The Science Behind Our New Sports Nutrition Line w/ Dr. Ben Bikman

0:00Dr. Ben Bikman:Welcome to the Just Ingredients podcast. I'm Cara Lynn, and here we dive deep into the journey of healing and wellness. If you're ready to learn, feel empowered, and take charge of your health, you're in the right place. Welcome back to the show. I am really excited for today's show because it is different than all of our other shows because I get to announce something super exciting. The exciting news is that we have added the first member to our science advisory board at Just Ingredients, and it is Dr. Ben Bickman. So thank you so much for being here, but most importantly, thank you for joining our advisory board.

0:38Dr. Ben Bikman:We are so lucky to have you. You are a top research scientist. You are world-renowned. You're amazing. In fact, why don't you tell a little bit about your background? Sure. Well, it's not amazing, but I'm thrilled to be here. I am a metabolic scientist, and nothing thrills a professor and scientist more than taking good ideas out of the lab and bringing them to life. And in this case, it is brought to life in the form of some really well-constructed products. So I am thrilled to be a member of the Science Advisory Board and delighted to chat with you about them right now. We should tell the people that you actually have helped us formulate our new sports nutrition line that's coming out.

1:15Dr. Ben Bikman:In fact, you and I were just chit-chatting one day and you were talking about how I could make some of my products even better. And I love when people tell me how I can make my products better. And then I was like, we need to bring you on Just Ingredients to help us out. And so to tell you listeners, he does a ton of research for us on the ingredients, ingredients being combined together, the outcome, how the products will really perform. So much research so that we make sure we bring you the best product out there. I would just add how impressive it is truly that Just Ingredients really does continue to be determined to just find the best stuff.

1:51And that takes a lot of humility. Maybe you're making up for not finding the best science advisors, but you're making up for it by finding the best ingredients.

1:59Dr. Ben Bikman:No, you're helping us make the best products out there. And so, in fact, I want to tell the listeners about some of our new products because they have some ingredients that are new that maybe some people don't know. And so, first of all, listeners, our new sports nutrition line, some of the products have ketones in them. And I learned this yesterday. We were doing an employee training. And there's over 100 employees. And I was asking, how many of you guys know about ketones? And only about maybe 10 raised their hand. And so I know it's a word we hear out there, but people aren't really sure what ketones are.

2:31Dr. Ben Bikman:So I want to start, like, at the very basics of what are ketones. Right. Yeah. Yeah, ketones are very misunderstood molecules. It's important for people to know that they're incredibly natural molecules, so natural that the human body makes them. In fact, so natural that a newborn baby makes way more than an adult does. They're so critical to just human development in the form of a newborn baby, but also just human function. So a ketone, to demystify it, is really nothing more than a product of the body burning a lot of fat. So if anyone's ever heard of a ketogenic diet, that means the body is generating ketones, the liver in particular.

3:12I joke that the liver is the soccer mom of nutrient metabolism. It can do everything with every nutrient in the body, whether it's fats or glucose or ketones. The liver knows what to do with them. And in this case, it's the liver burning a lot of fat and then understanding that if If glucose consumption or carbs is relatively down in the diet, that's what really identifies a ketogenic diet. The liver knows that it needs to be, the body needs to be kind of frugal with how it's handling glucose, especially the big hungry brain. The brain needs glucose or ketones as its fuel. And so if there's less glucose coming in, this is the liver's way of saying, hey brain, there's less glucose, so I'm going to turn down your need for glucose and I'm going to give you something else to use instead.

4:00And the brain will very greedily use ketones for a fuel. But so too will every other cell with mitochondria in the body. And a lot of what I'll come to as we go through some of these ingredients is highlighting the mitochondrial specific effects of ketones. but maybe one final comment on ketones is that short of making them if someone doesn't want to adhere to the dare i say rigors of a very low carbohydrate diet but they want the benefit of the ketone that's where exogenous ketones come in so the conversation you'd you and i'd had a few months ago that you're that you alluded to in the introduction it was based on that idea of what I consider to be a very untapped potential in the supplement realm.

4:49Namely, you aren't going to always be relying on your own body to make these ketones. So let's just give them to you in the form of exogenous ketones. So you can make them with the rigors of a lot of fasting or ketogenic diets, or you can take them. And the benefits are going to be the same with regards to the ketone itself. So ketones are simply products of fat burning, but they have a lot of effects, It's a lot of benefits that we'll get into.

5:14Dr. Ben Bikman:Okay, so to even simplify this more, your body needs to run on energy. And so your body's either using glucose as energy or ketones as energy. Well, that's the brain. So the whole body has fat as an option as well. So if you look at the whole body from a metabolic point of view, it's primarily, I just say it's sugar burning or like blood sugar or it's fat burning. And then ketones are, at the level of the whole body, a relatively more modest sliver of that energy. But when you go to the brain, the brain's biochemistry is unique in that it will not burn fat for a fuel. It will use fat for structure.

5:51And so its main fuels are now, as you noted, where the brain's hybrid engine is now glucose or ketone. In fact, one fascinating detail, a paper was published about a year or so ago that found it was an animal model. You couldn't do this in humans, but they found in this model that with menopause in women, the brain starts to become deficient in its ability to use glucose as a fuel. And it becomes so dependent, so demanding for ketones that it will start metabolizing its own white matter. So the brain has different kind of structural components, gray matter and white matter. It will literally start eating itself in order to turn those fats, the fats that represent the structure of the brain, to turn those fats into ketones to fuel the brain, particularly with menopause.

6:40So a lot of what we talk about today is going to be framed in the context of athletics. But I invite the audience, don't just consider this from the lens of athletics. If you're a middle-aged and beyond gal, your brain appears to be hungrier for ketones than maybe any other brain in any other stage of life.

6:59Dr. Ben Bikman:I did not realize that. Yeah. Okay, that's really good to know. Okay, so simplified again. The brain is going to use for energy glucose or ketones. The whole rest of the body is going to use the glucose, the ketones, or the fat. That's right. Okay, so with those energy sources, though, can we have both going at the same time? Can your body be burning glucose and ketones at the same time or no way? To be very precise and allow the professor to be precise, red blood cells are the only cell in the entire body that can only use one fuel. And that one fuel is glucose. It is the only known cell that is limited in its fuel use.

7:36Every other cell of the body, they're opportunistic. They'll use whatever fuel they have access to and whatever fuel the hormones of the body allow it to use. So to be very clear what I mean by that, or let's just look at the muscle, for example, because it's the biggest tissue in our body by mass. The muscle, you could say, well, the muscle has access to both glucose and fats and even ketones, but glucose and fats are the main fuels. But ketones are very much a fuel too. And so you'd say, well, which one is it using? Well, it's going to use both in a mix. And that's where the endocrinology of metabolism becomes relevant, where it's the hormone insulin that's telling the muscle which fuel to use.

8:15If insulin is elevated, it will shift the entire metabolic milieu of the body to say, okay, body, you are in sugar burning mode. In fact, so much so that it stops fat burning that the ability to make ketones stops. Because remember, you only make ketones when you're fat burning. And that happens when insulin comes down. So now I added a layer of complexity to that question. But the simple answer is the tissues of the body will use whatever fuel that's available. So it's not an all or nothing. It's not you've shifted completely to this one and this one's off. It's always going to be a mix of fuels.

8:52Dr. Ben Bikman:Okay, but getting your body to burn fat to make ketones is tricky because one, you have to either do intermittent fasting and not have your insulin be up. Yep. or you've got to be on a keto diet where your carbs are very, very low. Yep, and that can be boring, can be constrained. And there may be people like athletes who don't want to be cutting their carbs that much because they want the glucose for an extra fuel for performance. So yeah, for myriad reasons, there may be people who just don't want to adhere to a ketogenic diet. And so that brings us back to the benefit of exogenous ketones. So then that's why someone takes it.

9:26Dr. Ben Bikman:So for me, I hate a keto diet. I do love my protein. I love my meat. But I also want my fruits and veggies too. So I don't want to be in a keto diet. But I do want these ketones for my brain as a fuel. And as you say, as people going through menopause, then they're really great. So then I really need the ketones. So we put ketones in our products, which we're super excited about. So let's maybe just talk about some of these products with the ketones. Because one that I'm super excited about is our creatine, because we've now added ketones to the creatine. And creatine is becoming widely known now.

10:01Dr. Ben Bikman:It used to be the only bodybuilders used it. Right. And it was only for muscle. And now we're learning it's so good for the brain and sleep and mood and all sorts of things. But I know people are going to ask me, why in the world would you add ketones to your creatine? It is a match made in heaven. What we know about creatine is that creatine acts as a recycling engine for the cell. So ultimately, when you think about energy, and this will, I promise, I'll bring it back to creatine, but I'm a professor, so I just got to take the opportunities to teach when I can. Within the cell, the ultimate goal of burning any fuel is to get to a molecule called ATP.

10:38ATP is, when we talk about cellular energy, that's the molecule that we mean when we say that. And that's the molecule that will allow any cell to do its job. So a muscle is obvious. The muscle wants to contract. We wanted to contract and relax. You have to have ATP in order to do that. But then you think about you and I aren't working our muscles right now, but we are really working our brains. In the brain that has its own energy demand, the process of thinking and maintaining electrolytes across nerves and sending signals as I'm animating my hands and articulating my speech, that's also ATP dependent.

11:14So if you look at ATP as the primary, that's the goal that we have whenever we talk about burning anything or getting energy. Creatine is a recycling pathway where you break that ATP molecule apart in order to get the action you want, the working muscle or the thinking brain. And then creatine allows the ATP molecule, the T stands for a tri, there's three of these little phosphates. It splits off a phosphate, so you only have a two-phosphate molecule. Creatine allows you just to put that right back on. So you go from the broken version of ATP to just recycling ATP again. But that's a finite pool.

11:53A cell just has seconds worth of creatine in order to do that. But that's the benefit of creatine, where you load your muscle tissue with creatine, you saturate the muscle with creatine, and now it's able to recycle ATP faster. Now, before I leave that idea behind, the latest research on creatine goes beyond the muscle, and now it's heavily focused on the brain. So once again, pardon me for taking what is just supposed to be a supplement for sports and suggesting that there's another utility to it. And this is where people might experiment with actually going beyond the single use of the ingredient, where with muscle, you only need about five grams of creatine a day to saturate the muscle.

12:39I'm not giving anyone any medical advice here or anything, but in order to saturate the brain, you need like two or three times that amount. And so that's the latest research is looking at how creatine can also saturate the brain and help with cognition. It can help minimize the cognitive decline from sleep deprivation. So new parents that are wondering how to get through the next day when they're so sleep deprived, creatine has literally been shown in humans to improve cognition and mitigate the cognitive effects of sleep deprivation.

13:10Dr. Ben Bikman:Which is incredible. Incredible. Or those parents with teenagers who are waiting up late. Oh, my gosh. And that's the story of my life right now, because I don't go to bed until everyone's home. I'm just an anxious parent. So that's the whole creatine idea, which is it's recycling energy. Now, that still leaves opportunity for new energy. And that's where BHB, the main... So if anyone listening ever hears me refer to a ketone as BHB, that's the main ketone that we're talking about. And that's a competitive advantage with just ingredients. because many other ketone products don't have, in fact, some of the most marketed don't in fact have a ketone in them at all.

13:48Dr. Ben Bikman:Oh, interesting. They have something that's more technically called, more accurately called an alcohol that is a ketone precursor. Just because something says it's keto something, ketone something, it might not be. Look at the ingredients and make sure that it has BHB in it. And so with just ingredients, we picked the best source. the bioidentical BHB. So ketones are a fuel that it's unique even in the body where you think, well, my body also has glucose as a fuel. It has fat as a fuel. Yeah, but a cell can do a lot with those molecules, including store them as fat or store them as glycogen to be used for energy later.

14:27BHB has no storage capacity, ketones. The ketone in the creatine max product must be burned for fuel. So when you take it in, you know you're going to be burning it. So to me, there's a beautiful orchestration between these two sides here, where you have the creatine to recycle energy, you have the BHB to generate new energy that has an unregulated steps. Like with glucose, there are steps of the glucose getting into a cell, and that transporter, those doors for the glucose to go through, can be downregulated or upregulated. So glucose is a perfectly good fuel, but it's sometimes unreliable. Ketones have direct transport.

15:09They don't have to compete. They don't have to have insulin to tell it to open those doors like with glucose. So you have a direct kind of mainline fuel generating new ATP in the form of BHB, and you have creatine, which is helping recycle the BHB. It's a pretty good mix.

15:25Dr. Ben Bikman:So interesting. Okay, so let's talk about these benefits then because I'm hearing energy. So I'm thinking two different types. I'm thinking, well, okay, is this going to help me in the gym more with energy? And I'm also thinking, well, dang, am I going to be really smart that day and have no brain fog and just, you know? Yeah, well, to me, you touched on the exact two use cases. My view is with creatine, this creatine product, it really is kind of a brains and brawn product that I, as well put together as I am and my wife loves it, I don't make money from my muscles. I make money because of my brain.

16:01I'm a teacher. I'm a scientist. It's my ability to think and articulate that helps me fulfill my role. So that's why my personal use of creatine is actually more for my brain than it is for improving my 100 meter dash. But where I would want users to feel comfortable with this product is that it really can span a young high school student who is getting ready for his lacrosse game. And he wants to be able to perform at a high intensity. Or we have a 65-year-old grandma who wants to stay cognitively sharp because of all the disorders, of all the chronic diseases that kill us and make us sick, the one that affects women the most are related to the brain.

16:43And that's heavily a result of the loss of estrogen, which is very neuroprotective. Well, BHB is very neuroprotective too. In fact, BHB, that main ketone, has been shown to increase the expression of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which helps maintain the integrity of neurons. So to me, this is a product that as much as we have put it together as a sports supplement, and that it's good, it's the best out there, I would say at the same time, I wouldn't want the 65-year-old grandma to leave that product on the shelf thinking, well, that's just for my teenage grandson.

17:22No, it's for you too. But your motivation and use is going to be a little different.

17:27Dr. Ben Bikman:Oh, I love that. Okay. So there's one other ingredient in this creatine though that I want to talk about. So we've got some betaine in there. Right. And so why do we do that? Right. So the betaine helps with methylation and it helps the body clear a molecule called homocysteine. And the more we learn about homocysteine, the more we learn how inflammatory it is and how it promotes oxidative stress. So of all the things I could discuss there, I would focus more on that aspect of it, that if you can help with the methylation status of the body, you're helping your B vitamins work a little better, which of course are very relevant to mitochondrial function and burning fats and fuel for energy, but also helping maintain an inflammatory status as well with the regulation of homocysteine.

18:13And that matters for performance, especially because we need a little bit of inflammation. That helps with recovery, but we don't want inflammation to go too far. We want to have the recovery happen as quickly as possible. And so the betaine helps with that.

18:28Dr. Ben Bikman:Let's take a quick break to hear from our show sponsor. So many people are working out these days, athletes, everyday people trying to stay active and healthy, but they're fueling their bodies with products full of artificial ingredients, synthetic dyes, excess sugar, and things that really aren't doing them any good. And I kept thinking if we care this much about what goes into our food, why should sports nutrition be any different? Over the past few months, we've been working hard to create our Just Ingredients Sports Nutrition line. Real ingredients, real fuel, made for people who want to nurse their bodies while they train.

19:02Dr. Ben Bikman:We focus on the full performance cycle, energy, hydration, endurance, and recovery, so you can train harder and recover smarter. From high sodium electrolytes for heavy sweat sessions to clean pre-workout energy to endurance fuel with ketones for long efforts and recovery support to help your body bounce back, this line is designed to actually support what athletes need in real life. And to celebrate the launch, everything in this new sports nutrition line is 20 % off, plus all of our current NSF products too. That's everything in the black bags, all at 20 % off. Head to justingredients.com to shop real fuel for real performance.

19:40Now back to the show. All right.

19:44Dr. Ben Bikman:I also know about betaine that it helps your body make more creatine as well. That's why we put it in there. And it helps the muscles get the creatine, absorb that creatine as well. Yeah, yeah. So because of its role in changing methylation or methyl donation, it helps provide the building blocks to regenerate creatine. Betaine is not a direct contributor. Rather, it shifts the cellular cofactors that allow the cell to make more of its own. That matters because of those building blocks, a person can have a constraint or a limitation on their ability to make new creatine depending on what they're eating.

20:23So if someone is cutting back on red meat a lot, for example, they're much more plant-based, you may be a little deficient in your ability to make new creatine. So anything you can do to help the body regenerate its own creatine, which in turn helps the ATP get regenerated better, you want to do.

20:41Dr. Ben Bikman:Okay. So interesting. It's an amazing product, I think. It is. I do have a question about something that you just said earlier about creatine. So you're talking about how creatine helps us recycle the ATP. And you talked about losing the two phosphates or losing a phosphate, and the creatine helps bring that back. What's making us lose one of those phosphates? Yeah, yeah. So the enzymes that every cell has the ability to make the ATP and to split the ATP. So we have that triphosphate. That's a bond. Those three phosphate molecules, when you break them apart, they allow other reactions to happen.

21:16So there's these kinases, they're called, that will split that ATP molecule off. And then there are other kinases, other enzymes that will bring it back. And creatine, when it comes into the cell, it will bind a phosphate molecule and then say, oh, hey, ATP, you just went from triphosphate to diphosphate. Well, I have a phosphate I can give you because that's what I'm here for. So the creatine gives a phosphate back. So creatine comes in, it turns into a creatine phosphate molecule, And it's basically waiting for the ATP to turn to an ADP, and then it will give that phosphate back.

21:52Dr. Ben Bikman:Okay, but there's nothing that we're doing like in our daily life that's making us lose that phosphate. No. Any reaction you want in a cell, you have to have a molecule that kind of buys that reaction. The cell says, look, you want me to do this, but I need you to give me something to energize this outcome. ATP is that molecule, and the energy comes from splitting off one of those phosphates. Okay, I'm really excited for this creatine max because like you said, it's good for the teenage boy all the way to the 65, 70-year-old person. And this can really help people with their brain health and their energy.