In this podcast episode, what a doctor thinks about the paleo diet, heart rate monitors

and calorie burning, transdermal magnesium absorption, or whether you can take too much

magnesium, running faster for triathlon, and big news about an upcoming training camp.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness.com podcast. We provide you with free, exercise,

nutrition, weight loss, triathlon, and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation.

So whether you're an Iron Man triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds,

get ready for non-run-of-the-mill cutting-edge content from Ben Greenfield Fitness.com.

Hey podcast listeners, this is Ben Greenfield and I'm going to start right off by delivering to

you the content that I completely spaced last week. I was going to tell you whether or not a

heart rate monitor could really tell you how many calories that you've burned and I completely

forgot to discuss that, just left it out of the podcast. So we're going to jump straight into

that and then we'll go on to special announcements in the listener Q&A and finally our interview on

the paleo diet. The reason that I wanted to talk about whether a heart rate monitor can actually

tell you how many calories that you've burned is because heart rate monitors are claiming to do a lot

of things these days, including cleaning your house, doing your dishes, flushing the toilet,

making your bed. No but really some of these companies like Polar and Suntow, they do have a button

that you can push that'll tell you how many calories you're burning during your workout.

Well there's a recent study in the Journal of Strength and Dictionary Research and this study was

entitled Validation of Heart Rate Monitor Based Predictions of Oxygen Uptake and Energy

Spenditure. The whole idea behind the study was they were checking to see how heart rate monitors

actually measured calories and specifically how accurately they did so when compared to laboratory

measurements because traditionally you can go into a lab and actually find out exactly how many

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