Following Your Gut Podcast #20, Bridging Sports and Health with Trainer Justin Dees

Roland Pankewich welcomes fitness expert Justin Dees to explore the intersection of sports performance and health. Justin shares insights from his 30-year career, emphasizing the importance of foundational health in fitness. They discuss the pitfalls of neglecting digestive health and cardiovascular wellness, the dangers of misinformation, and the impact of lifestyle choices on fitness goals. Practical strategies, from balanced nutrition to stress management techniques, are highlighted to help listeners optimize their health and fitness journey. Justin’s passion for helping others and Roland’s expertise combine for an enlightening discussion.

Justin Dees is a renowned personal trainer, strength coach, and exercise physiologist with over 30 years of experience in the fitness industry. His career has been profoundly influenced by personal experiences and a desire to help others achieve optimal health and performance. Starting as an athlete himself, Dees pursued a formal education in exercise physiology at Arizona State University, which led to pivotal roles working with the National Academy of Sports Medicine and Apex Fitness. Throughout his career, Justin has worked with professional and Olympic athletes, acquiring a deep understanding of both the fitness and bodybuilding realms. Justin is passionate about bridging health and performance, educating his clients on the foundational aspects of fitness, nutrition, and wellness.

In this enlightening episode of “Following Your Gut,” Roland Pankewich invites his long-time friend and world-class fitness expert, Justin Dees, to share his insights from three decades in the industry. Broadcasting from Las Vegas, Roland and Justin delve into the intersecting worlds of health and sports performance, examining how foundational health concepts can often be overlooked in the pursuit of athletic excellence. Justin recounts his personal inspiration for entering the fitness field, emphasizing the lasting impact his grandfather’s health struggles had on his career trajectory.

The conversation steers towards the common pitfalls that many fitness enthusiasts encounter. Justin articulates how the allure of quick fixes and performance enhancers—such as steroids and fad diets—can overshadow the essential health fundamentals like digestion, sleep, and cardiovascular wellness. With engaging anecdotes and a straightforward approach, the duo discusses how a lack of foundational knowledge can lead to health issues ranging from digestive disorders to chronic inflammation and even severe injuries. They underscore the importance of balanced nutrition and the need for a well-rounded lifestyle approach to fitness, enriched by advanced supplement strategies.

Key Takeaways:

•             The importance of foundational health: Dig into the critical role that proper digestion, hydration, and sleep play in achieving lasting fitness success.

•             Avoiding quick fixes: Why the pursuit of rapid gains through supplements or steroids can often lead to severe health setbacks.

•             Nutrition’s role in fitness: The significance of a balanced diet rich in fiber, protein, and whole foods for overall well-being and prevention of diseases like colon cancer.

•             Effective stress management: Techniques such as gratitude exercises and proper sleep hygiene can drastically impact stress levels and athletic performance.

•             Intelligent supplementation: A smart approach to probiotics, digestive enzymes, and essential vitamins can support an athlete’s health and optimize performance outcomes.

“The microbiome of our digestive tract is like the soil of our body."

Chapters

• 0:00 A Lifelong Commitment to Fitness and Health Inspired by Loss
• 6:12 Bridging Sports and Health Through Collaborative Expertise
• 7:54 The Importance of Foundational Health in Fitness Pursuits
• 13:51 The Hidden Health Risks of Extreme Sports and Bodybuilding
• 18:34 Dietary and Lifestyle Strategies
• 26:20 Optimizing Health Through Sleep, Stress Management, and Mindfulness
• 30:11 Essential Supplements for Digestive and Neurological Health in Athletes
• 32:59 Collaborative Efforts to Transform the Industry

Transcript

0:00:01 Roland Pankewich: Welcome back to the Following your Gut podcast, where health science meets clinical wisdom. As always, I’m your host, Roland, and actually today I am on location in Las Vegas and I’m here for a multitude of reasons, but first and foremost, I’m here talking to some incredibly high level fitness professionals. And I had, I had to get my good friend Justin Dees on, because as modest as he is, Justin is not only a world class personal trainer, strength coach, exercise physiologist and more, but he’s a teacher and he explains things in such incredible ways that everyone can understand all the complexities about everything in his world of performance and fitness.

0:00:36 Roland Pankewich: And like me, he loves the intersection between health and performance. So, Justin, absolute pleasure to have you here today. Thank you.

0:00:42 Justin Dees: Thank you, my man. Always love chatting with you.

0:00:45 Roland Pankewich: It’s going to be fun. I never know what we’re going to talk about, but we always have a good conversation at the end of it.

0:00:49 Justin Dees: Absolutely.

0:00:50 Roland Pankewich: I usually start podcasts with asking people a little bit of their backstory just to give people a little bit of a primer. So, I mean, maybe you can give us a little bit of your history. What got you here?

0:00:59 Justin Dees: Yeah, honestly, what got me, I’ve been in the industry for 30 years. Legit. That’s the industry I’ve worked in for 30 years. So I’ve seen so much come and go. I’ve seen so many fads and all that. But what actually got me into fitness and health was it happened to me at a very young age. My grandfather, who was more like my father to me, was a very successful, powerful attorney, unbelievable, like, public speaker, and was my favorite human.

0:01:31 Justin Dees: But he didn’t exercise, had a terrible diet, became, you know, overweight, obese, developed diabetes and died at the age of 63.

0:01:45 Justin Dees: Which, you know, in our day that’s very young. But I watched this like very powerful, charismatic man dwindle into complete illness.

0:01:57 Justin Dees: Toes amputated, then feet amputated, then legs amputated at the knee and, you know, down to like nothing in a wheelchair. And, and I was in the hospital with him his last days and he died. And I thought I was like 13. And so I just thought in my mind at that time I was like, this is so unnecessary. He didn’t have to die. This way was his lifestyle. And I just promised myself I would be committed to being healthy and fit my whole life. And you know, I was always in sports really young, since like seven.

0:02:30 Justin Dees: But yeah, when. And then I kind of traditional sports got old to me and I got burnt out. And I started skateboarding. I was. I was very into skateboarding. And I shattered my ankle and I had nothing to do. I was bored. I was on crutches. And I, like, signed up at a Powerhouse gym in Tucson, Arizona, and I didn’t even know what I was doing. I had, like, weightlifting at school and stuff. But I started going to this gym and working out, and I just started responding and it helped my recovery with my ankle and.

0:03:02 Justin Dees: Yeah, and I, I found this world of bodybuilding that was so fascinating. I remember seeing bodybuilding like magazines when I was younger, and I was, like, fascinated by how they could do that, but with their bodies, build them to that level, like, Like a he man, you know, cartoon at the time. And so I was really fascinated with it. And once I learned that you could study exercise physiology in school, it like, I hated school.

0:03:29 Justin Dees: So all of a sudden I was like, no way. I want, I want to go to college for this. And so I went to the number one institute. Arizona State at the time was the number one exercise fitness program. So my goal was to get accepted there. I went and did that and. And then, yeah, I just loved every minute of it. And that opened doors for me to working with the National Academy of Sports Medicine in their department with, you know, all kinds of pro athletes, pro teams, Olympic athletes. And I learned that the sports performance side.

0:03:59 Justin Dees: But my. My passion was always the fitness bodybuilding side as well. And I had some amazing mentors. I worked for another company called Apex Fitness was like the nutritional component, the mother company to the National Academy of Sports Medicine. So I learned nutrition, proper nutrition, because unfortunately in dietetics back at the time, you know, hopefully they’ve advanced some. But to dietitians were telling people, don’t take supplements and things like that, and you can get all your nutrition from food, but you can’t.

0:04:33 Justin Dees: We don’t move enough. And so there was this dilemma. People were fat, but they’re not getting enough nutrients. And so I was learning all these solutions to fitness, and I just knew I wanted to do this forever. I wanted to help people not experience what I experienced.

0:04:52 Justin Dees: And I wanted people like my grandfather to never die that way. And so, and for me, bodybuilding was a great outlet. I, you know, competitive bodybuilding was something very exciting to me that I participated in. But so, yeah, and I’ve done it ever since. And I would do it for free, you know, because I just, I love helping people become better. And obviously that’s how we met.

0:05:18 Roland Pankewich: It is.

0:05:19 Justin Dees: And so you love that too. And, you know Here we are, right? Working together now to help people be as healthy as possible.

0:05:26 Roland Pankewich: It’s amazing.

0:05:27 Justin Dees: Yeah.

0:05:27 Roland Pankewich: And it’s the intersection point between sports and health. I find that to be a very interesting space. What I mean by that is usually someone’s on the side of athletics. There’s sports performance, nutritionist, trainer, you know, sports medicine doctor. Or you have people on the other side. They’re either an md, an nd, a do, or some sort of natural health practitioner. Not many people come together and do them, and I think that’s a disservice because if you look at social media or things that are popular, never before today has anyone been so captivated by wanting to be an athlete in the gym training. Like, everyone wants to be muscular, everyone wants to be low body fat, everyone wants to look and feel healthier.

0:06:12 Roland Pankewich: But in the pursuit of these things, I think people compromise a lot along the way. Would you say that’s fair?

0:06:18 Justin Dees: Absolutely. I think the biggest problem right now with our world of fitness, sports performance at any level, right? Whether it’s personal, competitive, whatever, it be professional in sports in general and fitness in general is every. I see two problems. I see one, there’s way too much information that people can’t disseminate and figure out. Like, the normal person doesn’t have time to do that, and so they don’t know what’s true, what’s not true, what’s a half truth, what study is accurate, what’s not. Everyone’s quoting studies, and some of them are even made up.

0:06:53 Justin Dees: You know, there’s so many podcasts with information that’s just garbage. And then you also have a lot of really brilliant people, but they’re like, everyone’s on their own island waving their own flag, like, hey, me, I. You know, I. I know everything, right? And it’s like, like you said, if all these people would come together and drop the ego, right, and be like, let’s apply all the stuff that we all are really smart in and create an approach that targets everything.

0:07:26 Justin Dees: I think the world would be much better than the industry would be better. But there’s all this, like, right now, there’s a lot of people doing content, wanting to grow their thing, and I don’t see a ton of people out there reaching out and having an open mind and being like, there’s got to be. I don’t know, everything, right? So let’s figure out everything we can of every aspect of how to make the body healthier.

0:07:54 Justin Dees: And I love that because I know that’s what you and I are doing.

0:07:57 Roland Pankewich: It starts somewhere. Butterfly effect is a thing.

0:08:00 Justin Dees: Yeah.

0:08:01 Roland Pankewich: Where do you see people who are wanting to pursue fitness go wrong with their health? What do you see from an observational perspective and what do you think conceptually?

0:08:12 Justin Dees: People miss this is very. We love cars, so I’ll use that analogy. But everybody wants to put racing fuel and turbos on a piece of shit car.

0:08:24 Justin Dees: And it’s like, yo, yeah, the foundation is missing. Yeah. Right. They want to take all the supplements they see Tik tok, they want to take anabolic steroids, they want to do all this stuff even there’s a kid on there I was, I heard about yesterday. He’s some 19 year old kid and he’s already taking tremblone and testosterone, all this stuff and he’s influencing other young kids that should not be doing any of that. Right.

0:08:44 Justin Dees: So they want to take all the fancy schmancy stuff, all the high octane fuel and all this stuff when they’ve never focused on the foundational health components of their body and they take nothing for that. They don’t know anything about that. Like we talked about yesterday, digestion, right.

0:09:02 Roland Pankewich: Everything.

0:09:03 Justin Dees: Sleep, cardiorespiratory health, all your, all your metabolic markers, all your blood work. Right. All these things. How, how is the foundational health going? Because once that’s working, by the way, if that’s not working, none of the fancy stuff you put in your body is going to work either. Right. So that, that’s my analogy is, is people are trying to like put F1 engines on Honda Civics.

0:09:26 Roland Pankewich: Yeah. Your minivan needs 700 horsepower. Yeah.

0:09:31 Justin Dees: And it blows up.

0:09:32 Roland Pankewich: Exactly. And they wonder what. And they wonder why.

0:09:34 Justin Dees: Yeah.

0:09:34 Roland Pankewich: And then to keep the analogy going, that’s after the fact, everyone wonders why.

0:09:38 Justin Dees: Yeah. They start having health problems.

0:09:39 Roland Pankewich: Yeah.

0:09:39 Justin Dees: And it’s like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have to. The foundational components of health have to be their biggest focus.

0:09:49 Justin Dees: And their nutrition, right. Their, their recovery, their sleep, their hydration, all those things that. They just want to take stuff though, you know, they just want to take all, all the, all the performance enhancing stuff, whether it be supplements or peptides or anabolics and they, they get their information from TikTok.

0:10:08 Roland Pankewich: And it’s amazing how few realize the points of connection in the human body. For example, if you are someone who’s aspiring to build muscle.

0:10:16 Justin Dees: Yeah.

0:10:17 Roland Pankewich: You are likely eating more food volume and calories than the average person because that stands to reason that to build some muscle you probably need some more energy. No one thinks, or I should say it, this Way we assume that everything you eat gets properly broken down, digested, absorbed and assimilated.

0:10:35 Justin Dees: Right.

0:10:35 Roland Pankewich: No one’s thinking, maybe I’m stressing my pancreas and my gut out by eating 8,000 calories a day. And maybe if I’m eating nothing but cooked foods with nothing raw, I’m not getting an adequate amount of enzymes from. You know what I mean? Like these things that people don’t think about, why is that missing in the sports nutrition world? Because to me, in health, it’s so obvious. We talk about this all the time.

0:10:55 Justin Dees: Yeah. Like I said, it’s two reasons. But you’re right, like it’s because they’re told you have to eat six meals a day or seven or eight or whatever. Right. No one says, oh, hey, did you know that when you eat food. Because they all know about insulin, right? They’re like, oh, yeah, pancreas secretes insulin. It’s like, it also secretes your digestive enzymes. One of the common.

0:11:18 Justin Dees: Because it’s not a common thing, but in bodybuilding it’s a lot more common is pancreatitis, which is scary. Yeah. Extremely painful and dangerous. And you’re hospitalized.

0:11:28 Roland Pankewich: Yeah.

0:11:28 Justin Dees: And it’s, it’s a high, high, high risk thing. A big problem. Right. But so just to tell you, no one’s like, hey, did you know they don’t know foundational biology and physiology? They just don’t. And it’s like, if they did, you would be like, okay, if I’m going to be eating this many times a day, how can I give my pancreas some help? How can I optimize? Oh, what about digestion? Proper digestive enzymes? How, how’s your hydrochloric acid levels?

0:11:58 Justin Dees: Right. Because most people are backwards. They think if you get heartburn, you have too much stomach acid. So they take stuff to decrease stomach acid, but they don’t understand that your stomach acid levels are what close off the sphincter that prevents acid from going up into your esophagus. So the higher your hcl, the, the better that closes off and digests your food. And so my point is it’s foundational knowledge of physiology and biology and people don’t have that.

0:12:27 Justin Dees: And they’re not taught that. You got coaches that are teaching about drugs and protocols of training and eat this many calories and macros, but they’re not teaching the foundational components of it. And they don’t really understand how the body works.

0:12:41 Roland Pankewich: No, they don’t.

0:12:42 Justin Dees: So they’re over stressing everything.

0:12:44 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, they’re under recovery.

0:12:45 Justin Dees: Yeah. They’re trying to run a race with no pit crew.

0:12:49 Roland Pankewich: Fair, that’s a really good analogy.

0:12:50 Justin Dees: Yeah.

0:12:50 Roland Pankewich: And then the person pulls in is like, I got no gas, my tie. What? Why? Where are the people? Where’s the support?

0:12:56 Justin Dees: Yeah, the car’s on fire or whatever.

0:12:58 Roland Pankewich: You know, And I mean, you know, I say this in a little bit of a tongue in cheek, haha way, but I mean, I’ve been in gyms in and out my whole life. I’ve never been a bodybuilder, but an athlete. I’ve smelt evidence of digestive dysfunction and I don’t think there’s an industry that is the poster child for needing some probiotics or some digestive cleansing protocols. These people are also contributing to dysbiosis, gut inflammation, leaky gut.

0:13:23 Roland Pankewich: And you’ll probably know this, but one thing we talk about a lot is when you have leaky gut, that’s an entry point of things that are meant to leave your body into general circulation.

0:13:33 Justin Dees: Correct.

0:13:33 Roland Pankewich: And they can go many places. People don’t think about the fact that microbes can translocate to the heart, to the lungs, to different organs and tissues and cause immune stress and immune activation. And I think bodybuilding, we’re just talking with some powerlift, like literally World record, power holder. World record holder, power lifters.

0:13:51 Justin Dees: Yes. Best in the world. Yeah.

0:13:53 Roland Pankewich: And he’s talking about cardiovascular fitness and various things because he knows what he’s put his heart through.

0:14:00 Justin Dees: Correct.

0:14:00 Roland Pankewich: Is probably quite stressful. But cardiovascular health next to digestive health is probably the thing I would think that is again, the next most urgent thing people need to know about. They have no idea. No one understands cardiac physiology, no one understands heart rate variability. And if the heart and, and the muscles in the heart are under more stress over time, that weakens the heart muscle. And it’s no wonder why we’re seeing what we see in this industry.

0:14:26 Justin Dees: Yeah, we see a ton of massive inflammation in these people. We see a ton of digestive issues, we see a ton of like.

0:14:34 Justin Dees: Ulcerative colitis. Right.

0:14:36 Roland Pankewich: Yeah.

0:14:36 Justin Dees: Is a common one.

0:14:37 Roland Pankewich: Rhabdo, which is rhabdomy, kidney degeneration, protein.

0:14:44 Justin Dees: Breakdown, the kidneys, inability to remove toxins. It’s, it’s, it’s too much muscle damage leads to toxicity, the kidneys fail, you can die. Right. These guys are getting rhabdo. It’s like. Yeah. So their system is not, it can’t handle the performance they’re trying to put on their body. It can if you do it right.

0:15:03 Roland Pankewich: Yeah.

0:15:04 Justin Dees: But they’re not doing that part. They’re just trying to get all this performance out of. No, maintenance.

0:15:10 Roland Pankewich: Yeah.

0:15:10 Justin Dees: In their, in their body.

0:15:11 Roland Pankewich: And what about things like joint inflammation and connective tissue injuries, and soft tissue injuries, torn pecs?

0:15:18 Justin Dees: Well, it’s massive because. Okay, yeah, now we’re talking about, you know, endocrine function and tissues. Right. So it’s like these guys are taking super physiologic amounts of hormones. We know, it’s not a mystery. Right. And by the way, it’s in all sports. So.

0:15:33 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, but yeah, you’re not gonna get around.

0:15:34 Justin Dees: But if you take anabolic series, your muscles repair and get stronger much quicker than your musculotendinous junction and your tendon. So if you keep the only. If the only variable in your training regime is heavier, heavier, heavier, you’re able to do it to a certain point until your muscles get so strong that they outgrow or out recuperate your tendon and the tendons rupture. And that’s what happens. Right.

0:15:59 Justin Dees: So are now the peptide world, and you know, that’s a tangent, but the peptide world has helped, you know, people understand, like the TB 500 BPC complexes. There’s a whole bunch of peptides now that a lot of bodybuilders are taking to help with tissue recovery. But that’s very recent, even though they’ve been around for over, you know, 15 years. But it’s just nuke becoming new in bodybuilding. But you’re right, these people.

0:16:28 Justin Dees: Are training with very heavy loads all the time, high inflammation, tendons and connective tissues aren’t recovering as fast as muscle. And so, yeah, you’re rupturing pecs, quadriceps, tendons, bicep tendons, popping off, tricep tendons, all the tendons. Yeah, yeah. And so again, they’re trying to just over override all this stuff. And the body, I always tell my favorite statement is the body will always win.

0:16:55 Justin Dees: The body always wins. It will win. Meaning you either push it to the point where it will force you to stop because it breaks. Right. Or illness will set in. You have to stop. Right. So you can’t override that. Like you’re going to lose. If you mistreat the body, it’ll win in that sense. Right. So there’s nothing more important than taking care of all these foundational components, you know, body, the, the lifespan. Okay. But it’s in all sports, like the average life expectancy of a professional marathon runner is 50.

0:17:30 Justin Dees: That’s a professional racer. Right. Marathon racer.

0:17:32 Roland Pankewich: And they’re not big muscular people. They’re skinny.

0:17:35 Justin Dees: Same problem. Yeah.

0:17:36 Roland Pankewich: Cardiovascular information.

0:17:38 Justin Dees: Yeah. Huge amounts of stress on their heart.

0:17:41 Roland Pankewich: Yep.

0:17:42 Justin Dees: Very high depletion of minerals and electrolytes in those people. Cardiac tissue gets all messed up. Right. They get like ectopic pacemaker stuff going on. Afib, all that stuff. The professional ironman triathlete racer. Average life expectancy is 40 years old.

0:17:58 Roland Pankewich: That low?

0:17:59 Justin Dees: Yeah. Wow. So why. Because they’re running a marathon. Right. Riding 100 miles, swimming two miles. They’re training for that every day of their life without stop. So my whole point is any sport to the highest level creates massive risk of death, some more than others. But bodybuilding is pretty high up there. Yeah, yeah. If, if you’re not working with a physician, getting everything checked, getting your markers check, working with people like yourself, systemically checking everything and then also knowing what to take and eat to mitigate all that stuff.

0:18:34 Roland Pankewich: So why don’t, why don’t we kind of round out that as a segue to kind of some strategies? Because I always like to have practical takeaways. Yeah, it’s nice to talk about the theory and talk about the problem, but most people have focus on the solution.

0:18:47 Justin Dees: Yeah.

0:18:47 Roland Pankewich: I mean, you have 30 years of wisdom. I’d love to know your practical takeaways. Kind of like high level overview, maybe mention them and then we’ll probably be able to do this as a deeper dive in the future. So. Yeah, let’s. Let’s get into that.

0:18:59 Justin Dees: Yeah. Okay, so let me know which one. What do you want to address first?

0:19:02 Roland Pankewich: Well, let’s look at some dietary strategies. Yeah, let’s look at some lifestyle rest and recovery strategies. Okay. Let’s look at some supplemental strategies and then anything else that you think might be pertinent or very important to hit on.

0:19:15 Justin Dees: I think one of the biggest dietary strategies that’s missed, period, is fiber intake.

0:19:20 Roland Pankewich: Interesting.

0:19:22 Justin Dees: There is a direct correlation with colon cancer and a lack of fiber intake.

0:19:30 Justin Dees: It’s not a question like you can directly correlate. Now there’s causation and correlation, right?

0:19:35 Roland Pankewich: Yeah.

0:19:35 Justin Dees: Because what causes something? I mean, there’s a myriad of things, but we know if someone does not have 25 grams of fiber a day, then their chances of colon cancer go way up.

0:19:45 Roland Pankewich: It’s a pretty strong correlation.

0:19:46 Justin Dees: Yeah. So that’s a huge one. But a foundational. So, okay. Dietary. Well, okay. I think it’s really important for people to not do extreme things. Every macronutrient has a function in our body. I don’t agree with. No, this is not talking medical stuff because like, the ketogenic diet was originally created from the Mayo Clinic.

0:20:10 Roland Pankewich: It’s an anti epileptic solution. That’s the original purpose of it.

0:20:14 Justin Dees: Yeah. And so it’s a medical condition.

0:20:16 Roland Pankewich: Right.

0:20:16 Justin Dees: They also used it for people that were too obese to have surgery. And, and they could not. They had to weigh a certain amount for surgery.

0:20:24 Roland Pankewich: Yeah.

0:20:25 Justin Dees: They were going to die. The only way to get massive amounts of weight off these people to qualify for surgery was to do like a ketogenic diet with no carbs. Right. Because you lose a lot of water, glycogen and you lose fat, you decrease calories. But my point is that’s not for somebody who’s healthy and functioning and exercising. So balanced nutrition is critical. You need fruits and vegetables. You need complex carbs, healthy carbs.

0:20:51 Justin Dees: Sugar does not make you fat. Everything you eat in a sweet potato converts to glucose.

0:20:55 Roland Pankewich: So people forget, like all, I’ve said this over and over. All, all carbs become glucose in terms of the currency of the body. It’s just. What did they start as?

0:21:04 Justin Dees: Yeah.

0:21:05 Roland Pankewich: And it’s long chain polymers. Or they start as simple sugars. That’s where it becomes correct.

0:21:08 Justin Dees: And you can even build a case for simple sugars. Like raw honey is one of the best things you could ever eat. Right.

0:21:15 Roland Pankewich: I grew up in Canada. Maple syrup.

0:21:17 Justin Dees: Right. Real organ. Yeah.

0:21:19 Roland Pankewich: It’s full of nutrition beyond just the sugar. So your body knows what to do with it.

0:21:23 Justin Dees: And like fruit versus a pop tart. Okay, well, that’s the problem with food labeling, too. If you put a food label, according the way the FDA works on an apple, it’s going to say it has all these sugars, or on a sweet potato, sugar, a whole bunch of sugars. People are like, oh, sugar is bad for you. And it’s like, no, that’s what your brain, nervous system and your muscles function on. But with fruit, you have fiber, you have a whole bunch of nutrients, and then you have some. A certain amounts of sugar.

0:21:52 Justin Dees: Right. Crystalline fructose, which is in fruit. But it’s a different chain. Right. It’s a long chain polymer. It’s not. And it actually stabilizes blood sugar. So that’s very different than me pounding candy. Right. Eating candy, which is more processed. And, and, but there is a case for even having really simple refined sugars. Like if somebody needs, you know, glucose during.

0:22:18 Roland Pankewich: During a workout and that, that’s an extenuating circumstance when you’re pushing for performance. And then you have to start making some concessions.

0:22:26 Justin Dees: But generally, people should be eating a balance of healthy proteins. And again, I don’t care if people don’t like fish, don’t eat fish, Right? If people. Honestly, if anyone does any research on regenerative beef, it’s one of the healthiest things things you can eat, right? It’s very different than other kinds of beef you get at grocery stores. But, you know, whole organic eggs, you know, again, the proper Greek yogurt is a great protein source. There’s all. But you need about 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight if you are trying to add muscle mass to your body.

0:22:57 Roland Pankewich: An appreciable amount.

0:22:58 Justin Dees: Yeah, yeah, yeah. One gram per pound. Or, you know, and there’s even studies that even showed a linear increase in muscle mass as people went above that. Right? So we know protein doesn’t damage your kidneys like they used to think.

0:23:14 Justin Dees: But complex, healthy carbohydrates, I say if it comes from the ground, you should eat it, right? Those fruits, sweet potatoes, jasmine rice, these things, Ezekiel bread, sourdough bread. These are all great things. And then healthy fats, obviously, like, if you can get the very best, you know, extra virgin olive oil with really high polyphenol content, that’s very good for you. I put that on all my food.

0:23:37 Justin Dees: I use that. That’s like what I put on my food.

0:23:39 Roland Pankewich: I use it. Some of my skin, avocados, right?

0:23:43 Justin Dees: You know, healthy fats. But you also need some saturated fats, like eggs provide healthy saturated fats for your body, too. So if people can eat, it’s going to be very hard to overeat calories when you eat those types of foods. Why? Because there’s a satiety factor.

0:23:59 Roland Pankewich: Yes.

0:24:00 Justin Dees: It satiates you, right? You’re not hungry all the time. What people also don’t understand is hunger is a physiological need. Appetite is a desire. Now, that’s important because I have an appetite for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, right. I don’t have a necessary physiological need for them. Right? But here’s the thing, though, okay? When kids eat food that’s void of nutrients, so Coke, candy, chips, Takis, whatever, they’re ingesting a lot of calories, but they’re not taking in nutrients. So what the body says is, hey, nice try, buddy.

0:24:34 Justin Dees: And that’s why they’re still hungry. It’s like that’s a physiological need for nutrients. So they’re eating massive amounts of calories with no nutrients. That’s why they’re obese and unhealthy and not satiated. When you flip that and you eat high, high nutrient dense foods with fiber. Right. And this, the satiating component of protein and fats, carbs satiate very well too. When your glycogen stores are full, you’re, you’re satiated. Right.

0:25:01 Roland Pankewich: So especially with fiber.

0:25:02 Justin Dees: Yes. So cool. So anyway, that, that’s, that’s how I would address someone’s nutrition. The last component I would be is proper enough hydration. Yeah. Right. People are just way too dehydrated. They don’t drink enough water. And then the electrolyte thing, that, that’s gone a little crazy with all these electrolyte drinks.

0:25:21 Roland Pankewich: Everyone’s putting them in everything. All my athletes are obsessed with element or what used to be biosteel. And it’s like, yeah, if you’re losing a lot of sodium via sweat and exercise, I could see the reason. But if you’re just putting it in water to flavor it or you think that you need to electrolyte enhance massively.

0:25:37 Justin Dees: Every day, it’s a little too much.

0:25:39 Roland Pankewich: But yeah, I mean the nutritional science stuff is super nuanced. I think that’s a great high level overview.

0:25:43 Justin Dees: Yeah.

0:25:44 Roland Pankewich: Let’s round out with some lifestyle and some supplemental stuff.

0:25:46 Justin Dees: Okay. So lifestyle I would say.

0:25:51 Justin Dees: And I’d like to get your, your thoughts on this too, but I don’t think anything beats sleep. Sleep is. So you have to have two components. Dr. Huberman like does some great stuff on it. Right. I don’t know that everybody has the time or the ability to get like 15 minutes of sunlight every morning when they wake up and all that stuff. Do the best you can with that. But go to bed at the same time, get up at the same time and do you need eight hours? Everyone’s different. But your quality of sleep is critical.

0:26:20 Justin Dees: So just start by having a sleep schedule. This is consistent as possible that you try to keep as consistent as possible and give yourself preferably eight hours. Some people need more, but some people function off six. But go to bed at the same time, get up the same time. If you need to take a power nap, do it. Get as much sleep as possible. Don’t feel guilty for sleeping.

0:26:43 Justin Dees: That’s probably my best lifestyle hack. The other one is, look, we all know there is no amount of alcohol that is healthy. No, and I’m not saying people can’t drink. But you just have to understand like if you want to know what an anti fitness compound is, that’s alcohol. It does everything opposite the fitness supposed to do. It’s a great way to say six type of cancers are related to it. Yes. But it decreases muscle protein synthesis, increases.

0:27:09 Roland Pankewich: Estrogen conversion in men.

0:27:10 Justin Dees: Yes. It increases cortisol, increases heart rate, increases blood pressure. Right. It destroys digestive health. It destroys your gut microbiome and your digestive enzymes. Does that mean people can’t enjoy a drink now? No, I’m not going to say that, but I’m just saying drink as little as possible. Right.

0:27:30 Justin Dees: That, that, that’s just a thing you have to cut out of your life if you want to be healthy. Yeah. You know, other than that, it’s the stress component, you know, cortisol is a huge problem. I think it’s related to so many things, but I try to get people to.

0:27:51 Justin Dees: Even if it’s 11 minutes a day, do a gratitude exercise or a wim hof breathing or something. Meditation. People, I think they confuse it. Like they think they have to sit like a monk in the home and like, you know, go into Zen or whatever. It’s. No, it’s like just a way to decompress. And.

0:28:10 Justin Dees: Gratitude is my favorite thing. Think about every grad, Everything I’m grateful for on the most detailed level for me works very well. It reduces stress, helps you relax, it helps you decompress. But the ability to remove stress from your life and the ability to.

0:28:30 Justin Dees: Have self talk that your words create your environment. So if people say, I’m always tired, I’m tired, I’m old, I’m. I hear that all the time. I’m old, though. Yeah, but I’m old. I’m like, I’m 15 years older than you, man.

0:28:43 Roland Pankewich: Stop manifesting your reality.

0:28:46 Justin Dees: Yeah. Don’t say I’m tired. Don’t say I’m broke. Don’t say I’m. I’m unhappy. Right. That you create that your mind doesn’t know the difference. So those practices in life, I think create way more health than people understand. And Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about it. Your world, you know, you know, so well, it’s. Your body will do what you think. Right. The placebo effect is so real, but it’s not really placebo.

0:29:08 Justin Dees: It’s generic consciousness projections of reality. Yeah.

0:29:12 Roland Pankewich: So I think therefore I am kind of thing.

0:29:14 Justin Dees: It’s real, 100% real. So. Yeah. And any other lifestyle things, I would say, don’t doom scroll.

0:29:23 Roland Pankewich: Yeah.

0:29:24 Justin Dees: Don’t do it.

0:29:25 Roland Pankewich: Don’t be a dopamine addict.

0:29:26 Justin Dees: Yeah, yeah. Or, well, get dopamine from doing work.

0:29:29 Roland Pankewich: Real work.

0:29:30 Justin Dees: Yes.

0:29:30 Roland Pankewich: Proper feedback mechanism.

0:29:32 Justin Dees: Yes.

0:29:32 Roland Pankewich: And you know, it’s so easy to doom scroll or just to give yourself this time to disconnect from being present and just occupy your awareness of just, oh, I’m watching what the world’s doing.

0:29:43 Justin Dees: And spend 15 minutes a day in the out, outside.

0:29:46 Roland Pankewich: Yeah. We talk about grounding, talk about circadian rhythm.

0:29:49 Justin Dees: Yeah.

0:29:50 Roland Pankewich: And the thing that I’m really excited about because you and I are going to kind of personally undertake bringing health into the world of bodybuilding and sports via teaching them about health and supplements. What would you have to say about suggestions for people who are exercising to keep their digestive wellness in check, supplementally speaking, just to round everything out.

0:30:11 Justin Dees: So you have to have a proper probiotic that actually gets to where it’s supposed to go and does what it’s supposed to do. Most 99% of them don’t. And you can’t overtake them either. Right. You can’t take too many probiotics. So. But foundationally, a probiotic that is actually.

0:30:30 Roland Pankewich: Well, like the efficacious.

0:30:32 Justin Dees: Right, but like the company we’re talking about.

0:30:36 Roland Pankewich: Yes. Yeah. US Enzymes, Master supplements. I mean, we, the one thing that we pride ourselves in is we have a patent that no one else holds and it’s infallible in terms of its outcome.

0:30:46 Justin Dees: Yes. So your gut microbiome is key. So proper digestive enzymes. Proper enzymes, period.

0:30:53 Roland Pankewich: Yes.

0:30:53 Justin Dees: Proper probiotic. Then if those are foundational, proper healthy fats, like, we have to supplement them, we don’t get them enough. And then. Okay, if you want a proper whole food multivitamin.

0:31:07 Roland Pankewich: Interesting.

0:31:08 Justin Dees: Yeah. When the, when the nutrients are from whole food, for example, you can get vitamin D from mushrooms or you can get two. Yeah. I bet you can get it synthetically. Right. There’s very good vitamin D3 and K supplements, though. But if you try to get, like you can get vitamin C from cherries, aspherella, cherries. Right. And there’s products that are made that.

0:31:27 Roland Pankewich: Way rather than fermented yeast extract.

0:31:29 Justin Dees: Right.

0:31:29 Roland Pankewich: Ascorbic acid.

0:31:30 Justin Dees: Yeah, yeah. So, okay, I’ll give you an example. If you see on a food label it says calcium scorbate or ascorbic acid. Well, there are seven other components to vitamin C in an orange that make vitamin C. Yeah. Like you can’t improve on God. Right. Or that’s how it’s made. It’s made that way for a reason. So you can utilize it. So to get your multivitamin from a whole food source, there’s companies that make them. Right.

0:31:55 Justin Dees: And then, look, now we know for neurological function, creatine monohydrate is massive. It’s now become an essential Nutrient, which people used to think it was a steroid.

0:32:05 Roland Pankewich: Right. I used to get in trouble. My parents found the creatine you’re taking. I’m like, yeah, I’m taking steroids.

0:32:11 Justin Dees: I own a supplement store. Store. I owned three of them. And I had a woman come in furious with me, telling me she wanted her money back because her son bought creatine. And he was roid, raging at home from his creatine. And so my. But my. Yeah. And so now everyone’s like, no, everybody needs to take creatine. It helps. Type 3 diabetes, which is what we call dementia, neurological diabetes. Right. So, yeah, those would be. If someone said, what are the foundational ones? That nattokinase is massive.

0:32:39 Roland Pankewich: Yeah, yeah. Cardiovascular, especially for the aging athlete, which we can. We can dig into another time. But, Justin, you know, you’re a wealth of knowledge. It just comes out of you so effortlessly. And I usually do these on Zoom. So doing it in person, it just. There’s a different feel, man. It’s such a nice flow of conversation back and forth.

0:32:59 Justin Dees: Yeah.

0:32:59 Roland Pankewich: Thank you so much for your time, for your wisdom, and I’m excited for the content that you and I are going to make because I know we’re going to make waves in this. In this industry, in this world, because these people need help. And I’m glad you’re on the front line, man.

0:33:12 Justin Dees: I appreciate you.

0:33:13 Roland Pankewich: Likewise. Thank you so much for your time again.

0:33:14 Justin Dees: Thank you.

0:33:15 Roland Pankewich: Talk to you soon and thank you all. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Please do follow us on all outlets like and subscribe to all aspects of social media, and we will be bringing you great content coming very soon in the future. All the best, everyone. Bye now.