Episode Overview
Episode Topic
In this episode of Holistic Health Habits, host Surani Fernando sits down with Ian Craig, founder of the Center of Integrative Sports Nutrition, to explore a comprehensive approach to sports nutrition that goes beyond calories and macronutrients. The conversation delves into the principles of integrative nutrition, emphasizing the importance of nourishing the body holistically to enhance both athletic performance and overall well-being. Ian shares his journey from being a middle-distance track athlete to becoming a pioneer in the field, where he bridges exercise physiology and nutritional therapy. This episode is ideal for anyone looking to optimize their health and performance, whether you’re a professional athlete or someone who simply enjoys staying active.
Listeners will gain insights into how integrative sports nutrition differs from traditional methods, focusing on the quality of nutrients rather than just quantity. Ian discusses the critical role of gut health, inflammation management, and a balanced ecosystem of stress and recovery. This episode highlights the importance of considering every aspect of an athlete’s life—from diet and sleep to mental well-being—and how these factors collectively influence performance and health.
Lessons You’ll Learn
This episode offers valuable lessons on integrative sports nutrition and its role in optimizing athletic performance. Ian Craig provides practical advice on how athletes can nourish their bodies beyond mere calorie counting and macronutrient balancing. He emphasizes the significance of gut health, the dangers of over-reliance on processed foods, and the need for a holistic approach to exercise and nutrition. You’ll learn why inflammation and poor gut health can sabotage even the most well-planned training regimen and how to counteract these issues through a nutrient-dense diet and mindful living.
Additionally, Ian discusses the balance between stress and recovery, a crucial component often overlooked in conventional sports nutrition. He introduces the concept of “yin and yang” in training and lifestyle management, highlighting the importance of rest, sleep, and mental wellness for optimal performance. Listeners will come away with actionable strategies to enhance their training, improve recovery, and maintain a balanced lifestyle that supports long-term health and athletic success.
About Our Guest
Ian Craig is a renowned sports nutritionist and the founder of the Center of Integrative Sports Nutrition. With a background as a middle-distance track athlete and a master’s degree in exercise physiology, Ian transitioned into nutritional therapy after discovering the limitations of traditional sports nutrition approaches. His unique perspective combines exercise physiology with integrative nutritional therapy, focusing on a holistic approach to athlete wellness and performance. Ian has developed a model that emphasizes the importance of nourishing every cell and organ system, not just fueling the body for exercise.
Through his work at the Center of Integrative Sports Nutrition, Ian has educated practitioners worldwide, offering courses and workshops to help them integrate these holistic principles into their practice. His upcoming book, “The Textbook of Integrative Sport and Exercise Nutrition,” co-authored with Professor Justin Roberts, is set to further solidify his position as a thought leader in the field. Ian’s approach is rooted in the belief that optimal athletic performance stems from achieving overall health and well-being, a message he passionately shares in his teachings and writings.
Topics Covered
In this episode, Ian Craig covers a range of topics essential for anyone interested in integrative sports nutrition and holistic health. He begins by discussing his personal journey from being an athlete to becoming a nutrition expert, highlighting the gap between traditional sports nutrition and the integrative approach he advocates. Ian elaborates on the importance of gut health, inflammation management, and choosing high-quality nutrients over merely focusing on macronutrient quantity. He also shares stories from his practice, illustrating the impact of poor dietary choices on athletic performance and overall health.
The conversation further explores the role of modern technology in sports nutrition, from heart rate variability tracking to continuous glucose monitoring, and the benefits and pitfalls of genetic testing for personalized nutrition. Ian also touches on practical applications, such as managing stress, enhancing recovery, and balancing exercise with a healthy lifestyle. The episode concludes with Ian’s top tips for athletes and health enthusiasts, emphasizing the importance of a mindful approach to both nutrition and training for achieving peak performance and well-being.
Our Guest: Ian Craig
Ian Craig is a trailblazer in the field of sports nutrition, merging his extensive background in exercise physiology with a passion for holistic health. Initially a competitive middle-distance track athlete, Ian’s early fascination with the human body and its athletic potential led him to pursue a master’s degree in exercise physiology in the 1990s. His experience as an athlete and his academic training provided him with a strong foundation in understanding the physical demands of sports and the traditional approaches to fueling athletes. However, Ian soon realized that conventional sports nutrition focused too heavily on quantitative measures like calories and macronutrients, often neglecting the holistic needs of the body. This realization propelled him to explore functional medicine and nutritional therapy, areas that offered a more integrative perspective on health and performance.
In the early 2000s, Ian earned a degree in nutritional therapy, which marked a pivotal shift in his career from exercise physiology to a more comprehensive approach to wellness. Combining his expertise in physiology with his new knowledge in nutritional therapy, Ian founded the Center of Integrative Sports Nutrition. Here, he developed a unique model that goes beyond traditional sports nutrition by emphasizing the importance of nourishing every cell and organ system to enhance overall health and athletic performance. His philosophy integrates concepts such as gut health, inflammation management, and nutrient quality, arguing that true athletic excellence cannot be achieved without first addressing these fundamental health issues. Through this approach, Ian has effectively bridged the gap between sports science and holistic health, positioning himself as a pioneer in a new wave of sports nutrition.
Beyond his work with individual athletes, Ian is also an accomplished educator and author. He has created master’s level courses and numerous workshops to train practitioners in his integrative approach, drawing students from around the globe. Ian’s contributions to the field are further solidified through his role as the editor of the Functional Sports Nutrition Magazine and as a speaker at international conferences. Currently, he is co-authoring “The Textbook of Integrative Sport and Exercise Nutrition” with Professor Justin Roberts, a comprehensive guide set to reshape how sports nutrition is taught and practiced. The book, expected to release in early 2025, will encapsulate his two decades of experience and innovation in the field. Ian’s dedication to advancing sports nutrition through a holistic lens has made him a respected voice among athletes, practitioners, and health enthusiasts worldwide
TRANSCRIPT
Surani Fernando: Welcome to another episode of Holistic Health Habits, the podcast where we explore the latest and greatest in holistic health practices. I’m your host, Surani Fernando, and today we have a very special guest with us, Ian Craig. Ian Craig is the founder of the Center of Integrative Sports Nutrition. He’s a pioneer in the field of sports nutrition, combining integrative and holistic approaches to optimize athletic performance and overall well-being. Welcome to the show, Ian.
Ian Craig: Thanks a lot for having me, sir. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Surani Fernando: Great. So let’s get straight into it. Firstly, I’m curious about your background. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, your own journey into the nutrition world and how that sort of evolved into where you’re at today.
Ian Craig: Sure. I started off fascinated with the athletic body or the moving body. I was a middle distance track athlete myself, so I was always pursuing, what do we need to do to have a better functioning body? So that to me, into exercise physiology, which I did up to master’s degree in the 1990s and then I and then gradually I got into nutrition, nutrition before it had been about calories and macronutrients and so on. And I didn’t find it that interesting, but I found functional medicine and nutritional therapy in the early 2000 and took on another degree in nutritional therapy. And that’s when I started understanding the integrative, uh, view of the body and how we need to nourish the body, not just provide enough fuel for exercise, but to nourish every single cell and organ system that we have. So that basically set about my path when I thought I was having a career change in direction. I was an exercise physiologist and strength and conditioning specialist, and I was suddenly in need of nutrition. But then I started pulling the two areas together, , to create an interest that I now call integrative sport and exercise nutrition.
Surani Fernando: Yeah. So you say that it was sort of a different path that you took in terms of, you know, incorporating the nutrition aspect or putting those two together. So I was just curious because for me, it seems like a natural combination, you know, putting exercise with, you know, nutrition. , but, you know, I was curious about the traditional part that’s taken that doesn’t include the nutrition.
Ian Craig: So within my undergraduate and postgraduate training, , I did study nutrition as part of that, but it was done in a very quantitative way. It’s like, okay, how many calories does an athlete need? How many grams of carbohydrate, fat and protein? And these are all relevant questions. , but they’re not the only thing we need to be considering. And even today, we’re still very macro focused, as I call it. It’s the quantity of food. But if, for example, you’re eating, let’s say you’ve got a recommendation from a sports nutritionist that you need so many grams of carbohydrate every day. And in order to do that, you’re eating lots of bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, bagels, you name it, without discernment for quality. What is that doing to the gut? Health. And if the gut health is not optimal, you’re actually decreasing the diversity of the microbiome, for example, and creating inflammation in the process. That’s ultimately going to have a negative consequence on the body even though you’re following these guidelines for fuel. Yeah. When we turn it around and actually look from a nourishing perspective, which we do for looking at body systems health first, then we can look at food as medicine, food as nourishment, food as vibration, and not just fuel, like putting petrol in a car engine.
Surani Fernando: Okay.
Surani Fernando: And so what are some of those, you know, putting that into practice where you’re going more for the nourishment rather than just, you know, the feeding. What would be some I mean, these are so that’s sort of where we get into the holistic principles. , if, for example, with the carb carb loading, , element for some athletes, what would be the advice that you give them?
Ian Craig: So if we’re talking about, you know, let’s say marathon runners who have traditionally always carb loaded because what’s understood is that we all have carb storage, we store glycogen in the liver and then the muscles, but generally not enough in itself to see you through a marathon or something, some kind of hard, enduring endurance activity of that duration. So we need to carb load. That’s never changed. , although the recommendations around carb loading are a little bit softer. It used to be in the 1980s and 1990s, you would do a carb depletion with heavy exercise and a low carb diet for a few days, and then a super carb sort of compensation type intake. That’s quite harsh. And not many people can, you know, be healthy and thrive on that kind of protocol. Nowadays, it’s sort of recognized. You just sort of push your carbohydrate intake up a bit, but below that, below the quantities we need to look at quality. If it’s just eat more bread to get the carbs in, that could have a negative consequence on inflammatory response through the body. Whereas we can be looking at the person and what makes them tick. An example not on the carb thing. Sing one of my clients have been working with. He’s had progressively more gastrointestinal distress of recent months while his training vole has been increasing. So I’ve been coaching him and sort of supporting him on the nutrition. And I asked him recently to just kind of give me a couple of days of sample eating, and I saw that he’d he was having maybe two glasses of milk each day, which was a new thing. And I said, well, just try knocking the milk out for a couple of weeks and see what happens. And I got an email last Friday. I can’t believe it. I took the milk out for about two weeks, and then today I had a cup of tea with milk in it and within five minutes I was running to the toilet.
Surani Fernando: Wow.
Surani Fernando: I wonder why he just added milk. I mean, that seems a bit random to add two glasses of milk into your diet randomly, but.
Ian Craig: If you look at if you do some googling, doctor googling, I mean, milk is very good for protein, right? Milk is considered well. Chocolate milk’s got lots of research for recovery. Milk’s really good for your bones. Or so they say. So it’s. But it has to be right for the person. His immune system is built up a sensitivity to the amount of milk that he’s been having while he’s been under the heavy load of the exercise. Because when we exercise heavily and I’m not just talking about moderate recreational exercise, he’s an elite cyclist. Mhm. You start compromising the immune system, you start imbalancing the immune system. And then it’s more likely to react and create an inflammatory response.
Surani Fernando: Right.
Ian Craig: And then something that might have a mild Held sensitivity and normal situations. You know, if he was just doing moderate exercise that you might not notice, right. In this circumstance, then it builds up into something that he can’t ignore anymore.
Surani Fernando: Right, right. Definitely.
Surani Fernando: And so just going back to, you know, the center for Sports Nutrition, tell us a little bit about how that started. You know what you guys are who your clients are, who you normally work with.
Ian Craig: Yeah. So the center for Integrative Sports Nutrition derived from this 20 year process of just trying to bridge the nutritional therapy work that I was doing with my old physiology background. And initially I started with creating a master’s degree module for the center for Nutrition Education and Lifestyle Management. I used to work for and then I did a few short courses for a publishing company, which sounds a bit random, but they also do the. They hosted the functional Sports Nutrition magazine that I used to edit, and they also do conferences. So we did conferences and a few, a few activities. But by 2018, I kind of wanted to do my own thing. So I created the center for Integrative Sports Nutrition. At the time, I was living in South Africa, so it was three flights per year into London to host three different modules, and it went really well. , but then of course, the Covid period came along and by that time we were transitioning to live or online study, and then it’s become fully online as part of that process, which means that people anywhere in the world can access this on the same tutorials. We’ll have people in America and Australia at the same time, which is quite exciting. So it’s not currently an institute for practices. It’s for education of practitioners. So we attract nutrition practitioners and exercise practitioners. We will get doctors on. We’ll get chiropractors. We’ll get different types of modalities. But ultimately it’s trying to help them specialize within sports nutrition. But within the integrative thinking way of thinking of sports nutrition. And we have a strap line health feeds performance, meaning that we believe very firmly that in order to have peak performance we need good health. And that’s where this integrative thinking comes in. So good gut health, good immune health. Good musculoskeletal health. Good nervous system, endocrine system, etc..
Surani Fernando: Okay.
Surani Fernando: And are the teachings just for, you know, very high level advanced athletes or does this apply to, you know, normal people who might be. Okay. So would this apply to high level advanced athletes or could it also apply to the everyday person that is regularly does regular exercise activity.
Ian Craig: Okay. So the people that we have on our courses are all practitioners. But they are then working with the athletes. The athletes. An athlete to me is somebody who moves on a regular basis with intention. So it doesn’t have to be an elite person who, you know, competes in the Olympic Games or the World Cup or anything like that. It’s somebody who moves on a regular basis from The basis of health. And when you look at integrative principles, it doesn’t matter firstly that the person’s an athlete. It matters firstly that they’re a hand being with these different organ systems that we need to try and get healthy. And then you layer upon, you layer in the other aspects of their life. So if they’re an elite, highly, highly elite athlete, then they’re training every day. Are they the stressors to the body. If they’re not a highly elite athlete, maybe just recreational, the stressors might be their job, their relationships, their nutrition patterns, their sleep patterns, and their exercise. So you’ve got a slightly different way of looking at what we’re calling ecosystems. So the ecosystem is just everything that’s around that athlete, what’s in their life. So there’s another use of the word holistic. So let’s look at the holistic lifestyle and how that impacts our health and how they resonate with what they’re trying to do. Yeah.
Surani Fernando: And you know something that you mentioned before with, you know, your elite cyclists, it makes me I mean, just with inflammation, like when you do something that’s, you know, heavy on the body, this is super related. But I have an experience myself. I mean, I would say I’m probably would fall into your category of like someone who’s moving regularly with intention and, you know, likes to keep active. I always like, feel like I need to do something, even if I’m on vacation, to just, like, keep those things functioning and well oiled. , but I did go through a period.
Surani Fernando: Of.
Surani Fernando: Like one month. I joined this thing called ClassPass, which allows you to do all these different boutique fitness classes, very high intensity classes. I did pair that with some yoga and Pilates and things like that. Wasn’t really thinking about my nutrition at all, just regularly just keeping the same thing, eating relatively healthy. But I just noticed that my body was so inflamed, it just felt just very like irritable. I started to gain weight. It didn’t. I mean, I obviously was maybe gaining muscle, but it didn’t look like that. It just looked like fat. And then as I when I stopped that, when I stopped doing those heavy routines, probably I wasn’t getting enough sleep. , because some of those classes were pretty early, I deflated after when I stopped, I stopped doing that. So what? What would you say in that situation. Like what’s your just high level analysis of that situation of just exercising, like probably burning a lot of calories more than I would usually, but then just like sort of ballooning.
Ian Craig: So that’s a really good example. Sahrani is one of the types of recreational athletes I used to see a lot of in Johannesburg. So Johannesburg, where I used to live, it’s almost like London on steroids. They’re still chasing. They’ve still got the gold rush going on in Johannesburg. So I saw a lot of stressed out individuals who were trying to train really hard on top of a very cluttered lifestyle, so they’d compromise on their sleep. They didn’t have time to feed themselves properly, but they were getting an early morning training session. They’d be working stressful jobs, they had family commitments. Et cetera. Et cetera. And what you’ve described is a bit of a paradox. When you look at sports nutrition theory or even just body composition or weight management theory. We all think that we burn more calories than we confuse, and then we lose weight, right? We do the opposite, then we gain weight. But the han body is a lot more complex than that very, very simplistic equation. What happens in reality is when you load your body beyond what it’s got the resources to cope with, it starts compensating, has compensatory reactions. You’ll be living on high stress hormones. So cortisol and adrenaline, which have a very large effect on body composition. But one of the books I recommend to clients is the Cortisol effect, and on the front cover, the strap line is why stress makes you fat and what to do about it. Yeah, so I think it says everything. Yeah. One of the factors I’ve just been writing , a chapter on body composition. So it’s very fresh in my mind. One of the big factors of cortisol is destabilizing blood sugar, which affects our insulin. And it can push us into insulin resistance, meaning that available calories are available, carbohydrates and fats become stored preferentially, preferentially compared to use for energy. So you might feel like, well, I’ve got all this excess fat, but my energy is low. I’m tired.
Surani Fernando: Right.
Ian Craig: So you’re not accessing that energy on your body as well?
Surani Fernando: Yeah.
Surani Fernando: I mean, yeah, totally. And that this was about eight years ago. And I came to that realization that, well, not as scientific as yours, but yeah, just the stress on my body. , you know, it was just heavily felt like it was inflamed. It’s more about, for me just working smarter, not harder with these kinds of things and like, yeah, you know, a whole holistic approach there. But I think, yeah, it’s something that a lot of people didn’t even understand when I would tell people, yeah, like I was doing a lot of exercise, you know, a lot of high intensity sort of stuff. And I just said, I got fatter. , and they were like, that’s so strange. Like, if you were doing, like, were you just eating a lot more or. And I was like, no, not really, I wasn’t. I was pretty conscious that I was on a health journey. I wasn’t necessarily dieting or anything like that. I was I was trying to nourish my body, but it was just, , you know, something that I blindly did without any education on, you know, those really nuanced things. Because at the end of the day, it’s like my body was trying to survive from the, you know, I was just basically breaking my body.
Ian Craig: Yeah. It becomes survival, not thrive, you know, survive. Not thrive. And I often talk about yin yang. Yeah. Because some of the, some of the most powerful messages that we can share with our clients are the simplest and ying yang. The old Chinese symbolism for, , opposites is really, really powerful. When we exercise hard, we’re in a yang state, you know, hard driving state. When we’re working hard all day, our busy stress jobs, we’re in a yang state When we’re thinking stressful thoughts, we’re in a yang state. But if you want to be a good athlete, you need to have the yang and yang balanced. So the ying yang is sleep. Are we getting enough of it? The yang is good nutrition. Are we getting enough of that? The yang is breathing well, are we doing that well enough? And the yang is having a very calm nervous system. Do we actually have any periods in our day where we have that? , and I’ve got similar stories to you, not with the body composition element, but just when I was an athlete myself, years when I had quite a simple life, I moved on. I progressed much better with the same training patterns as other years where I was suddenly trying to fit in another job, or I had other things in my life where I had a longer commute or lived in a more stressful place. So it’s really, really key that we think of that fundamental. Are we getting enough recuperation activity in our life to balance off that hard training session that we did today?
Surani Fernando: Right.
Surani Fernando: Right. And how important in your practice is the protein macronutrient, you know, compared to the others. And, you know, that seems to be with athletes. You know, you go to sports nutrition shops and there’s like lots of different nutrients. But protein seems to be a big one. And I recently sort of delved into this space, you know, thinking, okay, you know, for my body, I probably am not eating enough protein in my diet, but let’s go and see what like what I can supplement with a clean protein. And I was pretty shocked to see how much protein supplements are out there that have like a lot of sugar in them, a lot of chemicals in them. Like they’re just not like, clean. That what you were saying? You know, with gut health, you’ve got to take care of that as well. So I’m curious what you recommend for your clients that you see that might need that extra protein.
Ian Craig: Okay. So very good question. Thank you. So all of the macronutrients are very important. But protein you know especially tends to be underestimated in the endurance fraternity and then overestimated in the strength and power fraternity. But essentially whatever your exercise is, if hard enough and intensive enough on the body, we need good protein for recuperation. We also need protein for every other function in our body, including immune cells and endocrine cells and neurotransmitters. So it’s fundamental. The numbers that are bandied about tend to be about 1.6g of protein per kilo of body mass per day. Some will go up to about two. And then you’ll get your strength and power athletes sometimes going up to three for a short period. So some of them really go quite high. It’s recommended that we get most of it from our diet, but if we have athletes with high requirements or a busy life and not enough time to sit down and have a proper lunch. Breakfast lunch. Dinner scenario. The protein powders are a really good contribution. So I always, always look into the health market rather than the sports market when I recommend supplements. So like the I still like whey protein. We’re in an era of plant based protein. So pea and brown rice and hemp and and all these derivatives, which I think have their place as well. I’m still a fan of whey unless you have a particularly strong dairy sensitivity. Right. , but I just recommend a company that does grass fed, cow derived whey protein, either plain or with the flavors they add in. It’s real flavors. So like cacao powder is added into the chocolate. , dried freeze dried powdered banana is put into the banana flavor, you know? Et cetera. Et cetera.
Surani Fernando: Okay. Okay.
Ian Craig: And they won’t taste very sweet when you mix them, but you can add in a bit of honey or something if you want to do that. Or you can turn it into a smoothie. So absolutely, you’ve got very important point. A lot of products. The sugar doesn’t bother me too much unless it’s excessive sweeteners. They should not be in the food chain, right? The chemically derived sweeteners anyway. And then you get emulsifiers and you get stabilizers, and you get colors and you get preservatives and flavorings. They should not be in an athlete’s diet. Right. Because one of the most energy sapping processes for a han being is detoxification. Mhm. So we all need it. There’s a fundamental requirement to be detoxifying all the time. But if we unknowingly perhaps add in artificial ingredients that have to go straight for the recycle bin i.e. our liver, then it’s using more energy and nutrients and cofactor nutrients than we really need to write.
Surani Fernando: I think I ended up finding something that is a whey protein that has like three ingredients. It doesn’t have any flavor, but it does have, I think the soy lectin, which is for like that’s an emulsifier, right. Like is that like to get it mixed.
Ian Craig: Yeah. You need to be a wee bit careful with soy derivatives, but it just depends how much you’re having.
Surani Fernando: Yeah I sometimes find this like the wild wild West in terms of like, these are all things that people are taking with the intention of improving their health. But sometimes, you know, it can go the other way where you’re like putting something into your diet to help it, but then possibly doing some harm. So I’m just like very conscious of that, just generally trying to eat whole foods and be generally healthy with obviously the social element like can screw that up a little bit when you know. But we all need to enjoy life a little bit. A little bit, but you know, keeping keeping that balance. But the proteins is something that. You know, I think for me just educating myself a little bit more on that and definitely prioritizing that has 100. 100% given me more energy and more I feel stronger than before because I think I was really not. You know, sometimes people think that, you know, in a meal, you know, they just need some protein and one egg will be enough. But that’s not a lot of protein. Not a lot of protein.
Ian Craig: Yeah. It’s important to certainly when you are exercising and even just for general health itself to have a sense of how much protein we’re consuming and are we getting enough. So I have a handout for clients, just food examples of how you get 20g of protein. So then it’s a rough and ready way of they can just assess, go through a food diary and say, okay, right, there’s 20g from the three eggs I had in breakfast. There’s 20g from the piece of chicken, there’s 40g from the the mince I had at dinner, you know, etc. and get, get a sense. So it is an important aspect.
Surani Fernando: Yeah, definitely.
Surani Fernando: And this moving on to like technology. So do you use any particular technological advancements in your practice and how do you also see that side of things with, you know, there’s a lot of health tech products evolving, and people are wearing things like the Oura Ring, or they’re doing glucose monitoring and things like that. How do you use them? And, you know, how do you differentiate from the health and the hype?
Ian Craig: So I think we’re in an interesting era. The companies like often happens are getting ahead of the science. But then it means there’s a lot of people experimenting with stuff. What we need to be careful with as consumers is avoiding the hype and focusing in on how can we use these things. So you mentioned two things. The Oura Ring, which is one of the methodologies for heart rate variability. So heart rate variability is an assessment of the variation of heart rhythm. And actually more variation indicates that we’re in the relax and repair nervous system. The ying the ying aspect I mentioned earlier. So heart rate variability is a very good methodology. The aura ring, we’ve got the whoop band. We’ve got more, let’s say scientific devices that tend to be used by practitioners such as Firstbeat and Omega Wave. And we’ve also got apps, you know, very simple apps on the phones now that can assess a single HRV measurement. So I think they’re very useful, but we need to be careful that the person doesn’t lose their mindfulness. And what I mean by that there’s this word connect. So we’re connected to our devices. And literally I see people running down the road looking at their watch every ten steps. So presumably trying to stick in a heart rate band. Right. But what goes through my head is, well, how do they know what number they’re looking for? Have they done an assessment with a coach or an exercise physiologist to give them training bands? Most likely not, because most of the watches now will tell you based on your age and your sex.
Ian Craig: And, you know, a few basic variables that you stick into the device. What you should be training at, and then people take it as you know, a must, and then they become slave to their technology, not mine. Not being mindfully aware that they’re doing the right thing. And I’ll give you an example. When I left my master’s degree, I pursued my I put my energy into being the best runner I could be. So I took a part time job as a personal trainer in a gym near my training ground. I would get so many clients who would come to me and seek my services for personal training, because they’d come into the gym as a newbie member. They’d gone onto the treadmill, the cross trainer, or whatever other equipment, and they’d gone straight for the fat burning zone, and that was heart rate based. But of course, the machine, the treadmill that you could hold the hands of and handles of and get your heart rate. Didn’t know the person? How could the machine assess that this person needed this heart rate to burn fat? And of course, you get very disgruntled people who’ve been at it for months in this heart burning, fat burning zone.
Ian Craig: Yeah, without getting results. So then I would take over the program and, you know, give them some intensity mixed in with duration. So the mindfulness, if those people had been mindful as opposed to trusting the technology without thinking, they’d have tuned in, that it wasn’t hard enough for them, they needed to do something different for their body. Right. So I coach mindfulness alongside potentially using technology. The you also mentioned glucose continuous glucose monitoring, which is, I think, an amazing technological advancement because a diabetic can see their blood glucose measurement all the way through the day. Now they can play with different dietary, you know, intakes, different exercise patterns, stress management skills, sleep hygiene and see if they can level their blood sugar. So an athlete can do the same thing because a lot of athletes have a sugary diet which will peak their blood sugar. A lot of athletes have stress. The training sessions themselves are very stress inducing. Cortisol and adrenaline will drive your blood sugar up. So you can start playing around with that stuff. But again, I’ve seen too many people that get lost in technology. You need to use that as feedback and then tune in to the actual food that you’re consuming. Right? Very, very strongly.
Surani Fernando: Definitely. And what about technologies like personalized nutrition or genetic testing? Do you delve into that?
Ian Craig: Yeah. Funnily enough, I did a wee bit consulting work for a genetics lab in Johannesburg. When was that? About 2012. 2011. So it was a while ago now. And they were kind of, I would say, right at the point where you could start to apply the genetic information into practice if you’re careful. And I’m trying to use my words carefully there, because there’s still a lot of scientists that don’t think genetic testing or the science within genetics is sufficient to be used just yet. But what they tend to do, like doctors reviewing a blood test, they look at the blood tests and then give a script for a medication according to the blood test. Less effective practitioners will do that with genetic tests. So they’ll look at just the results and say, oh, you’ve got some inflammatory SNPs. That’s your single nucleotide polymorphisms or genetic variants variances. You get SNPs for inflammation. Oh we need to get you on to ginger and turmeric and so on. But actually there are only three SNPs on that actual test. And science so far has looked at ten or 20 or 30 of them. We need to be careful with that because that doesn’t represent everything in that person’s body. So we need to also be doing a very, very good health history when you first work with a client.
Ian Craig: And if you’re picking out inflammatory aspects of their life, and then there’s a few SNPs that agree with that. And there’s no harm in the process that you’re going to go and do with them, then great. You know, do some anti-inflammatory dietary protocols. Yeah. Food first, followed by supplements. But I feel that supporting information of okay, well, you already have spent the time to get to know your client. You’ve now got a little bit of genetic information. I think that can be powerful in the right hands with good practitioners. And genetics testing is getting better every year because it’s a very fast moving science. So you might have ten snips for inflammation this year, and next year you’ve got 15. And the refinement of information is gradually getting better. But we should never ever see genetics as like talent identification. It’s not the same, right? Yes, there’s Contributors, but I don’t think we will ever be able to see all the genetics of success. I think there’s a lot of inner stuff in a person that determines whether they’re going to be successful or not. And motivation and personal drive and personal journey are obviously part of that.
Surani Fernando: Yeah, great.
Surani Fernando: And just moving forward, just as we wrap up, you know, what’s next for the center for Integrative Sports Nutrition? I believe you’re writing a new book. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
Ian Craig: Yeah. So thank you. I’ve got a couple of projects at the moment. One is I’m writing the Textbook of Integrative Sport and Exercise Nutrition, and I’m doing that with Professor Justin Roberts at Anglia Ruskin University. So a bridging approach between science. He’s the academic and practice. I’m the practitioner. We’re bringing in various contributors to try and bring that to life in all of the chapters. So that’s going to be out hopefully in early 2025 through Routledge. And then also within the center for Integrative Sports Nutrition. We’ve just set up a diploma postgraduate diploma course. So that’s going to be launched later this year as well.
Surani Fernando: Okay, great.
Surani Fernando: And then just finally, you know, just for everyone listening, you know, we’ve got the sports and health professionals listening, but also just everyone everyday people that are sort of interested in this space. You know, if there are people that are wanting to get into, you know, more of a holistic approach to their exercise and nutrition, where you see, you know, the people that have like the biggest challenges. What sort of tips, what sort of top tips would you give if you’re going to if they’re going to really, you know, be mindfully getting into the space?
Ian Craig: It’s question right. Top tips. Top tips is know yourself what your weak spots. So as a striving athlete or a striving person just trying to be healthier and fitter with exercise. Do you have any weak spots? Is it a gut function? Is it recovery between exercise sessions? You know, are you getting inflammation or soreness in your muscles? You can then take that information and come back to your diet. Nourish your gut. Things like vegetables and fruits and not too much man made processed foods can help with inflammation. Looking at supplements that are powerful in certain ways. You know, we’ve got lots of stuff that can nourish every body system and our body. Looking at your ecosystem. So where are all the stressors versus where are the things that help recovery? So that yin yang perspective I gave earlier, Here. We need to balance the hard stuff. We can’t just build those through every single day working hard, training hard, not eating properly and not sleeping enough and expect that the body will cope. We’re not machines and even if we were, machines need oil changes and then respect the mind. The mind is much, much more powerful than we think. And I’ll just give one example. We’re now in the era in science of recognizing that the mind or thoughts or processes affect the mitochondria, and the mitochondria are well known as the powerhouse energy producers in our cells. And every athlete wants to grow more mitochondria. Well, having lots of negative thoughts and emotions and what’s been termed mental health problems in sport now will negatively affect your mitochondria. So we need to be nourishing the mind and the way we think in order to support every single process in the body. Yeah.
Surani Fernando: Well, all very good tips and a very holistic approach there. , definitely taking on a lot of those principles into my own journey. So thanks, Ian, for that. Ian, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for coming on and sharing all of your insights, and I wish you all the best. , you know, with everything that you’ve got coming, your book and everything with the business. So for our listeners who want to learn more about Ian and his work, be sure to visit the center for Integrative Sports Nutrition at Sports nutrition.com. Thanks for everyone for tuning in to Holistic Health Habits. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and leave a review. , stay tuned for more episodes where we continue to explore holistic approaches to health and wellness. Until next time, I’m Surani Fernando. Take care and stay healthy.