Breaking Down Nutrition: Fats, Sugars and Protein

In this week's episode of "Coffee in the Barn," Casey and Morgan dive into the world of macronutrients, unpacking the roles of fats, sugars, and proteins in our diets. Amidst the backdrop of agricultural life and motherhood, they explore the importance of balance and moderation, especially post-holiday indulgences like the Super Bowl and Valentine's Day. The conversation weaves through candid mom talks, from navigating school party snacks to meal prep strategies, highlighting the parallels between human and animal nutrition. They discuss the stigma around fats, the necessity of carbohydrates for energy, and the intricacies of protein consumption. The episode is not just about what we eat but how what we consume affects our bodies, our children, and even our livestock, blending science with heartwarming anecdotes from the barn to the kitchen. Join Casey and Morgan as they share insights, laugh over mom-life challenges, and provide actionable tips for a healthier, balanced approach to nutrition.

Transcript

Morgan - Introduction
 0:00:00
 From boardroom meetings to bedtime stories, Coffee in the Barn explores the delicate dance of balancing the demands of our professional lives with the joys and responsibilities of being moms. Join us each week as we discuss the latest trends in agribusiness, share insightful interviews with industry experts, and sprinkle in some heartfelt anecdotes about the humorous and heartwarming moments that come with being a working mom in agriculture. 

Hey guys, welcome to this week's episode of Coffee in the Barn with Casey and Morgan. This week we will be discussing fats and sugars and proteins and breaking down these macronutrients and further discussing why they are important and the balance and moderation of how we fuel ourselves and our brain. If you're listening to this after the Super Bowl or Valentine's Day meal, it doesn't count. It's not important or relevant for those types of events because we're recording this so we can vote. So it's all in moderation. You know that you might be splurging a little bit more on within the next couple days or just food in general. So then maybe just have a smaller lunch if you know that you'll be snacking and having a larger dinner. 

Casey

Well yeah, the sign-up genius list that we got for the school party kind of just scared me to death. Candy, candy, candy. 

Morgan

That's one thing I make sure not to bring to parties is because I feel like people all like that's just the easiest thing to bring is like brownies as I as I just made brownies today.  As I'm saying this, I try not to bring treats as I'm the one that's bringing brownies to our parties. Well, it's not my go-to I just had a box that has been sitting in the pantry that I needed to needed to make. 

Casey

Well, let's get into school you're not allowed to bring homemade food, so you can't modify or change things. And I think this is partly, our mom talks is going to be a good segue into the conversation in my mind. 

Morgan

Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, I haven't really had to bring snacks for school yet, but I know that, you know, most classrooms are nut free for sure.

Casey
 0:02:25
 I don't know.

 I don't have that constraint. It's just nuts though. Do you have that constraint? It depends on the kid or the classroom, but I don't think we have that constraint. It just has to be, you can't make it, which drives me nuts because I could, you know, put together something potentially healthier, like veggie sticks or fruit, but I guess kids really don't eat that either. 

Morgan

So. Are they afraid that parents are going to make special treats? special treat? 

Casey

Well yeah, or just food safety Morgan is part of it, food safety, right?

Casey
 0:02:58
 So labels in it that you know. We're not sending chicken or meat to school. There are some people's kitchens I don't think I'd want to eat them. Huh yeah yeah I could see that I could see that. But that is not today's topic of food safety. Well, that will be coming up.

Morgan
 0:03:16
 Yes. No, that will be coming up in the next couple of weeks. Calling from the mom who scrubbed her kitchen down for this morning. I think I've cleaned my kitchen three times today because I have just been cooking and prepping and just a day of being in the kitchen.

Casey
 0:03:35
 Whoa.  So when you prep food, I guess obviously you're prepping for a party, but do you also prep for the week? 

Morgan

Yeah, occasionally. Like yesterday, when I went grocery shopping, I like, will plan out. Well, it's hard on like weeks that I'm traveling because I'm going to be gone for two days and then I get home and then Garrett leaves for two days. So we really don't need to meal prep that much because we're both going to be gone for four days out of the week. So I more prep just like quick snack things that the kids can eat.

 If Garrett's juggling both of them by himself, like I made like mini blueberry muffins. I'll chop up chop up a bunch of like cheese and sausage so then he can just put those out with like crackers. When I do grocery shopping I'll make sure that I have quick and easy like grapes and blueberries, just like quick, easy grab and go snacks. But like today I made a double batch of like pork chops and sweet potatoes and stuff like that for the week. And then I made late last week, a couple of days ago, I made a rotisserie chicken that I had used like taco seasoning, made like shredded taco chicken. And we used those for nachos and then we used those for enchiladas. And then I also made a, like a casserole Tex-Mex type dish. So we still have quite a bit of food in our fridge from the last couple of days of meals that I've made. 

Casey

So yeah, that's kind of how I like to meal prep is do some crockpot meals. And you're like, I don't know what we'll do this week, but I do crockpot meals, lots of stews, soups, and then I'll freeze half of it for a week that we're really busy and we don't have time and they can just microwave it out. And then I do like to cook chicken, like you said, to shred it and use it in two or three different ways. The same, like if we do a roast, we'll do the same thing. We'll one, like on a Sunday have the roast for dinner, but then in the week, later in the week, we'll either make some kind of noodles with it or make open-faced sandwiches, things like that. 

But my husband learned that I can't make the salads five days ahead of time because some of the stuff gets soggy and he gets mad at me. So I can at least make his salads two days ahead of time. And I think it's kind of really important and I have this philosophy is you eat what's in front of you and sometimes we'll buy potato chips but I can't buy them often because we'll literally eat the whole bag because it tastes so good. We always have corn chips because we use you know corn chips in taco salads or nachos is like a big meal in our house or chips and salsa. I just really found that if I have the food in my house, I eat it. So I make sure, like you said, the quick and easy stuff we have is fruit and vegetables. And I think that's kind of really important when we think about that.

Morgan
 0:06:39
 I don't really stress eat, but I think sometimes I'll eat out of boredness. If I don't have it in the house, I won't eat it. You know, so I try to keep, and then with little kids, any time you're eating something, they always want whatever you have. I got lucky, what was it, two nights ago, we were on our way back from somewhere and they'd both fallen asleep in the car and I was like, I'm gonna go get myself some Culver’s ice cream. And I sat in the driveway and I ate it in silence and didn't have to share.
 
 

And both the kids stayed asleep. My neighbors are probably driving by like, how is their car on outside of our driveway? I was like, I'm taking 15 minutes for myself. That was my self-care for the day.

Casey Bradley

0:07:25
 I love it. I'm not a big ice cream fan. Well I’ll eat it every once in a while, but not my favorite. My husband's and my son, for sure.

Morgan

But yeah, it doesn't help that we only live like a mile from Culver's and you have to drive it, drive past it every single time we like have to come to our house. And Emma knows, Emma recognizes the sign now. So every single time you like drive to town or to the next town over, we have to drive past and she's like, I want that. And I was like, we'll see.

Casey
 0:07:59
 My son's favorite is McDonald's. I don't know what it is about their commercials, their Happy Meal toys or what, that for some reason, oh, what are you going to eat? McDonald's. Not sure that's the best choice. 

Morgan

No, but it's all in moderation. Okay, so I think we should break down for our listeners a little bit more on what are the top three macronutrients. So we have fat, protein and carbohydrates. Yeah, I like it. And I think today in the world of human nutrition, those three are very confusing for a lot of people.

But it's something as animal nutritionists, we look at and we balance every day. And a lot of times we don't have to use a variety of things to get it right. I think with all the different diet fads out there, we all know that obesity is an epidemic that's in our country and fat specifically gets blamed a lot that it's bad. In some forms it is, but you need fat to fuel your body, especially for energy storage, hormone production. Fat comes in three different types, saturated fat, unsaturated, and trans fat. Trans fat is what you're going to find in your potato chips and a lot of the processed foods.

 Unsaturated fats are also in a lot of those, if you label bad foods, but ones that you shouldn't necessarily eat all the time. But like good fats would be like an avocado, olive oil. 

Casey

It can be from an egg too.

Morgan
 0:09:38
 From an egg.

Casey

I know. And I think even we're learning, even fat nutrition is a great aspect and I'm sorry, I'm going to go back to that more because I know it more, but we're looking at even fat types and the chain length of fat. So when we look at fats, humans, we try to call it trans, unsaturated, insaturated, but we're even going into looking at these fatty acids or a lot of health benefits by isolating the omegas. So that's really rich, right? Omega fatty acids, those are the six and nines. We're looking at medium chain fatty acids in the nines, tens and twelves, different things like that, as well for disease control and natural health benefits. And when you look at where you get those types of fats, you can either isolate them, because we get them from the same sort of coconut oil, it's something you could eat. But in the animal nutrition world, if we want a specific chain link, because we know it does a certain thing, we will isolate that and feed those to the animals. Where in the humans, you'll get all of those, but not necessarily that isolated benefit, but it's really the types of foods and you know you can see it in different genetics or people evolve from different regions on different types of diets like Mediterranean diet versus the American diet.

I think it's really important and I think Morgan, in one of our first episodes you mentioned your role of your undergrad and what made you become a nutritionist as you did the trial with a really high fat meal with a pig and a normal diet. And I think it's just really like I said it's moderation and I was like, oh I can't eat that on my diet. I'm like you can have things but don't go to McDonald's every day.

Morgan

Don't know if I have anything else to add on fat. 

Casey

Well, I don't eat fat and I can go into carbohydrates and sugar because that's part of this conversation as well. And when people talk about, well I eat empty calories and as a nutritionist I see that as I'm eating an empty calorie I ate a huge bag of cotton candy. We can use that for example because that's primarily carbohydrate in cotton candy and that's kind of that empty calorie or I ate a bag of potato chips because I did get my energy and I did get my carbohydrates that I needed. So sugar is a form of energy, right? The carbohydrates, different complexities of sugar put together. But when I look at it, it's empty calories because I didn't bring in everything else that I needed with it.

 I need a balance of protein. I need a balance in vitamins and trace minerals, even the protein to fat ratio. And that's the biggest difference that we do in animal nutrition, I think that people don't understand, is that we have ratios of specific amino acids, which amino acids are the building blocks of protein, and we have ratios of those to energy. So when we formulate, when we give our animals their diets, it's not what we would consider it in the human side, empty calories. It's really... 

Morgan

Very targeted.

Casey

So every bite they get is hopefully everything they need to thrive. And if we get those ratios off, the animals will either get fatter or they won't grow properly. Or maybe they can't have babies if they're moms. Or if you feel sleepy there's some things there to look at and it's really it's incredible what I've learned on nutrition and that's why I just laugh at all these crazy people on the internet of like his diet fads and this and that like the Vshred guys one for instance he just drives me nuts and he's like this is a metabolism killer this is a metabolism killer like well my butt is sitting on the couch is a metabolism killer and I'm sitting through these videos watching you. 

Morgan

Growing up we had some friends that we grew up with and their parents were pretty strict on sugar and the kids were not allowed to have any type of candy or anything like all Halloween candy was donated they did not have sweets or anything in their house. As soon as they got outside of their house, like either at a school event or someone else's house, without their parents there, it was crazy how much they just literally just stuffed their face in sugar and I was like, oh my God, you're presuming they probably would get sick because they just, they were never allowed to have it and then as soon as they had the opportunity to have it they just went balls to the walls. 

Caesy

It's like the drinking problem here in the US. They don't have the same binge drinking problems in younger people in Europe then they do here because drinking is a part of a culture. 

Morgan

I mean we let our kids have sugar, but we don't let them have sugar multiple times a day all day long. It's very intentional I guess when they do have a treat, whether it's after they had dinner or you know we were potty training it was you get one M&M's. My point I was trying to make about sugar is that everyone blames like sugar is bad. And yes, the sugar in processed foods, I would say is bad, but there's naturally occurring sugar in fruits and vegetables. And that sugar is not bad for you.

Casey
 0:15:34
 No, I was going to say Arthur and I, our family eats a lot more natural sugars than we do processed sugars. And that was the only thing that scared me off about that list for Valentine's Day is it was all processed options and that kind of just we work on that right it's but like you said it's a hard battle to fight. You want to be that demon mom that you can't have any of that and then as soon as you're not there your kid behind your back eats so much it makes himself sick.

Morgan - UMM

 Casey

I think that's a balance I think this was a good time also then we talked a little bit about fats we can go in a lot more details if people want to learn about fats and nutrients and we'll bring on different experts but carbohydrates and here's the really hard thing for

1
 0:16:19
 people choosing what to eat and what's good and what people don't realize is is the two main sources you get your energy from to run your cells, run your body, or that can make fat. You would assume that's a fat that you digest and the carbohydrates you eat. Yes, but you can also convert if you eat an excess protein into like energy. And that's where that keto diet kind of works a lot. You change your pathways and you up regulate the ketone ketogenic pathways in your body with the fats and the protein so everything you put in besides maybe water has an energy or I mean some rock and different things like that don't but like most foods could have an energy equivalent but where we say eat salads maybe you're you know not as well as a cow to get a lot more energy out of the salad than we can because they have the microbes that are actually digesting the salad and then they utilize the metabolites of the microbes or they use microbes themselves as either protein or energy. And so everything works and it's just really that balance that you find. And I think carbohydrates, one of the unique things I found about that in research is sometimes these are fructose type products, fructans, pectans, beta glutans that you'll find in yeast and different things. They have natural benefits or they can sometimes not be good. So they get down into the different oligosaccharides are components of these complex compounds and there's benefits there. But it's really understanding the carbohydrate profile. And I had the unique opportunity at AB Vista and I still don't know.

1
 0:18:15
 Fiber is actually carbohydrates. You kind of get that confused in nutrition a little bit, but we are still just understanding understanding the different fiber components of feedstuffs and food to what those benefits are. And I guess that's unique in our time period as swine nutritionists even that that's still ever on our mind and we're learning the benefits of fiber because carbohydrates where you're eating an apple, there's fiber there. So how much of that fiber is utilized for energy or sometimes you just need fiber to help you stay regular. 

Morgan

Yeah, and I think fiber has been a huge research topic for us over the last year or two. And when you look at fiber, you can break it down into soluble or insoluble fibers. And solubles are gonna be those that we can digest easily in the small intestines and the insoluble fibers are going to be those that are digested in the hindgut by the microbes and bacteria, the naturally occurring bacteria that we have in our bodies. And so we've found that pigs and I'm sure humans as well, there's a balance of the insoluble and soluble fibers that you need to have to help create the best gut environment that we can to help digest our food. And the fibers will also adjust the passage rate of the nutrients. If the food you're eating is going through you too quickly, you're not going to be able to absorb all the nutrients from it. But if it goes through your system too slowly, you're going to end up getting backed up and you know all that fun stuff. 

Casey

I found it interesting and I have to give Denny McKilligan the credit for this because he told me it Dr. George Fahey he's a pet nutritionist or fiber expert didn't start out on pets but I think he primarily works on pets now looking at fiber and he and Denny was telling me this story he comes in and says that how many how much fiber do you guys get? You know, and he asked the audience and, you know, and we said, well, we eat salads. He goes, well, that's not fiber because that's 90% water. And so I think it's really important as we look at it and like oats are a main part of my fiber component because of the type of fiber they have. And because of the fiber they have and the different mechanisms that they do in your body with that type of fiber and those components they have heart health. It's not like they're going around to your heart and scrubbing your arteries they're preventing some of them bad fats going to your arteries in the first place but also different mechanisms of how as you said that balance between insoluble and soluble is it's a very complex, it's not simple to say, and I think I'm human nutrition, what just kills me all the information out there.

1
 0:21:20
 They try to make something very complex, very simple, which I understand, but it's not. But then you also allows for anybody to be an expert. And you know, one of my doctors says, we need more nutritionists in our field and my problem with wanting to I could probably go get my license and become a dietitian or nutritionist but one of the main problems I see in human nutrition is are you going to get people to follow your diet? 

Pigs don't have a choice, chickens don't have a choice. 

Morgan

Yep.

Casey

 If they're hungry they gotta eat what's in front of them. 

Morgan

Sometimes I wish I could do that with my toddler. 

Casey

I just make up a super high protein cornbread and put some butter on it. 

Morgan

Sometimes I wish she would just eat because she didn't have any other options, but I guess that's one of the benefits we have to being human is the variety and the different things we have available to us.

Casey
 0:22:20
 And it's part of our culture that we have to realize that is food's just always been part of our culture. It's necessary. And so that makes it very complex on the human side where animals is easier. You know, I guess the next main one is protein. And as you get older, like the elderly and the young probably don't consume as much protein as they need to in their diets. 

Meat sources, but there's also protein in eggs, in beans, nuts, seeds. There's a lot of different sources of protein. And protein is, you know, kind of discussed, protein is broken down into amino acids. Our body can only make, what, seven out of the seven? Yeah, essential versus non-essential amino acids. Yeah, there's only a handful of amino acids our bodies make otherwise we need to get those additional amino acids from. 

Casey

And I can still remember the essential amino acids by this from Animal Nutrition 101, PVT TIM HALL.

Morgan

 Oh yeah that's right. Tryptophan, Threonine, Isoleucine, Histidine, Methionine, Methionine M, Histidine, Phenylalanine, Arginine, Glycine, Leucine. The essentials that we have to consume that we can't make. 

Morgan

And I always thought that was interesting that the essentials are the ones we need to consume. The non-essentials are the ones that we can make.

Casey
 0:23:55
 But you still have to have enough protein to make the non-essentials. So we've even found that in the low crude protein diets in pigs and poultry is how low can we go? And we can use synthetic amino acids and really dial in that amino acids, but there's still a point that we lose growth performance in these animals because we don't have enough of the non-essential. We still need those nitrogen esters and different things to be able to create them. And so you'll see a lot of supplements for even humans' performance, right? You take these different amino acids and you take some before, some after, and they're supposed to help you perform better. And I mean, there is some research on that, but it's also some of those amino acids you're taking goes into energy pathways to help, you know, help that as well. So I think it's kind of cool.

Caset
 0:24:59
 I think for listening to this, you're not in the industry. We have on here that we want to talk about how ingredients apply to livestock. And we talked a lot about moderation, but I think it's been mentioned a couple podcasts or will be on some different things coming up is that livestock are the garbage disposals for human food as well. So a lot of stuff humans won't eat or bad stuff, we use that for feed in the livestock world. 

Morgan

Moderation is important on the human side, but it's also important on the animal livestock side because livestock can have too much of a certain type of ingredient and then it can negatively impact their growth.

1
 0:25:47
 Well, I would also say toxicity is something to talk about in that space. Even water can be toxic. And I've been close to having water toxicity in my life. So I actually kind of know what it was like. You're so hot, you just keep drinking more water and you didn't replace the salt. So yeah, there's a lot of things we have to watch out with what animals eat. It's an example would be this spring coming up. You see all the baby cows out there and all the cute cows on the pasture and you put horses out there.

 So like horses and cattle, you have to have a special trace mineral block for cattle in the spring because the grass is so full of sugar. And so you even, even with horses, you know, you've had them cooped up so long inside and you just want to put them out on that fresh green grass. You have to watch how much they eat of that new grass because it's full of sugar and it can cause colic. So those are kind of two good examples in my mind of ingredients and moderating what they eat and the timing and things like that.

Morgan
 0:26:56
 Yeah. Another ingredient that comes to mind on the pig side is distillers. There's some negative side effects of distillers as well that if you do start feeding too much of it, it can negatively impact the digestion and other aspects of the thing as well. Can you tell the audience in case they're not sure what distillers is, what it is? Yeah, distillers are a byproduct of corn? 

Casey

Well, ethanol production. Ethanol production. And what we found early on when we started using distillers, when that big ethanol boom hit, was the fact that it impacted actually of all things, baking quality. It made a floppy bacon. And because of the type of fat it put in the pig, it was a softer fat. And we had to learn how to even go back with utilizing distillers and getting that right. So we didn't have bad bacon or floppy bacon.

1
 0:27:59
 And you couldn't cut it, it'd fall apart. And the belly used to be a byproduct. It wasn't on a primal cut. When I went to school and studying, it wasn't necessarily deemed a primal cut. And today, go to all these sandwiches. Everybody who eats chicken also probably has bacon on their chicken sandwich. And that is one of our top sellers. So it became a real big problem for us in the swine industry as we started to learn how to utilize the stillers. And part of the reason also is that because it comes from corn, it is the concentrated protein version of corn. And we had to go back to some amino acid ratios. Today we're even studying that with high corn leucine. And what is the ratios of leucine for instance in our diets to optimize growth
 performance?

Morgan
 0:28:58
 Yeah, and I know you've mentioned ratios of amino acids a little bit and I just kind of want to break that down a little bit more for our audience. So for when we're formulating livestock rations, we compare all of our amino acid levels to lysine because that's the first limiting amino acid for pigs specifically and I think for most others.

Casey

 Poultry because they're birds, they're not mammals with methionine, but they still will ratio off lysine. They still ratio off lysine. Yeah, but methionine is their first limiting amino acid. If I remember right, Mitch could shoot me if I got that wrong. At least that's what I think it's set up in my software as. 

Morgan

So that means that if the diet does not contain enough lysine, the animals will not be able to make the other amino acids that they need to make. 

Casey

Yeah,

Morgan

 They'll eat for their first limiting. 

Casey

It's like a barrel, and that's the best way to describe it as I remember from nutrition class. It's like this barrel of water, right? And you're going to have a leak and if you eat to the amino acid that you need because you don't want to lose everything. So if you're limiting on lysine, you could be adequate on every other amino acid, but because you're limiting on that first one, everything leaks out. It doesn't do you any good because you can't construct the proteins you need to go with the other one. So that's kind of why we we talk ratios and to me that visual always stuck as of remembering the importance of those ratios and the animals. So interesting enough the animals will eat towards what they're deficient in. So if you don't feed them enough lysine they will do the same thing so whatever they need to keep growing or you know living life to meet homeostasis they'll eat towards that and that's where those excesses come in that's why we say moderation and that's kind of where we went to the plate standard versus the old food pyramid and human nutrition is you know moderation if you can use a plate you're going to be more moderate of what you put and make sure it's balanced. And that's essentially what we do behind the scenes in a very complex software system. 

Morgan:

 Yeah. And I'll also add that also for livestock, depending on the season, we might add or subtract certain ingredients. Just like, for example, pigs don't eat a lot during the summer because it's so hot. They experience what we call heat stress, where they, I mean, same as if you were extremely hot and you had issues regulating your body temperature, pigs don't sweat. And so in times of extreme heat, the only way that they can cool themselves off is through the passage of air and airflow and movement. And so in the summer specifically, we will increase the amount of fat in the diet by 10 or 20 pounds to help increase that energy density of the feed because we know that the pigs are not going to eat as much when they're hot. So we want to make sure that what they are eating is very energy dense, so that that will help make up for the lack of what they're eating. 

Casey

And that's one reason that we do that because they're not eating as much, but it also, fat digestion takes, produces less heat than fermentation does. And that pigs, if they ate really high carbohydrate diet, they had a lot of different fibers in there and they were doing, especially the older pigs, a lot of hindgut fermentation or the sows, that produces heat. In the wintertime that's great, that helps them maintain their core body temperature, but in the summer it is not. So why don't camels really aren't, they don't really store water like people think. And this is another good example is how camels are utilized in the desert, right? Where there's very little water and it's very hot. And they tend to store their energy in that water. And the reason why they don't need to drink as much water is stored as fat. So once that the fat breaks down, they get the water molecules from the fat as that breaks down. And so that's a unique animal and what's cool over there is they even milk camels. I've not tried milking a camel.

Morgan

 I've heard that before. Have you ever tried milking a camel? 

Casey

No. Probably the hardest milking a pig. But I know somebody in Pakistan who does research on them and I think it would be really cool to go check it out. But I find it's interesting and I use the camel as a good example because it's an animal that adapted to the environment that it was in and how it utilizes fat differently than we would. And I think even on humans, if we look at our different ancestors, brown fat, for instance, is another good example. Some genetics have more brown fat, which came from colder regions that you can save warmer easier, where some people for more tropical reasons don't have that kind of fat. We look at racehorses. This is why I was bringing up the different types of animals and how they adapt. We look at different horses, performance horses. So we look at an endurance horse versus a speed horse, the muscle twitch fibers, so slow versus fast hatching. And you'll see that in your nutrition, white versus dark meat from a chicken. It's the different types of muscle. So it takes a different type of protein and energy requirement for those types of muscles. And so the wings are the dark meat and the legs because those are the moving components of chickens. 

And that's the easiest one to display the differences in. But this goes back into the sugar conversation is performance horses are high working horses and dogs even. They're kind of schizo from a behavior standpoint. And I think some of the neatest work that came out since I've been a nutritionist is now they tend to, you know, horses used to get carbohydrates. They wanted that hindgut fermentation going on in the cecum but now they feed them a high-fat diet and they seem to have less behavior issues with them then they do sugar and I think that goes into kids and what we're talking about those kids who never had sugar you know probably got themselves sick and ate too much but I see that in Arthur I have to watch his sugar level because I just think things get out of balance and depending on your genetics it's how you can handle it and it's the same the hormones and you know I'm hoping someday that we'll have a metagenomics profile on people that we can help you know target this weight issue because my friend's a great example I love her to death but she struggled weight loss ever since she's had kids and you know she had the surgery 1200 calories a day she did everything she said and the best she could do was lose 20 pounds and you know you go in society you see these tall people who eat whatever they want and they're skinny but they die of heart disease for instance like I have a heart attack and you would never think they look healthy right that they would have been the one of heart disease.

Morgan

 On the human side your body is kind of pre-programmed to a set weight. Body has its natural I would say 10 pound fluctuation of where like your maintenance level is. Obviously you can eat yourself one way or another but more than likely if you're just kind of maintaining your body's gonna naturally fall within this certain weight range. 

Casey

And I'm naturally gonna be chunky.

Morgan
 0:37:18
 But I think that's interesting, and back to the muscle fiber conversation, is when I was taking my meat science class in undergrad, I didn't realize that you're born with as many muscle fibers as you are going to have. And I always thought that that was interesting for all those people that are in power lifting and hardcore weight lifting. Like, they're not changing the amount of muscle fibers that they have, they're changing the orientation of the muscle fiber bundles. Which I always thought was really interesting on how you can naturally condition yourself to have more slow twitch or fast twitch muscle fibers. An example that comes to mind for me is those individuals that are sprinters, like when it comes to, and you kind of already mentioned on the racehorse side, but individuals that are really good at more fast twitch muscle fibers than slow...than slow twitch... than runners like me... than runners like me who is... I'm like I can just go forever. I have way more slow twitch muscle fibers than fast. And here's the thing though is how do you program that to optimize it?

Casey

 It's not saying that a sprinter cannot become a marathon runner. 

Morgan

It takes training. 

Casey

It takes training to switch that over, right?

Caset
 0:38:54
 So you're transitioning that, but it also takes nutrition. And this is where even I think from a performance athlete, regardless if it's a human or a horse or a dog, we have really started to hone in nutrition and we can change that. like I use the laying hen as a great example of an animal that through nutrition we could change what she produces and that egg that we eat is a great example. One of the first projects that I did at Kalmbach was to develop a fat supplement to get higher omega egg fatty acids into the egg that humans ate and it was just incredible when people say you are what you eat and that is a great example is you know if you want to be this type of athlete you want to be a marathon runner if you want to be a sprinter or if you want to you know just look good on stage and do the big muscles versus you know a bodybuilder is not as strong as a strongman my husband always tells me that he's a strong man. He's not a bodybuilder. That makes sense. Okay. So he's like anti bodybuilder but like he could have been a strong man back in his younger days. He did shotput and stuff in college. That type of guy. But there are bodies and genetics that are good at you know certain things but you also have to have the nutrition and then of course we're not I'm not a trainer or exercise physiologist so I'm not going to talk about that I don't run marathons I'm just lucky I get out of bed every day. 

Morgan

Hey you're supposed to be running or I don't say necessarily running but your goal is to do a 5k this year. 

Casey

It is and if the Sun would come out a little bit more I’d be working closer to that goal. 

Morgan

It's interesting how, especially for endurance athletes, that your body only has an hour and a half of glucose storage in your liver for it to tap into. A term that some people might know is carb loading. So before a big race... 

Casey

What did you eat before a big race? 

Morgan

So when I was in high school, we would always have like spaghetti dinners and stuff like that like the night before and we'd carb load You know the night before our big race But granted our big races are literally just a 5k so it really wasn't that much but as I've continued on my endurance athlete journey over the last Since high school and over the years. I've Definitely changed how I feel differently. So before a big race, I will usually eat like a chicken breast, simple sugars like a sweet potato, a mixed green salad, and chicken. Like I don't want to carb load and like, I found that if I carb loaded or ate just like a giant bowl of spaghetti, it took a lot longer for my body to digest that and I just felt a lot more sluggish because my stomach was full. Where if I had like a sweet potato and chicken breast, it was a lot easier on my digestive system too. And I didn't just feel like this. And so that's what I would eat the night before. It was a learning curve, but and each person's different. Some people can eat a lot before a race or just continuously eat throughout. But you really learn like targeted nutrition and it's interesting how, you know, if you do a really, really hard workout and you don't replenish what you've just burnt, you're going to feel a lot more tired three, four hours after that event or hard workout than if you took a quick protein shake afterwards. That was something I really noticed is if I ran half marathon or a marathon, if I ate right away afterwards, even if I wasn't hungry, if I just ate something afterwards, I would feel a lot better than if I just was like, oh, I don't need to eat anything, I'm not hungry right now. Because your body can't tell you that you're hungry after an event that long. It's just kind of trying to survive at that point. 

Casey

I think you made some good points and I mean there's some yeah we could go on and on but I think we've kind of left us at a good part. What I'd like to do for and I'll let you give them the action item but if you have comments or you want us to go a deeper dive on specifics because we're opening up this nutrition realm for you right now. We're not trying to be experts on everything or go very minute on details. We're broadening the scope to see Audience is listening and the feedback we get because we want to develop content that's relevant for you.

1
 0:43:54
 But I think if you want to understand nutrition differently and you get frustrated and you're listening to this, an animal nutritionist is probably a good person to start with. But I always leave my clients or people wish for me to be their nutrition consultant or coach that you know my training is to make animals grow fast and get big. I have a lot of hard times taking weight off. So just that's the caveat I'm going to leave the audience with is that I always tell people if you're a bodybuilder I can probably help you but if you're a fitness coach I just tell you you got to be like me, stop eating and go exercise. 

Morgan

Yeah, it's calories in calories out and I think what I'm going to just leave with the audience today is there are a lot of great meal tracking apps, food journals, record-keeping type applications that make it really quick and easy just to kind of see what your diet looks like. And if you do have a hard time categorizing fats, proteins, versus carbs, just being able to enter all the different meals that you eat within an app or a food journal and having that break things down a little bit for you to help you know if you're exploring how you're feeling yourself. Our action item for the week I think is just take some time if this is something that you're interested in and want to learn more about take some time to evaluate how you intake fats, proteins, carbs, and the balance that you have within your your day and during and each meal. 

Casey

And you'll find trends over time and if you listen to your body your body will tell you what it needs and I use the example to leave that for the action item you know when I was pregnant with Arthur I craved hamburgers and watermelon and I think the hamburger was because the iron protein right growing the fetus I don't know about the water going but the water I guess sugar sugar I guess just that fast glucose. I like watermelon but I like craved it when I was pregnant. 

Morgan

Well there's worse things that you could crave than watermelon. Ask yourself that you know she gave you an extra and the right things down but I would say in that journal if you're doing that is if you had a craving for something ask yourself why your body may be craving that. So So with that, thanks guys for listening. Next week we will be tuning into phase feeding and we have a very special guest, Mariana Menegat. Gonna love Dr. Menegat. Yes, she's from Brazil, currently lives in the US with her husband, has great knowledge and... 

Casey

Since we already recorded it, I'm telling you, it's off the wall. You need to listen to it. 

It’s just not Casey and Morgan anymore We're bringing up some rock stars.

Morgan

So with that see you next week!