Transcribed using AI transcription - Errors may occur. contact Mikki for clarification

00:03
Welcome, hi, I'm Mikki and this is Mikkipedia, where I sit down and chat to doctors, professors, athletes, practitioners, and experts in their fields related to health, nutrition, fitness, and wellbeing, and I'm delighted that you're here.

00:24
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia, and this week on the podcast, I speak to Leighton Phillips, founder of the world leading low carb, high fat nutrition company that supports endurance performance, S-Fuels. So on today's podcast, Leighton and I discuss the development of S-Fuels, which happened when Leighton was searching for, but not being able to find, products that weren't totally full of sugar.

00:53
and how S-Fuels have since 2016 continued to evolve the product based on feedback from the likes of high performing athletes and brainiacs Dr Dan Plews and Zach Bitter who has been on the show before and has his own very successful podcast Human Performance Outliers and is just generally a very successful person athlete all around and how they've evolved the product based on feedback

01:22
and more to help endurance athletes optimize their health and performance, because you can do both. Leighton and I also discuss high carb intakes recommended by other sports nutrition companies, why this isn't ideal in all scenarios, and why S-Fuels has adopted a fuel for the work required approach, helping athletes both upregulate fat oxidation and provide carbs when required. We also discuss the different

01:51
product offerings from S-Fuels and we touch on ingredients that you will see in the literature as supporting both fat oxidation and performance and these are making their way to the S-Fuels range. So this is a great episode for anyone interested in sports nutrition, whether you lean the low carbohydrate route or not actually because you don't have to be low carb to get the benefits of products like S-Fuels. So

02:19
Leighton Phillips studied both naturopathy and computer science before starting S-Fuels in 2016 while working in Hong Kong and looking for a product to help reduce inflammation that occurred through both his training and racing as it was hampering his recovery. And this then started S-Fuels which was one energy bar and has grown into a portfolio of everyday low carb keto food and drink products that support enhanced fat oxidation training,

02:49
and a product set and protocol for high intensity interval training and racing. So there's a range of different products that S-Fuels has and you will find all of these listed on the S-Fuels website which is sfuelsgolonger.com and they all support the right fuel right time approach matching both aerobic and anaerobic intensity. So

03:18
check out the website link that I have in the show notes. Just a reminder though, the best way to support the podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform. That increases the visibility of the podcast out there and amongst literally thousands of other podcasts. So more people get the opportunity to learn from the guests that I have on the show, like Leighton Phillips.

03:47
So, Leighton Phillips from S-Fuels, so good to finally get this opportunity to chat to you. Now, first of all, completely unrelated to what we will discuss, what's the weather like in North Carolina right now? So yeah, actually, I just swam outside. So it's 70 this afternoon, but we had it, well, so I'm talking Fahrenheit. So like, you know, 20s Celsius.

04:15
But we had it down to zero twice already, like in this shift over transition of the season. So yeah, it's that classic kind of variable time of the year. The colors are magic. It's reds and golden, yellows and it's magic. Yeah. Oh, that sounds great. And you've just been at Havelina 100, haven't you? That was only a few weeks ago, am I right?

04:38
Zach was down there. Zach raced it this year. Nicole, his wife, has done it a number of times. I was actually in Catalina last weekend, which is another ultra series. It's in California. Javelina is in Arizona. Yeah. So just part of your role, and I know that we're going to get into it, but does it necessitate you?

05:02
I'm focusing around the different trail run series and supporting athletes and of course, getting people more familiar with the East fuels brand and things like that. Yeah. Nicole, who runs the operations and general management of the business, does a lot of the, yeah, what you just said. Increasingly though, we've got a lot of coaches and I would say pros slash like elite age groupers, Mickey, that are kind of wanting to dial in sharper.

05:30
You have to give a guidance when you have products like this that is a generalization and then you need to dial in for athlete really. Yeah, you do. And you know what I was reflecting on this this morning, Leighton, when I was just thinking about our podcast is that there are so many sports nutrition products out there on the market yet I haven't seen anything close to Esfuel's actually over the last few years, even with the hydrogels. You've got...

05:58
different sort of mixes. You've got the, I don't know if you remember Hammond nutrition. I don't even know if they still exist, but you know, that was almost as, as close to what you guys have produced, but this is still very much out, very left field of what other people would or other companies are doing. So I'm really intrigued to understand how you sort of reach the place that you have even like sort of starting at the beginning. Well, I think a lot of, you know,

06:25
companies in this space, whether it's shoes, like even Hoker and others, it came about usually from athletes that had some issues, right? And initially when we were thinking about, we weren't even really thinking about a product. I mean, we were athletes like all of us and we all had different issues. And at the time, the predominant issue, we were in Hong Kong for nine years. It's just a massive trail running endurance segment there.

06:54
and we were doing a number of 100k and 70k, 50 miles. I thought it was just me that was having these gap problems and the more I got into it, I found out that it was just a very common thing. I did cross-country at school, I did triathlon as a teenager. I went and studied naturopathic medicine. I think with that background and then observing this, I felt like, hey, we can do better here.

07:23
so much, Miki, about directly creating something that would cause an effect of you take it and you have a performance outcome. It was more about dealing with this issue that just a ton of athletes are still having today, which is gut distress. Yeah. And so if you look, and I know you'll know this, but just for the listeners, I believe the stats are as high as 86% of endurance athletes will experience a GI problem either in training or worse, in their racing.

07:53
which is actually is such a limiting factor for them to be able to perform the way that they've trained. Yeah, it's massive. And it's still the number one reason for not finishing these races for age groupers. I came off calls today with professional runners and you would assume that, hey, professional runner, you get all of the direction and guidance and what have you. They still have the problem. And this is in the era of hydrogels. And I'm not...

08:21
going to take negative shots at other companies, but it's not solved. And just a lot of it is to do with just the raw intake of glycogenic formats. And they clearly have a reaction in the gut, some of them more so than others. And yeah, we can chat through that. Yeah. What year was it when you sort of started thinking there's got to be another solution? So when was that? Yeah, 2018. Well, 17, we were

08:51
My kids would tell you, we were literally playing around in the kitchen and with stuff and take them out on the trails. If you want really non-sugar-coated feedback, just ask your kids what they think about it. We were playing around then, but then we worked with some labs in California on really bench testing, lab testing, and then ultimately, we worked with Dan on his campaign into the 2018 Conor Ironman.

09:21
It was one of the interesting comments we got from Bob Babbitt when he first started talking to us is, why did you ever create a training product before you created a racing product? Because he's never seen a nutrition company in the sport do that in 30 years. The reason was, the whole basis of what we were creating was not really about just on race day, calories in, calories out. We were looking at nutrition that would train the metabolism. That's where we started. We built that.

09:50
with Dan and you know, obviously 2018 we executed with him, he executed with us is the better way to say it, on the day and we were there and it's just an awesome day but that's where it all started you know and done a ton of development since then we've just put some patent filings in and you know just I would say we're still learning though like just a lot of innovation opportunity in this space. Yeah, I 100% agree. Now fun fact, so

10:19
prior to S-Fuels and in fact, not just prior to S-Fuels because at the moment it's pretty tricky for us here to get your product, which I'm hoping is going to change at some point, but I was telling clients to use MCT, BCAAs and put salt in it and then you could imagine my delight and I don't know where I saw it and I'm wondering whether you, did you ever stand at Kona 2018 as well?

10:46
Absolutely did. Yeah. And so I came across it and of course I knew Dan and I knew that he was sort of playing around like, oh, okay, well there are products that do that. But how did you come to the initial formulation? So did you come from a low carb approach yourself later, or it wasn't about your usual diet that sort of got you thinking about this? Who were the people that you looked to in order to sort of start thinking about how to produce this product?

11:12
Yeah. And like most athletes, I grew up during the era of carbohydrate fest and carb loading and everything that goes with that. So we all grew up with that. And then my training was more naturopathic, like holistic food based. Let me just put it that way. I did six years of that in Australia. But

11:36
You know, I would say probably when I started researching, the name I would say that came up more often was probably Tim Noakes. And it wasn't, like he had done a lot of work actually on hydration. And the issue that I was observing in Hong Kong, there was the gut issue and then it's just a very humid environment there. And there was a lot of extremity swelling, like fingers and feet. And then as a function of that blistering.

12:05
And so I was kind of looking at it through two lenses. So we started looking at, you know, well, what is high caloric, you know, ingredients, what is functional on the gut? And at the same time is non glycogenic, meaning not glucose based in the spirit of, cause what we were really trying to look for is calories that wouldn't trick would not trigger an insulin response. So that wouldn't blunt fat oxidation. Yeah.

12:34
We landed on MCT, but I would say it was three years later. Like I said, initially, it was more for those issues that we're dealing with, but it wasn't until several years later that we got way more specific on which specific MCTs and in what formats and bound to what. We talk about fats, we talk about carbohydrates, but they're very high-level references. There's a lot of specificity when you get down into the weeds and the stuff. Sure thing. I remember when I studied

13:03
way back in the 90s. Can you believe that? No. Same here. Crazy. Isn't it crazy? And I remember that doing sports nutrition is one of my papers and us discussing the gels that were out at the time that had MCT in them. And they also, I want to say that they had MCT and glucose, but I might be wrong about that because it was some time ago. And-

13:28
The research at the time showed that there was significant GI distress from the studies that are done. So people had almost thought, well, we've done that, that didn't work, and moved on. But there were specific problems with some of the research, as I understand it. Well, a few things, and you see this a lot, of course, in the nutrition industry, unfortunately, and also in the herbal medicine industry.

13:57
references are made to ingredients, but not the full disclosure happens. And you'll find that a lot of those MCTs in the early days were bound to a multidextrin. So, any reference to multidextrin itself is not a total evil thing, but in the spirit of if you're trying to uplift fat oxidation, it's totally inverse to that. It's going to stop that. That's the first point. And then the second point was

14:24
this is actually quite recent research, very recent research, and that is that it was thought that MCTs, it's true that it comes through the gut membrane without, if you will, active transport or like a lung chain triglyceride, which has to come out of the gut through the liver effectively, but it actually goes through the lymphatics before it ultimately gets into the blood supply. So, it's almost useless in a sport context.

14:52
The medium-chain triglycerides do come into the blood faster, but it was thought that at a cellular level, whether it's liver, kidney, muscle, heart, or what have you, that it also didn't need a transporter. It's since been found that that's not the case at all. It is true in the liver that it can get oxidized and release ATP and more specifically become very ketogenic. But outside of the liver, almost...

15:21
particularly where it matters from a sports context, the heart and skeletal muscle tissue, it absolutely needs carnitine like a lung chain fatty acid to transport across the membrane. That's quite new research. And that would explain a ton of cases where they didn't see any, if you will, oxidative support as a substrate, as a fuel. Yeah. And so carnitine, you know, I often see this being sort of talked about in

15:49
the keto low carb space. And of course people have L-Carnitine capsules. Now, I don't know, obviously Don Dagostino is someone you're familiar with. And I chatted to him about his protocols and supplements. And he uses three to four grams of L-Carnitine. Now, this is actually a slight tangent, but it just got me thinking to help upregulate that fat oxidation. So we're thinking that if you were utilizing MCT that

16:17
actually having a source of L-Carnitine is going to help us, help that sort of delivery of that to the working muscles and things like that. Yeah. Actually, there was years of studies on L-Carnitine that were unsuccessful. And most of the reason for that was that the dose, this is just again, classical clinical nutrition, if you get the dose wrong or the duration wrong, it's not overly effective. And that's exactly what was happening on one side of the equation.

16:47
meaning two lower dose and not for long enough. That dosage you just called out there with what he's using is what they... It is in the two to three grams per day range and it literally takes several months before you see... You can see about a 20% increase in fat oxidation once you do effective muscle loading of alkanotin. They found that...

17:14
combining caffeine and L-carnitine together further increases the carnitine loading into the muscle. And then the other piece is, you can do this two ways, but as you know, obviously insulin is one thing that can open up a number of the channels from the circulatory system into the muscle cell. The other way to open those channels up, of course, is exercise. So by taking the L-carnitine with exercise, it's in that period that those channels can support.

17:42
know, whether it's L-Carnitine, whether it's other amino acids to come into the muscle. So that's part of the reason why we actually reformulated one of our products, a primed product, which is really now much higher dose L-Carnitine with caffeine for exactly that. Amazing. That functional reason. And that is, that would be your pre-workout type fuel that you would have the prior to going on the trails or your longer sort of sessions? Yeah. It's, it's, I mean,

18:11
It's quite literal when we call it primed, it is really a priming function. And there's two aspects to this, of course, with caffeine, you know, when we take that coffee tea, like it's religiously taken around the world, the cognitive function, of course, is just more like 0.5 of a milligram per kilogram body weight to get that effect. But in a fat oxidation context, whether that's in training or racing, you really need to be in the three milligrams per kilogram of body weight to get the up.

18:39
the caffeine effect. So what does that mean? Well, in training, probably less so, meaning that in endurance training, particularly, you're just going to be doing zone two work, which is going to naturally upregulate fat oxidation by the fact that you're in zone two most of the time. But in racing, it's quite a protocol needed. By protocol, I mean just a method. And that means the hour before the race start is to begin the caffeine loading

19:08
And really, if it's a fast marathon, meaning a professional marathon in the two and a half hour space and less and a little more, of course, it's really in that first 30 minutes, you've got a dose high on caffeine. So the bulk of the race, you're having the benefit of that as opposed to drip feed it in small doses right across a race. It has about a half life of six hours, caffeine. So most marathons...

19:36
Olympic distance triathlons, that's fine. When you start getting into 50K, 50 mile, 100 mile, and full Ironmans, you probably need to be thinking also about a second dose out of that five to six hour spot in the spirit of maintaining the upregulation. Yeah. And have you had athletes sort of test that later in terms of like in their protocols and things like that? Cause I know you've done some sort of performance validation projects, obviously, and Dan is...

20:04
the great example of that, but you've had other athletes do these as well. Yeah. We started Primed really with Hayden Wild, who's the star in your country. Yeah. He just keeps, it's like, is there nothing that Hayden can't do? Like, it's crazy. He's a superhuman, I think. I think he's got something that a bunch of us don't have. Yeah. But

20:31
Yeah, we went on these, you mentioned that as performance validation projects. We started with Dan and then that was really to validate, if you will, this concept of glycogen retention. The way we really wanted to understand that is in the marathon part of, in his case, in Ironman, that the pace, minutes per kilometer, didn't fade off through the marathon. You can look at his splits and see that.

21:00
first test. We then went and did a... Oh, so COVID came along. So then the 100-mile testing we did with Zach Bitter was on the treadmill world record and then the US nationals, which he won. And that was more to kind of validate, well, is this whole theory real or it breaks down when you go from say a four to eight hour race to a 12 hour plus race? And we feel like we validated that. But then back to Hayden.

21:29
We went right back to the other side, if you will, of endurance sport and looked at Olympic distance, which is generally two hours and less, Super League, which is even shorter, more intense duration. So, what we were testing for there is two things. One is that's when we got into developing different starch formats for like 90% of VO2 max intensity type exercise. And also we started testing our caffeine there.

21:58
And lastly, we were testing gastric emptying time, like speed of getting through the stomach. Yeah, the stomach, basically. Yeah. Yeah. And Leighton, I find it, it's so the, I mean, obviously the athletes you work with high-level elite athletes, which as you noted with Hayden, like there is just something different about those athletes, right? And so I see, and this is related to the carbohydrate research, like...

22:25
There are continued to come out with these studies suggesting that you can push carbohydrates high as 120 grams an hour and get these sort of performance benefits. Or be it over the short term, I see that like even in the long trials, they are like two to three hours. So you just don't know what happens beyond that. But also in the back of my mind, when I read these studies, I'm like, how applicable is this to the age group? Because so many age groupers I see.

22:55
They come to me and they're like, I'm pushing 75 to 90 grams of carbs an hour and I'm just having these gut related issues. And I'm just thinking that there's a difference between the two. So first, I'd like to get your opinion on that. But equally, I'd like you to... Is this something that we need to be mindful of with your products because you're doing the validation on the super elite? I think there's three aspects there, Miki.

23:20
First aspect would be, and Dan has written a few papers on this more recently, and that is just, and actually he's really commentating on some of the earlier work that Jukendrup and others did, which was calling out the ceiling, if you will, for glucose of about a gram a minute or 60 grams an hour. And then you can add fructose on top of that that can give you an incremental on top of that again. Now at that point.

23:46
It's really a ceiling. I think you've got to delineate between training gut transition, meaning absorption, but the oxidation side is really quite a capped amount per hour. This taking of 100, 120 grams an hour, it just doesn't make sense at that level. Now let's assume just for a second though, that some superhuman athlete, maybe it exists, they can do all of that.

24:15
Well, the flip side of all that, of course, though, is that remember that every time you increase sugar intake, you're increasing the oxidation of that. One of the metabolites, of course, of sugar and glucose is lactate. You can see this in charts. I could show you the charts where you see an athlete who is highly glucose-dependent or carb You see this rapid...

24:41
crash, if you will, of use of fattest fuels, the intensity ramps, rapid rise of carbohydrate. Again, that would be fine if it's a two-hour race, but you get into a three, four-hour race where you've exhausted liver and muscle glycogen. Well, now it comes down to your ability to take all that in. Well, let's say you could take it in. Well, now you've got to look at what happens to lactate and you'll see on those same athletes, the lactate will just dramatically go up. So in those athletes...

25:08
their performance is not an outcome so much of running out of fuel. Their performance degradation is a function of the lactate they're producing. Now, lactate itself is a substrate, is a fuel, but that itself needs training. And the training of that happens in aerobic tend- so there's two aspects here. There is the buffering of lactate, which absolutely happens at high intensity training, but the transport and shuttling from, you know,

25:35
high Twitch fibers, slow Twitch fibers or type one, type two, that training efficiency of that happens in aerobic zone to work. And it gets blunted with the likes of fructose and glucose. And then, so let's say even if that could happen, then you get into the gut issue, which it's very debatable looking at the research, whether they actually are training the gut. You could squint.

26:03
and maybe cut to that conclusion. And then the last thing I would say is, I think it was March, probably one of the most esteemed group of researchers I've seen came together on a study. Dom was part of that study. Tim Noakes was part of that study. They looked at a full crossover blind study where they had, in fact, these were middle-aged 800-meter runners.

26:31
and they switched them from a high carbohydrate to a lower carbohydrate test. Aside from the fact, which was a really interesting finding, that they were still burning 80% over a gram of fat at 80% of their VO2 max, which is not classic textbook understanding. What they did when they did the crossover, those athletes that moved from...

26:58
that low carb to high carb, 30% of them in four weeks, they were all running 24 by 7 CGMs on their arm, like continuous glucose monitors. And they were, 30% of them had all the signs of pre-diabetes in four weeks. Yeah. And I talked to Philip Prinz, who was one of the authors of that study. He was one of the lead authors. Yeah. And I think that's something which is not...

27:25
I mean, 30%, people might go, only 30%, but if you're a coach and you've got 36 athletes, that's like 12 of them in that camp, right? That's a significant number of athletes. I mean, if a coach understands this, there's kind of a level of accountability that should happen on if you're driving people to that outcome, right? So it's a good question. Who's accountable for that?

27:53
Yeah. But then later on the other hand though, do you like, what are your comments on the applicability of the products for the age group or athlete for your products? Like, so, you know, yeah, so that's the second part of that question. I mean, don't get us wrong. I mean, we, when we started, we were absolutely

28:18
We had one product and it was our training product. And by nature of what we were building, it was just low carb. It had no carbohydrate in it. Um, that wasn't our strategy. Yeah. We had to get started somewhere, but our strategy, we refer to this right fuel, right time construct. And what that means is as you increase intensities, you absolutely use more carbohydrate. That's how the body functions. So.

28:43
In a race context, our guidance is that 60 gram ceiling. What we would say is that in training, where in an endurance context, the bulk of your volume is still done in zone two intensity, but it's really important, not just from a just classic building high intensity performance, but in the spirit of metabolism.

29:11
If you were to do just a ketogenic approach, which is not what we're advocating at all, but if you were to do that, you would see that the last enzymatic reaction of carbohydrate oxidation, which is the PDH enzyme, you would see that if you just went ketogenic, you would see that begin to lower and your ability to actually have really efficient carbohydrate oxidation would become weaker. So what's important is that in training...

29:39
there is clearly a strong segment of high intensity zone, full zone five work that includes carbohydrate to ensure that that enzyme remains like anything in the body. You can underuse it, you can overuse it, you can abuse it. Right. And I think this is a case where it's there for a reason. It switches on and it's meant to provide energy at those higher intensities. So we still advocate it.

30:06
Absolutely. And 60 grams an hour is generally the guidance we give. Yeah. And that's pretty much in line with where I suggest people are because a lot of the time we work from a nutrition space of building their efficiency and their flexibility so they've got that ability to burn fat. Were you familiar with Bob Siebelhoff's work when you started looking more into this later? Yeah. And I mean, even back in, I guess it was the 90s,

30:35
there was the Sears work of zone diets and things like that. I was more in clinical nutrition then. We were showing there in a clinical sense, just to try and educate customers, that even if you took the most complex of carbohydrates and you chewed it for long enough, and then you take a urine glucose strip and put it in your mouth, you will see before it's even left the mouth that it's full of glucose. So...

31:02
People need to get, there's just a ton of education needed. And I would say even more so in this part of the world than in Australia, Europe, New Zealand are way more ahead than I find in the US and really understanding some of these core principles of it. Yeah. And of course you're not like, cause I think a lot of people might look at S-Fuels and think it's just for those low carb athletes. Is that, how would you sort of respond to that? Like, is that how you are framing it or?

31:31
positioning it. No, I mean, I don't blame them because that's kind of where we started at a product level. I think if anyone spends just 10 minutes looking at our products, looking at our method and what we guide, you'll see that we are the balance between zone two, fat oxidation efficiency training. And as you get into zone four, zone five, workout space.

31:59
of our products. They have carbohydrate. What they don't have is fructose in training. We've already seen three studies showing the detraining effects of fructose to aerobic. Most of it's mitochondrial inefficiency that fructose intake is having an effect on the mitochondria. So, we avoid that in all of our racing...

32:27
and high-intensity training products. We will produce... We have some developments going on right now. A product that is explicitly for highest intensity racing, not training, that will have a little fructose. And that's just because at that intensity, it's actually a fairly efficient substrate. And if the name of the game is, at that point in time, is to go as fast as you possibly can, it...

32:56
it warrants being there and hence it's in fruits and what have you. But everyday consumption of that in training, no. Everyday consumption of that in diet, no. And again, I want to delineate between a very complex natural whole food is very different than an extracted high fructose corn syrup. So Leighton, can you just describe that a little bit more? So if we had, so for example, taking fructose in our sports nutrition products,

33:25
in training, does it decrease the efficiency of our mitochondria? Yeah. So that was, let me think, that was 2017, first study is looking at over a four week period fructose, and that was just looking at a diet and they looked at the gene expression of what happened in the skeletal muscle. In that case, it was man. There was a second study that was looking at mitochondrial dysfunction as a function

33:54
and this again was specific to skeletal muscle. And most of it was in that particular study was calling out oxidative stress that fructose was creating. The third study was really interesting. I think this was around the 2021 or maybe it was a little earlier than that. But it was specifically looking at impairing the expression of genes involved in the adaptive response to exercise. So, you know, as we begin to in through all different forms of

34:24
training routines, stress different parts of the metabolism, that typical aerobic training function, which is mitochondrial density, capillary density, mitochondrial number, glucose and fatty acid transport, all of those things became or were more dysfunctional by having fructose in the training formulas.

34:52
I think Dan just sent me another paper this last week that there's another study out there showing similar comments. So how does this then, how do we reconcile that information with the fact that fructose is recommended to help push that carbohydrate intake up? And I know that sounds like a ridiculous question, but I know that if I was listening to this podcast, I'd be wondering that as well. Yeah. I mean, so again, just back to...

35:21
In the raw context of what is the maximum substrate intake I can have come into the body, it is true that fructose is incremental on top of glucose. They're transported through the gut with different transporters. They're transported into the muscle cell with different transporters. Glute five in the case of fructose, glute four in the case of glucose.

35:51
what we're then, that's true, but then you've got to look at, there's metabolites that come out of the oxidation of these different substances. And those metabolites all have implications. They can have sensing functions, they can sense the body to do different things, they can be oxidative in the term of stress, et cetera. And that's usually what's like, blind eye given to that side of the equation. But increasingly we're finding that

36:20
Again, look, Miki, I think if it was a function where you took it as a whole food and you took it in a smaller dose, you probably wouldn't see any of this. But to your point, when you start talking 100 grams an hour, like this is medicine. This is... Yeah. That's a thing, right? It's a dosing thing.

36:42
as much as anything. I had a discussion today with a pro athlete and there's a really fair question that the coach gave me. He said, well, wouldn't you just see these upregulations of fat oxidation just by training alone? And the answer is you do see it, absolutely. But I said, I've got pro athletes go through the labs and you look at their data and these are people that have won world championships. And their fat oxidation levels...

37:11
are hopeless and they wonder why they can be successful in 70.3 and when they get to Ironman they get halfway into the run and everything just starts collapsing. Leydon, I 100% understand that because right back in 2012, May or 2011 at AUT when we were looking at athletes come through the lap, like good athletes, they were just complete sugar burners. And often what I see is...

37:36
is a couple of arguments is that one there that so the, the, what the coach just sort of asked you, but also I see other people saying that we don't need to work on metabolic flexibility because humans are born metabolically flexible. And whilst it's true, we're born metabolically flexible, the environment around us just sort of beats it out of us, you know, so you just can't rely on that. And if you're right, if anyone has issues with sort of going the distance, then

38:05
fat oxidation and efficiency and flexibility is where I always sort of have my mind at. Yeah, it's highly trainable, Miki. Like there was a study, I think 2017 also where Franzen looked at, if you will, the most determinant factors of performance outcomes in Ironman and fat oxidation VO2 max were the two most determinant factors of performance outcomes. And then there was another study, which, you know, since that 2017 period, I just think

38:35
technology advancement on testing, like metabolic testing, particularly in metabolomics, where they're looking at not just in a lab, but they take effectively the lab onto the race field. And they did this study this year in August. The study was published and it was on one of the UCI cycling teams that was in the middle of the grand tour that all the testing happened.

38:59
And what they showed again was that the most determinant factor of the highest performance athletes was all of the metabolites of fat oxidation. It's a fascinating study because it's not an artificial lab. It's a seven-day race, 100 to 200 kilometers a day, a lot of elevation change. And where the athlete shined was when

39:29
they were able to crunch more carb or fat at that time, but they had preserved glycogen and had produced least lactate. So when it come to the most intense time of the race, they could punch through that, right? It's really interesting. So I totally agree. It's fascinating. And what I find quite exciting is, Lacey you come from that trail running background, right? And as you were mentioning living in Hong Kong, it was like a mecca, which, by the way,

40:00
stuff like that. But this makes me excited for Hong Kong. And the ability to sort of utilize a product over several hours. I mean, you will have people will have to try it to see whether it sits well for them. But to like take some thinking out of it, because you've got a lot of things in it. So they don't have to worry about getting this, you know, carbohydrate from this source, and then putting MCT in themselves. One question, this is a bit of a selfish one, but...

40:26
Every time my husband takes MCT, I accidentally put MCT powder in something. He vomits. What's that about? I don't know. I mean, it's a nut, remember. Coconut is a nut. And there is absolutely a percentage of the population that have a reaction of course to nuts, period. And I was surprised at because not that I had a long time in clinical practice, but I had a few years, but I'd

40:56
put two and two together to think of coconut as a nut in the same way of peanuts and other classic allergens. But there is a very real, even I've seen athletes, sorry, I've seen just people have reactions to the coconut oil and in a skin reaction, not topical, but as they ingest it, they come out in a rash. So look, pretty much anything that people take, there's potentially a percentage of the population that will have a reaction.

41:24
But I would say though, that like I said earlier, it's worthwhile double clicking on if it's a powder, what they bound it to. And there's cheap sugars and maltodextrins that you can find coconut to. And actually, as you were talking, I was thinking about that because he usually does a bulletproof with coconut oil, no problem. So I'm actually thinking it's the powder and it's the Quest powder. So I mean, who knows what they put in. No, Quest is bound to maltodextrin. Of course it is.

41:54
And then the other thing, just on the MCT, it's fairly interesting because we didn't know this until we got into the lab work of developing the product. Again, MCT is quite a high level reference to fat. There is multiple of them. Some of those are useless in the context of there's no oxidation in both heart and skeletal tissue.

42:22
For example, C6 where there's six carbons in that MCT, particular fatty acid, there is no oxidation of that on heart and muscle. And then if you go up to 12 and 14, well, then you start to have membrane transport challenge. It doesn't move through the membrane so efficiently. So you have to be quite surgical with this. So is that eight to 10? Is that what we're thinking? Like eight to 10 is like the sweet spot. Eight to 10.

42:49
It is and even those two like eight, the metabolic signatures show that very strong, like you know what's really interesting is that have you ever thought how come the heart when you train really hard and go into say zone four, zone five, how come you don't get like lactic acid burn in the heart? It's still muscle, right? But the heart is extremely efficient at...

43:17
oxidizing fats for fuel and it so happens that particularly C8 is extremely now well oxidized. But you say, well, hey, most people don't take a lot of coconut oil. That's true. But if you look at what happens to when you start exercising and the actual fatty tissue begins to release fatty acids into the blood supply, what's released is a long chain fatty acid.

43:46
move transported through the blood supply comes into the muscle cell. And in the paroxysome, like outside of the mitochondria, but inside of the cell, the first stage of oxidation happens and it actually calves off the very long chain triglyceride and what breaks out? C8. Yes. And then that comes across into the mitochondria. And again, in both...

44:15
skeletal muscle and heart muscle, you still need Alcantin. But my point is it can run at very high intensities on that substrate. So yeah, there's a lot to it. Yeah, sounds like it. And I'm unsurprised given just the complexities of your and how thought out your products are. Because what I want to also talk about is glutamine, because I've seen that in your products. Can we discuss?

44:43
the role of glutamine in general and then of course how you utilize that. Yeah, I mean, again, with your background, you would well know, of course, in the clinical setting, particularly in highly catabolic patients, long-term bedbound patients, you do see a lot of atrophy, not just of the muscle tissue, but you also see it of the gut tissue, the membrane, et cetera.

45:13
gut epithelium, membrane integrity, et cetera. And you can test this and it has been done in many studies where you can see the movement of what they call LPS, like basically toxins from inside the gut across the blood. Those tight junctions can begin to be less tight, if you will, easy way to say it. And glutamate is one of the first treatments of that. Now

45:41
It so happens that similar studies have been done on what happens as you increase the heat over extended periods via exercise that has a similar effect on those tight junctions where they begin to open up. And so when we first built TRAIN, part of the reason that we wanted to build lowest

46:08
we wanted to, you know, the fuel of the membrane is glutamine. It's not sugar, it's glutamine. Glutamine is actually a very efficient substrate in its own right. Like it can, it does, I should say. It comes into cells, can be oxidized to release energy in the same way that glucose and fats are. So, we started the use of glutamine for the gut reasons and it was at a lower dose initially.

46:37
this intellectual property that we've just had filed is to be able to offer a higher dose of that as a substrate. And why that's interesting is because if you can imagine, let's say, on the intake of just substrates at large for exercise, if you could say 15 to 20% of that was a type of a substrate that was not glycogenic or more importantly, not lactate producing, this gets pretty interesting for an athlete in that I can take energy in.

47:07
but I'm not getting the negative effect of lactate. Glutamine and MCTs could give us that. So we've been doing a lot of development around those areas. That's awesome. And do you think Leighton, is it too much of a stretch to expect that taking glutamine during training will have favorable gut related or favorable gut outcomes as well? Or is that a little bit of a stretch? Yeah, you know, in a true clinical setting, if you had a real gut,

47:36
issue, the type of dosage you would need for that is much higher again. So we're not trying to be a treatment, a clinical treatment. What I would say is our revival product, like our recovery product, where we go into really quite more classical clinical dosage levels, absolutely could be used for that.

48:02
our rationale for using that is more associated with muscle tissue. I mean, the muscle itself is the producer and the storage pool of glutamine in the body. And it is a pool. And catabolic things, whether that's extreme exercise or disease, will draw on that pool. And it gets drawn out of the muscle and it feeds the gut first and foremost.

48:32
But what we've seen in a number of these studies is the reference to classic muscle tissue breakdown from exercise like creatine kinase, some of the inflammatory mediators like the interleukins, etc. that glutamine will have a reductionary effect on those inflammatory mediators. And we tell a lot of customers that are looking at our recovery product to say,

49:00
classic high intensity track workout that you know you typically have delayed onset muscle soreness on. Try this and report back to us how the DOMS was different with this. We just show how dependent and how you can offset a lot of that inflammation through glutamate. So that's kind of like how we're using it. But as I said, we're working on some

49:30
as a substrate in a more highly concentrated form in our training and racing products in the future. Yeah, that is awesome. And then one of the last sort of key things I want to touch on or chat about is of course the inclusion of ketones in your products, particularly in light of the more recent research showing its role with cognitive functions later on in exercise. So how do you guys use it? Yeah. I mean,

49:59
We, Dan and I talked a lot about this before we developed our, well, let me say it this way, before we thought about where we would use ketones, if at all. And I would say even Dan's still in the spot of like the clarity around its direct response to performance. It's like if you can have athletes that have taken it and...

50:29
perform well? Well, is that an association or a direct causation? Good question. It's hard. Like there's even studies this last year that came out that suggested in the cycling context that there was a reduction in performance, two to 4%. But what is probably far more studied and consistent in terms of data and research is around its role in recovery.

50:57
The earlier studies that were done on this, and this is quite some time ago, Mickey, it's not that recent, was showing that some of the biomarkers again of muscle tissue breakdowns, specifically what was happening, they found that L-leucine was being effectively catabolized, broken down in endurance sport, and they saw this in the blood plasma. And then they dosed with ketones, BHB.

51:25
And they saw that that L-lucine level was being reduced. And all that was suggesting was that after fats and after carbohydrate, rather than starting to chip away at the muscle tissue itself by dosing with ketones, it would not use the L-lucine or the muscle tissue, it wouldn't break that down. So we've put it into the product more in the spirit of...

51:54
muscle tissue recovery. And, you know, I'll be very transparent with you. It's probably one of our number one selling products. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think it's probably you're so innovative with your products, Leighton. I don't doubt that the more that research might come to light in terms of the efficacy of them for that cognitive function during an event, I'm sure that there may well be a further development.

52:21
Yeah, the jury's still out on that one for sure. There's more to come. Yeah, for sure. So, Layton, why can't we get these in New Zealand? I mean, what's the story? Talk to me. I'm intrigued with that because FuelMe, and I'm giving them an ad here, they supply it in New Zealand. And then I know there's a lot of customers that use Fastgear out of Sydney and Melbourne. Okay, that's good to know. And then we have some customers that just bring it in right from the US. But

52:51
FuelMe right there in New Zealand is pulling our products into New Zealand. I mean, let us know if the full spreads not there will work on it. Oh no, that'll be my ignorance actually. Because normally what I do is I text Dan, I'm like, Dan, where do I find S-Fuels? And he's like, nah. So maybe you need to... No, they're there. Amazing. Yeah.

53:16
you know, we're still new and our distribution is still forming for sure. Yeah, for sure. Are there any other like products on the market that you are aware of? Like there probably will be, but I just am so I just haven't seen anything. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I mean, the company I credit to them that got started probably five years before we did was UCan. They had this they have the Superstarch product, and we looked at that

53:46
They have a specific IP themselves and respect that. Our concern or problem with that model is that if you look at the positioning of that and what they show is that it has a more classic bell curve, slow moving starch across the gut barrier and as a function of that, a less blood glucose and insulin response. When you need carbohydrate...

54:15
in high intensity, you're not after a bell curve. You want it yesterday, right? Conversely, if you're in zone two, you don't need it. You're burning fat. So I just functionally felt like the product doesn't really line up in my mind to textbook physiology, which suggests that in low intensity zone two, we should be trying to build aerobic. And by aerobic, that means...

54:44
with oxygen and with, you know, mostly with fat. And as you get into high intensity, you begin, the body naturally is set up for more glycogenic, you know, substrate use oxidation. So I just struggled. And that, you know, when we tried it personally before we thought about creating S-fields, but when we tried it, you know, A, people can just go and look online on social on what the reaction is to the texture.

55:13
But secondly, physiologically, we feel that it's not set up optimally for athletes. So that's our point of view. Yeah, yeah. No, no, that's really good insight in terms of the sort of how applicable it is actually for athletes from your perspective. So you know, and I mean, there'll be people who love you can and I have used you can as great, you know, but I understand, I absolutely understand what you're saying when you want something.

55:42
Short and sharp, you wanted it. You wanted it yesterday when you needed it. So totally. What I love, Leighton, is that you guys have set up more than just... It's not just selling products. You're educating at the same time, like the blogs, the videos. I mean, it's such a... It's like a little hub of education for athletes who want to do it different. And you've made it super accessible as to how to do it. So there's very few questions.

56:10
If you people go through it, there's very few things that they'll be left wondering because it's all there. And of course, and you're very accessible as well. Like it feels, you know, like on social media and things like that, which is always really great. Thank you very much. We feel like we never do enough on the education side. So I appreciate that. So Leighton, is there anything else that you feel people need to know or

56:36
questions, how do they sort of find out more about how they use them and their training and things like that? Yeah, we have like, just on our website, it's just they have this kind of learn tab at the top of the page and that's got all of our guides in it, Mickey. So we've got like anything from a one pager to a 20 pager. And then we have our, to your point, the videos and the blogs. You can also go out to YouTube. We have Asfields Live, which is where we have effectively a weekly.

57:05
video on some topic. Right now we're doing breakfasts and reactions to different breakfast cereals and then we're doing recipes for marathon, Ironman, Half Ironman and Ultra. So, but, and then if people want to just directly engage support at sfuelsgolonger.com and you can find that on the website too and by all means email us, happy to help. Amazing. Leighton, thank you so much for your time. Your afternoon, my morning. It was really great.

57:34
It was such a geeky conversation, but I loved it actually, because it really, you did such a great job of explaining the different components and why they're there, which is really satisfied my curiosity. So thanks so much. It's just great to meet and get to talk to you and see your face on social so much. So we're keen to just talk, you know? Yeah, totally. Happy to do it more. Nice, thanks Leighton. All right, thanks, Miki, bye.

58:15
Hopefully you enjoyed that conversation. I really did and I love hearing how innovative companies are at bringing to the forefront the latest research and the latest design in their sports nutrition products. And I was super pleased to hear that S-Fuels was actually available in New Zealand through the Fueled Me website which we talked about in the podcast, but of course easily available in states.

58:44
Australia as well. Next week on the podcast I speak to Andrew Jagim all about energy drinks. Until then though you can catch me over on Facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition over on Instagram, Twitter and threads occasionally @mikkiwilliden or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com. I will be talking about

59:14
all around you making the most of 2024. So that's coming out later on this month in January. So keep an eye out for that on my socials. You will get notified for this free webinar and happy new year. Let's hope 2024 has started off a good one. All right, team, have a great week. Talk soon.