions here is, does exercise improve longevity, or does it actually hurt it? Doing exercise produces a lot of oxidative stress?
Chris Case 10:15
Yeah. I mean, I want to say that it’s probably a dosage element to this well.
Trevor Connor 10:20
So that was a question. There’s actually a study that I love called increased average longevity among the Tour de France athletes. Because talk about dosage. Here’s, yeah, as high in exercise dosage as you can get, and I’ll just read you out of the abstract. The key conclusion, which is the age at which 50% of the general population died, was 73.5 versus 81.5 years and Tour de France participants, they were living longer.
Jared Berg 10:46
Interesting, you know, I think from what I’m sort of read about and what they’re speculating in some of the research, it feels like exercise enhances or optimizes some of our protective mechanisms, you know, against oxidative stress and improves the, you know, the mitochondria and the aerobic capacity. So maybe we’re able to protect ourselves from some of these natural aging situations. I
Griffin McMath 11:11
think one of the things that Chris had mentioned is really what makes or breaks whether or not this is protective to jared’s point too, right? So we’re talking quantity, consistency and obviously intensity and volume of this exercise. So exercise as maybe an amateur athlete might do this a few times a week, for 30 minutes a piece, might be completely fine, but our audience specifically are people who go above and beyond and above and beyond that. So can we talk a little bit about specifics of that intensity or that consistency?
Chris Case 11:45
Yeah,
Trevor Connor 11:46
so some interesting studies here. First, before we can answer that question, here is the challenge of that question, which is, you want to do studies on, does exercise improve longevity? To truly prove this, you have to do an 80 year study. And for those of us who are already in our 40s or 50s, I’m not sure we want to wait around for that to get the answers right, so I’ll still be here. Yeah,
Chris Case 12:09
but yes, the funding for such research might be hard to get
Trevor Connor 12:13
to, might be hard to get as well. So where they’ve headed? You know, they’ve done a lot of animal studies. You know, mice live two years. So you can do a two year study and see, do mice live longer? But that doesn’t mean it necessarily translates to us. So what they’ve been doing, the reason I started with here are the different indicators, and by the way, I forgot one other really important one, which is cellular senescence, which is when cells stop replacing themselves and just basically themselves start growing older and stop functioning as well. We need what’s called a natural cell cycle, where our cells grow, then they hit a maturity phase, and then they go through apoptosis, which is programmed cell death. And you see in older individuals that programmed cell death doesn’t happen. And then cells go into what’s called senescence, and that contributes to aging as well. Sorry, I forgot that one. But what they’re starting to do is saying, If we accept that oxidative stress, telomere length, cellular senescence, inflammation, these things are the markers of longevity, then we can start doing profiles. And so these are called Bio age profiles, where we look at the markers of these things and see, are they better in athletes versus sedentary people? Are you know, do you have somebody who eats a particular diet? Does that impact these markers? And this is great, as long as you accept that, yes, these are markers of better signs of aging. So the studies that I’m about to cite use these bio age profiles. And definitely, what you saw is, in these markers, athletes had much better markers than non athletes. And one study in particular I found really interesting, where they looked at very high level runners. So these were people. They recruited them at the World Championships, Masters World Championships. So this wasn’t elite athletes, this was older athletes, and then they compared them to a young control group, and then a Masters control group that was sedentary, so not participating in sport. And what you saw in the athletes was they had a profile of oxidative stress, of telomere length. So the marker of telomere length is something called arisen and of inflammation that was much closer to the youth. So these were people in their early 20s, so they had a much better profile. But what was really interesting was they took endurance athletes and they took sprint athletes. And if you had asked me to bet on this, I would have said better profile on the endurance athletes, and that’s not what they found. I thought
Jared Berg 14:42
that was interesting, too, and I was kind of suspecting that might be the case just from an earlier study comparing soccer players to endurance runners that I read long ago, which I can get you that at some later point. But yeah, they found that the cardiovascular markers were superior in the endurance athletes more of. Related to cardiovascular aerobic capacity, which makes sense with it being endurance, but the sprint athletes were doing better on the biomarkers more related to the center science that you were mentioning, and the, you know, inflammatory markers and such. So that was pretty cool to see that not all exercise is created equal. And it it kind of gets me, as a physiologist and sort of guider of all things exercise, to be like, Yeah, we need to do a little bit of everything right. We have to be doing the endurance we also need to be doing our strength training, some high end sprint intervals. Could also be very good for you. And then, like Griffin alludes to, all within the right level of moderation as to not have an unsurmountable oxidative stress. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 15:42
and they did say on the study that they think the difference between the sprint and the endurance athletes is the volume. This is really depressing for me, because I’m like, my six hour rides are great for my health. And I’m reading all this and going, Oh crap. And we actually have a mark, who’s part of our team, who you’ve never heard on the podcast. He and I have arguments all the time, because I’m big on endurance. You need big volume, and he’s like, You can do everything through sprint training. So I sent him this study, and all I wrote in the email was, Well, damn it,
Griffin McMath 16:15
so you’re saying Trevor, that it’s more the excess volume of endurance rather than the absence or proportion of strength and resistance training, at
Trevor Connor 16:25
least their theory, and it’s all theory is, yeah, the high volume has been shown to down regulate the immune system, so they say that might be why you’re seeing higher inflammatory markers in the endurance athletes. Obviously, you’re producing a lot of oxidative stress when you’re doing a lot of volume where sprint athletes, what was really interesting, again, this is, had you asked me to bet on this before I read the study, I would have bet very differently. They actually saw better antioxidant defense mechanisms in sprint athletes and endurance athletes, and I never would have guessed
Chris Case 16:59
that. Yeah. By me, you got the study on the Tour de France riders that are already living like 81 years. What more do you want? Trevor,
Trevor Connor 17:08
I want to live to 91
Griffin McMath 17:14
I’d be curious if there was a ratio, though, if a certain amount of strength training at a certain point could help mitigate that. But it’s so interesting because when I think of Sprint athletes or different athletes, that more explosive movements, yeah, more explosive maneuvers, when I think about them, even how no one come for me here, but how they appear, sometimes appear younger and sometimes endurance athletes appear. No one take offense to this in the room here, sometimes more aged, and so I even think that’s an interesting reflection.
Chris Case 17:46
I mean, maybe I agree with that. It’s interesting that I feel like explosive athletes, soccer players, sprinters, are more, quote, unquote athletic in that they have a greater ability for more dynamic movements. Are usually stronger. Cyclists are locked onto a bike, and we pedal for so many hours that is not healthy for us if we don’t do other things to mitigate some of the effects of that. So that’s maybe the thoracic kyphosis stereotype of the cyclist. Yeah, that makes you look like an old person walking around. Walking around with a hunched over. So the
Trevor Connor 18:25
other fact you have to consider, here they were recruiting very high level athletes. You will tend to see athletes who have much more of a glycolytic profile, much more of a larger body muscle mass type profile. They’re the ones who are going to become the sprint athletes. Sure, where the athletes who naturally, you know, at that level, when you’re talking very high level, where the athletes who tend to be more oxidative, are going to end up becoming the endurance athlete? So there’s also the question of, how much of this is just genetics, the way you’re built?
Chris Case 18:58
Yeah,
Jared Berg 18:59
I think it offers like this opportunity for those folks that are in the middle like they’re not the most amazing sprinters, they don’t have the best endurance physiology, but you combine them both together, and they can become a good enough endurance athlete to really maximize health and wellness and longevity, yet still work on their sprints and be more that hybrid athlete that has Good power and strength and a metabolic sink capable of keeping blood glucose in control and metabolizing fats on both sides. And maybe that’s the best of both worlds. A post ride beer and pizza may be delicious, but is this the best fuel for your performance? I’m Jared Berg, and I’m a registered dietitian and exercise physiologist with fast talk labs, I’ve created a new eight week sports nutrition course to help you break old habits and set high performance feeling guidelines to power your best training and racing. See more at fast talklaps.com look for athlete services and sports nutrition.
Trevor Connor 19:58
Another thing they raise, which brings us to. Another study. And by the way, we’ll put all these studies in the show notes. So they’re really interesting studies. They did say in that sprint versus endurance athlete study that we also have to look at lifestyle factors like diet and how much that plays a role. And so that leads me to this next one, which is a 2024 study called multi omic analysis of biological aging biomarkers and long term calorie restriction and endurance exercise practice, that’s a mouthful. So again, we’re going to those biomarkers. And I will emphasize this, we’re looking at these markers and saying we believe these are markers of longevity, but we haven’t done the 80 year study to say, yes, absolutely right. So it is a guess, but what they did is compared endurance athletes to individuals. So looking at calorie restriction, this is not intermittent fasting. There is evidence that intermittent fasting helps longevity, but this is just people that keep their daily calorie consumption lower, and most importantly, while maintaining a healthy diet, meaning they’re not seeing any sort of deficiencies.
Jared Berg 21:02
So to quantify what that really means or qualify it, according to that research, the calorie restricted individuals were keeping their diet to about 1800 calories plus or minus 350 that didn’t strike me as super low, rather potentially healthy. And then, if you’re eating a nutrient rich diet there, I feel like those calorie restricted individuals are just cutting out the sugars and the saturated fats, the low quality calories, and they’re just eating good
Trevor Connor 21:33
that’s kind of where I was going at which is it’s really just people are eating healthy. It’s not somebody who’s eating like 800 calories a day, which we would recommend against. I think they’re comparing that to people who are over consuming.
Jared Berg 21:44
The control was 23 to 24 and then the endurance athletes were at 2800
Trevor Connor 21:49
That’s right, yeah. And what they showed was, again, exercise seemed to improve markers. Particularly they were looking a lot the oxidative stress markers. But so did the calorie restriction, and they did it in different ways. So they do say in the paper that their conclusion is they’re complementary, they’re synergistic. You need both. But I still feel they said in the study, at least, looking at the biomarkers, you’re seeing more benefits in the controlled calorie consumption than just from the exercise.
Jared Berg 22:20
Yeah. Which brings it home. You know, eat, healthy and exercise. Who would have thought,
Trevor Connor 22:25
shocking? Yes, that’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it?
Chris Case 22:30
It’s interesting. You mentioned biomarkers many times throughout our discussion of longevity. In the second half of this show, we want to talk about biomarkers of performance instead of longevity. Do you want to jump there? First
Trevor Connor 22:43
of all, I’m just going to mention we did an episode on this not too long ago. This was episode 323, with Dr Lauren Rudolph, where we talked about potential biomarkers for athletes. So if anybody’s interested, go back and check this. But what sparked this is Julie reached out to the two of us and was like, Do you guys know of any courses on biomarkers for athletes? Yeah, Julian, Julian, we just had this back and forth of, don’t know any courses. And really, there just isn’t that much. Yeah, I would agree. What we talked about in that episode 323, with Dr Rudolph was basically, you see iron deficiency in athletes. You see vitamin D deficiency. So those are good to check on, but you have to be really careful, because you get tons of false positives in athletes because they are different from your normal person, and you’re using kind of the normal person ranges to measure athletes. So constantly athletes are told by the doctors, oh, you’re out of range here. You’re out of range there, and it stresses athletes. So really the conclusion we do in that study is doing regular profiles is probably not good for athletes. Can
Chris Case 23:54
we back up for just a second? The broad discussion here is biomarkers of performance, but it sounds like performance is a very vague term. What do you mean exactly when you’re talking about biomarkers of performance? I would imagine, if you look at iron levels and they’re at the range that you expect them to be at for an endurance athlete, that means performance in one aspect, vitamin D might express that they’re on track for a performance in a different way, other agents that we haven’t yet talked about, those might indicate something else. So does that need clarification?
Jared Berg 24:30
I mean, yeah, with kind of what you’re alluding to, as far as, like, you brought up the iron first, and if that particular marker is low, what does that imply? Versus what happens if someone’s vitamin D is low, and what does that mean and they’re down? They’re definitely different things iron might. Someone might be like, hey, that’s has to do with oxygen carrying capacity, where the vitamin D that maybe is more in line with immune function or bone health and
Chris Case 24:54
such, right? Well, that’s what I’m getting at, is if a biomarker of performance is performance. In a general sense than Sure, it’s interesting, but can we give people more of an indication of how they would take this information and use it for their
Trevor Connor 25:08
benefit? Really broad. So I read a review last night that dived deeper into this. I was much more pro. We should be doing regular testing of athletes, and they called it blood profiling. So literally, out of the their text they have here, we define blood profiling as any blood testing where the data are applied beyond a medical diagnostic or anti doping purposes. So what they talked about was both looking for indicators of better performance, but they talked a lot about using it for nutritional status, making sure that the athlete is eating well, looking for markers of recovery, looking for markers of muscle damage, anything that’s going to impact the athlete’s ability to train, and particularly impact over training heading towards poor recovery, is kind of fair game here.
Jared Berg 25:58
It just seems like it would be hard to take somebody’s blood profile. It get the results and say, Yeah, you probably need to do more tabatas, yeah, yeah. It’s not that specific, right? That’d be beautiful, right? You could just be like, yeah, the blood says do more tabatas and have Hickam a root or something, right, right? Yeah. You know, for me, it’s a challenge, because what you present Trevor is like this perfect world where you can profile and you can do basically, like monitoring, using the blood test and grabbing the bloods to just monitor and progress and see the individual at their highs and at their lows, and be able to make some meaningful changes, you know, with their Coach and their training, and see how that affects, those biomarkers, modify their nutrition. And just, I mean, that would be amazing. That would be very expensive, yeah, and just unpractical for nearly everybody, from the point of finances, the point of, like, how much blood’s being drawn on the regular basis, right? So me as a practitioner. I mean, it’s, I say practice a practitioner. I’m really, you know, it’s a raw Weber’s practicing and trying to figure out what is meaningful, what is most helpful. I’m just trying to navigate and find what is the most realistic and plausible blood biomarkers to gather on a semi regular basis to provide some meaningful information.
Griffin McMath 27:24
This changes, though, now Jared, especially with so many lab companies mailing the kits to your door, and you can do things at home. It does break down a lot of cost barriers when it’s still expensive, but there are a lot more people who are having access to this type of information portals that will explain the results, whether that’s right, wrong or indifferent, out there. And when I was in school in California, this type of thing that we’re talking about checking biomarkers, especially for nutritional adjustments, for athletes and performance, it’s huge out there. So it is, it’s a lifestyle, it’s a mindset, it’s of constant optimization.
Trevor Connor 28:01
That’s kind of where this review went, and they talked a lot about nutritional status. And I think some of us, in particularly some of our listeners here, are very motivated to eat, right? But you think about some younger athletes who are telling their coaches, oh, I’m eating great, and then they’re going and having their pizza and McDonald’s hamburgers and all that sort of stuff. And so this is a way to see are they really getting what they need. And so some things they looked at were you can do fatty acid profiles from the blood. And one of the key ones is this metric, the OM three i, which looks at the Omega three status, because they’ve shown poor recovery when you don’t have sufficient omega threes higher perceived exertion when you’re low on that scale. So really making sure that athletes are getting enough omega threes, they have a flavonoid panel that is a measure of your fruit and vegetable consumption. And again, that’s associated with poor recovery, with poor performance. Obviously there’s antioxidant profiling and then another one’s amino acid, looking at glutamine and glutamate, because you tend to see those tanker go down or below when an athlete’s pushing towards fatigue and overtraining.
Chris Case 29:14
While some coaching platforms choose flashy trends, like hyped up markers, training peaks, tracks, the data that is scientifically proven to work. Use their powerful performance dashboards and compliance scores to get your athletes where they want to go. And with recently released strength training and virtual cycling, you can build training for every season. Start your free coach trial today at trainingpeaks.com/fast, off. One of the other questions that comes to mind for me is when we talk about blood profiling and these regular lab tests that people might consider doing, that’s one aspect of biomarkers for performance. But what about all of the new tech that we have for continuous glucose monitors, continuous lactate monitors. Monitors that technology could be applied to other markers, and I know it’s not a direct measurement of what’s in the blood. It’s like a subcutaneous, small, microscopic needle that’s running through an algorithm and estimating the levels correct
Jared Berg 30:17
the continuous glucose monitor is doing a pretty good job and even giving you an A, 1c and seeing how your blood glucose trends over time, and it becomes a pretty valuable data point. I don’t know how the continuous lactate meters are progressing, but the continuous glucose monitor seems to be pretty
Chris Case 30:34
strong, yeah. And I mentioned this because when we were talking about stress and cortisol with Dr Seiler, I said, what if they could create a continuous cortisol monitor? Would that be helpful? Would that be a really good one to look at as a biomarker of performance in real time?
Trevor Connor 30:49
Absolutely. So that was something also was covered in this review where they talked about endocrine biomarkers, because that’s a an indicator of low energy availability, which we know impacts athletes. You
Chris Case 30:59
said endocrine? As in endocrine, yeah, I just want to make sure that it’s just two pronunciations of the same word, okay, I’ve never heard it pronounced in doctrine.
Trevor Connor 31:11
I’m just gonna glare at Chris for a while. That’s fine.
Griffin McMath 31:14
No, it’s actually fair, because it could have sounded like indoctrinate, yeah, yeah.
Chris Case 31:19
So it is good that I clarified. I didn’t correct you. I just clarified. Go ahead, continue with your sighing, and then get to your point. Where was I at?
Griffin McMath 31:27
Indoctrinate.
Trevor Connor 31:31
The study looked at, oh, so yes, looking at various hormones, looking at cortisol. I’m not even going to attempt to use that word again, because you’re waiting for me to use. It can be really important markers and can be quite valuable. But you know, going back to the conversation that we had with Julie, I think part of the messaging and part of why we’re coming back to this is to be careful, because I do, what you do see is more and more studies coming out on this, and more and more pro studies saying, Yeah, this is something that we should be looking at. And I do think is one of those things that a lot of marketers can jump on and go, Yeah, we got this, we got that. And all these things are going to tell you, send us a drop of your blood, and we’re going to tell you everything about your training, including whether you should do tabatas, yeah, and you should be careful about like, going back to the continuous glucose monitor, there’s great things you can get out of this. It is really helpful for diabetics. Does it tell you real time when your glucose levels are starting to go low, when you’re out in a bike race? No, because it’s not sampling blood, it’s sampling interstitial fluid, and that’s got a 2030, minute delay. So when you see glucose dropping on that continuous glucose monitor, it’s not telling you fuel, it’s telling you fuel 30 minutes ago, yeah,
Jared Berg 32:46
have you ever wear one of those? Have you have? Not I have. It’s insightful. It’s really interesting, especially as somebody who’s sort of an avid exerciser and does a training the big thing that I noticed was at night, it would wake me up, because it’s like you are going hypoglycemic. You are going so low blood sugar that you’re gonna like tank. And then in speaking to that, 20 or 30 minutes, if I had two things, one, if I had sweet potatoes, I would like sweet potatoes has some fiber in it, and it’s a little bit slower releasing maybe lower glycemic not so for me, I digested sweet potatoes so fast I brought my blood sugar up like crazy. Maybe not the same with somebody else. I had the same thing with Cheerios. Cheerios, not even honey, not Cheerios, but if I ate Cheerios, 2030, minutes later, I was in the roof, yeah, like, I don’t know, 180 Yeah, it’s pretty fun.
Chris Case 33:33
What if you had Fruit Loops or Lucky Charms? What do you think?
Jared Berg 33:37
No, I’m scared to try that, you
Trevor Connor 33:39
know, and this is where I’m going to say, be careful. Stay to the core. Use platforms, use training, devices that are using proven metrics. Avoid the jumping on the brand new, immediate what seems to be cool and everybody’s getting excited about sort of metrics, particularly when it comes to these blood biomarkers. Because I think you’re going to see more people going, Oh, measure this measure that we’ll know everything about your training, and it’s just not
Jared Berg 34:06
there. Yeah. I mean, like, the most simple one, I think, is iron status, right? There’s so much that goes into iron status and the why. But someone might be like, my ferritin is low, but it’s still in range. For somebody, you know, healthy individual, well, that could be a situation. It could be low, but maybe your hematocrit, your percentage of red blood cells is really good. Your red blood cell volume looks good. We can’t really talk about hemoglobin, because we need to think about hemoglobin mass, rather, but so there’s lots of things to think about. You just can’t isolate one number that you see that is, you know, maybe a concern. Rather, you have to sort of really dive in, ask all the questions, get the right sound advice from a provider. It’s so true.
Griffin McMath 34:44
Jared and athletes shouldn’t be reading their own labs and interpreting them anyway. And rarely does one single lab result or biomarker tell a complete story anyway. But I think this goes back to one of the things Trevor said at the beginning of this, which is. Or athletes really need to be communicating with their providers who are requesting these labs. They need to be telling them, this is what I do for a living, or this is how intense I participate in this sport. Or only see providers who work with athletes, because not every provider understands the impact that this intensity of endurance sport will have on these different biomarkers. Well,
Trevor Connor 35:25
that goes back to what we talked about in the previous episode, and why we were recommending against doing the blood testing is you go and see a regular GP, many of them don’t understand athletes, and it is normal for athletes to be out of range in multiple markers. And that’s not necessarily an indicator disease or an issue. It’s an indicator of their sport. And the doctor is not going to see that, and they can really scare the athlete where they go. Look at this. Look at that. You’re off. So if you are doing this, you need to be seeing a doctor who understands athletes. That doctor
Jared Berg 35:56
understands athletes, going to ask the question, Well, what’d you do this morning I did a vo two Max workout. Well, that maybe it makes sense why your cortisol is really high right now, right? It’s all relative to timing. It can be positional, it can be nutritional, all those things matter. So it’s Yeah, it makes sense to work with somebody who can ask the right questions,
Trevor Connor 36:18
yeah. And to take that a step further, if you’re going to get a blood test and you want to see these profiles, make sure you’re clear with the doctor what you need to be doing the couple days beforehand. They might say nothing, hard, no interval workout for two days before.
Jared Berg 36:32
Yep. Or for instance, maybe the doctor or provider is trying to see what type of stress the athlete’s in, and they’re complaining about all these low symptoms, all these sort of struggles that they’re working through, low energy, poor performance. Well, let’s get it now. Let’s get it when you’re in this low let’s take a look. Let’s not try to have you in this sort of rested phase. And let’s see what they look at now. So then we could compare a month down the road, similar training load with a few modifications that they’re trying out, and to see if you’re maybe you’ll have a little better defense.
Trevor Connor 37:03
So you know, something they did mention in this review is exactly that issue of you can’t use standard population ranges and apply it to athletes, so you do need to look at the individual athlete. And so you might have to do multiple markers ago. This is this athlete’s profile, and now we’re going to look for variances from that exactly.
Jared Berg 37:22
Look at them, at
Chris Case 37:23
the highs and the lows. I think maybe to sum up both of these conversations on longevity and biomarkers, for me at least, is to come at it with a little bit of skepticism, given the fact that this is health and wellness. It’s in the world of health and wellness. It can be applied to performance. Health and wellness is a huge market. People are trying to profit off these things, which means that some people are doing things that are outside of the realm of good science. Griffin, you’re laughing. Is this not true?
Griffin McMath 37:57
No, it’s just so great. How you worded that outside of the realm of good science, pseudoscience?
Chris Case 38:02
Well, there’s a lot of ways you could put it, and doctrine markers. I can’t even say that, but there’s a lot of good things to be taken away from both of these conversations, when it comes to longevity, when it comes to what you might or might not want to be looking at in terms of biomarkers, but you also have to sift through a lot of crap out there that people are talking about, like, oh, you need to do this to live longer, and you need to do this to stave off disease. You need to sleep in your cryo chamber. You need to, you know, like, all this stuff that has no validity. And the same with the company that says, give us a blood sample and we’ll tell you exactly what to eat because of this and this, or exactly how many minutes of exercise you need a day based on this and this. And it’s just not true. What are you thinking? Trevor, are you still caught up?
Trevor Connor 38:53
You say endocrine. I say endocrine. Let’s call the whole thing.
Chris Case 39:01
I don’t know what we should tell our editor to do with that clip. Something Besides, don’t ever have Trevor sing, yeah, get it ready for the bloopers reel as the opener.
Trevor Connor 39:12
So cute, I think I have killed the conversation. That’s true.
Chris Case 39:18
That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed on fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcasts. Don’t forget, we’re now on YouTube, as always, be sure to leave us a rating and a review. To learn more about this episode, from show notes to References, visit us@fasttalklabs.com and to join the conversation on our forum. Go to forums.fasttalklabs.com, for Griffin McMath, Jared Berg and Trevor Connor. I’m Chris case. Thanks for listening. You.
