So this is exciting science.

Obviously there's giant tailwinds around protein right now, but this is different.

This is very specific to a group of people who put a lot of effort out there and a big focus of nutrition for them is how do I figure out how to get more carbs in my body so I get better workouts and better performance on race day.

And they don't think as much about what they need to do after the session and before the next one.

So that's the part that kind of turns my cranks, that there's some science that's new that that can help the crazies like the three of us and your listeners and the million or so who do crazy stuff like us in the US.

Hello and welcome to the February 6, 2026 edition of the Tridoc Podcast.

I'm your host, Jeff Zankoff, a triathlete, an emergency physician, a triathlon coach, and a multiple Ironman finisher.

Coming to you as always from beautiful sunny Denver, Colorado.

The voices you heard at the top of the program were taken from a clip from the recent second part of an interview that I had with the founders of adrolabs, Matthew Shuster and Eric Zaltis.

If you heard the episode from a couple weeks back, then you heard the first part of that interview wherein I covered how these two people came together.

An advertising executive from Madison Avenue in Manhattan and a former professional cyclist who has a background in science who went to a science school in Brooklyn, then went on to become an R and D developer at Power Bar before heading over to Nestle in Switzerland to work in their R and D lab, came back to the United States, was working for Power Bar when he met Matthew Shuster and went on together to to form this new protein bar company called Adur Labs.

You will hear the second part of that interview coming up a little bit later on.

I am quite confident you will enjoy it as much as the first part and potentially even more so.

Before we get to that though, there is a medical Mailbag segment to be hosted by myself and my friend and colleague Juliet Hockman.

We are going to be answering another listener question.

This time it relates to the use of methylene blue.

Methylene blue is a commercial dye product that actually has some uses in medicine.

It is a very powerful electron donor, so it is very useful to reduce oxidizing substances in the human body, specifically under certain medical conditions.

But it has been advocated for use in athletes by functional medicine practitioners and other kinds of allied health practitioners on the fringes of medicine.

Is there any evidence to suggest that this is something beneficial for athletes?

Is this something you should be considering or is it something you want to be staying away from?

We'll take a look at what evidence evidence there is and we'll give our opinions.

And that's coming up very shortly.

Before that, though, I do want to touch base on something that popped up in the news in the last week or so, and it relates another health and wellness influencer who has turned out to be not quite the person that maybe his followers thought.

Peter Attia is a physician who has a bit of a track record of being a very popular health and wellness influencer, specifically around the field of enhancing longevity.

He has a expensive course that people could take.

He has written books.

He has recently been a contributor on CBS News.

But more recently it turns out he's also been mentioned quite a bit in not the most flattering terms in the recently released Epstein Files.

It's not been a Great week for Dr. Attia and it is just the most recent evidence we have of a health and wellness influencer taking a lot of money from his followers and then turning out to be maybe not quite what his followers thought.

This is on the heels of the recent episode I did where I looked at Dr. Joseph Mercola, the head of a huge wellness empire who had some skeletons in his closet.

Dr. Attia's skeletons are maybe a little shadier, maybe a little grosser.

So I think it's a reminder to us all that these health and wellness influencers are often not who they say they are, often not what they appear to be.

And at the end of the day, they are selling themselves, but they are also selling a product and trying to make money after all.

And so we have to always remember when we listen to them, when we take advice from them, what we are really getting from them is a biased viewpoint.

They are trying to move a product.

They are trying to sell themselves.

So we have to be very careful of the curated image they're trying to sell us.

And we have to always be wondering what's underneath that curated image, what is motivating them to put the things they are motivating.

Fortunately, most of these wellness influencers are not going to turn up in the Epstein files.

But when they do, it definitely leaves a very bad taste in the mouth, especially if you've been a big promoter of this particular person.

There are other health and wellness people that I have talked about on this program.

I'm not going to get into it now because I really don't think any of them are going to show up in these files.

But the reality is that all of them are selling an image.

All of them are pushing products because they have a reason to.

So it is a warning to us all once again to please always be careful, always be skeptical, always ask yourself, what is it they're selling?

Why is it they're selling what they're why is it they're saying what they're saying to try and get me to buy something?

And is there any merit to it?

If you're looking for an unvarnished, unbiased view, keep listening to this podcast.

We have nothing to sell.

We are only trying to help you and understand how you can save your money and where it's best to put your hard earned cash dollars to give you the best bang for the buck in terms of where and how to get the best for your training, racing and recovery.

With that said, we will leave this unsavory little topic behind us and move forward with the Medical Mailbag and talk about the use of Methylene Blue for endurance athletes.

Is it something that actually has any science to back it up or is it just something that's going to leave you with a little bit of a dark discoloration?

Let's talk about that coming up right after this break.

And it is time for me to be joined by my friend and colleague Juliette Hockman, coach at LifeSport, coaching world champion at so many different events, but she is here on the Medical Mailbag when we answer listener questions about all manner of different things.

Juliet, it's been a difficult last few weeks.

I know you heard the monologue from the last episode.

How are you doing?

Yeah.

This weekend in particular was really tough.

Right?

It was just when you thought you got through it, there was another thing.

So that I think has impacted a lot of us and it's hard to know what to do with it.

Right.

Yeah.

And we should say that we are recording this on the Monday after the weekend when ICU nurse Alex Preddy was shot and killed in Minnesota.

And that's been weighing heavily on a lot of people.

We know that this episode won't come out for a little while, but that's the context that Juliet and I were just having this conversation.

But there's also been some things to be really happy about after our plea for people to weigh in on how the episode about your why?

Oh, I thought you were gonna go right to the Patriots winning.

No, definitely not.

Actually, I totally.

So that is definitely something about my son.

He's a football f I have zero interest in that.

But yeah, we had a really just lovely personal story in the Facebook group, and if you're not a member, this alone is a great reason to go take a look.

Can't thank Ron Cawthran enough for being vulnerable and open and honest and putting just the most amazing story about his why.

And I don't want to get into it here because it's long and I would never do it justice, but, man, did you not feel great seeing that.

So the little tiny background on this is during the ironman webinar that LifeSport is co hosting with Ironman every other week.

Our intrepid leader, Lance Watson, who runs LifeSport Coaching.

He was doing a presentation or webinar open to the public last Wednesday, and I was running the background chat and answering questions as quickly as I could.

And up pops this guy and he said, oh, Juliet, I know your name from the Tridoc podcast and medical mailbag and I really enjoy it and I'm trying to answer all these questions on running efficiency, right?

And so I have to quickly say, oh, gosh, that's so be.

Thank you.

I'll pass on your well wishes to Jeff.

And.

And then I wrote down his name quickly on a scrap of paper so that I could tell you.

And then I went back to answering the questions and then you and I had a little text exchange.

And hey, this guy said he liked the podcast.

We love that.

And then he pops up on the Tridoc Facebook group.

And you saw it first.

You told me about it.

I went.

I think I saw it in the evening.

And so it was just like the best way to end the day.

It was this wonderful.

I think I told you I got all for Klemped.

I was all choked up.

It was a wonderful story about his why and why he does triathlon.

And all we can say is that we are so excited, Ron, to see you at 70.3 Oregon.

Oregon, where Jeff and I will both be.

And we are stoked to cheer you and your son across the finish line in Salem.

We will be there waiting for you.

So I'm getting all for clump.

Just thinking.

I know it's going to be awesome.

Yeah, it's going to be awesome.

I am.

I'm really excited.

Excited about it.

If you haven't seen Ron's post, I urge you to go take a look.

If you're not a member of the Facebook group, please do go look for it.

Answer the easy questions.

We'll gain you admittance.

It's worth the price.

Of admission just to see Ron's story.

And, hey, if you're looking for a why, Ron's story is motivation.

And I gotta tell you, it was just great.

So thank you, Ron.

Thank you.

And thank you everybody who commented on it and who thought about it, and it was just great.

Your why doesn't have to be quite as monumental as Ron's, but whatever your why is, we want to know.

It really means a lot to us that we're having an impact on what you're thinking about, and we.

We just want to hear.

So thank you to everybody who gave us that feedback, and it was great.

Okay.

With all of that out of the way, we do have a question.

I love when we have listener questions, and we have one today, and it's a good one.

So what are we gonna be answering today, Juliette?

Shout out.

And thanks to listener Adam Middleton, who had been under the care of a functional medicine doc and had been prescribed to take something called methylene blue.

And he wrote to Jeff to ask if this was a viable answer to the issues that he was facing and if this was a safe product.

And we know that methylene blue is used in medicine for certain very specific purposes, But I know that your team did a date.

Well, actually just sounds like you didn't have to do a deep dive, because your initial answer was no, but then, of course, you always do the research to back up your reaction.

So tell us a little bit about the use of methylene blue, what it is, what it's used for or in some medical practices, but why it is not a good recommendation for what Adam was after.

Yeah, the purpose that Adam was told is that methylene blue got a lot of claims behind it.

Methylene blue is a dye.

It actually is used in commercial purposes to give a blue color to textiles, to all kinds of things.

A very potent blue.

It's really beautiful blue, actually.

And it has a property to it in that it's got a lot of bonds, it's able to donate a lot of electrons.

It's just got this.

The chemical structure of it just lends itself to being able to carry a lot of electrons, which can then donate to other oxidized.

Getting into reduction and oxidation is always a difficult conversation.

But just trust me when I say it's an electron donor, which is good if you give it to something that's in an oxidized state.

And so the idea that functional people and chiropractors and who knows what else are jumping onto and that they're claiming is that methylene blue can increase cellular energy output, it improves oxygen use, it enhances mental clarity, it reduces oxidative stress, which could prevent fatigue and enhance performance.

Notice the critical word at the end there could prevent fatigue and enhance performance.

Nina Takashima was the intern who looked into this for us.

And I think it's worthwhile just getting into what exactly it it's used for.

And then we can come back and talk about any research that's been done.

And I will give you a little bit of a spoiler to say not so much.

But I just can't wait to hear.

About the rats and the dogs.

Bring on the rats.

Gonna get a chance to talk about some drowning rats yet again.

All right, Methylene blue, as I said, it's got this structure that has a lot of.

It's actually a structure that looks a lot.

And this is important, it's gonna come back later, but it's got a structure that looks chemically very similar to a class of antidepressant, medic, tricyclic antidepressants, which are not commonly used anymore because TCAs, as they're called, in short, they have a lot of toxicity.

So they're not used to treat depression anymore.

But One of those TCAs called Amitriptyline is used frequently for a lot of other things, neuropathies, different kind of nerve related pain.

Amitriptyline is quite useful.

And so it is still used.

And you do have to pay attention if you're on a drug like that, because methylene blue that looks so similar to it can actually cause some problems.

And we'll come back to that later.

But methylene blue in medicine has one use for which it is approved, and that is for treating a problem called methemoglobinemia.

Now, hemoglobin, as we know, is the molecule.

It's a protein molecule that contains an iron atom inside of it that iron is in the ferrous state.

Ferrous meaning it's Fe2 plus.

So it's missing two electrons.

Under certain kinds of conditions, if you're exposed to certain types of chemicals, that iron can lose another electron and become in the ferric state, or Fe3 plus.

And that now becomes, instead of being hemoglobin, it now becomes methemoglobin.

And the problem with iron in the ferric state, Fe3 is that it no longer is able to bind oxygen.

And methemoglobin cannot carry oxygen to our tissues.

And it's very dangerous.

So if you're exposed to any number of chemicals and there's Even certain antibiotics that can lead to this.

It's not that common that methemoglobinemia happens, but it does happen on a somewhat regular basis.

We see it in the emergency department.

You end up with a certain percentage of your hemoglobin being converted to methemoglobin.

It can be fatal because you can't transport oxygen.

So the treatment for this is to reduce the iron from the ferric to the ferrous state to give an electron to the iron so that instead of being Fe3 plus, it becomes Fe2 plus.

And the way we do that is by giving methylene blue.

There's a series of different enzymatic processes that take place to transfer that electron from the methylene blue to the iron and it restores normal hemoglobin and the person is back to normal.

They're able to transport oxygen.

Everything is hunky dory.

It's pretty cool, actually.

The chemical reaction is pretty neat.

What is it, a shot or through an iv?

It's given through an intravenous.

Yeah.

So methylene blue, the commercial dye, is purified.

It's very tightly controlled in terms of how it's prepared and the concentrations and everything else.

And then you administer it in a solution and it's dripped into the person and it's given.

Now, there are some people who cannot be given methylene blue because they have a genetic problem called G6PD deficiency.

This is a rare genetic problem.

It is more common in certain parts of the world.

But those people can't process methylene blue properly and they end up having major problems.

So you can't use methylene blue in those people.

That's a total aside.

Anybody listening who's a medical student will be very excited at this whole conversation.

Anybody else is going to be like, what the hell is he talking about?

So let's get to what I said.

It does bring up the relevant point that I would be willing to wager that a functional medicine doc is probably not testing for this G6PD deficiency in.

And quite frankly, neither do we.

When we administer, if somebody comes in with methemoglobin, we can't test for G6PD deficiency.

We have to ask the patient, do you have it?

And most of the time they don't know.

Although a lot of times adults know because it's detected early enough because they get into problems.

But anyways, okay, let's get back to what really matters.

People have latched onto this idea that when you exercise, when you do things that are super stressful, we know we've talked about this before.

You end up in an oxidative sort of state because as you put yourself through stress, you end up getting into this problem where you end up with a lot of super radicals, a lot of extra electrons around and that leads to the formation of this like super oxidated oxidative stress.

And so there's been all of this thought about what can we do about that?

And so let's look at all of these supplements that we've talked about.

A lot of them, all of these, like the polyphenols, all of the different things that we talk about are ways of reducing this oxidative stress.

And so someone came up upon, geez, methylene blue is an amazing way to challenge that kind of oxidative stress.

Why don't we try that?

They didn't actually try it.

They just said, hey, it works so great, let's just give it to people.

And so this idea came about and I will tell you that when we looked for research on this, what we found was why athletes are turning to methylene blue for performance and recovery.

And it comes from King's Pharmacy and Compounding Center.

And basically this is an advertisement.

And they produce this stuff as a supplement and they sell it to people.

And what they do is they say that, look, methylene blue is great for endurance athletes.

It's great for functionality, fitness, competitors and high performance lifters because it's so awesome at allowing your cells to work better.

It throws electrons into your electron transport chain and just allows your mitochondria to work so much better.

And when you look to see where this is coming from, someone's picked this out of thin air.

It's like completely hooey.

There is no studies anywhere that looked at this to show that it actually works.

There are other studies, like here's one from Harvard Publishing that says what to know about methylene blue.

And they talk about, there are some ideas about methylene blue might help with slowing cellular aging, cancer prevention, reducing the risk of incurable neurologic disorder.

It's just a list of possibilities.

I'm looking at the same study I just saw.

Yeah, and remember you were talking about your January list, about all of the things that are possible and then you whittle it down to what's probable and actual.

So this is the kind, this article, this Harvard Health article is exactly that.

They're saying, look, these are all the things that methylene blue theoretically could, but we need research to see what it actually can do.

And that research is in its infancy, but we did come across a couple of studies.

One of them, intranasal methylene blue administration confers neuroprotection in rats subjected to exhaustive exercise training.

So it sounds promising, especially if you're a rat.

Those of us who are not rats, however, we need to take this with a little bit of a cautionary sort of.

Of view.

What they did is they took their rats and they gave them.

They had a control group, they had the experimental group, they gave them some methylene blue intranasally and then they had them swim to exhaustion.

And.

Yes.

Oh, the poor rats, swimming to exhaustion.

It's not good.

It's not good.

Are they in an endless place?

Just.

No.

Are they in an endless pool?

Is there someone, like, chasing them with a stick, making them go around 10.

Consecutive days of two hours of swimming with 3% body weight attached to their tail.

So they have little vests on something, dragging their tail down until they went underwater and couldn't come back up.

And that was the time at which they were determined to be exhausted.

This is awful.

I don't know how this gets through.

Ethics, but I don't think I could watch this.

I know.

Awful.

And this is a study from last year, 2025.

They gave them a methylene blue 10 milligrams per milliliter into the nose.

And then they made them do, like this maze.

And basically what they found was the rats who got the methylene blue seemed to manage the maze a little bit better.

And what they hypothesized was that the methylene blue helped protect the neurons from the stress of this horrendous near drowning episode.

And there are other studies that have been done in humans looking at methylene blue to protect after strokes, to protect in sepsis.

None of them have really borne out any good results.

But the theoretical benefits are like this idea that methylene blue may protect against the oxidative stress that happens when you have a stroke, when you deprive the brain of oxygen because you are near drowning, that kind of thing.

So this study was taken as one of the little bits of evidence that, hey, maybe methylene blue is helpful, right?

Sure.

If you're a drowning rat having to do a maze more quickly, maybe.

But as I said, when they've tried to extrapolate this and do human studies in not obviously the exact same thing, but when they've tried to look at sepsis or other kinds of things where the brain is under stress, methylene blue has not shown any protective effects whatsoever.

The only quasi exercise study that we found was effective Methylene blue on cardiac output response to exercise in dogs sounds pretty good.

That title tells us that we're looking at exercise, looking at dogs and not people.

And what they did is they gave methylene blue before exercise, followed by this strenuous work on the treadmill.

And then they were looking to see different markers, to see cellular metabolism, things like that.

And what they found was that methylene blue does indeed affect some of this redox balance.

So these chemical reactions that are happening within the cell are affected in a positive way by methylene blue.

But.

And this is the big but, it does not enhance cardiac output during exercise, suggesting that methylene blue will not enhance performance in any way.

So that you're seeing a positive marker response, but no positive subjective impactive impact.

Yeah, you're not seeing what you really care about.

And the other thing, and this is the thing that I told Adam at the time, and this is really important, is that methylene blue has what's called a hormetic dose response curve.

And what that means is when we.

I've talked about this before, when you're looking at a supplement or drug or something like that, you want to see an increased response the more the drug you give.

Okay.

And with methylene blue, you do see a little bit of that.

As you give more, you get a little bit more of these chemical effects.

But once you reach a tipping point, once you reach a certain dose, which is about 0.5 milligrams per kilogram, it starts to go the other way.

And you start to see, instead of it being a reduction agent where it actually reduces oxidative stress, methylene blue has the opposite effect, and it starts to cause an oxidative stress and actually causes methemoglobinemia in humans.

Wow.

And that was my source of alarm when Adam told me that he was being told to take this stuff.

My concern was you're taking a supplement that's not well controlled, so you don't really know the dose you're getting.

There is this potential that when you take methylene blue, you may not be getting any of the beneficial chemical effects that it purportedly has.

We know that even with those beneficial chemical effects, it doesn't impact the performance in any way that we can tell, but there is a risk of serious adverse health effects if you take too much and without knowing what dose you're actually getting.

That was my concern.

And there's the issue of causing methemoglobinemia, which can decrease oxygen transport and cause major problems.

It causes heart issues, it can cause headaches it can cause death if you take way too much.

Now, I wouldn't have expected he would have been getting into that kind of range, but it certainly is possible to get a little bit too much and get into.

Instead of getting a reduction, getting an oxidative stress and causing problems that way.

When you're on a knife's edge and there's a potential dangerous outcome of taking a supplement that really doesn't have any benefits, that's where I draw the line.

And I say you should not be taking this.

And the fact that somebody is recommending this and that anybody is recommending this in the absence of any evidence to support it, I could tell you what would happen to me as a physician.

Yeah, that would be the end of your license.

Yeah, yeah.

So I don't really understand.

I'm just looking.

I'm just, I'm just looking it up on Amazon and It's very inexpensive, 22 bucks a bottle.

And it does say, if you look in the fine print on the, on the back of the bottle, that the supplement sort of information is not supported by the fda.

Anyway, you and I could make this and market it on Amazon, in other words, and there.

But there's you.

Yeah, it's easily available.

There's.

You can take it by tablet, you can take it by nose, drop.

As you said.

There's, there's.

I'm scrolling down, there's at least two pages worth of this stuff by all different manufacturers.

So it's out there.

And we're in a time now where science is no longer taken as the backbone of how we should decide whether or not to take something.

Anybody can go online and just spout off that this thing is a miracle and people will believe them.

And so here you have something that has zero evidence to support it.

People are out there pushing it, and there are real potential dangers.

So many things that we review on this show.

It's like we don't really know if it's got any good health effects, but it's not going to hurt you.

And we've said that many times, right?

We have said that a number of times.

So if you want to go throw your money down on this, go right ahead.

But.

But this one actually, you're saying, no, don't take this.

It could have some negative health effects.

Negative health effects, yeah, and certainly negative performance effects, too.

Because what ends up happening is people we know this from, drugs actually are dangerous.

Tylenol, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, all of those medications, people know the dose and so they think, oh, if this much works, I'm just going to take double because it's going to work that much better.

You do that with methylene blue.

That's not a good situation.

And that's what concerns me.

People should stay away from this.

There's really no reason to be taking this again.

If there was some benefit, I'd be happy to share that with you.

There is zero benefit here.

Zero.

And there is significant potential.

I am not aware of anybody taking this as a supplement and actually coming to harm.

But these things aren't reported because they're not regulated by the fda.

As you just said on the back of the label, the FDA doesn't support anything, but we can say whatever we want.

So for that reason, they don't have to report the adverse outcomes, which is a huge hole in the system.

Right.

So very concerning.

Very concerning.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

Remember how we're always told as kids, don't eat the red MMs, don't eat the blue methylene people.

You've been waiting.

You've been waiting.

No red MM's.

So is the red M&Ms.

The silly thing about the red dye is that what that.

That was the whole thing about red MMs give you cancer because of the red dye.

Oh, my gosh.

Really?

Don't you remember that as a kid?

Don't eat the red mm?

I remember hearing stuff about red.

The red dye Bill talked about, about.

There haven't been red M&Ms.

For 40 years.

There's no red M&Ms.

Think about it.

There's orange, there's green, there's yellow, there's blue, there's black.

I don't think there's red anymore.

Or maybe if there is, at least there weren't for decades.

I don't know.

Okay, so again, from Canada, where there's a little more sanity and we don't have.

We have this candy called Smarties, which.

Smarties?

Yeah, it's British.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so you know what a Smartie is?

When I came to the States and I said, oh, I miss Smarties, somebody, oh, I have Smarties.

And they took out this like, like little wrapped thing of pressed sugar candies, and I'm like, that's not a Smartie.

No, no.

Yeah.

So you know what I'm talking about.

Oh, yeah.

Smarties.

They almost taste like M&Ms.

They're a little sweeter MM's.

So smarties in Canada is a confection.

It's a chocolate confection.

It's basically.

It's like M&M's, it's a different kind of milk chocolate in a candy coating.

And we definitely have red Smarties because they have a whole commercial.

When you eat your Smarties, do you eat the red ones last?

So the whole thing about the red dye is a very uniquely American.

I'm actually now just Googled it.

They were famously removed from production between 1976 and 1987 due to a consumer driven red dye number two scare.

So they were out of production for 10 years.

But they're back.

They're back now.

Yeah.

I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, I don't eat that many M&Ms, but I could swear I've had a red MM.

Okay.

Yep.

In fact, isn't one of the M and Ms.

I hate when they anthropomorphize my food, but one of the anthropomorphized M and Ms. Is red.

I'm looking at a picture, Adam, right now.

There you go.

All right.

I thought I was crazy.

Maybe I was, like, having a colorblind issue.

All right.

Okay.

We have covered a lot of territory on this episode.

You come to this podcast and you think you're getting, like, just one narrow focus.

No.

We are here to take you on a journey.

We'll talk about anything you want.

Yeah.

If you want to hear a similarly scattered answer to a question that you might have, we hope that you'll send it to us because we have lots of joy in answering it.

So you can do that by going to the Facebook group.

I've mentioned it several times, so you could put your question there.

We have a lot of questions that come that way.

You can email me@tridocloud.com you can message us on our Instagram.

You can do all kinds of things.

We are happy to take your questions anyway, but we will be here for you.

We would love to answer your questions if you have them, so make sure you get them in.

Juliet.

Another fun conversation.

I know now it's going to be almost four weeks until we do this again because we're recording this one a little bit early.

I know we're going early, but we're going to keep the conversation cycle moving.

Yeah, we'll keep.

There we go.

All right, everybody.

Have a great rest of your week, everybody.

And thanks so much for listening.

Bye now.

If you did not hear my interview with my guests on today's podcast, I strongly encourage you to go back to last episode and have a listen, because my two guests, Matt Schuster and Eric Zaltis, are the co Founders of Adriel Labs.

They both have a long history in athletics, including multi sport.

And when we spoke in the last episode, they gave me a little bit of their history in what they've been doing for the last several years.

You would have heard Matt talk about his history playing Lacrosse as a D1 player for Siena College in New York.

You would have heard Eric talking about his very fascinating history as a science student.

Come semi professional cyclist for the national team time trial, national champion.

Eventually working his way as a grunt in the lab for Power Bar, making his way all the way up to the top board room basically of Nestle in Switzerland, where he was advancing science and physiological research to help Power Bar understand the needs of athletes.

And then his return to the United States where he eventually met up with Matt Schuster and they started doing work together.

And that, that was where we left off and where we're going to pick up today.

I wanted to have them back to do a second part of our interview because it was such an extensive and interesting conversation.

We still had a lot more to cover.

So this is part two of that conversation.

Again, if you did not hear part one, I strongly encourage you to go back and hear it because it really was great.

This, of course, I'm certain, will stand on its own.

Matt, Eric, thanks again for coming back and joining me for the second part of this interview.

I really enjoyed the first part and I want to pick up pretty much where we left off, which was this, this notion that you guys met on a run.

Matt was casting about looking for his next venture, his virtual coaching idea, which sounds like it was a terrific idea and theory didn't really pan out in execution.

And then all of a sudden you guys met up and Eric, who was in need of some kind of business acumen in terms of getting his product out.

You guys seem to have a really good relationship and make things work.

Now I want to understand, Eric, you were working for Power Bar at this time.

I would have thought Power Bar had all the necessary resources to do the things you were trying to do.

Why did you need Matt to help you?

All right, so we'll go down the rabbit hole for just a little bit.

Nestle ended up selling Power Bar to Post Holdings.

Post, which is the same post as like Post serials.

So like tricks.

Yeah, like honey bunches of votes.

And they also have some businesses in the quote unquote, convenient nutritional space.

For example, Premier Protein Ready to drink protein shakes.

These are like the house brand at Costco.

What they were really good at is giant grocery stores.

And club stores and things like that.

What they were not that great at was the part of the business like bike shops and rei and it's a very.

It's a complicated channel.

Ultimately, they decided they didn't want to be part of that part of PowerBar.

And I still did because my passion was for the athletic part and the athlete oriented part of PowerBar.

Long story short, I got that part of the business as a standalone business.

And that is why I was looking for the kind of expertise that Matt had.

And I'll tell you what was really fun.

I don't know how far you go back in this history, but PowerBar was started by a marathoner and a nutritionist at Cal at UC Berkeley.

And they were stirring it up in their kitchen and they had a Ford Falcon and going out to races and sampling the bars out of the back of their car.

That's what Matt and I were doing with Power Bar X number of decades later.

And that Matt just gave you the example about that would have been in the previous episode.

And that was super fun.

And it really felt like we were taking PowerBar back to its roots.

The next chapter is that there's only so much you can do.

We had some limitations in what we could do inside of PowerBar.

And I have an innovative mindset and there's, you know, I don't know if you've ever read the book the Innovator's Dilemma.

It's hard to do cool new things inside of a big organization.

And it was finally time to do some cool new things.

And that's really where the story gets more exciting.

Because what I'll just teed up is this.

There's some really cool science for endurance athletes.

And it's not around carbohydrates and it's not around trying to do fats, and it is around protein.

We were just at the Endurance Exchange USA Triathlon Conference in Orlando a week and a half ago and we had these scientists who's doing a lot of this research there, talking to the 400 coaches and they were eating it up.

All we're doing is leveraging a bit of that science, which is what I've been doing my whole career, trying to bring science to the athletes.

I've talked a lot with nutritionists on this program.

I've talked a lot myself about the value of protein.

And we hear a lot in the media right now about protein.

And I mean, it is being pushed in quantities that are, let's just say, possibly a little excessively.

There are definite values to protein.

And for athletes especially, we know because when we go out, we do hard workouts, we break down muscle.

Protein is incredibly important for recovery.

We also know for athletes who are conscious about body composition, protein can help with satiety and allow for decreasing total calorie intake.

It also is very efficient as a fuel during the day when you're not exercising, when you don't actually know need rapid energy source.

But what are you referring to when you say there's a lot of new interesting science about protein for endurance athletes?

What more can you add to that?

So all of those things are the reason you need protein.

But then the question is how much?

And yes, I agree with you.

The amount of protein being advised to people who are not necessarily exercising, that's not the topic here.

We're talking about endurance athletes, athletes.

Also well known for 20 years is the recommendation for strength athletes.

They need more protein.

I have friends who are researchers in this area and that kind of hits 1.6 grams per kilogram body weight.

And the recommendations haven't changed in 20 years for endurance athletes.

Here's what's new.

The way you figure out how much protein you need used to be, and in many cases still is nitrogen balance studies, which are very complicated, and you figure out what goes in your mouth and then you figure out what comes out in every different way that nitrogen comes out.

Hair and whatever.

There is a method that's been used in other areas that has been brought to sport and specifically endurance sport, by a researcher at the University of Toronto and his name is Dan Moore.

It is a methodology called the indicator amino acid score.

And what it basically does is allows the research team to feed higher and higher levels of protein and look for a break point when an indicator amino acid stops getting wasted.

When the protein levels are low, this indicator amino acid gets oxidized because it can't get used for protein synthesis.

And in a really nice set of studies and from this lab, they've showed that, that for endurance athletes, they don't max out their need for more protein until they get to about 1.65 grams per kilogram body weight.

So similar to the strength athletes, similar.

To the strength athletes.

But the recommendation for the strength athletes adds a couple of standard deviations, they added a couple of standard deviations and they got to 1.8.

So the recommendation is 1.8 grams per kilogram per day, which is greater than strength athletes.

So what do you.

Wait, let me interrupt for a second and ask you because I know a lot of people are going to be thinking this.

Endurance athletes don't like to put on mass.

They don't like to bulk up the way strength athletes do.

So what do you say to the endurance athlete who says, whoa, that's a lot of protein.

I don't want to put on muscle mass.

A few things I'll say, first of all, as an endurance athlete, every hour that you're exercising, you are oxidizing 5 to 10 grams of protein.

Protein, sure, you're exercising mostly carbs and some fat, but you're also oxidizing protein.

And there's a really nice recent meta analysis from a Scandinavian group looking at the amount of protein that endurance athletes oxidize during exercise.

A lot of that protein is branched chain amino acids.

So that is one thing.

You are actually using protein when you exercise.

And strength athletes are not.

The next thing I'll say is that the human body is amazing.

We give it a training stimulus.

And what the body does with that is it says, I need to get better at the stimulus.

So if you go endurance training, your body's, he's going to make me do more of this.

I need to get better at that.

No matter what you feed, you are not going to instantly put on big muscles.

You're going to get endurance muscles.

And so that is the concept that with more protein, you are making more muscle and body proteins that are being used as building blocks to make proteins in response to the training stimulus.

So that is the concept.

And it's mitochondria density, it's capillaries, it's all the things that make us endurance athletes.

And if you're eating a huge number of calories, you might be getting the all the protein you need at that 1.8 level.

Level most.

And there are studies looking at the protein intake of endurance athletes and most are not getting that.

I know when I try to get 1.8, it's not that easy.

I have to focus on it.

And the other cool thing is this research group at University of Toronto published a performance study where they fed low, medium and high protein diets for four days and then did a performance test before and after and during.

They gave them a very tough training protocol like a training camp.

And the high protein group had a benefit in their performance, had less muscle soreness and had higher voluntary muscle contraction compared to the moderate and low protein group.

So there's some evidence that a higher protein diet over a relatively short period of time can actually have an impact on performance.

So it's not just that kind of theoretical.

I'm making More endurance proteins.

It might actually be in effect.

So this is exciting science.

Obviously there's giant tailwinds around protein right now, but this is different.

This is very specific to a group of people who put a lot of effort out there and a big focus of nutrition for them is how do I figure out how to get more carbs in my body so I get better workouts and better performance on race day.

And.

And they don't think as much about what they need to do after the session and before the next one.

So that's the part that kind of turns my cranks, that there's some science that's new, that that can help the crazies like the three of us and your listeners and the million or so who do crazy stuff like us in the U.S. yeah.

And I think a lot about what you say because as somebody who's plant based, also finding those grams of protein is something you really have to be conscious about.

It's not hard.

You just have to put some thought into it.

And so I get plant based protein that I add to a smoothie every morning.

I have plant based protein bars.

And so there are ways to do it, but you definitely have to be intentional.

So I want to come back to Matt now and this partnership that you had.

The two of you, you were power bar for probably more than a hot second.

And then obviously something changed.

What made you realize what was the trigger that made you think, you know what, we need to do something on our own.

It was a meeting that we had and Eric pitched me the idea.

He said, let's start a new sports nutrition company.

And I was like, yeah, what are we gonna do?

I'm all leaning in.

He said, we're gonna make a protein bar.

And I said, why those exist?

Lots, lots of them exist.

Right?

Lots of them exist.

And then he's, hear me out.

And then he laid out all the science, he just walked you through and how that there was this growing need and new science pointing towards this underserved market.

Because when you looked at the sports nutrition landscape, there's tons of companies that are catering to endurance, but their primary focus is carbohydrates, electrolytes, or both.

Many of them have a recovery product that's just okay.

Oh, and we do recovery too.

And some of them are halfway decent, but there's not much innovation.

Normally it's just protein powder in a bag, which is all that was available until somebody innovated.

But nobody really took ownership of.

Not just let's create an innovative product, but let's also take the responsibility to educate and own this space of recovery nutrition within endurance.

And once he laid out that, plus the opportunity to innovate on the product itself, which is all about getting into not just the protein source, but also the amino acid composition of that source.

And for me, it was like, okay, I can buy into this.

It passes the BS meter on.

Is this just a snake oil or is this legit?

But it was also one of those things I could get behind because there wasn't anybody that was talking about this.

Nobody was beating the drum of, hey, guys, I know you're just, you're slamming 100, 120, 140 grams of carbs an hour.

And everyone knows that metric for themselves.

But when it came to, okay, how do you now service the work you did with the right nutrition outside of training?

It was like, oh, I have no idea.

I just eat a bunch, I go have walked waffles, eat more carbs.

So there was this just massive need for education.

And we both decided, we held hands and we took the leap and jumped ship there and formulated ADRA Labs at the end of 2023.

So I see you're wearing a shirt.

It's got ADRA.

It's got a picture of an Impala.

I believe that's an Impala.

I was just in Africa and I would say looking at that, it strikes me as an Impala.

Am I right?

Right?

It is, it is.

The emblem is actually an Adra Gazelle.

An Adra Gazelle.

I did not see one of those.

So I'll have to look that one up later and see what that one is.

This one, it definitely.

It's a good picture of an Adra Gazelle.

Okay, so why adra?

What is.

I thought ADRA might be an acronym, but clearly it's not.

So why adra?

What is it?

What's it all about?

So when we were deciding what to name the company, company, we went through a lot, a whole process.

And what we landed on was we didn't want.

We wanted to stand out a bit and be a bit different than others in the market in every way.

And one of them was we could name and brand ourselves differently.

So most of the brands currently are very descriptive.

They're very adjective based.

Power Bar, Spark, Spring Energy.

And we wanted something that had an emblem to it.

And the, the Gazelle, specifically the Adra Gazelle, spoke to us because it represented the audience and the customer that we're really looking to approach, which is endurance.

And the address Superpower, is that it can outlast its competition, the cheetah, by just running slightly slower, but a little bit longer.

And it waits till the cheetah gets tired.

And that's how it survives.

So it was truly very representative of the ethos of the endurance algorithm athlete.

And Eric, what was your thought about these bars that was going to be different from what was already on the market?

Clearly you had an idea that won Matt over.

When I think about protein bars, like I, I know myself, I have three different brands of protein bars in my closet because they are all quite similar.

The only sort of distinguishing feature is going to be the amount of protein and the taste.

And generally the palatability is very important because let's face it, most protein bars are either like your old company, the power bar, they're incredibly difficult to eat, or they tend to be laden with fat and carbohydrates to make them more palatable.

I have managed to find a few different brands that actually are pretty good and I enjoy them.

But what was your thought about what you were going to do with Adra that was going to make it somewhat different and distinguish it from the crowd?

Yeah.

There's another kind of rabbit hole of science to go down is what is it about protein that actually optimizes muscle protein synthesis?

And you probably know, you've heard of the branched chain amino acid leucine, which is not just an essential amino acid and not just the amino acid that gets oxidized the most during endurance exercise, but is also this key trigger for protein synthesis.

Leucine is very rich in whey protein.

So whey protein is a great source of leucine.

Plant proteins are a little bit lower in leucine.

There is a hypothesis and backed up by a bunch of research about how much leucine is needed to maximize protein synthesis post exercise.

And from the dietary standpoint, it's around 3 grams of leucine.

It takes around 30 grams of whey protein to get to 3 grams of leucine.

A pea protein or brown rice protein probably takes 40 plus soy protein, 50 ish.

So a 20 gram soy protein bar has 1.1 gram of leucine.

So you'd need two and a half or three of those to get to the recommended level of leucine.

Now, you don't just need leucine.

It's not about just getting a jar of leucine powder.

You do need the other essential amino acids from around.

And there's a bunch of research around that.

So what we did is we took 20 grams of protein and we boosted the leucine content and we've ended up with a vegan protein bar with boosted leucine.

And there's actually research on the combination of vegan proteins with and without add leucine showing the incremental beneficial effect on muscle protein synthesis.

So that There is no 20 gram protein bar from any source source that has 3 grams of leucine in it and certainly not any vegan source.

So the only way you would get 3 grams of leucine is from one of these, like you see at the convenience store, like a hundred gram mega bar that has 30 grams of protein.

If it happened to come from whey you'd get that, but it would take you 400 calories to get there.

The other thing is we were thinking about our consumer.

Certainly our target consumer is the endurance app athlete.

These bars are not coated so they will not melt.

If you are.

Our classic usage of the bar is you finish the workout, you run to the car and you're trying to get to a meeting and you're not thinking about your recovery and nutrition, you're just going to grab whatever.

So that is what we use this for.

So it is 220, 230 calories, 20 grams of protein, 3 grams of leucine.

We have limited the sugar because it's not that we're afraid of sugar, it's that you don't need to get your sugar from a protein bar.

But on the other hand, we're not allergic to sugar so we put some in there to give a better taste.

And leucine is not a great tasting ingredient and we had to do a lot of work to mask the flavor of this bitter amino acid.

I guess that was because that's where I was going is why aren't more people boosting the leucine?

Because it always struck me as people are always pushing the branched chain amino acids and I always thought why don't they just boost it in these protein bars?

And you just went and answered that question.

That must have been a hurdle.

It's tough from a food science standpoint and it's also expensive.

But we wanted to design a bar that was the ideal snack.

Protein recovery bar.

That's what we did.

And then we had fun with the whole food ingredients.

We have a chocolate cherry almond bar that's got whole almonds and tart cherries from Michigan and this wonderful Willy Wonka esque cocoa extract that's super expensive and you just want to swim in it.

It's just this dark stuff.

It's beautiful.

But we all know what happened to the fat kid who went for a swim in the Willy Wonka River.

So you probably want to stay away from that.

So, Matt, food science, food, like, like marketing and all this stuff, it's a whole different ball game out there.

What has that journey been like for you on this side of things?

You mentioned earlier that the virtual coaching, great in theory, difficult in execution.

What has this been like?

Quite different because people actually already buy some level of supplementation.

So it's not something brand new or far foreign, but it's great to have something that tastes really good.

And for us, what we found in the first six to 12 months was, does this land?

And is their product market fit?

And I'll tell you just a really quick story.

We did our first major event.

We did a booth at Ironman Jones beach in New York back in 2024.

We had just completed a reformulation of the bars where we made all of them vegan.

And we did some improvements on the flavors.

And it was aha moment for us because we were out sampling and everyone coming up to the booth were like, damn, these are good.

Wow.

And then they would look at it and go, oh, what's this?

Three?

So on our package, I don't have one with me, where normally people just put 20g g for the grams of protein, we put 20g and underneath 3g and they're like, what's the 3g?

And that's the leucine content.

Oh, what is that?

And it was the kind of the two epiphanies were, wow, we have something that people really love.

And wow, we have a lot of education to do.

So a big part of our mission and our marketing strategy is anchored on that education where we're not just teaching why our bars grow great, but we're teaching people why protein is important and how it fits in and how it's going to improve their lives and their performance and their fitness and then why we formulated the bars the way we did.

And people come to the conclusion pretty quickly.

Now you can educate and people can love it all day, but if it tastes like crap, no one's going to.

Buy it again, right?

Thankfully, ours don't.

So most the more than half of the people that buy the bars come back and buy them again, which is always a good sign.

And so it's really about how do you scalably share that education?

And there's no easy way.

Just like endurance sports, you just got to keep showing up, you got to put in the work, have the next phone Call, do the next podcast and educate people on.

There's a different way to think about this.

Matt, Eric, I can't thank you enough for two full episodes of just fantastic conversations.

I've really enjoyed learning about you both, about your history, about how you came together, how you went on make this company.

That sounds super interesting.

I should say that on the Tridoc podcast, I do not do product endorsements.

And you guys both were very kind in coming on here, knowing that in advance.

But with that said, I do want to give my listeners the opportunity, if they are interested, to try Adrolab's products because I really enjoy the fact that they are clearly so clearly backed by science.

And so again, not an endorsement by me in any way, but I will certainly be interested in trying them.

And so if my listeners are interested, Matt has a coupon code that you can take to the site, which is adrolabs.com a d d r a l a b s.com I will have that in the show notes as well.

And that coupon code, Matt, is yes.

So you can just use Recovery 25 and it'll give you 25% off your first order.

And we don't share that out lightly.

It's usually one reserved for our loyalists.

But you've been such a great host, we're willing to share it out with your listeners.

Thank you so much.

And I want to thank you both for being here today.

This was a really great conversation.

Part two of two fantastic conversations.

I really enjoyed having you both here.

And again, it's adrolabs.com the Recovery 25 code will be in the show notes if you're interested.

And if you do take advantage of that, I would love to hear your experience.

Go over to the Tridoc Podcast private Facebook group.

Leave your comments in the post and let us know if you try them.

If you enjoy them or not, we would definitely want to know.

Matt, Eric, you've been fantastic guests.

I really do appreciate you taking the time to talk with me on this and the last episode.

Can't thank you enough again for being here on the Trodoc podcast.

It's been a real pleasure.

Yeah, I really appreciate it.

Nice to meet you, you and yeah, thanks again.

Hi, my name is Denise Haslik and I'm a teammate of the Tridock and a proud Patreon supporter of the Tridock Podcast.

The Tridock Podcast is produced and edited by Jeff Sankoff, along with his amazing interns Cosette Rose and Ita Takashima.

You can find the show notes for everything discussed on today's episode, as well as archives of previous episodes@www.tridocpodcast.com.

do you have questions about what was discussed on this episode?

Have a question about some hot new gadget or trend that sounds too good to be true that you'd like the Tridoc to sanity check on a future episode?

Send Jeff an email@tridocloud.com if you're interested in coaching services, be sure to check out tridocoaching.com or lifesportcoaching.com where you can find information about Jeff and the services that he provides.

You can also follow Jeff on the Tridoc Podcast Facebook page, Tridot Coaching on Instagram and the Tridot Coaching YouTube channel.

And don't forget to join the Tridoc Podcast private Facebook group.

Search for it and request to join today.

If you enjoy this podcast, do the Tridock a solid and leave a rating and a review.

And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you download downloaded.

And of course, there's always the option to become a supporter of the podcast@patreon.com TriDoc podcast the music heard at the beginning and end of the show is radio by empty hours and is used with permission.

This song and many others like it can be found at www.reverbnation.com.

be sure to visit and give small independent bands a chance.

The Tridot Podcast will be back again soon to answer another medical question and chat with another amazing person in the world of multisport.

Until then, train hard, train healthy.