Eat *This* If You Consume Seed Oils, Best Way To Combine Strength & Cardio, Peptide "Stacking" Rules & More! Solosode #504

**Ben Greenfield** (0:00)
My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast. In this episode of the Boundless Life Podcast, eat this if you consume seed oils. The best way to combine strength and cardio, peptide stacking rules, and a whole lot more.
Welcome to the Boundless Life, with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist, and I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond.
Well, welcome to yet another episode of Ben's Messed Up Hair. It's out of control, but I'm just letting it do its thing. No weed eaters here, and I'm drinking super oxygenated water.
I don't know how much research has actually been done on the idea of drinking oxygen.
Inhale, it's called, so yes, I inhale. I did a podcast with the guy who hands makes and vents this stuff. The ingredients are water, but then the label says oxygenated water. It says lowers heart rate and increases blood oxygen saturation. Seven times more oxygen than regular water. Look, this might just be water, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that that 40 ppm of extra oxygen is somehow making its way into my cells, even though I'm not in a hyperbaric chamber, nor in an oxygen star state.
Perhaps the inventor knows something about science that I don't, but it tastes like water, maybe with a little oxygen thrown in. We'll see.
Okay, so this is going to be one of those episodes where I talk to you about some of the latest research, while trying to ignore the tractor doing landscaping in my backyard. Hopefully you can't hear that as loudly as I can. And all the show notes are gonna be at bengreenfieldlife.com/504.
Why not start off with something that I think is a hot topic right now in the health industry? You guessed it, seed oils. And there was a randomized control trial that just dropped that might change the way that you think about seed oils. Maybe not, we'll see. So this study involved 52 healthy adults, and they were split into two groups for 12 weeks. One group ate about 2.5% of their calories from linoleic acid. Okay, that's the omega-6 fatty acid that is found in seed oils. Now, the other group ate about 10% linoleic acid. Now, that's more of what you'd find in the average American diet, probably most of the average Western world diet. 10% of the diet from linoleic acid, the omega-6 fatty acid found in seed oils. And the group that ate 10%, they all died.
Their heads exploded. No, I'm just kidding.
We'll get to what actually happened. So the popular anti-seed oil argument goes like this. Linoleic acid gets converted to what's called arachidonic acid. And arachidonic acid drives inflammation. And therefore seed oils make you inflamed. But this study found that arachidonic acid levels didn't change between the group who had just a little bit of linoleic acid and the group that had a significant, or at least they quote, normal amount of linoleic acid. What did change in their biomarkers was their EPA.
Oh, gosh, I'm going to try and pull this out of the memory banks, e-cosa, pentanoic acid, I believe is how you pronounce that. So EPA, the group eating the high linoleic acid had much lower EPA. Now, EPA is the anti-inflammatory omega-3 fatty acid that governs things like your immune response, blood clotting, also known as thrombosis, inflammatory signaling. So, linoleic acid and EPA compete for the exact same enzymes to get made. So, basically, what they saw was more linoleic acid, less EPA, and it kind of makes sense mechanistically, right? They're competing with each other. So, the reason that's important is EPA and arachidonic acid produce opposing mediators. These are little lipids. These mediators are called oxylipins, and arachidonic acid-derived oxylipins push things slightly towards inflammation, whereas EPA-derived oxylipins push things a little bit more towards the anti-inflammatory side. So, the long story short is that when we drop EPA by increasing our percentage of linoleic acid intake, we can tilt the ratio a little bit more towards the pro-inflammatory side. Now, this does not mean that I'm on the take your I'm allergic to seed oils card to every restaurant, and ruthlessly cut all seed oils out of your diet. You probably would have found me, you would have found me, about three years ago, saying this, but I am increasingly unconvinced that we need to completely remove all seed oils. If we did, none of us would be eating, I don't know, seeds, nuts, most grains, whole foods, cold salad bar, guilty pleasure, you name it. Instead, I think that what we should be avoiding, as I've mentioned on this podcast multiple times, are seed oils that have been repetitively heated, fried, or stored for long periods of time at high temperatures in translucent plastic bottles. Those are the types of seed oils to avoid. But more importantly, I think that this study highlights the fact that if you are going to have some seeds, have some nuts, whatever, eat at the whole food salad bar every now and again, I don't know why I'm kicking that horse to death. And basically, if you have some amount of this linoleic acid in your diet, which frankly, if you're the average person, you do, you probably have more than 2.5% and in many cases, maybe close to the 10% of your total calorie intake that was found in this study, you should make sure that you're getting adequate omega-3 fatty acids. The thing is, if you're eating, say, like black seeds or chia seeds or walnuts, a lot of the ways that people who don't eat fish will recommend you get your omega-3 fatty acids, it won't fix this because high amounts of linoleic acid from seed oils will block the conversion of plant-based ALA to EPA. So we really can't get EPA from seeds and nuts, et cetera, in an appreciable amount to allow for adequate EPA. So you should be getting your EPA basically from fatty fish or fish oil, especially if you have seed oils in your diet. That's the most simple takeaway that I can give you, right? Include fatty fish or fish oil in your diet. I am on the slightly higher fish oil bandwagon, unless I am in a scenario in which I shouldn't be taking things that lived in the blood, like prior to, say, a surgery, for example. But I take two to four grams of fish oil on any days that I don't eat a portion of fatty fish, and a bunch of trout from Sea Topia. Shout out to Sea Topia. Clean plastic and metal free farm fish. They farm it so they can control what the fish eat and get a cleaner fish. But I had Sea Topia last night, so I didn't need to take fish oil yesterday. But any days I'm not having fish, I have two to four grams of the Kion Omega, and that's anchovy caught off the Peruvian coast. It's packaged with rosemary and vitamin E and some other good stuff. Pretty good DHA, EPA ratio. Now, that's one that I choose. There's other good brands out there for fish oil like Nordic Naturals. Carlson's has a good cod liver oil. Dr. Jeffrey Bland, his company Big Bold Health, they do a pretty good salmon oil. But anyways, practical takeaway here is fatty fish or fish oil regularly, especially more so if you're consuming seed oils. So next up, we get into a look at how much strength training is actually adequate in order for you to be getting a lot of the long-term health rewards of strength training. So this was new research, and basically they trapped more than 147,000 people for 30 years. And what they found was that the sweet spot for strength training, brace yourself, drum roll please, is about 90 to 120 minutes per week. So an hour and a half to two hours of hitting the weights or doing some form of strength training per week is where you're going to get the biggest payoff. And this was a pretty long, pretty big study. And that amount of strength training, 90 minutes to two hours, was linked to lower risks of death overall, especially from cardiovascular disease and neurological disease. And when I was looking at this study, another one popped up that I thought was interesting. And this was actually looking at what happens when you combine the strength training with aerobic exercise. For these people in this study, when you combine the strength training with an aerobic exercise protocol, you got even better benefits. But then this other study that I saw showed that when you combine strength training with aerobic training, that is the most effective type of exercise, be on yoga, Tai Chi, breath work, stretching, running, walking, cycling, whatever. Combining strength and aerobic training in a week is the best way to reduce blood pressure, which is really good to know because blood pressure is, I think, the number one silent hidden killer of people worldwide. Now, there is a subtle nuance here that you need to be aware of. And that's an idea or the idea of what's called concurrent training. Now, concurrent training is the idea of combining, just like I mentioned, strength and aerobic exercise.