The Real Fitness Nerd

Illegal Dopes?

2012-01-25T15:22:00.000-08:00

I've been doing a bunch of research on substances banned by the World Anti-Doping Association lately. (Yeah, that's right. Some people experiment with elicit substances. Others get their kicks researching them instead. Back off.) Anyway, I stumbled into a couple weird smaller lists at the end of the big WADA list that I thought you might enjoy. Firstly, here's a list of sports that ban alcohol:

Alcohol (ethanol) is prohibited In-Competition only, in the following sports. Detection will be conducted by analysis of breath and/or blood. The doping violation threshold (haematological values) is 0.10 g/L.

• Aeronautic (FAI)
• Archery (FITA)
• Automobile (FIA)
• Karate (WKF)
• Motorcycling (FIM)
• Powerboating (UIM)

I can understand the inclusion of most of these, including archery cuz no one likes a drunk with a bow and arrow, especially if you've taken to wearing an apple on your head, which I understand is the fashion in the American deep south, where carousing archers often spend their holidays.

That said, I do not understand the inclusion of karate. It has been my understanding (and perhaps my experience) that drinking alcohol does not improve your martial arts technique. In fact, I find it to be somewhat impairing - unless, of course, you're Jackie Chan, as proven in Drunken Master II, but that wouldn't be right to ban a substance purely to inhibit the performance of one person.

Sports banning beta-blockers are also pretty interesting:

Unless otherwise specified, beta-blockers are prohibited In-Competition only, in the following sports.

• Aeronautic (FAI)
• Archery (FITA) (also prohibited Out-of-Competition)
• Automobile (FIA)
• Billiards (all disciplines) (WCBS)
• Boules (CMSB)
• Bridge (FMB)
• Darts (WDF)
• Golf (IGF)
• Ninepin and Tenpin Bowling (FIQ)
• Powerboating (UIM)
• Shooting (ISSF, IPC) (also prohibited Out-of-Competition)
• Skiing/Snowboarding (FIS) in ski jumping, freestyle aerials/halfpipe and
snowboard halfpipe/big air

(Before I continue, I want to point out how rad it is that an official WADA document actually uses the term "big air.")

I've always known beta blockers for their ability to help people with cardiovascular conditions, but apparently, they slow your heartbeat, keeping you cool in stressful situations. (Armed with this knowledge, I now plan to take beta blockers before any and all first and second dates. I will cease for date three, given a known "below the belt" side effect of this particular substance.)

According to the New York Times, they're the go-to drug for symphony musicians who want to chill out, which explains why rock 'n' roll replaced classical as the popular music of choice. Maybe if Keith Richards or Ace Frehley had a word with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra, they could turn things around a little for the genre - or at least make La Boheme a little more exciting.

So with that in mind, I understand most of these bans (although bowling is a bit of a stretch). But the one I don't get is bridge. Really? Keeping in mind that the only people I've ever known who play bridge are my grandmother and, well, everyone else's grandmother, it seems to me that banning heart medication is tantamount to banning your primary playing demographic. I look forward to the day that some rogue geriatric bridge champ makes the cover of Sports Illustrated for poppin' Lopressor between rubbers.

I hope they pose her next to Mark McGwire. I'd buy a lifetime subscription.

Exercise: Fat Buster or Fat Waste of Time?

2012-01-20T11:29:00.000-08:00

I am often flummoxed by "experts" who claim exercise has no influence on weight loss. Case in point, Gary Taubes writing in the New York Times a few years ago:

Let’s say we go to the gym and burn off 3,500 calories every week—that’s 700 calories a session, five times a week. Since a pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories, does that mean we’ll be a pound slimmer for every week we exercise? And will we continue to slim down at this pace for as long as we continue to exercise?... The catch is that science suggests it’s not, and so the answer to all of the above quiz questions is “no.”

Stuff like this drives me nuts. Taubes has a lot of important things to say about weight loss, but he ruins them by throwing out chestnuts like this. At this writing, the human body is not manufactured by Casio. It is not a calculator. Admittedly, this article is from 2007 and only last year did modern science finally admit that the whole "pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories" is redonkulously over-simplistic. But instead of waxing sarcastic any longer, I'm going to throw down a little study out of Rome showing that exercise benefits insulin-treated obese patients with diabetes.

Stefano Balducci, M.D., from "La Sapienza" University in Rome, and colleagues conducted a subanalysis of 73 insulin-treated patients among 606 sedentary patients with type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. The subjects were randomly selected to either the EXE group (twice-weekly supervised aerobic and resistance training plus structured exercise counseling) or the CON group (counseling only) for 12 months. Clinical and laboratory parameters were assessed at baseline and end of study.

The researchers found that participants in the EXE group had significantly more physical activity than those in the CON group. Following the 12-month period, values for HbA1c, body mass index, waist circumference, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, blood pressure, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and the coronary heart disease risk score were significantly reduced in the EXE group compared with the CON group.

Yes, I understand that these are hardly typical exercisers, but it's pretty black and white that BMI and waist circumference were affected by a healthy dose o' cardio and weight training. So I guess it's a little silly to categorically dismiss exercise as a weight loss method cuz for every study you have, someone else has another two studies saying the exact opposite thing. In other words, the only absolute truth about fitness and nutrition is that there is no absolute truth about fitness and nutrition, so quit being a smarty pants.

Just sayin'.

Blog Love: Steve Edwards wins the day!

2012-01-11T11:20:00.000-08:00

I'm going to give my fellow Fitness Nerd Steve Edwards some love today. If you hop over to his Straight Dope blog, you'll find a great post on staying motivated 24/7.

Why is each day so important? Looking back through my calendar I noted that I had only 6 full climbing days 2011, my preferred sport. My favorite workout of last year, Asylum Strength, I only did 5 times. PAP sessions: 12. When you have a full schedule and begin to analyze how it’s broken down the importance of each workout becomes clear; each time you slack off is missing an opportunity to improve yourself. If you lay each workout on a graph you will see exactly how a bit more effort or concentration here and there would have yielded greater overall improvements. Over time it’s the difference between champions and everyone else.

If you're like me, your head explodes a little when you try to wrap it around the amount of exercise Steve does. We can't all be him -- but that's a good thing because if we were, it would mean that the next time you climbed Mount Everest (as you do every Wednesday night), you'd get to the top to find a bunch of skinny guys in fancy running shoes drinking black coffee, playing with their dogs, and swapping movie quotes. It would ruin the ambiance, to say the least.

El Steve-o has a good point, but this "win the day" thing doesn't need to apply only to those hell-bent on world domination. In many ways, physically, I'm the anti-Steve. Unless the only qualifications are willpower and brute force, new sports don't come easy to me. Furthermore, I'm prone to weight gain and I have a true gift for injuring myself. Yet his M.O. still makes sense, particularly when applied to that age-old question, "How do you eat an elephant?"

As some of you may recall, I spent much of 2011 under the knife. ("Why?" you ask. See willpower and brute force above.) I'm still in the middle of rehab. I finally got the limp in my left hip under control about 2 weeks ago and I'm still months away from lifting my right arm above my head. But I do the boring, painful junk that the PT assigns me. Every. Single. Day. Each time, my hip feels a little stronger and my arm reaches a little higher. I take one more bite out of the elephant.

The hardest part about this process is that I haven't been able to surf since last March. Hopefully, I'll be back in the water around this April, putting an end to a 13 month lull. When that happens, I'll surf like I've always surfed. Just as Steve uses each day to push himself, I will use each day to be grateful. I will go out with the bittersweet awareness that my board-riding days are finite. I'll also look back at the challenging days of rehab with the knowledge that they were even more finite.

Whatever your goal is, you're never going to get there unless you get there.

The Revenge of Saturated Fat

2012-01-03T13:40:00.000-08:00

WARNING: Today’s Real Fitness Nerd post goes to 11 on the Geek-o-meter, so make sure to have your pocket protector firmly in place before reading. In the event of a water landing, simply empty your Big Gulp of Mountain Dew and use the cup as a floatation device.

A few months ago, loyal Nerd Herders may remember that a post questioning saturated fat was discovered by a pack of rabid paleo eaters. I made a few attempts to debate with them, but it was a little little like trying to debate the sanctity of the pope with the guy who makes his big hats, so I cut and ran, letting them overwhelm my comments section with vitriol.

But, as the Klingons say, “bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay,” so by no means did I walk away from the topic entire. Much like Rocky, I hunkered down in a Philadelphia meat locker and punched sides of beef until I had absorbed all of western science’s collected understanding of the saturated fats from the flanks I was so passionately abusing. In other words, I still have no idea if saturated fat is good or bad for you – and neither does anyone else. I do, however, have two theories.

1. I can find no convincing arguments why saturated fat is better for you than unsaturated fat or that it has any special benefits in the context of the standard diet. The body produces it on its own, so I see no reason we need to consume it. That’s a little like saying we need to eat straight glucose because our body manufactures that too.

2. I believe lumping all saturated fats together would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater in that more research needs to be done differentiating between the various saturated fats, or at least between long and short chain saturated fats.

Before I go into more detail, here’s a little background.

Contrary to what many a fad diet book will imply, humans need to eat fat to survive. Among other things, it serves as an energy source. It acts as a transport for fat-soluble nutrients such as vitamins A, D, and K, as well as several phytonutrients. It adds structure to cell membranes and acts as a regulator for several hormones.

For our purposes, there are four kinds of fats, or “fatty acids” if you want to sound fancy: monounsaturated, polyunsaturated (PUFAs), saturated, and trans. Generally speaking, trans fats are bad and monounsaturated fats are good. Saturated fat and polyunsaturated fat are much more controversial.

If eaten properly, PUFAs are good for you, but we tend to eat an imbalanced ratio of them (too many omega-6s and not enough omega-3s), which can lead to inflammation issues. Also, PUFAs aren’t very stable and when they go off (or “oxidize”) they become bad for you. If you avoid eating overly processed or heated PUFAs and get as many omega-3s as possible, you should be okay. (If you’re going to write in and flame about PUFAs, don’t bother. I just saved you a lot of effort by summing up all your arguments, only without the annoying spin. No need to thank me.)

All fat is made up of chains of atoms. The difference between sat fat and unsat fat is that, simply, a few carbon atoms in unsaturated fat aren’t “saturated” with hydrogen atoms. Monounsaturated fat has one loose atom. Polyunsaturated has more.

And as long as we’re geeking out about chemistry, I’ll also point out the fact that different fats have different amounts of atoms. That’s what people mean when they refer to long, medium, or short chain fatty acids. Remember this. It’ll be important later.

Although I read a shitload of books to reach my conclusions, I have two primary sources. The first is a 2001 review by the Harvard School of Public Health in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition entitled “Types of Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review,” which pops up in a wide array of writings on the subject, from Catherine and Luke Shanahan’s Deep Nutrition to (my personal hero) Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food.

My second source is the most authoritative (read: not lame or poorly researched) pro-sat-fat book I could find: Dr. Mary Enig’s Know Your Fats. (Enig was the first real whistle blower on the dangers of trans fat, decades before the rest of the world figured it out.)

To my shock, Enig gave only two instances where she felt saturated fats were of particular benefit. First, she suggests, “research has shown that saturated fat in the diet is needed by the body to enable it to adequately convert the essential omega-3 fatty acid (ALA) to the elongated omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA.” I found the study she cited and it turns out that she got it wrong(ish). According to Gerster, sat fats are marginally better than PUFAs for helping ALA convert, but not “needed.” Furthermore, this advice only really applies to vegans and vegetarians, given a healthy, more omnivorous diet should include EPA and DHA-rich foods such as fatty fish.

If you’re looking for a little 411 on this ALA/EPA/DHA nonsense, read this.

Second, Enig states, “there is strong evidence that some of the medium-chain SFAs such as lauric acid are essential since they are needed for maintaining the natural ability of the individual to fight potentially harmful microorganisms.”

Annoyingly, she didn’t properly cite this claim and my research only uncovered studies that either applied to soap or food packaging. These are excellent uses of lauric acid, but The Fitness Nerd hasn’t eaten soap since he was about five (not willingly, at least) and has only once eaten food packaging (I thought it was an especially chewy burrito) so the validity escapes me.

That said, lauric acid (the stuff you get in coconuts) may not be essential, but it could be beneficial. Here’s a study showing lauric acid raised HDL cholesterol in subjects, potentially making it a “heart healthy” fatty acid.

That brings me to my second point – not all saturated fats were created equal. Could it be that some are good and some are bad? The above-mentioned Harvard review states that “the association between saturated fat and CHD... was much weaker than that predicted by international comparisons.” However, some individual saturated fatty acids still look dodgy. Also from the review: “Saturated fatty acids with 12–16 carbon atoms tend to increase plasma total and LDL cholesterol levels, whereas stearic acid (18:0) does not have a cholesterol-raising effect in comparison with oleic acid (18:1). Among the cholesterol-raising saturated fatty acids, myristic acid (14:0) appears to be more potent than lauric acid (12:0) or palmitic acid (16:0), but the data are not entirely consistent”

In other words, some sat fats mess with cholesterol and others don’t. So, while saturated fat haters were too quick the judge, saturated fat lovers are also a bit hasty in categorically embracing this nutrient. Maybe the truth lies in looking at the various saturated fatty acids individually and weighing up their individual benefits and drawbacks.

At the end of the day, I think the answer is to focus on your own biochemical needs. Even Enig admits, “there isn’t any real evidence that everyone needs to consume exactly the same balance of fatty acids.” She also points out that it’s naïve to categorize most foods as sat fats or PUFAs, given both animal and plant-based fat sources tend to be a mix of both. With that in mind, the answer might be as simple as a little self-analysis. Is your current diet working for you? How do you feel? How’s your blood work? Are you having any issues such as inflammation or high LDL cholesterol? If all this looks good, your sat fat levels are probably pretty right for you. If not, it might be time to start experimenting a little, no matter what your Crossfit trainer tells you.

Fancy List o' References:

Beerman, K. & McGuire, M. (2011). Nutritional Sciences: From Fundamentals to Food. Belmont, CA. Wadworth Cengage Learning.
Enig, M. (2000). Know Your Fats: The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils, and Cholesterol. Bethesda, MA: Bethesda Press.
Hu, F., Manson, J., & Willett, W. (2001). Types of Dietary Fat and Risk of Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 20:1 5-19. Retrieved from http://www.jacn.org/content/20/1/5.short
Gerster, H. (1998). Can Adults Adequately Convert a-Linolenic Acid (18:3n-3) to Eicosapentaenoic Acid (20:5n-3) and Docosahexaenoic Acid (22:6n-3) International Journal for Vitamin and Nutrition Research. Retrieved from http://verlag.hanshuber.com/Zeitschriften/IJVNR/98/vn9803.html
Mensink RP, Zock PL, Kester AD, & Katan MB. (2003) Effects of dietary fatty acids and carbohydrates on the ratio of serum total to HDL cholesterol and on serum lipids and apolipoproteins: a meta-analysis of 60 controlled trials. American Journal for Clinical Nutrition 77(5),1146-55. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12716665
Pollan, M. (2008). In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York, NY. Penguin Press.
Shanahan, C. & Shanahan, L. (2009). Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food. Lawai, HI: Big Box Books.

Evil Fat Hatin' Microbes Must Die!

2011-12-23T09:24:00.000-08:00

Ho, ho, ho. Season's greetings. Happy Festivus. Et al.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's get down to business. New research has unearthed an impossibly convoluted way to fight obesity, but before I share it with you, here are a couple quick anatomy lessons.

Lesson one: There are several kinds of adipose tissue (body fat) but the two that apply here are white fat, which is the normal stuff around your gut and butt, and brown fat, which you find in odd places like your neck. Brown fat is considered "good fat" because it promotes the burning of white fat when it gets cold.

Lesson two: Your large intestines are home to billions of bacteria, some vital to life, others destructive to life. It's your job to eat healthy and maintain the balance between the two. It's a big responsibility, but I think you're up to it. I believe in you. Go eat some probiotic yogurt.

Now that we're all edumacated and junk, we can discuss today's study. According to the Journal of Proteome Research (which I'm sure you've probably already read this month), scientists cleaned out the intestinal bacteria from a bunch of mice and discovered that it seemed to cause their brown fat to fire up and burn more calories. Furthermore...

The research also uncovered major differences in the interactions between males and females and their intestinal bacteria that might help explain why the obesity epidemic is more serious and rapidly developing in women.

Those and other findings may point the way toward approaches that kick-up the activity of brown fat in humans to prevent or treat obesity.

That's just swell. Basically this means that by futzing with intestinal bacteria (a wildly complex ecosystem on your gut that influences your wellbeing in countless way, many of which we haven't discovered yet), we might be able to, in turn, futz with a weird kind of neck lipid that might have some impact on fat loss. Awesome, go for it.

While you guys do that, I'm going to publish a study in another medical periodical, the Journal for Obvious Solutions that Science Ignores Because They Don't Lead To Pharmaceutical Sales. In this study, I'm going to research another organ that might play a key role in the war on obesity: your mouth. Here's my hypothesis: Stop putting crappy fried foods and refined carbs in it and you'll lose weight.

That said, it is the holiday season, so if you eat a couple cookies, it's not the end of the world. Just don't gorge yourself. Your brown fat hatin' large intestinal bacteria will thank you.

illustration source: www.bam.gov

Carb Fasting Fantasy Study?

2011-12-21T14:07:00.000-08:00

Happy hump day, Nerd Herd! There's been a request at The Real Fitness Nerd HQ to have a looky-loo at a diet comparison presented this month at the CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium:

(British researcher Michelle Harvie and colleagues put) one third of the women on a Mediterranean-type diet that restricted calories to about 1,500 per day. A second group was told to eat normally most of the time, but two days a week to cut carbs and also calories to about 650 on those two days. The third group was also to cut carbs two days a week, but there was no calorie restriction on those days.

At the end of four weeks women in both of the intermittent dieting groups had lost more weight — about 9 pounds — than the women who ate low calorie meals every day of the week — about 5 pounds.

It's also worth noting that the intermittent fasters experienced greater drops in insulin resistance.

So that's great and all, but I have a few issues. First off, I'm annoyed that they compared a super-high calorie deficit with the carb-fasting without throwing a sensible diet with a slight deficit in the mix. From an insulin resistance perspective, I'd be much more interested in seeing those numbers, given intermittent fasting may be a good long-term solution for diabetes management, whereas committing to a lifetime of 1500 daily calories tends to involve such pesky side-effects as breaking down of muscles for fuel, reduced metabolism, reenforcement of eating disorders and, oh yes, death. With that in mind, it nulls the comparison a little.

Furthermore, there seems to me to be a lot of vague "eat what you want" aspects to this study, making for a lot of confounding variables, n'est pas?

But even more furthermore, I question the timeline - 4 weeks doesn't prove anything. I've read a few studies showing that low-carbing works better at the start of a diet, but not necessarily in the long term. Oddly enough, in my research to document this, I came across a study by - you're not going to believe this - the same crew who presented the research we're discussing here! Whadayaknow, Joe!

In May of 2011, Harvie et al authored a study in the International Journal of Obesity in which they compared "intermittent continuous energy (IER) with continuous energy restriction (CER) for weight loss, insulin sensitivity and other metabolic disease risk markers." This study, however, spanned 6 months. The IER ladies lost slightly more weight (1.7 pounds more, on average). The general findings were that "IER is as effective as CER with regard to weight loss, insulin sensitivity and other health biomarkers."

In other words, IER was a slightly better method, but not enough to get too thrilled about. So who's zooming whom here? Are these the same study? Were I a Conspiracy Nerd, I'd think someone cherry picked data from the May study to make for a more titillating, headline-grabbing December presentation. Who knows? I suppose the truth is out there.

I'm warming to intermittent fasting more and more each day. I'm willing to accept new methods for weight loss and diabetes prevention, but something's gone afoul here.

Radio Free Nerd

2011-12-13T16:32:00.000-08:00

I got a couple chances here for you Nerd Herders to hear my dulcet tones.

Here's a blog radio interview I did back in April on a show called Veggin' Out. I could never figure out why Melanee, the host, didn't send me the link - until today when I learned about the secret Facebook inbox we all have that some of us don't know how to access. Better late than never. Enjoy!

And here's a segment I did for KTLK AM1150 here in LA. I'm about half-way through. It's heavily edited, so I actually come across as rather articulate.

Although I'd love you to listen out of pure love, I doubt you will, so maybe instead you'll listen to learn some fancy science, some folksy wisdom and a little about the vegan aspect of the new P90X2 Nutrition Plan, which I played a biggish role in creating.

Magic Pants: The Key to Solving Childhood Obesity

2011-12-09T11:43:00.000-08:00

Happy Friday, Nerd Herd! It's been a challenging month here in the Fitness Nerd Cave, but I was allowed to take my sling off yesterday. Yay! Despite a non-existant bicep and an achy trap, I'm back on the keyboard and high on life (a welcome alternative to Percocet).

Contrary to what friends and family assured me, it appears that Western civilization has become completely unhinged without my gentle, hilarious guidance. Here's a break down.

First, America's youth continued to get more out-of-shape. Here in California, only 31% of kids were able to pass the California Department of Education's statewide physical fitness tests. A little more detail from the Los Angeles Times:

To pass the test, or score what state officials call a "healthy fitness zone," a ninth-grade male, 5 feet 6 and 150 pounds, would need to run a mile in nine minutes, perform at least 16 push-ups and do at least 24 curl-ups. Body fat is also measured, along with flexibility. About 25% of fifth-graders passed all six sections; 32% of seventh-graders and 36.8% of ninth-graders did so.

The article also mentions that numbers have gone up in previous years and that the dip could be due to restructuring. So maybe the situation isn't that dire, but from what the article outlines, they're not asking kids to do Sparta-level stuff. As I recall, when I was in ninth grade, they'd send us into the woods with nothing but a loin cloth and a butter knife. We weren't allowed to come home until we'd killed a bear and made its fur into a cloak. Being vegetarian at the time, I instead stripped a Birch tree and fashioned a three-piece suit from its bark. You might sneer, but it was no mean feat - especially getting the pleats right. Technically, the tribe shouldn't have let me back in, but I got points for originality. (That's how I roll.)

(By the way, what's with the term "curl-up"? Is that the new politically correct way to say sit-up? If we rename the exercise, does that mean they'll no longer blow out your neck if you do them wrong?)

Regardless of how you crunch numbers (or your abs), here's where I think the problem lies:

A survey released last month by the California State PTA found that 75% of the 1,600 members polled said their school's physical education and sports programs had been eliminated or reduced. Restoring such programs was the top health concern cited.

Apparently, the solution to this problem is entirely too obvious for Americans to wrap their heads around, so instead of making kids exercise as part of the War on Obesity, we get weird science like this:

Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have discovered a specific gene that plays an important role in keeping a steady balance between our food intake and energy expenditure. The study may help scientists better understand the keys to fighting obesity and related disorders such as diabetes.

You may think that sound cool, but it inevitably leads to crap like this notion from one of the researchers:

The existence of drug targets in areas outside of the central nervous system (the body's "periphery") might help in the effort to develop drugs that influence metabolism without major side effects, he noted.

Seriously? You want something that influences metabolism? How about physical education? How about teaching kids the value of exercise? What's with our society's constant drive to find work-arounds for fitness and healthy eating?

See what I'm talking about? The Fitness Nerd goes up on the racks for a few weeks and humankind loses all perspective. The only ones who seem to be able to get along without my help are the Japanese, who managed to spend November simultaneously making it illegal to get fat and inventing magic, fat-burning pants.

(Although, based in this video, they could use a few pointers on doin' the Robot.)

Video Fitness Nerds killed the Radio Star

2011-12-01T17:13:00.000-08:00

My fellow Fitness Nerd Steve Edwards and I took to the airwaves today. (I'm the good-looking one with the mustache on the left.) Although we covered a lot of great fitness and nutrition information in our hour-long chat, you'll probably want to watch it all the way through to hear me bust a funky rhythm towards the end. Word!

Getting Saucy with Congress

2011-11-28T10:09:00.000-08:00

Dear Congress -

I'm a little confused about something. I'm not sure whether to pity you for your ignorance or write you off as corrupt or some combination thereof. Could you please clarify this for me?

Allow me to explain. Last week, I read an article in the New York Times about overweight truckers trying to get fit. It's a hard slog for these poor saps, given America's 1-2 combo punch of greedy capitalism and lame regulation means they need to sit behind the wheel 11 hours at a time to make a living.

Furthermore, these guys (and gals) are struggling to exercise and eat right while driving down freeways lined with artery clogging convenience store crap and fattening fast foods. To make matters worse, the media has pickled their minds from birth with nutritional misinformation while our faulty educational system hasn't taught them to differentiate a Twinkie from a spear of asparagus. Get a load of this:

Some drivers have even turned to private trainers. Kevin Melton, 39, a trucker in Black Mountain, N.C., used to snack on Snickers bars and three or four Little Debbie pies a day while driving. His weight shot to 260, his joints and back ached, and his cholesterol was “through the roof.”

Two years ago, he began working with Chadwick Slagle, a trainer. Together they devised a nutrition plan: Mr. Melton now eats five meals a day, drinks water instead of soft drinks, and snacks on fruit and nuts. He wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to exercise, running on a treadmill or around a parking lot. He now weighs about 200 pounds and hopes to get down to 190.

He has had to rethink some of his beliefs. “You hear Snickers are healthy because of the nuts, that they give you energy,” he said. “But when you read the label you realize they’re surrounded by caramel.”

Admittedly, I'm no trucker, although I've seen every episode of B.J. and the Bear and my dad had a CB installed in our station wagon when I was a kid. However, I've known a few truckers and I've found them be nice, salt-of-the earth guys. I don't think they're genetically predisposed to being that ignorant, so I'm going to blame their schooling. It's swell that schools across the country have an annual assembly where some dude comes into the auditorium dressed like a corn cob and tells kids to eat fruit, but that's not education. That's a side show. While they're being quizzed on the food groups in the class room, they're being fed refined, processed, fried rubbish in the lunch room. We need to take our kids nutritional education seriously and that can only happen via their digestive systems. People learn by doing.

So that's where you come into the equation, Congress-types. From the AP:

Congress wants to keep pizza and french fries on school lunch lines, fighting back against an Obama administration proposal to make school lunches healthier.

The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year, which included limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line and delaying limits on sodium and delaying a requirement to boost whole grains.

The bill also would allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. USDA had wanted to prevent that.

Food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes, and some conservatives in Congress say the federal government shouldn't be telling children what to eat.

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee said the changes would "prevent overly burdensome and costly regulations and to provide greater flexibility for local school districts to improve the nutritional quality of meals."

Honestly? Remember how the Reagan administration wanted to make ketchup count as a veggie? It turned out to be a recommendation that's been mocked by nutritionists for generations now. I can't believe you're doing it all over again. It's like Groundhog Day meets Super Size Me.

My daughter goes to a public school and, as much as I respect the education she's getting, her school district does an astonishingly shitty job of providing healthy food. I know a lot of people fear the Nanny State, but they had their chance and they blew it. It's time for the government to step in and see to it that our children eat right.

And don't give me the whole budgetary excuse. You're Congress, remember? If schools can't afford proper foods for our children, give them more money. You're running a country where 1/3 of the population is obese and grown men don't understand that candy bars are candy. How is this not something you need to address?

So, to repeat, is the case that you're as ignorant as poor Kevin, or is it a matter of you being too evil to put party politics aside and draw the line with food industry lobbyists?

Which is it?

Love,

The Real Fitness Nerd

Further Adventures of the Bionic Nerd

2011-11-21T16:09:00.000-08:00

Fitness Nerd down! Fitness Nerd down! Sorry for the absence, Nerd Herd. It’s been a tricky couple of weeks. I didn’t publicize this quite the way I did last time, but last week I went in for my second round of bionic implementation. This time, it was my shoulder. I had something called a SLAP tear in which the glenoid labrum in my right shoulder was damaged.

I was hoping it would be a quick-and-easy thing. Sadly, I forgot that I don’t live in The Happy La-La Land of Make Believe, so it wasn’t. What was supposed to be a 1.5 hour procedure turned into a 3.5 hour arthroscopic marathon in which they discovered that my labrum was torn off on three sides and in desperate need of TLC.

While this may sound like a bummer, it’s actually kind of exciting. I’ve been dealing with a number of issues in my shoulders, neck and elbows for a while. I just chalked them up to a lifetime of extreme sports and bad posture. My surgeon thinks this tear was so severe that it might be the source of my other problems. If this is true, once I’m back in shape, I’ll be able to continue a life full of surfing, biking, climbing and, best of all, slouching.

I wasn’t planning on sharing this stuff with you, primarily because this blog was never intended to be about me. Sure, I told you all about my hip surgery a few months ago, but I figured that I’d shared enough of my travails. Maybe I was wrong.

Two nights ago, my fellow nerd Steve Edwards stopped by with burritos and a little much-needed manly company. Since my procedure, I’ve needed quite a bit of help to get through all this. (It turns out that shoulder surgery is considerably more constricting, complicated, and painful than hip surgery.) Quite possibly due to my stunning good looks, my various helpers have all been women. For the most part, that’s been, well, AWESOME, but by the time Steve showed up, I was ready for a little testosterone, shit-talk, and unregulated flatulence.

As we sat around farting and watching William Shatner documentaries – Steve drinking beer and me savoring my evening Percocet – we started talking about the nature of motivation and inspiration. (Bill Shatner has that effect on us.)

The conversation turned to Facebook. As many of you know, Steve and I both work for Beachbody, and therefore many of our Facebook “friends” come through that connection. Apparently, many of these people live in the aforementioned Happy La-La Land of Make Believe where every status update tells of another meteoric step on the stairway to Nirvana.

I know these posts are meant to inspire -- and sometimes they do. I love to hear about the great things that happen to friends and associates. However, sometimes they have an opposite effect. My life, as of late, is by no means perfect, so when I read about how amazing the rest of the world is, I start to question what the hell I did in my last life to get into this situation. It can be a bummer.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m also not a fan of Facebook updates that constantly whine about how bad things are, but there’s a balance. I have a friend who recently went public about her fight with multiple sclerosis. I’m not happy about this. In fact, I’m heartbroken, but what I am happy about is that this person is speaking to the world from a place of truth and not some sugar-coated fairyland. She’s a remarkably strong human being and most of her updates are funny, charming, and upbeat. The balance of knowing her struggle makes these happy posts all the more uplifting.

It’s not that misery loves company. It’s that misery stays in check when you know you’re not alone on this complex journey.

In other words, I screwed up by not telling y’all about my second surgery. It was painful and it continues to be painful - particularly typing - but I keep a bar of surf wax on my bookshelf that makes me strong. When I’m have a particularly excruciating day, I look at it and imagine a day – probably about 6 months from now – when I’m back on my board, using my repaired shoulder to paddle and my repaired hip to bottom turn like a champ. Whether or not that day arrives is irrelevant. The quest keeps me strong.

The nice thing about night is that it’s typically followed by day. Sure, then comes night again – but guess what comes after that? Every 24 hours, you can dread the dusk or look forward to the dawn. Personally, I think it’s healthy to do a little of both.

Antibiotics and Obesity: Your Body's Most Dangerous BFFs

2011-11-04T10:57:00.000-07:00

Here are two facts that every good Nerd Herder knows.

1. We over-use antibiotics.
2. Too many of us are fat.

So if I blogged about either one of those individually, it'd make for a rather ho-hum post. Eyes would glaze over. Attentions would wander. Pants would get zipped up. The usual indications of boredom. But what if I told you that the two might be linked?

I know! There's nothing finer than ending the week with an awesome bit o' biomedical conspiracy theory! It's geektastic! Woot! Woot!

Here's the skinny (so to speak). Our intestines are filled with billions of bacteria. (Yes, I know, it's gross, but now you know what planet Earth feels like. Deal with it.) These microbes play all kinds of important roles in the human body. Lactobacillus acidophilus, for example, improves nutrient absorption (particularly dairy), reduces the effects of food poisoning and prevents urinary tract infections.

Conversely, some microbes aren't as friendly. Helicobacter pylori - or Helicopter priority, as I will malapropize it in hopes that thousands of you will now accidentally mispronounce it for the rest of your lives - has traditionally been considered a "bad" bacteria linked with stomach ulcers and gastritis. It's also been linked to stomach cancer. If doctors detect too much H. priority in your gut, many of them will quickly prescribe antibiotics, just to be safe, whether symptoms exist or not.

But New York-based researcher Dr. Martin Blaser started thinking that maybe there's a reason for H. priority. From The New York Times:

In 1998, in a paper published in the British Medical Journal, Dr. Blaser was more circumspect, arguing that H. pylori (H. priority) might not be such a bad actor after all. “We’re talking about a bug that’s been in the human gut for at least 58,000 years,” Dr. Blaser said in an interview. “There’s probably a reason for that.”

Blaser and his crack team did some fancy research. As it turns out that H. priority might serve a positive function. When you eat, your body experiences a drop in ghrelin, a hormone that I often waffle on about because it makes you hungry. When mice had their H. priority wiped out by antibiotics, their ghrelin levels didn't drop after meals. In other words, they didn't know to stop eating and they got fat.

I know, I know, this is rodent science and many of us tend to discount rodent science, but there's more to it than that.

These results dovetail with research by Peter Turnbaugh, a Harvard University geneticist, in collaboration with Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, a gastroenterologist at Washington University in St. Louis. They have found that the ratios of various bacteria in the guts of obese mice and obese humans were significantly different from those of lean controls, suggesting that altering the stomach’s microbial balance with antibiotics might put patients at risk for gaining weight.

Even Dr. Barry Marshall, the dude who discovered H. priority and strongly advocates its eradication, admits we overdo antibiotics.

So what's a person to do? Even many holistic practitioners concede that if you're coping with a proliferation of Helicopter priority, antibiotics should be considered. However, there's a lot you can do to dodge this situation to begin with. Avoiding stress and eating right go a long way towards maintaining healthy intestinal flora, so take some time to put your feet up and enjoy a nice bowl of yogurt - but make sure it's the kind with live, probiotic cultures.

And I'm not talking sugar-filled fro-yo. I'm talking the plain stuff. Boring? Maybe. But if you prefer the excitement of stomach cancer, go for it.

illustration credit: Origami-Chicken
Thanks to Nerd Herder Ani for turning me into this article!

A New Weapon in the Obesity War: Religious Persecution

2011-10-27T16:37:00.000-07:00

The reason overweight people can't seem to keep weight off post-diet is pretty simple; They eat too much.

Why this happens, however, is much more complex. Nerd Herders probably know that the reason I feel this happens is well-covered in Dr. David Keller's book The End of Overeating. Long story short, the food industry provides us with engineered sustenance made so addictive with chemicals, sodium, fat, and sugar that it rewires our brains to overeat.

A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine dovetails into this theory nicely. Instead of focusing on external forces, however, it focuses on internal forces: our hormones. According to the New York Times, researchers found that when people lose weight, it affects a number of hormones in the brain. Specifically, leptin, which tells the brain how much body fat is present, drops and ghrelin, which stimulates hunger, increases. The reason for this is pretty obvious (to me, at least). While we live in a time of plenty, our brains are still hard-wired to live several thousand years ago, when a sudden drop in calories meant potential starvation, thus activating our internal hunter/gatherer for a little pep-talk. Our bodies like having fat and still haven't evolved to deal with how rotund we can truly get.

But back to 2011. The researchers continued to monitor these people and, after a year, their hormones were still out of whack. That ghrelin and leptin really, really wanted them to eat.

This isn't the first time that wonky hormones have been blamed for diet issues. You might remember that earlier this year, a study came out showing a lack of sleep could lead to ghrelin and leptin imbalances as well.

Admittedly and as the article points out, this new study had a few holes in it. The first thing that pops out for me is that the subjects were put on a 10-week, 500 calorie a day diet. If researchers did that to me, not only would my hormones go nuts, but my entire brain might lurch out through my nostrils and try to consume the scientists in a desperate bid for nourishment. In other words, who knows if a less extreme diet might have less extreme longterm effects. That said, the study still adds to growing evidence that further analysis of hormone balance and how it relates to weight loss needs to happen.

However, I'm a little troubled by this line: "A solution might be to restore hormones to normal levels by giving drugs after dieters lose weight."

Yikes! Seems to me that, much like obesity, the headlines are filled with stories about the overuse of psychopharmaceuticals in America. Sometimes a brain can mess with its user to the point that a pill is the only solution, but we're not talking schizophrenia or severe depression here. What we are talking about is knowing exactly why you want that McRib so badly, despite knowing it's basically (or potentially literally) just a salty, sugary piece of poop on a bun. It seems to me that taking ownership of that knowledge and being mindful of why you're driven to do things, is 78.5% of the battle.

Every day, countless parents tell their teenagers to take control of their hormones. Millions of high schoolers make it through prom every year without getting knocked up - or knocking someone else up - all thanks to self-control. Although, now that I think about, the threat of damnation and hellfire (see Commandment 7) or severe beating (see Commandment 5) probably go a long way towards helping Little Jimmy keep Littler Jimmy in his pants. While opening some kind of Whoop Ass Weight Loss Clinic is probably out of the question legally, I see no reason why we couldn't add an amendment to the Ten Commandments. Perhaps an Eleventh commandment along the lines of "Thou Shall Not Eat Crap Thou Doesn't Need to Eat."

They do that, right? I mean, The Vatican is always tweaking and fine-tuning doctrine. How do I do this? Is there a form I need to fill out? Or do I contact my local bishop? The Church can talk people into believing that the Earth was made in 6 days and Noah tracked two of all 30 million species of animal and fit them all on his ark. Certainly, they can talk them out of drinking Starbucks Crapachinos.

On second thought, that might take a miracle. Someone get Pat Robertson on the horn.

School Lunch Lunacy

2011-10-21T08:33:00.000-07:00

Good morning, Nerd Herders. Today, I have an editorial I wrote for my local paper, The Daily Breeze, in regards to the filth my local school district puts in hot lunches. Odds are your school district does the same, so I encourage you to cut-and-paste this, sign your name and send it to your local rag. (Then paypal me my writer's fee.)

Here's an excerpt. Click through for the full tirade.

I let my daughter eat garbage once a week.

Or, to be more succinct, I shell out three bucks and allow her to eat a hot lunch, courtesy of THE Redondo Beach Unified School District's "Department of Child Nutrition Services." It's a strategic choice rather than a nutritional one. Garbage Day, as I call it, is a small detour off an otherwise healthy diet implemented to demystify junk food in hopes that she doesn't go on an extended high-fructose corn syrup binge the moment she has the independence and disposable income to eat on her own.

But my semi-leniency was put to the test last week. I opened the RBUSD lunch calendar to discover Wednesday's meal was provided by Taco Bell and Friday had been entrusted to Domino's Pizza. Both days were emphasized with full-color corporate logos.

Hidy Ho, Readers! Here's how to get interactive with your poop!

2011-10-18T09:35:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by the whole corn-in-the-poop thing. Whenever we ate corn-on-the-cob, I’d anticipate the next day’s bowel movement. Was there going to be corn in my poop?

I know what you’re thinking. What kind sad childhood did I have? Actually, it was a pretty great childhood, but growing up in South Dakota has its challenges. Lots of time to fill. Luckily, Star Wars came out when I was seven and occupied the void I’d previously filled with figuring out how long it took me to empty my bowels.

In a way, it’s too bad. With all deference to George Lucas, figuring out your transit time - how long it takes for food to go in your mouth and out the other end - is enormously useful.

Why? Because a healthy transit time that’s between 12 and 72 hours – 16 to 40 hours optimally - is important to good health. If your food passes through quicker than that, it means you’re probably not absorbing all the nutrients you should. If it passes through slower, it mean your feces are hanging out in the colon too long. You might know this as constipation. It can irritate the mucosal lining and cause fecal wastes to be reabsorbed into your blood stream. (Gross.) It can also lead to an imbalance of bad bacteria in your bowel. This is called dysbiosis and it can cause scores of problems, ranging from gas and bloating to PMS.

So how are we going to test your transit time? I suggest one of three foods: beets, chlorophyll, or charcoal tablets. These will turn your poop red, green, or black, in that corresponding order. You can use corn or sesame seeds if you’re worried that your stools are too dark and therefore the other foods won’t show.

Personally, I prefer using beets. They’re yummy, but if you do this, keep in mind that they can turn your stool, not to mention your urine, a very dramatic red. I’ve done this test dozens of times. Without fail, I forget I’m doing it and my morning visit to the bathroom scares the crap out of me – or, technically, it craps the scare into me, but you get the point.

Anyway, here’s how to do it. Get yourself a “marker” - 2‐3 beets (cooked), 1 gram of charcoal tablets or 2 tablespoons of liquid chlorophyll. After your next regular movement (for me it’s 9am, like clockwork), consume your marker.

And then you wait...

Keep a log (so to speak) of your diet, activity, and stress level while you’re waiting. All three of these play important roles in your digestive process, so if you determine that your transit time isn’t satisfactory, you’re going to want to take a hard look at these factors.

The next time you have a BM that corresponds in color to your marker, note it. You now know that your transit time is this many hours or less.

Wait a day for any excess marker color to clear out, then do the same test, but consume your marker four hours later. For example, if you ate your beets at 9am the first time, eat them at 1 pm the second time.
Again, chart your diet, activities and stress levels.

(By the way, I realize that this is a lot of stuff to record. If it helps, here’s a little chart you can use. You'll need to blow it up a little and that'll pixilate it, but I think you'll survive.)

If your next BM isn’t colored, that means the marker hasn’t completely worked its way through your system. This means your transit time is pretty close to the previous longer test time. If you want to nail it down further, experiment with ingesting your marker a couple hours before/after that time.

However, if your stool is colored, do the test again, pushing marker consumption forward another 4 hours. (In the case of our example, 5 pm.) Again, once the marker doesn’t show up in your stool, you know that the previous test was your transit time. Keep watching for the marker, though. When it does show up, you’ll know the outer edge of that transit time.

Nice work! At this point, you probably won’t want to eat beets for a while. That’s perfectly okay. There are plenty of other sources of folate out there.

Also keep in mind that the three indicators you recorded (diet, activities, stress) may have influenced your transit time. If you’re not happy with your results, experiment with changing those three factors and then run the test again. A lack of activity or too much stress can both increase transit time, as can several dietary issues. If you want to work towards decreasing transit time, here are a few tips:

Eat plenty of fiber and make sure to hydrate. Eating fruits and veggies is a great way to do both.
Avoid dehydrating liquids like alcohol.
Avoid clogging foods like over-cooked meat and refined foods.
Exercise 3-4 times a week, for at least 30 minutes.
Work on that stress! Take time to relax, enjoy your food, talk to your friends, meditate, whatever it takes.

While the braver and/or more scatological-minded Nerd Herders will take this test and post your results here, I imagine I might take a dip in readership for posting this. I hope not though. Body awareness - even the stinky parts - is hugely important. Understanding your digestive process is a big step in achieving that. So take the test and, if you need to, clean up your act. With a little patience and some clean livin’, you’ll have that transit time scooting along in no time.

Reference: Lipski, E. (2005). Digestive Wellness. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Um, so, is it cool if I write about veggies instead?

2011-10-13T13:18:00.000-07:00

Regular Nerd Herders, particularly the Facebook set, may be aware of the fact that I drew the ire of several Primal eaters last week with my post on the possible link between saturated fat and diabetes. To be honest, it caught me off guard. Some people wrote in with intelligent points, but many of the reactions (particularly the name-calling ones posted on other sites) were just weird, angry attacks reminiscent of the way normal people might act if someone were to question their ethnicity or suggest that Roger Moore was a better James Bond than Sean Connery.

Seriously, it's a lipid. I'm all for healthy conversation on the topic, but is the lack of a couple chemical bonds really worth spewing that much hatred into the universe? Maybe Cross-Fit gyms need to install meditation rooms or offer post-workout happy endings before someone goes postal.

Anyway, I was going to address some of the well-thought-out comments, but I have a feeling that no matter what I say, the angry caveman eaters will jump in too, so I'm going to file away saturated fat for a while and talk about produce.

Long story short, about a fifth of people with European ancestry possess a gene called chromosome 9 which makes them susceptible to heart disease. New research in the Plos Medicine journal indicates that a diet filled with raw fruits (especially berries) and veggies weakens the effect of said gene.

The study looked at 27,000 people from all over the world. (Actually, about 8,000 were international. 19,000 were from Finland, but whatever.)

To me, this is all a little obvious, but I may be wrong. And frankly, I don't have much else to say because I'm a little concerned the Atkins crowd might get wind of the fact that I'm advocating the consumption of fruit and descend upon me with their lard hammer.

Life was easier when I just a looney on a street corner yelling scripture and wearing a sandwich board.

Saturated Fat? Attack!

2011-10-07T09:08:00.000-07:00

In the last few years, a number of "experts" have become quite vocal with the notion that saturated fat isn't bad for you. They drive me a little nuts, to be honest, because they all fall back on the same three, flawed arguments.

I want to focus on the third one today, but let's blow through those first two quickly. Regarding those indigenous people, they lived in toxin-free environments, ate entirely natural diets and exercised huge amounts. Could it be that they were healthy in spite of the saturated fats? Furthermore, the amount of saturated fats they actually ate is up for some degree of speculation. Even when they nail down numbers of these "high saturated fat" diets, it's not that much fat. From Whole Health Source:

The Kitavans also eat an amount of coconut fat that would make Dr. Ancel Keys blush. Dr. Staffan Lindeberg found that they got 21% of their 2,200 calories per day from fat, nearly all of which came from coconut. They were getting 17% of their calories from saturated fat; 55% more than the average American. Dr. Lindeberg's detailed series of studies found no trace of coronary heart disease or stroke, nor any obesity, diabetes or senile dementia even in the very old (6, 7).

First, there's the whole coconut saturated fat versus animal saturated fat issue, which I'm going to save for another blog. Them there's the fact that 21% fat is bordering on a low-fat diet, so lipid advocates should probably tread softly when mentioning the Kitavans. Third, the rest of their moderately low-calorie diet was "root vegetables (yam, sweet potato, taro, tapioca), fruit (banana, papaya, pineapple, mango, guava, watermelon, pumpkin), vegetables (and) fish." Sorry, fellas, but there are just too many confounding variables in there to elevate saturated fat to "must eat" status.

Next, the whole refined carb thing. I'm just going to say this: Has it ever occurred to you that both bad carbs and bad fat could be the problem? What is it with nutrition "experts" and their mutually exclusive villains?

Now, let's move on to #3, the heart disease thing. Some of the research in the past might not have been spot-on - and that's compelling, but here's the deal: Heart disease isn't the only illness that saturated fat might play a part in. All these pro-sat-fat sites are happy to warble on about heart disease, but they all seem to side step the increasing body of evidence linking saturated fat to cancer, including...

Cancer of the small intestine.

Prostate cancer.

Breast cancer (particularly milk, meat, and cheese.)

And why stop at cancer? Researchers at UC San Diego have a found a link between saturated fat and type 2 diabetes.

Senior author Karin, first author Ryan G. Holzer, PhD, formerly a graduate student in Karin's lab and now at the Mayo Clinic, and colleagues began with the observation that saturated fatty acids, such as palmitic acid, are potent activators of Jun kinases (JNK), key regulatory molecules implicated in the development of type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance, obesity and atherosclerosis. However, unsaturated fatty acids such as palmitoleic acid (POA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) not only do not activate JNK, but actually block JNK activation by palmitic acid.

This is hard science. It's not some bare-chested beef-o-phile trying to pitch his blueprint book. It's not some conspiracy theory "foundation" looking to Eskimos for advice on modern living. (The fact that it never occurred to them to drop down a few latitudes when it got chilly kind of discredits them for me personally.) These are serious scientists breaking down our relationship with food on a cellular level. They should be listened to.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for ancient wisdom and traditional cures. I'm in the middle of getting a masters in holistic nutrition, for Pete's sake! But in the same way I think the anti-bad-carb and anti-bad-fat crews need to work together, I think that the fringe needs to check in with the mainstream sometimes to make sure that they're not spouting lunacy.

Bungee Jumping Turkeys!

2011-09-28T13:11:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered why, when you jump from a high place, the impact doesn't cause your legs to crumple up accordion-style, turning you into a hat and feet like in the cartoons?

Probably not, but I've put a lot more thought into this question than you'd expect, so I was delighted to read that Brown University has done a new study showing exactly how legs absorb sudden impacts. As it turns out, your tendons take the hit.

Now researchers at Brown University have documented how muscles and tendons work in concert first to store and then to rid themselves of energy and heat. They found that tendons take on the role of shock absorbers at the time of impact. About a tenth of a second later, the fibrous bundles in skeletally connecting muscles, known as fascicles, absorb the remaining energy. The tendons' role is crucial, the Brown researchers write in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, because they help protect the fascicles against damage from the rapid burst of energy and power generated by the impact.

And here's the same thing in lovingly geeky detail:

The researchers focused on two main periods. One, called the force rise, began when the turkey landed. The researchers were surprised to see that muscle fascicle length remained essentially the same. That means, Konow explained, that the jolt of the impact was being absorbed somewhere else: in the tendon. The researchers believe there is a biological reason for this. To protect themselves from the energy generated at the moment of landing, the fascicles leave the impact to the tendons, which stretches like a spring. In fact, electrical pulses recorded in the fascicles indicate the muscle steeled itself against the landing even before the turkey jumped.

Following the jolt of landing comes a period the authors call force decay. During force decay, the tendon recoils to its original length, releasing the energy it had accepted during the landing. "That means the tendon is shunting energy to something that's lengthening," Konow said, "and that's the fascicles. The fascicles are sensing that the force (from impact) is going down and it's safer to lengthen to absorb the energy."

Observant Nerd Herders will have noticed the word "turkey" mentioned in the above explanation - and that's what I'm excited about. To test the impact, Brown researchers put sensors in the turkeys' legs then using "a ceiling-mounted pulley and rope system tied to a custom-made webbing harness strapped around the proximal (humeral) wing segment," dropped the birds about 5 feet to see what would happen.

In other words, they bungee jumped turkeys in the name of research.

Yeah, I know, the turkeys probably didn't love it, but it's still rad. This information will have all kinds of benefits in the fields of reconstructive surgery and athletic performance, just to name two. It's not like they tortured the turkeys. They just bounced them for a couple hours. (Admittedly, the turkeys were then knocked out and their tendons were detached and wired to machines. But that's splitting hairs, isn't it? Seriously. Bungee jumping turkeys!)

Also, I saw no indication in the researcher required the birds to pay for the bungee jumps. When I bungeed in New Zealand a while back, it cost me a ton. Furthermore, the surgeon did God-knows-what to my leg tendons in my recent surgery - and I had to pay for that too.

I think these turkeys got a hot deal. This is what I like to call "Win/Win Science."

Reference:
N. Konow, E. Azizi, T. J. Roberts. Muscle power attenuation by tendon during energy dissipation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2011; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2011.1435

Is Losing Weight Slowly Worth The Wait?

2011-09-23T09:44:00.000-07:00

Here's a positively awesome article from The New York Times about proper diet and exercise strategies for prolonged weight-loss. New research from The Lancet debunks the whole Cult of The Magic 3500 Calories by stating that the key to sustained weight loss isn't crash dieting, but a long-term slight calorie reduction.

If the 3,500-calorie rule applied consistently in real life, it would result in twice the weight loss that the new model predicts, the authors wrote. This helps to explain why even the most diligent dieters often fail to reach weight loss goals that were based on the old rule.

A more realistic result, he said, is that cutting out 250 calories a day — the amount in a small bar of chocolate or half a cup of premium ice cream — would lead to a weight loss of about 25 pounds over three years, with half that loss occurring the first year.

Many people get discouraged when weight loss slows even though they are sticking religiously to their diets, but Dr. Hall said a gradual loss is nearly always more effective because it allows the new eating and exercise habits to become a lasting lifestyle.

Yay Lancet!

The article (and the research it's based on) also stresses the benefits of exercise, countering lunacy of dudes like Gary "Carb Czar" Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories) who feel exercise isn't important to fat loss.

If a man weighing 220 pounds ran an additional 12.5 miles a week at a moderate pace, he would lose more weight, and slightly faster, than if he cut the equivalent amount of calories from his diet, the authors calculated.

Honestly, none of this stuff is new, but I'm always happy when a journal as prestigious as The Lancet validates something I've been telling people for the last decade. Perhaps modern science will indeed one day catch up with the super genius of the Real Fitness Nerd.

Happy Friday, Nerd Herd! My PT has me off my crutches, so I'm going to go for a hobble to the beach.

The Hip Report

2011-09-22T11:31:00.000-07:00

Feeling a little contemplative today, Nerd Herd. My cleaned-up hip is making progress, but it's slow. I'm almost off crutches, but the the only prolonged exercise I've been cleared to do is low-resistance stationary bike work. To accomplish this and simultaneously get a little outdoorsy time, I've hooked my beach cruiser to an indoor trainer and put it on my front stoop.

Initially, I felt this was pure genius, but as I peddling away furiously one afternoon recently, staring blankly into space with grim determination, a neighbor walked by and commented how I looked like someone fake-biking in an old Hollywood movie and that maybe I should get a green-screen installed behind me.

After that, a couple more neighbors walked by and commented, "What's your hurry?" My daughter then got her own bike out and peddled around me, all the while shouting "I'm beating Daddy in the race!"

At this point, I felt like an idiot, but I elected to continue. The way I see it, I'm 41-years-old and recovering from a hip injury, so if it's my prerogative to look like Miss Gulch from The Wizard of Oz, that's just fine. As of late, the only reason I both looking cool is if I want to get lucky and, frankly, getting lucky isn't physiologically possible for me right now without the assistance of some very complex rigging - and I'm not that desperate. With this in mind, looking like a boob in front of my house does me the service of further eliminating unattainable temptation.

Anyway, I don't have much else to share with you today. I'm in the middle of crafting a diatribe on the fact that my daughter's school has decided to serve Taco Bell and Domino's and it's taking up a lot of my snarky energy. Instead, here's a short article from GizMag about the anchors they used to reattach my labrum.

Basically, they're made of a combination of biodegradable plastic and ceramic. In a year or two, they'll just become part of my hip. (And yes, this is an actual photo of my procedure. I feel very close to you all, so I was willing to expose myself.) At first, I was a little bummed because this means I won't make airport metal detectors go off. Furthermore, by definition, I won't be able to call myself a cyborg or bionic.

However, it's pretty amazing. Ten years ago, my procedure would have required an extended stay in the hospital, a pile o' steel, and a scar ugly enough to put a permanent end to my career as a Speedo model. Today, it's an out-patient procedure, three little bullet holes, some fancy plastic, and leg that will be as super-model sexy as ever, once the swelling goes down.

Makes you want to go out and get a sports-related over-use injury every day, doesn't it?

Question of the Week: Should you lick your salt habit?

2011-09-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

Our question of the week comes from Krissy, a proud member of the Facebook branch of the Nerd Herd:

This morning... my little cousin posted "No salt allowed in schools, really guys?' I responded back with "You don't need salt, the food you are eating already has sodium in it, go buy Mrs. Dash or pack your own lunch."

Then I get this response "Actually, our bodies NEED salt! Anything in excess is bad for us. :-) When I was a child, salt tablets were given out in dispensers at the Air Force Base (in Georgia) where my dad worked."

Wanna take this one.....your thoughts?

Thanks for writing in, Krissy. Sadly, your little cousin suffers from a condition we in the fitness trade refer to as "ignorance." As you pointed out, the Standard American Diet (SAD) has pul-lenty of salt in it without adding any, so unless the child in question is an endurance athlete living in a severely hot climate, in all likelihood, there's no reason whatsoever for them to add salt to their diet.

That said, it's understandable why your cousin is so vastly ill-informed. She is correct in that salt is, indeed, necessary to human life, but beyond that, her knowledge bus takes the dopey onramp into Foolish Town.

(I could just keep going all day insulting your cousin - nothing funner than trashing someone you've never even meet via a third party - but maybe I should answer your question instead.)

Sodium in an essential mineral, or electrolyte if you want to get fancy about it. The main thing it does is maintain fluid balance in the blood. It also works alongside potassium to aid nerve function and muscle contraction, but let's focus on the fluid thing. Simply put, too much sodium means too much fluid in your blood (hypernatremia). Not enough sodium means not enough fluid in your blood (hyponatremia). Luckily, your adrenal glands can help maintain this balance.

In theory, if you consume too much sodium, you'll just pee (or sweat) it out, but some people are salt-sensitive. This means that excess consumption will jack up blood volume levels, which increases blood pressure. This is also called hypertension. There's no easy way to determine salt-sensitivity, but the elderly, women, and black people tend to be more susceptible. That said, kids are also susceptible to hypertension, as spelled out in one of my previous posts.

How much sodium we need, exactly, is a super fuzzy area. It's so fuzzy, in fact, that the US Government declines to issue a "Recommended Daily Allowance." Instead, they suggest a vaguer "Adequate Intake" of 1500mg daily for the average adult (recently lowered from 2300mg). For children 1-3 years old, the number is 1000mg. For children 4-8 years old, the number is 1200mg.

(Even less salt for kids? Hmmm... it appears your cousin's knowledge bus is spending the night in Foolish Town at the Ill-Informed Inn.)

When you hold 1500mg up against the SAD, things get a little embarrassing. According to the Mayo Clinic, the average American consumes about 3400mg of sodium per day. Yikes!

So, there are very, very few times that anyone needs to add salt to their diet. The most obvious being if you are a salt vampire from the planet M-113. While better-informed readers might feel compelled to point out that Bones phasered the last, known salt vampire in the Star Trek episode "The Man Trap," it's worth noting that said episode takes place in the year 2266AD, so technically, they're still around at this writing.

Another situation that might require additional salt intake is if you are an endurance athlete. As I noted previously, we sweat out excess sodium. My buddy Steve Edwards recommends that the best way to deal with this is to keep sodium down in general, but jack it up for training and competition. From The Straight Dope:

Athletes need to worry about hyponatremia, a life-threatening situation where sodium levels are diluted due to sweating and excessive water consumption. However, randomly consuming more sodium along with more water does not seem to be the best course of action. Instead, athletes who lessened both water and sodium intake to 24-28 ounces of water and 300-600mg of sodium/chloride, along with other electrolytes (calcium, magnesium, potassium) per hour while training and racing, along with lowering their overall daily sodium consumption, performed best. The bottom line was that athletes who lowered their overall salt intake and only increased it based on the needs of their daily training performed best.

A final case where adding sodium might be a good idea is if you're in a highly active job, outdoors, in an excessively hot climate, such as a military base, in Georgia, in the summer. That being said, I'd be surprised if the military still uses salt pills, given it's a really obsolete way of increasing sodium levels. (This Field & Stream FAQ suggest they don't.) But if you're in a situation like this, and you know for a fact that your diet isn't particularly high in sodium, you're much better off using a sports drink instead of a pill. That way, you're also rehydrating and getting other electrolytes you've lost. (The same advice stands for endurance athletes. Salt vampires, however, seem to do best when leeching sodium directly from human beings - although I question the ethics of this.)

How's that work for ya, Krissy?

Post-surgery check-in

2011-09-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

Just a quick check-in to let you all know that the surgery went well. I was lucky. The doctor said there was a lot of damage and had I waited much longer, it probably would have resulted in a hip replacement. He took lots of cool arthroscopic photos during the procedure of my insides. Interested?

I feel pretty good and plan on writing later this week about sodium. Thank you all for all your emails and posts! Sadly, only one of you offered to show up in a nurse uniform and she lives in England. Oh well. Considering I'm sitting here with a cooling unit that keeps my hip (and adjoining regions) at a semi-permanent 43 degrees for the next 7 days, it probably would have been a wasted effort anyway...

On Friday, the Fitness Nerd gets filleted!

2011-09-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

It's been an interesting two and a half years in my world.

Normally, I devote this blog to news, spews, and views, but every now and again, I throw down autobiographical style. Because of this, regular Nerd Herders know that I’m a divorced beach bum with 50% custody of the world’s awesomest 7-year-old. You also know that right after my divorce, a spinal injury I probably received playing high school football 20+ years ago presented itself. The right wing of my L5 vertebrae had snapped off and, probably because of the ~~increased~~ insane amount of exercise I was using as therapy and because of my skyrocketing stress levels, it decided to hurt. A lot.

It took about 20 months to sort it out. At about 18 months, my third physical therapist threw in the towel and my orthopod wanted to fuse my spine. Several hours of Googling later, I realized this would be a dicey choice at beast. I threw one, last Hail Mary pass to the East and contacted a highly recommended acupuncturist. He saved the day, not so much in the sense that he poked me with a bunch of needles, although that was great, but more because he recommended a form of therapeutic yoga called Viniyoga.

Viniyoga did two things. It worked a few muscle that my PTs just didn’t know how to work, particularly the stabilizer muscles in my lower back. It also gave me a 30-minute routine that was impossible to over-do.

Ya see, I’m one of those unfortunate souls who doesn’t know how to do things by half. Each PT I went to gave me an intense core program and advised me to do it daily. I think they do this expecting patients to do it 3-4 times a week, max. I did it daily and then some, not only trying to fix my back, but also feed my endorphin addiction. A woman who I dated briefly watched me do the workout one afternoon and commented, “Jesus! Are you trying to heal your back or break yourself in half?”

(And, yes I’m aware of the hypocrisy of making a living helping people eat right and exercise while I simultaneously ram myself into the ground.)

Anyway, it was impossible to overdo the gentle Viniyoga routine, so I designed a program where I’d torture myself on odd days with a hybrid of all the PT core work and nurture myself with yoga on even days. It worked. Within two months, I was able to break a 7-month surfing fast and resume more intense yoga practices which I’d given up over a year ago. Yay! I had my life back.

The problem is, for all my brilliance – and you all know how brilliant I can be – I’m also capable of impressive feats of dumbassery. I ignored the subtle lesson that the Viniyoga workouts were trying to teach me: that I needed to relax. Instead, I surfed, I biked, I swam, I yogaed. I also continued to work 12 hours a day, increasing my workload at Beachbody and taking every writing assignment that came my way, while simultaneously caring for my daughter, writing screenplays, and (because this wasn’t apparently enough work) going back to school to earn my masters in holistic nutrition. Meanwhile, I stopped reading for pleasure completely, rarely watched movies unless they were research, and drastically reduced my social schedule.

Sure, I took up meditating to help with stress, but 10 minutes of nightly Zen just didn’t make up for the vast amount of leisure I was forsaking.

My body completely melted down. In February of this year, my left elbow started killing me, so I overcompensated with my right arm and an old injury in my right shoulder went nuts. Then, my knee went funny. Then, when I was camping with my daughter one weekend, I pivoted at the waist to grab a lantern and my femur felt like it was going to pop out of the socket. Then my lower back started to hurt again. Then my left trap started locking up every morning.

Suddenly, surfing and yoga dropped out of the picture again, as did painting, cooking, slouching, sitting cross-legged or lifting things above my head. Walking also became a little tricky unless, oddly enough, I was barefoot on sand. So daily sand walks, while still slightly painful, kept me from going insane. (My theory is that while sand walking works your muscles, it’s low impact on your joints.)

After two cortisone shots, one round of prednisone, 3 MRIs, a comprehensive blood test, several conversations with my orthopod, PT, and acupuncturist, and enough xrays to allow me to construct an exact replica of my entire skeleton this coming Halloween, I received the following diagnosis:

Tendonitis in my left elbow
Bone spurs on the head of my left femur causing a femoroacetabular impingement (FAI)
A hunk of cartilage about the size of a quarter missing from my right knee
A degenerative disc in my neck
Osteoarthritis in my right shoulder
A labral tear in my right shoulder
Tendonitis in my upper, right bicep
The proud knowledge that I was putting the sons and daughters of all three of my medical professionals through college

Meanwhile, I became a freakishly regular patron at the doctor's office. While my orthopod was extremely sympathetic, he insisted that I should be proud of the fact that I was the first patient in the history of his practice to present some form of every major orthopedic malady simultaneously.

Another piece of the puzzle was that the knee and the dodgy right shoulder were old injuries. Equipped with this, my orthopod’s theory was that the bone spurs were causing an imbalance that, in turn, caused everything below the waist, including my back, to hurt. Meanwhile, the bad disc in my neck was causing old injuries upstairs to flare up and not allowing new injuries to heal.

I took this information to my physical therapist, who ignored the other symptoms and focused on the neck. I also reminded him that I was an “enthusiastic” exerciser and would therefore probably overdo any home therapy he assigned. That was two months ago. The neck and both tendonitises have abated, but the labral tear is still nagging me.

And, for the record, my home exercises are breathtakingly dull.

As for the lower half, there’s not much you can do for an FAI except shave the bone. You can try to manage the pain, but every time those little spurs bang against my hip, it’s wearing things down all the more, which will eventually lead to a full hip replacement. Even my acupuncturist, who’s also a licensed herbalist, reacted to the diagnosis by saying, “Dude, I’m sorry, but you really need to go under the knife for this one.”

Unlike a spinal fusion, the success rate is good – 85% to 90%. Also, I’m thin, fit, and young(ish), which brings those numbers well into the 90s. The downside is that I’m due for a couple highly immobile, painful weeks of recovery followed by a couple highly inactive months.

My surgery is tomorrow at noon. My dad has flown out from Atlanta to help me for a couple weeks and an astonishing array of beautiful women have fanned my ego by offering to bring me food. Sadly, they all categorically refused my request that they serve it in a naughty nurse uniform.

That said, if any of my readers have a white mini-dress and a spare tuna casserole, I’m not giving up hope completely. (Email me.)

As for the recovery, I’m not too stressed. I’ve been dealing with pain for a while now, so the idea of pain with a purpose is weirdly appealing. Furthermore, I’m doing a lot of projecting 4-6 months into the future, when I’m up and riding my board again. It’ll be just in time for the winter swell.

So why am I telling you this? Three reasons. First, I might not write next week and I wanted to explain why. Second, like all bloggers, I’m hideously narcissistic. Third, when my orthopod diagnosed me, he left a huge factor out that I wanted to share with you: stress.

My dad has a theory that the reason this happened is because I don’t eat red meat and therefore I’m missing “crucial enzymes.” My mom thinks it’s because I’m “too darn skinny.” It’s neither of these things. It’s because I don’t let up. Granted, many of the things I do, the intense exercise, the creative writing, the schooling, give me great pleasure. I think they better me as a person, but in addition to all the self-improvement, I need to take time to just enjoy myself the way I am now.

Last week, I was in Missouri visiting my sister’s family. I had an epiphany. I marveled at the way they watched TV, read books, played games, and did nothing, despite all being very busy people. At one point, my brother-in-law gave me a copy of Keith Richards’ recent autobiography and insisted I’d love it. I almost turned him down with a line I’ve used many time in the last couple years, that condescending chestnut, “I don’t have time to read for fun.”

Then I realized it was my dumbassery talking. I accepted the book. I’ve been reading it every night since and will continue to do so as I convalesce. Then, if Mick Jagger writes a tell-all, I’ll read that too. Hell, I might even read one from Charlie Watts.

So if you’re like me, take this as a cautionary tale. It’s cool to work hard. It’s cool to play hard. It’s cool to live hard. But if you want to keep doing those things into your twilight years, sometimes it’s equally as important to live easy.

Never mind the eggs, give hens a break!

2011-08-29T08:01:00.000-07:00

Damn egg farmers.

I have no problem with people eating eggs. I don't particularly like their taste, but I understand their function in a diet. Furthermore, I don't think the chickens mind all that much if we eat them. However, what does bug me is battery farming, where hens spend their lives in a space roughly the size of a piece of paper, with no room to stretch their wings or lie down, cranking out their goods until they're too old to produce at which point they're sold off to American school lunch programs to be blended into paste and served to second graders.

Admittedly, we do the same thing to humans. It's called college and it's not quite as bad because it typically only last four years and you get all the cheap beer you can drink.

So, while I may indulge in the occasional Keystone Light for nostalgia's sake, I'm incredibly vigilant about eating organic, free-range eggs. Admittedly, the USDA's definition of "free-range" can be manipulated by unscrupulous farmers, but I see it as a step in the right direction. As for "organic," I know the farming industry distorts the term way too much, but when it comes to livestock, it's super important. Battery farming is incredibly stressful on the chickens. So stressful, in fact, that they have a habit of dying unless they're hopped up on antibiotics and hormones. Considering humans grossly abuse antibiotics and 80% of the antibiotics we use go to farm animals, it's obvious math that saving a buck or two on a dozen antibiotic-laden eggs will eventually lead to the eradication of our species via some monster, antibiotic-busting, super bacteria.

If they're organic, all those antibiotics and hormones are off limits.

But the first step to this is getting them out of those damn cages - and the poultry farmers of America don't want this to happen, which is why their little PR group, the American Egg Board, sent out this obnoxiously misleading press release last week:

New study finds no nutritional difference between free-range and cage-produced eggs

CHAMPAIGN, IL (August 26, 2011) – Eggs produced by free-range hens are often perceived by the public to be nutritionally superior to eggs obtained from layers kept in traditional battery cages. However, a recent scientific study has called this popular perception into question by finding essentially no differences in the nutritional quality of eggs produced by hens from both management systems, said the Poultry Science Association (PSA).

So many things wrong here. First off, it's a lie. So much of a lie, in fact, that the release admits it 5 paragraphs later by explaining "β-carotene levels were higher in the range eggs, which... may have contributed to the darker colored yolks observed in these eggs during the study."

Huh? How do "no nutritional difference" and "β-carotene levels were higher" mesh? The study indicates vitamin A levels in both types of eggs were the same, yet β-carotene can be converted into Vitamin A in our body, so technically, the body gets more A from the free-range eggs.

Then, if you go to the actual study in Poultry Science (a publication, incredibly, that has been around since 1908, outliving both Life Magazine and the Weekly World News. How do they do it?), you'll see that the slightly higher fat levels in free-range eggs that the press release dismissively mentions translate to said eggs having more unsaturated fat, including omega-3 fatty acids. Granted, it's a minimal amount, but omega-3s are an essential nutrient that many Americans don't get enough of, so every little bit counts.

And press release aside, the study is rather flawed for a couple reasons. First, while the eggs were tested for cholesterol, n-3 fattyacids, saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fat,β-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E, they were not tested for vitamin D or any of the B vitamins present in eggs. Also untested were calcium, iron, selenium or any of the other minerals that make eggs a healthy nutritional option.

Second, all the animals were given the exact, same diet. One of the points of letting chickens go free range is that you can give them a healthier diet. If the tiny nutritional changes I mentioned about came from hens eating the exact, same food, imagine what would happen with better food?

I'd like to see this study done with free-range, organic, antibiotic-free farming versus doped-up battery farming. But if that happens, fat chance of the eggheads at the Egg Board writing about it.

Question of the Week: Is Breakfast for Champions?

2011-08-23T09:58:00.000-07:00

Sorry about going incommunicado for a week, Nerd Herd. I was in stunning Nixa, Missouri visiting my sister. I brought my Mac and was planning in doing a little writing, but to my astonishment, the midwest proved to be action-packed. Somewhere between the combination Mexican/Chinese restaurants, mini golfing in 100 degree heat, and the Yakov Smirnoff Dinner Theater, the week escaped me.

But I'm here now for you, babies.

This week's question comes from long-time Nerdist Alex:

Is skipping breakfast bad or good if you eat normally for the rest of the day? I rarely enjoy bkfast and have been skipping it during the week. Research?

I'm not sure if you're asking this from a weight-loss perspective or a sports performance perspective, so I'll answer both. Short answer, Alex, is that you should probably eat breakfast. Your body is in a fasted state. It's primed to accept nutrients. Why not take advantage of that? That said, there's some nuance involved and, as you know, I'm Mr. Nuance, so let's take a closer look.

Much of the research on breakfast is funded by the cereal industry, which creates some really annoying bias. Because of this, a lot of the studies point out the importance of complex carbs, as opposed to balanced nutrition in general. That, in my opinion, is a load of Craptain Crunch. Yes, I believe some carbs are a wise idea in the morning in order to restore blood sugar after a night without food, but no amount of research in the world is going to help you decide what works best for you in the morning in terms of macronutrient balance. Some people might need that bowl o' bran. Others might benefit from a more protein-based meal, which can promote satiety longer. Personally, I like a big bowl of fresh fruit smothered in goat yogurt.

There are also some super-healthy people who just don't like breakfast at all. (My buddy Steve Edwards, for example.) I maintain that Steve would be better off if he ate in the morning and when he's visiting, I nag him with grandmotherish intensity, but still, I recognize that it just doesn't work for some people.

You might be one of those people, but before you make that call, you should seriously check in with yourself. Steve is super fit and knows his body inside and out (except for that weird mole I keep bugging him to have checked out.) You, on the other hand might be trying to lose weight and, in so doing, you've noted that breakfast is the easiest meal of the day to skip. This logic may seem sound, but it rarely works. Usually, if a person has a weight problem, that means they don't have an awesome relationship with food. You can try to keep the snacking down for the rest of the day and keep the meals reasonable, but by skipping breakfast, you're making a task that you've struggled with all your life just a little more difficult. Here's a 1992 study out of Vanderbilt University indicating that.

And another study I blogged about a couple years ago.

And a third study presented at The Endocrine Society’s 90th Annual Meeting in San Francisco showing that a big high-carb, high-protein breakfast might actually help with weight loss. Admittedly, the study isn't about meal timing as much as it's about adding carbs back into faulty low-carb diets, but it certainly backs up the notion that breakfast isn't detrimental to weight loss.

From a sports performance perspective, I still think breakfast is important, but if you're a morning exerciser, I'd usually suggest doing it before you eat, for reasons best explained by this great New York Times blog. Cliff Notes: exercising in a fasted state trains your body to mobilize body fat stores more efficiently. For the person looking to lose weight, this means, well, you lose weight. For the sportsperson looking for that extra edge, it makes your body a more effective machine.

The article also points out the while this is ideal for training, exercise in a fasted state doesn't generally allow for maximum performance, so if you're competing, make a point of fueling up.

However, the article doesn't discuss bonking (running out of blood sugar). If this happens to you during morning exercise, the quick fix is half a banana or a similar sugar hit about ten minutes before working out, but the average Joe or Josephine should have the glycogen stores to get through an hour or so of exercise in the morning, so if you're bonking on a regular basis, you might want to re-visit your over-all diet.

Whew! That was a big information dump. Did I answer your question?

Does this faulty research make my butt look big?

2011-08-12T07:30:00.000-07:00

It is with great ~~pleasure~~ annoyance that I officially proclaim a study in the most recent issue of Health Affairs entitled "Following Federal Guidelines To Increase Nutrient Consumption May Lead To Higher Food Costs For Consumers" to be the most misleading research of the year!

Hooray!

Here's the abstract:

The federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010, emphasized the need for Americans to consume more potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin D, and calcium, and to get fewer calories from saturated fat and added sugar. We examined the economic impact of meeting these guidelines for adults in King County, Washington. We found that increasing consumption of potassium—the most expensive of the four recommended nutrients—would add $380 per year to the average consumer’s food costs. Meanwhile, each time consumers obtained 1 percent more of their daily calories from saturated fat and added sugar, their food costs significantly declined. These findings suggest that improving the American diet will require additional guidance for consumers, especially those with little budget flexibility, and new policies to increase the availability and reduce the cost of healthful foods.

Of course, the media picked up on it with its typical drama-a-gogo zeal. The Reuters story starts with "Eating healthier food can add almost 10 percent to the average American's food bill -- and that is just to boost a single nutrient like potassium."

MSNBC jumps in with "If you are trying to eat as healthy as the government wants you to, it’s going to cost you: at least $7.28 a week extra, that is."

So now crappy eaters the world over have a great excuse buy another 2 liters of Diet Coke, claiming that it saves them $380. The only problem is, this study is so absurdly flawed that even these silly news stories need to admit it - even though they bury this fact towards the end. Of course, those previously mentioned crappy eaters probably wouldn't know this, given they tend to be the kind of people who also don't read past the 2nd or 3rd paragraph of a news story, if they read at all.

From Reuters:

In the study, the authors collected questionnaires on the typical eating habits of 1,123 people in King County, Washington, and calculated how much each diet cost based on retail food prices in three local supermarkets. However, they did not factor in costs for food bought outside grocery stores, such as fast food -- which would likely increase the food cost for each person.

Oh yeah... hmmmm... factoring restaurant costs and the fact that many overworked, ill-informed, economically disadvantaged people look to fast food as a quick way to feed their family might be a factor. Maybe! And then from MSNBC:

So why would the participants in Monsivais’ study have to spend so much? King County includes Seattle, one of the most affluent and highly educated cities in the country. When those folks consume potassium, Monsivais says, it tends to come in the form of more expensive fruits and vegetables such as nectarines and dark leafy greens.

Oh really, rich people buy better food? Ya think that might skew the results a little? I dunno...

But let's say, just for fun, that this study is right. Let's say it's more expensive to eat right - no wait, let me rephrase that. The correct wording should be that it's cheaper to eat poorly. (The reason I prefer to use this terminology is because eating healthy should be considered the status quo.) Either way, here's the thing that kills me. I admit that there's a small, SMALL section of the American population caught in the horrible trap shown in the documentary Food, Inc. These poor people are truly in a situation where farm subsidies and lack of access forces them to eat inferior food. My heart goes out to them.

But the rest of you are just lazy and looking for excuses.

How many of you have unlimited texting on your phones? Designer jeans? Cable TV? iPads/Pods/Poops? A new car payment? a Starbuck's latte? Little flowers painted on your fingernails? Cocktails a few times a week? These are not requirements for human life. Potassium, fiber, vitamin D, and calcium are. As bad as the state of nutritional education is right now and as awful as companies like Monsanto and McDonald's are, we need to take ownership of our issues. If you're overweight or just generally unhealthy and you know it's because of what you eat, odds are you could make the changes you need. You might have to switch from Luckies to Levis so you can buy bananas and whole grain bread, but here's a little secret: when you're fit, your ass looks hot in even the cheapest of jeans.

A little walk here, a little stretch there...

2011-08-03T15:14:00.000-07:00

My 7-year-old and I have a ritual. Her summer camp is six blocks from my palatial beachside estate, so we walk there each morning. The whole time, she complains. I explain that on the days I have custody, I don't have a lot of time to exercise, so I like to fit it in when I can. Furthermore, it's ridiculous to drive 6 blocks.

Then she complains some more.

Although I've just summed up the entire life of a single parent in about 70 words, the primary reason I mention this is to demonstrate my big time wisdom. I'm so wise, in fact, that a recent study out of the University of Missouri backs up. As it turns out, it's not that one, big workout of the day that makes the difference. It's all the little things you do along the way. From Science Blog:

John Thyfault, assistant professor in the departments of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology and Internal Medicine, found that negative physiological changes associated with a higher risk for type 2 diabetes, occur in people who transition from high amounts of activity (greater than 10,000 steps a day) to inactivity (fewer than 5,000 steps each day).

“If people spend the majority of their time sitting, even with regular periods of exercise, they are still at greater risk for chronic diseases,” Thyfault said. “If people can add some regular movement into their routines throughout the day, they will feel better and be less susceptible to health problems. In the long term, they may not see big changes in the mirror, but they will prevent further weight gain.”

It's nice to see this information in black and white like this, although it's nothing new. The New York Times did a great article about the evils of sitting a while back that makes a number of similar points. For example:

Several strands of evidence suggest that there’s a “physiology of inactivity”: that when you spend long periods sitting, your body actually does things that are bad for you.

As an example, consider lipoprotein lipase. This is a molecule that plays a central role in how the body processes fats; it’s produced by many tissues, including muscles. Low levels of lipoprotein lipase are associated with a variety of health problems, including heart disease. Studies in rats show that leg muscles only produce this molecule when they are actively being flexed (for example, when the animal is standing up and ambling about). The implication is that when you sit, a crucial part of your metabolism slows down.

Spooky!

My daughter isn't alone in her desire to drive short distances, especially here in Los Angeles. It's not like you're "saving time" if you really think about. Yes, you gain 10 minutes in your day, but if you feed those 10 minutes into the "Time Is Money" calculator, you also waste an amount of gas worth more than you'd earn in that 10 minutes. Also, you'll get fat and have a heart attack.

Even if you'd prefer to side with a 7-year-old and not buy into my logic, there are plenty of ways to keep moving through out your day while holding onto your precious 10 minutes. Take the stairs. Walk to your co-worker's desks instead of calling them. Take water breaks. Walk around when you talk on the phone. Do stretches when you're watching TV. Here's a great extensive list from WebMD. The list of activities is endless.

Hopefully, the list of excuses won't be.

Gluttony, Inc.

2011-07-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

Longtime Nerd Herder and walking encyclopedia MichM wrote in recently with this article about foods designed to allow you to pork out without worrying about calories.

Foods aimed at helping you slim down have been around for decades, but a recent wave of ultra-low calorie products — such as the 150-calorie per pint dessert Artic Zero — is making a direct appeal to our national sense of gluttony.

“What we’re seeing here is a strategy that says Americans like to stuff their faces,” says food industry analyst Phil Lempert. “And these mean we don’t have to sacrifice.”

My knee jerk reaction was to question the vast amount of chemicals in a pint of ice cream-like substance, but later in the article, they explain that's not the case.

Many of these products are achieving their low-calorie status with different ingredients than similar products in the past. Arctic Zero is made primarily of whey protein and gets its sweetness from organic monk fruit, an Asian gourd the company says is 150 times sweeter than sugar.

The bastards and their damn Asian gourds ruined my argument! Fortunately, I'm multifaceted in my cantankerousness. It may seem like I'm about to veer off-topic here, but stay with me. According to 2004 study published in the International Journal of Obesity, which I tend to prefer to the Domestic Journal of Obesity, artificial sweeteners possibly mess up the brain's built in calorie counters. Basically, you consume an artificial sweetener snack and it throws off your brain because it thinks it's getting lots o' calories. Once it figures out that you effed with it, your brain effs with you back by causing you to want more food to make up for the lack of calories.

I know monk fruit isn't an artificial sweetener, but it's the same principle, so I bet the same thing would happen.

And to even further ignite my grumpy indignation, the article features this completely inappropriate notion from this guy who's a neuroscientist or something.

Health advocates, dietitians and government programs decry the American propensity to over indulge. But what if we were meant to eat as much as possible? UCLA neuroscientist Dean Buonomano says in his new book, “Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape Our Lives,” that the human brain was designed to guide us through a world in which dying from starvation was a greater possibility than becoming obese.

Come on. Really? Yes, it makes complete sense that the human body would want to add fat to protect from obesity, but that doesn't mean the human body is genetically wired to pork out as much as possible. You know what other animal does that? Goldfish. Birds don't do that. Mammals don't do that. Is this article seriously suggesting that appetite-regulating genes were somehow bumped out of humans in the evolutionary chain? I don't think so. Binging - and that's what it is - isn't a healthy facet of the human condition. It's a psychological problem. I'm a binger. I've been fighting it my whole life. I mostly deal with it by overly indulging in fruits and veggies. That's still not awesome, but it's better than eating weirdly engineered noodles and whey protein.

There's no ethical justification for these products. Their manufacturers are nothing more than exploiters of human gluttony. That's it.

Mumble, mumble, mumble. Monk fruit. I'll tell you where to put your monk fruit.

Question of the Week: Ectomorph, Mesomorph, Endomorph, everywhere a Morph, Morph

2011-07-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Real Fitness Nerd -

I just heard about different body types about 5 minutes ago (Ectomorph, Mesomorph or Endomorph) and I wanted to know what you think about it. Is it just a load of bull to help people feel better about being fat or not being buff? Or does it at least hold some water?

- Morphtastic in San Marcos

My short answer, Morphtastic, is yes and no. Does that help? Of course not! It's a vague, annoying response, so allow me to go into more detail.

The modern incarnation of somatotyping, as it's called, categorizes bodies into three groups. Ectomorphs are skinny people who gain neither fat nor muscle quickly. Endomorphs are big people who gain fat quickly. Mesomorphs are right in the middle and tend to gain more muscle. The system is a really easy way to categorize body types and is therefore is often used by the fitness industry to size up the needs of people looking to put on muscle, lose fat, or some combination thereof.

Although there's certainly a common sense aspect to somatotyping - and it's very pleasing to say aloud because it rhythms with "tomato-typing" - there's not a ton of science behind it. It was actually conceived in the forties by a psychologist named William H. Sheldon, who wrote about it in his awesomely-named book, Atlas of Men. The 1954 tome features just enough photos of naked men to raise an eyebrow. The publishers, apparently, tried to downplay this by whiting out the genitals - which actually makes the whole thing all the more eyebrow-raising, in my opinion.

Sheldon's original concept was far more complex than grouping men into three groups. (He never wrote an Atlas of Women, perhaps because the publishers resists the substantially bigger white-out job the naked female form presents.) Instead, Sheldon presented a complex, base-seven rating system suggesting that all men possessed elements of all three body types. In other words, most guys are part ectomorph, part mesomorph, and part endomorph.

The system makes complete sense (to me, at least). But, for some reason, Sheldon then assigned animal names to the different body types. Here's an example:

Somatotype 3 6 1 (Endomorphic extreme mesomorphy, at extreme ectopenia, 10-level) Wolverines. Sometimes called “cat bears” and also as “weasel bears.” Compact, short legged, giant weasels who know no fear. A wolverine can put to rout a hungry bear and can hold his own against any North American animal except man (who perhaps uses unfair weapons)

Fascinating. I'd probably put myself it 3-6-1, making me, technically, a wolverine. As thrilled as I am by this, this labeling smacks more of Facebook fun quiz, less of scientific research. He probably could have skipped it and stuck with the numbers.

So that's how tomato, er, somatotyping started. However, Americans don't like complexity, unless it pertains to their healthcare system or debt ceiling, so as the fitness industry adopted Sheldon's system, they dumbed it down to the three body types and omitted the animal names. Regardless, from now on, I intend to refer to myself not as a mesomorph, but as a wolverine. Just try and stop me.

Do I buy somatotyping? I suppose. There are skinny people, fat people, and middle people, so if you want to slap labels on them to sell books, feel free. It's a useful tool when helping people in broad strokes. However, I think it's important to understand the nuance of Sheldon's original theory. There are scores of body types between these three. Although categorizing yourself as one of them is a good start, eventually, you'll probably need to cross-apply strategies from the three to reach your goal.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go "rout a hungry bear," whatever that means.

Out of Sorts with High School Sports

2011-07-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

I was at my 6-year-old daughter's soccer game the other day when something really creepy happened. As the girls were warming up on the field, a dad from the other team called his daughter over for a "pep talk." He was direct and to the point.

"Do you want to get frozen yogurt after the game?"

"Yeah!"

"Great, then score a goal."

"But --"

"No buts. Also, no yogurt if you don't score a goal. Now go win."

There have been very few times in my life that I wanted to punch someone as I did then. However, I don't think it would have set a good example for the kids. Also, judging by his shaved head and ritual scarring, he probably would have punched back, so I bit my tongue, choosing to save my rage for the internet, as any good nerd would do.

So now, I lash out at him with scientific research, although I know that unless the study I'm about to mention was printed on a beer bottle or tattooed just above his girlfriend's ass, he'll probably never read it. Regardless, here's a summary from Science Blog:

Vigorous sports activities, like basketball, during childhood and adolescence can cause abnormal development of the femur in young athletes, resulting in a deformed hip with reduced rotation and pain during movement. This may explain why athletes are more likely to develop osteoarthritis than more sedentary individuals, according to Dr. Klaus Siebenrock, from the University of Bern in Switzerland, and colleagues, whose work is published online in Springer’s journal Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research.

I'm sure you're asking what this has to do with Yogurt Nazi Dad. Listen, I'm all for fit, healthy kids. I also think a little competitive fun builds character. However, what really chaps my hide is when grown-ups get all Friday Night Lights about it, using kids as pawns in some kind of demented, glory days-seeking full-contact chess game. I don't care if little Jimmy catches the winning pass in the big championship and you shouldn't either. Mahatma Gandhi didn't catch the winning pass. Bill Gates certainly didn't catch the winning pass. I seriously doubt most US Presidents caught the winning pass. (I know a lot of you are going to say Ronald Reagan, but that was a movie, not real life.) The winning pass has no bearing on what a person is capable of achieving later in life.

Kids aren't naturally inclined to torture their bodies when survival isn't on the line. No one is. It's completely counterintuitive from an evolutionary standpoint. So, to get back to my point, that imbalanced, play-to-win, destructive approach to fitness starts with a messed-up dad telling his daughter the only point she's on the field is to score a goal. If the kids in the study I mentioned above weren't pushed the way most of us were pushed in high school sports, were taught to enjoy sports, to respect injuries, and to crosstrain, I bet the incidences of early-onset osteoarthritis would plummet.

Either we're letting them sit inside on summer days, playing PS3, eating nachos, and ballooning to 300 pounds - or we're driving them into the ground on the playing field, battering their joints into oblivion. We seriously need some balance here.

Yogurt Nazi Dad's daughter did score a goal and her team did win. Guess what? I was stoked. I gave my daughter a huge hug and told her she did great and I was happy because it looked like she was having a fun time out there. Then, even though it's counter to everything I stand for nutritionally, I took her out for frozen yogurt.

So take that, Yogurt Nazi Dad!

Sadly, I feel like a bad-ass when I hop the curb on my bike

2011-07-15T10:35:00.000-07:00

The world's first BMX triple backflip, shot from all kinds of cool angles. Wow. Thanks to Steve Edwards for turning me onto this.

Question of the Week: Do Milk and Cookies Benefit Your Beddy Bye?

2011-07-13T11:37:00.000-07:00

Dear Real Fitness Nerd -

I heard that there's a new study out validating the benefits of carbs before bed to help you sleep. Does this mean I get to put Thin Mints back on my bedtime menu?

Sincerely,

Sleepy and Snacky in Saskatchewan

You so badly want me to say yes, don't you, Sleepy? Because I am a kind and generous Fitness Nerd, that's exactly what I'll do. The answer is YES!*

That's it for today's blog. Thanks for reading... oh wait. It looks like an asterisk popped up next to that "YES!" Who put that there? I didn't type that! Looks like I'll have to go talk to legal. Please hold...

(play soothing waiting room music here)

Okay, I'm back. I checked with the Real Fitness Nerd Legal Department and it turns out, the answer is still YES*, but only provided you eat it FOUR HOURS before your head hits the pillow. You'll also need to eat high-glycemic carbs with little fiber, protein, and fat. And you need to make sure that your snack contains an amino acid called tryptophan. FURTHERMORE, you need to be aware of the fact that this sort of snack will generally promote type two diabetes and heart issues, unless timed when your blood sugar and glycogen are extremely low, like after a workout.

Whew. Sort of takes the fun out of it, huh? Damn Legal Department.

In case you're curious, the reason this type of snack works is due primarily to that tryptophan, which the body uses to create serotonin, a neurotransmitter that slows your brain down, promoting restfulness. But for tryptophan to work like this, it needs to cross the blood brain barrier, which means it needs to have easy, quick access to your brain. High-glycemic (fast-absorbing) carbs help this process, but other amino acids (proteins) do not. This is why the myth that Thanksgiving turkey makes you sleepy was debunked recently. Turkey may contain tryptophan (as do other birds), but all the other protein and fat that comes with it means it doesn't really get to your brain.

And why the four hour rule? I'm not 100% sure, but my guess is that this is how long it takes for the serotonin to kick in. If you don't believe me, here's a study out of Australia confirming it. They fed the subjects rice (a tryptophan-containing carb) at various times before bed, finding that the 4-hour folks fell asleep faster than the 1-hour folks.

Frankly, this is a good thing, considering eating right before bed also messes with your sleep cycles, meaning you may be asleep after that midnight snack, but you're not going through proper REM cycles, so you're not getting proper rest. I could keep going about how this, in turn, can promote over-eating and how a recent study found that sleep-deprived teenagers tend to crave carbs, but I've thrown enough science at you for one day, so instead, I'll share with you this weird, Japanese television show where they mess with sleeping people:

*some conditions apply.

F should be for Fit, not Fat

2011-07-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

The Trust for America's Health released their annual F is for Fat report this week. Guess what? We're still getting fatter. To be more precise, 16 states have become more obese and everyone else is holding steady in their chubbiness. 32 states have a diabetes rate over 8%. 9 states have a hypertension rate over 30%.

What the hell?

I blogged on the 2010 report last year. I still find it baffling. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought it was supposed to work like this:

Step 1: report comes out showing a hideous problem plaguing our culture.

Step 2: the masses rise up, write letters, stage protests, have t-shirts made. Creepy guys use protests to pick up on cute co-eds.

Step 3: either the government affects positive change or... Revolución!

But that's not happening. Except maybe the t-shirt part. I don't know. If you've made t-shirts, please send me one. I wear a medium - which brings me to my next point. The other day, I attended a beach clean-up where they gave away free t-shirts. Who doesn't like a free t-shirt? So I went to the table to get mine - and they hadn't even bothered to print medium-sized ones. XL? Sure! XXL? They had plenty of those but, but it hadn't occurred to the organizers that a fit person might actually show up. I bust my ass to stay trim, so I'm not going to wear a tent that covers it all up!

That said, I took the t-shirt anyway because, you know, free t-shirt. But still, I was offended. Maybe I'll use the expansive piece of white cotton as a surrender flag when a fitter nation invades us and our army is too portly to fit in our tanks.

But I digress. The F is for Fat report makes a number of policy-based recommendations, including:

Protect the Prevention and Public Health Fund: TFAH and RWJF recommend that the fund not be cut, that a significant portion be used for obesity prevention, and that it not be used to offset or justify cuts to other Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) programs.

Implementing the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act: TFAH and RWJF recommend that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issue a final rule as swiftly as possible regarding school meal regulations and issue strong standards for so-called "competitive" food and beverages - those sold outside of school meal programs, through à la carte lines, vending machines and school stores.

Implementing the National Physical Activity Plan: TFAH and RWJF recommend full implementation of the policies, programs, and initiatives outlined in the National Physical Activity Plan. This includes a grassroots advocacy effort; a public education program; a national resource center; a policy development and research center; and dissemination of best practices.

Restoring Cuts to Vital Programs: TFAH and RWJF recommend that the $833 million in cuts made in the fiscal year 2011 continuing resolution be restored and that programs to improve nutrition in child care settings and nutrition assistance programs such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children be fully funded and carried out. If fully funded these programs could have a major impact on reducing obesity.

I know some of you libertarian-types might rankle at these suggestions, but we've got to do something. There are some areas, such as school lunches, where we need to get hands on about what kids are eating, but for the most part, these suggestions aren't of the nanny-state variety. They're about education. They're not about telling people what they're going to eat; they're about telling people what they can eat. I genuinely think ignorance is a huge part of the problem. I live in Southern California and work in the wellness industry, but I still encounter peers who think that meat is a good source of fiber and that marshmallows are healthy because they're fat-free.

We need to educate our country. Like the old Chinese proverb says, "Feed a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man that fish is an excellent source of omega-3 fatty acids and lean protein, he'll eat less red meat and loses weight."

Or something like that.

Ask the Nerd more questions!

2011-07-05T09:59:00.000-07:00

I still have some of your older questions to answer, but I'm looking for more! Please post your questions here or on my Facebook page.

Please send stuff I can inform with while still crackin' wise. If you have Beachbody questions, please save those for the Team Beachbody Message Boards where my alter-ego, "Advice Staff Denis," works day and night to make your life easier.

But if you have a question that's just, plain weird or requires a certain degree of smart-assery, ask me here!

All the benefits of wine - without the wine.

2011-07-01T10:09:00.000-07:00

I could practically hear the cheering coming from Napa Valley yesterday morning when I read this article in Science Blog:

As strange as it sounds, a new research study published in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), suggests that the “healthy” ingredient in red wine, resveratrol, may prevent the negative effects that spaceflight and sedentary lifestyles have on people. The report describes experiments in rats that simulated the weightlessness of spaceflight, during which the group fed resveratrol did not develop insulin resistance or a loss of bone mineral density, as did those who were not fed resveratrol.

Resveratrol is a phytonutrient found in the skin of red grapes and a few other fruits that studies show can potentially fight cancer, inflammation, and aging. In fact, at this rate, researchers will probably discover that, if you consume enough resveratrol, you can play Rachmaninov's Symphony #2 in E minor and poop 24 carat gold.

But before y'all start mainlining Two Buck Chuck for the 4th of July weekend, I need to point out two things. First, all the resveratrol in the world won't do you a lick of good if you blow your hand off with an M80 because you were drunk when lighting the family fireworks. Second, as I stated before, resveratrol comes from the skin of red grapes - which is to say, it's already plentiful and bioavailable before fermentation. There's also a fair bit of it in blueberries and peanuts. All three of these foods have considerable more nutrient value than a glass of Pinot.

There's plenty of viable research showing that moderate alcohol consumption has its benefits, but don't be one of those goofballs who's all, "The only reason I drink is for my health." Hogwash. If you're looking for phytonutrients, eat fruit and come clean to the fact that you drink because it tastes good, it's fun, and it takes the edge off. There's no resveratrol in beer, so I'd be better off drinking a glass or two of wine - but I don't. I drink beer. You know why? Cuz I like it.

Happy Independence Day, my fellow 'Mericans. Relax and have a glass or two of wine - just don't blow any appendages off. However, if you start crapping out any precious metals, I insist on some kind of commission.

Fake fat makes rats fat. Imagine that.

2011-06-28T10:39:00.000-07:00

Good headline, huh? It's like a line from a really bitter Dr. Seuss book.

Anyway, today I've got an interesting, albeit not super conclusive study for y'all. Recently, researchers out of Purdue University discovered that when rats on a high fat diet (41% fat) were fed low-cal potato chips made with a zero-calorie synthetic fat substitute called olestra, they were more prone to gain fat than rats fed normal, fatty potato chips. Rats on a low fat diet (about 14% fat) didn't gain much weight from either kind of chips.

(Quick side note: while the high-fat diet was a modified chow made with peanut oil, the low-fat diet was an actually brand of remarkably nutritious rodent chow called LabDiets 5001. Click the link, check out those nutrition facts, and explain to me the justice in a country where university lab rats eat better than public education 3rd graders.)

Here's a good summary of the study from the American Psychological Association, including this possible explanation of what the hell is going on.

Why would a fat substitute confuse the body? Food with a sweet or fatty taste usually indicates a large number of calories, and the taste triggers various responses by the body, including salivation, hormonal secretions and metabolic reactions. Fat substitutes can interfere with that relationship when the body expects to receive a large burst of calories but is fooled by a fat substitute.

I'm not surprised at all. This isn't the first time something like this has happened. Case in point, this study in the journal Obesity (a publication which, FYI, you don't want to leave on your coffee table if you're having a cake and ice cream party) showing that artificial sweeteners impede weight loss.

Modern science barely understands how nutrition with real foods works. When you throw synthetic food substitutes into the mix, everything goes Wild West very quickly. If any of you Chow Chow McSmugeaters out there think you truly understand how nutrition works, you're wrong. It's too complicated - unlike a car, for example, which is simple to understand. There aren't 20 different theories as to what causes a carburetor to flood with gas. Conversely, accepted wisdom on how the humans interact with food continues to flip flop like a politician in a blender. As my friend Steve Edwards says, "One rule of nutrition is that as soon as you become dogmatic, it's just a matter of time before your God is usurped."

Most artificial sweeteners and fats were invented within our lifetime. According to the laws of relativity and the space-time continuum, it's absolutely impossible to know exactly what they'll do to our insides longterm - unless, of course, the big food companies maintain either flux capacitor equipped Deloreans or Tarot card readers in their R&D departments, which I doubt.

Conversely, bad fats and refine sugar have been around for a while. Even with all that we don't know about nutrition, we have a rough idea how the body reacts to a PopTart or a handful of Pringles. Personally, I prefer the devil I know. And if you're eating right the rest of the time, as the study shows, then a little indulgence isn't going to matter. But that's a big ask in modern society, given we can't all start our days with a healthy bowl of LabDiets 5001.

Oh, to be a lab rat...

All the Pretty Diets

2011-06-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

US News and World Report has come out with its survey of the best diet plans. While I'm slightly offended that I was not asked to be part of its 22-member "panel of health experts," I have to say, I dig their findings.

1. DASH Diet

2. Mediterranean Diet

2. TLC Diet

2. Weight Watchers Diet

5. Mayo Clinic Diet

5. Volumetrics Diet

7. Jenny Craig Diet

8. Ornish Diet

9. Vegetarian Diet

10. Slim-Fast Diet

11. Nutrisystem

12. Vegan Diet

13. South Beach Diet

14. Eco-Atkins Diet

14. Zone Diet

16. Glycemic-Index Diet

16. Medifast Diet

18. Raw Foods Diet

19. Atkins Diet

20. Paleo Diet

Except for the fact that whoever wrote the list apparently has a few sticky number keys on his laptop, this is great. I love that the first three diets are pure common sense, not to mention completely free-of-charge to do. And I love that the fringier diets all fall towards the bottom.

I respect Vegan, Raw Foods, and Paleo eaters, but I don't think those systems are panaceas for the masses. They're more panaceas for the authors who write bestsellers claiming that they are panaceas - and even then, they're panaceas for their bank accounts more than anything else.

I think people like you and me, the edumacated and the nutritionally-bi-curious, should try these diets. You just might find all the hard work and research required to do them right is worth it. However, for someone who knows nothing about food, is obese, and just wants to turn their life around, it just doesn't make sense. All their problems will not be solved if they give up (in order of the three diets I singled out above) bacon, bacon, or everything but bacon. The first thing they need to do is learn what the spectrum of healthy foods are. Once they've mastered that, then get fancy.

And on a final, odd note, I'd never heard of the Eco-Atkins Diet before. It's a vegan take on the Atkins Plan (!) in which 31% of your calories come from plant protein and 43% come from plant fats, meaning the vast majority of your diet would be beans and nuts. I don't know if it's effective, but I do know one thing; I would not want to be trapped in an elevator with someone on the Eco-Atkins Diet. I don't even want to ride on the same bus. They should be made to wear some type of badge or identifying symbol. The Scarlet EA or something like that.

Blasting the "no carbs after 6pm myth" myth

2011-06-20T10:48:00.000-07:00

A dude over at the Team Beachbody message boards (part of my day job) pointed out a study today indicating that loading carbs in the evening can actually induce weight loss. A host of bloggers have picked up on said study and are touting it as the death of the "no carbs after 6 pm myth." The death? Really? That's a bit grandiose, isn't it? Let's break it down.

First, the study from the journal Obesity. Here's a nice little summary from Hive Health Media:

In total, 78 police officers with BMI’s over 30 were randomly assigned to two identical low-calorie diets. In the experimental group, they consumed carbohydrates mostly at dinner while in the control group, they consumed carbohydrates throughout the day. Both groups followed their respective diets for a duration of six months.

Again, both groups followed the same standard low-calorie diet consisting of (20% protein, 30–35% fat, 45–50% carbohydrates, 1,300–1,500 kcal) per day with the only difference being the timing of their carbohydrate intake.

This isn't surprising at all. I don't think the cops lost weight because they ate carbs with dinner. They lost weight because they didn't eat carbs during the day. They were all obese (I'm going to assume the 30 BMI wasn't caused by muscle weight), so the lack of blood sugar would have triggered mobilization of body fat stores. But to test this diet properly, there really needs to be a third group eating a high-protein diet to measure the results against - which there was not.

A fourth group that wasn't overweight would have been nice too.

Also, the fact that they were eating at an extreme deficit makes a huge difference. Odds are, the lion's share of those dinner carbs went to replacing glycogen stores and blood sugar that were tapped out during the day. Furthermore, 45-50% of a 1500 calorie diet is massively different from 45-50% of a 2400 calorie diet. In fact, it's an over 100 grams difference if we're referring to carbs. Someone eating an average, healthy diet who loads all his or her carbs into dinner is looking at 300 grams in a sitting!

And by the way, the notion that nutrition experts all say "No carbs after 6pm" is rather dated. No one says that anymore - at least not the cool nutrition experts. What they advise is to avoid porking out in general in the evening. If you take in a bunch of calories and then then just sit around or sleep - as usually happens at night - all that energy has to go somewhere. Furthermore, if you eat those calories too close to bedtime, there are studies showing that digestion interrupts sleep cycles, which leads to a poor night's sleep. An obese person eating a mostly carb dinner as part of a 1500 calorie diet is going to digest those those carbs super-fast. The abstract of the study doesn't mention exact meal times, but if it's around 6 or 7pm, it's safe to assume that they had plenty of time to digest.

In summary, if you're obese and you're eating at a severe deficit, then, yeah, go ahead and save your rice allotment for the evening. Otherwise, there needs to be A LOT more research before this study has any bearing on the rest of us.

Here's where to get that hat.

Stop reading this and go to bed!

2011-06-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

Because only smart, well-informed people read the Real Fitness Nerd, you already know that late bedtimes can cause diet problems, given a lack of sleep stimulates production of the hormone ghrelin, which tells you to eat, while decreasing the hormone leptin, which tells you to stop eating. But now, adding to this bad case of hormonal hokey pokey, a new mini-study presented at a meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies shows that tired people are less-likely to listen to their front-brain when it says, "Put down the cheesecake, smart guy."

From Health Day:

In the new study of 12 adults aged 19 to 45, people who were sleepy during the daytime showed decreased activation in the part of their brain that inhibits behavior (prefrontal cortex) when they were shown photos of high-calorie foods such as hamburgers, French fries, pizza, cakes and ice cream, compared with images of low-calorie, healthier foods.

"When you are sleepy, there's a good chance that you won't be able to control how much you eat," said lead study author William Killgore, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. "You may be drawn to unhealthy foods because you are not putting the brakes on as well as you would be if you were well-rested."

So now that the "what," "where," and "when" seem to be fleshed out, I'm pondering the "why." My guess is that this dietary "minus" was actually a "plus" from an evolutionary perspective. Back the day, if a caveman wasn't getting the sleep he needed, it meant there was some serious shit goin' down, like maybe a sabertooth tigersaurus had moved into the family cave, or maybe an unplanned Ice Age had dropped in, making hunting more of a challenge. Either way, Gork needed to take care of business and sleep just wasn't on the menu. A desire for extra grub gave him the extra fuel he needed to chase wild game or negotiate with the home realtorsaurus.

Conversely, in the modern age, whatever activities we feel compelled to do after bedtime rarely burn many calories - we all generally overeat whether we sleep or not - so it's working against us. And by the way, if anyone out there thinks that whatever you're doing late night is as important as what Gork was doing, you're probably wrong. If Gork didn't find food or shelter, he would die, as would Gorkette and Gork Jr. You, however, won't die if that spreadsheet isn't sent to Corporate by 2am or if you miss the season finale of The Real Housewives of South Dakota.

I'm as guilty as anyone. After a full day of work, exercise, and child-rearing, I often stay up too late simply because I really want some time to hang out, watch TV, read, or look at William Shatner sing "Common People" on Youtube. But that doesn't make it right.

Well, except the William Shatner part. That's extremely right. But you get the point.

The Nerd is Guest Blogging!

2011-06-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

Hey Nerd Herd -

I'm crazy swamped this week saving humankind from itself. I'll try to get something up, but in the meantime, I've been doing a little guest blogging around town. Here's a little something I did on the evils of trying to add nutrients to inherently crappy foods over at People for Green Justice.

While I generally avoid ease-dropping, it was a challenge to ignore the kindly old man at my daughter’s soccer game this weekend fawning over the bag of Werther’s sugar-free candies he was sucking on. Apparently, he was diabetic, so it was with great joy that he’d discovered a way to side-step the necessary austerity measures. “They’re sugar-free! They’re good for you!” he rhapsodized as he shoved the bag under his grandson’s nose. “Have another one! It’s healthy!”

Every cell in my body wanted to leap from my seat and get in his face with a stern lecture on the true nature of these sugar-free sweets. Firstly, they’re sweetened with sugar alcohol, a low-calorie sweetener that absorbs though the intestines and can cause gastric distress. And secondly, while they may still contain a few calories, they’re also completely void of vitamins, minerals, or fiber. In other words, they’re little brown balls of flatulence-inducing empty calories. They’re not good for you at all!

But as I said, he was kindly, so instead, I used the moment to channel my energy into contemplating the many ways the food industry loves to pull the nutritional wool over our eyes when it comes to bad foods re-engineered to be “healthy.

Enjoy!

Question of the Week: Seaweed, not Needweed

2011-06-02T08:28:00.001-07:00

Our question of the week comes from Coach Jeff, who I admire primarily because he scored the handle "Coach Jeff." I bet a lot of Jeffs out there would like to have a "Coach" before their name, but there can be only one Coach Jeff, or you win.

Nerd,

Shellfish allergies. Worse... Kelp allergies. I am guessing shellfish eat kelp and that's why my wife is allergic to both? Or is it?

Being the super-fabulous source of iodine that it is, I would love for my wife to be able to have vitamin supplements that have kelp in them. Finding a suitable multi is a bear... add that to the fact that she prefers gummy vitamins and you'll see I have pulled out all my hair!

Look at our BB line-up! They put kelp in EVERYTHING!

Some food allergies you can grow out of, take blockers for, whatever. What are my options here?

Why are we allergic to stuff that's so good for others, how does it work, are there any studies that show how we can work around, who cuts your hair, is there any hope for us?

Signed,
Kelpless on the Coast

Jeff, bubala, calm down. You're gonna be okay. It's not like she's allergic to something crucial to living such as air, water, or Star Trek re-runs. It's just seaweed.

I'm reading about this dentist from the 1930s named Dr. Weston Price. Yes, I know, the notion of early 20th century dentistry doesn't really inspire a sense of peace, tranquility, or trust, but this guy was pretty cool. He wondered why primitive, isolated cultures tended to have incredibly healthy teeth whereas people in "modern" society experienced crowded dental bridges and cavities, so he decided to investigate.

Luckily for Dr. P, western society hadn't completely homogenized the planet back in the 1930s. There were still a couple places where you couldn't find a Starbucks, so he traveled the world, documenting all these indigenous peoples. He discovered that it was all about diet. When they ate meats, produce, and grains the land provided, they all had great teeth and excellent health. When they were exposed to refined flour, added sugars, and all the other hallmarks of the Western diet, they all got messed-up teeth and tuberculosis.

Admittedly, the bulk of these indigenous diets consisted primarily of raw meat and veggies. But before all your primal eaters out there start throwing a beef party, keep in mind that there were also healthy groups with completely different diets. Isolated communities in the Loetschental Valley in the Swiss Alps ate rye bread as a staple and only consumed meat once a week. While the meat-eating Nilotic Tribes in Africa, a herding culture, were crazy healthy, their agricultural neighbors, the Kikuyu tribes, came a close second.

While seafood played a big part in many of these diets, in North America, several Native American tribes existed for generations in incredible health - with no access to fish or other sea-life whatsoever.

Why am I sharing all this? Three reasons. 1. It's super interesting. 2. I wanted to show off my Big Brain. 3. If kelp is a challenge for your wife, skip it. There are lots of ultra nutritious foods out there that don't contain kelp or shellfish. If you're looking for iodine, try yogurt, eggs, or strawberries. And she can still enjoy scale fish with all its excellent omega-3's, right?

I don't understand the nuances of food allergies and intolerances. I don't think anyone truly does. For example, I can't eat oranges. If I do, my nose clogs up. No Western doctor can tell me why. I do know that in traditional Chinese medicine, oranges are considered a damp food, which is probably the problem, given I also have an intolerance for cow's milk, another damp food. It's a pain in the ass skipping those foods, especially considering I have an orange tree in the middle of my side yard, but it's not the end of the world.

As for supplements, by definition, they're just that: supplements. In other words, they supplement a healthy diet. They aren't the required part. (Okay, that's not "in other words." It's technically the same word: "supplement," but you get the point.)

And a multivitamin is a nice-to-have, but if you're eating a balanced diet, you shouldn't need that either, so go forth and tell your wife to enjoy a landlubber's diet. Also, avoid sea cruises because if your ship sinks and you end up on a deserted island were you need to live off coconut and crabs, she's screwed.

Keep the questions coming, everyone! This is fun!

Anatomy of a Lame-Ass Protein Article

2011-05-31T09:14:00.000-07:00

I have no problem with protein. I eat it every day. In fact, I had a hearty bowl of goat's milk yogurt for breakfast, but I gotta say, protein-pushers drive me nuts. Long story short, if you're looking to increase mass, massive protein piling just doesn't work. Yes, if you're trying to promote a little ketosis and burn fat, that's one thing, but the notion of 1-1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight to build muscle? I have yet to read a compelling article or study that proves this.

The correct numbers, according to every piece of scientific evidence I have ever read ever, ever, ever, are .8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight for plebs, 1.5 gram per kilo for athletes. Why did people switch those kilograms to pounds, which would approximately double intake? My theory is that 50% of America just can't grasp the metric system and the other 50% exploits the measurement-impaired first half to sell protein powder.

Case in point, this article from Bodybuilding.com about the importance of nitrogen balance. I'm not going to wade through the whole article here, but I will quote this key point:

A nitrogen balance study of bodybuilders demonstrated an increased protein need relative to controls and estimated the RDA for bodybuilders to be 1.7 g/kg total.

In another study, impressive strength gains of 5% and size of 6% were seen over several months of strength training in world-class weight lifters when they increased their dietary protein from 1.8 to 3.5 g/kg of body weight per day.

Both these studies underscore the greater need among strength athletes, for a higher protein consumption. For the average, non-pro, bodybuilder, it is best to err on the side of caution and consume more than the one-gram-per-pound guideline, to ensure maximal nitrogen retention.

Okay, noted. There's a also a little calculator in the article telling me that at 165 pounds, I should eat 263 grams of protein per day. Lots! Now, let's skip down the article's references:

Fritz, B.(1991). Balance: What Growth is all About. Muscle and Fitness. December, 1991.

Lemon, Peter, "Do athletes need more dietary protein and amino acids?" International Journal of Sports Nutrition, S 39-61, 1995

Tarnopolsky, M, Evaluation of protein requirements for trained strength athletes." Journal of Applied Physiology, VOl 73, No 5, pgs 1986-1995, 1993

The link is mine. While the article offered plenty of links to various amino acids it sells, it did not link to these references. I suppose that's understandable - a lot of commerce sites avoid external links. The problem is, the links are all completely bogus, so not linking to them smacks of misdirection.

And for the record, none of the references above mention the study showing "impressive strength gains" due to heavy protein use. If you're going to mention a study like that, you probably want to include it in the references. Just sayin'.

Wait. I take that back. I'm not 100% sure of that because I couldn't find that article by B. Fritz. I have no idea what it says, but seriously, when you're throwing down heavy science like this, is it really appropriate to mention an article - not even a study - from an obscure, 20-year-old magazine? I have a copy of the July 1992 Australian edition of Field and Stream stating that claims shoving soft-boiled eggs up your butt combats gout.

Do you believe me?

From there it gets better. I wasn't able to find that second reference either. I did, however, track down a hell of a paper trail from its author, Dr. Peter Lemon, who apparently spent the better part of the 90s on a quixotic quest to lance the protein windmill, ending with a 2000 article in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition stating the following:

A variety of factors interact to increase dietary protein needs of individuals who exercise regularly. Although future study will need to determine precise recommendations, current research indicates that as long as energy intake is adequate a daily protein intake of 1.2–1.4 g/d for individuals participating in regular endurance exercise and 1.6–1.8 g/kg for their counterparts involved in strength exercise should be sufficient. To ensure these increased needs are met, care should be taken to consume a diet containing adequate energy and a selection of high quality protein foods, i.e., dairy products, eggs, meat, fish and soy products. Select populations may be at increased risk of not consuming sufficient protein due to increased requirements for a variety of other reasons, i.e., unbalanced diet (vegetarians), inadequate energy intake (dieters or athletes with high energy expenditure, especially women), higher baseline requirements (those who are growing or the elderly) and so on. More study is necessary before all of this can be untangled.

In other words, this is a study from the guy who wrote the phantom study sourced in the Bodybuilding.com article dated five years later stating "1.6–1.8 g/kg for their counterparts involved in strength exercise should be sufficient."

And here's another article from Dr. Lemon in 1992 stating that "during the early stages of intensive bodybuilding training, PRO needs are approximately 100% greater than current recommendations but that PROIN increases from 1.35 to 2.62 g.kg-1.day-1 do not enhance muscle mass/strength gains, at least during the 1st mo of training."

Oops!

Finally, I did find a link to the third reference in the Bodybuilding.com article. Here's the abstract:

Leucine kinetic and nitrogen balance (NBAL) methods were used to determine the dietary protein requirements of strength athletes (SA) compared with sedentary subjects (S). Individual subjects were randomly assigned to one of three protein intakes: low protein (LP) = 0.86 g protein.kg-1.day-1, moderate protein (MP) = 1.40 g protein.kg-1.day-1, or high protein (HP) = 2.40 g protein.kg-1.day-1 for 13 days for each dietary treatment. NBAL was measured and whole body protein synthesis (WBPS) and leucine oxidation were determined from L-[1-13C]leucine turnover. NBAL data were used to determine that the protein intake for zero NBAL for S was 0.69 g.kg-1.day-1 and for SA was 1.41 g.kg-1.day-1. A suggested recommended intake for S was 0.89 g.kg-1.day-1 and for SA was 1.76 g.kg-1.day-1. For SA, the LP diet did not provide adequate protein and resulted in an accommodated state (decreased WBPS vs. MP and HP), and the MP diet resulted in a state of adaptation [increase in WBPS (vs. LP) and no change in leucine oxidation (vs. LP)]. The HP diet did not result in increased WBPS compared with the MP diet, but leucine oxidation did increase significantly, indicating a nutrient overload. For S the LP diet provided adequate protein, and increasing protein intake did not increase WBPS. On the HP diet leucine oxidation increased for S. These results indicated that the MP and HP diets were nutrient overloads for S. There were no effects of varying protein intake on indexes of lean body mass (creatinine excretion, body density) for either group. In summary, protein requirements for athletes performing strength training are greater than for sedentary individuals and are above current Canadian and US recommended daily protein intake requirements for young healthy males.

As I read it, strength trainers need more protein than sedentary people, but a high-protein diet (2.40 g protein.kg) is too much. Therefore, a moderate protein diet (1.40 g protein.kg) is ideal for weightlifters.

So, to sum up, how on earth are we supposed to take an article seriously when its references are either impossible to find or completely contradict the key points?

It's enough to make the yogurt curdle in my stomach. I'm having carbs for lunch.

The Zen of Cholesterol

2011-05-27T10:59:00.000-07:00

Ready to get your namaste on? Keeping in line with this week's enlightenment theme, I gotta study and a Buddhist parable for y'all. First, the story:

"A young widower, who loved his five year old son very much, was away on business when bandits came who burned down the whole village and took his son away. When the man returned, he saw the ruins and panicked. The took the burnt corpse of an infant to be his son and cried uncontrollably. He organised a cremation ceremony, collected the ashes and put them in a beautiful little bag which he always kept with him.

Soon afterwards, his real son escaped from the bandits and found his way home. He arrived at his father's new cottage at midnight and knocked at the door. The father, still grieving asked: "Who is it?" The child answered, it is me papa, open the door!" But in his agitated state of mind, convinced his son was dead, the father thought that some young boy was making fun of him. He shouted: "Go away" and continued to cry. After some time, the child left.

Father and son never saw each other again."

After this story, the Buddha said: "Sometime, somewhere, you take something to be the truth. If you cling to it so much, even when the truth comes in person and knocks on your door, you will not open it."

I know, I know. Not your typical Real Fitness Nerd hilarity. I'm probably killing the party a little bit, but I want to make a point, so stop your belly-achin' and stick with me. Now the study:

Scientists from the University of Warwick have discovered why a newly found form of cholesterol seems to be 'ultra-bad', leading to increased risk of heart disease. The discovery could lead to new treatments to prevent heart disease particularly in people with type 2 diabetes and the elderly.

The research, funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), found that 'ultra-bad' cholesterol, called MGmin-low-density lipoprotein (LDL), which is more common in people with type 2 diabetes and the elderly, appears to be 'stickier' than normal LDL. This makes it more likely to attach to the walls of arteries. When LDL attaches to artery walls it helps form the dangerous 'fatty' plaques' that cause coronary heart disease (CHD).

The reason I'm particularly interested in this study is two-fold. First, I love the Darth Vader-esque ring of "ultra-bad cholesterol" and look forward to watching Today Show "medical experts" abuse the term. Second, these scientists figured out that this stuff is created by a process called glycation, in which excess sugar attaches to normal LDL and makes it stickier. They think this is the reason why a diabetes 2 drug called metformin tends to also lower the risk of heart disease. In other words, too much sugar can cause heart issues.

So now I'm going to put the parable and the study together. Some of you may know what I like to have sport with the Sat Fat Set - those pro-lipid enthusiasts who claim there's nothing wrong with dietary cholesterol and the only true evil in the nutritional world is refined sugar. While I'm no fan of added sugar, I find myself polarizing every time someone insists that coconut milk will save the universe or that the obesity epidemic is 100% due to high fructose corn syrup.

But, as of late, I've been trying not to cling to my "truths." I'm in the middle of Gary Taubes' book, Why We Get Fat, which argues that it's malnutrition, not over-nutrition that makes people obese. I'm reading slowly and trying to accept it and, I gotta say, the man makes a few good points. And today's study just reenforces his points. Maybe I need to rethink things.

Don't worry, I'm the same cynical bastard I've always been and I still plan to call bullshit when bullshit needs calling. For example, so far in the book, Taubes has taken several pokes at Michael Pollan's motto "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants" when, in truth, their two theories can co-exist happily. You're being a douchbag, Gary. Knock it off. It just waters down your point.

The thing is, while our bodies aren't changing that much, what we know about them and what we put into them is changing rapidly, so I think it's important to check in sometimes with my convictions. What should I hold onto as truth and what's my bag of ashes?

Question of the Week: Sweet Enlightenment

2011-05-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

Wow. You guys ask a lot of questions. I don't know whether to be honored that you're looking to me for answers, or really disturbed that you're looking to me for answers. Either way, I've committed myself to this, so pull down your pants, turn your head, and cough, as I get on with it.

I think I'll start with The Grumpy Buddha's question. Frankly, I could use the karma boost, so if you could put in a good word with the Cosmic Oneness, GB, I'd appreciate it. I'd rather not come back next life as a goat, which is what a recent ex-girlfriend strongly suggested might happen, but only after I rotted in hell for 5 million years. (I didn't question her co-mingling of afterlife beliefs given she was holding a golf club at the time.)

Dear Mr. Real Fitness Nerd -

Most anti/pro-sugar wars I see look like this:

Atkinsy Health Nut: Sugar is bad!
Not-Atkinsy Health Nut: Not really! Just the processed crap!
Atkinsy Health Nut: I dunno, I still think sugar is bad!
Non-Atkinsy Health Nut: Just ignore the processed crap. Fruits and veggies are fine. They have fiber, so the sugar is absorbed slowly and stuff! I mean, it's FRUIT. How could it be bad?
Atkinsy Health Nut: Whatever! Sugar Is Bad! You should just eat seal fat, like all our ancestors did.
Non-Atkinsy Health Nut: Seriously, if fruit is bad for you, then WTF?

Sadly, I have yet to see the conversion continue in this way:

Slacker Junk Food Addict Pseudo-Health Nut: Eeeexcellent, so, Non-Atkinsy-Health-Nut, I can have a few Little Debbie snack cakes, and as long as I down some All-Bran with it, I should be fine, right?

What say ye?

- Favoring Fudge and Fiber Fusion in Fiji

That all ya got, GB? Easy! First off, no, a bowl of All-Bran will not offset that snack cake, not that it wouldn't be delicious. Sadly, the fiber in the All-Bran is busy slowing the absorption of the carbs in the cereal itself. A confectionery blast would overwhelm it. However, theoretically, yes, you could lace the treat with psyllium husk, ostensibly reverse engineering the world's first whole grain Little Debbie snack cake, but it would be really nutrient-poor, so while they might be slow-absorbing calories, they'd be slow-absorbing empty calories.

Which brings me to why I think people who shun fruit are mostly dumb-asses. Sure, some fruit can be slightly off re: the fiber/sugar ratio, but they're so nutrient-rich that it doesn't really matter. For example, everyone's favorite low-carb whipping boy, the banana. A large one is 121 calories, 31g carbs, 17g sugar, and 4g fiber - which isn't all that bad and therefore kind of moots my point before I make it - but pretending it is an unhealthy blast of sugar, it's also loaded with electrolytes and vitamins, so it's worth it. Furthermore, it's really filling, so you'll eat less. A King-Sized Snickers is 537 calories. I could totally eat a King-Size Snickers, but could I eat the 4.43 large bananas I'd need to meet that calorie count? Gross.

As for refined sugar, yes, it's bad for you, but don't be a freak about it and you'll be okay. A good rule of thumb is 80% of your diet should be rock-solid so that we can all pretend we didn't see you eat the other 20%. This rule works out nicely for sports supplementation as well. For example, if you're lifting weights and you want to supplement creatine, the best way to transport it to your muscles with straight sugar. Technically, this should be just fine because if your protocol is right, your hard workout should tap your blood sugar and glycogen so the rush of sugar carrying the creatine should just recharge your stores. But if you want to get all Gary Taubes about it and fret that refined sugar gives you everything from cancer to ingrown toenails, I still think it's okay if the rest of your diet is top-notch. Like I said, 80/20.

Of course you could swear off sugar completely and it wouldn't be a bad thing. It would be super healthy in fact, but, well, like that's going to happen. As I always say, moderation, Buddha Boy, is the key.

Ask the Real Fitness Nerd

2011-05-20T07:36:00.001-07:00

I'm getting a little tired of bitching and moaning about questionable studies all the time, so I might try something new here at the Real Fitness Nerd. If you Nerd Herders want to ask me questions, I'll pick some out and incorporate them into the blog with sarcastic and vaguely accurate answers.

You can either post questions in the comments after my posts, or you can ask them on my Facebook page.

Throw me some fun stuff. If you give yourself a good name (Constipated in Cincinnati, Protein Packin' Pete, etc), you'll just make me want to answer you all the more. And, yes, I'll link back to your blog. Many of you know me through my work at Beachbody, so I ask that you steer your questions regarding those products to the TeamBeachbody Message Boards, where I tend to tone it down and be a little less... what's the word for it? Oh yes! Fabulous.

What ya got for me?

Cardio may save you from zombies, but not necessarily a heart attack

2011-05-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

Apparently, it's "Bothered by Science" Week here at The Real Fitness Nerd, cuz I have another study to whinge about. Here are the facts, hot off the press release:

In one recent study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers analyzed the heart disease risk of 45-, 55- and 65-year-old men based on their fitness level and traditional risk factors, such as age, systolic blood pressure, diabetes, total cholesterol and smoking habits. The scientists found that low levels of midlife fitness are associated with marked differences in the lifetime risk for cardiovascular disease.

For example, a 55-year-old man who needs 15 minutes to run a mile has a 30 percent lifetime risk of developing heart disease. In contrast, a 55-year-old who can run a mile in eight minutes has a lifetime risk of less than 10 percent.

In my mind, this is just another overly-simplistic test that produces highly-contestable results. Here's why: I hate running.

That is to say, I don't mind it when you run. Run all you want. I'll be here when you get back. What bothers me is when I run. Maybe it's the fact that my scar-tissue-laden shoulders and cartilage-deficient knees start complaining before I can even get my heart rate up. Maybe it was too many laps mockingly assigned to me, the fat kid, by Mr. Mann in P.E. class. (Yes, my gym teacher's name was Mr. Mann. Maybe that's funny for you. For me, it's a painful memory that makes me want to comfort eat Pop Tarts, so laugh it up.) Either way, I have a Grinch-esque dislike for running and therefore, I'm lousy at it.

If this test were for a mile swimming or biking or paddling, I'd probably do quite well, but my systems just aren't trained for running. Honestly, I don't know if I could do a mile in 8 minutes, but I doubt it - and I know my heart is infine shape. Sure, if I were being chased by zombies, I could probably blow through that mile once the adrenaline kicked in (of course I'm referring to 28 Day Later fast zombies, as opposed to your conventional Night of the Living Dead slow zombies), but last I checked, these scientists did not factor escaping the undead into their experiments.

So if you can't crank out an 8-minute-mile, don't freak out. If you're truly out of shape, you don't need a track to figure it out. Go to the doctor and get some blood work done. Then if you feel you need to run to fix things, get yourself a new pair of jogging shoes, but don't expect to see me out there pounding the streets with you. Unless, of course, this Saturday's pending apocalypse turns out to be of the zombie variety.

photo: The Zombie Research Society

Switching your genes won't help you fit in your jeans.

2011-05-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

In one of the more subtly surreal news stories I've read in recent months, Reuters reported yesterday that researchers have uncovered a "master gene" in body fat that regulates other genes associated with obesity-related issues such as diabetes and cholesterol.

In a study published in the journal Nature Genetics, the British researchers said that since fat plays an important role in peoples' susceptibility to metabolic diseases like obesity , heart disease and diabetes, the regulating gene could be target for drugs to treat such illnesses.

"This is the first major study that shows how small changes in one master regulator gene can cause a cascade of other metabolic effects in other genes," said Tim Spector of King's College London, who led the study.

This all makes for cool science and all, but one thing struck me as odd. Other than a passing mention that type 2 diabetes "is often linked to poor diet and lack of exercise," at no point in the article did the reporter feel compelled to point out that obesity is also linked to poor diet and lack of exercise. The whole perspective felt very much as though it's just an accepted fact that we're a massively overweight society, so instead fixing it, lets just work within that paradigm. "Hey, you're gonna be fat no matter what, so let's stop trying to fix that. Here, have some pills so that you can be fat and live longer!"

I agree that this research is important. I have overweight friends who I would very much like to benefit from it, but I'll also be the first to tell them that a pill to switch off their diabetes should be plan B.

Sure, weight-loss is a zillion dollar industry, but it doesn't hold a candle to Big Pharma, who are more than happy to let the world plump-up. That way, they can eagerly applaud scientists who discover how to better flip our gene switches, so that they can develop drugs that work around a problem that could actually be solved by a daily walk and a daily apple.

But no one profits when you go for a walk - except you.

The Nordic Diet: Beware of Vikings bearing Cabbage

2011-05-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, Mother used to say, "Never trust a Viking." Ever since, I've always made a point of being wary of fair, bearded, seafaring men bearing axes or large hammers.

Until today. I just read a new study out of Denmark showing that people who follow a traditional Nordic diet tend to live longer. Yes, it's entirely possible that one of the researchers has a brother Sven who owns a large cabbage farm in Northern Jutland, thus causing a conflict of interest, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt anyway. From the study:

A healthy Nordic food index, consisting of traditional Nordic food items with expected health-promoting effects (fish, cabbages, rye bread, oatmeal, apples and pears, and root vegetables), was extracted and associated with mortality by Cox proportional hazard models. Mortality rate ratios (MRR) with 95% CI were used to associate the index to mortality. In an adjusted model, a 1-point higher index score was associated with a significantly lower MRR for both men [0.96 (0.92-0.99)] and women [0.96 (0.92-1.00)] (P = 0.03). When the index components were evaluated separately, whole grain rye bread intake was the factor most consistently associated with lower mortality in men.

While I admire the Danes for timing the release of this study to coincide with the new Marvel movie Thor in hopes of causing some sort of Nordic pop culture groundswell, I don't think it's going to work. The problem is, for all the lust and swagger that was the Vikings, it appears that they ate the world's most boring food. Cabbage and rye bread could make us live to be 124-years-old, but health-conscious Americans still wouldn't eat it on a regular basis. "I'll have a Reuben sandwich please, hold all the good parts." Fat chance of that.

In order for us to accept a superfood in this culture, it needs to follow the Rule of the Three E's: exotic, expensive, and easy to exploit. Case in point, this article on CBS.com touting "Six new superfoods," including sykr, teff, cupuaçu, black garlic, chia, and mullberries.

Wait, after reviewing that list, make that the Rule of the Four E's:. exotic, expensive, easy to exploit, and have a name that J.R.R. Tolkien would have given to an elf. "Walk safely into Mordor, Frodo Baggins, for Sykr and Black Garlic shalt guard thine path."

If you haven't figured it out, I'm being a little snarky. In truth, I agree that it's fun to explore new foods. I do it all the time. Once Sykr gets back from casting the Ring into Mount Doom, I fully intend to try a bowl of his namesake yogurt. But I don't think it's going to be some magic cure-all that'll cure my arthritis and give me a six-pack. This Nordic study shows us that there are tons of great, cheap, universally-accessible foods to try. So tomorrow, take a break for the $5 acai berry smoothie and try a bowl of oatmeal with some apples in it. If you just don't have a Viking palate, throw a little cinnamon and honey in there. It'll be our secret.

Not so bad, huh? This Viking thing might take off after all. I hear their latest study involves pillaging small coastal villages as a method of stress-relief. I can't wait to try that one. I'm already sourcing horned helmets on eBay! Who's got a longship I can borrow?

No need to avoid fish post-Fukushima, but continue to be vigilant re: 20-story, fire-breathing lizards

2011-05-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

Dear Real Fitness Nerd - Am I going to die of Japanese radiation poisoning because I eat fish? Love, A Nerd Herder

I've gotten this question from about a dozen people now. It may seem a little off-topic for this blog (and a little late - sorry), but I'm going to answer it anyway.

Most of the askers were people who know that seafood has long been a passion of mine - not eating it as much understanding the sociology, biology, and ethics of it. In fact, whether to call this blog the Real Fitness Nerd or the Real Fish Nerd was a flip of the coin. It has a lot to do with my love of the ocean, but I also think it's because I'm a pescatarian. It took a lot of soul searching to walk away from vegetarianism, so now I'd like to know as much as I can about that which I kill and eat.

Having put that in writing, it sounds a little sociopathic, but I'm going to run with it.

Anyway, nuclear seafood: I don't think you need to worry about it and here's why. First off, I had my friends at the New England School of Medicine write up a little report on the health effects of nuclear power plant accidents. Thanks, guys! Here are a few excerpts I'll use to make my point:

Reactor accidents can release a variety of radioisotopes into the environment. Table 1 lists the radioisotopes that were released during the Chernobyl accident. The health threat from each radioisotope depends on an assortment of factors. Radioisotopes with a very short half-life (e.g., 67 hours for molybdenum-99) or a very long half-life (e.g., 24,400 years for plutonium-239), those that are gaseous (e.g., xenon-133), and those that are not released in substantial quantities (e.g., plutonium-238) do not cause substantial internal or external contamination in reactor accidents. In contrast, iodine-131 can be an important source of morbidity because of its prevalence in reactor discharges and its tendency to settle on the ground. When iodine-131 is released, it can be inhaled or consumed after it enters the food chain, primarily through contaminated fruits, vegetables, milk, and groundwater. Once it enters the body, iodine-131 rapidly accumulates in the thyroid gland, where it can be a source of substantial doses of beta radiation.

The release of radioactive water into the sea at the Fukushima plant has resulted in an additional route whereby the food chain may be affected, through contaminated seafood. Although the radioactivity in seawater close to the plant may be transiently higher than usual by several orders of magnitude, it diffuses rapidly with distance and decays over time, according to half-life, both before and after ingestion by marine life.

and...

In accidents in which iodine-131 is released, persons in affected areas should attempt to minimize their consumption of locally grown produce and groundwater. However, since the half-life of iodine-131 is only 8 days, these local resources should not contain substantial amounts of iodine-131 after 2 to 3 months. On the advice of public health officials, area residents may take potassium iodide to block the uptake of iodine-131 in the thyroid. To be most effective, prophylactic administration of potassium iodide should occur before or within a few hours after iodine-131 exposure.

I'm not a doctor - I just play one on TV - so correct me if I'm wrong, but iodine 131 is the thing we need to worry about. But it has a half-live of 8 days and it diffuses super fast in the ocean, so unless you were eating sushi Fedexed from Japan, I don't think you need to worry. Not that I trust the FDA, but they don't seem to concerned either. Even if some radiation does work itself into the food chain, add up the various nuclear, environmental, and fishing watchdog groups keeping an eye on this and you've got yourself one nasty pack of pitbulls. If three-eyed mackerel starts showing up on dinner plates, we're gonna hear about it.

Between lefty bloggers hungry for content and "holistic" supplement sellers trying to overdose West Coasters on potassium iodide, I find the way this paranoia has been fed a little sad. We're supposed to be the fringe. Our paranoid ramblings are meant to expose deeper truths, not garner clicks and sell pills.

Thanks to Steph for pointing out this article. You never read my blog, so this thanks is wasted, but I'm still doing the right thing.

Putting the Up in Up Dog

2011-05-02T13:48:00.000-07:00

Today we lighten up here at the Real Fitness Nerd. Literally.

Anti-gravity yoga. This looks absurdly fun. I can't wait to try it.

The 4-Hour Body: More Like 4-Hour Baloney

2011-04-28T10:17:00.000-07:00

Full disclosure: this review of Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman isn’t going to be 100% ethical, in that I didn’t bother to complete the book. I got 111 pages into before I had to stop for two reasons. First, I had to go take a shower to wash off the stink of bull poop. Second, what I did read was filled with faulty research, lies, and half-truths. If he isn’t going to give his readers the respect of completely researching what he’s talking about, why should I?

For example, on page 27, there’s a sidebar stating, “Remember those 107 calories you burned during that kick-ass hour-long Stairmaster session?” He then goes on to state it was a wasted hour, given you burn 100 calories in an hour of watching TV so, technically, you only burned 7 extra calories exercising.

Huh? Where on earth did you get those numbers? A 165-pound person burns upward of 500 calories in an hour on a Stairmaster. You’d need to weigh about 35 pounds to burn 107 calories. I could understand if you were a couple hundred calories off – but you’re either stupid or a liar to come up with that number.

And then there’s his argument to avoid carbs (including fruit) based in part on the 1956 Kekwick and Pawan study, in which test groups were fed 1000 calories of protein, 1000 calories of fat, and 1000 calories of carbs. As it turns out, the fat and protein people lost weight, but the carb people gained weight. What Ferriss fails to mention is that this study is severely dated. Even the study’s authors admit that those odd fluctuations in weight had to do with fluid retention, not fat loss or gain.

And then there’s the part where he groups whole grains and brown rice in as “white” carbs. And the part where he justifies binge eating via conclusions that show no knowledge of physiology or, for that matter, physics.

While I didn't make it to the exercise part, Steve Edwards did, and he found it to be utterly ridiculous. I also didn't make it to the sex part (which, if you know me, says a lot), but I showed it to my friend Amy Jo Goddard, who's a sexuality educator. Normally, I'd find the string of obscenities she used to review the book titillating coming from a woman like Amy Jo. But in this circumstance, I was a little terrified. It was a lot less x-rated and a lot more Exorcist.

So if you haven't figured out, I was pretty disappointed by this book, which is too bad because I like Tim Ferris. He's an interesting guy and has some cool ideas. But no one knows everything, Tim. He’s stretched himself so thin across these 567 pages that anything useful is lost in a jumble of hogwash. This book is a missed opportunity.

The High Cost of High Calories

2011-04-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

I've been a bit of a negative Nelly lately towards the mainstream media, so I'm switching into positive Polly mode (not to be confused with Pollyanna) and sharing with y'all this great op-ed in the New York Times by chef/author Mark Bittman.

In the scheme of things, saving the 38 billion bucks that Congress seems poised to agree upon is not a big deal. A big deal is saving a trillion bucks. And we could do that by preventing disease instead of treating it.

For the first time in history, lifestyle diseases like diabetes, heart disease, some cancers and others kill more people than communicable ones . Treating these diseases — and futile attempts to “cure” them — costs a fortune, more than one-seventh of our GDP.

But they’re preventable, and you prevent them the same way you cause them: lifestyle. A sane diet, along with exercise, meditation and intangibles like love prevent and even reverse disease. A sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more.

Bittman nails it further down in the article, albeit in an overly idealistic fashion.

Corny as it is to say so, if we can put a man on the moon we can create an environment in which an apple is a better and more accessible choice than a Pop-Tart. Some other billions of dollars must go to public health. Again: we built sewage systems; we built water supplies; we showed that we could get people to eat anything we marketed. Now all we have to do is build a food distribution system that favors real food, and market that.

Experts without vested interests in the status quo come to much the same conclusion: Only a massive public health effort can save both our health and our budget.

Even though I truly dig what Bittman is saying here, I do think it needs to be understood that we have become a country serving big business and special interest groups, as opposed to a country serving the people. As long as there's money to be made in making us fat, we can't look to our leaders to help us get thin. I appreciate Bittman's stance, as well as all the work Michelle Obama is putting into things like reforming school lunch programs, but ultimately we're the ones who need to do the heavy lifting. It's you, not the government, who needs to choose between the apple and the Pop-Tart.

And, no, Frosted Apple Strudel Pop-Tarts don't count. Stop being a smart-ass.

More BMI Blasting

2011-04-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Finally, the mainstream media is seeing the Way of the Nerd. Here's an article from the Sunday LA Times:

For how often doctors, researchers and politicians lean on this quirky, almost-two-centuries-old mathematical formula to browbeat us into shaping up, a number of experts caution that the BMI is a fairly imprecise tool — and often wrong — for helping individual patients appraise their health prospects.

The article goes on to discuss the many, many ways that BMI doesn't work.

For patients who are very muscular, and for African Americans, body mass index is often a poor (and unflattering) gauge of body composition, Bergman added. For Asians and people who are sedentary but slim, a reliance on BMI can lead a physician to overlook signs of elevated disease risk.

Although the article suggests possible replacements, including BAI and simple waist circumference, I don't see why we need one. Human beings have this bizarre urge to look to numbers as a solution. If you're counting calories or measuring reps, sure, a little counting can be helpful, but beyond that, it's all just silly. Either you have these wildly complex daily caloric burn calculators that, no matter how byzantine they get, are just rough estimates. No calculator can account for the air temperature, your genes, how "on" you are that day, or a billion other variables. On the other hand, there's overly simple, vague math like the BMI that's easily trumped by a quick look in the mirror.

Just say no to math! Run a lap, eat a carrot, and you're good!

Is Sugar the New Satan?

2011-04-15T09:13:00.000-07:00

You'll need a lot of free time and maybe a cup of coffee or two to read journalist Gary Taubes' lengthy anti-fructose diatribe in last Sunday's New York Times. But whatever you do, don't add any sugar to said coffee, lest Taubes manifests himself in your living room via the internet and pummels you for poisoning your body with what he feels is the most toxic substance this side of Fukushima.

If you're not familiar with Taubes, he's the respected writer behind a book called Good Calories, Bad Calories in which he blames sugar and refined carbs, as opposed to animal fat and cholesterol, for all of western society's health woes. While Taubes is a gifted journalist and makes many good points, it's an incredibly frustrating book from the perspective of someone who gives nutritional advice. I can't tell you how many times I've suggested to a poor soul struggling with their weight that maybe three salted beefy beef burgers a day isn't an ideal diet, only to have them throw Good Calories, Bad Calories in my face.

Fortunately, most people own the paperback edition, which is considerably easier to deflect, so I've only once bloodied my nose. Also fortunately, his new book, Why We Get Fat, is 340 pages shorter, although it's still in hardback, so until the paperback comes out in December, I'll be wearing a helmet when giving diet advice.

Anyway, what I want to talk about today is Taubes' article in the Times, Is Sugar Toxic?

The history of the debate over the health effects of sugar has gone on far longer than you might imagine. It is littered with erroneous statements and conclusions because even the supposed authorities had no true understanding of what they were talking about. They didn’t know, quite literally, what they meant by the word “sugar” and therefore what the implications were.

This statement alone baffles me. There's a debate? I think the entire world pretty much uniformly agrees that added sugar isn't good for you, except maybe Mary Poppins, and even she advocates limiting it to a spoonful. If this is a fight, you've won, Gary. Sugar = Bad. Way to choose the winning team.

I suppose the point of the article is that sugar isn't just bad for you, it's flat-out toxic to the point of being cancerous. But then you need to consider that fructose, the form of sugar he attacks the most, is present in both fruits AND vegetables - and you certainly can't demonize those, so when you attack fructose, what you're actually attacking is added fructose, which no one denies, can lead to obesity and diabetes. If you want to call it "toxic" and add cancer to that list, go right ahead. (For the record, there are lots of "toxic" substances that can actually be beneficial in small amounts, such as alcohol and caffeine.)

This is the second time this week that I'm completely baffled by a nutritional expert's need to demonize one thing as the source of all evil. What am I missing? Why does my TMOTI (Too Much of One Thing Intolerance) theory not make more sense than categorically labeling added sugar as the anti-Christ? There's not a food on Earth that someone doesn't think will kill you, so instead of avoiding one, nutritionally hedge your bets and eat all of them in moderation.

You Nerd Herders are a smart lot and I'm sure one of you is seeing something I'm not. Please explain.

TMOTI: The Intolerance to end all Intolerances

2011-04-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

Popular nutrition's favorite whipping boy, gluten, fell under CNN's sizable cat-o-nine-tails this week. Behold:

While celiac disease affects about 1 percent of the U.S. population, experts estimate that as many as 10 percent have a related and poorly understood condition known as non-celiac gluten intolerance (NCGI), or gluten sensitivity.

Awesome. Thanks, CNN, for pumping up yet another silly acronym that America will cling to as the source of all their woes. If you're a regular member of the Nerd Herd, you know that I have a gluten intolerance intolerance. Yes, I concede that it affects some people, but I think far more people are just looking for something to help them feel better in lieu of exercising, reducing stress, and cutting out chemicals and refined sugar. From the article:

When gluten-sensitive people were asked to eat bread and muffins every day that, unbeknownst to them, had been laced with gluten, 68 percent saw all their old symptoms come back rapidly, compared with 40 percent in a similar group that ate only gluten-free products.

So, by my math, 32% of those folks weren't that gluten-sensitive after all. That's a big number. Odds are, the reason that doughnut is making you sick isn't the gluten. It's the massive amount of sugar and fat, as well as the fact that you're stress-eating it because your boss yelled at you and you don't have the communications tools to confront him so you're swallowing your pain (along with the donut) instead of doing something constructive like working out to channel your rage and then having a constructive conversation with your employer and a human resources person, if necessary. And yes, I know that's a massive run-on sentence, but I did that to prove a point: sometimes, it's a lot easier to blame a random protein then do all the work involved with actually solving the problem.

That being said, I also concede that we as a society eat too many grains, thanks to a screwed-up, skewed agricultural model designed to feed the public that which is easiest and cheapest to grow, as opposed to that which is healthiest for them. But honestly, if apples, carrots, and oranges had been prevalent in the American diet for generations the way grains have, I'd bet you a million bucks that CNN would be writing about pectin intolerance right now instead of gluten intolerance.

So I'm going to create my own acronym. TMOTI stands for Too Much of One Thing Intolerance. And the cure for TMOTI isn't the elimination of any one nutrient. It's the inclusion of all nutrients in balance. Hell, the cure for TMOTI can even include refined sugar, as long as you can eat it in moderation.

So eat the doughnut, but do it because you've dined well all week with 1 or 2 servings of grain a day, max; you just had a great swim; and now you want a little treat with your coffee and Sunday Times.

Remember, people, putting an end to TMOTI starts with you.

Kids aren't, like, invincible

2011-04-07T20:20:00.000-07:00

Holy Moly! As longtime Nerd Herder MichM pointed out, it looks like I hit a nerve earlier this week with my post on food addiction. Frankly, I'm a little nervous about a follow-up. Unless I A) post nude photos of Katy Perry, or B) libel the Pope, there's no way I'm getting the hits I've been getting for the last couple days, so I think I'll just play it safe with a little public service announcement.

(Although, for the record, I may or may not have access to documents that sort of combine A and B, but if I ran those, I'd go to hell and it's just not worth it.)

Anyway, there was a great article in the New York Times a couple days ago about being mindful of overuse injuries in young athletes.

Just as warming weather brings millions of young athletes back onto sports fields, a major athletics association has renewed this warning: Some school-age competitors who are inadequately prepared, or improperly coached, continue to develop serious overuse injuries.

The risks often exceed those faced by adults who get carried away with a chosen sport because young athletes are still growing mentally and physically, and so are vulnerable to certain injuries, some of which can compromise growth.

I've reached an age where I can muse at the naivete of youth, the way they think they're, like, totally immortal, ya know? But the truth is, us oldies are just as guilty of assuming kids will heal easier and that it's okay to let them push beyond reasonable limits. I still have vivid memories of my own high school football years. Or wait, was that North Dallas Forty? Frankly, they were equally brutal.

Evidence of this is my L5 vertebrae. I have what's called a spondylolysis, or a Pars Defect - and it's gone chronic. In other words, the right "wing" of that vertebrae has snapped off and it will never fully heal. It's not entirely uncommon. What happens is that you break the vertebrae when you're an adolescent (probably playing high school football). It can sit there trying to heal for decades, but you're strong enough to support it, you don't really notice it. Then, one day... For me, it was probably a couple degenerative disks that finally reached a point where they couldn't support the injury anymore. My lower back has never been awesome, but being a manly man (read: idiot), I just put up with it. Then, one day, I was crawling with my daughter up a tube slide and PANG!

It took a very painful and scary year for me to figure out what was happening. It took another equally painful but oddly empowering year to figure out how to get it under control without surgery. It's not perfect, but thanks to a combination of core work, yoga, and my own bad-assedness, I'm making good progress.

But here's the deal. I work with teenagers from time to time, and very few adolescent boys are interested in core work or yoga. And when I say core work, I don't mean six-pack abs. I mean the more nuanced glute and back work. I know how you feel, lads; I was just as guilty. If it wasn't going to help with my washboard, it wasn't worth my time. As for yoga, well, I didn't care how many hot girls did it. Booooooooooring.

However, had I done these two things, I probably wouldn't be where I am today, writing this with an icepack shoved down the back of my pants. If I'd started in my teens, the strength and flexibility would probably have supported the vertebrae so it could heal. If I'd started in my twenties, the dodgy disks wouldn't have become an issue.

So think about it, tough guys and parents of tough guys. That toughness is great, but it's not going to last forever. Today's weird feeling in your lower spine after a late hit could be tomorrow's 3am back spasm.

And like I always say, chicks dig guys who do yoga.

You're not a "food addict." You're a "crappy food addict."

2011-04-05T10:33:00.000-07:00

Until recently, I found the notion of "food addiction" to be a load of horse poop. But after reading David Kessler's book, The End of Overeating, I started wavering. Kessler's theory is that food manufacturers have, over the years, engineered the balance of fat, sugar, and salt in fast food and junk food to the point of making them irresistible. Why? Because they're a bunch of greedy, thoughtless bastards. It's a compelling argument and a great read.

(Full Disclosure: Kessler doesn't actually refer to anyone as a "greedy, thoughtless bastard," but it felt really great to write that.)

Now, a couple studies out this week have made me a true believer. First off, this study out of Sweden (usually, I don't trust the Swedes, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt this time) shows that ghrelin, "a neuropeptide that both activates the brain's reward system and increases appetite" can have similar links to both sugar and alcohol.

In a new study published in the online journal PLoS ONE, researchers examined the genes of 579 individuals chosen from the general public. It emerged that people with certain changes in the ghrelin gene consume more sugar than their peers who do not have these changes. This link was also seen in people who consumed large amounts of both sugar and alcohol.

"This shows that ghrelin is a strong driver when it comes to tracking down rewarding substances such as sugar or alcohol," says researcher Elisabet Jerlhag from the Sahlgrenska Academy's Department of Pharmacology.

And in a second study, researchers at Yale showed that certain activities in the brain identified with addictive-like eating behaviors are similar to those associated with substance dependance.

"As predicted, elevated FA scores were associated with greater activation of regions that play a role in encoding the motivational value of stimuli in response to food cues. The ACC and medial OFC have both been implicated in motivation to feed and to consume drugs among individuals with substance dependence," the authors write. "In sum, these findings support the theory that compulsive food consumption may be driven in part by an enhanced anticipation of the rewarding properties of food. Similarly, addicted individuals are more likely to be physiologically, psychologically, and behaviorally reactive to substance-related cues."

So there you go. Food addicts, you have my sympathy - for about five seconds and then I'm going to start lecturing you. So bask in the solicitude for 5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

Okay, first off, these studies and Kessler's book show that you're not, technically, addicted to food. You're addicted to crappy food. Delicious, convenient, and fun? Yes, but also crappy. The reason I mention this is that "food" addicts often wallow in their misery, claiming that their addiction is worse than alcohol or other drug addictions because they can never go cold turkey. They need to eat, right?

I'm calling horse poop on this argument. Yes, you need to eat, but you don't need to eat Dolly Madison honey buns. Are you addicted to carrots? No. Are you addicted to apples? No. Are you addicted a piece of plank-grilled salmon with sides of steamed broccoli and whole-grain couscous. No! These aren't the kind of foods that do the Humpty-Hump with your anterior cingulate cortex and making y'all sugar silly. These are the kinds of food you need to eat to survive.

Just as many recovering alcoholics reach a point where they're able to show up at a party, order a mineral water with lime and have a great time as the people around them booze up, you should be able to reach a point where you can have a fine meal at just about any restaurant without ordering a double side of Bloomin' Onions and an Oreo Parfait for dessert.

You are not a food addict. You are a crappy food addict.

This feeds into my second point, which is that you need to stop wallowing. I've watched a number of friends overcome addiction over the years, particularly alcoholism, and generally, admitting there's a problem is the first step. The painful journey to recovery starts there. Conversely, I don't know how many times I've heard people say things like, "I'm addicted to food! I'm 300 pounds and I'm miserable! Say, are you going to eat the rest of that banana cream pie?"

It's official. You're an addict. The studies above attest to that. Now do something about it. If you're the DIY type, read Kessler's book. Another great resource is the chapter on desire in psychologist Tara Brach's excellent book Radical Acceptance. If you need more support than that, look into Overeater's Anonymous. Or throw out all the junk food in your house. Or create your own reward system. Or make a point of being naked every time you open the fridge. Just do something!

And on a final note, if you're a food addict and you're about to throw an angry missive at my head via the Real Fitness Nerd comments box, keep this in mind. I'm not just some skinny guy being an ass. I'm some skinny guy being an ass who has spent the bulk of his life struggling with eating, who still copes with psychological scars from being a fat kid, who still actively has to work not to pork out on pork rinds - sometimes, since we're playing true confessions here, by getting a little too carried away in the opposite direction and eating a little less than I should.

But for the most part, I'm doing alright. I did it. I made a change, and no one held my hand. So consider this tough love and do something about your crappy food addiction.

The Friday News Fiesta!

2011-04-01T10:13:00.000-07:00

To be honest, I'm a little nervous about posting today. I've been burned in the past by bogus April Fools studies. One of the downfalls of writing a blog that mocks idiocy is that the tables can turn very quickly and the mocky can become the mocker, so I figured I'd hedge my bets by commenting on two news items. That way, if one turns out to be a jest, I'll just come across as a partial boob, not a complete boob.

Candy-coated science. A new study in Nutrition Research claims that eating candy can be beneficial.

Good news for candy and chocolate lovers: they tend to weigh less, have lower body mass indices (BMI) and waist circumferences, and have decreased levels of risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and metabolic syndrome, according to a new study(1) published in Nutrition Research.

The findings are positive, but lead researcher Carol O’Neil, PhD, MPH, LDN, RD, Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, cautions it is all things in moderation. “We certainly don’t want these results positioned as eating candy helps you to lose weight,” she said. “This study adds to the evidence base that supports candy’s role as an occasional treat within a healthy lifestyle.”

I flip flopped three times when I read this. First, I was all, "Rad!" Then I noticed that is was supported by the National Confectioners Association and I was all, "Bad!" Then I thought about it for a minute (I do that sometimes, despite popular belief) and it occurred to me that we need to apply a little chicken or the egg logic. Normal people eat a little candy. I am routinely ridiculed by friends and family alike for being a nutrition fascist, but I still spirit away the occasional mini-Snickers from my kid's Halloween stash. If you don't eat candy, odds are you're either really uptight, which is going to screw with your cardiovascular health, or you're trying to lose weight, which means you're probably overweight. So I question if the candy is doing you any good. I think it's just that you're healthy and relaxed to begin with. In other words, don't use this study as an excuse to eat candy if you're overweight. That will make you a complete boob.

Some diabetes with your double latte? Here's new research suggesting that the combination of fatty food and caffeine increases blood sugar spikes.

“The results tell us that saturated fat interferes with the body’s ability to clear sugars from the blood and, when combined with caffeinated coffee, the impact can be even worse,” said Beaudoin, a PhD student who conducted the study with U of G professors Lindsay Robinson and Terry Graham. “Having sugar remain in our blood for long periods is unhealthy because it can take a toll on our body’s organs.”

And here's my favorite part:

“We have known for many years that people with or at risk of Type 2 diabetes should limit their caffeine intake. Drinking decaffeinated coffee instead of caffeinated is one way to improve one’s glucose tolerance. Limiting the intake of saturated fatty acids found in red meat, processed foods and fast food meals is also beneficial. This study has shown that the affects of these foods can be severe and long lasting.”

I love that the first bit of advice they give isn't to lay off the fatty meals, but rather to limit the one factor in the equation that's actually been shown to have some health benefits. But this is a genuinely useful study, so I will cut them some slack and grant partial boob status.

Thanks to Science Blog for aggregating these studies for me, making the job of mocking them so much easier.

Jogging and your Knees: Friends at Last!

2011-03-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

I've never been a huge fan of jogging and because of that, I've always actively looked for reasons not to do it. Bad weather, unsafe streets, broken back - anything that came my way, I'd throw out to the universe as an excuse not to hit the mean streets. Now that I've reached the twilight of my years, I've simply settled into the "it's hard on aging knees" excuse-groove.

(Okay, so technically, I'm in the early afternoon of my years, but in some ways, 40 is the new 80. When kids start telling you that you smell like vitamins and waitresses suggest a side salad with your tempeh burrito because they think you need plenty of fiber in your diet, it's okay to throw around words like "twilight.")

Unfortunately those commie bastards at NPR have botched my tidy little excuse by reporting on new studies showing that, for most of us, running doesn't harm the knees at all. In fact, it can actually strengthen knees.

David Felson, a researcher and epidemiologist at Boston University School of Medicine, says past concern about jogging and knees centered on the continuous impact of the foot to the ground and suggestion that it caused degeneration of the knee and the onset of osteoarthritis. But when researchers actually studied the impact of running on knees , he says, that's not what they found.
"We know from many long-term studies that running doesn't appear to cause much damage to the knees," he says. "When we look at people with knee arthritis, we don't find much of a previous history of running, and when we look at runners and follow them over time, we don't find that their risk of developing osteoarthritis is any more than expected." Both types of studies agree, says Felson, that recreational running doesn't increase the risk of arthritis.

The story goes on to explain that the impact running has on the knees might actually stimulate the production of proteins that strengthen cartilage. I'm interested to see what kind of impact this information will have on the barefoot debate, where both sides claim the other side is systematically grinding their knees to boney nubs. Maybe they're both wrong. The article states that if you already have damaged knees or you're obese, jogging isn't something you want to jump right into, but other than that, it looks like you're free and clear, whether you're shod or not.

Except me. I haven't read the entire text of any of the studies yet, but I'm fairly certain that there's some caveat in every one that says if you're a blogger who reeks like a GNC and is occasionally a victim of mild ageism at vegetarian restaurants, you shouldn't jog.

At least that's my story.

Good news! Fishy toenails won't give you a stroke!

2011-03-25T08:20:00.000-07:00

The cool part: Research in the New England Journal of Medicine used toenail clippings to determine mercury exposure from eating seafood in 174,000 participants. The resulting data shows that exposure doesn't increase the risk of heart disease or stroke.

The lame part: Research in the New England Journal of Medicine was completely pointless.

As a fishatarian, father, and Fitness Nerd, I've researched on the whole mercury dealy-bob quite a bit and until Wednesday, I was completely unaware of the cardiovascular concerns associated with mercury in fish. In my mind, this study has a smoke-and-mirrors feel to it, like saying that sitting on a hot stove won't effect your ability to juggle.

It's tough topic to research at this point, given Google has been completely overwhelmed with press-releases about the government-funded report, but previously, I'd always read that mercury exposure affects the nervous system, as opposed to your ticker.

Here's what the EPA warns about:

Outbreaks of methylmercury poisonings have made it clear that adults, children, and developing fetuses are at risk from ingestion exposure to methylmercury. During these poisoning outbreaks some mothers with no symptoms of nervous system damage gave birth to infants with severe disabilities, it became clear that the developing nervous system of the fetus may be more vulnerable to methylmercury than is the adult nervous system.
In addition to the subtle impairments noted above, symptoms of methylmercury poisoning may include; impairment of the peripheral vision; disturbances in sensations ("pins and needles" feelings, usually in the hands, feet, and around the mouth); lack of coordination of movements; impairment of speech, hearing, walking; and muscle weakness. People concerned about their exposure to methylmercury should consult their physician.

Even alarmist sources like the Environmental Defense Fund don't mention it:

Mercury exposure can also harm adults. Symptoms can include numbness, burning or tingling of the extremities (lips, fingers, toes); fatigue; weakness; irritability; shyness; loss of memory and coordination; tremors; and changes in hearing and blurred vision. Extremely high mercury levels can permanently damage an adult's brain and kidneys, or even lead to circulatory failure.

I didn't find anything about cardiovascular issues in Wikipedia either.

No one argues that kids and pregnant and nursing women need to limit fish intake, but until now, my view regarding mercury and fish has been that if you're a healthy adult and you're not looking to make a baby, all the fuss over mercury is a bit silly. Sure, it's worth being mindful of, but since the human body doesn't need that much protein anyway, if you have a balanced diet that includes fish 3-4 times a week, you're fine. Furthermore, the seafood that's high in mercury, like swordfish and whale, also tends to be overfished or just nasty, so if you do well by the earth with your meal choices, you also do well by your body.

But now here's this government-funded red herring of a study (Get it? Red herring is also a fish! I'm hilarious!) that doesn't address the real issues people associate with mercury. Why do that? What are you trying to hide, fellas? Just when I was starting to trust The Man. Questions I thought were long ago answered are coming back to me. Who killed Kennedy? What's at Area 51? Is Elvis still alive and, more importantly, does he eat fish?

This is completely unraveling my worldview.

Sex is bad for you!

2011-03-23T12:48:00.000-07:00

Got your attention, didn't I? Today, let's talk about this study from The Journal of the American Medical Association. Apparently, the risk of heart attack and sudden cardiac death increase after bouts of workin' out, doin' the nasty, or any combination thereof. From WebMD:

The risk is higher for those who are occasional exercisers compared to habitual exercisers, says researcher Issa Dahabreh, MD, a research associate at the Center for Clinical Evidence Synthesis, Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.

"For those individuals habitually physically active, they are less susceptible to the triggering effects of physical activity and sexual activity," he tells WebMD.

This is an interesting study, I guess, but it really shouldn't influence you in any way. If you're fit, the massive benefits one gets from sex, including stress relief, cardiovascular fitness, increased immunity, and decreased cancer risk, far outweigh the minute risk. In fact, here's a study from a year ago suggesting that when men throw it in a couple times a week, it can decrease their chance of heart attack by 45%. So, while there might be a slight risk after each "event," overall it'll work to your advantage. It looks like Nietzsche was right when he said that what doesn't kill us will make us stronger. Yay, German nihilist philosophy!

On the other hand, if you're so out of shape that doing the humpty-hump might cause your ticker to stop going thumpty-thump - and you're unwilling to increase your fitness level - I don't think abstinence is such a bad thing. With obesity rates soaring, we need to get lazy attitudes like that out of the gene pool.

It's Darwinism in action, really.

Where'd you get that banana, anyway?

2011-03-18T10:59:00.000-07:00

Today's finding is a little more "Nerd" than "Fitness." Check out Sourcemap.

Basically, it's a catalog of user-generated maps showing the supply chains of various consumer goods. A few of the more thorough maps get into carbon footprints, like the can of Coke above, but even without that information, it's fascinating to see where the elements come from. I didn't know Coke sourced its caffeine from Colombia, but it makes sense considering the beverages drug-addled origins.

Because it's user-generated and doesn't have the massive check-and-balance system of sites like Wikipedia, I don't completely trust the information, but it's still cool. And because a variety of people contribute, you get some outside-the-browser thinking, such as this banana map.

That's a long way for a piece of fruit to travel. It makes me feel a little high and mighty about the bowl of locally grown apples I have in my kitchen.

via The Kitchn

Walking Doggy-style

2011-03-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

I smacked my hand on my fin surfing this morning. Although it no longer looks like I'm carrying a handful of purple sausages, it's still a little swollen, making typing tough, so I'm keeping it short today. Here's a cool article from the New York Times about the health benefits of owning a dog:

Just last week, researchers from Michigan State University reported that among dog owners who took their pets for regular walks, 60 percent met federal criteria for regular moderate or vigorous exercise. Nearly half of dog walkers exercised an average of 30 minutes a day at least five days a week. By comparison, only about a third of those without dogs got that much regular exercise.

And here's another one:

A study of 41,500 California residents also looked at walking among dog and cat owners as well as those who didn’t have pets. Dog owners were about 60 percent more likely to walk for leisure than people who owned a cat or no pet at all. That translated to an extra 19 minutes a week of walking compared with people without dogs.

I'm as guilty as the next guy of relying on my canine companion for fitness at various busy times in my life. (That's Bruce in the photo.) Now that I think about it, though. Most of us understand that dogs need exercise and we're willing to commit to making that happen, but according to the article, that willingness to stay active drops off when we're petless.

In other words, we as a society take better care of our dogs then we do of ourselves.

Maybe there's a lesson I can learn from all this. My hand hurts. It wouldn't have happened had I skipped the waves today and just taken Bruce for an extended hike.

Wanna grow old? Set down the drumstick.

2011-03-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

You bastards gave me a little caning this week for my analysis of a study regarding post-meal snacking. Some of you seemed to think that the "statistically insignificance" of the 10% difference in snack calorie consumption between people who ate quick meals and long meals made my argument moot. I've thought it over. There's a 10% chance you might be right. Therefore, I consider it statistically insignificant.

So you're wrong.

Just kidding. I'm impressed (and slightly terrified) by your intelligence, Nerd Herd. Thanks for keeping me on my toes!

And speaking of fitness and nutrition bloggers who occasionally make shit up, Dr. Gabe Mirkin completely stoked a lot of vegans this week by linking reduced protein consumption to longevity. The gist of it is that eating less protein causes a drop in a hormone called Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 (IGF-1). This is a good thing because "IGF-1 shortens life by increasing cell DNA genetic damage, and causes cancer by blocking apoptosis that causes cancer cells to kill themselves before they destroy their host."

I tend to take Dr. Mirkin's writing with a grain of salt. On at least one occasion, I caught him making a super controversial claim with really dodgy back-up studies. I think it was regarding the icing of injuries to fight inflammation, which he claimed has worthless. When I tried to track down the study he sited (not a big link provider, that Gabe), it was nowhere to be found. I emailed him about it and he never responded. Of course, given my vast importance in the Fitness and Nutrition Blogosphere, I'm certain he saw my email, so I take the lack of response as an admission of guilt.

But I digress. This time, I think he's on to something, but he's a little twisty-turny about it. If you want the Short Attention Span Theater version:

Here's a 2008 Science Daily article describing the study showing that decreased protein also decreases IGF-1.
Here's a 2011 New York Times article about the study showing decreased IGF-1 can lead to a longer life.
Eat about .8 grams of protein per kilo of body weight and you'll be able to sing "When I'm Sixty Four" and mean it.

Another thing Dr. Mirkin fails to mention is that the 2011 study, which is sort of the lynchpin of his commentary, involves an isolated community of Ecuadorian dwarfs. I don't think it's that important, but it's a rad fact that would liven up a somewhat dry post. Then again, he's a highly regarded and successful fitness and nutrition authority, so maybe he knowingly decided that the mention of South American little people would be statistically insignificant.

Longer meals cause you to eat less snack waffles!

2011-03-08T12:37:00.000-08:00

Today at the Real Fitness Nerd, we're doing one of my favorite activities: poking holes in scientific studies and the way they're covered in the media. You fancy journalists and scientists may think you're soooooo cool with your little "degrees" and "IQs" and "knowledge." Whatever, Dr. Clever. I got your knowledge right here.

Case in point, this article in the New York Times regarding a study out of the Netherlands asking whether longer meals will cause you to snack less.

Two and a half hours after the beginning of the meal, when the diners were offered an array of traditional Dutch tea treats like apple cake, chocolate-covered marshmallows, peanuts, chips and waffles, they ate almost as much as they did two and a half hours after a meal that they had consumed in 30 minutes.
“We didn’t see a big difference in their energy intake afterward,” Dr. Lemmens said. In fact, the slow diners ate only 10 percent fewer snack calories than when they had consumed their meal quickly, a difference that wasn’t statistically significant.

Let's pounce on the scientists first, shall we? In these two paragraphs alone, I find so many problems. First and foremost, Dr. Lemmens should spell her name "Dr. Lemons" because that would be funnier. Second, "10 percent fewer snack calories" is HUGE. Do the math.

Let's take something from that list as a snacking example. Maybe waffles. I don't know anyone who snacks on waffles, but I'm already offending the Dutch enough in this post, so I'll run with waffles. According to Nutritiondata.com, your standard waffle is about 100 calories. We won't even bother with whatever the Dutch put in waffles - pickled herring or whatever - we'll just have a straight waffle snack. Now, let's say you only waffle snack on weekdays - weekends are waffle-free - and that you have that waffle after you snarf down a 30-minute speed meal. Over the course of a year, that's 260,000 snack waffle calories.

Now, let's say you switch to a longer, more leisurely lunch and therefore cut your waffle intake by 10%, or 90 calories a day. That adds up to 234,000 annual snack waffle calories - a 26,000 calorie difference. Considering a pound of fat equates to about 3,500 calories, that's seven and a half pounds on potential annual waffle weight gain.

(To answer your next question, I believe I wrote "waffle" 13 times.)

I know my example is completely silly (except the pickled herring part. They really eat pickled herring), but it proves the point that even if drawing out your meal decreases your intake of junk food, er, I mean Dutch tea treats, minimally, it's worth considering as an option.

Now it's time to bash the left-wing, commie, Nazi, fascist, liberal, monarchical, intellectual, freedom-hating, east coast journalist who wrote this. The lead states: "Does one leave you more satisfied — and less likely to snack afterward — than the other?" The study isn't about being satisfied, it's about our lame drive to eat junk even when we are satisfied. As Dr. Lemons points out towards the end of the article.

When participants ate the drawn-out meal, their satiety hormones (glucagon -like peptide-1, or GLP-1, and peptide tyrosine-tyrosine, or PYY, believed to communicate satiety to the brain and curb the appetite) increased more gradually than after the nonstaggered meal, when they spiked more rapidly. Just before the snacking period, diners who had eaten a drawn-out meal rated their satiety higher and their hunger lower, and their levels of ghrelin, a hormone that increases with hunger and is believed to stimulate appetite, were lower.
Yet these differences in hormone levels did not significantly affect how much participants ate of the sweet and salty tea snacks, Dr. Lemmens said, suggesting the availability of tempting foods overrides the body’s internal messages about when to stop eating.

I don't think I'm splitting hairs here. It's important that New York Times readers understand satiety and the drive to eat are two different things. Just because your brain wants junk, it doesn't mean your body needs it. I'd like to see the same study done with carrot sticks and apple slices. That would prove something about satiety. I think the Times would totally leap on that one, given they could recycle the lead from this article.

photo: www.jenlouie.com

BMI and BAI: Better fitness through fancy math

2011-03-04T09:45:00.000-08:00

Next to Monsanto, fad diets, and trucker hats, BMI (Body Mass Index) is the bane of my existence. It's commonly used by the medical profession - even taught in schools - to determine how fat you are. Yet, it can be obnoxiously inaccurate. Here's the calculation:
First off, I don't see why you need to add a bunch of math to your weight and height. No matter how many numbers you multiply it by, it's still your weight and height. Making it fancy doesn't make it more accurate, Pointdexter. Furthermore, it doesn't account for muscle mass or bone structure, so it's usually completely wrong. According to BMI numbers, Arnold Schwarzenegger (BMI 33), Sylvester Stallone (BMI 34) and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (BMI 33) are all fat.

I'm 5'11" and 165 pounds, putting me at a BMI of 23, which is on the large side of normal. But the thing is, I'm big boned - and I don't mean that in a fat-sitcom-dad-justifying-his-gut way. I have broad shoulders and a wide rib cage. I also have approximately 9% body fat, which, according to the American Council on Exercise, is "athletic" or, in layman's terms, "really skinny." The two don't match.

So I guess someone important somewhere finally figured this out. According to WebMD, new research in the journal Obesity is testing a new method called the Body Adiposity Index (BAI) that's supposed to be more accurate. (Not to be confused with Chinese actress Bai Ling, who continues to be very inaccurate .) The new method measures height and hip circumference and, to make it extra special, features even fancier math.

BAI = (hip/height x the square root of height) minus 18.

Or, in other words, the hip measurement in centimeters divided by the height in meters times the square root of height minus 18.

Square root! It must be accurate. It's about time someone factored square roots into a body fat calculator!

There's been a lot of interesting research lately about hip circumference and obesity, but why all the arithmetic and acronyms? And what about the whole apple v. pear-shaped body issue? Look, I'm not a doctor, I don't even play one on television, but I know a fat person when I see one. You want me to tell you if you need to lose weight or not? Strip down to your undies and let me have a look. I'll tell it to you straight. No math or co-pay necessary.

Can't fit in your jeans? Blame your genes!

2011-02-28T13:38:00.000-08:00

Hooray! Science has uncovered yet another scapegoat for what a fat, lazy society we've become. No, it's not a new kind of corn-based sweetener and no, McDonald's hasn't finally started triple-sizing their meals. This time it's your own, damn fault! That's right. The blame lies in you. In fact, it lies in every, single one of your cells. According to researchers at the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, humans have an effed-up, mutant gene that makes us susceptible to obesity and diabetes.

In this study, which is the first to examine the effect of a human-specific CMAH genetic mutation in obesity-related metabolism and diabetes, Kim and colleagues show that the loss of CMAH's function contributes to the failure of the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells in overweight humans, which is known to be a key factor in the development of type 2 diabetes. This gene encodes for an enzyme present in all mammalian species except for humans and adds a single oxygen atom to shttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=114379802028075564ialic acids, which are sugars that coat the cell surface.

I don't doubt the science in this. After all, science is always right, right? However, it amazes me that it took us this long to activate this dodgy gene. We made it through the fall of Rome, the Dark Ages, and rise and fall of Crystal Pepsi all in good shape. But now we're fat. Sure, this CMAH might be problematic, but just about everyone you know has a messed-up gene or two. That doesn't mean they're going to succumb to them. "Oh well, I have a family history of blindness. I might as well poke myself in the eye with this pencil right now." No! It doesn't work that way.

So, the first time I hear some slob blaming their weight problem on the CMAH mutation, well, that's going to trigger my DNA mutation - the, um POed@BS mutation - and I'm going to smack them down and feed them some salad.

So quit whining and take a lap.

Seniors versus Vegans: Who would win in a cage match?

2011-02-25T11:07:00.000-08:00

Today at The Real Fitness Nerd, we take a look at a couple studies proving that, regardless of your laurels, you're better off if you don't rest on them. First, here's a rad report (and I don't use the word "rad" lightly) from NPR about the benefits of pumping iron for the senior set:

New research published in the journal Medicine & Science In Sports & Exercise finds older adults who begin lifting weights after 50 may win the battle against age-related muscle loss.

"You have to do what we call resistance exercise," Heber says. This can take a lot of different forms. "It could be lifting weights, it could be stretchy bands, but the key is you have to stretch a muscle."

The article goes on to tell the tale of Sandy Palais, who started lifting weights at a spry 63-years-old when she was diagnosed with osteoporosis. Today, at 73, she benches 80 and deadlifts 165. Right on!

It's so common for people to reach an age when they decide it's all downhill for there - but what this study and Palais' bad-assedness both show is that your goose doesn't have to be cooked just because you have a few liver spots. You're never too old to spend a little more time in the exercise oven. (Yeah, I know, sort of a labored metaphor, but I'd like to see you do better.)

This story is especially important to me because I've been bugging my parents to exercise for years. Inspired by my recent glowing reviews of a local yoga studio, they enrolled in a senior's yoga class. They're both well over 60 and I'm fairly certain neither of them has touched their toes with their knees straight since the Iran-Contra affair, so I'm incredibly proud of them. Of course, I failed to mention that one of the primary reasons I've embraced yoga as of late is for the stupefying number of gorgeous women who practice at my studio, but I'm fairly certain that my dad will figure it out shortly. Hopefully, my mom won't.

The other study I'd like to share with you involves the perils of going vegan. If you'll excuse me for a second, I need to put on my helmet and bulletproof vest, given anytime I dare suggest that veganism isn't the perfect diet, I'm besieged by volley after volley of hate-filled, cruelty-free slings and arrows.

(pause)

Okay, I'm back. There are no sacred cows here at The Real Fitness Nerd, so it with mild sadistic pleasure that I share with you this new study suggesting that an improperly implemented vegan diet can increase your risk of developing blood clots and atherosclerosis or "hardening of the arteries."

Duo Li notes in the review that meat eaters are known for having a significantly higher combination of cardiovascular risk factors than vegetarians. Lower-risk vegans, however, may not be immune. Their diets tend to be lacking several key nutrients -- including iron, zinc, vitamin B12, and omega-3 fatty acids. While a balanced vegetarian diet can provide enough protein, this isn't always the case when it comes to fat and fatty acids. As a result, vegans tend to have elevated blood levels of homocysteine and decreased levels of HDL, the "good" form of cholesterol. Both are risk factors for heart disease.

So take that, you dirty hippies!

No, not really. I've floated between vegetarianism and pescetarianism (or the term Steve Martin uses, which I prefer, "fishetarianism") for the better part of two decades and I have the utmost respect for vegans. I wish I had the patience and constitution to pull it off, but I don't delude myself into thinking that humankind was never intended to eat meat. Just as people who skip veggies suffer nutritionally, the absence of meat needs addressing. You leave something out of an omnivore's diet and you need to make up for it - and this study proves it.

So eat ethically, but be smart about it. It's not hard. Keep an eye on your protein, iron, omega fatty acids, etc. If you're looking for a good reference, check out Becoming Vegan: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Plant-Based Diet by Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina.

So that's it for today. For the record, I was going to post a link to my yoga studio, but I'm a little concerned an irate vegan might stake the place out, storm in the class, and throw red paint on me while I'm in the middle of a vinyasa. That wouldn't do much for my downward-facing dog - or my luck with the ladies - so I guess you're on your own if you're looking for a good yoga joint.

photo: Jason Millstein for NPR

More proof exercise benefits you in destroying the undead

2011-02-21T14:59:00.000-08:00

Confused how one, tiny, little hour of daily exercise can impact your otherwise lazy-ass lifestyle? That's understandable. A lot of us have this notion that the metabolism is an off/on switch. Working hard = burning calories. Sitting around = not burning calories.

I don't want to justify anyone's sad sack, PS3 playin' existence, but the body is a little more complex than that. That hour (or even 45 minutes) of weight work, basketball, or yoga is going to build muscle - and muscle requires more calories to exist than fat. In other words, the fitter you are, the more calories you burn simply sitting on the couch playing Super Metal Gear of Zombie Honor Apocalypse 3 or whatever. (And, yes, yoga builds muscle, you caveman. But that's a lecture for another time.)

Further proof that a little workout goes a long way comes via small study appearing this month in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. From the Los Angeles Times:

The small study involved 10 healthy men, age 22 to 33, of various body mass indexes and aerobic fitness levels. Their calorie expenditure was measured after they exercised vigorously for 45 minutes, as well as on a rest day... The 45-minute exercise session... burned an average 519 calories... But the big news is what came afterward. In 14.2 hours following the exercise bout, calorie expenditure was elevated, resulting in about 190 extra calories burned.

While I'm stoked on the LA Times for reporting this, I'm a little perturbed by the follow-up paragraph:

While that may not seem like much, think of it as being able to eat about three Pepperidge Farms Milano cookies with no consequences, or getting the calorie burn of a 30-minute walk at 4 mph for free.

Way to take a positive discovery and spin it to justify eating crappy food. Also, you don't get the 30-minute walk "for free," given the 190 bonus calorie burn isn't working your cardiovascular system like the stroll would.

That said, this is great intel. I hope you use it as motivation to take 45 minutes to an hour for your body each day. But don't use it as a baked-goods-chompin' get out of jail free card. And if you do choose to eat the cookie, for the love of God, walk that 30 minutes to the bakery instead of driving three blocks to the 7-11. Those little bits of exercise are still going to have a huge impact on your fitness - and the zombies will be there on your 40" plasma screen to slaughter when you get back. They're undead; they're not going anywhere.

(In the event that you want to buy me that cookie jar, here's the link.)

Diet Soda? Bad! Sloppy Activist Journalism? Worse!

2011-02-17T07:17:00.000-08:00

I've been spending a lot of time reading the Michael Pollan-endorsed Grist lately. It's a (mostly) great activist blog with heaps of eye-opening commentary on our screwed-up food industry, among other things. Unfortunately, it also has a few problems getting the facts right.

Before I get into this, let's be clear: I'm a hardcore food activist. The way we eat and the way The Man feeds us are both ludicrous. If positive change came about, if we ate less chemicals and meat, if we ate more organics and local foods, I sincerely believe it would save the planet and end world hunger - or at least we'd all look a little better in our Speedos. That being said, I'm also a firm believer in "The Truth," a sticky, little annoyance that's so often overlooked by both side of every issue, from Glenn Beck to Michael Moore to Rush Limbaugh to, in this case, Grist Senior Writer Tom Phillpott.

Lately, Tom has gone to task on diet sodas. In this February 10 post, he explained the dodgy circumstances under which aspartame, the sweetener in most diet sodas, was made legal. It was an ugly business involving two of my favorite whipping boys, Monsanto and the FDA, so I was amped.

In the early 1980s, a company called Searle owned the patent on aspartame, already known, paradoxically, as Nutrasweet. (I get the sweet part, but nutra?) Searle's CEO was the well-connected Rumsfeld -- who took the Searle job not long after serving as secretary of defense for the previous Republican president, Gerald Ford.
In 1981, President Reagan appointed a man named Arthur Hull Hayes as his FDA chair. Soon after taking the post, Hayes approved aspartame over the objections of an FDA-assembled panel made up of independent scientists. That panel had voted to reject clearence of aspartame, on the grounds that one of Searle's own studies had shown that rats that consumed the chemical showed an increase in brain tumors.
Rummy, of course, would go on to greater things, but not before engineering the sale of Searle and its suddenly quite valuable Nutrasweet division to Monsanto in 1985. Under Monsanto's ownership, aspartame conquered the diet soft-drink market.

But my titillation quickly faded when it took me about five minutes of googling to realize that Tom left a few facts out. First off, the US Government Accountability Office reviewed the FDA's actions in 1987 and found them justified:

In response to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition's (CFSAN) process for approving aspartame, specifically its: (1) review of the scientific issues raised concerning the aspartame studies; and (2) monitoring of current safety concerns.
GAO found that the: (1) firm that developed aspartame submitted nearly 170 studies supporting its safety; and (2) studies that CFSAN considered crucial for approval met FDA requirements. GAO also found that CFSAN: (1) adequately followed its food additive approval process by reviewing all of the manufacturer's aspartame studies, holding a public board of inquiry to discuss safety issues, and forming an advisory panel; (2) had an outside group of pathologists review the crucial studies; and (3) used the studies to establish a safe level for long-term consumption before approving aspartame for marketing, etc...

Admittedly, asking the government to spot-check the ethics of a different branch, all under the same administration, is a little like asking a school of hammerheads to investigate the ethics of the way Great White Sharks kill seals, but it's an important fact and the summary I linked to above includes some important, hard information worth considering.

Tom also draws attention to a 2006 Ramazzini Institute study (referred to as "recent," which is a favor trick of crusading journalists to sidestep when something is actually five-years-old) showing that aspartame may cause cancer in rats.

Italian researchers recently added to a long-standing and growing body of literature pointing to aspartame's possible role as a carcinogen. Their conclusion, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, was stark: "The results of this mega-experiment indicate that [aspartame] is a multipotential carcinogenic agent, even at a daily dose of 20 mg/kg body weight, much less than the current acceptable daily intake."

Tom backs up everything I've highlighted above with a 2006 New York Times article that discusses it all in much more detail. That's great and all - indeed, it's an excellent article. The only problem is, the aforementioned Italian study was largely discredited in 2008 for a multitude of reasons, including...

Of course, the Times article doesn't mention this, but that's probably because it would have had to look two years into the future to do that. Tom's blog post was written three years after the fact. No excuse there. (For the record, that link is to a pro-aspartame website, so I'm sure it's probably spun a little, but the case is overwhelming, as you'll see Tom admit shortly)

Finally, Tom refers to a recent (this time, for real - 2011!) study out of New York pointing to diet soda as the possible cause of strokes. This research is so ridiculously vague that I don't even feel I need to comment on it, but I do love the sound of my own writing, so I'll point out that it doesn't account for other foods in the subjects' diets. Generally, people who drink soda tend to eat junkier in general, so...

I'm not the only person to notice the many wobbles in Tom's research, so on February 14, he felt compelled to defend himself on a follow-up post. That was pretty weak too. You can read it yourself, but here's my favorite part.

Were the results invalid, as the FDA claims? Maybe, but if so, where are the long-term, large-scale, independently funded animal studies showing that aspartame is safe?

There are a few of these "maybe" moments in this rebuttal. Tom, that's not good enough. You're a journalist. Make sure your facts are solid before you write and don't leave obvious stuff out. And if you're caught or you're wrong, admit it. I've been wrong on this blog a few times and I've admitted it.

You have the truth on your side. WE have the truth on OUR side. You're right in that the FDA is a pack of douche-bags, a s their approval of the Lap-Band for ostensibly healthy-weight people yesterday shows. You're also right that aspartame is a creepy substance that needs more research. But bad science and conspiracy theories on either topic only make us look like a bunch of loonies.

We can do better.

Worth the weight

2011-02-14T08:40:00.000-08:00

Although I'm more from the "it doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do it" school of exercise, this article in the Los Angeles Times brings up some interesting arguments for including some weight work in your fitness regime.

A growing body of research shows that working out with weights has health benefits beyond simply bulking up one's muscles and strengthening bones. Studies are finding that more lean muscle mass may allow kidney dialysis patients to live longer, give older people better cognitive function, reduce depression, boost good cholesterol, lessen the swelling and discomfort of lymphedema after breast cancer and help lower the risk of diabetes .

"Muscle is our largest metabolically active organ, and that's the backdrop that people usually forget," said Kent Adams, director of the exercise physiology lab at Cal State Monterey Bay. Strengthening the muscles "has a ripple effect throughout the body on things like metabolic syndrome and obesity ."

The article goes on to cite a number of studies, even going as far as to point out that resistance training can potentially improve cognitive ability in older people by triggering the production of pro-brain proteins.

But as I said above, while I think it's important to include some type of resistance training in our lives, I question if you all need to go out and buy a set of kettlebells. While I personally enjoy the occasional weightlifting session, I have several very fit friends who view visiting the free weight room at their local gym as the closest they'll get to hell in this lifetime without the aid of an in-law or a red-hot farm implement. All the processes that cause the benefits mentioned, the breaking down of muscle, the mobilization of protein, aren't exclusive to lifting a dumbbell. You're going to get that from any activity that has an anaerobic element. In other word, from any activity that works the muscles a little. Pilates, kickboxing, moving furniture, even a particularly brutal yoga session is going to work those muscles to some degree.

So go lift something.

Want better USDA Dietary Guidelines? Write 'em yourself.

2011-02-11T08:27:00.000-08:00

The USDA released its new Dietary Guidelines a couple weeks ago. They troubled me deeply because, well, I like them. That's why it's taken me so long to comment. One of the missions of this blog is to be the cynical fly in the hypocritical ointment that The Man claims will cure our nation's nutritional issues. But the thing is, everything I read made sense.

What's not to like? So, I decided to take a few days to see what the other cynics were going to say. Maybe they'd inspire me into the state of fear and loathing that's typically the grist for my insightful, hilarious writing.

First off, my fellow Fitness Nerd Steve Edwards said this:

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released Jan ’11, are now highlighting the merits of vegetarian and vegan diets... This is good health news if ever I’ve heard some. Never mind that when George McGovern was put in charge of this task, back in the 70s, his research told him pretty much the same thing. When he tried to enact the changes, however, the meat and dairy industries lobbied to have him fired . They were successful and our food pyramid’s been championing way too much meat and dairy ever since. But, hey, better late than never right?

Sure, he belly-ached about how long it took them to endorse vegetarianism, but that's because Steve is a grumpy old man. He's like the Walter Matthau of the fitness world. Ultimately, though, he likes the guidelines.

And then there's this attack over at Grist from blogger Michele Simon, who passively-aggressively admits that the guidelines are essentially good advice, but that they're still pointless:

The time has come to ask, are dietary guidelines just another charade, a waste of taxpayer dollars? Who even pays attention, except for a bunch of dietitians, food industry lobbyists, the media (for about a minute), and a few policy wonks like me and my fellow Grist contributor Tom Laskawy ? The general public barely notices; and after the initial media blitz, it's back to business as usual for the next five years.

I'm wondering if Michele Simon has kids or, for that matter, ever was a kid. Let me tell you, babe, my first-grader looks to the food pyramid like it's the Ten Commandments. She doesn't really listen to her old man when it comes to eating right, but since they've started teaching her about fruits, veggies, portions, and calories in school - based largely off these guidelines - her outlook has changed and I doubt she's the only six-year-old who feels this way. In this context, saying the guidelines are pointless is like saying Dick and Jane books are pointless. Just because you've transcended the need for this knowledge, oh wise and powerful blogger, doesn't mean the rest of the country hasn't.

Moving on, I had the honor of attending a conversation between Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser the other night at USC. These guys are two of my personal heroes, so it was a thrill, kind of like if they made a movie where Captain Kirk and Batman teamed up to save the universe, Gotham City, or some combination thereof.

I was hoping they'd find serious flaws in the pyramid, but they really didn't. More than one commentator has noted that the new guidelines basically plagiarize Pollan's mantra, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." The best he could really do is grumble that he feels they aren't specific in trashing bad foods. He felt that the urging to avoid "sugary drinks" and "solid fats" wasn't enough, but I can't agree with that. I'm guessing that he feels the government is too scared to target, say, the cattle industry or the soda industry, but the website does clearly take a stance against "regular soft drinks" and various beef products. Furthermore, it wouldn't' make any sense for the general literature to get too specific because bad food has become so pervasive. If the guidelines targeted soda, people would drink sports drinks. If they targeted sports drinks, people would drink energy drinks. If they targeted energy drinks, people would drink Tang. I think "sugary drinks" is perfect.

I'm not sure what people want. If the government discontinued the guidelines, we would complain that they doesn't care about the obesity issue. If Michelle Obama came into our homes and personally removed the soda from our fridges, we'd bitch and moan about that too. It's easy to criticize the government. For those of us in the media, it's a natural state of being. But sometimes we're just shouting to shout because it sells papers or gets clicks.

So I'm not going to do that. For once, USDA, nice work.

School Lunch or Satan's Mozarella Sticks?

2011-02-09T10:15:00.000-08:00

Why are American kids getting fat? A new University of Michigan study looking at 1003 Ann Arbor sixth-graders reveals all kinds of reasons. While a generally junky diet didn't seem to make a difference, obese kids tended to drink more soda, exercise less, and watch more television. And the biggest surprise/not surprise of the study was that school lunches made a huge impact. Kids who ate school lunches were 29% more likely to be obese than kids who brought lunch from home.

In case you're curious, here's what's on the menu today at my daughter's elementary:

Tony's Famous Mozzarella Sticks with Marinara Dipping Sauce.
Tasty Green Beans.

For the record, it is the only time all week that a green vegetable shows up, the only other vegetable being the golden sweet corn that accompanies Thursday's hamburger - although I'm betting that'll be overshadowed by the tater tots. And, honestly, if you set down a tray of fried cheese and green beans in front of your kid and walked away, which one would he or she plow into?

I let my kid have school lunch once a week. I hate it, but I understand the gave-and-take of parenting. I don't want her to be that one "tofu kid" that every school has. I remember the tofu kid from my grade school. He was anemic and played violin. Of course, he is now so rich that he could buy the entire internet, were he not too busy real estate flipping Caribbean island nations, but his childhood pretty much sucked.

I digress. My point was that school lunch, to my daughter, is a decadent pleasure and that's just wrong. There are underprivilaged kids with subsidized school lunch who have no choice but to eat that crap every day. I doubt they're complaining, but their wasitlines, arteries, and insulin levels sure are.

Last December, Obama announced the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which is supposed to clean this mess up. The webpage includes a "before and after" sample menu including, ironically, cheese sticks on Wednesday:

And here's the recommended improved menu:

That would be awesome, but I don't see it happening. Those congressmen and senators are going to take one look at what it would cost to feed our nation's children like that and laugh. Their kids all go to private schools anyway, so why look out for other people's kids? That's not the American way! Let them eat cake!

And for the record, I googled "Tony's Famous Mozzarella Sticks" and got nothin'. If they're not on Google, they're not famous. Truth in advertising, you peddlers of portliness.

Kayaks to Oblivion! And Beyond!

2011-02-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

Apparently, it's not a huge day in fitness news, so I thought we might start the day with a video.

As many of you know, I'm an avid surfer. I also like to sea kayak and, on (very) rare occasion, I'll whomp it up on boogie board. Yet, for the life of me, I can't figure out if these guys think they're having a good time or not. It just looks like they're turning those watercraft into big, uncontrollable, orange and green bullets with the intent to drill as many surfers as possible, all while drowning themselves in the process.

But, for all I know, they're having the time of their lives and within a year, tiny bullet-kayak surf-drowning will be all the rage from Mexico to Oregon.

I would imagine the bafflement I'm feeling right now is exactly what non-outdoor sports people feel when they watch me trying to paddle out past an overhead beach break or watch Steve repeatedly fall while trying to sort out an impossibly technical rock climbing move.

Fun is perspective.

Have a great week and do something fun, just try not to kill any surfers in the process.

Fluid Facts Friday

2011-02-03T14:42:00.000-08:00

As I sat down with my cup o' joe this morning, I was amazed to discover the shear amount of beverage-related news lighting up my My Yahoo page. A more conspiracy-oriented Real Fitness Nerd might blame this on the fact that I spilled a glass of water on my keyboard a couple days ago, accidentally giving my Mac some form of crude artificial intelligence, so now it's searching the internet for information about that which gave it life.

But that would be silly.

Instead, I think it's because we're a society oddly driven to drink calories in constantly new, increasingly unhealthy forms and now, those who realize how wrong this is are clashing head-on with the sugar junkies and their corporate dealers. To wit:

The Deceptively Vile Vitamin Water. From ABC News:

The National Consumer League, a Washington consumer-advocacy group, filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission requesting it investigate Coca-Cola's marketing claims for Vitamin Water . The league said the brand touts more benefits than it can deliver.
"Vitamin Water: Flu shots are so last year," reads one advertising poster for the product.

In its complaint, the league said Vitamin Water ads say the drink not only promotes a healthy immune system but can also replace the flu shot.

And the sad thing is, people are stupid enough to believe that this thickly-veiled sugar water is actually healthy. But at the end of the day, although the stuff is supposed to be 50 calories a serving, each bottle is 2.5 servings, or 125 calories, almost as much as a can of Coke. And who doesn't drink the whole bottle? Shove as many synthetic micronutrients into it as you want, it's still 30 grams of unregulated sugar just buckin' to jack up your insulin and induce type 2 diabetes faster than you can say, "I can't possibly be obese, doctor. All I drink is this healthy water substitute."

The Deceptively Vile Starbuck's Trenta. From a University of Missouri press release:

Starbucks recently announced a new-sized 31-ounce drink, the "Trenta," which will be in stores this spring. The mega-sized coffee joins the ranks of other energy drinks that can pack plenty of caffeine and calories. Ellen Schuster, a University of Missouri nutrition expert, says that Americans should be wary of extra calories and sugar in the quest for bigger, bolder drinks.
"The sheer size of new coffee and energy drinks increases consumers' potential for unhealthy calorie and sugar consumption," said Schuster, state specialist for MU Extension and the College of Human Environmental Sciences. "A 'Trenta'-sized Starbuck's lemonade could include 21 teaspoons of sugar – much more than should be consumed at one time, or in one day."

More like Tenta, as in, if you drink one of these every day, the only dress that'll fit you is a tent. And what's with the 31 ounces? Do they think that if they slide in one ounce under a Big Gulp, they'll hold some sort of moral high ground?

21 teaspoons of sugar aside, that's a massive amount of coffee. You long-term Nerd Herders out there know that java and me are like two peas in a caffeinated pod, but three 8-ounce cups is plenty, and when I do splash out (literally) and pour myself a fourth, it's over the course of a whole morning. I don't blast through it all in one heart attack-inducing go.

What sucks about Starbucks is that they are a sugar shack wolf wearing the sheep's clothing of being a coffee house - a place that sells "real" drinks with at least a vague notion of nutritional value, so people are lulled into believing that when they drink their ultra frapacapchinotastic chubbity-chub-chub latte, they're just having a cup of coffee. On the other hand, no one can be that stupid. I think people believe what they want to believe.

The Deceptively Vile Non-Alcoholic Energy Drinks. From a University of Maryland press release:

Highly-caffeinated energy drinks – even those containing no alcohol – may pose a significant threat to individuals and public health, say researchers at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
In a new online commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), they recommend immediate consumer action, education by health providers, voluntary disclosures by manufacturers and new federal labeling requirements.

"Recent action to make pre-mixed alcoholic energy drinks unavailable was an important first step, but more continued action is needed," says University of Maryland School of Public Health researcher Amelia Arria, who directs the Center on Young Adult Health and Development. "Individuals can still mix these highly caffeinated energy drinks with alcohol on their own. It is also concerning that no regulation exists with regard to the level of caffeine that can be in an energy drink."

Believe it or not, I actually fall on the other side of the fence here. As I commented a few months ago when The Man banned caffeinated alcoholic beverages, you can't stop people from drinking "dangerous" beverages. Prohibition kind of proved that, so just cool your heels, Elliot Ness.

Education and protest are far more effective tools, when used properly.

The Deceptively Vile Tap Water. From the Los Angeles Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency took steps Wednesday to curb toxic substances in drinking water, including perchlorate, a chemical thought to threaten the thyroid gland that has contaminated hundreds of public water wells, mostly in California.

The agency also moved to set standards for 16 other substances that can invade water supplies and impair human health.

Perchlorate, a remnant of California's manufacturing, aerospace and military bases, can inhibit thyroid hormone production, especially in fetuses and infants. That can lead to lower IQs and developmental delays, studies have shown.

Didn't see that one coming, did ya? I would have loved to end this post with a snide fix-all, telling you guys to stick with plain, old water. Indeed, from a diet and weight maintenance perspective, it's the ideal, but somehow, humankind has gone and messed this one up too. Tap water is full of chemicals and bottled water can be even worse, considering it's even less regulated than the toxin-laced H2O that comes out of our facets.

So what's a thirsty fella to do? I'm not sure. My solution was to buy a water filter. I got a Pur system, but according to my research, they do the same thing Brita filters do, so just get the one with the best price. If you're currently drinking bottled water, the $30-$40 will pay for itself in a few months. Or you could do what I did on a trip to Vietnam a few years ago and just drink beer when you don't know where your water is coming from. Believe it or not, a couple beers a day is a far healthier option to pretty much every sugary beverage listed above.

Just don't drink a Trenta's worth.