Essentials of Exercise & Sports Nutrition

Our Expert Interview With Dr. Rick Kreider

Jason Vaught: Welcome to the Better Body Sports Podcast, I am your host, Jason Vaught, and in this episode, we are speaking with Dr. Rick Kreider from Texas A&M University. Dr. Kreider serves as a professor and executive director of the Human Clinical Research Facility, as well as director of the Exercise and Sports Nutrition Lab at Texas A&M University. Dr. Kreider holds a Ph.D. in applied exercise physiology from the University of Southern Mississippi, as well as a number of other certifications. 

Dr. Kreider is a wealth of information, so you will absolutely want to listen up and focus on what he speaks about, because it is profound and it’s going to really help you with your nutrition, supplementation and training. No matter your age we cover a wide range of topics for all ages, so this is a podcast for everyone. So, without further ado, let’s tune in and listen to the interview with Dr. Rick Kreider. Today, we have Dr. Rick Kreider. Thank you for being on the show with us.

Dr Rick Kreider: Happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Jason Vaught: If you could give our listeners a brief backstory as to how you became in the position that you are at Texas A&M, I think that would help set the tone for the conversation.

Dr Rick Kreider: Sure, I started out as a football player and coach and interested in exercise, strength, conditioning and nutrition, and I went and got my graduate degree at Southern Miss and Masters and thought I’d be going into strength coaching and football coaching and as I got there I got interested in research and so I get my Ph.D. So, I then moved on to Old Dominion University last year, about a year or so, and then to University of Memphis and then I became Department Chair at Baylor and started a Ph.D. program in exercise, nutrition and health. 

Thought that was my last stop but then got a call from a search committee A&M and I worked for a new partner and I mean it was such a great program, one of the largest ones in the country. They made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Jimbo, got an offer to move to Texas A & M. I didn’t get that much money but a decision I couldn’t turn down, which I served the department for nine years, two terms plus, and as I was in transition, I thought about what we should do. 

Then we were developing a new facility called the Human Clinical Research Facility and so we built that and I’m serving as Executive Director, helping the University increase the presence of doing Human Clinical Research on campus. That includes my lab, the Exercise, Sports, Nutrition lab which I started at University of Memphis officially and went to Baylor and [unclear] and so we’ve been doing our research on exercise and nutrition, health and performance for 30 plus years or so and have had a great career so far.

Jason Vaught: Well, it sounds like you love your work if you’re willing to do it for that long.

Dr Rick Kreider: Yeah, I work with athletes and help people improve their health and fitness, and what I’ve learned is that when you do research, it can make an impact worldwide. So, we have the privilege of doing some really neat research studies that have had worldwide impact on sport, nutrition practices, exercise modality, weight loss and so it’s a little humbling to see the impact of all that work on all the students we produced and see all that they’re doing.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, absolutely. I want to go way back to your football career and talk about how serious you took the training and the nutrition component when you yourself were an athlete.

Dr Rick Kreider: It was huge. So, I was always a little bit smaller. OK, so I was always the harder working athlete. When I was in high school, we had a really good high school team and had a strength program. We were the first ones in the Miami area in high school to have a really nice weight room and things like that. So, I think it’s a great transition to this school. My senior year I actually went to University of Miami strength clinic where I went and played college football, and so I took training, very serious as nutrition, because if I didn’t maximize my strength and power and muscle mass, I just couldn’t compete with some of the other folks who were just a little bit bigger. 

So, I was a walk-on in college and I earned the scholarship. I’m one of those guys you see on Tv they congratulate you. After two hard years you get a scholarship and earn some playing time for special teams and staff and things like that and it was a great opportunity to see and test some of the exercise nutrition training principles that we were learning about in physiology, nutrition class on myself and that really prompted my whole interest in exercise, nutrition and performance enhancement, which then has gone into my career.

Jason Vaught: That’s amazing. Honestly, that’s not the answer I expected, because usually when you hear from people, when they think back to their high school college careers, they go, what if I would have taken my nutrition and my training seriously, what would I have become? So, you’re a bit of an outlier in that regard.

Dr. Rick Kreider: No, I still think that because we didn’t know about the things we know today. I just think that we would need two states of it. We had no idea we were giving that much creatine from the State for example. We had very limited supplements. I think I ate protein, we had shacks, we had drinks and there weren’t that many sports nutrition products, a little major. but I tried a number of things. I think now I would have had a better career.

Jason Vaught: Yeah. Did you ever take the liver tabs, the giant massive tablets?

Dr. Rick Kreider: I took some tablets that were kind of, I guess glandular basically crushed up bull, you know.

Jason Vaught: I just remember my dad having these massive, well maybe they weren’t massive. Maybe to me they were massive but being in the industry now I look back to the things he took and I just like-

Dr. Rick Kreider: I took things stupidly. I looked in tabs, the protein is not really called protein, B12, we knew about it and thought it would help but on the other hand, you know, I took a lot of protein powder. I would drink like ten glasses of milk every meal in college to get more protein basically in college so obviously, I had no idea that that was a pretty good idea. Milk protein. Now, that’s a great protein. 

So, but I drank a lot of milk, but my tray was lined with small little drink glasses. That’s all we had back then. Nowadays you really can optimize performance with some great products and nutrient timing. Yeah, so I do think back. I wish I knew what to do now and could have done some of that back then.

Jason Vaught: Definitely. So that kind of brings me to a point that I want to talk about later on, which was the placebo effect. I have a feeling that you have a pretty deep understanding as to the potential of just believing something works versus itself actually doing the work. Do you have anything to say on the placebo effect?

Dr. Rick Kreider: Yeah, well, it’s powerful. You think that you are going to get a benefit if you may. I’ll give you a couple examples. We did a study once in direct cycling like Tour de France type level Cyclists and we were doing post exercise massage and we’re trying to see if it helps recovery and it was very big back in the day and so we quit our system. It was a microwave system called diathermy used in physical therapy. We turned it all off, but it still had lights and buzzed. Right and so we would have the guys drive a hundred miles a day, four days in a row. We did it twice. We would break in between and we had one time to get the massage, one time I got the diaphragm and we actually moved it around to all the different parts and cranked it up.

But we worked hard to crank it up and guess what, at the end of the study, several of them thought that that worked better and it was nothing. except just putting something over and it would work right. So, we call those double blind and dumpsters. We’re trying to make it act like- they believe it works. Same thing with Dr. Supplements. If you have a feeling it can work or you should have known of all the things that happen when you put on those, that breathes through your mouth when you exercise, you don’t need that but my thought is if it doesn’t hurt them, they think it helps. They like to tie their shoes one way and wear the same type of clothes. It’s not going to affect them. OK. If it makes you feel better, great. Now if it’s something dangerous, then we put our arm around the athletes, say hey, you really don’t need to be doing that. It’s not what you should be doing at work, you’re wasting your money.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, that’s funny. I just love the placebo effect because I had direct personal interactions for 15 years and they would come in telling me that this piece of fitness equipment or this supplement or this nutritional strategy was the most wonderful thing in the world. But it was the person that sold it to him originally that gave him that motivation that this is going to work, that caused them to

Dr. Rick Kreider: We often do a post supplement, study questionnaires and see if they could guess which ones are wrong, at some point creatine they can kind of guess they feel it. A lot of time they picked the wrong one which is kind of funny. But when we do the studies, we usually have a placebo group because we want to see if there’s a statistically significant greater result than that placebo effect. We saw 30% of people respond to placebo. So, to say it really works, you’ve got to get beyond that psychology and have actual physiology.

Jason Vaught: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That’s great. So, you worked at Baylor for a while. Did you work with Dr. Willoughby over there?

Dr. Rick Kreider: Yes, I recruited and hired him.

Jason Vaught: Oh, you did? Wow, that’s amazing, and how muscular was he before he started working there first?

Dr Rick Kreider: Darryn’s always been, you know, big guy. So, he actually played some professional football for years. I mean until his forties or something, he always did bodybuilding. Every time- I’ve known for 25, 30 years, he’s always been that way. He may have been down for some competitions, but he was a big guy.

Jason Vaught: Yeah I got to say, it was it was funny reading your book because I didn’t realize I was going to be brought up in your book because of Dr. Willoughby’s study on D-Aspartic Acid and at the time we were making just a basic, straightforward D-Aspartic Acid capsule and so he reached out to us and used our product for the study, which concluded that it didn’t do at the time what we thought it was going to do, which resulted in us discontinuing the product, no longer making the product. So, it was pretty funny to be found in your book next time I hope to be found and maybe successful.

Dr Rick Kreider: Looking for the next creatine.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, yeah. You know, that’s I mean, that’s what we- I think we can both agree on, is the things that work are the things that are maybe not as exciting as the general public would like to think, do what they do. So anyways. Your time at Baylor was in the same department. I’m sorry, were you in the same department as you are now? Were you conducting similar studies there as you are now?

Dr. Rick Kreider: Yeah, we’ve always been doing nutrition, exercise research. When I went to Memphis, we started our own lab. We were working with an ex [unclear] lab and we did get some support to have our own area and so the exercise for nutrition lab, which is really well known, started officially at Memphis and when I moved personnel, staff quit everything they learned. The same thing happened when I wanted to and so I’ve always maintained a very active research program even though I was doing administration as well and so that over the years has really developed and produced a huge who’s now in the Sports and Nutrition Industry.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s absolutely amazing. Through your time, I know you have to be going into a study kind of unbiased and not really favoring if it’s going to work or not work. But has there been anything that you thought the outcome was going to be positive and then it turned out to.

Dr Rick Kreider: Yeah, so that’s a great question. When you do studies, we always want to see if there’s a good theoretical rationale for any basic data to give us an idea that this may actually work. So, we actually go into it, even though you try to be as blinded and unbiased as possible. You have a theory. You have a hypothesis. We just don’t go into doing a study and no hypothesis. Why would you study? So, we have some thoughts now. There’s a lot of times our theories are upheld, but sometimes they don’t and a perfect example of this study we did with Jeff Stout when he was a GMC, they supplemented a study for us to look at adding branched chain amino acids and glutamine to whey protein to get super whey.

Which was actually a product they developed and we thought, well, we wanted a nitrogen balance for placebo. So, we gave whey protein plus casein. We thought that would be a good placebo to nitrogen. But we’re really looking at adding a little bit more amino acids to really get this boosting effect. I guess we found that the group that had the creatine there with Whey worked better than the ones that we thought was super [unclear] and we didn’t find out, you know, if you add casein, it slows down your digestion and it may have an anti-catabolic. We didn’t know that then. But there is an example. We’re completely surprised we did. It was completely opposite of what we thought would happen and then it ended up being shown in other studies. Now, that makes sense. It’s why the proteins and bedtime casein now can used and so we’ve had a number of those because we’ve been first in a lot of these studies.

Jason Vaught:  Was that in the early 2000s and late 90s?

Dr Rick Kreider: There were areas where we found no effect or marginal effect that now seem to have a few other studies that we thought.

Jason Vaught: Before we had some technical difficulties, we were talking about the Whey Protein and Micellar did use my Micellar or just Standard casein.

Dr. Rick Kreider: I think it was standard casein If I recall. But I know that Jeff Stout and others use that as an example for when they do talk about. They helped design the study with Joey Antonio when he took the completely opposite of what we said. But then it actually gets replicated and now we know that there’s some thinking, oh how was it? So at least something happened with the research.

Jason Vaught: So, was that in the late 90s, early 2000s, before the catalyst casein the wave?

Rick Kreider: Yeah, absolutely. So, this was probably a study we did around 96 or so 94, 95, 96 in that area and we published it around 2002 or 3 or something like that. It was just the facts and this was before we knew about you know essential amino acids being more of protein stimulus effect versus Casein being a slower digesting protein and this was right before we started learning about nutrient timing and how that can stimulate protein with essential amino acids versus and losing versus delaying it and so it was kind of ahead of its time, which is why you think this makes sense. But then after all the other stuff, it’s kind of like of course it’ll makes sense.

Jason Vaught: But what was the dosages, if you can remember?

Rick Kreider: It was 20 grams of Whey protein plus eight grams and if I remember it was like five grams of sugar. So, adding an extra two and a half grams of lossy on top of the way in which 40 grams is going to give you probably five or six grams of loss. So, it kind of makes sense. You don’t know what you get about three grams loosening. We now know you have probably enough three Six is plenty and going beyond that, probably just done more and we also now know that the Casein probably slowed down digestion. So, you probably had some anti-catabolic responses that we just didn’t know about at the time.

Jason Vaught: That’s amazing. So that’s one study where it surprised you in the opposite direction. Did you have any studies that you went into its kind of pessimistic and then were surprised by the outcome?

Rick Kreider: Oh, of course. So, I would probably put creatine in that category after- our first study with creatine – you know we were the first ones in the United States to do creatine with athletes. First paper actually on athletes and up to the time, you know, there were some studies out of Europe or England with Roger Harrison and [unclear] showing to give a bunch of this, it increases Muscle, [unclear] as well as energy for high explosive exercise and they did one study where they did untrained people, gave to them like five days and they didn’t like extension, showed a little bit improvement, but nobody ever saw any of that with training. We went into that study thinking, OK, maybe it’ll make you stronger, maybe more reps and maybe a little bit of a training education.

But we saw a huge increase in muscle mass, 14 days in our first study, we were given about 20 gram a today with creatine, a huge increase that we sustained for twenty-eight days and resistance trained individuals. We did not expect-the first time we did that study and I had some colleagues like Andy Fry. It’s like there’s no way there’s just no way this can happen and then when Kramer get a study replicated it’s like well, I guess this does happen and all of a sudden, we start seeing all these other studies, our study shows great increases in muscle mass, and so that was one where we didn’t expect we thought would be performance mainly. But what a great increase in muscle mass. Now I use creatine for preventing Sarcopenia or helping people maintain muscle mass as they age and for all these health benefits and so that’s one thing we started with sports and we ended up now being a tremendous nutrient for health.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, what about the- I know it’s a nootropic to some degree, but do you feel confident in saying that maybe this will help with Alzheimer’s dementia patients, the ones that have late onset?

Dr. Rick Kreider: Yeah. Excellent. We’re doing a special issue on Creatine and health and clinical diseases for the journal Nutrients right now and we have about 11 papers that just came out in the last month or so. One of them is on Creatine and the brain and what’s fascinating is that Creatine normally increases in muscle concentration usually in a 20 to 30 percent range when you load, but also increase in brain creatine by about five to 15 percent and we have now shown that in older individuals, particularly, who are somewhat going through mild cognitive decline.

This helps with cognitive function, and so there’s a number of studies showing that creatine loading in this type of population seems to have some benefits for brain health, and we also know that creatine through neuroprotective in the brain and so something we never thought would happen would be it also seems to help reduce the trauma associated with brain concussions and stroke, and spinal cord injuries and so that’s one reason why we see athletes should have creatine because they are susceptible to this type of thing. So, yeah, there’s some really good data on brain health and [unclear] probably just had a great paper come out overview. That research is available online for people to look at.

For creatine the starting point impacts your response. So, if you’re a vegan or older, you generally maintain about 50 to 70 percent of your creatine stores normally and a person who eats lots of red meat maybe about 75 percent. So, yeah, we can maintain it with red meat. On the other hand, you can’t get the hundred percent. You’d have to have so much red meat. I mean, a pound of red meat contains maybe a gram of creatine load. You’d have to have huge amounts, meat, calories, fat and all those things will come with it. So, it’s better to just use some supplements with creatine.

Jason Vaught: That’s amazing. So, I’ve kind of seen that it seems like supplements or supplementing becomes a little bit more effective as we age, as there’s decline, there’s more of a reason to supplement to achieve those normal levels. Do you see the same thing or is it different?

Dr. Rick Kreider: Yes. What has happened with sports nutrition is it’s now becoming middle age, nutrition and health care. You’re applying this to clinical populations and the biggest consumers of nutritional supplements, especially sports nutritionists, it’s not just your high school or college athlete or recreational athlete. It’s usually your middle-aged individual trying to keep muscle mass and strength and low body fat as they age, and so we know that these things also work in middle age. It’s probably more beneficial, you know. But another perfect example, we did a study and we looked at high protein diet on weight loss with resistance training we had shown in women this is very effective.

We start to think, well, what about older women? Because they usually don’t have as much protein in their diet, they don’t digest protein as effectively so we them on a slightly higher protein diet, giving about 1.1, 1.4 two grams per day, almost double what they were doing and they had this huge beneficial effect on increasing and maintaining muscle, losing fat compared to folks you just cut calories on the high carbohydrate diet. So, a lot of these things we now find in the clinical population, in elderly, is probably more important that you do these things than any other athlete.

Jason Vaught: Yeah. All right. Well, then I’m going to load my mom up with supplements. That’s what we’re going to start doing right after this podcast,

Dr. Rick Kreider: We recommend 3 grams of creatine every day and good quality protein every day and low fat you know and so I think those principles really play well as you age.

Jason Vaught: So how has your research affected your own personal approach to nutrition and exercise?

Dr Rick Kreider: Yeah, so I try everything. Usually if I see something new, I try it sometimes and see if it might give some idea to study or seek funding to get the study. But my training, you know, is basically resistance training, high intensity interval training with all the sprinting when I train and of course golf and recreational type things I enjoy doing. But my diet is higher protein, low fat and I do multivitamins, fish oil, things for heart health and creatine and then protein snacks, high protein snacks.

Jason Vaught: Touching on fish oil for a second fish oil seems to get good research, bad research, good research, bad research, what are we looking at in terms of the type of fish oils that we consume that’s going to be beneficial to us? Because I know that there’s varying types of cold processes, cold water is sourced. With your large amount of research and the mass media being very confused on the subject, is there a certain type you would recommend or does it not really matter?

Dr. Rick Kreider: I think you need a quality source of omega 3s and if you go with most of the main brands, you’re going to use a quality source. I don’t know that we can say that one form is too much better, although if you look at the ratios of the EPA, DHA and things that are higher quality, and so you may not need as much if you have a higher quality. But I think the importance of the Heart Association recommends three times at least a week of some type of fatty fish. Or if you can’t do that, then at least the fish oil type of supplements seems to provide a lot of health benefits. I think that’s understood, the question is for sports. Does it really do anything for sports? Well, it could be a toxin and although we were there at that point for general health there is some benefit.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, and that leads me to that the question of how do we in the public deal with an ingredient having a proven track record for a long period of time and then one research paper comes out saying that it doesn’t do what it says it does, and then it ends up all over the media. I mean we have to listen to it and read through it. But how do we deal with that when there’s so much other stuff out there that says it is effective? Where do we go? Does that make sense? It doesn’t seem to be an ingredient.

Dr. Rick Kreider: This is an important issue because especially with the social media click bait type of advertisements and articles, you’ll see they have provocative headlines and then you read the details and they’re always follow up. So, people are confused and so one of the reasons we started international standards for nutrition, is how our position statements and our supplement reviews that we do is so people who get an authoritative review to help them make an informed decision. But with that said. Realized one that it doesn’t mean anything until you see a preponderance of the evidence, and that’s where these reviews and analysis and things can help the consumer understand, oh, maybe there is something to this and the official organizations have supported it.

Dr. Rick Kreider: That’s why if you look at the ISSN positions stand, that stuff Sam or others have come up with that have looked at dietary supplements in Athletes. There’s only a handful of things that they feel confident about.. Studies consistently show it can be helpful, and so we help consumers make those decisions. What is a part of science? Does it make sense? Does it have any studies? Was it done in a population that was recommended for it to be beneficial? Have there been replications of the results? Are there any position stands or announced on? and so when you kind of layer all that together, you can make an informed choice about whether something’s worth a try.

Dr Rick Kreider: But if something comes out oh, no, it’s going to be harmful or helpful or whatever it might be, you have to be a little bit skeptical and put it in context of all the information. We just had the other day, a letter to the editor, to a journal, because somebody had some study that came out and showed that it can increase the growth of tumors for creatine and we have all this data on creatine for benefit and antitumor effects. This one paper is going to be put out, we’ll hit the headlines and so like it was done with doses that are 20, 30, 40 times what anybody would take and yet that come off the headline. It should be and so we have to be leery of the media and look at the results and see and make an informed decision.

Jason Vaught: I really wish the general public could get access and, well, I wish they would care enough to get access to the information to read it in full rather than a two second, three second Instagram post.

Dr Rick Kreider: Well, a lot of our news becomes fake because it’s a twist or just a comment that people just think it’s the way it is. There’s usually some interest behind some of these things, like looking for clicks or looking for certain stuff or whatever, and so you have to be skeptical. But if you do a search on the Internet and great dissemination on health, you’ll find some good authority papers. Same thing with the news out there and so I would always encourage people to do your homework and then also don’t assume that your physician knows everything about this. They don’t get trained in nutrition, and so a lot of times you provide information to them. So, I mean, my mom had cancer and I had to give the physician information about how essential amino acids and HMB can preserve muscle mass and this is why we were trying to encourage her to take and ensure with HMB type of supplement and I showed him and I looked at his face. “I had no idea” and so you give them this is a renowned doctor for cancer and then he’s like, oh, I’m gonna do this for the rest of my patients. 

Jason Vaught: Ok, sounds like he was pretty receptive though, correct. He or she.

Dr. Rick Kreider: Yes, he was and so that’s not always the case. Sometimes – supplements is one of those areas where you have some people that will not agree that any supplementation is necessary. You still see some group saying oh there’s nothing just needing a regular diet. Well, we know you have to regulate the diet, time to diet and then there’s the question: can you get enough of the nutrients you need from a regular diet? We were at the Tour de France recently and we ate twelve thousand calorie days. You’re not going to sit down and eat three meals a day to get there and be able to train so there has to be some accommodation. So, I think you have to be reasonable, interpret the literature and make wise decisions and do your homework.

Jason Vaught: Now, that’s the biggest thing. Do your homework. I got to tell you, in reading your book, it was hard to read your book because I wanted to immediately go out and get blood work done about every chapter. I felt the need to know more so that I could make the right decisions. How important is blood work to all of this research that you do? Is there anything you would recommend the general public stay up on that general physicians don’t typically recommend doing for blood work?

Dr Rick Kreider: Well, I think keeping a close eye on your health and doing general clinical chemistry is like a physician would do to look at your cholesterol. All those things are helpful. There may be some advantage to measuring every once in a while, vitamin mineral content in your blood, things like that, to get an idea whether you’re doing a good job on your diet or deficient in anything. Maybe you have to add, Why is everyone so tired?” We don’t usually do that as screening for athletes and put them on a program, although there is some irrational that, you know, if an athlete or healthy person is doing their normal diet, the question is are they getting enough? So that’s why, you know, a multivitamin tends to [unclear] insurance policies. So, I think that every once in a while, doing that type of – is interesting and could help provide feedback. Are you doing a good job? 

And then there’s a whole interest in genetics and I think there’s these swab tests that you can do, I’m not convinced we’ve actually done some things. I’m not convinced that we’re there yet. But I think eventually we’ll be able to do a blood test, the genetic screen to find out what you are sensitive to or not sensitive to from a nutrient and the drug level and we might get to that point.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, I agree with that. The company I work for previously, we had a genetics course and a lot of the information, I think we just need a larger data pool and maybe a better way to profile each individual, because it didn’t seem to come out accurate and almost half the cases and so, for example, male pattern baldness, apparently, I don’t have that gene, but I was bald at twenty-one. So, something there accelerated the rate of hair loss.

Dr Rick Kreider: Yeah, you have genes and then you have gene expression alright so some genes may or may not be influential in environment and diet mostly conflict that and so I think there’s something there. We did a study where we’re looking at fat genes. We try to match up diets compared to what their gene profile was and there were some studies that show retrospectively when they went back and to look at weight loss, people more successful seem to have better matching to what type of diet. Several diets replicate that. First three months it’s like, wow there’s something to this. Then we went beyond that and kind of seems the body adapted back to where it used to be and it made no effect so I think there’s something there, but we need a lot more studies on it to figure out how to use that information effectively.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, and that brings up a really good point in how the body responds and adapts. You said three months for the gene expression?

Rick Kreider: Yeah, for the first three months It was a great match. When you matched the diet to the gene that showed separation of weight loss better with when we’re matched, but then after that, it actually narrowed back in.

Jason Vaught: Do you get enough funding to fund a study for a length of time that goes beyond that, if that makes sense, like what are the effects of creatine after three months of supplementation versus 12 months of supplementation versus twenty-four months supplementation? I mean, that’s hard, right? Because you’ve got to get enough money to get that going.

Rick Kreider: Yeah, it’s hard with creatine. We were able to do that. We actually did almost a three-year study in athletes that we monitored and the company that was supporting it and we have two companies, actually, one providing the protein powder. So, for the people who didn’t get creative and we started something and then the others provided a protein with the creation and other products and that was great until the NCAA decided we shouldn’t allow our athletes to take these supplements. We can’t buy them or provide them, take them on their own but they can’t provide them. So that actually stopped that three-year study and so it’s hard to get long term data in a weight loss and usually it’s about six months to a year to get some long-term effects and really like two years to see if to get that much in the millions of dollars. Fortunately, the study we’ve done as part of our current research and invested eight or nine million dollars over the 12-year period to do research and they were interested in if this could help them identify what diet may work better for them. So, they invested that money, just didn’t pan out. So sometimes your work doesn’t seem to work as well as you thought it might, and then you have to go in a different direction.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, let’s give the listeners some practical help here, since a lot of them, our listeners are educated, podcast listeners in general are educated because they like to spend thirty to forty-five minutes versus three on a subject, but let’s give them some top 3s. What would you say are the top three ingredients for muscle building that you would recommend or that we recommend?

Dr. Rick Kreider: The first is I would say it’s creatine, by far the most extensively studied supplement, not only for exercise now and mental health benefit. This is for the aging process. So, we generally recommend 20 grams per day for about a week and then five to 10 grams depending on how big you are after that to maintain and as you age at least three grams a day. So that’s kind of how we to build muscle. Then the next one would be protein and we would look at a high essential amino acid profile. So, we like whey protein, high quality whey protein that will provide about six to 10 grams of essential amino acid. So, 20 grams contains about six grams of essential amino acid. About three of that would be quite a loss. So that would be the next thing we would recommend for muscle building and then after that, maybe bedtime casein or maybe if you’re doing a lot of intense training, a beginner, maybe you can be, or if you are trying to improve performance beta on top of that to improve quality training.

Jason Vaught: Beta alanine is the bonus one, we’ll call that the fourth one.

Dr. Rick Kreider: Yeah, it definitely helps you with muscle, but if it helps you improve quality of training, get more quality training, that will probably help. So usually, amino acids and protein together. So, you can almost combine as long as you use a quality protein with a good essential new acid content.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, great, so moving to fat loss, which is maybe a little bit more of a controversial subject than building muscle. What would you say are the top three there?

Dr. Rick Kreider: Well, I think the most important thing to do is a slightly hypochlorite diet. Include resistance training into your program. Just to go out and walk on the treadmill for an hour or two you burn fat. Do resistance training and then a higher protein diet, low fat diet. OK, so this helps you build and retain muscle as you lose fat. As far as supplements on that, we still like the thermogenic type supplements that are usually green caffeine and those type of things are a little bit more calories and if I was looking at a long term, probably CLA I think that is some pretty good data on health and in the long-term effects on body composition with CLA.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, that’s an interesting one where people ask me about CLA, I go, well, take it if you want in a fat loss program, but take it for the health benefits and then burn some fat along the way, then that’s amazing. But, you know, unfortunately, ingredients get lumped into a particular category and they don’t get seen as anything else.

Dr. Rick Kreider: Yeah, that’s my view as well and it seems more healthy and for the fact it’s a long-term thing. So, the best manager in the six months to a year just had a little bit of CLA to your diets, essential fatty acid. That’s going to prevent a lot of health benefits and it seems to help maintain weight loss. Then the other is that once you lose the weight, how do you keep it off? The most important factor is maintaining your exercise program, right? and then also make sure that your heart protein, your good diet. But then again, that’s where some of these things, like CLA or Thermogenic, may actually help you keep that weight loss off and so that’s also [unclear].

Jason Vaught: Yeah, so we’re in a performance culture, so we can’t we can’t forget that we’re all considering ourselves athletes these days, it seems, in terms of nutritional strategies or supplements. What’s the most important factors for somebody who’s trying to just increase performance like cross fit or anything along the-

Dr. Rick Kreider: Sure. We look at the type of exercise that they’re trying to train for, so it’s more power and short bursts of activity. We will generally recommend Creatine Beta Alanine, sometimes bicarbonate, depending if it’s like a two-, three- or four-minute bout of exercise and even nitrates have been shown to have some benefits, beetroot juice, things like that. If we’re thinking of endurance athletes then we’re trying to get more carbs and restore fat oxidation to caffeine, sodium phosphate. I think it’s still one of the best for endurance athletes, nitrates athletes to help with efficiency. 

So, actually our book breaks down these at the end of the year. If you got endurance athlete, here’s the thing you should do in order of priority and if you’re a power athlete, here are things you can do and so the Big Three are usually; make sure you have quality protein, make sure you get enough carbohydrate in your diet to meet the energy needs and then creatine, beta, nitrates, sodium phosphate and of course, fluid. You’ve got to prevent fluid.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, that’s probably the missing link for a lot of athletes, is they don’t take the fluid and take it seriously.

Dr. Rick Kreider: Yeah, really quick when I talk to my students. What’s the most important nutrition that I usually give to athletes? They’ll say carbs or protein or something. It’s water. It’s fluid. You prevent dehydration, you prevent loss in performance. So, our key is in working with athletes and making sure they’re hydrated then and well-fed before they start and then you have some beneficial nutrients.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, absolutely. So we touched on creatine for aging, but we’re all getting older. So, what should we do nutritionally without being able to do everything? What should we do nutritionally and supplementation wise to live well?

Dr Rick Kreider: This one is I think that as you get older, the importance of resistance training becomes greater. I don’t think that weightlifting is just for young, no as you get older, it’s even more important to help maintain strength. So how do you support that? How do you maintain your muscle mass? It’s things like a higher protein diet with protein as you get older, you don’t digest proteins effectively and so there’s usually a loss of any muscle mass to [unclear] at loss so its protein creatine and then HMB something and elderly seem to be more effective than even an athlete. Or if you go to the hospital, there is essentially no absence of protein, which some HMD seem to be helpful with. In fact, one study for a colleague in our facility here, Doctor, a huge study where they showed that patients that were in hospital stays, that their 90-day survival rate was 50 percent greater when they simply provided essential amino acids plus HMB yeah, 50 percent.

Jason Vaught: HMB as a metabolite of Leucine. Correct. Is that the correct way to say that?

Dr. Rick Kreider: Yes, so there’s a lot of people who think as long as you can have Leucine, you’ll probably be OK. The studies have looked at it usually having an essential amino acid plus HMB and in that population to prevent Sarcopenia in beginning Training is when HMB thinks it has a greater effect. It really doesn’t help athletes unless you’re doing something where it’s going to be in an event where they know they’re not going to get enough calories, lose muscle mass like your race across America or something like that when they would be going every day. It might help them other than just protein, creatine, things like that.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, that’s great, I think that, you know, I deal with the general public and so the general public a lot of times is coming in at a deficit. So, they’re not willing to increase their protein to the levels that they need to be because they just don’t want to eat that much food or drink that many protein shakes and so a lot of times, we have to look at things with the understanding that we’re not we’re not working with the optimal human being here. We’re working with somebody who’s a step behind and may not be willing to come up to that level. So, things like you said, essential amino acids and HMB and those can be very helpful for people that are overtraining under nourishing and the like. So that’s great in your book-

Dr Rick Kreider: Because as we get older, we tend to cut those things out, especially if we’re gaining weight as we try to really cut out dairy products and meat and things like that thinking we’re going to get healthy by being more vegan [unclear] you just can’t get enough protein amino acids. So, in those populations, it seems even just a little bit an extra quality serving a day helps those individuals.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, I love the way you put it in those populations, which I know is a very researcher way to state things. But, you know, we categorize everybody into one just giant population instead of speaking to specific groups and so that’s great. How much of your research actually will just hone in on a specific population besides speaking to the general audience?

Dr. Rick Kreider: A large part of our studies have been done either in specific athletes from a sports nutrition standpoint or in population. So, for example, we did all of our studies [unclear] it’s middle age women who are usually overweight and high risk. So, we did a lot of that. We’ve done studies in elderly and then my background’s clinical physiology. So, we’ve done studies in patient populations for rehab. So, example, right now we’re doing a study on individuals who are overweight, prediabetic, [unclear] kind of a metabolic syndrome type of- which is most of us, in fact, study in women, we first excluded people with all of these problems because they had to be healthy and it was like we can’t get any [unclear]. So, we better start doing [unclear] it’s the reality and then we come down to hypertensives and thyroid conditions and all these different conditions, and so there are specific exercise and nutritional guidelines for each of these populations and even some form of recommendations for them.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, it’s super important that the listeners understand that if you’re dealing with or you’re looking at a study from a middle-aged woman with prior health issues and you’re a twenty-one-year-old male. You can only look at that research and the context in which it’s put and not specifically for you. I could go on rants all day because I’m so involved on social media and just the misconceptions about where the research goes after it’s published. But this is your podcast and I won’t do that. Anything specific in the book that you want to talk about before we close up that you think the listeners should know before they definitely go read the book?

Dr Rick Kreider: Well, I think you go in to get an overview of nutrition and health and exercise and what’s really cool about the book is it’s for everybody. It’s for a beginner through intermediate person who train a little bit or wants to improve their performance in training, which of the elite athletes and at the end of the book, which we have a lot of the diet and exercise programs and little timing programs and things we’ve used successfully with athletes over the years, as well as in our studies on weight loss in women and things that are there for folks to put programs together, not only for themselves. 

When I teach my students in my class, they now have a guide for personal training to develop programs for people who they may serve as clients with. So, I think we try to develop not just an academic book to talk to the other scientists, but to write it in a style that everybody can understand. Is interested in health and fitness and that can apply either for themselves or their clients and so that’s been very successful as far as the classes and students and professionals using it. But I also have a lot of folks that just were interested in nutrition, one authoritative place to look at what is what. and, you know, there’s got to be a lot of bias with it and then they can make interpretation shows and have some guidance to do. The other thing is we have a great way to put it, ideas for nutrition guidelines in there, which is a great resource. OK, let’s take the exam.

Jason Vaught: I just thoroughly enjoyed it, and I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and I’m just as much of a fan and just as excited today as I was 20 years ago, and so reading your book was a bit of a firehose for me and so going through it made my brain just activated and went all over the place. But it really is a resource in that you don’t have to read the book cover to cover. Right. You can find what’s interesting and dive into that particular subject.

Dr Rick Kreider: And a question earlier about how do you know if that study comes out? What’s cool is you can just look that up, Vitamin E oh it’s going to do this or that. You look up, you get so much literature and it’s easy to understand this is what we know. This is the basic recommendation and then you can put whatever you content and so we have it as a resource, like, yeah, it’s like a supplement review you can find these things and then also, what does the society say about -what is the recommendations from dietetics and they see a sea of other organizations out there who have position stands on these things. It gives you some ideas about how to apply it and whether it’s worth a try.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, yeah and that’s it’s important that the listeners know that in your book. It’s not just your research, which there’s a lot of in there, but you are welcoming of other researchers’ results and so you’re including those as well rather than just your own, which is important.

Dr Rick Kreider: Yeah, we want it to want to be a broad overview of what we know so you can make informed decisions, which is fascinating, you know, there’s so much data out there and even people in our field don’t realize all the health data exercise that we merged together, what we do or don’t know. So, it is mind opening. Wow. I had no idea of these studies and I’ve had many a few students and other colleagues use it for classes I never knew about and we were trying to do a real [unclear] review and see what we know about it right now.

Jason Vaught: Yeah, that’s wonderful. Well, I won’t hold up too much of your time. I know we’re a little bit farther into this than we had planned, but is there anything that you wanted to speak to the listeners about before we let you go?

Dr. Rick Kreider: The only thing I can give is a piece of exercise and nutrition plays a huge role in health and performance, rehabilitation.

Jason Vaught: How can they get the book if they want it?

Dr. Rick Kreider: Amazon.com, it’s probably easier worldwide. We actually have it in Italian and Spanish and Portuguese now as well. We have Amazon.com or exercise and sportnutrition.com is their website.

Jason Vaught: Great. Dr. Kreider, it’s been an honor, to be honest and I am very grateful for your work and I look forward to speaking with you and working with you in the future and keeping up with everything that you have going on.
Dr. Rick Kreider: Well, thank you very much, Jason. We appreciate all you’re doing in your podcasts. You give great information for people to make informed decisions.

Jason Vaught: Thank you very much, sir. We hope you have a great day.

You can learn from the expert himself by taking the official Sports Nutrition Certification Course which uses the curriculum from Dr. Kreider’s book Essentials of Exercise and Sports Nutrition.