Dr. Jaquish became interested in improving bone density when his mother was diagnosed with osteoporosis in her mid to late 60s and she was worried about having to give up playing tennis and hiking with no way to reverse her condition. Dr. Jaquish sought out a group in society that was able to build bone density and he found that gymnasts were most effective at this because of the impact of jumping and then landing on the ground. Gymnasts sometimes impact the ground with up to 10 times their bodyweight. But nobody wants older people to go through high impact exercise, so Dr. Jaquish developed some machines that can provide the benefit of high impact without the risk. His mother had a T-score of -2.5 and after 18 months of using these machines, she was back to a T-score of just under zero and she has maintained that till now when she is in her mid 80s.

Full Transcript

Dr. Weitz: Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates. And to learn more, check out my website, drweitz .com. Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast. Hello, Rational Wellness Podcasters, thank you so much for joining me again today. For those of you who enjoy listening to our podcast, please give us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. And for those who’d like to see a video version, please go to my YouTube page. And if you go to my website, drweitz.com, you can find detailed show notes and a complete transcript.

Today our topic is, how to improve bone density with osteogenic loading with Dr. John Jaquish. We have recently focused on osteoporosis in episode 164 with Dr. Lani Simpson and we explored some of the most effective diet, lifestyle, supplements, and medications for improving bone density and bone health. Osteoporosis is a major health issue affecting 44 million Americans over the age of 50. Osteoporosis can lead to fractures that can be disastrous for our health, especially hip fractures which result in death in 24% within one year of the fracture.

                                            Dr. John Jaquish, our guest today has a PhD in biomedical engineering, and he’s the inventor of OsteoStrong, which are wellness centers utilizing medical devices that can reverse osteoporosis and create more powerful fracture resistant athletes. He’s recently partnered with Tony Robbins to help market his centers. Members go through a four device circuit that takes approximately 10 minutes and done once per week has been shown to significantly increase bone density up to 14% in one year. Most other scientific studies have failed to show a consistent increase in bone density with conventional weight training. In fact, according to Dr. Jaquish, conventional weight lifting is a waste of time as is traditional cardiovascular training like biking or running. Dr. Jaquish is also a research professor at Rushmore University, and he speaks around the world. Dr. Jaquish, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dr. Jaquish: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Weitz: So maybe you can start by telling us about how your desire to help your mother got you started on this topic of improving bone density.

Dr. Jaquish: I did it for my mother, yes. She was diagnosed with osteoporosis, and she was pretty distraught because she was prescribed some medications and she didn’t like the side effects she read about. Neither did I. But she said, “This is just going to totally limit my life.” She felt like she was too young to just sit at home and watch everybody run past the window, because it was going to be something that she believed would change the quality of her life just for fear of fracture.

Dr. Weitz: How old was your mom at that time?

Dr. Jaquish: She was in her 60s.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Dr. Jaquish: In mid-late 60s, but she was very active. She played tennis, and she hiked a lot. Not just walking around a yard, like 15-mile hikes.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Jaquish: Like a real hiker. So I saw her just having to go through the mental exercise of just giving up on everything she liked and I didn’t like that at all. So I said, maybe there’s a population out there that has figured out how to get their bone to respond. And by getting to bone respond past childhood, being able to really build a serious of amount of bone mass. And so I said, “Let me look into this.” Of course, she had nothing to do, so she was like, “Yeah, sure, go ahead.” And so I did, and I found those super responders is gymnast. They build bone density, very high levels. Now, they also fracture a lot of bones because they’re going through high impact. They hit the ground with sometimes 10 times their body weight.

Dr. Weitz: A lot of joint injuries too because my daughter was a gymnast from age four.

Dr. Jaquish: Sure, yeah. There’s probably… Some of your patients are probably past gymnast who have all kinds of lifetime injuries that they got when they were teenagers or even younger.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah. So there’s an unfortunate part of the sport, but it has allowed us to learn a lot. Unfortunately, the amount of research that has been compiled on high impact is plentiful. It’s in the thousands of studies. It’s very obvious what impact does. But of course, that’s the opposite of what’s recommended by most physicians. Most physicians say, “Well, resistance exercise is good.” It’s a really irresponsible recommendation because there’s no dosage associated with it. So aspirin is good for headaches. Well, how much? Five milligrams or 5,000? Well, five milligrams will do nothing, 5,000 will kill you. But 350, that works for almost everybody. So having a dosage associated with the recommendations are important. So when looking through all of the data, I thought nobody wants older people to go through high impact type exercise. But what if I were to create a series of medical devices that would give the benefit of high impact without the risks? So for example, being in an isolated position where I’m just in a position I would naturally absorb high impact. So I’m going to trip and fall. I’m not going to try and brace myself like this. I’m going to be about right here, 120 degree angle of inclusion from upper arm or lower arm. So if I’m in a position and I can brace for that impact, I can handle far more than my body weight, sometimes four or five. If we’re talking about my legs, 10 times my body weight. And as soon as I made that discovery that this was just through trial and error that even untrained athletes could hold five, six times their body weight, I thought, wow. We can build a device that will trigger bone growth in the body based on the process that’s supposed to happen physiologically but doesn’t because of our avoidance of high impact. So I prototyped these devices. I treated my mother with the prototypes. Within 18 months, she had the bones of a 30-year-old and she was back to a T-score of just under zero. She never quite got to zero. She’s hovering around there now and she’s in her mid 80s.

Dr. Weitz: Her original T-score was what?

Dr. Jaquish: Negative 2.5. I read the diagnosis.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah. And so within 18 months, it was totally reversed. So like I said, there’s thousands of studies that talk about the force that’s associated with impact, but then the studies conclude, but these forces aren’t practical for anyone other than high performance athlete. Untrue, it’s just the way they’re applied. So that’s what the devices at OsteoStrong do. They are incredibly effective. They’re incredibly quick. It takes just a few minutes to go through the protocol and you can only go through it once a week, because bone has a very different metabolic rate than musculature or your lungs or whatever, from a different kind of exercise. We don’t call it exercise.

Dr. Weitz: So are they going through a short range of motion or are they just holding one position?

Dr. Jaquish: Well, that’s a great question. A lot of people who don’t really look at the technology thoroughly make a mistake and call it isometrics. It is not, because there is a range of motion, but the range of motion comes from the compression of bone.

Dr. Weitz: Aren’t you compressing the joint still?

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah, oh yeah, of course. And then the joints adapt also based on what we learn from the Benjamin and Ralphs study in 1996. You put axial compression through a joint, which is where the joint is the most optimized, and you grow… There’s fibrocartilage growth that thickens the tendons and ligaments around the joint capsule, so making the joint stronger, more powerful. And not that even somebody who’s bone on bone, there’s still going to be bone on bone, but they’re going to have a better support of joint and that can cut down on their pain.

Dr. Weitz: Now it’s not really physiological in a sense that, normally, you would sit down and you would stand up, or you would push yourself away. You’re normally using your muscles through a range of motion when you’re doing activities and weight training is really designed to duplicate some of those normal activities. But this is-

Dr. Jaquish: Not at all. When you move something… If you watch movers, guys who professionally move stuff, they don’t use a full range of motion. They’re trying to be efficient with the way they move their body. They’re not going to squat all the way down when they go to pick up the piano to make sure they get a full range of motion. That is not how we functionally move at all. But if you look at a runner, if you look at a sprinter, you use seven degrees of flection behind your knee where you have 180 degrees available. Why don’t you use 180 when you sprint? Because you wouldn’t go anywhere. That’s why. So it’s a full range. Now, full range has its place for sure.

Dr. Weitz: If you were a football player and you were kneeling down. And when you’re coming up to block somebody, you’re going through starting maybe in a deep squat and coming up and pushing.

Dr. Jaquish: No.

Dr. Weitz: No?

Dr. Jaquish: No, you use your strongest range only. I train over 10 NFL players with my other product. And no, you don’t… Full range of motion is nonsensical to athletes and to functional movement. Now, sometimes we go to a deeper range of motion, like getting off the toilet for activities of daily living for elderly people.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Jaquish: You have that discussion with your patients all day long. Because somebody who has a knee injury, getting off the toilet, it got a little harder. They’re talking to you about it, how do I improve the joint health? How do I… Activities of daily living full range of motion. But if you’re looking at performance movements, not at all

Dr. Weitz: Interesting.

Dr. Jaquish: No.

Dr. Weitz: Now, when patients get loaded on these machines, do you start at a lower level and gradually increase it?

Dr. Jaquish: The computer system is actually capturing their output, so it’s whatever force they create. We measure the force that they create. So nothing is being placed on the body. The body’s creating the force and compressing its own bone mass and joints.

Dr. Weitz: Uh-huh (affirmative).

Dr. Jaquish: That way, we let… Instead of trying to have some software system that’s trying to outsmart your injury potential which has never worked in human history, we use neural inhibition as the limiter. So if something becomes uncomfortable, even unconsciously uncomfortable, your body starts to shut the muscles down. And so you get to the maximum output every time. And as the bone mass adapts week by week, that number goes up and up and up.

Dr. Weitz: So can the average 70-year-old person produce four times their body weight in force?

Dr. Jaquish: Sometimes they have to build up to it. 70, usually, they’re right around the minimum dose response, because it’s 4.2 actually in the hip joint that it takes to begin growing bone. But they usually see that within two or three weeks.

Dr. Weitz: It’s interesting. I’m used to seeing people… Every once in a while, you see somebody at the gym when the gyms were open doing a leg press, and they’re just doing a really short range of motion and it’s funny. I was like, Oh man, that dude is kidding himself. He’s not doing anything.

Dr. Jaquish: Right.

Dr. Weitz: But he’s in that short range of motion, he may actually be increasing his bone density.

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah, it’s possible. It takes a lot of weight to do it. Usually, when people are doing that, they’re just fooling themselves into thinking that they’re really strong.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Jaquish: You know what I mean? People are like, “Oh yeah, is that what they’re doing?” And I’m like, “I don’t think they know what they’re doing.” But could they be getting a bone density benefit? Yes, they could be.

Dr. Weitz: So for participants who go through your OsteoStrong centers, they do that once a week. What other types of exercise do you recommend for them?

Dr. Jaquish: Really nothing.

Dr. Weitz: What about, say, balance training, since we know a lot of people fall and break a hip.

Dr. Jaquish: The balance training is a part of the OsteoStrong protocol.

Dr. Weitz: Oh, it is?

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah, because it kind of goes hand in hand. You want to… There’s avoiding fracture by avoiding the fall. So that is part of the protocol.

Dr. Weitz: So do they do that at the OsteoStrong Center or they do balance exercises at home?

Dr. Jaquish: No, they do it at OsteoStrong.

Dr. Weitz: Oh, okay. What kind of balance exercises do you use?

Dr. Jaquish: It depends. That protocol changes a little bit. You want them to feel slightly off balance, but you don’t want them to actually fall. So there’s a bar in front of them that they hang on to, and they stand on a vibratory platform, a whole body vibration, by the way.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah.

Dr. Weitz: What do you think about that alone as improving bone density?

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah, that’s a falsehood, because… And that’s been disproven many times, There’s actually a great piece of research from a Canadian university that shows that vibration does nothing, basically, for bone density. It does plenty for balance. It does plenty for activating musculature especially in the deconditioned. But what they did when the first vibration platforms came out, I actually know the guy who came up with this scam. It really irritates me, because this is why when you come up with something new in physical medicine that it’s so scrutinized, because there’s so many scams out there. Alcohol and water, it was going to cure everything, except it really doesn’t do anything. So at least as far as any research goes, are we going to discover later that it does something else? Maybe.

                                            But thus far, nothing. What they did was they played a game with some of the mathematics of the acceleration. That’s what they would call it. They would always reference the acceleration, how the thing would go up and down. And it went up and down in whatever, 15 miles an hour and your body having… You put under that impact, you’re getting six times your body weight. But the amplitude is so minimal you’re basically just compressing your skin. It’s less than… I think it’s a millimeter at the most. Most of them are half a millimeter. So it’s not getting into your bone because all of your other tissues are absorbing that force.  So when it comes to your bone, your bone’s not getting anything.  So they basically just lie with math and said, “This is going to increase bone density.” But then whenever it was trialed by somebody other than a company, it didn’t do anything

Dr. Weitz: Now, what goes into fracture risk is not just bone density, but we also have bone quality, the ability of bone to flex, for example. Do your machines improve bone quality as well as bone density?

Dr. Jaquish: Yes. That’s harder to measure. Now, ours… OsteoStrong focuses mostly on trabecular bone. So you’ll see a bone density change within six months or a year, and then you’ll see an even greater change because, typically a DEXA scan is looking at the outer cortex, not the outer cortex really and the inner. The middle of the bone is where the newer bone cells are, and they’re the ones that are absorbing minerals. So the outer cortex is the old bone. It’s not dead tissue just yet, but it’s right before it’s metabolized. So it’s compact, and it’s on the outside. It’s the strongest part of the bone, but that’s not where the growth happens.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I guess, according to Dr. Simpson, I haven’t performed this test yet, but some of the labs that do the bone density can also give you a trabecular bone score, which is supposed to be a measure of bone quality.

Dr. Jaquish: Yes, trabecular is much more in the quality category.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. I guess if they have a certain software, they can compute this.

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah.

Dr. Weitz: So I looked at some of the literature related to being able to increase bone density. I did see a trial called the LIFTMOR trial in 2017.

Dr. Jaquish: Out of Australia?

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. It showed that heavy weight training using five rep max, squat, deadlift, overhead press plus they had them jump onto a chin up bar and then drop down, did improve bone density.

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah. The only thing that did anything was falling off the chin up bar, because that’s where they’re getting the impact. That’s where they’re getting… They’re hitting the ground. Because no one’s… We already know and it’s been shown in multiple studies of very high quality, and this study was… It was more of a exercise science study, so it was pretty low quality, very low sample size, not a lot of controls. The methods section was not well-documented. Nutrition wasn’t even recorded. So okay, it’s a typical exercise science study. Because I don’t like holding studies to a standard of what we would see in therapy or what we would see with something you find in the European Journal of Sports Medicine necessarily, because usually it’s a smaller study that stimulates a bigger one. But having said that, we know 4.2 multiples bodyweight is what’s required. We know that from big studies, awesome studies that were published in top journals. And so they added impact in with a bunch of weight lifting and they say, weightlifting works. Well, we could do something health-focused with cocaine users and then say, cocaine makes you healthy. No, it doesn’t. It gives you permanent cardiac damage every time you screw around with it. So it’s just one of those things where-

Dr. Weitz: That’s a bit of a stretch for an analogy.

Dr. Jaquish: Everyone will get it. Everyone who listens to this will be like, Oh, okay. Yeah, that would be obvious.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Jaquish: There’s a great study that was done for basically comedic purposes for researchers where they determined that jumping out of an airplane with a parachute versus not having a parachute with you does not increase your chances of survival. So parachutes are useless. I’m not kidding, they actually did this. You read the conclusion and it’s just like, you would think people were just jumping out of airplanes and just tumbling while they land. And it’s like, I guess you can just jump off of anything and you won’t get hurt. But when you read the methods section, they did this study while the plane was on the ground. So parachute or no parachute, it didn’t even open. Jump from the airplane to the asphalt, to the tarmac.

                                            The point was, this is how people get misled. This is why when you read something in even like the New York Times, the health reporter isn’t really familiar with what they’re talking about. They read the wrong sentence and misinterpret it and then that becomes the new reality for most people. It’s like, are vegetables good or are vegetables bad?  Well, it’s just not that simple.  Sorry.  How many patients come into your office and they really want health summarized into a meme, a sentence fragment? And it’s like, I’m sorry, it’s just not that simple. You should probably… They still write books for a reason.  It’s because memes don’t tell you the whole story and usually they’re wrong, right?  How many times… I bet you every day you tell somebody, you should read this book or you should read that book. Right?

Dr. Weitz: Sure.

Dr. Jaquish: It’s not that simple.

Dr. Weitz: Yes, and the science changes over time and-

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah. So I think the LIFTMOR study, it’s like they proved my point. It’s like, Oh, we’re going to do all this weight training. And then we’re going to do this thing that’s just like osteogenic loading and then say weight training works.

Dr. Weitz: So you think if they did the five rep max, squat, deadlift, press, it wouldn’t show an increase in bone density?

Dr. Jaquish: I can show you 50 studies that’ll give you exactly that.

Dr. Weitz: Where they use the five rep max?

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah. Maybe not all of them are five. Maybe some of them were 10 reps, some of them were one rep. It doesn’t matter. You know that 4.2 is a minimum dose response. You know that some of the strongest people in the world don’t squat with 4.2 times their body weight. You also know that a leg sled, you’re only getting 40% of the weight because it’s at an angle and most of the weight is being driven into the floor. So people are like, leg press, a thousand pounds. And I’m like, okay. People push cars when their cars run out of gas.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Jaquish: Car weighs 3,500 pounds. It doesn’t mean they can bench press 3,500 pounds.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Jaquish: They just got to break the inertia, and it’ll just go on flat ground. You can do it with 100 pounds, 50 pounds.

Dr. Weitz: Right. So you also think cardiovascular exercise is a waste of time?

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah. So the title of my book is Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time: So Is Cardio and There’s a Better Way to Have the Body You Want. Now, there’s a lot of caveats to that and I wanted a title that got attention and it sure did. Yeah. It’s a Wall Street Journal bestseller, USA Today bestseller and also an Amazon bestseller. Not that that really means much.

Dr. Weitz: No, I think that’s a big deal these days. It really-

Dr. Jaquish: What people do is they’ll write a book and then put it in the category of gardening tool buyers guides 2020, and then it’s like, it’s a best seller. Amazon’s got a lot of categories. But I actually was number one for I think… It’s only been out three weeks. I think we’ve been number one the entire three weeks, including the first hour we put it up on Amazon for the subject of weight training, for the subject of fitness and exercise, or maybe it’s exercise and fitness, however they word it. So it was big everywhere. So I sold tens of thousands of copies.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Jaquish: And soon, we may be past 50,000 at this point. So what-

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, it certainly got my attention and I’ve been lifting weights for more than 40 years.

Dr. Jaquish: Sure. So just very briefly because I don’t want to run us out of time and I know you have a limit.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Jaquish: Weightlifting is a waste of time, because what I demonstrated was that what you can hold here and what you hold here is seven times difference. So if you have seven-fold greater the capacity, why would you ever lift with a static weight?

Dr. Weitz: But the muscles used change. There’s more pecs at the bottom. You switch over to the front delts and you switch to a lot of tricep at the end. So if you’re not going all the way down, you’re not fully working your pecs, I would say. Sounds like you disagree with that, but…

Dr. Jaquish: All the way down. I know-

Dr. Weitz: Whatever range of motion you’re going to have. I usually don’t go below this plane but-

Dr. Jaquish: We use a full range of motion. OsteoStrong doesn’t, but in the book, which is mostly about why I departed from weightlifting. I always thought it was inefficient. It just bugged me. Every time I would lift weights, I’d be like, there’s a better way to do this.

Dr. Weitz: I don’t know. I just lifted weight this morning, I felt great after doing it.

Dr. Jaquish: You’ll feel even better if you do it right. Physiologically… So I take it you have not read the book?

Dr. Weitz: I did.

Dr. Jaquish: Oh, you did read the book? Okay.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Jaquish: So you know that every time we try or every time scientists try variable resistance, it grows more muscle and builds more strength than standard weightlifting. That was chapter two.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah. So when you have the weight change as you move-

Dr. Weitz: Right. You’re saying it gets harder as you go through the range, so you want the resistance to increase as you go through the range?

Dr. Jaquish: Well, no, it’s easier when you go through the range of motion, so bench press…

Dr. Weitz: You can handle more load. Right. So you want the load to increase? Yeah.

Dr. Jaquish: Right, right. So you really want high load where you’re capable of handling a lower load to still exhaust the muscle, but also be easier on the joint because the joint grows based on the force you place on it, close to lockout, back to the Benjamin and Ralphs study in 1996. So the joints don’t need a full range. They need impact range which is very small. The rest of the musculature definitely benefits from a full range of motion. So we do use the full range of motion, and especially when it comes to sarcoplasmic growth. There’s two types of muscle growth, myofibrillar and sarcoplasmic.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah. People have toyed with this idea for a number of years. There were some selectorized machines that had a funny shape cam to try to change the resistance during different ranges. I’ve certainly seen people doing, say, a bench press with chains on. And as they lift more, the chains get heavier as they go towards the lockout and even using bands. So people have been toying with this idea of changing the resistance as you go through the range.

Dr. Jaquish: They have been. Typically, they break world records if they do it right. That’s really how Westside Barbell… That’s the secret to their success, is using different methods and they have very complicated apparatus which… It’s one gym, and there’s more than 200 world records broken out of that one gym. One gym, one location.

Dr. Weitz: Where is that gym?

Dr. Jaquish: It’s a suburb in Ohio, and I always… forget the name of the town. But yeah. So they were doing it and it’s kind of anecdotal information. But I approached it from the data I had where I could demonstrate that somebody’s so much more powerful in the impact of greater range of motion. And so the previous approaches to variance would be like, I got X at the bottom and 1.2X at the top, where I’m like, no, no, no, what we need is X at the bottom and 5X at the top. I think the 13th study I described in the book in the Variable Resistance chapter, in chapter two, they demonstrate how the greater degree of variance that they tested… Now, they didn’t go quite as high as I did because I had the bone density data to know exactly how far to go. They didn’t. So they demonstrated that the more variance and less actual weight you’re lifting… They’d have weights and then they’d add bands on a bar.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Jaquish: But the less weight and the more bands, the more growth, because they had a higher variance curve, because it is a very steep curve what we have. It’s not linear at all. It goes like this, because it’s not X at the bottom. Let’s say we’re using 5X at the top, it’s not 2.5 in the middle. It’s X, 1.5X, 5X at the top. So we’re designed the whole product, X3 product to get as close as possible to those curves with very simple and elegant design.

Dr. Weitz: And so you also think cardio is a waste of time as well?

Dr. Jaquish: It depends on what your goals are. If your goal is to be a distance runner? No, it’s great.

Dr. Weitz: What about overall health?

Dr. Jaquish: You get a better cardiovascular benefit from strength training, and there’s more than 100 studies that say that. And the meta analysis, it references. The 100 studies is referenced in the book as well as a few others, some of the highlights. It really shows you can build as good or better cardiovascular health with strength training. Now, the real reason I say cardio is a waste of time is because most people’s goal is losing weight. And when you do sustained cardio, and this research has been out there for 40 years. When you do you sustained cardio, and what I mean is over 20 minutes at a similar heart rate. So as in

Dr. Weitz: Low-intensity steady-state exercise?

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah, that’s right. You surge cortisol and you keep it high for a long period of time. So cortisol does two things, it gets rid of muscle, and it ensures that you keep body fat longer and don’t metabolize body fat and instead metabolize muscular tissue. So you’re losing muscle and you’re preserving your body fat. That seems to be the opposite of what people want, is just staying fatter longer, which is why when you look at distance runners, they’re skinny fat. They’re not lean. You look at sprinters and they’re lean. I know they might be bigger muscular wise. That might not be everybody’s goal. But if you want to be a distance runner, you got to run distance and your body will adapt. You also have to consider the fact that the body is making decisions based on the environment it’s being placed in, like with all exercise. So if you’re trying to show your body that you want to go long distances, your central nervous system is like an engineering team. So it realizes you’re trying to become an economy car. So what do we know about economy cars; lightweight frame. So you start losing bone density. People who do a lot of cardio, they lose bone density and so they have a lighter frame, which makes sense. Cortisol is going to increase the storage, as in preserved body fat. Because if you want to go long distances, you got to be efficient. You’ve got to carry a lot of fuel with you. So that becomes body fat. You don’t see many V12 engines in economy cars. So it’s going to shrink the engine too, so you’re going to lose muscle. So you lose muscle, you keep all your body fat, you lose bone density. That has a tendency of shortening people’s lives. I just think it’s a mess. Don’t do it. I can tell you’re loving this. The myth that strength athletes have for cardiovascular endurance really has to do with what is the test and is it the right test? So for example, have you’ve been to Munich Airport? You got to run up and down the stairs four times and go through immigration, get your checked bag and bring that through an examination stall where they never really examine your bag. They just wave you through. But you’re running up and down stairs four times. It’s crazy, terrible design of an airport, which is really weird, because the Germans design everything great except for the Munich Airport. So I’m with this guy who probably weighs 100 pounds less than me. I’m 240 pounds. He’s a really slim guy, and we’re running up and down the stairs because we’re trying to get a connecting flight to Moscow. I’m out of breath after running up four flights of stairs. And, “Oh man, your cardio is really not very good.” And I said, “No, my legs are four times bigger than yours. Blood has to pump to my quadriceps, which are tremendous. Yours are not.” So it’s like, does the Lamborghini burn more fuel than the Prius? Yeah, it does. It doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with the gas, it’s just a different machine. And so that’s kind of where that myth comes from, that a strength athlete won’t have as good a cardio health.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Dr. Jaquish: And like I said, there’s 100 studies to back that up.

Dr. Weitz: What nutritional approach did you think are most effective for improving bone mass?

Dr. Jaquish: High levels of animal protein, really. I know that there’s a meta analysis-

Dr. Weitz: Won’t too much animal protein leach calcium out of the bones?

Dr. Jaquish: No, never been shown in a real research study, but it has been… So there’s a meta analysis that compares vegan and vegetarian nutrition to a more what they call balanced diet, which it’s all epidemiology research. So what do people eat, and what do they tell you they eat might not be exactly-

Dr. Weitz: Food frequency questionnaires which are often unreliable.

Dr. Jaquish: Right. Well, it’s like you have when a patient walks in and you ask them how much they weigh. No, you weigh them, because they won’t tell you. They’ll tell you what they weighed in high school. They do it. It’s wishful thinking. It’s like, well, I’m on a diet. So in two weeks, I’m going to weigh this. Yeah, but that’s not what you’re weighing now.

Dr. Weitz: So besides a high animal protein diet, is there a thing else you recommend? Do you recommend green vegetables, vitamin D, vitamin K, calcium, magnesium?

Dr. Jaquish: Because of the inflammation… So I look at a lot of vegetable… Did you read the nutrition section of the book?

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Jaquish: Okay. So you know I prefer carnivore nutrition. Yeah, heavy animal protein. The vitamin K and the vitamin D, you’re getting it. You’re getting a lot of… Now, there’s a difference between grass-fed meats and farm factory raised.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Jaquish: You always get the same… Throwing little organ meats in there pretty much gives you every vitamin and mineral. I usually have liver once a week. I don’t emphasize it as much as Dr. Paul Saladino. He eats organ meats daily. I think that’s… Ultimately, if you look at a cow, it’s got 500 pounds of muscle meat and two pounds of organ meat.

Dr. Weitz: Right.

Dr. Jaquish: So if you eat in that proportion, it’s a 1:250 pound ratio. That’s not a lot of organ meat. But it’s there. So yeah. The people who do the best to build the most bone mass, they have a lot of animal protein. And like I said, oxalates and vegetables are inflammatory. So we know the lower your inflammation is, the more your bone mass can build. And so I really don’t recommend many vegetables at all. It doesn’t mean people can’t eat them and it’s not like an either/or. The NFL guys and the NBA guys, I talked to them about carnivore nutrition. I talked to their nutritionist about carnivore nutrition. I sent them all copies of the book. A lot of them, I sent advanced copies of the book because I even got the Miami Heat’s endorsement on the back of the book. They’ve shifted most of these athletes to about 70% animal protein as opposed to… The standard Western diet is 70% plant-based. So it’s really that observation. It’s funny, it’s 70% plant-based right now. We were just laughing about epidemiology, we don’t really know much from it, but we know what people buy. And chances are, if they buy it, they eat it. But 70% of calories [inaudible 00:42:40] purchased are plant-based. Now plant-based is also a Twinkie. That came from plants, which… Oreo cookies. I know vegans will eat three or four sleeves of Oreos right in front of me. And they’re like, “Well, they’re vegan. They don’t have any…” I’m like, “Yeah, but that’s like poison.” It’s not like they have one, they just eat them in a box. But they think because it’s vegan, it’s healthy. So you got to look at what the building blocks in the body are. I really pushed towards carnivore nutrition when I realized how much protein somebody needs to build muscle, and muscle and bone have a synergistic relationship. So even though I was past my days of bone density development, but I still consult on all the research projects of which there are multiple ones going on at different universities focused on the OsteoStrong devices. Yeah. The ones who respond the best are the ones that have the least inflammation and focus on driving muscle. The forerunner to my chapter on nutrition-

Dr. Weitz: Aren’t a lot of phytonutrients found in plant foods anti-inflammatory?

Dr. Jaquish: So the antioxidants, let’s start with the antioxidants because we’ve been studying that for a long time. You don’t need an antioxidant if you’re not oxidizing. So the idea that I’m going to poison myself and then take an antidote too.

Dr. Weitz: But you’re breathing oxygen, right?

Dr. Jaquish: Is what?

Dr. Weitz: You’re breathing oxygen. So we have oxygen?

Dr. Jaquish: Right.

Dr. Weitz: So oxygen-

Dr. Jaquish: We do not [crosstalk 00:44:38]-

Dr. Weitz: In at least oxidative stress, we know oxidative stress occurs in our system.

Dr. Jaquish: Right, but the least amount would be better.

Dr. Weitz: Sure.

Dr. Jaquish: So yeah, I don’t-

Dr. Weitz: [crosstalk 00:44:52] probably the osteoclastic activity probably involves… Because we have the osteoblastic, osteoclastic balance that occurs in bone where bone is being broken down and rebuilt. I’m sure the osteoblastic activity probably involves oxidative stress as part of breaking down the bone, but that’s part of the growth as well, because you want to get rid of the bad bone.

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah. A, exercise is inflammatory.

Dr. Weitz: Of course, exactly.

Dr. Jaquish: You can’t avoid it all, but-

Dr. Weitz: Very oxidative, very acidic.

Dr. Jaquish: Nutritional inflammatories become chronic, because also people eat all the time. So I also recommend time restricted eating. So I only… Right now, I’m eating five meals in a week. So I do a 72 hour of no food period of time, three days. And then I’ll eat one meal a day the rest of the days. So I go nothing in my system and that’s to take down all the inflammation, allow autophagy to happen. I see my scars disappearing. I got a lot of scars and they’re metabolizing [crosstalk 00:46:15].

Dr. Weitz: Why do you have so many scars?

Dr. Jaquish: I guess I was part of that generation rode motorcycles without helmets [crosstalk 00:46:27] and got ahold of the farm rifle and maybe got hit with ejecting brass a couple of times and burned myself-

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Dr. Jaquish: … [crosstalk 00:46:42] I understand that. Yeah. Fireworks, punched through a car window. When a car rolled over, I was the Terminator thinking that that wouldn’t cause any problems.

Dr. Weitz: Okay.

Dr. Jaquish: Yeah. Here’s one, you can probably see a little bit of the scarring on my arm. My fraternity letters are branded into my deltoid. So a very serious fraternity, a very good fraternity too. So this is like… You could see when I first started X3, it’s the only time I ever took pictures with my shirt off and then been doing that since then. But you can tell in the last two years that it used to have a [inaudible 00:47:34] on it. It was sticking off of my skin half a millimeter. It’s almost gone, and that’s been there 20 years.

Dr. Weitz: [inaudible 00:47:46].

Dr. Jaquish: [inaudible 00:47:47].

Dr. Weitz: Okay, Dr. Jaquish. Any final thoughts you have for our listeners or viewers?

Dr. Jaquish: Well, it depends. You know more about your listeners than I do. So what do you think that I can tell them? Yeah, [crosstalk 00:48:07] vegans or they’re going to be upset with me because I say eat carnivores? Do they look at their nutrition like it’s their religion? Because that’s not how you should look at anything.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I’m not sure who all my viewers are. So I know we have functional medicine practitioners, but we have educated viewers too. So I’m sure there are vegans. I’m sure there’s people who promote Mediterranean diet. I’m sure there’s people who promote paleo or carnivore.

Dr. Jaquish: I like the people who tell me that they’re doing hybrid nutrition between… They’re doing sort of keto and sort of Mediterranean. So they’re told bread is great and so are fats. So they just eat pizza. Yeah.

Dr. Weitz: Yeah, that’s good.

Dr. Jaquish: One of the sad things about the internet is it’s really shining the light on the fact that people want the news that they want. They don’t want the news that’s actually right. So with nutrition research, there are people who are furious with me because I tell them to stop eating sugar and carbohydrates. You can apply carbohydrates in a very intelligent way when it comes to strength training. And if you really want carbohydrates, the time is, time very carefully around your workout and you can get away with it and actually grow more muscle. I described that in the book, but did you read the hyperplasia section?

Dr. Weitz: Yeah.

Dr. Jaquish: Yes. I say that and I get just hatred messages by usually chubby people with little baby arms. And it’s like, you should be looking for the right answer not the right answer for your hunger, because you’ve been following that one for a long time and you’re probably going to die a lot younger because of that. So there we are.

Dr. Weitz: There you are. I thank you for the time spent with us and providing us with some interesting perspectives on building bone and building muscle.