Science, Self-Mastery, and Human Potential – A Deep Dive with Daniel Tausan

Brad Minus: Welcome to another episode of Life-Changing Challengers. You guys, we are super lucky. I'm telling you, we have Daniel Taum on the episode with us today, and he is a molecular biologist. He also tells himself, a cell biologist and he's a health and wellness coach. But you wanna talk about getting down into the weeds of how science portrays health, and what are the markers, what are the ins and outs of what our bodies go through when we exercise, when we don't, what food does, what it doesn't, what certain nutrients have.

I mean, the guy knows it all and he's been through the wringer. He's also used to be a competitive water polo player and like, you know, elite coach. So the guy knows this stuff and I'm really excited to talk to him. So, Daniel, how you doing? 

Daniel Tausan: I'm doing fantastic. still another day in Paradise.

Brad Minus: Ah, Canada. That's right. Gotta love it. So, all right Daniel, can you tell us maybe a little bit about your childhood, you know, where you grew up, what was the compliment of your family and what was it like to be Daniel as a kid? 

Daniel Tausan: Yeah, I definitely didn't get the average call it experience, though.

I know such a thing exists. I'll get my mom asking me what I dreamt every single morning and, and I thought this was just like the standard parent handbook is supposed to ask the kid what he dreams. And, I didn't realize that my dreams were that akin of, you know, hallucinations or, or you know, drug trips that people have later in life where they're very lucid, very vivid.

And I was animals. I would do, you know, all these different things, adventures in my dreams. I would love going to sleep. It didn't take me, take me half a second to fall asleep. And, I also had a lot of health problems as a kid. And, that's really pushed me towards kind of the health and wellness side of things, right?

to fix my own problems. And then now I can help people fix theirs, in return. So I was allergic to everything we're, we're talking. it's springtime in my eyes, are like bulging all the time. Just constant, constant, right? If I touch my eyeball, you know, I'm out for the day. allergic to animals, talk about cats, dogs, I can't get close to 'em.

and so, you know, long story short, I dealt with all of this. I dealt with the gut problems. The gut problems was what drew me. Like I wanted to be a surgeon. You know, that was what I said when I was six years old. I, when I cut my stomach open and take the pain out, like, what's in there that's causing all the pain?

and the pain was very simple. It was just not very good idea of what food was. I thought milk and cereal were, the Breakfast of Champions right? And, no, that was probably the worst thing I could been eating. No one was really around in my circle to point that out or to know how to guide me towards very simple things.

Often, anytime you went with a problem, they're like, oh, well you have, you know, IBS and, you know, we can put you on these medications. Mom was very against all that. So, you know, she put me through tons of different, holistic treatments, which, you know, eventually just got to a point where I, I learned what it meant to be, you know, quote unquote healthy.

Like, well, what do you have to do for your gut? What do you have to do for your metabolism? And, you know, it's not that complicated. As a kid, I was a sugar junkie. it's that simple. You're just addicted to sugar. Like people are addicted to crack. It's the same, neuroimaging can be seen on cocaine as it is with sugar.

And I love sugar, right? So I would have a bag of m and ms that would go through the entire bag of m and ms. I wanna get the stomachache right away, but the next day, you know, I'm out. Right? the route was to be a doctor, you know, to go be a surgeon, be a doctor.

But I am, I'm a space cadet. You know, I, I, my dreams are just a reflection that I'm really daydreaming in the waking state more than I'm present with the rest of us. And so, even though I, I have this jock like exterior, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm a Muslim man and all that kind of good stuff. people would think you're very, oh, this guy must be cocky or whatnot.

And they start talking and be like, oh, you're, you're out there. What plan are you from buddy? You know, even in the right time. And, like huberman, you know, I can't help but just start saying things to people, oh, you know, you could do this to, to help you lose self, lose weight. Oh, you're in your fifties.

You should probably really consider resistance training. 'cause your, your bone mass is about to go real quick in the next 10 years unless you start doing something about it. And, you know, I have to learn through life that's not welcome all the time. You know, you can't, right? You can't just say these things to be, but not, you learn emotionally ready.

I have to understand everyone's in their own journey. And so, I really didn't like where medicine and call it like our biotech is today. You know, when you work for biotech, it's a lot of, you can't deliver what's really there because the market's not ready for it. So you're playing this game of trying to like upsell what you have in a way in which isn't right, and you can't even communicate what you have because what you have could be exciting, but it's too hard to, even to bridge to the audience.

You know, the jargon's also just part of, a little bit of the jargon. It's just part, so you can have the conversation, you know, we're talking about endurance training. Like you need to know a little bit about how your body metabolizes oxygen, sugars, and fats.

If you don't, you just can't have the conversation and the conversation is cool, right? That's what existence is based on. It's all based upon what's. That's what we have to work with. You know, you can't ignore it. Either you learn it or you let someone else do it and tell you how to leverage it.

And so, this desire, this curiosity has just, kept me hungry for knowing what is it to be human being? what is our potential? And, you know, just like the cold exposure, and what we know from hypothermia our textbooks need to be rewritten, right?

Like what I learned in my textbook, I myself already could physically override with my control over the autonomic nervous system. But this isn't new to the world. jet fighter pilots, deep, deep sea free divers, pregnancy for women. Like we all use a breathing technique in order to be able to hijack your physiology in order to be able to withstand unbelievable feat.

So why isn't this, you know, incorporated into our understanding of physiology? How come this part is left out when you're training a doctor or even when you're training a scientist? And, you know, that's the part where I didn't really fit in with the rest of, call it the, the crowd there.

'cause today, if you want to be, your standard scientist and get a job as a scientist, your best bet is to model disease. I just wasn't into it. Yes, you can go down the sports route and whatnot, but then you're also very much so, capped at what you're supposed to be looking at.

Great. You know, how dare you talk about health. You just stick to the performance side of things. And I like educating, you know, I like talking about what's there. And, so, you know, a lot of people are the outlier. Like, you'll go, you'll get some data and you don't fit the trend, but you can't just toss that person away.

And I will help make sense of you as the outlier because that's real biology. I can go sit in the lab and curate data, but, and the real world, I gotta address the fact that you exist and that biology is real. It's meaningful, it's telling me something, and I'm up for the challenge, you know? So here I am.

Brad Minus: and that is a great, like, that's a great like almost agenda that we can, that we follow what you just, that what you just said, but I wanna step back a little bit. I wanna know a little bit more about you. so just basic question, brothers, sisters? 

Daniel Tausan: older brother. Were you close? Very close.

Yeah. Yeah. we wrestled, I would, I would leap my, I would jump from like the top of the stairs in wrestling style, you know, like, Ray Mysterio Jr. From, that's the kind of brother I had. And, you know, sometimes he'd catch me and sometimes he'd move and I'd slam me into the closet, but, you know, I love him regardless.

Brad Minus: Oh my God, that's awesome. I didn't have any brothers or sisters, so I don't know about that. I had 12 cousins, so I got a little bit of it, but Oh man, that's great. So when you were in, they call it high school In Canada, right? Yeah, its secondary school. Okay. So in high school, is that when you started, water polo?

Daniel Tausan: Yeah, I started water polo and I was like 11. Yeah, pretty young. Oh, wow. Like my biggest, I guess, feet in, in life so far as I taught myself to swim at age four. I just, I just walked into the ocean. I saw everyone else and they said, Hey, what are you doing? I'm like, leave me alone. I have to go learn how to swim in the deep end.

And I just started doing the thing, you know? So I'm an aquatic kid and, that's where I feel the most comfort is near water. 

Brad Minus: Oh, I, yeah. That, that, that I envy. I, you know, I've, I've been through, I got a, a total amount, probably somewhere around the a hundred mark for, for our alon and yeah, it's still like, alright, survive the swim.

So I have the privilege to get on my bike. But I'm getting there. I get there. you know, it's good enough for, it's good enough to get on the podium once in a great while. 

Daniel Tausan: for swimming. If you don't do it when you're young, it is extremely, if not yet impossible.

So a 17-year-old can decide, Hey, I wanna be a world renowned soccer player. They can still make it at the upper echelon. A 17-year-old that doesn't have aquatic background. We'll never break into any kind of like national, even world championship, no chance. So don't feel bad. 

Brad Minus: Yeah. I mean, so just for everybody listening and I'm not ready, but hey, there are exceptions.

You know, Lionel Sanders, very much an exception. Canadian triathlete never swam as a kid, started working on the water. But he worked really hard, to get to that point. And now he'll swim in the front of the pack. he'll never be in the front.

So that kind of still led to your argument, but he does. But again, like you said, you could be 20, 23, 24 and you can get on a bike. Yeah. And you could get upper echelon, you know what I mean? You could go crazy and get upper echelon if you've got a little bit of jeans and a lot of persistence.

You can get there, but you're right. Swimming, it's tough if you didn't start when you were a kid. but that's, that's amazing. So, did you play water polo through high school and did you play for college too? 

Daniel Tausan: Yeah, so I played up until I was 20, and I played for Team Canada. So there's no college, so to speak.

Oh, cool. pretty much from the high school you go into, the training center, which was in Calgary at the time, and, you just start practicing with, the mix of what's there, the national team. And, in 2008 when Canada made it to the Olympics, I got to train against a team that got to go.

So maybe if there was two or three injuries, I would've been, you know, on the bench forming it or, you know, being in there. But, yeah, that's as far as I pushed it. But, you know, being a Canadian athlete is pretty tough, right? Like, there's not that much, glory support or even future in it.

And so I very quickly decided like, no, I wanna go pursue that. dream of being, you know, the doctor or science or whatever it was. Then just go get smarter, so to speak. 

Brad Minus: so you mentioned your gastrointestinal, a allergies, you know, and the whole bit. and that's why you decided to take up, did, you started out, you just started out with basic biology and then you moved and you started to drill down into what molecular biology, stem, cell 

Daniel Tausan: Yeah. So initially it was like, Hey, what do I have to do to become a doctor? And then, you get a chance to, talk to people and whatnot. So I had a chance to shadow a bunch of doctors and I was put off almost instantly.

the first gentleman I don't think you're a human being. He was a saint. when I shadowed him, he was awake for like 40 something hours. He had like an hour nap, he had some insane shift and he had multiple roles in the hospital. an absolute godsend. Like this is like when you meet someone that's a doctor, he'd gonna be like one in 50, but that's the person you're hoping takes care of you.

and the next two weren't that great. There was just, they said wrong things. And like in third year biology, if I could figure out you saying things that are wrong, that's not good. And you know, one of 'em was bragging how he got a person back onto insulin.

I just felt very wrong in so many levels. Yeah, right. It's like a businessman and a coach pretending to be a doctor who's just happy to, sign off on things, which obviously it's not all of them, but, you know, I did get to meet that person and then I just saw how the day looks like, it's very quick interactions with people and then a whole boatload of paperwork and, you gotta play this game of liability and red tape and you're kind of helping.

You're kind of not. And, I understood the medical system a lot better then because I. you know, if you're not a good patient, like it's pretty hard for a doctor. I don't think people realize how impossible it is in today's day where the doctor doesn't know what you ordered, who you could order a package from anywhere and expose yourself to God knows how many different chemicals right?

Like there has never been a civilization in history exposed to more molecules of various sorts than we are today. Plus we can synthesize ones which can be very weird for the body that you can't metabolize like trans fats, for example. So, you know, the fact that you go to a doc, you're like, Hey Doc, I'm not feeling all this my problem.

I get it. He's there just to stabilize you and get you out the door. He's not there to teach you how to live or change your lifestyle or go do this detective work to figure out where you could have been. You know, like that show house deludes people into thinking that that's the medical system's gonna do if people remember that, right?

Like so. Absolutely not. Yeah. Right. So that, that put me off right away. And one of the doctors said, I don't think you'd be a very good doctor. You ask way too many questions. you know, I lo I love talking to you here about you. I'm excited. You're probably better off than being like, backhand research because like, I would love for you to come and bring this information to me.

You're down the line. And I took that to heart. I was like, okay, yeah, maybe. And the moment I went into, volunteering and being part of the research crowd, I was at home, I was with the nerds. I get to ask the questions and I get to be left alone with microscopes and, tools in which I can then explore things and make my own, observations and guesses.

And so I looked towards the stem cell biology, lab, and I started working there to, do the doctorate. And I loved it. I spent a lot of time, looking at a mouse model in which looks at mesenchymal stem cells, and I looked at how the liver generates and I helped my mentor who taught me how to be a scientist in lab.

He's doing his, doctorate on muscle damage. So I would help him with everything that he was doing. And so I got to understand how the body regenerates and through the connective tissue in particular and the chy stem cells, but lab work and animal work and that kind of stuff, I need to be interacting with people.

So I switched out and I started doing the molecular profiling of exercise. So in the stem cell biology, what I was working on is taking a look at a lot of information. It's called the transcriptome. you get DNA, you make a message to make a protein.

So it's looking at that message. But you don't just look at one message at a time. You look at, you know, as many as you can capture. So with an mouse, it's about 20,000. And so you're looking at about 20,000 messages you can capture. And I wanna know what messages are being turned on when you're undergoing regeneration.

And specifically you isolate the senical stem cells to see what is this stem cell doing. In order to help you regenerate. And you know, if you, the more you learn about it, the more you can leverage your understanding. 

But what about just getting that on people's blood? Because I don't, you know, I'm not gonna get your liver biopsy anytime soon, right? I don't want your piece of your heart. Let's keep that to you. liver, no problem. But heart your lung. I don't want that either. Right? Let's make sure that stays on you.

those organs can't regenerate, whereas muscle, no problem. Gimme some muscle, sure it hurts. It's a little bit obnoxious, but your muscle heals phenomenally. I was interested, can I bring this understanding of molecular biology to the person, like to actual person? And I was lucky to work with a company, molecular youth, you know, through the doctorate.

when Covid came, I stopped the doctorate and I started working with people, I did the thing you're not supposed to do. I started caring about the person instead of the data and the work. I've been freelance since, I've started my own, venture and I act as a bridge.

There's plenty of science available. and I'm happy to do the heavy duty science side where I connect you to it. Whether you bring me a blood test or a molecular data and be like, Hey, interpret this for me. whether it's, Hey, I have some blood variables. Can you make a scoring method for me, to, Hey, I just wanna get healthy.

I have none of these biomarkers. What do I do? And I still like that part. I still like telling people the base physiology in which very few people know. And the funny thing is it's just not taught. And so I do, I run my own, educational series. when people are like, well, I want to, get back to health.

Really what they need is they need a little bit of nudge in the right direction, a little bit of dissolving their beliefs. 'cause the beliefs are causing the problem. and then, a point to be like, Hey, well here's your physiology. Did, did you forget about how the liver functions? Would you forget about what your blood means?

did you forget about, you know, like moving your body at the right time? the things that are super important for your health are mostly for you, and that's why they're not talking about very much. 

Brad Minus: Right? Right. I mean, they've got us cornered, but no, I am, fascinated, about the why and I have some of my clients that are like, yo, coach, just tell me what to do.

I'll do it. You know, I trust you to get the results and we'll go from there. 'cause I'm always telling them, you know what? You're just gonna have to humor me because this is what I do. I'm very big on it and I always say, listen, if a coach can't tell you why you're doing a specific workout, he's not a very good coach.

So when I'm talking about, you know, them being on the bike for 45 minutes and doing certain intervals, I'm sitting there going, okay, this is a tempo workout for this specific thing. We wanna get your legs and your body used to going at this speed. And then we bring it back down to give yourself some recovery and put it back up again.

And this gets things going. And then the next day it's a steady, you know, it becomes steady bike or a steady run or get in in the pool and it's steady. And I says, it's steady to clear out the lactic acid, let it run through your body and re recreate the, the, the energy level, 

Well, that's good. There might be more to it, which I would love to hear about. Yeah, for sure. but that's the whole idea is that I'm always about that. I'm like, this is why, and I tell them why. This is your objective. These are your metrics, this is why you're doing it. you have a threshold, heart rate of this, and we wanna be above threshold for a while and we wanna be below threshold for a while.

And, this will, help out with metabolism that will, get you to the point where, we're at a certain level of your plan so that we can get to a certain speed so that by the time we get to the end of the plan, you're ready to go for your race. Yeah. So lemme but people are like, lemme 

Daniel Tausan: Yeah. So lemme ask this from, from, from your experience in that, you know, is it the, is it the same? Principle of training, or let's, maybe not principle, but is it the same time course that every single athlete's gonna take? Or do you come with your experience and be like, Hey, I want you to push a little more.

Okay. You don't need as much recovery. Hey, you know what you need way more recovery. You get to, you know, okay, I see you nodding your head. Absolutely. Can you share a little bit here? 'cause that, I'm happy to interject, but I think, 'cause that's, that part is a little bit understated from the coaching side.

'cause coaching I say is an impossible job. 

Brad Minus: It's tough. because of the personalities, right? So I use a SaaS program. SaaS is, you know, software as a service, program called Training Peaks. and I always make sure that everybody has to have a Garmin. And, if they don't have a heart rate monitor on the Garmin, then they've got a wear chest strap.

And I know that the optical one is not as complex. It's not as accurate or precise, but the delta is usually really close. So if I do the tests, if I'm doing GXT tests where, we're doing, graded exercise tests to get to their zones, if I do it on the watch, then their delta will be the same.

Yeah. So that part was, works out. Right. but if I use a chest strap, it'll be much more precise. Mm-hmm. using that, and then when they go through each one of their workouts, it graphs it and it will using, heart rate variability, and heart rate itself.

Resting heart rate RMR, it will, it actually graphs it. So I can actually tell. When fatigue is high and form is low, but fitness is improving. So if I, so I'm very deliberate on, I'm constantly looking at it. So if they've got a really hard, workout and I see their fatigue spike, I'll usually call 'em and say, listen, we're gonna just bring down tomorrow, or I'm gonna slip this with an easier workout tomorrow, and then we'll go back to work the next day because you, you know, you, you spiked something here.

I also make sure that most of them are being diligent on their recording of their diet. I don't care what you eat for now, but definitely you wanna journal it. Then all those nutrients. MyFitnessPal will then also goes into, training peaks, it integrates.

So I can see what their macronutrients are. So obviously, you know, as you would know, is that if they go out and they do a 10 mile run and they kill it and everything's great and then all of a sudden a few weeks later they do it and they're like, woo, I'm a little bit, like I'm a little, a little more fatigued than I was last time.

and everything else looks fine. Like, you know, their fitness level, everything is fine. Then I can at least go into and go, okay, well wait a second. Yeah. Well, the day before you did the last 10 mile run, you were, you were at 60, 65%, you know, carbohydrates. And the night before last time you were at, you know, the day before last time, you were only at 40% carbohydrates.

There must be something there for that person. sometimes it's fat. I've got some people that are, like to be more aesthetic, like I've got one, I've got one woman that we were doing a four day challenge. So she did a 5K on Thursday, 10 K on Saturday, half marathon on on Saturday, and then, full marathon on Sunday.

So Thursday, 5K, Friday, 10 k, Saturday half marathon, Sunday marathon, 48.9 miles, four days. And it goes inside of, it's down here in Tampa, just a couple miles away in Disney World. So you run around the parks and the whole bit, but it's all four these races. 

And so I said, you know what we're gonna do, let's see if you're really that way. Let's try you on keto. And I did this like three months out and then we had our train. Two days before your race, we're gonna start adding carbs back in. We're gonna add a boatload of carbs two days before another, another good amount of carbs one day before, and then we're gonna maintain until Saturday.

It's not gonna matter on Sunday. but to top em off and she killed it, she absolutely blew it out of the water. Like literally prd every race. And, but then Monday she goes, yeah, it was great time and all, but I looked in the mirror today and I don't like what I see. You know, and I'm like, really loaded water?

I'm like, great. So I'm like, go back onto a regular diet. You don't have to go completely keto, but let's pull, just pull your carbs down just a little bit. Call me on Thursday and tell me you feel the same way. She called me on Thursday. She goes, yeah, you're right. That's the reason you're the coach, coach.

she goes, no, I look good. So, that's one of my kids that she doesn't like to be told why. 

Daniel Tausan: Right. It helps sometimes knowing why, so that you can, I think make the association with, hey, what's going on at the moment? that's why it's important to have a social circle, a community.

You, you, delegate responsibility who's to know what, so that you're not worried about having to know everything you know. Exactly. I think one important thing for endurance in terms of just understanding the physiology of it, is that, you would like your body to spare glycogen and sugar as much as possible.

it's not because of the energy, aspect of it. It's because how those resources are tied in with your, hormonal system and how much they act as a fatigue or a break on the body. It's not a real fatigue would break. It's a safeguard that the body has. And if you can't practice intuit, which we don't, 'cause it's usually within the performance time or the very uncomfortable, glycogen depletion and glucose depletion puts us at a, oh my God, I can't go anymore.

But as you keep training, especially when you train in fasted states, when you train in states where you haven't ingested very much glucose And you have to convert it yourself, you have to produce your own glucose, your body becomes very good at sparing the glucose and it actually shifts what the oxidative capacity of the muscle fibers that like fats.

So even your oxidative, the slow twitch fibers, well, they can still use glucose and once they get to a certain threshold, they'll consume glucose as well. And there's a threshold when you activate the fast switch fiber.

So, you know, this is something I'm always fascinated in because some people, no matter what they're really doing, they're very good at adapting themselves to both what's called the fat metabolism and to what's referred to as keto, metabolism, right? So your muscles don't use ketones as a fuel.

but you can get 'em to, and so this is where my bias or my kind of outlook for, this training, especially this hybridized way of being strength endurance, where your body doesn't really wanna do both. it's the most grueling of the type. And I know this very well, 'cause in water polo, water polo is a very good example of where you need strength endurance in a very weird way because you're in water too.

And so you have someone who's trying to drown you. You have to be very strong. You have to sprint up the pool. 'cause if you can sprint and beat 'em up the pool, you already win. 

'cause the other guy will just muscle you out. So this notion, especially within the water, you get very, very good at strengthened during sports. So much so is that when you transfer to something else like juujitsu or mixed martial arts, you're like a freak in comparison to everyone else because you've built out a system that's, very good at using your energy resources at really good rates, let's call 'em.

And so your muscle fibers are adapted very much so to both endurance, meaning you can function on call it very little air for a long time, where other guys just a few seconds in their huffing and puffing and and you, you've adapted your blood chemistry so that ketones are easier to be in circulation.

and so this is some of the stuff I've, as I've seen in conjunction with, you know, the performer, you know, the athletes and their blood results. And as people have gone over longer periods of time with me, is that the more that they practice a principle of metabolic flexibility. In which their diet, their lifestyle has it so that every single day they're going into a state of producing ketones.

This is where now with the time with longevity comes in. And what I would say is that there's never, I never really, I know I don't care for longevity, but I realize that if you understand the principles of longevity, those are the same as the principles of health. They're not different. the only call it separation is that if you really wanna talk about pushing the last, you know, 10, 20 years, you're gonna do stuff very differently.

But this idea of health and what that means for understanding predictively, is the same for longevity. Now the funny thing is, athletes actually die sooner than most people think, and that's because they adapt their cells. So the muscle fiber is great, the blood looks good, and lots of stuff is on the cellular level, adapted to such an extent where it could last a lot longer.

And that's one part of longevity. How long will the cell live? How good is your cell? And sometimes the athlete doesn't do a great job where after they've stopped being an athlete, they'll start burning through their cells very quickly. 'cause they try and live a certain lifestyle similar to before, but now they've adapted the cell very great and they don't do a de training process.

they're, you can imagine the blood pressure can be maintained incredibly high with an athlete. And later in life you can still send the pressure, but the vessels can't hold that pressure anymore. And so they rupture in birth. And so you often see athletes die of, or ex-athletes of like, cardio cardiovascular event or stroke.

And so there's a two part for longevity. There's this, can the cell make it? And what are the physiological correspondence? How's the physiology doing? Right? The cells gotta work together in order to give you a function. And it's this functional component that has to continue for reaction to survive. And so you need both in order to have, longevity.

And for some there cells are absolutely crippled. They look like they should be dead. God knows how long ago, but for whatever reason is you're able to coordinate still and work, you know? And so I'm always kind of looking at what is the best predictive value, but there is a very, I call it fortunate or unfortunate, whatever side you wanna be on, inter-individual variability.

There's just so much variation. Even what we understand is a standard blood test. That's why there's a range. And sometimes you're on like the edge of the range and athletes often are outside of those ranges, and the doctor needs to know. And if the doctor is not call it equipped to understand what an athletic blood value should be, they get misdiagnosed or misinterpreted easily.

So this idea is, you know, great if you're looking like, Hey, I need more work in biology, great. It's complex enough where there's always more, more stuff to do, but it makes it a little bit difficult in terms of having confidence all the time with what everything's telling you. This is why there is no better comparison than yourself.

You are your best control and the sooner you get interested in yourself. The sooner you have access to wealth in which I can't give you monetary value for, because I don't know what treatment or let's say other thing you're gonna buy into later life, in which I'll tell you now, people that have lost their health, they'll give all their money to get their health back.

they're dumping it by the, and so, you know, for me, the, this sort of look on the inside, it's cool that you have heart rate monitors and you know, there's data, which at times out, I sometimes wonder from the coaching side, do we, do we like overvalue the data? But, I, I really got interested more of what's happening on the inside because I, I did, I personally trained, you know, once I stopped being a waterproof athlete, I, I helped my brother with his personal training company at the time, and I had a client have a stroke with me and he was super healthy.

Right? his nickname was oh oh seven. Yeah. Just a stud of an older gentleman. And, you know, he liked his red wine, but he didn't abuse alcohol or anything like that. And I had no way of guessing that he'd have a stroke in front of me. And, you know, I guarantee it that he, if he got a blood panel, like what's available today that I would've known and I would've changed drastically the way I approached training him.

And, I would've been super careful to reinforce his blood vessels. And when you say, well, we need to train so that your blood vessels can handle pressure. We need to train so that your blood has no worry for clotting. And what does that look like? What does that mean?

But if you have the blood values, you know, if you have two markers, no good, but if you have a hundred, that gives you a very, very good insight as to where your health might be trending towards. And there is no, like tests on the market that'll give you everything, but there are tests in the market that give you a massive leg up.

Because about 70% of your blood is, is your liver excluding the cells, excluding the red and white blood cells? It's, it's about 67% of it's your liver. So understanding that really it, the more you understand how to help and support the liver, which is everyone's best brain, it's at your right side, right underneath your ribs.

You just give that little, little, little appreciation. It's constantly taking grenades for you. Everything you do deliver takes the grenade. You make a mistake where, you know, like the longest time we had the, pool time for water polo at very late at night, so my biggest meal would be at 11 o'clock at night.

That's not good. That's not good for a college's basic physiology, but as a kid, that's your option. You either get the food in at the right time Or just get the food in. And so I didn't get it in at the right time and I would always have a messed up circadian rhythm as a result. And that's fine from when you're a kid.

But even early on in my twenties, I then suffered the consequences of it. And it took some years, it took some unlearning and it took, funny enough, very deliberate works. One guy I'll point towards his name is Michael Kogan. So I've read all his books and I said, this guy is about 30 years ahead of his time.

He's born in the wrong era. And, everything that he put forward not only stood to test time today with all the advances and all the research that came to, but you know, it, it's still something I rely on in terms of, hey, you know, what, if he noticed 30 years ago, what information did he use? And the physiology didn't change, you know, like the genetics didn't change, so, right.

You know, maintain the basics even though the fascias and science constant change, right. Eggs are good, eggs are bad, eggs are good, eggs are bad. Cholesterol fashions and science in health always change, but the underlying physiology doesn't. And that's what something I'm really interested in because to me it's fascinating, this idea of, okay, metabolic flexibility, producing ketones, that's one thing I can tell you about.

When the ketones are produced, that's an entire other biological pathway that's turned on in which turns on other things in which also come as a result. And so your genetics, you're dealt like, there's no point in hammering or hampering on about your genetics. the tests are usually very fun, but not that useful for what you should be doing in life.

Whereas you must, as soon as possible, start learning to master your metabolism because you're responsible, you're responsible for setting metabolism every single day. And if your coach tells you, Hey, you know, try and go keto, that's very open for what you can still eat. It's just telling you restrict carbohydrates.

Because even if you're, if you're trying to eat keto, but you're having difficulty digesting your food, alright, it's gonna be shit. Your performance can be garbage. But if you eat carbs and you're digesting, no problem. But you wanna be able to train yourself to be able to do these endurance style trace races.

You gotta figure out how you're gonna get to supporting your digestion better. it's funny enough, is something where people will start ignoring very often where it's like, oh, well, someone told me avocados and eggs are great, but the guy eats it every morning and feels like there's a rock in his stomach.

It's like, well, you just, you're really punishing the amount of enzymes you're asking your body to make. You're super high fat, super high protein. That's great buddy. But you can't keep that up for a long time. Like you're gonna get a dysbiosis. And all of a sudden this guy who's listening to all these health tips is in the hospital because his stomach is, is just calling him immense amount of pain.

Okay? You gotta slow down with what you're doing. So even the things in which we think are healthy, we still learning about it. Say, wait a minute, what's the biology that faltered here? And how do I, how do I do it? How do I, how do I better understand it? How do I better approach it? And. Digestion is something that's funny enough I haven't heard ever in my athletic career, but it's been more and more what I actually bring forward, to athletes is like, Hey, you know, how do you feel when you certain meal?

Okay, well try it again. But this time you're gonna add either the cumin, the f Greeks, you're gonna change up the preparation. You're either gonna slow cook your meat for eight hours before you eat it. Put way more peppercorns, things like this, you know, like how are you preparing your food? and then all of a sudden, like, man, now all the things I was, I was eating before, way different.

You know, like my, I, I really, I love my food. I'm not feeling like lethargic and whatnot. And you know, a lot of times it's a kick wheat, you gotta kick wheat to the curve. Even though we love wheat. Wheat's often call it not the best thing. Right? And I guess another one is that there's this myth somewhere within athletics where it's like a bunch of pasta.

Pasta is your best friend, but pasta is okay. especially if you have a good fresh pass, that's a different story, 

Brad Minus: Right. 

Daniel Tausan: This idea that, you know, past is your best carb source. no. It's, it's slow to digest. It'll make you feel lethargic and like, yes, there's always gonna be a guy in the team that can eat an insane amount of past will still be okay, but that's not everybody.

And that's a big part where, you know, your, your biofeedback like you have when the heart rate monitor, that's great, but your sensations of like, Hey, I'm comfortable, I'm uncomfortable. That's the most useful. You know, that's also the leading edge where it tells scientists like, maybe I could develop a product that will tell people like, you know, without subjectivity that this is it.

And so this is a big part where, you know, from longevity, I'll throw this at you to, see what you think. But, the temperament for all the people that I've got to interview personally that are Centurion made it to a hundred is they're, they're kind, they're fun. Like they're funny people.

Their mood, their temperament is, you know, you can't really get on their nerves. If you say something that they think is disrespectful or rude, they'll just call you out. they'll try to be cheeky. They'll try to make you laugh very often. They don't take things to like too much personal, and it's not like they don't get angry in life when you ask them like, oh, when's the last thing you're angry?

they're very much so in tune with the real biofeedback, the not your beliefs, the things that you said, oh, someone told me eat almonds. I must eat almonds now. They're good for me. The almonds are good. And yet, you know, the person is suggesting more oxalates than they ever did in, you know, the last 30 years.

Just 'cause someone told them, you know, almonds are a good protein source or fat source and they gotta eat the vitamin E or whatever. So this notion of mood and temperament is also tied in with this idea of feeling because, you know, they're, they're very good, they're very apt to be able to respond to what's in front of them, you know?

So I guess that's like a long-winded way to give you a whole boatload of, where, where do we take it, right? is this the complexity we're dealing with? The fact as a coach That you have to be blind and be like, do this when you're right. As a coach, I have to say, it's a sensational feeling because the amount of guesswork that you take, obviously the super computer in the brain does a lot of quality stuff, otherwise you wouldn't be where you're at.

But it's such a hard, especially when you have athletes that are good at slacking, you know what I mean? Like when they can lie to you very well and they're lying to themselves, like to cheat themselves. And so you have to figure out like, how am I gonna play this game of psychology, with them.

And so you're not even dealing with sport at this time you're dealing with, a whole different ball game too. 

Brad Minus: You gotta be a coach, you're a therapist, you're a friend, you're a brother, you're a father. You know, 

There's certain people that react in a certain way, you know, like I've got somebody that's strictly as I can give them a little bit of information and tell 'em what they need to do, and they're very, very happy. Right. the woman that I said, you know, let's try keto for a few weeks and then we're gonna come off of it for the race.

Right. So I find that pasta is good for a major event, no pasta throughout it. but then when we're starting to, use the old term of carb load, just to pack the glycogen stores, then we'll add that in three, four days before the race.

I'm not talking about like 20-year-old water polo athlete pasta. I'm talking about a normal side of pasta and as fresh as possible. but then we cut it out and then after the race, you're done. we leave it alone. because what you said exactly is that slow digestion.

So when you're on the run, it's still digesting, you're still getting, The glucose out of it, in my opinion. And it seems to work. I am not a big fan of a normal runner. They're always telling me like, yeah, before a race, same thing. Bagel peanut butter, banana and coffee. And I'm like, yeah, it's either not enough.

And then I'm trying to tell 'em, you gotta be there at least two and a half, three hours beforehand if you're gonna pass that kind of stuff in. And they're like, no, no, I do it 45 minutes before. But you're not getting anything out of it. What you're getting is the night before. in what I've seen.

But let's talk about some of these, myths, you know, that we come up with, right? So, what you've told me right now just got me thinking, because you talked about using ketones, getting your body in ketosis and that you can train your body.

To be, what'd you call it? Glucose sparing. how long is somebody working in ketosis before their body can actually start using that? When do they start feeling that? does it take a month, two months? obviously there's gonna be a range because everybody's different.

Daniel Tausan: Yeah. 

Brad Minus: point. 

Daniel Tausan: Yeah, I mean, when you take a look at the literature in science, right? You really, you take a cohort of people, you might put 'em in a bike, you ask 'em to change your diet, you take a muscle biopsy and you see, does the enzymatic machinery on the muscle change, in due time.

So within about, a month to three months, you can see that the muscle has adapted to be able to use X amount, some small amount of ketones as a energy resource You can see the upregulation of the enzyme present there. and so that would give you a little bit of confidence be like, okay, muscles pulling in ketones.

So in this notion where, hey, I'm giving my body another access to not only are there fatty acids, so fats present that I can pull into the muscle to use, which is the part primary, you know, of the slow twitch, what they're gonna use.

The ketones are a additional fast access fat, so to speak. Where the way you go into burning, you know, we don't really burn things. We oxidize our food in order to be able to extract energy. It's just a shorter step into oxidation for the energy, whereas the fat has to go through a slow process called beta oxidation.

So you chop it up and you have access it for energy. It really depends individual and their background, because, you know, we kind of think, people are born in these different kind of body types. It's not necessarily, it's really like you're, if you're chasing aesthetics, you should really just chase a biomechanics and then the aesthetics come as a consequence.

if you're focusing on aesthetics, you're doing things you don't want to do necessarily. it's always a motivation game then that you're always kind of on the back foot. Whereas, hey, my goal is a certain movement, like a handstand or whatnot. Then aesthetics start following, because, you know, if you do a handstand, you have to have certain alignment and posture with your skeleton.

Therefore, it gets that muscle development to a certain amount. You know, you put a time trial like, Hey, I wanna get my, one kilometer run under a certain, time. your body's gonna change in accordance to that.

You know, you can take a look at what physique do you like? Okay, what athlete emulates that physique go play that sport. You'll get there faster. And obviously you can use gym as a supplement. So this idea of how to adapt your metabolism, it really goes into this notion of what did you put into your body?

And, you know, I've seen from on a high level endurance athletes that, you know, the meal beforehand has very little to do with energy. It has everything to do with comfort and psychology. Yes. So like the energy that you're gonna be using for the race, especially for endurance, it's already kind of preset, meaning that, you can load your liver with glycogen, but there's a certain enzymatic rate in which you're gonna access that stores.

And there's a certain threshold in which your body's capable to operate for long periods of time. So, you know, you eating whatever you're kind of considering as like, Best outcomes. Sure. Preworkout, it has a lot more to do with the psychological edge. So, hey, I feel good eating peanut butter, therefore it really doesn't matter because me feeling good is more important because that psychological component is what keeps me in a state of I'm happy, I'm coping, you know, with whatever it is that I've gotten to.

But there is a better and worse for sure. And so, you know, the notion, I think I would stress here more so than anything else is that, it's always good to whatever it is, the idea like, Hey, I'm gonna load pasta or I'm gonna do car blood or whatnot, is to always do a mock more difficult trial version of the event than the actual event itself to see how you respond to changing nutritional conditions.

'cause what's most important for an athlete, especially one that's in constant performance, is something that they can guarantee be okay with, especially when you know your performance is tied to your paycheck. Don't necessarily wanna be throwing in these curve balls and testing things. you wanna test it when you're comfortable, where you can fail.

You'd be like, oh, I'm, I'm flat lining. that's okay. I made the leverage in this space. And so this is where, I'll push point towards, you know, we have, bodybuilders and weightlifters that, for example, are a seven day fasted. And they do a personal best in a deadlift because they prepare themselves for that, you know, like seven days without food.

Yet they're able to exert their personal best in deadlifts and we're talking deadlifts in the six, 700, you know, pounds. It's not like a small deadlift if they're lifting. So, you know, this type of physiology, I would say is not like the extreme. It's just an example when someone has prepared and set themselves up so that you know, they gain access to their body because, you know, you can put lots of mental roadblocks for yourself, but that's tied in with a physicality too.

your belief system does control your hormones. you think, you see a snake and you get scared. Oxytocin goes up, cortisol goes up, cholesterol goes up, heart rate goes up. But there's a physical consequence to you thinking that there's a snake, even though there's nothing there.

That's even just a perception. So in the same way when you have a belief where, oh, I won't perform well if I'm in a, in a keto right, ketosis you won't, 'cause you've already set the stage in which you're going to have a certain hormonal cascade, certain neurological control in which is already working against you.

And the more you hear from today from, you know, celebrities or, or big names that had massive problems and they say, oh, I always talk bad about myself. I always talk down to myself. I always had this negative self dialogue and it would destroy my performance. It would ruin my marriages, it would ruin my relationships.

And I realized that I was having the 20 years of negative self-talk. Well, that's a part of a belief system. That the person isn't deserving of something or the person isn't worthwhile, And you know, this is why when you talk to the best, they'll say like, well, I saw it, I visualized it, and I acted on it.

You know, and they're not delusional. It's not like, well, I just sat around, playing games and walking my dog. And then the next day I woke up and I, you know, I, I won, you know, gold medal at, at, at, you know, an national championship. Now there's, there's obviously a level in which they know their availabilities, they know their competition, they know what they can see with the mind's eye.

And this is something that I'm personally always gonna, like, I quest a better understand. 'cause I feel the, the science to me comes pretty easily, but the part where it's difficult is this emotional portion in which, you know, that there is massive play for the human being. you can, you can feel it viscerally.

You can't always measure it so quick. You know, these fleeting emotions that come in which really dictate I think, a person's health more so than we can give it credit for, I talked to a lady and she told me that she lost her voice for a few years.

I was like, well, that's bizarre. She's like, yeah. When I lost my voice, I really, went my own way. I opened my own business. I did my own entrepreneur way. I started changing my entire life. And that's a very different way to heal your voice, funny enough. Where she stopped doing this busy run around.

She took a lot of effort to take things into her own hands and as she started doing a lot more things for herself, rather than just, you know, working for others, her voice started coming back. Like, that's a bizarre state, you know? But almost every condition in which people experience I see is almost tied to some kind of, call it physiological.

it's like a slap from the universe saying, Hey, you need to pay attention to this in order for you to be able to align yourself with what you wanna be doing. Right. It's almost as if you came here to do something. Right. as you know, I think everything has got some level of meaning.

Right? Or mechanic, they're, they're meaningful 'cause they help you be able to transverse the world and you all gotta get from point A to point B. you know, from yourself who's coaching, bringing up even the smallest thing where, you know, I'm sure a lot of the athletes, they could do it on their own mm-hmm.

But they'll never do it on their own if you weren't there. Right. Because it's so much easier when you have a pillar in which one you look at, you feel responsible or accountable to like, okay, now I gotta keep going. And so, you know, the athlete, they, they seed in you a certain level of power if you're smart, which inadvertently they, they do, you know, I'll call it their own ego comes into play.

Brad Minus: the first set of results. It's like some sort of result, you know, you get it is like, okay, so follow the plan, trust the plan. And I say, you know, I say just trust the plan the first time. Get out there, find out what we get a result. They get the result, they get a positive result. They're there for a life.

They even might have, bad races after that, for some reason or another, they'll still come back. 'cause they remember that first race. I tell everybody the same thing. The first distance, the first time you do a distance.

And especially like, I get a lot of like bucket listers, right? Oh, a bucket lister. Do a marathon. And they come see me in September so they can run the Disney marathon in January and they just want to get through it, right? That's all they wanna do. They want to say that they ran a marathon.

And I'm always like, okay, first time you do a distance. You do it for fun, you take all the pressure out and you go how your legs will take you. I'll get you the endurance and I will get you to the best that you can possibly be in that four months. But when you get there, I want you to have a great time The first time, enjoy.

And the Walt Disney World Marathon, you don't really go there to PR because it's huge. There's like 25,000 people, and if you're anywhere but the first two corrals, you're stuck behind a ton of people. But every so often there's a place to stop and take pictures with characters, and then you're at Animal Kingdom and they bring out like real live animals out there.

so it's not really there to pr so that's why I liked that race. 'cause, especially for first timers, but you always say that, but it sticks in their head at that point. They're like, oh, I did it. And I got through it and it was fun. So then you could start adding time goals and stuff.

And even if they have a bad race after that, they remember the first one, the first one always sticks. And I think that's that mindset that you keep talking about as far as, you know, what you eat before the race is more about your psychological. 'cause we know it takes 48, even if they're not doing keto, ketosis.

If they're not ketosis, it still takes 48 hours for you to, it takes up to 48 hours to fill your glycogen stores. So most likely you're still working on dinner either two nights before or maybe breakfast, the, the morning before. That's when that's when you finally filled up all your glycogen stores. and then we, of course, we use things to top off the glycogen stores, but, like GOs and stuff, which that, that's a question that we can talk about too.

But I wanna go into some myths. because I'd be, and getting a scientific. Point of view. so, working on the keto diet or the carnivore diet, can we, can we compare and contrast both of those? They're close, 

Daniel Tausan: Yeah. So I mean, the carnivore diet I think is very interesting. it's very interesting because my, my, hepatology or liver textbooks don't really have a chapter in which say, Hey, if you eat only meat, what happens to your health?

And, I mean, the case studies are in, it's unbelievable of how it's transformed people's health, where you'd think it'd be terrible, but they're kicking medications they've been on for 20 years. their, blood pressure's coming back to normal, people that are even on antipsychotics and, you know, mental health have never been better.

So there's something very unbelievable from the carnivore diet side of things. some people that try, they're like, oh, I got constipated and I stopped after about, six days. Another guy that tries to says, well, I had explosive diarrhea for two weeks before I was, okay. So you'll see that very often in biology where it's either, Hey, I am constipated or I have diarrhea.

And that goes back to, just the fact that anywhere within our pathway, what we have is inhibitor activator, inhibitor activator. And you don't know sometimes when what's out of line or what's being compensated. And so you might see a very opposite effect, but the fact that it's still in the same part region or area is a good sign, that there is something really happening.

And so the carnivore diet will make it so that your insulin is very low when you're eating your food. And the meat has the vast majority of what you need in terms of dietary requirements. And so you will be very quick to lose a lot of weight, a lot of fat, and you will be in a state of, I would say pretty good place to do performance, as it kind of goes to saying endurance races.

Now, I have never worked with anyone individually that's done both endurance and the karma diet at the same time. My guess is you'd have to go slow and steady because it's gonna be difficult to eat that much meat in order, be able to sustain very high outputs of endurance training, and you would have to really do a great job of making it easy to prepare a lot of these meats.

So I would think like stew, like preparations in which you're the, the assimilation of the meats super easy because again, you have to expend a lot of enzymes to digest your meat. So that would be my kind of take from the carnival side of things where I wouldn't rule it out as like, oh, you can't do this, 

slow and steady and you know, if they come to you like, Hey coach, I'm trying something new. You know, can you work with me? And then you'd be like, okay, well let's see what you got and let's see what you can showcase. 'cause that's also the interesting thing is, you show me what's possible.

You think it's go ahead, you do it, and we'll work together and we'll see where we get to keto is, I, now I'm notorious for never liking when people tell me that what diet they're on, because it still doesn't tell me what you're eating. Right? Are you eating eggs and avocado every single day? Because those two in combination have a very heavy digestion requirement and you're better off, for example, eating your avocado with boatload of other fats.

And then you're better off eating your proteins with both of other proteins, separating those out, almost two different meals, so to speak. or just preparing it in a different way, altogether, right? That's why guacamole is actually so good, because you're taking things that help ease the absorption of the avocado and the modification and everything else.

'cause you're putting in the lime, you know, and other things in there. Right? So, keto is, again, you'd have to specify, what am I eating? 'cause you can eat a whole boat with a processed garbage that's terrible for you. And you'd be like, well I'm on keto diet. Ah, yeah. But you're just eating, food in which you can't even access the nutrients to.

so often when people think keto it's heavy meat. Meat and like low carb vegetables. the difference between keto and carnivore could be non-existence. 'cause you can say, Hey, I'm doing keto, which is another way of saying I'm eating a lot of meat.

I just kind of all the vegetables, or, keto can be vegetarian too. You can go fully veggie and still be in, in keto, obviously harder though. I don't necessarily think that you have to be a hundred percent keto all the time in order to get the benefits of keto because you can, for example, eat one.

Carbohydrate rich meal at, let's say, on Monday in the evening at six, and did not have any carbs the next day. And by the morning, by 10 o'clock in the morning, you'll already have entered ketosis and you just don't have very high carbs. You can have like 30 maybe grams of carbs and you won't kick you outta ketosis and you'll be ketosis for the rest of the day.

So, you know, I know intermittent fasting is a big, you know, buzzword in fad, but I would just call that, that was my next default. That was my next myth. Yeah. So I would just say intermittent fasting is just, it should be more just considered a default. Biology is just the way that you're supposed to respect your liver and your, and your blood cleaning process, because when you eat, you turn on digestion and it lasts from four to six hours.

During that time, your liver can't detox your blood at the same rate or the same level. So the first thing you're doing in the morning is you're eating like a heavy nutrient rich meal. That's great, but you've delayed your detoxification, so your liver is gonna hold onto that. So the best thing you can do in the morning is give something like lemon water.

Give something like, you know, like a, a, you know, cucumber or whatever, something very simple that has what's, they, they act like scavengers or transport so that your liver can throw it's intoxication contents from the night before onto the little bits of lemon, little bits of cucumber. They go into your colon and they go out and then you can have calories after that, like the egg and the nutrients and you're not delaying your detoxification or you're not holding onto what you're trying to clean your blood with.

And so anybody that's eating three meals a day will start having problems. You know, a lot of the young athletes specifically, I tell 'em, you shouldn't eat your reakfast 'cause you're, you're, I can see you, you're, you're, you know, you're in my training camps and they can barely put food in your mouth.

They get acne all the time. And so I'm like, okay, just drink boatloads of water. You're thirsty and we're gonna put stuff in your water so it's hydrating so you're not just peeing it out right away. and then eat your meal when you're really hungry and you'll see how when day it's time for the kids to eat.

Oh man, they have a massive meal and they'll eat right after practice. Right? Well, they, they skip the morning meal. Some kids will still eat 'cause whatever, you know, they, they're okay to eat. but you know, as soon as practice finishes, like their, their plate is gigantic. And then, you know, same thing in for the evening, right?

Believe a big meal. So, you know, the myth of like, you gotta eat all the time to gain weight. That's not true. You know, that, that's, that's quite the like, very nuanced scenario that some people should be eating all the time. Usually when you have like an acidic issue or you have some, you know, very specific case, would I advise speed eat all the time because you're, you're not allowing other systems to come online.

If you're constantly eating, constantly snacking and what you wanna be, you wanna be strong resilience and, and think about endurance training. You know, there's, there's two types of things that endurance trainers have to consider. They have to consider training their fastest state to help 'em adapt with their energies.

You also have to train in a gluttonous state, so leaving the door and eating food, because if you're doing a very high amount of exercise 

Brad Minus: mm-hmm. 

Daniel Tausan: need to refeed while you're still in motion. And we're not designed to do that. you're not designed to move and to digest. And so to FreeWheel to do that, very uncomfortable, very difficult, and you should train it, right.

It's like bananas are a great option when people are in marathon. It's not there because, bananas are sponsoring it. It's because banana is like an alien food designed for the human being because it's so complete, so easily accessible and so quickly transferable into us continuing, let's say, movement.

So, you know, there's a lot to say within this, area of like, okay, keto carnivore, intermittent fasting, where I would say intermittent fasting is really something for everyone to consider as you need a better word for it, because this isn't fasting. Fasting would be, I eat once a day. I have 20 hour fast from all my meta tablets.

You eating twice a day with a respectful break between is how you are in one, your physiology functions, and the moment that you get back to a healthy baseline and respect with food, you'll see how when you start eating at odd bits in a day, you'll ruin your appetite. Like, oh, I had a little bit of nuts or whatnot, A couple snacks this, now it's time to eat, but like, I don't want to eat right now.

And then three hours goes by and then you're like starving at nine o'clock. Okay, gimme all this food and you go to sleep at 11 and then your liver's all sluggish, interrupts your sleep and you just now always in a, this is the circadian rhythm. You're not in a rhythm with your biology and you can't go off of what some guy's, you know, telling you on, on Facebook or Instagram or whatever.

'cause he might as well set himself up to adapt slowly to that lifestyle, whatever it is. I know I've heard like it doesn't matter when you eat so long as you fast for 16 hours, you can have passed at 12 o'clock at night. Okay. No, no, no, no. Let's stop this and, let's just bring it back to something very simple is that we, we are not designed to be so feeble and dependent on food.

So I would say this again. Remember when, when I eat food, there's a, a, there's a massive pleasure response to food. And so this is when I, when I said psychology, this is really what, what I'm referring to is that that pleasure response won't get me to a state where I'm gonna inhibit access to my energy resources because I didn't have this pleasure response.

But I can also train out of that. I can train myself saying, okay, you know what? I won't have the food. I'll have a fast state. I'll exercise. It'll be a terrible training session. I'm gonna go to sleep 'cause I'll be fatigued. And then when I wake up, I'll drink water and I'll go again. 

I'm gonna have good positive self-talk, and I'm going to go to exercises that I like, like the deadlift, for example. I like doing deadlifts. Deadlifts are fine. And lo and behold, all of a sudden I'm doing a personal best, you know, on a day three of a fast, what's going on here?

Where did I mess up? Or what belief did I have beforehand? In which thought, like I can't have access to my energy. You have to have access to your energy stores and you can slowly inhibit or you can accelerate how you can get access to those stores.

And remember, fatigue is a self preservation process. It's an important process. So you, as the consciousness don't push past the body's physical limits so fatigue set in place, be like, no, you, you power down for now. But it's put at like 20 or 40% of your capacity. 40% would be nice just to consider.

That'd be nice if you can get to 40%. Yeah. So once, once you start training into the state, really what happens is you become a lot more resilient. You become a lot stronger, and your organs start adapting. So anyone that does endurance training, what you see does, their heart will become more efficient pump.

But the person that has bad nutritional, bad dietary habits, their pump will never become as efficient as someone that has phenomenal dietary and nutritional and call it this incorporation of science, because they're, they're not reliant. For example, I have to eat in order to be able to perform. 

Like just slowly go into this focus, my breathing. I just have to get to 20 K. There's not a particular time to hit. He just said, do it in a fasted state. Okay, I have plenty of water. My stomach's full of water. I'm okay. Hey, I gotta pee in the middle of the race. That's okay. He said, I could do that. You know, we're hiking.

This notion is that you're gonna become a lot more resilient. And when you're doing so, it's the same idea with our plants and fertilizers. when you give an insane amount of fertilizer to plants, the plant becomes very bad. It's taking in nutrients. Now it's gonna grow and have a high yield, but the moment you put that plant in a average or low nutrients, it, it'll die.

It won't survive. And it's the same thing as you. If you constantly keep giving yourself such high abundance of food where a portion of it's passing through, you constantly, you're peeing out your vitamins, you're peeing out your supplements, you're defecating out food, you're, you're trying to ingest, you're fat, you're trying to ingest.

When you fast yourself, when you get hungry, oh man, digestion won't be an issue. You will burn through that food like no, tomorrow. And I know everyone's gone through those training sessions where like, I don't care anything about anything else. And it's usually there's this myth of like, you have a 20 minute eating window.

That's not really the case. It's 'cause as you alluded to, there is a depletion access to glycogen. There's depletion access to both liver fat and adipose fat and mm-hmm. Just a more complicated intramuscular fat that is all being at a play in a time.

So, you know, when, when we have something in which we're thinking like, Hey, we're putting my glycogen stores, it's very likely the glycogen stores don't need any replenishing. they're often at such capacity in which, unless you're, it's like your guys, I'm talking about the average individual, but your guys, you know, they, they're training on a regular basis.

They're gonna go to a point where every practice, yes, they're gonna access their lecture stores, but the average day individual, they're eating so often that their gly stores are at right capacity and they're constantly getting in influx in which now they're storing it as fat. if, for example, you have extremely high fat metabolism, someone's very well trained and you have a very easy session for them, their gly stores are barely touched.

They touch their blood supply of resources and it, especially if it was a low tempo practice or just let's say, like a stamina practice. Steady state. Steady state, yeah. Their liver glycogen might barely have moved, you know, if you were to take a look in a biopsy at it. And obviously it depends volume, training status and all this other stuff, but Yeah.

Yeah. It's to understand that, we have the resources on us and the better you are in an athlete, the top athletes have very good efficiency at, the biomechanics, their techniques great, but they have very good efficiency at being able to utilize these energy substrates at the appropriate time.

And then using all available from muscle glycogen to intramuscular fat, within the muscle within the blood supply. There's a ton of resources in the actual blood supply in terms of amino acids and fats and ketones if you're in that state. And then glucose obviously.

and then you have the liver it, this massive resource that can supply all of them. And then the fat stores, which we haven't talked about. So, you know, the, the access to energy stores is absolutely everything when it comes to, you know, this high performance, you know, even just I would say performance, you know, no matter what level, just for you to be able to excel at that level, it's this biology that's at play and you're gonna stumble into this bit regardless of who you are.

And the more you have sort of support or interest around it, the more you can start playing within the confines of what we're talking about, you know? And so that, that would be my, like, very long-winded answer between keto. No, 

Brad Minus: are you kidding? That's fantastic. And I even learned a bunch of things that you just mentioned.

So it was interesting that you were talking about, you know, in a facet state you're learning to what to take in and you know that you don't need to yet. A lot of it is already there for you. You just need to learn how to access it. Very interesting because I got that case study. So around here, because we're in a very high humidity climate, you know, everybody around here, all the runners, they usually have belts or they have, where I put a water bottle back here.

There's people that have bladders and the whole bit, and they're all out there, we've got this one loop, it's 10 miles and then all it's got, it's got like three water fountains. 

I never carried anything. And all my friends, all my runner friends is like, you're not carrying water, you're not carrying high, you know, electrolytes above. I'm like, it's 10 miles. It's fine. 'cause my body learned that I could, I could work on just water and I only needed those three stops, you know, and they were almost like three miles in between.

Right. so it was like, I knew that my body learned that I didn't need the salt for 10 miles. I didn't need the highlight the electrolytes that I just needed enough water to wet my whistle. And who knows if might even need it. I might, that might have been a psychological thing where I just needed my mouth just needed to be watered down a little bit.

I did start that way. I started with always carrying the belt and blah, blah, blah for six miles. You know, I would have the belt and the goos and everything. And now it's like, I don't carry anything for 10 miles.

And I've done eight minute miles for 10 miles as just a training room without an issue. but I recognize that from what you were talking about, that it is a psychological, thing that was gonna help you. Same thing like you said, that people have the bagel and the peanut butter.

It's more the taste, and that's what they've done. So that's what they're gonna put in their mouth. 

Daniel Tausan: Yeah. 

Brad Minus: that taste, 

Daniel Tausan: there's a certain, let's say a caliber that they'll always operate at. So if I constantly need to use a gel pack to get through 40 kilometers or marathons, 

Brad Minus: 26.2 miles. 

Daniel Tausan: So I do think within that range, for the average individual, they can easily train with it to be able to go without any bit of, call it additional food supply. If you are at a state where you must, consume something in order to get to there, you're pretty much saying, Hey, body, don't access fat anymore.

Here's more sugar. And you're interfering with your body adapting to be able to function with its resources, which is in the long run going to handicap you and keep you at a certain level while there's gonna be another echelon or group that's gonna operate a level above. this is where you're gonna see these sort of like brackets of individuals where they're not in the same ballpark or league.

And, that's why I said belief at the beginning was one of the big challenges from the health side of things where, we put that sort of limitation that we have for ourselves, oh, I can't do this without it. And you do often need someone you really trust and have support there.

Whether it's a coach, whether it's a loved one, to help you realize like, Hey, you know, maybe it's not the best thing. Can you try and push past it? Push past the discomfort, and then once you've adapted, you turn on your superpowers. And then there is a certain level for ultra marathon in particular, where it's just not biochemically feasible without you consuming food.

And I do think that's like, that's past, you know, when you started going into the 80, a hundred kilometers multi-day races. Yeah. There's no chance that you're going to be able to use just the energy reserve that you're in your body. You need to constantly, you know, find ways, easy ways to incorporate. And that's what I was talking about, the gluttons training.

When you have these Ironmans that are, you know, 10 hour races, right? that's a different ball game. And for those guys, I, you know, I don't recommend them going without it, but I, I'll say, oh no, 

Brad Minus: I've done five of 'em. Oh, yeah. and yeah, I've done five of 'em and yeah. No, no, no, no. And that's where, you know, very interesting that you say that because it is a, they've got a saying, right?

And you talk about being gluttonous. So basically it's swim, bike, run, and they call, alright, the bike's a smorgasbord. Mm-hmm. So basically you're constantly eating on the bike. Of two, because, two reasons. But first of all, you're on a bike, so you're on a steady surface. Your body is not like, you know, trembling up and down so you can kind of get into your digestive without it feeling like you're overrunning it, but you're coming off the swim.

So you've burnt 2.4, you know, 2.4 miles on the swim. and you come off of that and you've had your, you know, you've had your meals and stuff before then, so you come off the swim and obviously you can't eat during the swim, so that's not gonna work. but, so you've gotta go on the bike. 

Is, you've got to replenish for what you lost in the swim. You've gotta maintain fuel for what's on the bike, and then you've gotta get ready and prepare your body for the run. So that is the reason why they say, okay, the bike's smore sport. So you might eat a thousand calories, a thousand to 2000 calories on a bike, for what you've lost, what you need to finish the bike.

And then you're going into a pretty big, run at that point. 

Daniel Tausan: what's your preferred calorie source for the bike? 

Brad Minus: I am big on, I like gels and bananas. So I use a Morton gel, which is basically fruit. it's a combination of sugars, fructose, dextrose, and, 

I think it's something else. it tastes like sugar water. Mm-hmm. It really does. The gel going down. and that was the other thing is that there's all these myths. They, right. So they've got these other gels and they say that they're about 20 grams of carbs and they're like, take one every 45 minutes.

And that used to be the standard. Yeah. Yeah. I remember. And then, and then I recently in the triathlon state, I'm like, no, 90 grams an hour game changer. Complete game changer now. 'cause I'm not, you know, I'm not in a ketosis state. I haven't, I haven't transferred and, and learned to use those extra energy stores.

but at 90 grams an hour, it was game changing. When I started to feel, when I started to feel fatigued before all of a sudden it's like, Nope, I can keep going. it was an amazing feeling. 

Daniel Tausan: The biking window? 

Brad Minus: some of the gel packs and stuff will have it, like there's one, the fatty acid, is the, starch, more of that less on glucose. Higher on like kind of starchy fatty acids.

Right. instead slow fats to just instead of, and then you don't have as much. there's not nearly, you don't have to take as much like when I take 90 grams of carbs, you're taking one gel. And for the people that have done that transfer. They're fine and they're good.

Perfect. yeah, the other story was, I had talked to a woman who had taken her family raw, complete raw. Right. obviously not. They're also ve well, I dunno, it's vegan. Vegan. so, but raw, completely raw. And she was telling me that her kid loved to ski.

When they would go skiing, his friends every couple hours would have to go down, would be starving. they'd have to go down to the lounge and get a hamburger and fries and blah, blah, blah. And he would just bring a couple oranges and he'd be fine.

Daniel Tausan: that's how the human beings supposed to be. I'm just gonna say that. that's how we're supposed to be. We're not supposed to be this. Like, call it chain to chain, to, you know, the next meal within the next four to six hours. That's a good indicator that you have dysregulated hormones, and that, you're very likely overeating or that the food that you're eating is missing nutrition.

And so this is something in which it's pretty basic, but you calories are not a very good concept for nutrition, Oh, for sure. There's no such thing as calories and food. Calories come from the notion of a bomb calorimeter, right? So you can put anything in a bomb cal emergency.

How many calories are present in there? Meaning, you know, how many degrees do I change water up in order to be able to use this unit? So when you're eating food, can we get to the idea of what we're trying to label as a calorie, which is what we call macronutrients.

Why do we call these one specific a macronutrient, carbs, fats, and proteins is because they can go into what we call the energy cycle, where we actually transfer that into the energy currency for the cell, right? So fats don't belong in this category, and proteins are barely used for the energy cycle. So really now what we're left with is, you know, we started with this idea of calories and now we finally got to a point where we're talking about what we're actually using in terms of biochemistry.

So this is why calories is a terrible notion, because your fingernails are calories. You're not gonna get any attrition outta them. Cantu now has calories, but you're very like unlikely to get any bit of that nutrition in you, like you think you're gonna get, because not every single can, obviously, but the vast majority of that protein has been clumped up in such a way that your enzymes have an insanely difficult time getting at it.

It's kind of akin to you cooking food in a certain way in which you denature the protein to such an extent. You've, and you've wrapped it up in this, you know, little matrix of food in which your enzymes just don't get to it. 

So that's telling you that you weren't able to get to digesting all. And so the notion of calories, it's in there, but you didn't have the, to break it down to absorb it. So did you get the calories that you ate or that you think you did? 

But really what we're talking about is these three big macronutrients. And the reason I see fats don't belong there is because the class of molecules that we call fat is just too big. It's too important, it's doing too many processes and only a small fraction of what you call fat is actually being used for energy.

Because keep in mind, every single one of your cells is just fat. Fat and a little bit of protein, right? And filled with water. That's what your cells are. pick up a brain. What is it? It's just entirely fat. So for example, you eat your omegas Omega-3, six, and nine.

Yeah. So you need all of those in order to build out your brain. You know, you're not using those for energy, though you can in certain circumstances. But for example, Omega-3, your body's gonna spare all of the Omega-3 for the composition of your body. So you eat nutrition for the calories and that nutrient for energy.

Today you eat food because you want it for composition. I'm going to be this thing. This is making up my cell membranes, this is making up my protein. And so you don't want to have bad drywalling in the house where it's gonna let a bunch of water and mold through. You don't want to have bad fatty acids in your membranes because they're not gonna be able to do the signaling and the function of life in which you get to experience like palliate, vior, you know, bliss.

You won't get that because they're filled with holes. Trans fat. Getting into your membrane is bad news. It's not gonna be able to do the processes of life. It's gonna clog things up to cause problems. The same idea when you need good amounts of omega threes and omega six is the part of your membranes and you don't have them, it's gonna be consequential because now the process is necessary for you to be able to have fast reactions, learning memory, it's all gonna take a hit.

Focus, sleeping. And so that's what you need the nutrients for, you know? So you're undergoing a higher amount of recovery all the time. When you're doing an athlete, you've becoming back strong and stronger.

So you need to regulate your immune system. So your immune system does the job it's supposed to do. How you regulate it, well, you make things called prostaglandins and you make these molecules that help you coordinate these responses. What are they made from? What they made from the food that you eat? Oh my God, you really are what you eat.

You are a hundred percent, you are what you eat. And, you know, the importance of it is high. And, adaptation is a real thing. And which it throws a massive curve in a wrench, in, in a lot of science and biology, and you get all these sort of different ideas. but like I said, you know, people have adapted to a keto diet facet for seven days, done, you know, record lifts or deadlifts that are unbelievable.

It really showcases to you that, you should take matters into your own hands and work with people around you to, achieve something special. Right? And so, I've had people throughout my life, come with these ideas of go, can I try this? Should I do this?

And I give them the best I can where I'd say ready evidence or, you know, as acting as a nexus for information where what people have, see what people having with what they're doing. And to give them, call it the safety net of, you know, risk of they might encounter, but to also showcase like I've learned through people what's possible in biology where if they didn't do it.

I would still be at a, I don't know, but because they went, they did it. Now I'm like, okay, so you can adapt to that. You know? How did they get there? Well, it looks like they were born for it, you know, because of their life, their circumstances, you know, or they're in the military and they're forced. Right. So a lot of the people that showcase some of the most interesting biology are often the ones that are putting themselves in extreme scenarios, and athletes are actually part of that.

Copenhagen, so Denmark and Norway are two of the biggest publishers for exercise physiology. And to me, that's been a game changer for, health and wellness because the disease portion of, our understanding of biology is super easy because when there's something wrong, something's not arranged.

The association's no problem. And when you go to your medical institutes, it's very easy for us to point, Hey, this is an issue. It's not very easy for us to be like, Hey, you're doing way better than the average individual. But that's what exercise physiology, that's what people push themselves up.

Besides these comfort zone, it's really shown us and teach us about, health, longevity and really what that means to the molecular level so that someone can lie to you all the time through their words, but through their actions, they're always gonna show the truth. and through their actions, they're gonna be their physiology, their heart rate, their ventilatory capacity, their VO two max.

Everything kind of showcases, Hey, this is what the actual outcomes of my actions were. And now we can use that to be like, oh, you're gonna do very well in life, or you're not gonna do very well in life. And to just reiterate how complicated the, the blood portion is, is that I have someone that's 91, they have Alzheimer's, they have dementia.

They're not doing that great on the cognitive side of things, they have good days, they have bad days. they're very happy though. they don't have too much complications. They're quite, easy to deal with and their blood looks like they're 180. Their blood looks like someone would've died, you know, unbelievable.

Everything's off, everything's red. You're just like, how's the liver functioning? And yes, you know, he's on quite a few meds, but his lung capacity's phenomenal. You know, so it's interesting, to say where, you know, we get these blood tests and we, use them.

They're very useful. but there's just, there's so many hard to understand scenarios and, and you really have to take in as much information you possibly can with who's in front of you, who you dealing with, you know, and Right. exactly. And be curious. Right. That's why I said be curious, you know, try to understand as much as you possibly can, and that will only, you know, be a benefit for you when you're trying to make, you know, call it helpful, you know, big changes, right?

Where one time you might try one thing and like you said, Hey, I switched the, you know, the, the timing or how much I was consuming and I got way bigger. You gotta be brave enough, courageous enough to be able to fail in order to be able to get, call it the glory too, when you succeed, right? And it feels good when you have an idea like you know what you're talking about, and then you do something and you really reaffirm that, right?

that's what we live for, right? That's the real high that's worth the chase. 

Brad Minus: I'm like that mad scientist. So I'll do the research, I'll read stuff and then I'll be like, huh, this is interesting. Then I'll try it on myself, and depending on the results, then the first thing will happen is I'll go to a client and I'll be like, I need you to be my Guinea pig just for the next training block.

Okay. And want you to try this, this, and this. And then, and I have my, I've got a certain set of clients that I know that I can go to. I've got like three guides that will do it. And I've got a couple women that will, when I give it to them, they will take it and run with it. Like just recently, one of the women that I had, she is a lawyer.

so Her diets fluctuates 'cause she's gotta take clients out and, you know, the whole bit. So recently, we went to a point where about, two months ago, I said, okay, listen, I want you to prioritize protein. I want you to get one gram per body, per body pound, per day, no matter what.

First of all, she said that, she was more satiated during the day, so that was good. So that made me happy. But all of a sudden, she was recovering faster, she was progressing more, everything got better for her, right?

Everything got better. Times are faster. She's able to last longer. she's not taking as much, of nutrients and carbs during her runs as she was before. just by this one small little thing. Just prioritize protein and then whatever else you wanna eat, fine. because she was more satiated, she didn't eat as much as the other stuff.

So that worked out, plus all the other stuff. But then I have got another guy that didn't work out as well. of course there's obviously changes in people's behavior and things going on that I can't be a hundred percent accountable for what he ate or what he did.

but there are times that, it didn't work or it didn't work as well, that comes to your interpersonal when you called it inter individual variation. So that's perfect. you and I could talk about this stuff forever.

Could go. I have more quick, questions and I think we're gonna have to just have a part two and a part three and a part five, on this, because I've got like definite, So Daniel has a company called Timeline Sciences, and you need to see this website, ladies and gentlemen.

and you know, it's not all about Daniel. this is about his, services, health coaching, scientific consulting, longevity performance, metabolic health. he's got all this stuff going on and you need to like, and then there's a place for you to book a one-on-one call with him.

again, this is time line sciences.com, and you definitely need to, check that out and, look at that. He has brought it down to three different social networks. He's only on X, Instagram and LinkedIn. And I wanna make sure 

Daniel Tausan: that's only on XI, I'm terrible with the other two.

I'm a scientist, not Okay. A social media guy. 

Brad Minus: All right. So gotta write from Daniel's mouth, right? So he is gonna be mostly on X. and we'll give you that link to his profile there so you can, jump into his dms and his spaces please. and get questions answered.

What are you working on? 

Daniel Tausan: myself, the biggest thing I work on is cold exposure. 

that's what I've been doing for quite a long time. I'm not doing any real big competitions. there's just, Too many, projects that I put myself in, which is now the priority. It's to build a family too at the same time. got the wife recently.

So that's, that's, that was a big milestone. Congratulations. Thank you. Awesome. and, you know, I swim with my dog pretty recreationally, in the ocean. So our ocean's pretty cold here. And, and so, you know, as the season warms, I'll go from what I do now, about five minutes in the water to about 10, 15, just as, as, as it gets a little warmer and warmer.

I appreciate the shout out more, more than happy to come back and talk a lot more biology, performance, health, Energy systems, models, science. You know, I do think it is absolutely imperative that the conversations around science are public and up for debate.

That we don't trust the science 

Brad Minus: Yeah. And next time, so this is the kind of get to know us, you know, regular episode, but I will put episodes with agendas on there where we will literally just talk about energy systems and maybe we'll talk about case studies and different things that to give people.

That's, the biggest, gift that I'm trying to give everybody that listens and watches or listens. Life changing challenges is the fact that everybody gives a little, nugget somewhere. So I'm always like, Hey, listen, if you've learned one thing, I've done my job, one thing that you can take back and level up 

Either if it's, if it's a, you know, if you're into health and fitness or if you're into, you know, mental wellness or, or into entrepreneurial adventures. Somewhere down the line, one of these episodes is gonna, every episode is gonna give you something to think about, to level up your life and increase your potential.

And that's what I wanna bring. That's the whole reason for life-changing challenges, because that's what exactly what it is. but so I'm, you know, I'm excited. You fixed yourself, your gastrointestinal and your, well, I don't know about your allergies. okay. But We'll, and we'll definitely talk about that.

but you're, You're delving into the science of it. so Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. If you are watching this on YouTube, please go ahead and hit that like, and that subscribe button. Hit the bell. So you always know when we drop a new episode, if you're watching or listening on Apple or Spotify, hey, drop us a quick review.

You know what? And I don't even care if it's a bad review because anything kind of feedback you give me is just gonna help me evolve the podcast. So the next time you listen, you're gonna just love it that much more. So again, thank you so much for listening, Daniel, again, we really appreciate you joining us.

So for Daniel and myself, we will see you in the next one.