Joel Furhman is Awesome and So Are Spices, Egg White Powder, and Intense Exercises

Jonathan: Hi everyone Jonathan Bailer and Carrie Brown coming at you with another Smarter Science of Slim podcast. Carrie how are you today?

Carrie: Hello everyone I’m doing just fine thank you.

Jonathan: I had a weird sort of inflection in my voice in that intro I am not sure what happened.

Carrie: There’s always something weird about production. But we love you anyway.

Jonathan: Fair, fair. Well thank you Carrie I appreciate that. This week we will continue with lovely reader your questions and readers remember to post the questions in the Smarter Science of Slim support group not in individual’s e-mails, or the individual Facebook messages.

Carrie: We get too many and yet we lose track, we can’t keep up.

Jonathan: And we want to make sure that other people if they have the same question can find answers probably. So please, please, please let others benefit from others questions. Post them in the support group like John W. for example. John W. says that he was listening to it, an interview I did with Dr. Furhman and sounded like Dr. Furhman holds a low opinion for animal products. He asks, from my research does Dr. Furhmans advice to reduce animal product consumption regardless of quality hold any merit?

He say he eats a lot of animal products, whatever level he said, approximately 10% I can believe is a big leap for me. So at its root Dr. Joel Furhman, gentleman who I’ve had on the show. Actually I will have back on the show, very well respected, brilliant man. He recommends a diet with sub 10% animal products, I think it’s actually is yes I think in the ball park then. What is our thoughts on that Carrie? Would you like me to tell you my thoughts?

Carrie: My thoughts are I hope you’re not going to tell me I have to eat meat less than.

Jonathan: Fair. So one thing to keep in mind, Carrie and I were just talking about this. The point about the bonus podcasts that we have is that when we look at the way 95% plus of the western world is eats, it’s killing them. It is literally killing them. I believe is the single problem the Western world faces because if we’re all sick what else matters, right? So when you look at any guest who comes on Smarter Science of Slim podcast you will notice that all of their recommended approaches to eating are saner than the standard American diet.

Carrie: And we are off to progress not perfection.

Jonathan: Exactly and even people who come on to talk about exercise. You’ll notice that their exercise recommendations are smarter than the mainstream exercise recommendations. They may not be ours and I wouldn’t expect them to be ours because they are not us. So keep in mind folks we are trying to show you the diversity of options out there. We’re trying to show you that again just like there’s not a one outfit that fits best for everyone, certainly there are key characteristics that tend to look good on people.

For example wearing your pants on your legs and your shirts on your torso is generally better than doing it the other way around. In Smarter Science of Slim remember also when we, sane is about saying you can be a sane vegetarian. You can be sane vegan, you can be sane paleo, you can be sane low carb, you can be sane south beach. Just about saying however you chose to eat here’s how to evaluate the quality of your foods, make the highest quality choices possible.

So specific to your question to Dr. Furhman, Dr. Furhman recommends a diet predicated on nutrient density and he includes nutrients such as phytonutrients that are found only in plants as a critical, critical component of that. He also has some beliefs about the hormone IGF1 in cancer that my research does not agree with. So because of that that leads him to the conclusion that your diet should be 90% plus plant based.

Now a 90% plant based diet can absolutely be sane. We all know that a perfect sane diet is a plant based diet because the vast majority of foods your eating would be plants. Non-starchy vegetables, whole food fats coming from plants as well as low fructose fruits. The vast majority of your plate should be plants. Does it have to be 90% plants? No. Like Carrie said we’re after progress rather than perfection. But a sane diet is a plant based diet and if you want to eat a completely plant based died and be a vegetarian or a vegan you can do that sanely.

If you want to do a Furhman nutritarian diet which is 90% plant based you can do that sanely too. Hopefully that helps.

Carrie: I’d like to talk about something quite exciting for just a minute.

Jonathan: Thus implying that what we just talked about is not exciting?

Carrie: No that’s very exciting too but this is kind of big news. I am not suggesting for one minute that we should all go out and eat at this restaurant but my point is that we are making noise and it is being noted because I read today that McDonalds are changing their burger recipe. Because they got so much heat about the whole pink slime nitrogen, this isn’t fit for human consumption unless we wash it in nitrogen, that they have actually changed the recipe now. They have upgraded their burgers. As I say, not suggesting we all run down to McDonalds. My point is we need to keep going because we are making a difference.

Jonathan: That’s awesome. That’s really awesome.

Carrie: Big companies like McDonalds are paying attention.

Jonathan: I love it. So John hopefully to answer your question I love Dr. Furhmans work. I think the vast, vast, vast majority of Americans and everyone else in the world would be dramatically healthier if they ate the way Dr. Furhman prescribes. Is it exactly the same as we prescribe? No. Might it work better for you? Yes. Let’s use sanity as a frame work and let’s find what works for us individually. I love it.

Alright next from Natalie and I don’t know how to say her last name. Do you know how to say that? [Dudreas 0:06:31]?

Carrie: [Dreyas 0:06:31]?

Jonathan: [Dreyas 0:06:33].

Carrie: Of course I would say Natalie. But anyway.

Jonathan: Carrie why don’t you, because actually this is a question for you.

Carrie: Oh it is?

Jonathan: It is, it is.

Carrie: You love our podcast, thank you Natalie. So Natalie just made my peanut butter chicken salad and she said it was fabulous and it was so delicious she will be making it again. But she thought that there was something lacking and in her world there was some spice lacking. So I guess she means some heat. She likes her food spicy and that dish resembled Asia cuisine so she kept thinking that it would be hotter.

Jonathan: Like she wanted it more three to five stars hot rather than zero stars.

Carrie: So her question is, what would be my suggestions of spices to add to this dish without ruining it. Oh dear. So here’s the problem.

Jonathan: Cause British cooking is generally not very spicy.

Carrie: Here’s the problem. I have a heat tolerance of zero. So I am absolutely not the right person to answer this question, how sad is that?

Jonathan: This Carrie you might have to, we might have to have a special post or contest to be like what are the optimal sane spices? You might need to find some collaborators.

Carrie: Yes I may because I am not, yeah I actually cannot answer you.

Jonathan: So Carrie will be on the lookout for some spicy collaborators.

Carrie: Yes that’s what I need.

Jonathan: In the meantime if you’re just lazy and boring like me I just get the crushed red pepper from Costco and put it on everything. Everything which deserves spice. Ever the assembler, glorious. Carrie Brown coming up next a question from oh my gosh Ashley I am so sorry.

Carrie: [Grundle 0:08:36].

Jonathan: [Grundle 0:08:37]. Or [Grundal 0:08:39] depending on where she’s from in the country. She says she loves our podcast which is very kind of her. She’s curious what brand in call caps, she is very serious about the brand. What brand of protein powder do we recommend?

Carrie: We have one, I use one.

Jonathan: So there’s a couple. If you have the, backing up remember protein powder is always secondary to all foods. So we are always using protein powder because we can’t eat whole food nutrient dense protein because we would always prefer whole food nutrient dense protein to protein powder. That said if you want to do protein powders, brand if you’re going whey or casein, Beverly International is the only brand of any kind of supplement that I use consistently.

There’s Optimum Nutrition which also has pretty good whey protein. You can also get some from Costco. Again the key thing to keep in mind is just if you’re doing a whey protein ensure that it has very little sugar. A lot of things call themselves protein powders which are really just sugar powders. So literally the sugar to protein or the protein to sugar ratio should be almost ten to one.

Meaning thirty grams of protein should be coming with zero to max of five grams of sugar. If you want to stick with more plant based, pea hemp and rice are fine. But some that Carrie and I have been enjoying very much, which is a wonderful hybrid of “protein powder” and whole foods because it’s minimally processed is…

Carrie: Powdered egg whites.

Jonathan: Powdered egg whites. Amazing, Carrie talk to us about powdered egg whites.

Carrie: Their awesome.

Jonathan: That’s all. So folks really quickly so. . .

Carrie: You can reconstitute them. You can make them into liquid egg whites or you can use them like you would a whey protein powder by adding them to smoothies. So you can use them either as a powder or reconstitute them into eggs, or egg whites. You can do with them, once they are reconstituted you can use them exactly like an egg that you just cracked. You can whip them, you can cook them, you can do whatever with them.

Jonathan: Here’s what’s another thing that’s glorious about powdered egg whites, is that it gets to the point that we have gotten some flak for in the past. Carrie but why do you recommend egg whites? Are you afraid of fat? Obviously we are not afraid of fat. But an egg white, like if you were trying to eat a protein powder and I told you this powder was 35% protein you would say “Jonathan that’s not a very good protein powder if it’s only 35% protein.”

Well if you powder an egg the powder. . .

Carrie: Egg white.

Jonathan: No, no.

Carrie: Whole egg.

Jonathan: If you powder an egg the powder would be 35% protein. If you powder the white of an egg it’s 91% protein. So when we talk about egg whites, one you can just use them in recipes for whatever reason. But if you are looking for protein, an egg is a good source of fat. An egg white is a great, great source of protein. Carrie has done some amazing things throughout her recipes and it’s incredibly convenient and it’s incredibly cost effective.

Carrie: It’s incredibly cost effective. Jonathan and I are both getting them from Honeyville Farm, is where we get them. In one number ten size can you get the equivalent of two hundred and fifty five eggs and it’s under $30. Two hundred and fifty five eggs for, I mean it’s just incredibly cost effective way. I mean if you sometimes run out of eggs you will never run out of egg white powder. You got, you can just make it up right there in the kitchen.

Jonathan: You don’t have to worry about, it has some of the glories of some of the convenience foods that we don’t eat when we are going sane. It’s in your cupboard, it’s always there, it doesn’t go bad, it’s cheap, you don’t need to do really anything to prepare it. Carrie even found discount where you can buy these crates of these things and you’re literally talking getting the protein like for a penny, two pennies. It’s absurd. We love them.

Carrie: We do. I’m now, I will be creating more and more recipes. I am trying baked goods with egg powdered egg white instead of or as well as whey protein. There are going to be some differences so I will probably have to recreate the recipes so you can either use the version with whey protein or you could use the one with powdered egg whites they won’t be interchangeable. But I am working on that now.

This is particularly brilliant for people who want sane baked goods but they can’t do dairy. Because obviously whey they can’t have that because of the dairy. So I will be producing baked goods that don’t have the whey protein powder in but they are still very high in protein. So that’s coming soon.

Jonathan: Honestly folks this discovery of, and there has always been egg white powders out there but what I like so much about this is with any “supplements”, whey protein, rice protein, hemp protein, traditional supplement forms of egg protein, I mean there is so much marketing and hype, gimmickry. But this egg white protein that Carrie and I are talking about is not sexy at all. It comes in this food services drum.

Carrie: Yes, sexy it is not. But cheap and effective most definitely.

Jonathan: It’s just egg whites and anticaking agent. If you don’t like artificial sweeteners it is really hard to find a whey or a casein or really any other protein powder that isn’t sweetened with some artificial sweetener.

Carrie: So that’s a good thing to note. If you are switching out or if you are one of the people that can’t or don’t want to have whey, if you’re doing my smoothie recipes you can switch out the same amount for powdered egg whites. But you will need to add some xylitol or stevia if that’s what you use. You will have to add some sweetener because they don’t, the sweetness will be off once you switched out the wafer. Powdered egg white.

Jonathan: Just to reiterate that I know that there are people who do things like put whey protein in their coffee to sweeten it. Again if you just put egg whites in your coffee it will be disgusting, cause part of the reason whey tastes good is they have put a lot of [inaudible 0:15:50] property into putting flavors into the whey to make it taste good.

This is just unflavored. It is just egg whites. Like it says if you crack eggs and put them into your coffee. So probably don’t want to do that.

Carrie: However they would work great in a smoothie. You’ll just have to alter the sweetness with whatever your preferred sane sweetener is.

Jonathan: Yet another example of how sanity can be amazingly convenient and amazingly affordable. Yay.

Carrie: Yay. We love that.

Jonathan: So Ashley thank you for that question because you inspired us to cover something we have been wanting to cover for a while. But sometimes we forget.

Carrie: Yes we do.

Jonathan: Alright. Next question is a fairly long question so I am going to try and condense it down and anything to listeners that you can do to keep your questions a little bit long, have mercy on us. Carrie and I are here in the booth and if you write a three paragraph question we are trying to read it and speak to it at the same point. So here we go, Bev [Solaski 0:16:55].

Carrie: Good job.

Jonathan: The reason I can say that Carrie is because I am Polish. My last name used to be [Viakoski 0:17:03] but my grandfather had to change it when he came into this country. . .

Carrie: They couldn’t say it.

Jonathan: No. They didn’t like Polish people where he lived and he needed to make it sound different. So my name is now Bailor, but Bailor is actually a made up name. It supposed to [Viakoski 0:17:23] that’s why most people whose last name is Baylor because Bailor is just made up.

Carrie: Well there you go we both have made up names. Yet another point of connection for Jonathan and I.

Jonathan: Point of connection. Yeah we were talking the other day, total side track, what is the chance that Carrie and I. . .so I do all this research, Carrie is a chef and a food photographer so I means that’s just glorious in our, anyway. We’re sharing the goodness with you listeners and we’re happy to, we had a moment of Zen recently.

We were like man things are kind of falling into place a little bit. So that’s pretty cool. Anyway we are working hard.

Carrie: Bev, let’s talk about Bev.

Jonathan: Bev, awesome fellow pole. Bev [Solaski 0:18:13] says she’s been doing the eccentric exercise, a bit confused about the cardio information in the book, which again folks is sadly out of print. But the calorie method is glorious and coming soon. You can actually pre-order it now. Right now I ride a bike like you explained for ten minutes and then I do my eccentric weight routine. Okay so that right there we can help you already.

Do I need to do the cardio? Should I do cardio on a separate day? Also after my eccentric weight training I am not really sore just slightly sore. How much weight should I increase at a time? So lots of questions. Backup, so Bev you said that on one day you ride the bike for ten minutes and then you do your eccentric weight routine. So if you’re doing the Smarter Interval Training correctly, and Carrie can speak to this, when you finish. . .

Carrie: There’s no way you can do the rest of it.

Jonathan: Yes so you are definitely not supposed to do these two things on the same day. In fact if you can with all the love in the world it’s an indication that you are nowhere near the level of exertion that you need to be at to achieve these metabolic benefits.

Carrie: So you need to increase the resistance on that bike a lot. The resistance needs to be such that you cannot push the pedals and remain seated on the bike. The only way you can push those pedals around is to stand up. That’s how hard it needs to be.

Jonathan: If you have ever seen, this is a two analogies that, we’re about telling the truth here, not about sugar coating things so I am going to tell the truth. Remember the benefit you get from exercise is proportional to the effort you put into it and if you can consolidate that effort into short bursts that are safe, you’ll get dramatically more benefit. So when we want people to understand the level of intensity we are talking about two things. When someone walks up a steep hill and they are out of breath and they are like man that was hard work.

That’s not hard work. So if you’ve ever seen someone doubled over who can’t really breathe, that person just experienced hard work. Or if you’ve ever given birth, that from what I have been told is extremely hard work. So not that you need to feel that you are giving birth or that level of exertion every time you exercise but understand that on a scale of one to ten I would imagine that giving birth is probably the closest thing we can all visualize to be a ten on the exertion scale.

Sleeping is a zero. What most people think is hard is probably like a five, maybe. So remember we are only asking you to exercise for ten to twenty minutes per week. But for that to work, and for that to work better than any amount of lower intensity exercise it’s got to be a nine. It’s got to be a nine otherwise your just exercising less. You’re not exercising less but smarter and that’s really key.

So Bev, we got to encourage you to increase the intensity to which you’re doing the bike and once you do that you will be so sore that you will not even question whether or not you should be doing the eccentric exercises because you won’t possibly be able to physically do them on the same day.

Carrie: By the time you get to the fifth, the last rep on the bike you will literally almost not be able to push the pedals round even standing up for that last thirty seconds.

Jonathan: If you need, I should have recommended this a long time ago now that I think about it. Sorry folks learning as we go, doing the best we can. If you want to really experience what intensity feels like, it may be worthwhile to go down to your local gym and almost every gym I’ve been to offers one free personal training session. Now you’re going to have to sit through a sales spiel and their going to try and sell you more personal training. Which may not be the worst thing in the world if they are a good personal trainer.

But ask them to, on a stationary bike or on some non-impact cardiovascular machine, help you get as close to your maximum heart rate as you possibly can. Because one for a lot of us that is not something we’re really able to do on our own. It’s just foreign and it may not even be a good idea for us to do it without some additional instruction. But if you get a personal trainer and you say I want to know what it feels like to get to my maximum heart rate, just all out, will you in an hour help me experience that feeling?

For a personal trainer that’s a walk in the park. So that would be a good idea so you could at least feel and take that feeling and understand that you need to emulate it on your own moving forward. Make sense?

Carrie: Makes perfect sense.

Jonathan: Bev, thank you for the excellent question. Hopefully our answer was helpful to you and I salute you in your Polishness we are united. We talked about eccentric exercise, pushing ourselves safely and intensely. Talked about Joel Furhman and how he’s glorious and how our goals as Carrie says is. . .

Carrie: Progress not perfection.

Jonathan: Exactly so the guest we bring on the Smarter Science of Slim podcast obviously are not going to be talking exactly sane because there’s only two people in the world that talk exactly sane and you are talking to them right now.

Carrie: Although you may not think so listening to some of them.

Jonathan: But they are certainly saner and that’s what we are about here. Carrie’s going to figure out how to make her recipes sane and spicy simultaneous. Alliteration sane and spicy simultaneously.

Carrie: I suppose I should issue a call for taste testers because my spice tolerance is zero so I will have to actually have to have some other people come and taste them.

Jonathan: That’s right. We should get some pictures up on Facebook of Carrie like trying the spicy food and being like oh my god. Then of course our new best friend egg white powder. Folks it’s been a pleasure as always. Eat more, exercise less, do it smarter. See you next week.

Carrie: See yeah.