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Scot: Thunder Jalili is back, but this time, he's not just here to teach us. He's here to quiz us. That's right. It's time for Thunder's Nutrition Smackdown, where we're going to find out if Mitch and I have actually been paying attention through all these episodes, or if we've just been nodding along and pretending. You knew this day was coming, Mitch.

Mitch: But you didn't tell me it was today. I didn't study. Okay. Here we go.

Scot: This is "Who Cares About Men's Ìð¹ÏÊÓƵ," with information, inspiration, and a different interpretation of men's health. My name is Scot. I bring the BS. Also, on the show with us, Producer Mitch. He's a "Who Cares About Men's Ìð¹ÏÊÓƵ" convert.

Mitch: Hey there.

Scot: And Thunder Jalili is a professor in the Department of Nutrition and Integrated Physiology, and he's our quiz master today.

I threw down the challenge to have Thunder come up with the nutrition quiz. I told him, "Anything goes. Have fun with it." So the question is, Thunder, are you ready to shine?

Thunder: Yes, I am so ready to give you guys a pop quiz.

Scot: Okay. So this will be fun. You can play along at home and see if all these episodes have helped your understanding of nutrition.

So where are we starting, Thunder, on the Thunder Jalili Nutrition Smackdown?

Thunder: We're going to start with something broad. We're going to think about the grocery store and something . . . So tell me, is this rumor true or false? It's better to shop at the periphery of the grocery store rather than the center of the grocery store.

Scot: Mitch, what do you think?

Mitch: It's the perimeter. That's where the fresh fruit and veggies are.

Scot: Wow. You know?

Mitch: Oh, yeah. We talked about this before. That's where the whole foods tend to be. That's where a lot of your ingredients tend to be. And then on the actual aisles itself, that's where the snacks and processed foods live.

Scot: I'm going to go ahead and agree with that because I'm thinking when I go to my grocery store . . . Actually, it's kind of weird, though. I go to my grocery store, and it kind of dumps you right into the produce section right away. You would think they'd want to dump you out into the Cheetos section, but no, it's the produce section.

But you're right. You go around the edge, you've got the dairy products usually, you've got your meats, your seafoods . . .

Mitch: A bakery, sometimes.

Scot: . . . your yogurt.

Thunder: The bakery throws a wrench in the works.

Scot: Yeah, a little bit. All right. So, Thunder, both of us say that it's better to shop the periphery. Although in some of the aisles you can get good stuff like rice and quinoa and stuff like that. But I think generally the perimeter, I think both of us agree.

Thunder: Yeah, and you guys are right. In general terms, the perimeter is better because that's where you find more of the whole, unprocessed, natural foods.

Now, here's a bit of a trick question. When it comes to produce, can we find healthy produce options in the center of the store?

Scot: Well, Mitch?

Mitch: Oh, yes.

Scot: Oh, produce options?

Thunder: Produce options. I'm thinking fruits and vegetables. Is it possible to find anything healthy in the . . .

Scot: Yeah, it is.

Thunder: . . . fruit and vegetable category in the center? Tell me about it.

Scot: Yeah, we talked about this on the podcast too. Frozen fruits and vegetables are nearly as nutritious as fresh.

Thunder: What about canned? Would canned vegetables and fruits be okay?

Scot: Well, first, is frozen fruits and vegetables just as nutritious as fresh? Was I right on that?

Thunder: So frozen can be just as nutritious. Sometimes, it can actually be better. One key difference between fresh and frozen is . . . You think about the process of getting produce to the grocery. A lot of times, you've got to pick it before it's actually ripe to allow time for the transports and all that. And then by the time it gets to the store, you don't want to be overripe or spoiled or anything. So that results in especially things out of season not being great.

The advantage of frozen is you end up picking the berry, or the peach, or whatever it is that's frozen when it's ripe, and so you actually get decent nutritional value out of that.

Scot: Is it sometimes cheaper? Well, no, because sometimes they have really good prices on fresh stuff if you happen to get it . . . like, if they're trying to get rid of it. It's still good, but they're trying to get rid of it.

Thunder: Yeah, I think it just depends on what grocery you're at and what's on sale, so it could go either way.

Scot: How'd you do on that one, Mitch?

Mitch: I did okay. But my question is what about canned vegetables? Is that okay, or no?

Thunder: Let's talk about canned. I'd like to hear your thoughts first.

Mitch: So my partner, when we first started dating, he had the rule that no tin will touch my food. For me, being someone who in college ate strictly out of cans as a poor college student, it was very strange to me. But he swore that it was not as good as fresh or even frozen, but that's where he started. So I really don't know. I'm not sure.

Thunder: So that's a great question. My answer would be I think it depends on the type of canned product you're looking at. Let me just give you two examples that everyone is familiar with.

So canned peaches on one hand versus something like a canned tomato on the other hand. So the canned peaches typically are more processed. They may have things added to it, like sugar or some sort of syrup or things like that that make it less healthy than the fresh one. But a canned tomato, on the other hand, you can get just whole, unsalted, untreated, regular tomatoes in the can, and they're picked when they're ripe, and they're canned that way.

So it depends on what food you're looking at. That's kind of the politician's answer, but that's really what it is.

Scot: And check those labels. If it has added sugars and stuff, then maybe not.

Thunder: But yeah, you'd have to look at nutrition label to confirm that.

Scot: Got it. Well, that's good.

Mitch: And I absolutely love this, because as someone who is . . . I don't know. I think it's partly ADHD, I think it's part just who I am. When I used to buy fresh veg all the time, it would go rotten in my fridge because I would forget to cook it, or I didn't have a meal plan, or my life would change, or I'd just forget.

And so now I have some grab-and-go frozen. I have a whole bunch of frozen veg that I just leave in my freezer, and when I'm making a pasta dish or doing something quick and easy and need a vegetable on the side or something like that, it's super-duper easy. And I've found that I've been eating more vegetables when I got over the idea that the fresh stuff was always better than the frozen.

Thunder: So, Mitch, I'm curious. Will you share what your go-to frozen veggies are?

Mitch: Yeah. So they make these kind of tray-bake looking things where it is things like . . . I got potatoes with broccoli and sliced onions. That's all together. I pop those out a lot. Love a frozen green bean.

Scot: That's my go-to, green beans. It seems like that's what I always want.

Mitch: Green beans, peas, yeah, just whatever is up there.

Thunder: Me, personally, I like the frozen broccoli and the frozen cauliflower. Yeah, the whole broccoli. They have the broccoli cuts, which are really cheap, but it's basically just the stems.

Scot: Or the florets.

Thunder: Yeah, the florets, we always have a couple bags in the freezer at all times.

Scot: You like those in cheese sauce, right?

Thunder: Yeah, there you go, in cheese sauce.

Scot: Butter and cream.

Thunder: Melt a block of Velveeta and then . . . But it's so easy because if we don't have the fresh vegetables in the refrigerator, or you're kind of pressed for time, you don't have to wash it and cut it or whatever. You can just go ahead and cook it. Or if you're cooking something, you can always throw them in there, like if you're doing a soup or something like that.

Scot: All right. What's your next question on Thunder Jalili's Nutrition Smackdown?

Thunder: All right. So the next question is a hydration question. And hydration is something that, in my experience, a lot of students are a little bit confused on because there are a lot of mixed messages about it.

So here's the question, and I want you to fill in the blank. The average male should drink X glasses of water per day. What would be the number you're going to insert in there?

Scot: Hey, Mitch, do you remember? I think it used to be . . . The thing I used to hear was eight 8-ounce glasses, so 64 ounces total.

Mitch: So 64 ounces, and it's about 2 liters or so. That's what I've always heard.

Scot: That's what I used to hear, yeah. But I've also heard that you should drink one ounce per pound of body weight. No, that's not right. That's too much. Can you drink too much water, Thunder?

Thunder: Yes. If you drink it in a short time span, you can actually overload your kidneys and develop hyponatremia, which is low blood sodium levels. It could actually be fatal.

Scot: But you have to drink a lot of water to do that, right?

Thunder: Yeah, you've got to pound a gallon or two of water in an hour or less, and it just leads to just uncontrolled urination, and you dump sodium, and it's bad. It's like water challenge, stuff like that, that you may have heard of in the past.

Scot: I mean, it would also depend on, Mitch, how active you are. If you're out running and you're sweating a lot, then you'd have to drink more than maybe the 64 ounces, or if you're exercising.

Mitch: What about hot or dry climates? Do you think that would impact? I'm going to say more than eight glasses. If I'm a male with decent activity living in a dry climate, I'm going to say more than eight glasses.

Scot: I'm going to say a half ounce per pound of body weight. So, for me, that would be 90 ounces.

Thunder: Ninety ounces. All right. So I like how you guys are both thoughtful and trying to think about different scenarios.

Scot: But we've both been smacked down, right?

Thunder: Well, actually, you guys hit upon a really important theme. We always look for a rule that we can kind of apply all the time. For example, with hydration. So a lot of times your nutrition and hydration needs are going to vary based on who you are and what you do.

If Mitch is in the studio working on putting together a show, and he's in front of a laptop for eight hours, he's going to need a lot less water than he would if he was out riding his mountain bike for three hours in July.

So there is no standard answer of, "This is how much water you should drink." It kind of depends on what you do.

And the other thing that I think is misleading about the whole hydration is people like to equate it in "I need this many glasses of water a day," and then they kind of forget about all the other things they eat and drink that have water in it that isn't necessarily a glass of water, right? What if you have two oranges? Doesn't that count as liquid?

Scot: I don't know. Does it? I always thought that it was just . . .

Thunder: Yes.

Scot: I thought it was all about the water. I thought that other stuff didn't matter.

Thunder: No. I had tomato soup for lunch. Instead of that tomato soup, what if I had cheese and crackers for lunch? Which is going to have more water, the tomato soup or the cheese and crackers? So doesn't that count towards my hydration?

Mitch: Why have I never thought of it that way? Why is it that soup is wet, but not water?

Scot: So there's no real straight answer, but you've got to take a look at what you're doing, the environment you're doing it in, and what else you are consuming.

Thunder: Right. And then let me do a follow-up question. Is there a way that we can get an idea of whether we are adequately hydrated or not without any special tools or devices or anything?

Scot: Yes. Hey, Mitch, are you thinking the army method?

Mitch: No, I don't know about the army method. I was thinking of . . . what was it? Oprah back in the '90s did an episode about this.

Thunder: What was the Oprah episode about?

Mitch: That your urine should be the color of lemonade made with a single yellow lemon.

Thunder: I can imagine Oprah saying that in my mind.

Mitch: Yeah, that was it.

Scot: The army version is it should be the color of straw. It should be straw yellow. It should have just barely a little bit of yellow in it. You don't want it clear because that means you're drinking too much water, and you're maybe peeing . . . Are you peeing out nutrients? Is that the case, Thunder, if it's clear?

Thunder: No, you're not really . . . it's not that you have to worry about peeing out nutrients so much. It's just that it's unnecessary hydration.

Scot: Got it.

Thunder: If you're always running looking for a bathroom every hour, that can kind of get in the way of activities, normal life.

Scot: So is that color right? Just a very light yellow?

Thunder: Yeah. Instead of focusing on, "How many glasses of water should I be drinking?" check yourself by looking at the color of the urine. It's super easy. If you're kind of consistently that lemonade color, then whatever you're doing is working. If you're consistently not, then make adjustments accordingly.

Scot: All right. So what's it look like if I'm dehydrated and I urinate?

Thunder: It's going to look very yellow, like a darker yellow. Definitely really dark yellow. Kind of like the highlighter color on Microsoft Word when you highlight something.

Mitch: Oh, sure.

Thunder: That's the dehydration color.

Scot: That's not good. The color of a glass of lemonade with a single delicate lemon squeezed in is what you're looking for.

All right. What's next on the Thunder Nutrition Smackdown?

Thunder: Let's talk about protein for a little bit. And I have a few questions on protein I'm going to ask you about. So the first question is active men should always take a protein supplement, true or false?

Scot: How active?

Thunder: So I'll paint the picture. You have a guy that likes to go to the gym. He tries to make it for three workouts a week. In between, he has other days where maybe he goes on a bike ride, or he goes on a hike or maybe plays pickup basketball with some other friends. So we're talking kind of a moderately active person.

Scot: Okay. Mitch, what do you think?

Mitch: Being thoughtful, we've learned, and I have been mistaken before, that sedentary people only need about 0.8 grams or so per body weight, or per kilogram of body weight.

I'm assuming if you're relatively active, you're going to need a little bit more. So I am going to lock in at 1.1 grams per kilogram. Final answer.

Scot: So I thought . . .

Thunder: The question was do we need a supplement or not?

Scot: Oh, okay.

Thunder: I like your precision, Mitch.

Mitch: Right. So I'm going to say no, because you can eat one gram per kilogram in the body. I mean, that seems more doable to me, and so you wouldn't need a supplement.

Scot: No, because that would be pretty easy. You'd divide your weight in pounds by 2.2, right, Thunder?

Thunder: Yes.

Scot: So if you're a 200-pound man, that would put your protein requirements, if it was one gram per kilogram, at a little over 100.

I mean, that'd be simple, because if you eat 4 ounces of chicken, there's 28 grams of protein right there. So, yeah, I agree with Mitch, except for I say one gram. Or no, sorry, I say you do not need a supplement.

Thunder: There you go. Correct.

Scot: Wow. That was a lot to get to that answer.

Mitch: Sorry. I was doing math.

Thunder: I was looking for a true and false, but that's okay. Yeah, you don't need a protein supplement if you're that kind of moderately active guy like we talked about. Even if someone is in a situation where they train very hard and they have a really high protein requirement, they still need to really focus on the diet first.

The one thing about relying on a protein supplement to meet your protein intake is if you're not focusing on the diet, you're actually also missing things that are important to support exercise and recovery that are not protein. And I'm talking about micronutrients, like vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals and things like that.

So we've always got to look at the diet first. In this example, we talked about easy to get it from the diet.

Let me twist around the question a little bit and hear your thoughts on this. What if we have the same guy, and this guy decides he is going to start training triathlons with the goal of qualifying for Iron Man in Hawaii? Do you think this individual would need a protein supplement?

Scot: Here's what I think about this individual. Why would you ruin a trip to Hawaii by doing that? That's what I think. I don't think this guy is that bright. No, good for him.

Mitch, can I go ahead and jump in?

Mitch: Yeah.

Scot: I think this is easy. I think absolutely, because you're breaking down a lot of muscle tissue, so some extra protein would be good. As we talked about, and we should probably get these numbers, 0.8 for the average person, maybe one gram per kilogram of body weight for the above average. But if you're really going for it, you probably need to be about 1.2 to 1.3?

Thunder: Actually, higher. Someone who's . . .

Scot: One point six?

Thunder: Yeah, let me hear from Mitch before we dive into this more.

Mitch: That's actually what I was going to say, is that I would imagine if we jumped from 0.8 to a little over one, I would assume you'd be jumping the same amount if you increased your activity level significantly.

So I would put it at 1.5 or 2 kilograms at the most. That seems like a whole lot, and that seems like it's going to be hard to get that in your food every day. So maybe a protein supplement would be helpful.

Thunder: Yeah. So I think Mitch gets the nod on this one. His answer is more complete than Scot's.

Mitch: Yes!

Thunder: I'm sorry, Scot.

Scot: Except I was still more right about this guy not ruining his vacation.

Thunder: Yeah, we agree his vacation is ruined, so you got that part.

So, yeah, there's a continuum of increasing protein needs depending on the activity level.

And someone who is training for something like a triathlon that they have long swims and runs and bike rides, it's kind of daily training. There's a lot of protein turnover and rebuilding and repair that goes along with that. So this individual could have a protein requirement that is close to two grams per kilogram of body weight.

If we kind of extend this thought experiment out a little bit and say our guy weighs 80 kilograms, he's looking at maybe getting up to 160 grams of protein a day.

Now, you can do that with diet, but as Mitch touched on, that could be challenging, right? So that's where you may want to consider a protein supplement. Not so much for the meals, but for other points of the day.

So this then leads us to our next wrinkle in this. Is there an upper amount of protein we can assimilate and use per meal? Yes or no? That's a yes or no question, and then we can talk about it.

Mitch: This was on the TikTok . . .

Scot: It was. We talked about this. And this is where we fall flat, Mitch. I don't know. Hopefully, you know.

Sometimes it takes a while to change perception, so I'm okay with this, right? My perception is that in a particular meal, yes, there's only so much protein that your body can assimilate. The rest of it would be used for other purposes at that point when we're talking about muscle synthesis. That's my answer. Mitch, what do you think?

Mitch: I don't remember. There was a bunch of dude bros that were saying the opposite, who were like, "Hey, no, there are all these other positive things you can do." But he said an individual meal, so I'm feeling it's a trick. I think he's tricking me.

Thunder: It could be a trick.

Mitch: It's a trick. No, I agree with Scot. There is an upper limit per meal.

Thunder: Yeah, absolutely. When you consider muscle protein synthesis, there is an upper limit. And what I mean by that is you can feed a person somewhere in the 20 to 30 grams of protein, in that range, and you get a nice muscle protein synthesis response.

But going over beyond the 30, the response flattens out. So, in other words, there's not an additional protein synthesis gain from, say, having 50 grams of protein versus 30.

Scot: In a meal.

Thunder: In a meal. So here's why this is a quiz question. Let's go back to our guy who's training for the triathlon, and we figure maybe he needs 150, 160 grams of protein a day. If he's only eating three meals, how many grams of protein would that be per meal?

Mitch: That's like 50, 60 grams.

Thunder: Right. So he would probably have a bit more efficient increase in strength and repair from injury and all that stuff if he kind of spread it out a little bit more.

So that's where maybe getting your protein in five hits where you're closer to 30 grams per hit . . . That means you have your three meals and you have two snacks of that protein in there.

Now, with that in mind, the protein supplement could actually be a convenient way to get those snacks in there. Maybe you can have, as a snack, an apple with a little bit of peanut butter on it and a protein drink.

Scot: I mean, a regular guy, three meals a day is fine because their protein requirement is 30, 60, 90. It's going to be 90-ish or less. So us regular Joes, that's great.

But if we're really pushing ourselves, that's why you hear the bodybuilder bros talking about eating multiple meals a day because they want to make sure they maximize each hit of protein they get.

Thunder: And then one other thing I'll add to this, there's an age component as well because when you're young, it's easier to initiate that muscle protein synthesis to get that anabolic response. When you're older, it's a little harder. There's more resistance to it. So maybe you need a little bit more protein, and you have to be a little bit more careful about your hits.

You can have a vigorous protein synthesis response as an 18- or 20-year-old with 15, 20 grams of protein, but that won't give as much of a response to, say, someone who's 50 years old. And we know there are a lot of middle-aged athletes out there.

Scot: Do they need to consider that daily requirement going up a little bit? So when we talk about the 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight of protein for the average person, if you're older, should that go up to 1 or 1.2?

Thunder: Yeah, it could go up a little bit. And the way I would look at that is just make sure each of your meals has at least 25, 30 grams of protein. Depending on your size and everything, if that comes out to 1.2 or whatever, fine. If it doesn't, that's still okay. But yeah, it's more look at it per meal. Try to get like 25 to 30 grams.

And remember, beyond that, you're going to be likely using that protein for other purposes. There's a reason why low carbohydrate, high protein diets work. People don't die of starvation. Yeah, they're pounding way more than their protein requirement, but they're taking all that extra protein, they're taking those amino acids, they're stripping off the nitrogen, and they're using the carbon skeletons as fuel to make ATP. And that's what we all do if we eat too much protein in one single meal.

Scot: And then I always come back to this, Thunder. The downside is if you're eating way more protein than you need, then you're not getting that other good stuff, right? Because you're full, or you're on a diet that stresses protein. You're not getting those fruits and vegetables and legumes and all the phytochemicals from that stuff because you just don't have the room to eat it, right?

Thunder: Correct. Yeah, absolutely. So if you're focused on getting 100 grams of protein in a meal, you're going to be kind of full from just the steak or all the chicken you're trying to choke down.

Scot: All right. Did we have three questions? We probably could wrap up the smackdown here pretty soon. I mean, I'm sweating a little bit, so I'm going to have to up my protein after this session.

Thunder: Just be smarter about how much you eat in a meal. I think a lot of us can just start there.

Scot: Right. Hey, that was fun. That was good. We did all right, Mitch.

Mitch: Yeah.

Scot: I think maybe we've learned something.

Mitch: Yes, because that was one of the things that I was thinking just a second ago. I thought you were going to quiz me on a takeaway. Because my takeaway is that . . . How many years have we been doing this? Four or five years ago, when I first started helping out with "Who Cares" or whatever, I didn't know any of this.

I had actually thought the opposite about a lot of this, and it made having healthy nutrition or a healthy relationship with food really, really hard. And so it took talking with professionals, talking to other guys, etc., to kind of get me to where I am today.

Scot: Right. It's easy to get swept up and all the stuff in popular media and on the internet, right? Yeah, it can be easy for that to happen.

I'm going to say my takeaway is probably going to feel a little out of left field, but I just want to come back to something that Thunder said about the phytochemicals again, talking about eating those fruits and vegetables.

We tend to think that, if we are exercising or active, protein is the end all, be all. It seems to wear the crown. But after a few episodes, and you just reminded me about this again, Thunder, those things that are in those other foods that I talked about, fruits and vegetables, help reduce your inflammation, help your body recover in other ways. I think that those are really downplayed a lot.

And that has given me a better relationship with food, because I used to think in terms of macros: protein, carbs, fats. And I'm like, "If I want protein, why would I eat beans? I'm going to get a lot of carbs I don't want."

Well, the reason you eat beans is because there's a lot of great stuff in beans that's going to help you not only with your activity, but just your overall health, which is more of my goal now. I just want to be healthy and feel good and be able to do the things I want to do.

So again, thanks for bringing that up about the importance of those other things that we kind of can neglect at the expense of protein.

Thunder: And I have to say from my end, being on this show on and off with you guys over the last few years, I'm very impressed how much you guys have learned about nutrition. And I think this quiz really, really showed it.

You're more thoughtful about the fact that nutrition is not a black and white single answer for everybody, but you do have to consider kind of individual personalized nutrition. I think that's awesome.

Scot: Well, thanks. We got a better grade than I expected, Mitch, and the teacher even complimented us.

Mitch: I was going to say that's much better. I thought it was [inaudible 00:27:42] type situation.

Thunder: I'm looking for the good course evaluation. That's why I complimented you.

Scot: All right. Well, we hope you did well on the quiz as well. If you didn't, go back and find some of Thunder's other episodes. Truly, Thunder being on the show, this is where we get to compliment him, has helped both Mitch and myself just reformulate, recalibrate our relationship with food and nutrition, which we didn't have necessarily the best relationships with.

I don't want to speak for Mitch, but I think I can, that we're both in much better places. That knowledge is power, and it can help you feel better and diagnose problems when you have them, so it's definitely worth it. Go back and listen to some of those other episodes.

How did you do on the quiz? Hopefully, you did well. If you have anything you want to say, if you'd like to tell us a story, or maybe drop a nutrition quiz question that Thunder could ask us, you could reach out at hello@thescoperadio.com.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for caring about men's health.