Coca-Cola, Bad Studies, & Vitamin Timing
Guest : Rebecca Washuta
JULY 26, 2025
Steve Washuta
Steven, welcome to Trulyfit. Welcome to the Trulyfit podcast, where we interview experts in fitness and health to expand our wisdom and wealth. I'm your host. Steve Washuta, co founder of truly fit and author of fitness business, 101, speaking of if anybody wants a copy of fitness business, 101, via PDF, I will send you that for free. And if you want a truly fit t shirt, reach out to me and I will send you that, not quite for free, but I will send you the truly fit t shirt with a physical hard copy of the book for basically just a shipping cost of some sort. So feel free to reach out to me. The best way is really just my email.
Steve Washuta
Stevewashuta@gmail.com could also social at truly fit that app. That email will be forwarded to me. Today I have on my sister Rebecca Washuta, who's a Licensed Dietitian. We talk about trending health topics. These episodes are fun. I look up four or five trending health things that are going on in their nutrition world, in the fitness world, in the health world, and my sister and I talk about our perspectives on these particular topics. For anybody who's not a regular listener of the podcast, there's basically three different iterations. There are solo episodes that are five to 15 minutes where I just rant like I'm talking right now.
Steve Washuta
There are episodes I have with my sister where we talk about trending fitness and health topics. And then there are interview episodes where I have somebody on who's an expert in the fitness or health related genres, medical genres as well. Come on to talk about their expertise. I'm going to be doing more of those now that my son is in daycare, but I've been doing much more of the trending health episodes and the solo episodes, given that they're easier time wise, it is funny when you haven't done something in a long time, like I don't record a lot of podcasts in the last maybe two months or so, you really forget all that it takes to record a podcast, because when you're doing it on a regular basis, when you're recording every week, or two or three episodes a week, everything is sort of set up already for the podcast.
Steve Washuta
But typically, to run a podcast, it's like you have these mic checks that you have to do. You have to make sure, if you have lighting, there's a lighting setup. You have to make sure the recording is working properly. Do you have a second computer in case something goes down? Do you have a second computer with potential questions on it or show notes on it, and then the editing process? And there's a lot that goes along with this. When you do it on a weekly basis, it's much easier when you don't you forget.
Steve Washuta
So of course, the sound isn't amazing on this episode. I think my mic was just a little bit lower than it should be at the time. It wasn't that my wasn't that my mic was off. It was just lower than it should be, and it was also then picking up some of my sister sound on the on the one end. So there's no major problems with the sound, but it's not as good as it usually is.
Steve Washuta
My apologies. It's been a while relearning this. It's not like hopping back on a bike starting a podcast. It's a lot of energy and effort to get back to what it was once was. But I appreciate everybody, and with no further ado, here's my sister, Rebecca and I. Rebecca, thank you for joining the truly fit podcast for listeners who have not heard you on previous episodes, why don't you give a quick rundown of what you do day to day in the fitness and health space before we jump into our trending health topics today. Yeah. Thanks
Rebecca Washuta
for having me. Great to be here. I am a board certified, State Licensed Dietitian. I have my own practice in Miami Beach, and I am metabolic health and longevity.
Steve Washuta
I was reviewing trending fitness and health topics, as I do before, just in general. Obviously, that's what we do for life. But before this podcast. And the first thing that popped up, which I thought was interesting, was Coca Cola may switch to use cane sugar. And I started to think about it, all the products that use cane sugar and don't use cane sugar, and how people talk about cane sugar.
Steve Washuta
And then I thought, I don't really know the major difference between why one would want to use cane sugar and the purposes of maybe supplanting whatever they're currently, currently using, let's say, the high fructose corn syrup, with cane sugar. But I did find this interesting, is that the director of food and medicine said there is no difference both high fructose corn syrup. This is a quote. Quote start the quote, both high fructose corn syrup and cane sugar, about 50% fructose, or 50% glucose, and have identical metabolic effects. I have the feeling you disagree.
Rebecca Washuta
I do, yeah, I do disagree. Um, high fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose, where, you know, cane sugar, table sugar is about 50% fructose, and that doesn't seem like a big deal, but over time, that 5% really does add up. And so, you know, just to, just to go back to basics here, right? And talk about the difference between fruit, fructose and glucose, right? Like, what is the issue with fructose in general? The issue with fructose is that it's metabolized differently in our body than glucose, so fructose is mainly broken down in the liver, and it can be really taxing on the liver, and so that's why we're seeing a lot of these cases of what's called non alcoholic fatty liver disease, right?
Rebecca Washuta
So forget alcohol. There's like 13 year olds with fatty liver because they're consuming so much fructose through processed foods. So you know, we do want to limit. Fructose as much as possible. The other issue with fructose is, you know, not only is it metabolized primarily in the liver, when you think about the biochemistry of it, right? So if you can take yourself back to the high school chemistry we learned about the Krebs cycle, right? How, how glucose is is turned into energy. And there's different pathways, right? If you can envision the cycle, maybe this is like in your in your nightmares, right from from chemistry when you were 16, but glucose and fructose enter the pathways at two different points, and so fructose is basically overriding a step.
Rebecca Washuta
And so it is able to sort of get away from the checks, the natural checks and balances of the system, and so it causes your body to absorb more fructose than it would glucose, and that's what they think is also, you know, the contributing factor to obesity. So there's, there's that, you know, there's just the biochemistry of it, that fructose is metabolized differently, that high fructose corn syrup has slightly more fructose than normal cane sugar. But then there's the issue of, you know, just in general, high fructose corn syrup is a highly processed food. If you look how it's made, they take corn they make it into corn starch. They do. It's this huge, huge process, this huge manufacturing process.
Rebecca Washuta
Cane sugar is, is much more natural, right? So if we're just getting back to basics, cane sugar is, is a much more natural, you know? And then the other thing is, when you're looking at how, like the agriculture in general, corn is one of the crops that is most highly sprayed with pesticides, so high fructose corn syrup likely has glyphosate in it. You know, they've, they've done some studies. They've tested for that sugar may also have glyphosate in it, but it's much easier to find organic sugar. It's basically impossible to find organic high fructose corn syrup.
Rebecca Washuta
So, you know, do I think the switch this, this switch is as big of a deal as they're making it seem No, I think too little too late, right? We should have done this 15 years ago, you know? But the idea in general isn't to swap out high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar. It's to reduce the sweeteners. And I'm not even saying we need, you know, it's like stevia or monk fruit, like in general, the goal should be to train our palates and our brains not to crave super sweet foods.
Steve Washuta
Yeah, and it's always sometimes how the delivery is in the perspective, because if you look at the messaging, it says both high fructose corn syrup and cane sugar are about 50% fructose and glucose. And one would think, Okay, well, if you're just taking that statement as a truth, it's really it's not false. But where the nuance comes in is, there is a difference. How much difference? And how much does that difference matter, right? And I wish we had a one to one for the average person of like, what is a gram of fructose, or percentage of fructose that is equivalent to, like, a beer on your liver, right? Some sort of easy thing for the public to see. It's like, is it like, Is it five grams of fructose equivalent to two beers?
Steve Washuta
Like, Oh, as far as like, the taxing being taxing on our liver, when we speak in these terms of, it's close to, and then we don't, and then he doesn't go on to describe why that small difference matters. You wonder why these people are in these positions in the first place. He's a cardiologist, which is not really his specialty, but also a lot of these people, when you look about where the money is coming from, and there's always lobbyists in the background, of course, you know what they say is very political, but they're not digging into the nuance of the science to explain to us why that small difference matters, right? Yeah,
Rebecca Washuta
exactly, being thrown around in that industry. And, you know, to his credit, he didn't say anything that wasn't true, but it is misleading. Yeah, it's
Steve Washuta
extremely misleading. I don't know if they're actually going to do it. Actually going to do it. It was a weird situation where apparently, like, Donald Trump said that he had this conversation with like the CEO of Coca Cola that they're going to be changing over. And he never had the conversation. And he did it as a power move to be like, well, I already put it in the public so like, now you guys are going to look really bad if you don't go ahead and make the move. So, like, then, then Coca Cola came out and said, like, well, you know, we're, you know, we're really interested in potentially doing this.
Steve Washuta
We're looking at different things. But just let everyone know we already have Mexican Coke, which is, apparently it's used that same way. They just don't have enough factories to, like, make enough of the Mexican Coke, in comparison to how their factories are already built, I guess, right, so they would have to spend a lot of initial money in order to kind of swap over their mechanics, for lack of a better term, but, but that was funny. Moving on here. Thoughts on correlative studies. I've been talking about this a lot the more the. The more you pretend we know about studies, the less we know about studies.
Steve Washuta
Just like everything else, like quantum physics, there's so there's so many holes in studies and how they do studies. I read it. I read an old study in 2005 and it was by John alonitis. It was actually called Why published research findings are mostly false. And he does a meta analysis of all the meta analysis, and just showed like, hey, none of these are replicable. They all have so many holes. Like, we shouldn't necessarily throw the baby out with the bathwater, but also at the same time, like, maybe sometimes you do need to do that.
Steve Washuta
And all I see time and time again, and I think this is my I'll let you, I'll let you give me your perspective on this, but from a without getting into like, the details here, from a general perspective, most studies done well, come up with this conclusion, we don't have, like, hard evidence of something, right? But people don't want to hear that. So when there is a study that comes out that says this proves X, Y and Z, well then that's new, that that's newsworthy, right? Whether the study is right or wrong, because people don't want the answer of we don't have any answers.
Rebecca Washuta
Yeah, for sure. The problem is, studies will come out that, do you know in their conclusions say what you said, we still need more evidence. We need to look into these other variables, but it'll get picked up by the media, and they'll say, oh, peanut butter is associated with having healthier skin, right? Or the headlines causing a bright skin. And you're like, wait, what that was like, not the finding of the actual article. And then, you know, it gets it gets around the world before somebody can even say, Stop, wait a minute.
Rebecca Washuta
This is actually not, not at all what it said. So my favorite core coral correlative correlative study is, and this is someone trying to make a point about how unreliable these studies are, right? And he looked at, in the summer, ice cream sales go through the roof. In the summer drowning, the rate of drowning triples. So if you looked at that, you'd say, You know what? This ice cream is causing drowning. Ice Cream is doing something with the respiratory system and it's causing people to drown. No, you know, we all know people are more likely to eat ice cream in the summer because it's hot.
Rebecca Washuta
People are more likely to swim in the summer. And when you know there's more people swimming, there's going to be more drowning. So you know, you have to take everything with a grain of salt. I will say it's a good place to start right? If you if you wanted to look at a population and look at them and say, wow, they seem super healthy. What are they eating? What exercises do they do? Do they have a sort of meditation or stress, stress management practice? And then to look at it that way.
Rebecca Washuta
And then, once you have that, let's dig deeper. Let's look into the other variables, right? So you know, if you think about the Blue Zones, right, which everyone has heard of, these, these areas in the world where people live well into their hundreds. What Dan Buettner did was he went to the, I think there's maybe five or six. He went to all of them, and he studied, he looked at all these people. And his data isn't it's more correlative. But what he did was he went to all of these places, and he said, what do they have in common?
Rebecca Washuta
So it's still correlative, but it's stronger, right? Because if people in Japan are doing the same thing that people in California, the same thing that people in Costa Rica and Greece are doing, okay, well, maybe this is, you know, making more sense. So I don't want to totally say it's it's trash. I think it's a good place to start. And then from there, you need to start asking why, and you need to look into the science. Okay, all of these people, they're walking 10,000 steps a day. Okay, well, let's look at the actual biomechanics and the science of how that changes your body, how that reduces stress. Like, let's actually get the science behind it so we can do some real studies from that.
Rebecca Washuta
So I do think it's a good place to start. And you know, I also want to say for nutrition, it can be frustrating for me, right as a professional, because I can basically find a study to prove anything you want to hear if you told me, Hey, I want to be carnivore diet, I can give you a lot of peer reviewed journals that talk about the benefits of the carnivore diet. You told me you want to follow a vegan diet, I can give you similar right? So, but what's hard about nutrition, and you know, analyzing nutrition and lifestyle habits, is that we can't lock people up in a lab for 20 years and control exactly how much they're eating right, or force them to to exercise in a certain way.
Rebecca Washuta
So, you know, compared to like a pill, right? We can, we can make sure that someone is taking a pill. We can take their blood work. We know it's at their system. We know it's not these types of things are harder. So I do think you know you have to sort of start somewhere. But what I have found is it's never just one thing, right? So again, if we look at the Blue Zones, okay, these people are active all day. Okay, but they're also eating very healthy. They also have great social relationships, right?
Rebecca Washuta
And so you find all of these things. There's never just one component when it comes to health, right? It's not just one soup of food. It's not like, Hey, you eat blueberries, it cut your risk of heart disease in half. Okay? You're eating blueberries. What are these other things that you're doing? Right? People who eat blueberries are probably more likely to exercise. They're probably more likely to eat broccoli and and all of these other things. So everyone is looking for a quick fix, and it's, I don't think it exists, and you need to take, take anything you read like that with a with a grain of salt,
Steve Washuta
yeah, I think what you said about it's a great place to start, and I would add it's a terrible place to finish. You can't finish. You can't finish you can't finish on a correlative study, right? It's a great place to start. That means we need to do further research into one particular area. But when you look at something like the blue zones, the major difference is that is what I call compounding correlative data, right? So if you did that ice cream pool study, but you found out that all of the drownings, or 90% of the drownings, were from coffee ice cream, and they were from one particular place, and they were eaten between six and 7pm right? Then we actually start needing to look at the ice cream, right?
Steve Washuta
That's a problem. Why is it always coffee ice cream? Why is it all from, you know, Bob's ice cream shop? Why it was all eaten at 6pm those are compounding factors at some point, scientifically speaking, right? There's a statistical anomaly going on here. That would lead you to believe that there is science behind that, right? So we're talking about science. You can't have seven or eight variables that all line up all over the world and not have that be a statistical anomaly, right? So, so there is science behind that, rather than just have the one particular thing.
Steve Washuta
But also, like you said, how you read the study and how they present the headlines is almost always the problem, right? I feel like there should be like, major, major, somehow, pushback against the journalistic community when they present these things in that way, right? When those headlines are misleading completely, because nobody, even half the time they link to a study you can't even click on because it's behind a jam, a paywall or something, right? So, so no one can read the study, and they're just, they're just seeing what it is, and you'll see something like, you know, even you know, the most famous of, you know, health and fitness podcasters talk about, you know, grip strength and all cause mortality, right? Having, okay, that is a secondary characteristic.
Steve Washuta
I can easily prove that wrong. If I had a 300 pound man who sat in a room all day and he squeezed a grip strength machine while he ate Doritos and drank jolt and played video games, he would not be healthier than me if I just decided to do every other version of exercise except deadlifting and gripping heavy things, right? So there's a secondary characteristic. What it's telling you is that most likely that person's working outdoors with their hands, or they're lifting or they're moving around, they have good blood flow. But it's not the primary reason why these things are going on, right?
Steve Washuta
There was a study that just came out about Parkinson's disease. They said living near a golf course raises your risk of Parkinson's disease. That was the title, right? So then they go in, you find out in the study, it's only done in two states, right? So it's from Wisconsin and Minnesota. They don't, they don't poll people as to when they move there, so you don't know if this person's lived on that golf course for 70 years or seven months. Then they tried to look at the water sources, right? They said, Well, what happens is, we think that the pesticides that are being used in the golf course are going to the water sources.
Steve Washuta
Well, I don't mean to be insensitive here, but anybody who makes over 50 grand is not drinking tap water, right? So like you think them showering in this water transdermally is causing these issues through there, like they're not drinking tap water. So, like, and then you keep going, like, Okay, well, why didn't you the people who are spraying the golf course like they're not in the study, because they're the closest exercise like, you just keep going on and on and on be, like, looking all the holes in the study, and then say, okay, Parkinson's older age disease, the people who are going to the physicians at older ages are people with money, because the poor lady in Detroit who probably has some sort of movement disorder issue, who's 68 and she's, you know, she's on government aid, might never go to the physician in the first place to be to be diagnosed.
Steve Washuta
So it's just all these holes in these studies, and that's fine, as long as you present it as if we don't have it. But to do a study like that, and then come out with the headline saying, like, living closer to a golf course is more likely to be Parkinson's degrees without having any sort of, like mechanistic data, to me, is, is, is not only improper, but it's almost, it's almost malevolent, right? There's, there's a, it's more than just negligent, right? There's, there's a, there's a sort of an evil aspect, but there's a, there's a purposeful aspect there where people in the science community are not doing the right thing by putting a headline that says, you know, there's a correlation, but we haven't found any causation. Yeah,
Rebecca Washuta
you know, if I were to do a study and it gets published and it's out there, I have no control over how the media, yeah. Have to, unless they come to me and they interview me, and, you know, some of them do that, but I think once it gets off and running, the authors may not, you know, even really get a say in how it's being pushed out to the public. So, yeah, it's, it's a problem on, on both fronts, for sure,
Steve Washuta
yeah. And there's, you know, also what you know, what I've seen now in the studies, especially with correlative studies. Specifically we're talking about it studies, in general, there, there isn't enough, what they call like inclusion or exclusion criteria, which there needs to be, because sometimes it's just really difficult to do, right? So if you know Rebecca and her colleagues are doing a you know your celiac are doing a study on celiac, and you know, you want to look at people between the ages of 30 and 50 and women specifically, right? So you find, you found a woman, she's between the ages of 30 and 50 and she's celiac, but then you find out, let's say, that she had diverticulitis three times and she had part of her intestines taken out, right? She's not a good candidate.
Steve Washuta
That should be an immediate exclusion criteria, because, like, her gut system is going to work differently now that she's had major surgery in her intestines. But like, these sorts of things are not always taken out or so you'll see these studies. I don't want to get too far down this rabbit hole, like the stuff that RFK is talking about, where, like, there's no inclusion or exclusion criteria, where people have like, two and three and four diagnoses, and they're all being grouped into this one study. It's like, well, how do we really know what's going on if there's all of these things and there's no inclusion exclusion criteria, so there's just so many flaws.
Steve Washuta
And I hope that people, if you get nothing else, just know, like, from a sense of humility, whenever we read a study or have this information, right? It is just like we said, it's a starting point. They need to do more research into it, but it's almost never an ending point. Yeah, fads. I like to predict fads. I think it's important whether you're right or wrong. Thinking about the fads in your particular occupation, especially when you're a small business owner, is important, right? It doesn't matter what doesn't matter what that fad is. I've seen people who are literally make enough money for the rest of their lives because they predicted who may or may not be president or something, and they made a funny t shirt, right?
Steve Washuta
And they sold 3 million of these T shirts, right? So, like, predicting fads is an important part of business, right? And that's we're in a business in the fitness and health industry. So I want to know how you go about doing that. Do you do that in your mind? Do you see things that are going on now that you think, Okay, well, the public's going to push back against that and and so what's going on in your community where you can predict a fad coming up in the near future?
Rebecca Washuta
Yeah, I think anytime the pendulum swings too far to one side, it'll inevitably come back, right? Anytime that things go too extreme, anytime that you see all these quote, unquote experts, everyone is, you know, pushing this, it's, it's obviously going to come back. So I think fads are fads for a reason, right? They're not, they're not lasting. What I see happening, which isn't like specifically tied to nutrition, but but health and wellness in general, is people really getting back to basics and getting back to nature.
Rebecca Washuta
So like, you know, I live in Miami, and I think everyone I, I think probably considers Miami to be a a, I don't want to say like, cocky, but you know, a town that's that's focused on on how you look, right? So I know a lot of people who are like, famous or not famous, right? Who are no longer getting Botox, right? Who say, Hey, I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in like that. I don't want my face to look that way. And so what's becoming more popular are there's different types of massages you can get, right? Like just, just getting back to nature.
Rebecca Washuta
There's a lot of wellness, sort of social communities that have popped up in Miami, and yeah, none of it is cosmetic procedures or even the biohacking. It's more of it is grounding. It's meditation, it's sound, math, it's it's massage, right? It's incorporating all of these things that we've known for 1000s of years, from Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine, and it seems like people are really leaning into that more than, you know, the typical western approach when it comes to wellness and esthetics. The other thing I see to just, you know, in popular culture is women just being more authentic, right? So I think we went through this age of Instagram and Tiktok, and everything is filtered, and everyone has a filter on, and the makeup and the stuff and the hair, and now people are really craving that authenticity.
Rebecca Washuta
So I don't know if you've seen like Pamela Anderson recently. She was obviously like when we were growing up, like the. The most beautiful woman in the world, right? And now she's like, totally bare faced, right? She doesn't do makeup. She's like, really, really natural. And then even, you know, some of the younger generations. So there's an influencer turned singer that you probably have never heard of, because I only recently heard of her.
Rebecca Washuta
Her name is Addison Ray, and so she's, like, out on tour right now, and, you know, even looking at her Instagram, she does no makeup, you know, so she's like, early 20s, beautiful, but she's just, like, no makeup. Even when she's on stage, she's just like, This is me, right? And her body is beautiful, but it's, she doesn't have a six pack. And, yeah, I think we're, we're sort of the pendulum is swinging from filters and esthetics and all of this, like fake beauty standards and wellness, to sort of coming back the other way. So that's what I'm predicting we're going to see more of, yeah,
Steve Washuta
I agree. Totally same thing in the fitness community. I think there's obviously an influx of people who are going to the gym, which is good, right? They're getting in shape. They're going to the gym. Unfortunately, I talked about this, you know, I beat, I beat this horse to death. There's just too much of, like, the bodybuilding aspect. And obviously, people have cameras in the gym, and it's just, think about the whole process. You're you're indoors, you're filming yourself. You're alone. You have headphones on. The lighting indoors is terrible, especially in gyms, right? It's either dark or it's like fluorescent lights.
Steve Washuta
Then you go home, you go back indoors so that you can upload whatever it is to online. So you can sit down and edit the video alone and put things in also wearing headphones. You upload it so there's so much of this, not only like being solitary, but also being indoors, that I see this push being more outdoors and less regimented, right? I see the next wave of fitness being like, hey, let's just go play adult soccer outside, right? Let's go meet in the field and play soccer for two hours and run around. So I think it's going to be less regimented. I think it's going to be more outdoors.
Steve Washuta
And you're going to see a push sounds odd. A push sounds like it's coming from somewhere else. I think it'll be intrinsic. You'll just see people who are basically sick inside saying, I need, I need to go outside and do something different. And you're going to see a wave of of these things popping up all over the place. I mean, there are. You can go to any small city and find these things if you want to find them, if you want to find some sort of like a adult kickball League, and maybe they're having a beer or two, but guess what? They're outside. They're running around. They're with their friends.
Steve Washuta
They're in the sun. They're making connections. And I think that's there's, there's more room for growth with that, because people, there's been a generation who didn't do that, right? Like it's, I felt like it stopped with my generation. You know, you included, right? So if you're, if you're under the age of 30, now, I highly doubt you're a part of any of that, right? There's this whole group that's not part of that sort of thing where, like, you have you like you're you're playing on these softball teams or something with your friends as an adult. So I think, I think that wave is going to start back up and kick back up. You're going to see less people going to the drab, gloomy gyms and just lifting by themselves. I would call that European style health, right? That makes sense.
Rebecca Washuta
You know, even through work, we always had, like, kickball leagues or soccer like there was always something, I think people are really couldn't create, that, that social aspect of it too, and that there's a lot of evidence, right, if you go back to the peer reviewed journals, but there is a lot of evidence that talks about how community is such an important and overlooked factor that contributes to your
Steve Washuta
health. Yeah, and right now, there's, unfortunately, the pseudo communities they think they have, right? The people who are online liking their pictures. This is my community, right? They commented on my thing. It's so funny, because however crude and horrible, this is to say, like, if half of these people died, you wouldn't even know. Does that make sense, right? You wouldn't you. You wouldn't even, you wouldn't even find out, like you, like they know, if they're not them hosting on their Instagram, chances are you're not even friends with them and cross platforms, right?
Steve Washuta
So you're not even friends with them on another platform, like it's these people mean nothing to you, yet, you know, you let them control your lives by, you know, liking your pictures. So I do think that will eventually rear its head, and even if it doesn't rear its head, intrinsically, I think there's parents who see what's coming down the pipe, like myself, right? So we're not going to let our kids fall down that rabbit hole and then, you know, things get cyclical, right? We want our kids to grow up in more of a 80s, 90s era, like we did. So things will change that way, speaking of being outside and, you know, getting some vitamin D, as they say, vitamin timing, you've, you've briefly talked to me about this before. You didn't give me specifics.
Steve Washuta
You just said, you know, generally speaking, I shouldn't take my vitamins at night. Are there certain vitamins you should take at night? Should you always take your vitamins altogether? Uh. I've been told, and I've I've felt anecdotally that if I'm taking fat soluble vitamins, which is AG, A, D and K, I need to have something in my stomach. Just give me the whole regimen of timing and and what we should do around those for both beneficial reasons and for, you know, stomach related issues for sure. Yeah.
Rebecca Washuta
So it depends on the specific vitamin you mentioned, vitamin D. Vitamin D should only be taken in the mornings, so it basically works counter to melatonin. And you know, it's because it you want to mimic natural circadian rhythms, right? So if you were to get up in the morning and go out and get sun on your skin, your body would take the cholesterol in your skin and create vitamin D. It's not doing that at 9pm at night, right? So you don't want to take vitamin D at night. You want to take it in the morning. The same with vitamin B 12.
Rebecca Washuta
That's a vitamin that is involved in energy, and that's something that should also, that also ties into your circadian rhythms, and that should also be taken in the morning. You know, in addition to that, there's nutrients that interact with one another, and so you shouldn't take them together. So, you know, most people are on a multivitamin. And you know, this is specific for women who are borderline anemic or women who are pregnant. Iron in a multivitamin is sort of useless, because some of the other minerals block the absorption. So specifically zinc. Zinc blocks the absorption of iron. So if you take it all in one pill, it's useless, right? So I always tell clients you want to take iron separately. Iron also has interactions with food.
Steve Washuta
So is it Sorry to interrupt? Is calcium in that same uptake channel a zinc and iron, or not?
Rebecca Washuta
So calcium can also block the absorption of iron. And so, yes, so certain foods, right? So high calcium, foods, foods that are high in oxalates, foods that are high in phytates, they can also block iron. So you, you know, iron is something that you do need to take strategically. Another one that has, you know, has an effect based on when you take it, are probiotics. So you don't want to take probiotics with hot liquids. You don't want to take them in the morning with your coffee, because the hot liquid can actually, you know, denature and kill off the live cultures. Also you want to take so you ideally, you want to take probiotics at night.
Rebecca Washuta
You want to take them right before bed, so they have time to sort of implant into your your your gut lining and proliferate. So yeah, vitamin timing is super important, and again, it depends on the specific supplements you're taking, what your goals are, what your diet is, what your lifestyle is. So I always recommend working with a healthcare professional to get your supplement regimen down and then talk to them specifically about what, when you should take one.
Steve Washuta
Yeah. I mean, I know some of that from my eight month old, right? So we have to give my eight month old iron, and it's really difficult because you know that they're eating, you know, breast milk and regular foods, and you have to somehow time the iron out between their sleep and not eating, which is like you have, like 30 minute windows to potentially give them this iron, which is, by the way, like the grossest smelling thing ever I have. No I I understand why he spits it out. Need to find a better tasting iron for toddlers. But now it's your turn to ask me a question. Anything we haven't planned this out. I don't know any impromptu fitness related questions, things that your clients are going through, things that you've been thinking about, things that you've seen trending, yeah, for sure,
Rebecca Washuta
officially, just for me. So I started taking new workout classes. And so this is last week I took a class and I was sore for three days. Like, I took the class on Thursday, I was sore. I get the delayed onset muscle soreness. So, like, I took the class on Thursday, I wasn't that sore on Friday, Saturday, I was very sore, but I was even sore through Sunday.
Rebecca Washuta
And you know, I've heard you say, like, Okay, you do arms one day, you do legs another. But literally, I was like, I can't work out again. Like, I don't think I could work out till Monday. So I wanted to get your feedback on that and see, is it normal to be sore for three days? Did I just push it way too hard in the class? Should I go back and, you know, take another class while I am sore? What are your thoughts on that
Steve Washuta
one? Did you push it too hard? Yes, you definitely did. Is it a big deal? No two. The average person will think, Oh, this is just like lactic acid. And there's a lot of misinformation or misunderstanding about that. How long lactic acid actually lasts and stays in your system? It's not as long as people think, Okay, so that's already cleared, typically, whatever, within 36 hours. So yes, there's a delayed onset muscle soreness, but that's different. That's from the muscle, that's from the muscle repairing itself, because there's, you know, the small tears in that muscle that sometimes help it grow back stronger, right? You. Um.
Steve Washuta
But the issue is, is that it sounds like you've worked muscles in that class in a way, whether it's uh, like, let's say, Time under tension when you're not used to that, whether it was high repetitions and lower weight, whether it was movement patterns that you're not used to, right, you're working muscles in a way in which you haven't before. So yes, it's totally normal for you to be sore for two or three or four days. The issue lies in if it's a class that is centered around full body workouts, which are fantastic, which are something that I promote, and you are that sore, you're sore everywhere.
Steve Washuta
So there is, there is no sort of muscle separation exercise routine that you can do because your arms are a little bit sore and your back's a little bit sore and your butt's a little bit sore and your calves are a little bit sore, so there really is nothing you can do except to light cardio, recover, eat healthy, those sorts of things. I think this is sort of a hot take that involves what you're talking about. I think, honestly, people focus too much on the workout and not enough on the recovery. If you're not on something, right? If you're not on test, if you're not on excessive amounts of supplements, if you're not 25 your body does not recover very well from these difficult workouts. You actually need more focus on recovery, right?
Steve Washuta
More hydration, more rest, more nutrients, more calories. Good calories, right? So I think the recovery is very important from from a long term perspective, people want to rush back and say, I need to get back into the gym and get back to exercises. Well, your body's telling you that you need the recovery, and that recovery is really going to help you so that you can get back into the gym. But when you start going on four and five days of being sore, you know that you pushed it too much, right?
Steve Washuta
Whether that was the weight, whether that was the movement pattern, whether that was the duration, or some combination of those three, you need to maybe take a step back. I wouldn't just go back to that class and be like, Oh, I did it once. I'm going to be fine the second time, I would still lighten the load the next time you go back to that class. And if you do, if you're somebody who, like, just the workout is cathartic for you, like it is for me, then maybe it's going to be tough for you to do these full body workouts, because you're going to be sore everywhere. So maybe that's just not for you, right?
Steve Washuta
So maybe muscle separation is for you, where you can be like, Hey, I'm going to go running one day. If my legs are tired, no big deal. I'll do abs and some arms the next day. And that is one big benefit forget about the vanity bodybuilding side, is that you can kind of work through the different muscle groups and always have a day to work out without having to worry about being sore when you do muscle separation.
Rebecca Washuta
Yeah, I like classes because they push you right. You're looking around, you see the person next to you. The instructor is like, motivating you, but then at the same time, I'm also like, someone who doesn't speak up and so, you know, like being crushed by the weights and stuff. So it's like, yeah, you have to find a balance of being motivated but also understanding, like, you know where your boundaries are, and really what you can handle too. So then you can, you know, come back again in two days and work out.
Steve Washuta
Yeah, well, just speaking to that, the worst thing to do with somebody in a fitness class is look at somebody else in the fitness class and base your weights off of that, right? You have no idea, just based upon their size or their age or their look how strong they are, right? I've worked out with 70 year old women who can get underneath the TRX, completely vertical, and rep out pull ups, right? Rep out inverted rows. And I've worked with 25 year old women who look like they're in great shape, who just don't have that strength, who can't do any single inverted router.
Steve Washuta
So you don't want to do you don't want to go into a class and look over like, oh, that girl's my age. She has 12 pounders. I'll be great with 12 pounders, right? It takes time. You have to notice. But I would always say, always err on the side of light, right? If they have five pounders in that class, just grab five pounders for the first time. Worry about the movement patterns. Worry about doing the form, right? Grab the lightest weight you possibly can. Nobody's looking at you. Nobody cares. No one's making fun of you, right? And always do that. I'm not saying you specifically, but that's I do feel like that is the one bad part about those classes, too, right?
Steve Washuta
However much camaraderie and motivation you get, you get an ego sometimes that sets in and people go, Jan, Jan's got 20 fives. I'm grabbing 20 fives and and that's when you start to see, you know, injuries and people slip off. So what I like to do, if you're a good, if you're a good, good instructor, you should be able to notice these things anyway, when someone's struggling. But there's, there's two things I think, that are very important. Number one, never just have one set of weights, right? Always have sort of a light, medium, heavy if you're doing some sort of full body strength training class, right? And you tell people, most likely this exercise is going to be a lightweight exercise.
Steve Washuta
If you think you're stronger in this area, feel free to grab medium. Do not grab heavy. Most likely this is going to be a heavy. If you think these are too heavy, feel free to grab medium, things like that. In addition to that, though, where I see. A problem with some fitness instructors is that they do repetitions when you should always do time. Because, you know, Rebecca may finish a set of 12 in 15 seconds when somebody else finishes it in 30 seconds, because they're just doing the rep slower, but that extra time under tension is really tiring them out, because they're going slow while you're going fast.
Steve Washuta
So doing time allows you to say, hey, we're going to do this for 30 seconds. If you're starting to get tired, I'll keep you updated. I'll tell you when we have 20 seconds left and when we have 10 seconds left, you could either drop the weights, or you can go from your medium weights to your light weights, but we're going to do this for time so that you can pace yourself, and you want to be sort of like 80% maxed out by the time we get to whatever that time limit is, if that makes sense, right?
Steve Washuta
If we're doing a 45 second exercise, as we draw closer to 45 seconds, you should feel like maybe I got a few more reps in me, but I'm close to being torched. If that makes sense, right? Yeah, you can grab your weights, but when you do repetitions, it sucks. It's not, it's really just not the right way to do it. If, if you have too many people in class that have all these various strengths and weights, it's, it's just you're, it's not going to be cohesive, yeah, but it
Rebecca Washuta
makes so much sense, like, how could everyone in this class do four counts of eight for the you know, like we're all different levels, you know, with the same weight, so that that makes me feel better. Thank you. Yeah.
Steve Washuta
Doesn't carry it doesn't carry over. Well, unfortunately, from what I would do with you one on one, as to what I would do with you when you're in a class, we can't get, we can't get optimal workouts, and we can't focus on everybody by doing those rep ranges. Now, unfortunately, what you'll see is you'll see people sometimes when they start in the fitness class, we call it group fitness background is they started things that are much more like tempo based. They'll be in Zumba, or they'll be in some step sort of class where there's all these counts involved, right?
Steve Washuta
And, and there's a lot of timing that just doesn't really work out with strength training, right? With strength training, we have to, we have to let people kind of feel their bodies out more. So it's one of the hardest things to do, I would say, is to teach a general strength training class, right? So instead of me personal training, you, I'm essentially now personal training 15 people, as opposed to doing something that's body weight, like a TRX suspension trainer or even a pilates reformer that's on springs, those, in a sense, are a little bit easier to teach than when we're actually starting to grab heavy weights and we're worried about more sort of injury prevention issues.
Steve Washuta
All right, I gotta read you all some ingredients here. It's my new energy drink. It's my new energy drink. Tell me if I'm going to die tomorrow or next week. Let me see the cover. It's called, it's called salud. Okay, these are the ingredients, l, tyrosine, taurine, theanine. Organic caffeine from unroasted green coffee beans. Organic guayasa extract, some sort of caffeine and vegetable juice,
Steve Washuta
powder, 200 How much 200
Steve Washuta
milligrams Are you
Rebecca Washuta
having that in addition to coffee? I don't want to talk about it. You You do have a baby at home so much
Steve Washuta
I now drink coffee as a I drink one cup in the mornings. Yeah, sort of so I only put like a tablespoon and a half, two tablespoons of coffee. Grant, like grinds, which is nothing, but I'll put, like, three cups of water in it, or something. Does that make sense? So I have a very, I have a very, very weak coffee, and it's just, it's just for the taste and the heat and whatever. If I don't have that, I'll have a black tea in the morning. And then let
Rebecca Washuta
me ask you, has that changed since December? Because the coffee I had at your house over Christmas had me like, off the walls, yeah, yeah,
Steve Washuta
yeah. So, yeah, I don't, I don't have that coffee right now. That's a, that's a special coffee. And yeah, that was a time in which, how old was my son at that point? Yeah, yeah. I had a newborn, so that you know that caffeine intake was probably closer to 400 milligrams a day instead of 250 so
Rebecca Washuta
I get it No, all those ingredients done, approved. That's it. There's nothing else in there.
Steve Washuta
No dairy free, soy free, no artificial dyes or colors. That's it. It's just that weird. That one weird ingredient, they call it amatay, but it has like a an asterisk next to it. They describe it as an organic guayasa extract that is grown in the rainforest of South America. So who knows what that. I would advise
Rebecca Washuta
anyone who's sensitive to caffeine, obviously don't, don't go near that. But for you, I would say nutritionist approved,
Steve Washuta
cool. Well, let everybody know where they could find you, whether it's on the old internets or if they want to reach out to you directly with any questions via email or whatever's the best way to get in touch with you.
Rebecca Washuta
Yeah, for sure, my website is happy healthy nutritionist. I just redid it so come take a look, and my Instagram is the same, happy healthy nutritionist. This
Steve Washuta
has been episode of the truly fit podcast back. Thanks for joining in. Thank you so much for listening in. And remember you can subscribe to TrulyFit app on YouTube to watch the Monday interviews. See you guys soon.
Rebecca Washuta
Website: http://www.happyhealthynutritionist.com
Instagram: @happyhealthynutritionist