Podcast Episode #12: Podcasting From Poland!

Ben Greenfield (0:02)

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield fitness.com podcast. This is your weekly free audio exposure to cutting edge fitness, diet, and wellness news. Hey, whether you're an Ironman triathlete, or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, this podcast is going to present you with the latest exercise and nutrition content from the nation's top experts. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, certified nutritionist, and exercise, diet, and wellness guru. Each week, I'm going to be bringing you cutting edge fitness, nutrition, and wellness advice. Stay tuned for this week's podcast from bengreenfieldfitness.com.

Hey, Ben Greenfield Fitness fans, this is Ben Greenfield podcasting from Warsaw, Poland. And to those of you who are wondering what the heck I am doing in Warsaw, I am actually here for my brother's wedding. Today I'm about to catch a train to a remote little town whose name I cannot pronounce. Somewhere in south central Poland where I'll be attending his wedding and then returning back to the States. Right around September 3rd.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to get a little content out to the listeners and didn't want to miss recording this podcast episode. As you can understand, I'm not going to be able to conduct any interviews from over here in Poland, so I'm actually putting off the interview that I was going to have with Matt Masuda from Millennium Sports to next week's episode. And Matt's going to be talking to us a little bit about some of the dietary supplements that they have over there at Millennium Sports. He'll be talking about this brand new product that I'm a little excited about. It's actually a creatine-based product that works for sports performance and power, but also for endurance athletes. And he'll also be talking about some of the other health, wellness, and sports performance products that they put out over at Millennium Sports. But we'll have to wait for that interview until next week. In the meantime, today, we'll have a slightly brief podcast. I will be introducing a brand new fitness device that I'm very excited about that I just discovered. I'm gonna be giving you a little bit of listener Q&A. I'll be introducing some of the new content at bengreenfieldfitness.com. And that is about it for today's podcast episode. So, short and sweet, let's get to the content here in podcast episode number 12 from bengreenfieldfitness.com. Come.

Listener Q&A.

Okay, I have a couple of different listener questions this week, and the first is focused on nutrition.

And Pat from New Jersey wrote to me, and what Pat says is, can I cook with butter, or should I just cook with olive oil?

And the basic idea behind butter versus olive oil is that butter is, of course, a saturated solid fat at room temperature, and olive oil is what would be considered a mono unsaturated fat. It's a liquid at room temperature. And for the most part, olive oil is consistently going to be slightly healthier and lower in calories than using a solid-based oil. But I don't want to give saturated fats like butter a bad rap, because they're really not as bad for us as we may have learned in an average nutrition class. Basically, part of maintaining a high metabolism is ensuring that your cells are operating properly. And saturated fats are a major part of your cell's membranes. And the membranes are crucial in the flow of nutrients in and out of the cell and the actual metabolic rate of the entire body and the maintenance of proper cellular function. So, the other thing is that heart and muscles actually use saturated fat as a fuel. So your body has to have some source of saturated fat in the diet. Now, the problem is that people who eat a diet high in saturated fat simply have too many fats circulating in the bloodstream, and so they increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and obesity, etc. But the much more evil fat compared to saturated fat are the modern day replacements for it. And this would include hydrogenated fats and trans fats, things like margarine, mayonnaise, most of the fats in packaged food like crackers, pretty much anything that's fried. All of that is going to be more damaging to your metabolism, to your cardiovascular fitness, than the natural saturated fats that we find in things like animal meat, like dairy, like butter. And the reason for this is that those processed, basically fake, factory-produced compounds, are very difficult for your body to metabolize because they're not natural.

And they're heavily associated with heart disease, with obesity, and with metabolic damage. So, I could go into how your body processes saturated fat in greater detail, but what I want you to take away from this is that basically, you'd be better off choosing butter over margarine, choosing, for instance, string cheese for a snack over, say, boxed crackers, choosing steak instead of like a chicken salad with mayonnaise on it. So, even though you need to be careful, because saturated fats are very, very calorically dense, and you don't have to use that much of them, don't get the impression that you simply have to cut things like butter, like eggs, like red meat, completely out of your diet. You just need to make sure that you consume it in moderation, and the much more damaging fats for you are the fake ones. So, just remember that having a little bit of butter with dinner, like a small pat of butter on a potato, is sometimes going to be as many calories as a potato itself, but also don't completely avoid saturated fats. So, I hope that answers your question, Pat. You can use butter, but you want to use it in moderation. One of the times I'll use butter is, for example, when I'm cooking at high temperatures, because high temperatures can degrade olive oil and cause production of a lot of free radicals when you heat it up to real high temperatures. I'll use just a little bit of butter instead, and it really is a more flavorful way to cook. Now, the second question that I have is from Matt, and this is more of a triathlon nutrition-oriented question, but Matt asked me why I, in Ironman Canada, used goo instead of rock taint. Now, for those of you who have absolutely no clue what I'm talking about, you may want to visit another blog that I have called bengreenfieldtri.blogspot.com. That's bengreenfieldtri.blogspot.com, and this is a website where I give race reports from my triathlons.