Joel Totoro (INTRO)

This is the Thorne Podcast: Performance Edition, the show that navigates the complex world of sports science and explores the latest research on diet, nutritional supplements and the human body. I'm Joel Totoro, director of sports science at Thorne. As a reminder, statements in this podcast have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Any products mentioned are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

Joel Totoro

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Thorne Podcast: Performance Edition. Joining me this week is Casey Thomas, a dietician, writer and instructor. Casey has a degree in neurobiology and has worked with Olympians and athletes at the highest level of sport and is currently a leader in the field of performance for elite eSport athletes with the 1-HP company where he utilizes his gamer diet philosophy. Casey, welcome to the show.

Casey Thomas

Thanks so much, Joel. I'm excited to be here. It should be fun.

Joel Totoro

Yeah, I know we've got a lot to talk about. It's good. We've had a lot of these conversations offline, so it's it's really good to kind of share this. I think it's it's there's a lot here to talk about. You started your career in clinical research looking at supplement and pharmaceutical impacts on the brain and brain health before returning to school to become a registered dietitian. Can you talk a little bit about that journey and kind of how your research background shapes your nutrition philosophy?

Casey Thomas

Yeah, I'll definitely say that. I took a little bit of a unique path towards dietetics. Most of the people who are working in sports usually come out of the fitness scene or they were, you know, former athletes themselves, things like that. For me, I've always been really interested in science just in general. Back in like middle school, high school, I was kind of playing around with different hobbies and things and I was already checking out scientific research articles from libraries and things like that, going to universities. I didn’t have a lot of money growing up. And one thing that hit me was like, I was like, Oh, this is so cool. This chemistry's awesome. I want to do this at home. And it's like, Oh, well, I can't afford a, you know, half a million dollar lab setup. And like, buddies who were into cars, I had some people who were into like, you know, astronomy is like, I can't afford to book time on the Hubble telescope or any of this stuff.

But I read some nutrition things. I was like, Oh, I can spend 20 bucks and go buy a couple food items and I can test things out myself. And so I just started doing these random experiments on myself where I'd test out the diets that I would read about and actually have an entire shelf on. It's it's digitized now, but initially I had an entire shelf with just like little notebooks where I keep tabs on how I was feeling with my workouts, my mood, my sleep, like all this kind of stuff.

And once I got a little bit older, I would do like, pre-post tests with with the doctors, too. And so, like, my doctors would hate me because I'd always get like, blood draws of like, what crazy diet are you doing now? So that really was one of the main drivers for me into nutrition was just like there was a low cost of entry and just being candid on the front end. And from there anyway, I was always fascinated by the brain, as you mentioned, the neurobiology, and that was really interesting to me. I initially was slated to be pre-med, to be a doctor. Started chatting with some doctors decided that that was really not for me. I didn't enjoy it and I wanted to go back to doing, you know, the research stuff.

So I went and went to work in the private sector. We were looking, as you said, various supplements and pharmaceuticals and their impacts on the brain. And this was my first exposure to high level athletes because just speaking candidly, I had several individuals who had approached me and they're like, Hey, is there anything that you can give to me that isn't yet being drug tested? You know, maybe you have a little insider information about something like up and coming something. At this time I was just like a nutritionist and I was helping friends and family out with their own diet stuff just based off my own practice. But this was the first time where I had some high level athletes who were, you know, reaching out to me. And that's really interesting because at the highest level you see that the difference between first and last is usually a neurological difference rather than a physiological difference. If you have half a second improvements in reaction time, I mean, that'll be pretty massive. But if you have improvements of just like a fraction of a second, that can be the difference between first and last in a lot of these events. So anyway, this, this really excited me and I was like, Oh, this is so cool. Like I can leverage some of this stuff that I'm using here to enhance performance measures and to get these people hitting their goals. And so from that I was like, okay, I want to return to this diet thing.

And so I went my back to school became a dietitian. Initially, I started working with traditional athletes, specifically, I would try to leverage nutrition and supplement strategies that could enhance the brain because that was such a gray area and both like NCAA a and at the professional level, like there's no real ban on any kind of supplements that would be beneficial for the brain. Everything that's banned is all the obvious stuff, like testosterone, you know, the stuff is the banned stuff. And so I was like, okay, what's what's another route we can take? And so I tried to put out to put all this stuff together, put the neuro stuff together, put the supplement research time, see what I can do. And I had a lot of success helping out with a lot of traditional athletes in things like baseball, which doesn't require a lot of physical performance measures. You just have to have good hand-eye coordination, good reaction time and, you know, base level strength to get on base. And I was also doing volunteer work with a lot of the gamers on campus at UCLA. And they were like, Hey, I see you're doing this stuff with the baseball guys. Can you do that here? And the answer was just a resounding yes.

So I started doing a lot of pro bono work with gamers and being a lifelong gamer myself, albeit a rather poor one. It just felt a little bit kind of like a return to home. After doing a lot of pro-bono work with them, COVID hit during my time in traditional athletics, which made the job really unfun, I couldn't do the stuff that really excited me about working with traditional athletes, so I decided to go pursue more the private practice route and 1-HP reached out to me. They're a team of medical professionals who works in the e-sports scene, and we are contracted with pretty much all the top tier organizations in North America, and we've also branched out internationally and so they reached out to me, knowing my experience, I was kind of building a name for myself in the space and I was able to join up with the team and it's been growing. It's been really fun and to this day I still keep my foot in the academic side of things. I still am an instructor and a professor at a couple of universities. I do peer review for scientific journals and I keep my foot in the practical side of things and I just try to leverage these strategies in order to maximize benefits for, you know, the athletes that I work with. Hopefully that maybe that’s a long winded answer, but yeah, that's kind of the route I took.

Joel Totoro

No, that's perfect. You're very interesting and unique guys so glad to get that kind of background. One of things you just said kind of makes a big point for me, kind of the idea of feeling cognitive performance and kind of the brain and central nervous system. I think traditionally in sports, you know, everyone's like, okay, cool, I need to replace my electrolytes, I need to replace my glycogen. But we don't really talk about and for a long time I didn't have a solution for kind of the brain side of things. So we're talking about e-sports and kind of e-sports players. They can make, you know, five, 600 actions per minute. They're, you know, assessing so many different things per second and it's just a massive cognitive load. Right? And where, you know, the brain's massively metabolic at rest. Right? So can you talk a little bit about kind of how you fuel the brain or kind of the nutrients the brain uses and kind of how that's a little bit different? Because like you said, similar to baseball, it's not as physical of a competition, but there's still a lot going on kind of biologically.

Casey Thomas

Yeah. And the funny thing is that for some reason in e-sports, it's almost entirely forgotten that nutrition can be leveraged for cognitive performance. And this is something that we've known and utilized across the board for literally like thousands of years. Like if you go back in time and you look at ancient Greek students and things, they literally would modify their nutrition practices to help them study and, you know, help them take their tests and all this kind of stuff.

So this is something that we've been doing for a long time. And in modern times, you look at things like the tactical setting, you look at military and you see that they're doing specific nutrition practices. You look at chess grandmasters, they're doing stuff. And, you know, I've had the pleasure of working with them. And so e-sports is somewhat of an extension of this.

And as far as what the brain is actually doing, the brain does have unique nutritional needs and nutritional requirements. Depending on the age, there might be a difference slant on different things like if they're growing or not. Still, we do see that a lot of e-sports athletes are younger. If you're 20, you're kind of like almost peaking. And if you are approaching 30, oh my God, you're an old man. So there's some changes that are going on there. But as far as like the actual needs of the brain, what we do see is that it does rely predominantly on two fuel substrates. The first is ATP phosphocreatine and the second is glucose. An interesting note is that the neurons actually don't store the glycogen locally, like in house. They have to store it in a nearby cell and then it gets transported to them, which has some implications for things like TBIs and such. And in some of these sports. But anyway, so, so the brain leverages these two nutrients. So some other thing that's really interesting about the brain is that it is the fattiest organ that we have outside of pure fat tissue.

So if you dehydrate the brain like it's it's got more fat in it than any any other organ that we have. So we start to see a picture of kind of what the brain is built of and also what the brain needs, which is at a base level. It's built from fats. You know, this shouldn't be a shocker to a lot of people. You know, we throw fish oils and things into prenatal vitamins, right. Because it's important for the, you know, baby's brain development. The brain is continually growing over the years. And a lot of these healthy fat sources can be used to quite literally change the architecture of your brain. And there's a little bit of a misconception that your brain stops growing or I don't know.

When I was a kid, I was told of a being my head and I lose a neuron. Uh-Oh, that's it. Like I'm screwed for the rest of my life. You can never regrow any neurons, but there's there's neurogenesis occurring in the brain through in certain regions, through the entire lifespan. And so if you're going to build neurons or at least change them, then you need the right substrates in order to do that. So the right substrates literally means the food that you eat, right? So you have to eat the right stuff if you want your brain to be built of the right stuff. And if your brain is built of the right stuff, of the hardware of your brain is of higher quality material, you see all sorts of beneficial impacts. You see like more resilience to injury, better stress resilience, you see quicker learning, better mood, like all this kind of stuff, which is great.

And then as far as like the actual fuel substrates that the brain is using for all the chemical reactions and stuff that it's doing, you know, we try to leverage that ATP and try to leverage that glucose. All of this stuff will help in more of the acute short term timelines. And if we can show enhancements through delivery of the short term nutrients to the brain, you can see maintenance of let's say you have a very cognitively demanding stretch of time. You know, like if you're just trying to be thinking and focusing for, you know, 8 hours, depending on the nutrients you give your brain, you can sustain that performance across this cognitive load instead of seeing, you know, the steady taper down that is more, more typical. So there's a lot of fancy stuff. I mean, you know, micronutrients play a big deal.

Different macronutrients play a big deal, which just depends on what time course we're looking at and what specifically we're trying to leverage for improvement. First off, and I think this is really important because this is a conversation I have to have with all of the athletes is simply, yes, nutrition does impact your brain and does impact your health and performance and emotional state and mood and all this kind of stuff and getting them to acknowledge that that is a reality is is kind of step one, because a lot of times they just think it doesn't matter. And a lot of them are younger, so they get away with some things, but I would say that they're succeeding despite their diet and not because of it.

Joel Totoro

For some of our younger listeners or people who are just kind of new to this. You wrote the Gamer’s Diet. What are the if you don't have a supplement budget, what are the actual some of the foods you can incorporate in it? What's in the gaming diet, What's kind of some staples some people should be looking for if they're making small food based changes?

Casey Thomas

There's three main arms. The first arm is removal of a negative. The second one is long term changes and the third one is acute changes. And so if you're doing something that is in the short term impact negatively your performance, then you just got to got to get rid of it. And so you'll see the quickest cognitive improvements by eliminating those things.

What I'm talking about here is like drinking alcohol nonstop. Okay, that's not really conducive for your performance if you're having a bunch of fried chicken and pizza or something which can acutely occlude blood flow to the brain, this stuff done right before the cognitive loads will make you dumber, literally. So the removal of a negative, any kind of like junk things that you can think of either before or during your cognitive tasks, try to minimize those things that'll give you the most bang for buck. And then from there we talk about like actual, okay, All right. So, yeah, don't don't eat trash. Okay. Who would do thought? So some broad strokes things that I want to say is a lot of nutrition. Can a lot of the high level strategies cannot be realized until the fundamentals have been dialed in first. And what I mean by that is, for example, hydration.

The brain is, you know, I mentioned is the fattiest organ if you dehydrate it, but your brain is actually one of the wateriest things that we have in your system. Like a lot of people are like, oh, your body's two thirds water. Well, your brain can be 70 to even sometimes 75% water. So what this means is literally as little as a 1% dehydration can lead to significant cognitive impairment. Every single metric that we look at and most individuals are chronically dehydrated. So if you correct your hydration status immediately, every single thing that we look at doesn't matter what metric you put there, both physical and mental, you will see significant improvements in as little as 24 to 48 hours, which is about how long it takes for you to adjust your hydration status.

So that's step one is just like, let's get we remove the negative, let's add some fluids, let's make sure you're drinking enough. Let's really prioritize that From there. I'll say, you know, if we're looking at long term changes I mentioned, you know, the brain's the fattiest organ, a lot of gamers and most Americans have a tendency to on average be eating mostly unhealthy fat sources, processed and fried fats and oils and things like this. And if you start substituting some of your unhealthy fats for healthier fats, admittedly, it's going to take some time. But over time, this can literally rework and rebuild the entirety of your brain, which is kind of cool. Some fruits and veg. You know, I sound like my mom right now. You know, have I mean, if you're playing the numbers game, though, like the average American is not eating any fruits and veg.

But, you know, have you even seen a piece of broccoli in the last year? Like that's usually a good starting stuff for a lot of people that I work with. These come with very beneficial micronutrients in there that are instrumental to the processing of the brain. So literally in as little as like two weeks, if you go from not eating fruits and veg to eating fruits and veggies, you're going to notice that you're going to have better focus, better concentration, better sustained energy throughout the day. You'll even start to get a little bit of a skin tone. You're going to look healthier, which is just really cool. It sounds silly, but like really have are you doing that? And then what I'll say is something that is not really talked about, but something that's kind of big for for this is based off. Are you eating the amount of energy that your body needs? If you are either drastically under eating, how much your body needs or overeating, how much your body needs, then that has detriments both ways.

Making sure keeping tabs on yourself, like if you're actively eating a whole lot or not enough. And I do see this is somewhat polarizing in e-sports where there's a tendency for a lot of esports athletes and gamers to either eat a lot or to be so focused and one dimensional on the game that they forget to eat. And then really they're just like having one meal a day, that kind of thing.

So I see both ends and both of these have some issues. These are some very like fundamental kind of easy-ish things that you can do, but I promise you, like if you're actually doing all of these things, you're going to see like 80 to 85% of all the benefits that you would possibly want. And then after that, then we can start looking at some more high level stuff like, okay, do we want to incorporate supplements? Do we want to incorporate like timing recommendations? There's just like really fun strategies that you can start to incorporate, but there's really not a single high level like fancy strategy that you can incorporate that will undo a deficit in a fundamental area. A big example in e-sports is the leveraging caffeine products to overcome poor sleep practices. We have the data that's quite clear.

It's like, okay, you know, you talk to the gamers and they say, Oh, when I take caffeine, I feel amazing. Like it makes me better than I was. And it's like, okay, it makes you better relative to where you were sleep deprived. But it doesn't mean that you, if you compare to yourself well-rested where do you where do you sit? We've done the studies. It's like you sleep deprived individuals. They maybe go from like 100 to 60% of their cognitive performance. There is like some fun, like military studies where they force them to be sleep deprived because they can do whatever they want in the military, which is always fun. And then they try to restore their performance with caffeine.

And what you see is a partial restoration of lost performance. You don't see a total restoration of lost performance. And so they go from maybe 60 to 80%, something like that. For these individuals and for e-sports athletes. It's like, okay, get your sleep dialed in, because then if you layer caffeine on top of good sleep practices and you're already at 100%, well, hey, now maybe we can go from 100 to 105% or 110% or something like that, really, the fundamentals truly are where it's at. And then once you get past that, then, you know, we can start having some fun.

Joel Totoro

If the foundations broke, broken. You can't really do much beyond that. I do actually want to kind of expound a little bit on the caffeine question. So we get a lot of questions about energy drinks. And I think there's a lot of misconceptions about what caffeine actually does as opposed to what it just makes you feel. And then kind of what are you actually trying to get out of the caffeine? Right? And what are the actual kind of nutrient solutions that can kind of get you where you want to go without your third or fourth energy drink of the day?

Casey Thomas

Caffeine's really interesting. It's one of the most widely used psychoactive compounds in the world. It's been used for literally thousands of years. It's we have so much data behind it. We know what it does. We know the impacts. And it's not until recently that we've started to, for lack of a better word, like bastardize it, like it's been used somewhat. You know, it's just like coming out of like the coffee beans and the teas. Right. And a lot of people have been doing this for for literally thousands of years. So caffeine is definitely a hot topic and it depends on what you're trying to accomplish with the caffeine, depending on what you're trying to accomplish with it, it will dictate both the dose and the protocols that you're going to follow with it.

So I guess the start, though, caffeine, the most prominent effect that it has that maybe is relevant for a lot of people is that, I'm sure, you know, it acts as an adenosine antagonist and this basically blocks the sensation of tiredness and sleep perception. The sleep pressure is still there, but you're just blocking your perception of it. So the second that it wears off, then all that sleep pressure is going to hit you really hard. And the funny thing is a lot of people talk about, you know, like afternoon crashes and things like that and it's like, well, it's because you haven't been sleeping and I'm sorry and the caffeine's wearing off, so you're not actually washing away the sleep pressure. All you're doing is blocking the fact that you're feeling it, which is two very different things.

I'm literally drinking coffee as we speak. So, you know, people know I am a caffeine user. This is one of the most common use cases for it. And it's actually kind of a beautiful use case because previously humans have been forced to operate under a very strict, you know, day night cycle. And we've kind of been forced to operate this way until, you know, the invention of the light bulb. And so it wasn't until literally the last couple hundred years that we've been able to adjust our work life schedule. Or just our living schedule as humans. And caffeine makes those adjustments be a little bit easier. It gives us some freedom from which we can choose where we want our tiredness to happen. So rather than always occurring at these set times based off of, you know, when it's daylight or when it's nighttime, yeah, what we see is that that caffeine allows us to break this cycle so we can choose when we get to be tired, we can choose when we want to be awake.

So in that sense, it's actually really nice. It gives us the freedom to do that for most people. In modern times, though, as I said, it's a little bit bastardized in modern times. A lot of people are getting poor sleep and are using caffeine to allow them to be awake when they probably should just be getting their sleep in check. And so that's the most common use case depending on what your job is or what the cognitive load is. Caffeine. Does that. Like it just you know, it does wash away the perception of it's got a half life of about 4 to 10 hours, depending on who you look at or who you ask. So based off the duration of your cognitive task, you're going to adjust when you have the caffeine and also the dose of it.

And it'll work. It'll do what you need to do. And I do want to say that caffeine does have a tolerance effect. So if you continually use caffeine, you'll see that you're going to need a higher, higher dose to get the same level of efficacy out of it. And this can cause some problems. And some people are taking an excess of a gram a day of caffeine, which can, you know, start getting pretty dangerous if you're just using it to try to fix poor sleep patterns. You got to fix your sleep if you're using it because you have busy work, busy schedule, all this kind of stuff. I get it. I'm using caffeine right now. Normally, if you need it to peak in esports, it's like, okay, I have competition right now. So it's like it's a very discrete task. It's a it's a one off task.

And in these instances, what you'll do is you'll take in about 30 to 60 minutes before and we see this mimicked in traditional sports as well, where that will give enough time for it to be absorbed into the body. And then it'll be peaking at about when you want to be peaking with the caffeine in your system. For acute tasks lasting less than like five-ish hours in duration, I like to say we'll take the caffeine anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes before. For long duration tasks spread out across the day in tactical settings what they'll do is they'll break up the caffeine into micro doses and have it every 4 hours incrementally. So they take that same dose that I might give in a bolus dose and then break it up into into micro doses. And every 4 hours. And they'll just keep doing that and that'll give you that sustained attention and sustained vigilance across, you know, 16, 20 hours. Like if you have to pull a night shift or something or maybe you didn't study for a final and so you got to pull an all nighter.

So we have both use cases for like sustained attention and cognition, which, you know, you do the micro doses. Typically for this, you're looking at a dose of like less than 50 mgs per increment for the acute dose for cognitive benefit. We're looking at a dose of about 1 to 3 MGs per KG body weight for physical measures. So like if you need physical performance, we're looking at doses of about 3 to 6 mgs per carry body weight. These are averages. And what I'll say too is if you if your daily dose is like much higher than any of these numbers that I just gave, you probably need to do a wash out.

You probably need to do a wash out the minimum time. Take it. To do a wash out is 48 hours. There seems to be that if you are really ODing on caffeine that I can take up to like three ish weeks to fully resensitize to your caffeine and something for, for e-sports particularly or other cognitive realms. If you are blasting your body with caffeine every day, you can no longer realize some of the cognitive benefits that come with it. And you have to be caffeine sensitive. So for a lot of e-sports athletes, what I'm encouraging is like, you know, you’re cycling your caffeine, so that way you can maintain that sensitivity. You're not using it every single day. If you're using caffeine in the form of like a coffee or tea, you might be using it for health benefits.

Like there's this funny, like meta analysis that come out and they're like, oh, one cup of day, a coffee is great. You live longer. And then like, oh, two cups of coffee a day is better to do. Another says three cups of coffee. It is. I think I saw a recent one actually that said like seven cups a day is like better than five for all. All cause mortality or something it's crazy. Like the number just keeps going up and it's like, how is this even possible? Which is just, I don't know, funny to me. But what I'll say is that for that, that, that runs strictly opposite to performance benefits. So if you're using coffee in that way for health, it runs counter to performance benefits. So you have to talk about what is your purpose with using caffeine before you talk about the dosing and things. So if you're doing it for health, you know, you can do coffee, tea every day. There's other things in there besides caffeine that are health promoting. It's not strictly the caffeine. For e-sports, if you're going to leverage it for performance or for cognitive benefit, you want to be strategic with it and pick your high value days and pick the days where you can leverage caffeine in order to to optimize your performance.

There are some caveats to this. Caffeine doesn't work for everybody. They call it the inverted U phenomenon, where the arousal level of caffeine is a stimulant. It arouses you. And so you see a little bit of arousal is really good for you and brews performance, but too much arousal and you start to see decreases in performance. And so where you are on that spectrum naturally will dictate how much caffeine can work for you. And that comes at a little bit of a testing thing. One of the caveat that I'll throw on too is we don't actually know if caffeine helps out on competition days. It's very hard to mimic competition days in the lab setting. There's not as much adrenaline running when you're just chillin in a room in a lab compared to, you know, there's 100,000 viewers who are watching you. Your job hangs on the line. You've been training for this your entire year. Your family, your friends are all watching you. You know, you're on stage, there's lights, there's cameras, there's all this kind of stuff. The natural adrenaline that comes out in those events is quite high. And layering caffeine on top of it could probably push you too far in the inverted U and may not even be doing anything. So we don't actually know on game days if it's doing anything. But I think on scrim days you you can leverage it, especially if you're more mellow and you need a little pick me up.

Joel Totoro

All right, now, now it's time for us to take a short break. But when we come back, we'll answer some of the questions from our listeners and get some more information out there for us.

Joel Totoro (Ad Read)

This is Joel with the Thorne Podcast: Performance Edition. Do you have a health question or suggestion for a guest or topic that you would like to be featured on the show? Reach out to us on Instagram. Our handle is @ThorneHealth. Ask us a question or topic you'd like covered and we'll try and cover it in future episodes. And don't forget to subscribe to the show in your podcast app. Get updates on the latest in medical research, the insider scoop on performance and health insights and more. When you subscribe to the Thorne Podcast. Thanks for listening.

Joel Totoro

And we're back. So, Casey, a lot of the questions we got were around supplementation. And I think rather than, you know, spending another hour on that, that's a whole other podcast. You have a really great supplement guide on your on your website, which is gamerdiet-dot-g-g. A ton of information for people to read up on. But one of the things you mentioned in there is the concept of verified supplements. Can you talk a little bit about what that means to you?

Casey Thomas

This is a huge topic in the realm of supplements, especially for e-sports sports and for me as a medical practitioner, this is really a hard line that I have to take almost always with any pro e-sports team that I work with, I deliver a supplement presentation as like a little team talk to them. It's a little bit of a scare factor, but some truth to it. So just some scary stats. Most individuals are taking supplements, but as much as like 60-70% of supplements don't pass the purity test. So like, if you hear me talk and say, oh, you should take vitamin D, you go to your local GNC, Costco or whatever nutrition, and you go buy some some vitamin D, there's, you know, very high percentage chance, more more than 50-50 that it's not passing the purity test.

So what's on the label doesn't match what's inside the capsule or the bag or whatever. And what's worse is there's been multiple studies now where, depending on which study you look at anywhere from like 10 to 25% of random supplements off the shelf are going to make you pop on a drug test, which is absolutely just super, super scary. And it's just a big no go in the realm of professionals sports, right? Like if you pop on a drug test, that's a suspension or worse, that could be a career ender. That could be, you know, negative press and branding and all sorts of stuff. You're going to lose all sorts of things. So this is huge. You cannot have you popping on a drug test just because you decided to take a random supplement. The FDA, you know, I think it's really funny, too. And a lot of stuff manufacturers, they're like, oh, we have a GMP facility. And it's like they say they wear this as a badge of honor. And it's like this is the bare minimum legal requirement for you to be open. Like, that's not really a badge of honor. But what's worse is the FDA did an internal audit and found that over 70% of facilities were in violation of GMP.

So it's like, okay, you can't even do the bare, bare minimum legal requirement. And it's just like it paints a really ugly picture of the supplement industry in America. And so the way to protect us is to get some kind of product that is third party verified. So these are independent companies that have no financial stake in the supplement. And what they do is they will do a couple of things. They will test your product for purity, make sure that it passes the purity test, and also do a drug test on it, some of them where they'll test to make sure that it's not going to have you pop in a drug test and they'll do an audit of the facility to make sure that it's up to snuff. And so really, this is the hard line that I take. And if I'm going to recommend a supplement or if I'm going to be taking a supplement long term, it has to be third party verified, like that. That just is what it is. And some of the most common verified companies is NSF for sport. That's the most well recognized.

It's really easy, actually. You just go to the website and it's up for sport and you type in, Oh, I want to buy a vitamin D or Oh, I want to buy protein powder or whatever it is that you want to buy. And it'll pull up a list of just everything that has been certified by NSSF and that's your shopping list. Like you can pick and choose from that based off of, you know, the the colors on the bottle or whatever. I don't know whatever you want, but it really for me, that's as a practitioner, that's really what I choose. That's partly why I land on Thorne a lot of the time for a lot of the products that I recommend is one. It's third party verified. Two, it's a relatively comprehensive product line, so it's almost like a one stop shop because so many of the Thorne products are third party verified. And what you see is that sometimes companies, they have like one particular product line that's NSF certified and then like the rest of it isn't. So then you get tricked into thinking like, Oh, I bought this one thing, and then I bought these other three things from the company because I was already on the website. And then, Uh-Oh, wait, none of these are third party verified, only that one particular one was. So that really like bugs me when I see that if you're going to be taking a supplement long term, you need to make sure it's third party verified. That's that's really what it is.

Joel Totoro

We say a lot, You don't have to be a drug tested athlete to want to have that same level of, you know, security there. So this is a question we get a lot from parents. So my kid plays a lot of video games were recently you had to get glasses for them and I worry about the strain in his eyes. Do you have any diet or supplement condition for him? Should he be wearing filter lenses?

Casey Thomas

Yeah, I'll say that the data is a little bit inconclusive in humans. We do have a lot of convincing data that blue light is damaging in animal models where we've done this in humans, again, it's a little bit equivocal, but still we know that blue light does some other negative things to the human, like it suppresses melatonin, this alters your sleep patterns and sleep quality and quantity. In the nighttime, we know that people who use screens before they go to bed, they're literally going to perform a full letter grade less on test the next day. So you're literally dumber the next day because you've been looking at this blue light stuff. So anyway, blue light blocking lenses and things like that do seem to have some utility both as far as potentially protecting from eye damage. Again, the data is a little bit iffy in humans right now, But, you know, the road and data says it's pretty bad, but it also protects you from this abnormal circadian Q and melatonin suppression that could be going on.

From a nutritional standpoint, there are two nutrients that I really like to highlight that are very beneficial for eyes, which is lutein and zeaxanthin. These two nutrients have been shown in young, healthy individuals to protect the eyes, both the eye health but also to enhance performance. And so this is one of the things that I do did regularly. And baseball players, because they're constantly like looking up, you know, at the sun and all this kind of stuff. So for baseball players and other outdoor sports lutein, zeaxanthin makes a lot of sense and then also for computer people. So if you work at a desk job all day or you know you're a gamer these two nutrients will not only enhance the health of the eye, but also enhance performance, which is really cool. And so we see like very specific performance enhancements in young, healthy individuals when they're taking these those nutrients. And then potential inclusion of blue light blocking material seems to be beneficial.

Joel Totoro

We've spent a lot of this conversation talking about esports athletes, but you and I have talked off camera. The idea of cognitive performance isn't just for gaming, right? I kind of have dumbed it down to do you have a brain and do you use it? Well, then you're a cognitive performer. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about what some of the things we've talked about, other places that they can translate to?

Casey Thomas

I think you summed it up nicely, which is if you have a brain and you're using it, I would say typically any kind of cognitively demanding job that you're doing, if you need sustained attention across a day, if you're a student, Right. Like students are continually going to school, managing and juggling a lot of things. I've worked with a lot of corporate individuals where efficiency, there's a premium on efficiency, but I mean, if learning faster sounds good to you, if having less sick days sounds good to you, if you know improvements in just overall mood and wellbeing, if reaction time sounds good to you, memory sounds good to you.

Like if you're just trying to learn and use your brain for literally anything, I think that you can leverage all sorts of nutritional strategies and potentially supplement strategies in order to improve the performance there. And you know, I've done a lot of talks with corporate and you can reduce sick days and also enhance efficiency at the high level for for businesses and things like that. And the data is quite clear, like it's there. So please leverage it and it will only help you.

Joel Totoro

Yeah, it's funny how much of an impact you can make. We talked about hydration in the brain. I was working with a high level computer company and all we did, it was a water challenge. Like legitimately we just drink more water and like the coding areas pretty immediately went down and they're like, Wait, this is all we need to do to increase efficiency. And then we got a lot of attention from the higher ups, right? Yeah, But yeah, it's as simple as taking care of those fundamental kind of areas. So last question for you. I know you're always kind of doing your N-of-one Casey studies. What topics are you kind of playing with right now and kind of what are you interested right now?

Casey Thomas

Oh geez. So Casey N-of-one I did just get done with earlier this year. I was kind of forced to, with all the media attention on the Carnivore diet, I was forced to do the carnivore diet for a little bit. So I tried that out. And like I said, that was air quotes, “Fine” while I did it. And like when I went back to incorporating other foods, like, I got to tell you, my stomach was just like, terrible. And it was. And I know why. I mean, I know why is just because it killed my gut microbiome when I was doing it. I wasn't eating any fiber or anything. So that kind of sucked and it was really unfortunate. The most recent thing that I have been trying to work in, though, is I've been trying to test out more dark chocolate because I was reading some research studies that showed that it enhanced ocular blood flow. And so I've been trying to do like these eye tracking things and see if I do a high dose dark chocolate if I can improve this.

So I'm I'm like a few days into it and we'll see in another week or two if there's any results. But I got to say, it's really hard to get this amount of dark chocolate in a day because you need the actual extract. If you're just like eating chocolate, like it'd be like like six candy, it'd be like six bars. It's just like impossible. So you have to get the actual extract and like, or like the super powderized like high dose cocoa extract kind of thing, and so it doesn't taste good, but when you do it this way. But yeah, so, so TBD we'll see. We'll see how how the eyes and we'll see if this one is something that can work for me or not because I do like chocolate, but I don't know if it's feasible. I don't know if it's actually feasible given what I'm doing right now. It seems like it's kind of unrealistic because the product line just the market isn't there yet.

Joel Totoro

Yeah, well, we'll see the media spin that, Casey recommends six chocolate bars a day.

Casey Thomas

Oh, yeah. Oh, geeze.

Joel Totoro

That's all the time we have this week. It's been a joy. Where can people go to see more of your work?

Casey Thomas

I am notoriously awful at social media, so I am trying to get better at. If anyone has any tips, please let me know. But you can probably most readily get me on Twitter, which is @CaseyThomasRD. I'm very responsive there. My website GamerDiet.GG has all sorts of fun articles on there about nutrition for cognitive performance specifically. Yes, it says gamer diet in the title, but I think that this is applicable to literally, as we talked about, any kind of cognitive realm. And then also 1-HP, which is, you know, the team of medic professionals I'm a part of and we have all sorts of content and articles and videos and stuff related to different disciplines and E-sports performance. So, you know, whether that's physical therapy or sleep or psychology, like all this stuff. So yeah, that's, that's where you can find me. I don't have the other platforms, sorry, but If anyone wants to help me, I'll take it.

Joel Totoro

No, those two, those two websites are really a wealth of knowledge and they're, they're really approachable articles. So anyone interested in space, I recommend checking them out. And then you can always, you know, check out Thorne.com and our Take 5 Daily. We're writing articles nonstop, you know, this podcast and other episodes and Casey, hopefully we'll have you on again. I think we could we could go down a lot of different ways and spend an hour on those. But that was Casey Thomas, EA Sports dietician. And thank you for listening.

Joel Totoro (Outro)

Thanks for listening to the Thorne Podcast: Performance Edition. Make sure to never miss an episode by subscribing to the show on your podcast app of choice. You can also learn more about the topics we discussed by visiting Thorne.com and checking out the latest news videos and stories on Thorne’s Take 5 Daily blog. For this Performance Edition of the Thorne Podcast, I'm Joel Totoro reminding everyone to stay active and stay hydrated.

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