 Life is about constant evolution. Always better today than we were yesterday. There are no shortcuts to a successful fitness regimen. Only hard work and consistency. And to navigate through the mountain of fitness advice available, candidates must learn to separate fad from function. I'm Daniel Fletcher. Welcome to the Only Easy Day was Yesterday, the official Navy SEAL podcast. In this extended series, we'll speak with select special warfare performance experts to clarify common training misconceptions and provide insight into areas of focus specifically important to special warfare candidates. Today, we extend our fitness series with a discussion about protein powders and supplements with performance dietitian Justin Robinson. Let's get started. Justin, first of all, thank you so much. Taking a little bit of time out of your day to sit and speak with us. We appreciate you being on the podcast. It's fun. Thank you. Yeah, it's been, I think a year or plus since we had you on episode 11. So if you guys are listening at home, you guys can go back and listen to episode 11 and hear your official intro and learn all about you. But just spend a couple of minutes to tell us a little bit about your history and what brought you to NSW and what your function is. So my background is pretty broad. I spent a lot of time in both strength and conditioning and sports nutrition. Going through school and after school, my bachelor's degree is a dual in nutrition and kinesiology. My master's degree is in exercise science. And so I was working at a sports performance center for a while and then the call came almost out of nowhere to interview with a professional baseball team. And so I took that route and spent a year working with Los Angeles Dodgers as their team dietitian. And then I taught for a while in college and then these opportunities in the military came up in 2015. And so I've been working here in this community since then and it's been an awesome experience. I learned something new every day here. Yeah, I think that's a cool part of your job focus is just being on the edge. You're constantly learning about the human body performance and it's just kind of an ongoing thing. It doesn't really stop, you know? Never and part of that is driven by my colleagues. So I'm part of a special operations forces dietitian working group. So there's about 40 of us across all branches of the military. Part of the learning is us driving each other and coming up with questions but the other component to that is this community and hence why we're doing these podcasts is that I get questions from students and operators every day and so they're constantly challenging me about new diet trends and new supplements and research studies. It's a very well educated population here so it keeps me going. Yeah, it's interesting because I think a lot of the guys that are in this community they are the types that would do their own research I think and try to seek their own path which it's seeking out professionals like you is obviously the smart thing to do. So we have a bit of a series we'd like to talk with you about a few specific misconceptions or big talking points in the community for prep in buds or even in a pipeline in general. We'll start out talking about protein powder and supplements because obviously that is a big broad topic and it's very common in exercise and performance. There's a huge widespread rich market of products that are in front of people all the time. How do you recommend recruits start navigating all these products out there and them versus eating clean real foods and how do you help people or how do you recommend people negotiate that balance? Great question and I'll tackle that from two aspects. So I will, you know, what they say CYA on my part you can look it up see exactly what that stands for in terms of what the students should do when they're here what they're allowed to do when they're here. So I'll tackle that and I'll discuss the student prepping for this program. So we do have a rather strict supplement policy and that is essentially no supplements at all once you are within Naval Special Warfare if you have a circumstance such as a stress fracture history then we can prescribe calcium or vitamin D if you have a food allergy we could probably prescribe something like a probiotic. So there are ways around that but your basic pre-workouts creatine anything that is a pill or powder is not allowed while you're a student here. So I'm a big fan of I didn't come up with the phrase but gain the way you train. So one of my recommendations is if you know you are only allowed to have extra calories and extra protein from Whole Foods as you mentioned while you're here then a large portion of your training should consist of getting those calories getting the extra protein extra vitamins and minerals from nutrient dense and calorie dense food. So doing things like eating trail mix instead of chips instead of a salad maybe you have cooked vegetables because that's going to wilt it down you'll get more on your plate using olive oil or coconut oil in the foods that you eat to get some extra calories hard boiled eggs for example so getting your calories from there but I'm also a realist so I understand that a lot of the individuals prepping for this program probably have part-time jobs or still in school and are probably training twice a day and so if you're going from one training session to school or from school to job you might not have time to prepare meal and so grabbing a protein shake is a very convenient thing so my advice for when or why to take a supplement really comes down to convenience I do feel that whole food calories are better calories but we'll discuss recovery aspect in a little bit but I think you may not be able to get the calories that you need just from whole foods if you have such a busy hectic schedule especially if you're 18 or 19 maybe you're living in an apartment with some friends and it's just not there so definitely valid reasons to take a supplement Let's just talk about protein maybe just for a second I think that's probably one of the most popular powdered we'll say supplement that's really commonly used for good reason I think a lot of times as a kind of an add-on to an existing really well-rounded diet do you think that protein powder itself is wise to use in addition to whole food as in maybe you're not even able to take in enough protein throughout the day not necessarily for convenience but just for volume Yeah and to get an answer to all of these questions is it depends Yeah right It's the best response I can give for anything If we look at most Americans most Americans get enough protein if you are very very active you need more protein than the standard individual if you are prepping for a program such as this you probably need more protein and more total calories so most of more carbs and more fat than that really active person so yeah I think it is feasible to have all of your calories and all of your protein needs met from food but again I think it's a matter of do you have the time and the means to prepare all of that food the answer is no I think protein powders can be a very solid option when it comes to any supplements so whatever you do choose whether it be a creatine or a protein powder my first tip is get things that I call stripped down so a lot of times you'll see protein powder and it's part of a protein complex or like a weight gainer or something like that Exactly it's a weight gainer it's a pre-workout it's a post-workout and the ingredient list is a mile long like sugars and all kinds of other junk in there Exactly so one of my biggest things is make sure you know what you're putting into your body don't be naïve don't leave gray area in terms of what you're putting into your body and I'll talk about certification here in a moment but you hear all the time collegiate professional athletes they pop positive for a test and like oh well it must have been this protein powder that I was taking and so I'll still point the finger back at him and like well it's your body somebody may have handed you that shake but you still drank that and so don't be naïve The proprietary blend you read that word right? Yes, proprietary blends you don't know exactly what amounts are in a proprietary blend so the two major points take homes with supplementation whether it be a protein powder, pre-workout, post-workout one, know precisely what you're putting into your body the strip down take a protein powder that's just protein added flavor and really nothing else if you do take creatine it should say creatine and that simplistic approach That cuts out a lot of the products right there already Absolutely The second and most important is third-party tested supplements so the research is all over in terms of the contamination and tainted aspects of supplements and what I mean by that is some studies will say well there's 25% of products on the shelf at common health food or supplement stores are contaminated with something not on the label I've read another one that it's up to 75% so roughly if you split the difference roughly half of the products that you can purchase on the shelves at a grocery store even at a specialty store probably don't have in the bottle what's actually on the label Some residues or contaminations Exactly, that could be any number of things so it could be to the left end the not very dangerous spectrum Yeah, maybe there's not the exact amounts so it may say it's 25 grams of protein per scoop but it's actually 20 grams where that can get a little dangerous is maybe with some of the micronutrients things like iron, vitamin A some of the fat soluble vitamins that can maybe be toxic it may say it has 20 milligrams of something but it really has 40 it may have to the right end a more dangerous aspect of that spectrum it may be contaminated with anabolic steroids or amphetamines or maybe heavy metals as you talked about other residue so when you have a product that is third party certified and the primary organizations for that are NSF sport and informed choice it'll have that label on there you can check out those websites it'll list what products are verified that at very least assures that what you're taking is safe it may or may not work Yeah, you may have a few Yeah, there's somebody else looking at it Exactly the people that are selling it to you At the worst, you're wasting your money but you're not potentially wasting your kidneys or wasting your military career by having too much heavy metals in your system or popping positive on a test or hurting yourself or hurting yourself because we look at things like total caffeine intake and total caffeine intake should be less than 500 milligrams per day so if you're having a cup of coffee and an energy drink and a pre-workout if the pre-workout label says 150 milligrams but it really has 250 and you're doing two scoops of that now you're getting two 300 extra milligrams of caffeine Ripple and quadruple and you're recommended or yeah, max dose, right? Exactly and so you're being unaware of what you're putting into your body I think that's a really good kind of cornerstone just dig deeper past that page in the magazine that's the ad and find out what's really in there That's exactly a lot of people read the label on the front and don't spin around to the back to find out what's in there or try to find the stuff that's been tested Or the worst reason my buddy's really jacked and this is what he's taking so that's what I'm gonna take Yeah, right, right Let's talk about vitamins maybe for a minute What are some of the common nutritional deficiencies that you think people should actually be supplementing for if there are any? Good question and again, the CYA on my part is I have a hard time prescribing any individual vitamin or mineral without having some sort of a blood test first We look at those the one that comes up more often than not is vitamin D A lot of athletes especially people who are very active people who are training for a military special operations forces program such as this are typically deficient in vitamin D Or why is that? So it's not just a standard vitamin it's also a hormone in the body and because it's used in so many different processes I don't know the exact pathophysiology of it but because it's used in a number of different processes it's not just for bone health it's important in gut health it's important in other hormone regulations in the body especially in our community even though the guys are outside quite a bit they're usually wearing long sleeves and pants and covers and so that minimizes skin exposure to the sun depending on where you live if you are I forget the exact longitude number but if you're north of Denver area across the United States you have lower UV rate exposure and so that may increase your risk for vitamin D deficiency so I would say that would probably be one of the big ones calcium and iron we do see a little bit however I wouldn't prescribe iron especially without that iron panel because iron can be toxic in the liver So yeah maybe a multivitamin vitamin D right? yes yeah there's if people talk about it it's great for insurance so I have no problem somebody wants to take a multivitamin but there's been zero conclusive evidence that taking a multivitamin really does anything for performance or even for our immune function so people will say oh well take a multivitamin because you won't get sick as often or it'll improve your strength or performance or recovery there's really no evidence to support that however there's really no evidence to say that a multivitamin is dangerous or bad for you or bad for you outside of taking something that is not third party tested that may have other contaminants in it so if you go to again a popular health food store a lot of the times they'll have the men's pack multivitamin and it doesn't just have vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D it'll have an herbal tons of stuff in there extract pill it'll have this and that and going back to what I mentioned with supplements not matching the label not matching the product the biggest culprit of those are herbal supplements so things like ginkgo and ginseng those are really all over the place in terms of not matching that again the 250 milligrams of whatever it says that amount not being in the bottle how do you recommend people decipher between a high quality vitamin and something that isn't I mean is it just based on price where do you start with that? to some extent yes I do think you get what you pay for but the caveat to that is there are a lot of overpriced products so I probably would not go to a dollar store to buy my vitamins I would say it goes back to making sure that it's third party tested a friend of mine who works with the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee she has a two step process step one is it third party tested if the answer is no you stop right there and you don't even go to that and I like that approach so again that affects more of the safety as opposed to the efficacy of that but most third party supplements are at least above average in terms of quality and the other caveat is that even if a supplement touts that it is a very high quality compared to food pills and powders are still pretty pills especially are pretty poorly absorbed so even a highly bio available supplement is still not as highly bio available as food so with vitamin D you mentioned being remotely commonly deficient in people I guess kind of a broad stroke what can people do to give themselves exposure or what foods to eat to kind of cover that base if that's possible sure and that's the thing vitamin D is pretty tough to get from the diet mushrooms are one of the only natural sources we talk about dairy products but that vitamin D is added a lot of the times to those products but they are in dairy products so again I'll go back to the same analogy of making sure that your supplements are stripped down I would say the truth also applies to most foods so things like yogurt and milk I'm actually a bigger fan of Greek style whole fat yogurt whole fat milk it's less processed looking for products that maybe have less added sugar so the whole fat natural grass fed if you can afford it dairy products outside of that it's really fortified foods so you might see things like orange juice that have calcium and vitamin D added to them but it really is tough to come by in a lot of foods if you like things like anchovies and sardines that have little fish that have the bones in it you can get some of the vitamin D and calcium from consuming those bones bone broth probably has which my grandma used to just call chicken stock but now it has it's fancy now right it's fancy now exactly getting some of the nutrients from leaching the calcium out of some of the foods there sun exposure as 5 to 10 minutes of mostly body exposure or maybe 15 to 20 minutes of partial body exposure again depending on what part of the country you live in or part of the world you live in should be enough I don't have any problem with people supplementing a thousand I use per day again this is Justin and you're talking about vitamin D here this is just vitamin D aren't there like a few different vitamin D's like different numbers vitamin D3 or there's 11 2 and 3 2 and 3 so there's D2 and D3 D2 is from non animal sources so plant based so if somebody is a vegan they will probably only choose vitamin D2 so if you have an almond milk or flaxseed milk soy milk that has vitamin D added to it that's actually going to be vitamin D2 which going back to the bioavailability or how absorbable the nutrient is vitamin D2 is less bioavailable than D3 D3 is derived from an animal source so regular milk or yogurt is going to have that D3 and most vitamin D supplements that come in bottles are going to be D3 again if you're vegan or vegetarian you may need to consider that when selecting that supplement gotcha let's go back to that moment when you're between meals and you're trying to get a workout in and you know you're kind of walking into it with an empty stomach or not feeling 100% because your blood sugar is low there's a lot of different packaged products whether it's like bars we talked about protein shakes what can you recommend people either like steer towards or maybe avoid obviously there's some things that are just going to be like sugar products you know exactly I think that certain people maybe gravitate towards certain types of protein whether it's a whey protein versus an egg protein or something like that you're talking about the bioavailability of vitamin D3 one being more absorbable or faster absorbing than others in the protein spectrum is that the same is everyone different or maybe you can unpack that a little bit that's a lot to unpack but yes so to answer the first part of the question the simple message I give is that if it's two to four hours before a heavy workout that's when you want more sustained energy and that's going to come from a combination of a carb fat and a protein and beyond that it really does depend on what works for you and for your stomach quick example a lot of people love bananas because they're high potassium I love bananas as a snack but I know that if I eat a banana within two hours of workout it gives me indigestion but that's something that I've only learned from years of training and racing and just learning that about my body so trial and error I think is a huge component to know what works for you and for your body the other side to that is if you're within an hour 30 to 60 minutes of workout that's where you want a more carbohydrate based meal or snack and that's where a lot of the sugary products sometimes do come in gels, goose, sports drinks that are all sugar those are fine I think if it's timed right around activity and yes is something like water down orange juice probably better than a sports drink in terms of your overall health yes but is a sports drink effective in providing fluid carbohydrate and electrolytes absolutely so it meets that bill I think the thing that you mentioned earlier about testing knowing your sources reading the ingredients kind of doing a little deeper examination of products is that the same thing you'd recommend for diet bars or nutritional bars or meal replacement bars and those products are a plenty right now there are different ones with different targets I think when it comes to the bars the meal replacement options again it depends what is your goal what is your purpose of consuming that are you trying to get extra calories are you trying to get extra protein so I'm still a fan of diet quality over the macro content of the food so can you explain that a little bit absolutely so the macro content macro nutrients carbohydrates protein and fat we have a tendency when we look at products to get the ones that have the most protein and the lowest sugar and it's not that high protein low sugar is unhealthy that's a great way to eat this is a little empty is what you're saying exactly we know that sugar fat and salt all taste really good and so if you take one of those products away you have to add more of something else to it so a lot of the sugar-free foods are high in fat and again not that high fat is wrong but I just want to make sure that people are not naive about what they're putting into their bodies and that sugar-free or low carb is not necessarily low calorie so if your weight loss is a goal that may not be the best approach if they don't add fat they maybe add something artificial to it so a lot of the times in protein bars specifically they'll add a lot of sugar alcohols and we discussed doing what's right for your body sugar alcohols take longer to digest and some people have digestive issues with high amounts of sugar alcohols so you may wonder why alright I ate this bar and I was gassy and bloated well that's the 15 grams of sugar alcohols in there I'm still a fan of looking at the ingredients list and we mentioned this in the previous talk that the fewer the ingredients the better a whole food approach is better if the ingredients are actual foods and not chemistry words that's still what I look for so I do have a tendency to skip the grams of protein and grams of sugar and I go almost directly to the ingredients it's food and that's what I think we need to put into our bodies we don't have time to get into gut health but the short answer to that is artificial colors flavors artificial sweeteners may negatively impact gut health and so the whole gut microbiome discussion in five years and 10 years we're gonna have really a lot of discussion about this because we're just kind of getting the data back finally you just the very very tip of it now but it's related to our sleep it's related to our immune system it's related to weight gain and weight loss and appetite so if we are constantly pumping our bodies full of artificial ingredients yes we may be cutting down on our calories or increasing protein or cutting down on sugar but at what cost and so the major concept now is lower calories not necessarily the best way to lose weight I believe that performance weight loss overall health comes from higher quality of food and more real food as often as you can I think that's a really great note to end on look at your ingredients eat as much whole food as possible and only rely on these when you really really are in a pinch exactly and plan ahead if you know that you're going from school to work to a training session then yeah pack trail mix pack a bar to pack a protein shake that has a nutrition facts label or is a third party tested protein shake and that has again those simple ingredients inside of it and then that way you don't come home at six o'clock a night and over eat on unhealthy food because you have no willpower because it's been four hours since you've eaten and you've been expending all this energy so yes you're absolutely right I think planning ahead is an aspect that I would had to that has an enormous amount of benefit awesome thank you so much for talking with us about absolutely protein powder supplements and all this stuff thank you find out more at sealswick dot com and join us again for the next NSW podcast