Leah:
Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition podcast. I’m Leah Higl and I am here with my co-host Aiden Muir and today is another Q &A episode. So this is our sixth Q &A episode so far of the podcast after 133 episodes, which is pretty cool. So we’re going to jump straight into it. So we’ve asked for some questions through Instagram and we’ve just picked out 9 or 10 that we particularly wanted to answer that we thought would be valuable.
And the first one is, can you explain the myth with evidence that tea with a protein-based meal, especially eggs, doesn’t limit absorption?
Aidan:
So it seems like a little bit of an odd question, but with context it makes more sense. There’s a dietitian from Pakistan who asked this. To be honest, neither myself or Leah had ever heard of this myth. Once you see what the study is, we’ll talk about that. You can see how it’s probably a bit more of a South Asian kind of concept which is probably more prevalent over there. But I thought it was interesting because I’m like, I’ve never heard of this. Is this actually a thing worth talking about? So the specific study this was in reference to is co-ingestion of black tea reduces indispensable amino acid digestibility of hen’s eggs in Indian adults. Do you want to read that? That’s in the show notes with all the other studies we’ll reference. But we’ll jump to the conclusion if you don’t want to read that.
The conclusion was that the true in dispensable amino acid digestibility of whole boiled egg protein significantly decreased by 17% when it was had alongside black tea. They also found that spirulina protein did not have this issue. There was no decrease in digestion. They then also said that tea polyphenol protein interactions reduced egg digestibility in healthy Indian adults, but had minimal effect on that spirulina protein digestibility.
Then the next part, makes it a more relevant for South Asia as well, is in populations who are at risk of dietary quality protein inadequacy, the consumption of tea during or after a meal can further increase the risk of inadequacy. Let’s give some thoughts on that. Do you have thoughts? I’ve got thoughts.
Leah:
I mean, my thoughts overall is that if we’re having a high enough protein intake for our goals, it probably doesn’t matter in regards to kind of just general digestibility, even if there is this like small decrease.
Aidan:
Yeah, for sure. And like that’s something that’s like relevant from the plant-based intake perspective of protein anyway, like in your case, because like, whenever we talk about like plant proteins, people criticise either the amino acid profile, the fact that it’s hard to get enough or the digestibility. And when you look at all of those things, it’s like, well, if you have an abundance of protein, it solves digestibility thing, particularly when you look at the numbers. Like let’s say there is 17 % less digestibility. If you have a really high intake, then it doesn’t actually matter.
Leah:
Yeah. I mean, I suppose if you’re having, if you’re having tea with every single meal and it has this like small issue with limiting absorption, digestibility, et cetera, do you just like up your intake by 10 to 15% protein wise? And does that solve all your issues? Probably. And that’s kind of how I view it. It’s just being like for, for anybody who has the luxury of being able to do that which I hope most people listening to this have the luxury of being able to do that.
That’s how I view this and be like, doesn’t matter if your total protein intake is high enough. But you could therefore see in like certain countries where or certain population groups or anything like that where the ability to do that or there is a risk of inadequacy. Maybe this does matter a little bit. I just hope not many people listening are in that position. So the next question is how to start anorexia recovery by myself?
Leah:
Well, I think this is what we’re to take a kind of not so nuanced approach with. Ideally, you just don’t. Ideally, you don’t go into anorexia recovery by yourself. Ideally, you’re in a position where you can get support. The odds of success are just so much higher when you do have a team of professionals around you and you’re working with a psychologist, a dietitian, and you’ve got that health care team that is really supporting you through the process.
At a minimum, I think if you’re someone who is like looking at a lot of social media like the person who probably asked this I would if you feel like social media is impacting your eating disorder or the way that you you do consume food then you would try to follow accounts that are useful and that have good information around eating disorders like at least you’re getting some good quality information there and then ideally also not following accounts and seeing content that is conducive to continuing the eating disorder or talking about weight loss and things like that. I guess the issue here is when you are so deep into that world, it can be really hard to tell what is useful information for you and what is potentially harmful information for you. I think that can get very blurry, especially at the start of your recovery and that’s where having that support network and that accountability and guidance really comes into play and is so, needed.
Aidan:
Yeah. Could not agree more.
Leah:
So next question we have is should powerlifters be focusing on carbs pre-training or fats since we aren’t using carbs as our primary fuel source.
Aidan:
So taking this question very literally and answering it as thoroughly as I can, powerlifting does use a decent amount of carbs.
Chucking an example out there, they still will be put in the show notes, I’ve referenced this on the podcast before, but there is a study that was just looking at leg extensions and glycogen depletion of the quads, where they found that six hard sets of leg extensions led to around 40% glycogen depletion in the quads. If you went really deep in that study, you would find that certain muscle fibers were actually significantly more than 40% depleted. That’s just the average, right? Which would make it more interesting because it’s like, what if those ones were depleted more and then that impacted performance more?
So you can suddenly see how glycogen could be relevant in powerlifting style training, just doubling down that glycogen as a storage form of carbohydrates. Because if you’re doing a long session or you were depleted with glycogen at the baseline at the start of a session, suddenly you could be low glycogen and your performance could suffer. At the other end, when we look at it about the whole fats pre-workout idea,
That’s not necessarily relevant because while we have limited stores of glycogen, we have almost infinite stores of body fat. Some people could take that the wrong way, but using a specific example, say you’re shredded and you have like, I don’t eight kilos of body fat or something like that. Every kilo of body fat contains around 7,700 calories. So if you had eight kilos, it’d be eight times 7,700, that’s over 60,000 calories that you’d have of stored body fat that you could tap into and obviously you wouldn’t be able to tap into all of that.
But the point is like you’re not burning over 60,000 calories in a single session. At least I hope not. So like the fats pre-workout thing is not necessarily relevant. And you can see that based on this, maybe carbs pre-workout is relevant. Maybe it’s not. It kind of depends on your baseline status and also your thoughts on how much this matters with long -term progress as well.
Leah:
Yeah. And I think when it comes to, I guess that idea of carbs not being really necessary for powerlifters is probably from a grain of truth in that powerlifters probably need less carbohydrates than other sports, particularly things like CrossFit, for example, where you’ve got like a lot of this high intensity cardiovascular work as well, or even bodybuilding where you’re pushing most things to failure. But that doesn’t mean we don’t need carbs. It’s still very important. It’s just the amount maybe is a little less than some other sports.
Aidan:
So somebody asked best cooking preparation tips for bloating after certain high fibre foods, example is lentils, beans and oats.
Leah:
Yeah. So I obviously work a lot in this space in terms of the plant based space, definitely a lot of IBS and especially where they cross over into a nice little Venn diagram. And my typical suggestions for this in terms of cooking and preparation tips is that soaking and sprouting your legumes and grains can be quite beneficial from a digestion perspective as well as making some of the nutrients in those foods more bioavailable so you get kind of a double win there.
I always recommend washing your legumes really well and if you’re cooking them from scratch like giving them a good soak beforehand. But something that I think that is highly underrated that is less to do with cooking and preparation is literally just chewing these foods really well and making sure they’re at like a nice apple sauce consistency before swallowing.
We know that digestion does start in the mouth. So the more work that you do there, the less work your gut has to do and then potentially less of that fermentation that is happening in that lower GI tract. So chewing really well, along with some of those cooking and preparation methods can be super beneficial for reducing bloating. And then if you continue to struggle with it, then I would just look at playing around with your fibre intake.
If it’s potentially too high or looking at reducing like legume intake and then building up as you go. So yeah, heaps of tips around there, but from a cooking and preparation methods, soaking and sprouting seems to be helpful.
The next question we have is, will better quality food help performance more than processed foods? For example, nut butter filled dates instead of cookies or homemade smoothie instead of an up and go, because less inflammation equals better recovery. So there’s a lot to unpack there.
Aidan:
Yeah, there’s a bit to unpack there. I’m going to try to go with a nuanced approach. first thing I’d is I’d said that this is less likely to be about process versus unprocessed and more likely to be about a lot of other things. Processing itself isn’t inherently a negative thing, but there’s a lot of things that often come alongside with processing and that’s too complex of a topic by itself. I’m going to use the specific examples to try and keep it simple.
Starting point. Eating dates and nut butter would have a very significantly higher micronutrient intake than if you had cookies. The big thing that we’re looking here at that was implied in the question is better recovery. So I want to look at it from that angle. This could have carrier effects just having the higher micronutrient intake. I’m going to use one example because there could be many examples. But one example is that in previous podcasts, we’ve talked about how higher dietary intakes of magnesium have been associated with better sleep.
One variable that you could also point out with that is it’s like, is it the magnesium or is it also the fact that you have a bunch of other micronutrients if you have a higher dietary intake of magnesium? And in either case, having a higher micronutrient intake could probably help sleep quality, which could improve recovery. So like if we use the dates and nut butter versus the cookies, like that’s one obvious example of how this could play a role.
But then that part gets pulled apart a little bit in the next example of the up and go versus the homemade smoothie because Up and Go is fortified with a bunch of micronutrients. It’s almost like they’ve added stuff kind of like a multivitamin. So the micronutrients argument gets less relevant. But that leads to the next part of the question. The implication that a processed food like Up and Go would increase inflammation. But would it?
Leah:
Probably not.
Aidan:
Is it that simple? Like, is there evidence for that kind of implication? Like, that’s another deep rabbit hole. But like, without context, I’m just going to say probably not, right? If anyone is interested in debating that point, feel free to go to my Instagram and send me a DM, Adian, underscore the, underscore, dietitian. We can talk more of it. But like, the thing I’m saying right now is without further context, I’m not going to say that it’s going to increase inflammation by itself versus the homemade smoothie.
I think it would be a bit much to go through the entire ingredients list of Up and Go and break down each one to kind of add evidence for that statement because this would turn into quite a long podcast. But my short answer is that there probably isn’t going to be much difference. Taking those examples out for a second and then looking at that whole process versus unprocessing, the other side of the process versus unprocessed debate could come down to things like convenience and digestibility for things like pre-workout, intro workout, those kind of timings.
Because let’s say you become hyper focused on “I should never eat processed foods ever because it could impact my recovery and my inflammation levels” without any further context, then you could end up in a position where you could potentially be under fuelling for certain scenarios. Using a specific example, say somebody’s trying to run a marathon and they have the choice of gels or whole foods. If they think processing is inherently a negative thing, they would never have a gel. But the top marathon runners in the world are having like 90 grams of carbs per hour.
Very, very, very difficult to do through whole foods if you’re running as hard as you can, a lot easier with gels, which would be a processed food. So it’s like in that case, you could theory, like I know I’m cherry picking an example, but like if you hyper-focus on, should never eat Whole Foods ever, you could end up in a pretty rough position in certain scenarios as well.
Leah:
Yeah, I think like it really boils down to context is key. It’s not about processed versus unprocessed being better or worse generally. It’s more about overall dietary context and the specific context in which you are eating that food.
Aidan:
For sure. So another question hits close to home. What are your thoughts on dietitians not being good cooks or not caring for this? I feel like it shows up in their work with nutrition recommendations or recipes.
Leah:
Yeah, we talked a little bit about this off air and we came to the conclusion that different dietitians for different people. I think some people are really good at this stuff, like in terms of dietitians. There are some people that are really good at the content creation around recipes and getting creative in the kitchen and there are dietitians who don’t really care about that. I think it depends on you as a person in terms of what practitioner you would fit best with.
So for me personally, I’m not the best cook in the world. I think I’m okay and I do enjoy flavor and that’s something that I value. But the thing I value above everything would be easy, low prep options for a busy lifestyle. A lot of my content on Instagram and all that is really centered around that and I think I bring in a lot of clients who resonate with that content.
So they’re not clients who are looking for how to spend 40 minutes in the kitchen to make the world’s most amazing curry that fits their nutrition requirements. They’re looking for something that takes them five minutes in the kitchen and meets their nutrition requirements. They’re gonna vibe with me even though I may not be the best cook ever. On the other hand, I follow other dietitians who are incredible, like so amazing and I think they would draw in the clients that do wanna get creative in the kitchen and enjoy that part of nutrition. So different strokes for different folks. And I think there’s a dietitian for everybody.
Aidan:
I agree. An analogy that I’m going to chuck in here is strength and conditioning coaches. Conditioning is in the name of a strength and conditioning coach. And there are many strength and conditioning coaches out there who do not care for conditioning. Yes. I have worked with many strength and conditioning coaches who do not care for conditioning. And I have worked with them just because I want to get strong.
I chose them for that reason and they have a huge gap in their knowledge as part of their role or whatever but I didn’t care because I was seeing them for that. If I wanted to see somebody for conditioning I probably wouldn’t have chosen that coach, I probably would chosen a different one which is why different ones for different people. Asking you a question before I progress further, did you have to do the Cert II in kitchen operations at TAFE when you were studying?
Leah:
No, I never did.
Aidan:
Never let my partner Sarah forget this. It’s on my LinkedIn as well. I have a certificate too in kitchen operations. You had to do that as part of your it’s part of my that’s like, think, don’t quote me if I’m wrong here, but I think like a set four is like what you have to do to become a chef. So like on the track, I’m more qualified as a chef than most people. But no, I don’t care for cooking.
But I also don’t give recommendations around recipes unless very, very specifically asked for it. Something I touch on though is that I do think that this is important in a way. I spent the first two years of my career trying to improve in like everything where I could. And if you scroll really far back on my Instagram, you’ll actually see some cooking stuff on there. I mean like really far. But like, what have I got? Like almost 1,400 posts. So if you scroll all the way back, like you’ll find some cooking stuff. So it’s not like I never gave it a crack. But then one day it just kind of clicked for me.
I was getting results of clients who I was working with without going down that route, without doing much with recipes and everything like that. I decided to kind of just like lean into my strengths and just be like, that’s not my strength. If people are booking with me, off of Instagram and stuff like that, they’re not coming to me for that. They’re coming to me for all the other things. I do value the cooking stuff though. like, with hiring dietitians, I try to hire a broad and diverse thing, a diverse team.
One of the first things I was looking when I was hiring was at some stage, I like, I want to get somebody who’s good at cooking stuff because I’m not good at that. Let’s get somebody to fill that gap.
Leah:
Yeah. And I think something that was beneficial for us is like, we’ve recently added like a recipe hub to our services for our clients, but it’s like, you’re not in there doing the recipe creation, but we have people to do that, you know?
Aidan:
It also means when people come to see me and they do ask that rather than me just giving it a crack and having a go. I just send them the recipe database that we as a team have been building or not we, the rest of those teams have been building. Yeah, because we have dietitians that are good at that.
The next question is pretty simple in that what degree of volume eating is excessive?
So there is no specific answer. I will list a few red flags. If you get a bunch of GI symptoms, so gastrointestinal symptoms from it or feel super full or super bloated consistently, that could be a red flag. If you are using it as a hack to try to avoid feeling physical hunger ever, that is a red flag. If you are not aiming to be in a deficit, like you’re just aiming to be at maintenance or you’re in a surplus and you still feel like you need to do it to a large degree year round, that’s probably a red flag. You probably only really want to be implementing concepts of volume eating more so at a deficit, particularly if you’re it to a bit of a larger end of the spectrum where you think that it may or may not be an issue.
The final one that if none of the others have stood out to you is if you’re eating over a kilo of vegetables, it’s probably excessive. like I say that, but like I have had clients who have been in that position where they’ve been eating roughly maintenance calories or more while coming to see me and aim for a greater than a kilo of vegetables to kind of manage their hunger. This is a tricky situation to manage if you are in this situation, because the first thing I would do is be like, slowly wind it back because if you try to do it all at once and go back to a quote-on quote normal level of food volume, it’ll be tough.
Leah:
Yeah, but it’s worth getting there. It’s just I would probably progress that over time. Yeah, I think an interesting thing is like we know that like a lot of competitive like eaters. Yeah, we’ll use like these very excessive amounts of vegetables to like train their stomachs to like tolerate that so it’s like you’ve inadvertently kind of done that.
Aidan:
Yeah, exactly exactly. For exceptionally lean individuals, how much protein and also what counts as exceptionally lean?
I was wondering if they stole that wording from post I put out, sometimes I just use that to like Yes. Yeah. So anyway, so what counts as exceptionally lean and how much protein for those people?
Leah:
Yeah, I think rather than defining what we mean by exceptionally lean, because when we talk about protein requirements, we know that they come from research where the people in that research are like an athletic level of lean or quote on quote, exceptionally in whatever terminology we want to use. Obviously that can, that’s a bit of a range, but rather than focusing on defining what that means, it probably makes more sense to go from those general recommendations to basing things more on fat free mass.
So in a deficit, the gold standard is 2.3 to 3.1 grams of protein per kilo of fat free mass. So this is really easy if you know like your body fat percentage and your weight, you can kind of work this out based on your fat free mass. Something else I’ll note that just at maintenance or in a surplus, your requirements would be slightly lower than when you’re in a deficit. So probably about 0.2 grams per kilo lower. So I think, the beauty of the not having to define exceptionally lean is that we do have these targets for fat free mass.
So in practice, I’m gonna use myself as a bit of an example to just kind of talk through how you would work this out. So I personally am around 80 kilos body weight. I know on a recent DEXA scan that I have about 24-25% body fat, which means that I have around 60 kilos of lean mass which would put my protein target at maintenance between 125 to 175 grams of protein based on those recommendations that I just stated. If I was 80 kilos, but 20% body fat, this would scale my protein requirements accordingly. So my protein intake would scale up based on my body composition. So if you have this data, that’s where you can use and it just takes out that whole part of needing to define exceptionally lean.
Aidan:
I also think you can estimate this data pretty well because you can see how that’s such a big range as well it’s like if you did like, I don’t know people get in their own heads, but if you like Google, what do different body fat percentage look like? And you have a rough estimate, like it’s still gonna work out pretty well.
Leah:
Yeah, yeah, that’s an easier job than going to get a DEXA scan.
Aidan:
So just for time constraints, I reckon we just do one of the last two, which one do you reckon we do at last two?
Leah:
I mean, I’m not too interested in blue zones, but up to you.
Aidan:
Okay, let’s skip blue zones. Sorry to anybody who cares about blue zones. Let’s go with how much dietary fat is necessary? So the person who asked this said, I feel like 0.5 grams per kilo, which me, Aidan, that’s a target I often put out as a minimum. They said they feel like 0.5 grams per kilogram, which is what a calorie calculator has recommended, is very little for her because she is short at 140 centimeters. So it ends up being small, like 20 grams per day, which when you look at that number is super low.
Leah:
Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And I think the, again, like this target, like I often say have at least 0.5 grams per kilo body weight of fat, but I don’t think it obviously scales perfectly for every single body weight. It’s just kind of a rough target that I will use. But in practice, if I had someone that came to me who was this kind of very low body weight, I would scale that up to something that looked more practical. Something else that I want to just mention with that is that whilst that is a target minimum, I want to put the emphasis on minimum. It’s just the minimum required ideally for us to have a good hormone production. So for a man, if we have too little fat coming through our diet, potentially we see issues with testosterone production.
In females, it can be a little bit more complex, but if we have too little fat, there could be some disruption with the menstrual cycle and changes in hormones, and that can be an issue. There’s also the issue of needing a certain amount of fat for digesting and absorbing fat-soluble vitamins. So that minimum is really based on being able to not have issues with lack of absorption of fat-soluble vitamins and not having issues with hormonal dysregulation but it’s just a minimum you can scale up.
Aidan:
Yeah, for sure. If anybody is interested in hearing more about Blue Zones, maybe we should do a whole podcast on Blue Zones eventually. I reckon a call to action. Send me or Leah a DM on Instagram. Okay. Or there’s a Spotify, there’s a Q and A section on there. And if you just want to leave a note there, so you’re interested, let us know. If not many people DM us, we won’t do an episode.
Leah:
Okay. Sounds like a fair call.
If people do, then we will. But apart from that, this has been episode 133 of the Ideal Nutrition podcast. Thank you to everybody who has been listening. As always, if you could please leave a rating or review, that would be greatly appreciated. But apart from that, thank you.