Dr. John 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. John 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. John 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: 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. John Jaquish, conventional
Weight Lifting is a Waste of Time
as is traditional cardiovascular
training like biking or running. Dr. John Jaquish is also a research professor
at Rushmore University, and he speaks around the world. Dr. John Jaquish, thank
you so much for joining me today.
Dr. John 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. John 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. John Jaquish: She was in her 60s.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John Jaquish: Negative 2.5. I read the diagnosis.
Dr. Weitz: Okay.
Dr. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John Jaquish: No.
Dr. Weitz: No?
Dr. John 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. John 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. John Jaquish: No.
Dr. Weitz: Now, when patients get loaded on these machines, do you start at a
lower level and gradually increase it?
Dr. John 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. John 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. John 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. John Jaquish: Right.
Dr. Weitz: But he’s in that short range of motion, he may actually be increasing
his bone density.
Dr. John 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. John 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. John Jaquish: Really nothing.
Dr. Weitz: What about, say, balance training, since we know a lot of people fall
and break a hip.
Dr. John Jaquish: The balance training is a part of the OsteoStrong protocol.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, it is?
Dr. John 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. John Jaquish: No, they do it at OsteoStrong.
Dr. Weitz: Oh, okay. What kind of balance exercises do you use?
Dr. John 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. John Jaquish: Yeah.
Dr. Weitz: What do you think about that alone as improving bone density?
Dr. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John Jaquish: Everyone will get it. Everyone who listens to this will be
like, Oh, okay. Yeah, that would be obvious.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. John 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. John Jaquish: It’s not that simple.
Dr. Weitz: Yes, and the science changes over time and-
Dr. John 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. John Jaquish: I can show you 50 studies that’ll give you exactly that.
Dr. Weitz: Where they use the five rep max?
Dr. John 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. John Jaquish: Car weighs 3,500 pounds. It doesn’t mean they can bench press
3,500 pounds.
Dr. Weitz: Right.
Dr. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John Jaquish: Oh, you did read the book? Okay.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah.
Dr. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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 Bar
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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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. John Jaquish: Is what?
Dr. Weitz: You’re breathing oxygen. So we have oxygen?
Dr. John Jaquish: Right.
Dr. Weitz: So oxygen-
Dr. John Jaquish: We do not [crosstalk 00:44:38]-
Dr. Weitz: In at least oxidative stress, we know oxidative stress occurs in our
system.
Dr. John Jaquish: Right, but the least amount would be better.
Dr. Weitz: Sure.
Dr. John 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. John Jaquish: Yeah. A, exercise is inflammatory.
Dr. Weitz: Of course, exactly.
Dr. John Jaquish: You can’t avoid it all, but-
Dr. Weitz: Very oxidative, very acidic.
Dr. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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 Bar
, 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. John Jaquish: [inaudible 00:47:47].
Dr. Weitz: Okay, Dr. Jaquish. Any final thoughts you have for our listeners or
viewers?
Dr. John 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. John 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. John 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. John 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.