A conversation with Dr. Jonny Bowden and Kristin Kirkpatrick on caffeine, the breakfast debate, and more?

Question

Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS · Answer

Welcome to Creator Conversations. Listen in as board-certified nutritionist, Dr. Johnny Bowden and registered dietician, Kristen Kirkpatrick, discuss caffeine, healthy breakfasts, and of course, bacon. Moderated by me, Sam Darkwa. You're both nutrition experts. You've been members of Any Question for a long time. You've given hundreds of answers, I believe. And so first and foremost, we want to thank you for your dedication and commitment to the platform. With that, let's just kick it off. The first question I have for you, and so this one with some context, I'm not a coffee drinker myself, but there's obviously conversation around how healthy caffeine is for you in general. Kristen, why don't we start off with you? Is caffeine bad for you to drink? Is it so bad for you that you can't drink multiple cups a day? So a lot of this depends on genetics. There is a gene called the CYF1A2 gene that essentially puts people into one of two camps. You're either a fast metabolizer of caffeine or you're a slow metabolizer. For those individuals that are fast metabolizers, they have a cup of coffee, goes through the system, gone. They can have cup number two, no problem. Slow metabolizers, it builds up. It's not coming out of the system. And so the problem with that is then the caffeine could go up and up and up in terms of levels in the body. Then you might have problems. You could have an increased risk of arrhythmia, increased blood pressure, things like that. So it's really a genetic question more than anything else. But from the standpoint of the delivery system, I think the coffee bean is a great delivery system of it just because there's so many phytonutrients, antioxidants. There's so much benefit to coffee. We just have to make sure we have the genetic capability to be able to metabolize it correctly. And I'll just end by saying that, really most people know without having to take a nutrigenomics test whether or not you are a fast or slow metabolizer of caffeine. That was going to be my next question. I was going to say, how often are people getting tested for this? We only need to get tested once because our genes don't change. From an epigenetic standpoint, we could have a difference in gene expression and the way genes are expressed, but our genes are the same the day we are born, the same the day we die. So the epigenetic response is we're going to have less coffee or less caffeine, let's say less caffeine. If I know that I have the genotyping that is relevant to a slow metabolizer for the CYP1A2 gene. So that's how we find out. But most people know if you feel jittery, if you feel a little uneasy, you can't go to sleep. If you're having it later in the day, you're probably a slow metabolizer of caffeine. And Johnny, I want you to also answer the same question. Is caffeine bad for you? Is it okay to drink a couple of cups of coffee? First, I want to ask how many cups of coffee do you drink a day? And secondly, who is, who should be a coffee drinker? Is there like an ideal type of person who should be enjoying the beverage or? Well, let me answer the easy one first. I do usually two to four is my average. So when I started my career in nutrition and in health, the CYP1A gene hadn't been discovered. So we used to have to answer this question blind. And it was like, oh, there were the, kind of the naturopathic tradition that was like, no, caffeine just screws up your adrenals and it's bad for you. And other people were like, no, it's the best source of antioxidants in the American diet. And we were kind of working blind. And I think this is kind of a metaphor for where we're going to be with a lot of things in nutrition. Then they discover the gene and they find out, well, for some people, it's not a good idea, but for other people, it's perfectly fine. They basically find a genetic reason for the explanation, which I used to give, which is I've been doing this 30 years. And I can tell you that there's always somebody who can take two Valiums and go out and party all night and somebody who can drink four espressos and sleep like a baby. There's a huge variation. We don't know why, we kind of do, but it really does come back. Kristen couldn't have said it better. I really found nothing to disagree with in what she said. It always, for every question about is a banana good, is pasta good? The answer is always going to be, it depends on the individual on whom it is having an impact. We've got to know that. I don't recommend anybody go out and get tested for CYP1A, just find out whether it keeps you up at night because that's really, what's the harm in caffeine? The number one harm, as far as I can see, is that it interferes with possibly the most important thing for anti-aging that we know of, which is deep restorative sleep. And now that we have things like the Oura Ring, you don't have to take my word for it. You can drink your caffeine and then look and see the kind of night sleep you had, how much deep, how much REM, all of that stuff. And you can see for yourself if it's disturbing it. Most people don't need a gene test to know if they're jittery at night. And that's the big thing. If you are, stop drinking it at noon or don't drink it at all. If you are one of those people for whom it just is a little bit of a brightener and it doesn't keep you up at night and it doesn't interfere with anything, it's a, as Kristen said, actually, wonderfully, it's a wonderful delivery system. There are lots, the same flavanols that exist in dark cocoa that are the reason we tell you to eat dark chocolate. Well, they're in coffee too. So it's not a bad thing. It's not a good thing. It really is a question of a fit with the individual. I want to keep the ball rolling on this, but I do have to say, I have plenty of follow-up questions. Maybe I'll send them to your inboxes later. They've just come to me as you've spoken, but I just want to keep the ball rolling. So I'm a curious person. Yes, good. Curiosity is good. But anybody can take this. So now the question that I have is around your suggestions for a great balanced breakfast. It can be how you start your day. It can be how you recommend people generally start their day. I'm sure there's no blanket solution, but maybe there are some things that you would recommend that people try to touch on in their breakfast. The floor is yours to start with that one. Johnny, why don't you start us off? Well, I'm not the best person to ask this question because I very rarely eat breakfast. Now, I taught, as I'm sure Kristen did, and as we were all taught to do, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and you should never skip breakfast. And guess what? There is a lot of published research on that, particularly when you're talking about school kids getting off to school in the morning. And I would stand by that to this day. If you're a mother or a father and you've got a kid and you're sending them off to school, you better give them a good breakfast. And we can discuss what that consists of. To me, it's based around protein, not carbohydrates, but very important meal for people in those circumstances. You get older, you maybe have some metabolic issues, maybe weight, maybe prediabetes, maybe all kinds of different things. Now, intermittent fasting is looking like a really good idea. There's really good research on that. And so maybe you're starting to experiment, and guess what goes first? Breakfast. And guess whether that's healthy or not? It is. For many, many people, that's a very, very healthy way to start the day, but not if you're not fat adapted. What do I mean by that? So when I was a trainer at Equinox, we always told people, don't ever exercise on an empty stomach because you'll get lightheaded, blah, blah, blah. And some people still do. That is because they are acclimated to burning sugar. That is what their metabolism knows how to do. You go two, three hours without eating when you've got a sugar-burning metabolism, you're crawling the walls. So if you're not fat adapted, your body doesn't know how to run on stored fat. It's looking for sugar. It might not be a good idea to start by skipping breakfast or working out on an empty stomach. But you go back to the days of the bodybuilders at Gold's Gym in Venice, when Gold's Gym in Venice was called the Mecca, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno and all those guys trained there, they all trained on empty stomachs. They didn't know anything about fat-burning metabolism, but they figured out that in a fasted state, there was less sugar in the bloodstream, so they were more likely to be using fat. And they were, in fact, although they didn't know it, very fat adapted. If your body knows what to do with fat, going all morning without eating isn't an issue. I play tennis every morning, usually for about two hours. I usually don't get back from my morning tennis till 12, one o'clock, and that's when I eat my first meal. If you would ask me to work out like that 10, 15 years ago, I'd be climbing the walls. I could never, ever, ever do it. But my body now knows. It says, oh, there's no sugar there, but no problem. He's got plenty of fat around, and I've got the ATM code to get into that fat, and that means fat adapted. Your body's metabolism is flexible. It can use either fuel, and guess what? You don't need sugar to start the day with, or starch or anything that converts to sugar quickly. You can do perfectly well with your stored fat. So I don't think breakfast is the most important meal of the day for everybody, and so I don't have an ideal template for breakfast, but if I did, it would be centered around protein. It would probably be eggs and bacon with a slice of avocado and a cup of coffee. Hard to follow that one, Johnny. I completely agree with you. Do you? Yeah. One of the things I tell my, and I'm like you, like I think I had my first meal today around one myself, I had mine right before we started. Okay. But one of the things I like to tell my patients is breakfast is just two different words coming together, which is breaking the fast, and it doesn't necessarily have to be done when you wake up. It doesn't have to be in the AM hours. I love what Johnny was saying about metabolic flexibility, because it's true. I think if you're not in that area, right? If I have a patient that comes to me, and they're used to two donuts in the morning, the second they get out of the bed and a glass of orange juice to down it, it seems almost impossible to them, or let's say really challenging to then say, okay, have some eggs or maybe have some cottage cheese, really try and take away the carbs in your breakfast. And I don't really love carbs at breakfast, because I feel like as we wake up, the pancreas is still sleeping. So it's like the last one to kind of wake up and be like, oh, okay, I'm good now, right? If we start our day with sugar, we oftentimes end our day with sugar, and we keep the cycle going the whole time, because it is really a vicious cycle. So we get up, we have the donut, we have the orange juice, the typical standard American diet. We craved it, we have it, our blood sugar and insulin goes up tremendously, and then it drops down to below where we started, and then we want it again. We need to get that high back. So I agree, having protein, having healthy fats, and not having it have to look like breakfast. I think that's the other thing. Breaking the fast could be at one o'clock, I'm going to have a handful of almonds, and I'm going to have some yogurt. That could be breaking the fast. So could a hamburger. I've had- A hamburger, a piece of salmon, right? I've been doing that. It's funny too, because that was actually the, I'd preface by saying I had a follow-up question. It was around, you know, one, what happens if you do skip breakfast, which I think you've both touched on. Absolutely nothing except pizza, right? Right, but then secondly, I really like what I was going to follow up with. Beyond the art of food, which is the pediatric population, yeah. Yeah, because the thing to me that you had just touched on, Kristen, which is pretty interesting, is like, is it really more about the food itself, what you're eating, or is there something about eating first thing in the morning, right? Nothing about eating first thing in the morning. I mean, I didn't mean to jump in, but I mean, nothing about, I'm sure she'd agree, it's about when you break the fast, and you can do it with, I used to have Buffalo burgers all the time, you know, just big hamburger for breakfast. It's a great way to start the day. But I agree, I mean, Kristen really nailed it with what she just said. It's about metabolic flexibility, and, you know, and I don't, I'm not strict. I don't know if you are, Kristen, but I'm not really strict, like I'll never eat breakfast. Weekends come if I'm with the family, they decide to go to brunch, whatever. Of course I'll do it, but as a rule, it's not my go-to. It's not my go-to. Right, and I think too, sometimes we get trained towards eating breakfast because it's what to do. Of course. It takes us out of the realm of listening to our body. Yes, yes, yes. If you are not feeling hunger, if you don't feel hunger, it's like, it's not really like, why would you eat if you don't feel hunger, right? I mean, like, let's take people that are on medications and need those for, you know, to take food with it, that kind of thing out of it. But really, it also really tapping into mindful eating. That's why I like fasting because really when I feel hunger, that's when I might say, I think I'm ready to eat something. But some of my patients, they'll say, well, I had breakfast at 10 o'clock. And then I say, oh, curious, why do you choose 10? Yeah. Well, because it's 10, right? It's breakfast time, right? But that's not tapping into their feelings of, I'm hungry or I'm full or, so I think that can tie into it as well. I want to take, can I interject two things real fast? Sure. The first is, in no particular order of importance at all, I was going to say to Kristen, can you believe that we taught them that a healthy breakfast was special K, orange juice, low fat, milk and a banana? Do you believe that we taught them that? That's the healthy version of two donuts. Right. Metabolically, it does the same thing. So that's number one. So anybody that thinks, well, that's a perfectly, no, it wasn't, we were wrong. We were idiots. That's what we believed. I taught it. I'm sure Kristen taught it. It's not true. So the second thing I wanted to tell you is that there was a study that I heard when I was in psychology school of all places, when in the seventies, when I was getting my master's and you couldn't call this study what they called it, then it's not politically correct and wouldn't be allowed, but they called it the fat flying Frenchman study. And what they did was they looked at flight attendants on Air France and they looked at the ones that were very overweight and the ones that weren't. And they're on the same schedule and they're eating the same food. So they're wondering like, what is the big difference between the overweight steward, and the normal weight? And the answer was very clear. The lean people, the lean flight attendants ate when they were hungry. The fat ones ate when it was time for breakfast or time for lunch. They were, the reason I learned this in psychology, they were tending to external clues, cues like time. Like Kristen said, oh, I ate breakfast because it was 10 o'clock. That's what you do. So that's what was driving them, not does my body need any fuel right now? And the ones who were leaner were more in tune with the internal clues. That's super interesting. Super interesting. You know, last one on the food topic, is bacon unhealthy? So bringing it back to me, of course, I typically eat Turkey bacon rather than regular bacon. No, for no particular reason, maybe it's healthier, maybe it's not. I'm hoping you can shine some light on that. So that's question one, right? Is bacon unhealthy? And then kind of the extension of that is whichever way you answer, are there some ways of preparing bacon that are healthier than other methods? I love this question. I have a feeling it might be the first time Kristen and I might disagree, but okay, Kristen, why don't you go first? Well, here's what I, you know what I actually think- I have a very unconventional view of this. Well, you were adding Samuel that like, you have Turkey bacon. The first thing I thought in my head, again, is like, well, if all things were equal, what would you prefer? And it's probably bacon, right? Real bacon. Probably, yeah. Real bacon, right? So it's like, that's the other thing. It's like, why don't we eat what we like? And if we have data that shows that it might not be the best thing, we just don't have excess amount of it. I would rather you have a piece of bacon and say, man, I love this and I'm enjoying it than a piece of Turkey bacon and say, well, that kind of sucked, but it was kind of- You know that the taste is not too far off, somewhat similar. Oh, I don't agree with that. I don't know about that, but all right, okay. All right, let's give them that. Okay, so here's my answer. So when you look at the data that we have, looking at the components of any kind of processed meat, we do know that there could be adverse effects based on the data, but the data is also based on people eating a lot of it. And I think that is what's lost in the data. You know, I just answered something like this for the app where I talked about the fact that I love bacon. I think bacon is delicious. I don't have it every day and I probably have it once every two weeks and I really enjoy it. And I don't think my health is gonna be impacted so dramatically because of it, because everything else around my diet is pretty darn healthy. I think we need to always go for progress and not perfection, which is why I asked you, what do you prefer? So whenever my patients come into the office, I always ask them to start with a non-negotiable and we all have one. Most people's non-negotiable is bacon. Don't take away my bacon from me, right? So it's like one of those things where I would never take it away from people, but I also probably wouldn't recommend it every single solitary day. And it has nothing to do with the fact that it's an animal. I would be more concerned about looking at the nitrates in bacon and the data that we have very clearly from many different organizations. But I think in moderation, it's just fine. And I think we need to get back to the fact that food is also pleasurable and we lose that sense sometimes. We restrict so much and then we can't stay with that restriction. It's not sustainable. So going back to what is pleasurable and seeing how can I add that into my diet in such a way where it's not going to negatively impact my health. I think that's a great answer. I'd like to maybe move 10 degrees to the right of that. You guys are talking about it and Kristen's talking about it in such a reasonable and rational way. Pleasure is like my great nutrition mentor, the late Robert Klein used to say, pleasure is a nutrient. Correct, I agree. But you guys are talking from the ground of being that it's really a bad food, but we can have some of it. I want to make the argument that it can be a health food. And I'll tell you why. I did a webinar on this once and I put it on YouTube called Why a Nutritionist Eats Bacon Every Morning for Breakfast. So first of all, especially when we're talking meat, there's meat and there's meat. When I talk about hamburgers, I am talking about 100% grass fed, humanely raised cows who were raised on pasture, not just till the last six months before they die, when they beat them up on grain, but till the very moment of slaughter, which is hopefully humane and painless. And they live that life and they don't have steroids and antibiotics and human growth, I mean, and bovine growth hormone and all the rest of the shit that they add to it. That's what I'm talking about with meat. With bacon, it's kind of the same thing. If you're talking about humanely raised pigs where they haven't docked the tails and they're not living in battery cages and they're actually living social lives and they're running around, they're eating their natural diet, then you're going to have a food that is about half fat and half protein, to which I say, what the hell is wrong with that? Now, you might say, but it's saturated fat. And I would say, I've got studies this long since 2010 showing that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease. It doesn't clog your arteries. It doesn't make you have a heart attack and it is not associated with mortality. So what's the problem? Can you just define saturated fat? Yeah, there's three classes of fats, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and saturated. And polyunsaturated is further defined as omega-6 and omega-3. Those are the two classes of polyunsaturated. Monounsaturated, this, by the way, the definition for general normal people, it has to do with carbon double bonds. It's nothing anybody wants. It's just they're molecularly different in structure. Saturated fats tend to be solid at room temperature. That's all, I mean, nobody's going to say, well, the third and the sixth double bond of carbon, it's really just a molecular arrangement of carbons and hydrogens and stuff like that that makes them different. The interesting thing is that pork isn't all saturated fat. It's about half monounsaturated fat, which is the stuff found in olive oil. So if you're talking about a food that doesn't have all these things, I don't see the problem. Now, Kristen rightfully mentions nitrates. Let's talk for one minute about nitrates because everybody, oh, nitrate-free, all this stuff. The number one source of nitrates in the diet is vegetables. The reason the nitrates in bacon are a problem is that when nitrates are combined with the amino acids in protein are combined with high heat and nitrates, they can produce carcinogenic compounds. It's not the nitrates, it's the nitrates, the amino acids and the high heats. That's not present in vegetables. That's why we can eat all the nitrates we want from lettuce and it doesn't have any effect at all. So I recommend, and this goes to your point, are there easier, are there better ways to prepare something is nitrate, no added nitrates. We certainly don't want more nitrates added to the bacon. So I always go nitrate-free and I don't do it at high heat. Microwaving bacon actually produces, or the best way to make bacon, both from a point of view of taste and health, is to bake it. Takes about 20 minutes. It's lower heat, you get nitrate-free, and I'm waiting for anybody to show me why that's bad for you. Now, you'll read a study from time to time where they look at processed meat versus regular red meat. They've never even looked at like grass-fed red meat, which I think would blow the comparison off the charts, but even looking at regular meat that you get from the supermarket, hamburger meat versus salami, bacon, all that, and there is a difference. The danger always is with the processed meats. But if you look at the studies on bacon, you'll go, oh my God, it sounds so horrible. Every slice of bacon raises your risk for heart disease. I'm making this up, but this is close to what they say, 13%. Well, what does that really mean? When we're talking cigarettes, we're talking like an 800 to 8,000% increase in risk. When we're talking a 13% increase in risk, we have to ask what's the baseline. So if your chance of a heart attack or cardiovascular event at your particular age is one in 200, a 13% increase means it's now 1.26 in 200. It's infinitesimal, it's meaningless. And the media just blows it up, 13% for every, so what? Probably there's 8,000 habits you have that raise or lower risk for things by 10 or 15%. When we see 800%, like with cigarettes, it's time to be worried. When you're seeing 13%, come on. So for all those- They make a great bacon, it's still delicious. For all those reasons, and what Kristen said about it being pleasurable and fun, I don't see surrounded by a good diet and good lifestyle and good habits that that's gonna make this slide. I think the protein and fat actually is great for fasting. You can break, you don't wanna break a fast, but sometimes we have what we call fasting aids of food that it's low in calories. It doesn't really, you're gonna get lots of the benefits of fasting, but it'll get you to put in more hours. You'll be able to sustain longer. Bacon is one of those foods. It'll break fast, but man, you can go all morning with a couple of slices of bacon. So I'm not of the belief that it's always bad for you. And that- And I think, Johnny, you made such a great point too. I was giving a presentation last week about how the sugar industry essentially tricked us into thinking that- That's right. Saturated fat that increased heart disease, but really it was sugar. Spent a lot of money on that little- Well, of course, and lobbying and all that. But one of the things that I was telling people, and I tell my patients this, and you hit on it when you talked about the feed and the life of the animal, is that I always go back to Michael Pollan's definition of food, which is something that, food is something that comes from nature, is fed from nature, and will eventually rot. So even, that's such a great point you made, that even within the bacon aisle, some of it is food and some of it is not, right? Bravo. We only have a couple of minutes left, and I want to- No, this is so much funny. You kidding me? It definitely flew by. So why don't we just do- She's my new best friend. I don't want to say goodbye. I know, you do. Listen, keep answering the same questions and we might have to do something like this again, but let's just do a quick rapid fire here, real quick, in a few sentences. We've talked a lot about food and meals, first meal of the day. What is the best thing you can do after a meal? Leave that to yourselves on how you define that, but Kristen, why don't you kick us off? Go for a walk. Johnny, go for a walk. Done. Okay, well- 20 minute walk after dinner is like the best. If they taught that in grade school, we probably wouldn't be having a metabolic emergency with prediabetes. And so then on the inverse of that, then what is a less optimal activity to do immediately after eating? Having dessert because it's what you do, right? Like, so that's the other thing. It's like the structure of our meal. So, or sitting down and watching your TV show or even worse, watching your TV show while your plate's on your lap, right? So it's just like that gets into intuitive and mindful eating, but moving your body, I always say when you're done sitting to enjoy your meal, become vertical, not horizontal. So anything you can do to kind of help manage your blood sugar after that, there's so many studies that can make a huge difference. And just to dig into that a little bit deeper then, Johnny, you go for a walk. What's happening in your body now? What is the benefit of that? So from my perspective, because I am passionate about educating people about something called insulin resistance, which is basically pre-diabetes. From my perspective, one of the most important things, and there are a number of them, but one of them is that it creates a demand for glucose, which opens up the cells and insulin literally can now take some of that sugar that's been floating around making your blood and put it into the muscle cells because now it has like an insulin-like effect. It's literally helping insulin do its job. So you're hoping to, if you do that enough, you reduce insulin resistance. The other things is that I'm not talking about a fast calorie burning kind of, I'm talking about maybe a meditative, relaxing being in nature. There's an entire field of psychotherapy called ecotherapy that deals with the impact psychologically, physiologically, biochemically of being exposed to greenery. They have studies showing that in a hospital, if you have a view of the lawn, you do better than if you have a view of concrete. It's that profound. So I'm blessed and fortunate. I live in Woodland Hills, California. I go outside and I'm in the most beautiful woods and ups and down hills and everything like that. In 20 minutes of that, it's very meditative, very peaceful. It creates a demand for sugar in the blood cells. So that helps insulin do its job better, helps you digest your food. It's just a very, very good thing to do. Appreciate that. And final question for today. We basically got to the end. Once, as people age, their metabolism and ability to lose weight, I imagine, diminishes over time. Maybe not broadly for everybody, but probably to an extent. And so I guess my question to you is for those of us who are over the age of 40 and are maybe struggling to lose weight. Those of us who are over the age of 40, how cute. Okay. What advice would you have for those people about how they can lose weight? Maybe they're struggling to lose weight or they don't know how to get started. What changes as you age in terms of losing weight and how can they sort of get back on track? You go, Kristen. Okay. You know, it's interesting. And I mean, I know you implied, Samuel, that Johnny and I are long-winded and I don't know why you would imply that. I don't know what would make you say that. No, we're talking about the audience. Why would you say that? Not those of us in this room. Not those of us in this room. What a one-word answer from us. It's not easy. Yeah. So I think like, in my opinion, it boils down to looking at your exercise habits. Now, a lot of my patients are female patients that are peri and post-menopausal. So that's kind of a different perspective that I see a lot of times. I'm not, I'm seeing mostly that population. And sometimes it boils down to looking at the nutrient density of your diet and just simply eating less. I think like it's astonishing, especially when people go on a fast and I'm coaching them through the fast. The one thing I hear is, I can't believe how little food I was able to sustain myself on. So it's like, as humans, we are not meant to eat the way we do. We are programmed by the environment around us and these social norms and all these other things that occur that we overfuel. So I think fueling to the capacity of what your body actually needs, which is really tough to do and it can take years to perfect. That's really the key. And then moving more. I mean, I think the fact that we know that we have studies looking at the benefits of exercise, but especially after the age of 45 and what that means, it just makes sense that we have to figure out a way to get more movements in people. And where Johnny lives, and I mean, I'm in Denver, he's in California. Like we're surrounded by people that move, but that's not the case every place. That there's a lot, most people are not moving enough. I would add something to that, if I may. It's always, there are always great benefits to eating less food. I mean, every study, if you cut calories by a third or something, you live longer. There's just, there are a lot of benefits. There's also a caveat. The research I'm following now, the people that I'm listening to, the theme that keeps coming up that I think is gonna be huge in the next decade is we ain't eating enough protein. And it's very difficult to even get normal active people to eat what they're now saying we should be eating. And elderly people start to lose their appetite. And you can, you will see people who are protein malnourished, they just, they're not, they don't have a crushy core or whatever that disease is with the bellies. They're not deficient, but they're not optimized. They're not optimized. And here's the other half of that. We're also learning, and there's a saying to encapsulate what I'm about to say. The saying is muscle is the organ of longevity. So we are now learning that people are under muscled. And remember 80% of the sugar in your body is cleared by the muscle cells. So if you're losing 4% of your muscle every decade, you're losing your most powerful asset in being able to clear sugar from your bloodstream and not being able to clear it means it turns to fat and become insulin resistant. So we need more muscle and we need more protein. I interviewed Esther Blum a couple of weeks ago. She wrote this wonderful book on menopause called See You Later, Ovulate Her, terrific book. And she says, and she's a great poet. The cure to menopause is a steak and a pair of barbells. And she recommends, and so I think we, I agree with Kristen 100%, but we need to get away from this just move and be a little more directed. Build muscle, build or maintain or hold onto that muscle you have, because if you don't, your risk for frailty goes up and frailty is a death sentence. That's when you fall. That's when you can't recover. That's when all that bad stuff happens. So you really, I think that we need, one of the things that really slows people down as far as weight loss and as far as health in general is not getting enough protein and not doing enough strength. Thank you. So- Well said. I learned a whole bunch. Like you mentioned, this session flew by. Just a quick send off before we go. While you have the floor in the audience, where can people hear more about you outside of any questions? Any question, definitely. Go ahead, Kristen. Any question is a great place. I mean, people can go to my Instagram, FuelWellWithKrissy, or just my website, kristenkirkpatrick.com. My website is johnnyboden.com, no H in Johnny, J-O-N-N-Y-B-O-W-D-E-N, and at johnnyboden on Instagram. Thank you two very much. Following you now, Johnny. It was so good to meet you. Thank you, Kristen. So good to meet you. Appreciate it, appreciate it. Yes, yes. More to come. Bye. Bye, guys. Bye, guys.

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