Art De Vany: May 2005 Archives

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West Nile

May 31, 2005 08:34 PM

The West Nile disease is one of those cross-over diseases that happen when humans move into new territory and encounter new pathogens. Or, the pathogens move in on us. In this modern world, travel is so fast that a person can be infected in Egypt and be in New York in hours. When travel was slower, the infected person might not survive the trip.

So, now we have the Associated Press trying to rev up concern for West Nile virus. This is not wholly unjustified, as it is pretty virulent at this early stage of cross-over from a host that is accommodated to the virus (apparently mosquitos and birds) to a new and unprepared host --- us. But, their story line is wholly misleading because it confuses long-distance cycling with super health.

Here is the lead-in to the story (The Spectrum, May 31, 2005): "Patricia Heller was super-healthy, an avid skier and competitive bicyclist. So when she collapsed in the street after a day-long bike ride, she first shrugged off the weakness as cramps.

By the next morning, Heller's left leg was completely paralyzed. It was West Nile virus, from a mosquito bite the Colorado woman doesn't even remember...."

I was first struck by how the AP took competitive bicycling to be an indicator of super health. It is not. Competitive bicyclists often have compromised immunity. If you have read any of Dr. Demopoulos' literature on glutathione, you will know that excessive aerobic exercise depletes glutathione (GSH) which degrades the immune system. This is a key pathway, but there are other pathways to degraded immunity from long aerobic exercise.

Note that Patricia Heller had spent the entire day out in the sun on a bike ride in Colorado. Sun depletes GSH and so does the long duration ride. In addition, she likely consumed carbohydrate heavy drinks, snacks and meals on the ride, like nearly all bicyclists do. These too deplete GSH because the carbs and elevated blood sugar promote free radicals which deplete GSH. The ride relied on her aerobic energy system, a potent generator of free radicals or reactive oxygen species.

She wasn't super healthy. Long bike rides don't prove you are healthy, they show that you are accommodated to riding through conditioning. Yet, you may be unhealthy because of the ROS load your body is under from excessive aerobic exercise and ROS-generating high carbohydrate drinks and snacks.

I suppose the AP had in mind that if someone they say is super-healthy was badly harmed by West Nile, then those of you who don't bike or ski should worry. Actually, you may be safer if you don't bicycle and if you stay away from wooded areas where the mosquito is likely to be found. At this time of year and following the snow melt, mosquitos are near their peak in mountainous areas. Nothing breeds mosquitoes like snow-melt meadows.

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Glutathione (GSH)

In response to questions about what HMP products I consume here is a brief answer.

I take what are called the ultrathione Health Pack. It contains 500 mg of Glutathione, the stabilized form used by HMP in their products. Because it is stabilized, the sulpher atom does not unbind in the stomach from the effects of stomach acid and digestive juices.

In addition to glutathione the product contains ascorbic acid (1750mg), vit E in a stable dJ-Alpha Tocopherol Acetate (250IU), vitamins B1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 12 and some folic acid (100mg). It has 20mg of stable beta carotene.

The product has changed over the nearly 20 years I have been taking it, but not a whole lot. Beta carotene disappeared for a while after it became hard to find a stable form. When a stable form again became available, it was put back in. Note also that the amount of Beta carotene is modest. This is very sensible and an example of the scientific basis of the HMP products. There are many forms of beta carotene, if you take a lot of just one form in a vitamin you crowd out the others and may actually become deficient in one or more forms. Folic acid is a recent addition.

I take from 1 to 2 packs a day depending on what I do. If I am in the sun a lot or doing things like hiking or playing softball, I will usually take 2. Otherwise, just 1 is fine. On random days I take none. This is to remind my body how to make GSH internally rather than rely on external sources. The store of GSH builds up and once this is accomplished you have about a day's worth in tissues. And your body makes a substantial amount each day if you have a good diet.

I do believe in the product and recommend it. Take your time getting used to it and drink plenty of water when you take a packet, always just after a meal. They don't mix with coffee in my system, so I take them at lunch and/or dinner. The B-12 is energizing. So, if you are dragging take a packet with the next meal. But, above all, follow Dr. Demopoulos' protocols, he is the expert. He is a serious and accomplished scientist who brings to best of science to his products.

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Do You Get Sick?

May 30, 2005 01:57 PM

As chance would have it, a former vegan asked me this question. But, I would also have to say that it is not uncommon for vegans to have compromised immunity, as do joggers and long distance runners. After a marathon, you are pure bug (as in microbes and viruses) bait because your immune system is so shot. Any over-training does this, even if you lift weights or play baseball or basketball or any vigorous sport.

So, do I get sick?

No, I never get sick. In 20 years I have had only had food poisoning from improperly handled sea food in a rather high end restaurant. I recall one other occasion when I felt under attack from a virus going around, but it never got me. This was during my teaching years when I was exposed to about 700 students a year in my classes and countless others in daily work on a large campus.

This was unusual among our faculty; I could always be counted on to fill in for some one who was sick and couldn't teach class. At finals, my classes were filled with coughing, hacking students sick from all night study and stress. The flu and other viruses never seemed to get me. UCI also has a large foreign student contingent, somewhat weighted toward Asia. This is a part of the world where many flu virus originate because of the hog-duck-people cycle.

When humans live close to their domesticated animals, pathogens cross over from one species to another. When there is a cycle of species, the chances multiply of a cross-over to humans. A disease may be benign in, say, a duck, but when it crosses over to humans it will be virulent at first. Think of avian flu, the newest of these. Later, the virus and the host will accommodate to one another and the virus will cease to be so virulent.

The human history is full of these cross overs from animal to human, since the beginning of agriculture. Distemper crossed over to humans from dogs. Anthrax from cattle, HIV/AIDS from chimpanzees who are butchered for "bush meat". Small pox is the most virulent of these cross overs.

Hunter gatherers were less susceptible to these cross-over diseases (zoonoses) because they did not live in large groups to form a population to carry the pathogen and they did not live in settled areas with their animals and crops. The beginning of settled agriculture was a dangerous time for humans, crowded together, living with animals, eating novel and less nutritious foods, subject to crop failure and starvation, and settling into novel areas where new pathogens resided.

Humans are still subject to these forces, particularly as they move ever farther into novel range and encounter new pathogens. Lyme's and West Nile disease are some of these newly encountered pathogens.

Why don't I get sick?

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Metabolic Rate, Diet, and Exercise

May 29, 2005 11:39 AM

In reviewing some of my collection of articles and abstracts I found this one that is worth sharing.

Among other things it shows, some years ago when the research was done, that current recommendations for moderate exercise miss the mark by a lot. You have to do some more vigorous exercise.

The agnostic finding is that a very low calorie diet AND a large volume of aerobic exercise appears to lower the resting metabolic rate. Not a good thing. Dieting and jogging appear to reduce metabolic rate per unit of body mass, probably because total muscle mass is reduced as fibers are converted from FT to ST. These latter fibers are smaller and more efficient users of oxygen.

Later studies have shown that diet alone does not lower the resting metabolic rate per unit of muscle, but does lower the muscle mass and, therefore, the total basal metabolic rate. Not a good thing either.

None of these problems will present themselves on the Evolutionary Fitness program. And, what is more impressive is that as you increase your lean muscle mass and convert more of it to larger FT fibers, your basal metabolic rate rises by a substantial amount. FT fibers are expensive tissue, so you burn lots of energy at rest and you increase your ability to burn far more in activity. Plus, you won't be apt to fall and hurt yourself with the quick response and power you get from FT fiber.

The abstract follows.

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Searching

May 28, 2005 01:27 PM

A question:

"I enjoy your take on joggers. How about the currently ubiquitous, obsessive compulsive water drinkers? - those folk that force themselves to drink glass after glass of water all day long whether they are thirsty or not because of an internet-spread urban legend that it's the key to health."

This is right on. I have commented at some length on this issue. Try the search function on the blog and you will find about 5 entries dealing with water. One of them, Water Bottles, goes right to the trendy and unhealthful practice of drinking water all day. Other entries also touch on this issue.

Note, that this blog is not a news or current comment blog, so an earlier post is not old news, it is a statement that will be as true tomorrow as yesterday.

So, please remember the latest post may not hit your question or issue, but you may find it using the excellent search feature of the blog.

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Living LIFO

May 26, 2005 09:15 PM

Suppose your body were like a big warehouse with shipments coming in and going out. The warehouse is big and dark and stuff is piled all around. The piles represent proteins, fat, neural tissue, organs, and so on. Every tissue in the body turns over; the cells obey the command to die (apoptosis) and are removed to be replaced by new stock.

Which pile of stuff do you think will end up being the oldest in the warehouse? Fat, not the fat in your nervous system or membranes, the fat known as adipose tissue that stores your excess energy intake over your expenditures. Think of this pile as one where the shipments coming in exceed the shipments going out and you have the idea.

The order and reorder process is LIFO, last in first out. So, when you burn fat you burn that pile that is easy to get to in the front of the warehouse, not that stuff piled way in the back down a dark corridor. This is your newest fat. Your oldest fat just sits there getting older if you slowly gain weight year over year.

That is why fat people are actually older than lean people, they carry more older tissue accumulated from years ago and not used. If you take a weighted average (pun intended) of an obese person's body contents you get a higher average age of tissue than a lean person of the same weight would have. Overweight people are older.

Poor eating and overeating are the causes of this LIFO accumulation of aged fat. Poor eating, meaning consuming foods that elevate insulin too much turn your body into a CHO burning machine, so you never access those piles of energy in your fat stores. And they sit there aging. What is aged fat? It is oxidized fat that produces toxic substances like tumor necrosis factor and free radicals. Oxidized fat is CELLULITE! It is stringy and hard from oxidation.

To clear out some of the aged fat from the warehouse, you have to start burning fat and stop the flow of new fat coming in. You do this two ways: 1. take in less energy and expend more, 2. eat fewer foods that elevate your insulin, the hormone that shuts down the fat shipments leaving the warehouse and turns other inventory into fat.

Now for a question raised in my mind by a distinguished member of our little group.

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Starting Hints

If you decide to embark on the evolutionary fitness way, it is your choice. So, take responsibility to know what you are doing and take care.

1. It is helpful to have someone check your form. Bad form, bad results.

2. Ask your doctor to check your insulin level (serum insulin). Not your glucose tolerance, your insulin level. If it is above 8 you may already be started down the aging cascade. My insulin level is 3.4, below the range for the lab. My doctor and I know this is good.

3. Your insulin level should fall as you progress in eating and playing/working out the evolutionary fitness way. If it doesn't you are doing something wrong.

4. Check your blood pressure now and then. You can use a meter at home or one in the drug store. After a workout your pulse should be a bit higher and your blood pressure a bit lower. That is a sign of a good workout. If your blood pressure drifts up over time, then you are overtraining.

5. Let it happen. The changes will come at their own pace. You can't force it or make it happen. You are trying to release your body and mind from the 21st century metronomic rhythms and live the way you were designed by evolution to live.

6. It will happen. A year from now you will look back at how far you have come. And you will be hooked.

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The Original Evolutionary Fitness Essay

May 25, 2005 02:40 PM

This is a lightly revised version of the essay that started it all, the original Evolutionary Fitness essay. I decided to give it away rather than waste my time and yours charging for it.

My newest technologies are not here, but there is much to get you started. The threshold and alactic sets that I devised long ago are still my base work out technologies and are very very effective. The book will have more topics and more depth of analysis than these brief sketches as well as a lot of new stuff.

Download the pdf file by clicking on the title Evolutionary Fitness Essay.

I hope you enjoy it and that it is of some benefit to you and yours.

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Buns

Young women love them in a man. Evolutionary psychology tells us they should. Strong and solid buttocks are a sign of health and power in a male. But, buns seem to be shrinking these days. I am struck by the lack of glutteal musculature in males these days. The pants just hang on a lot of the softball players I see.

A male can't be powerful unless he has developed buttocks. They are the foundation of mobility for almost all athletic moves and they are the prime movers in any rapid or powerful move. Heavy lifting, sprinting, hitting or throwing all move off the drive from the legs and gluts.

Why are buns shrinking?

1. Too much sitting. Sitting cuts off the blood supply to the gluts and they atrophy. They just waste away from a lack of blood flow. Go into a truck stop and you will see men that may have started driving as young, tough truck jockeys whose pants just hang straight down from their belt after 20 years in the cab. Office workers are just as vulnerable.

2. Too little full body exercise. Dead lifts, squats, splits, power cleans, and overhead moves engage the gluts. Sitting in a leg extension machine does not. Hack squats on those slanted racks were designed to avoid developing the glutes by body builders seeking a Steve Reeves look.

3. Not enough sprinting. Glutes are essential to a powerful and full leg drive. Jogging doesn't do it. Running at varying speed does to some degree. Long term joggers tend to have a tucked under pelvis, tilted forward from the base, probably to protect their lower back. This reduces engagement of the glutes.

4. Too much alcohol. Alcoholics have no glutes. Check it out. They do all of the above: sitting, not exercising, no sprinting. But, they have another problem. They are so malnourished, particularly in protein, that they consume their own muscle mass to maintain their overworked organs. Their organs are busy trying to detoxify their bodies and are overloaded.

One of the strangest sights I have ever seen was inside one of those bars that open at 6:30 in the morning. I was delivering beer kegs in one of my summer jobs and went into one of those bars to make a delivery. At 8:00 in the morning there were drinkers sitting at the bar. What strange creatures they seemed to my inexperienced eyes. They didn't speak, they croaked from free radical damage of smoke and alcohol to their vocal cords. They had flourid faces (blood vessel damage, again from ROS). They had bloated bellies from protein deprivation and liver damage. And, they had no glutes.

With the stench, dark, smokey air, and bar lighting, I felt like I was in another world populated with strange creatures. I have never forgotten it.

I know two famous economists who drank themselves to death

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Waiting for the attack...

May 24, 2005 03:31 PM

of the vegans.

The last time I said anything about vegans was on Mr. KABC's radio show.

After I spoke, the phones lit up with angry calls. I have been waiting to see if any vegans attack my post The Human Branch. So far, the coast is clear.

I think Mr. KABC knew this would happen and that may have been part of his reasoning to have me as a guest. Some of the callers may have been lacking in B vitamins (the pool lasts about 7 years when a vegan can hit the wall if he/she does not supplement intelligently). I think some of them had hit the wall they were so angry to the point of irrationality. Come to think of it, don't a lot of vegans jog too?

I don't know why the attack of the vegans was so fierce; I have nothing against vegans and respect their choices. I was only troubled when I found that many of them did not respect mine.

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Publishing

Keith pointed out the changes his publisher forced on Loren Cordain's Paleo Diet book.

You would think the editors know something, but they don't. They are at least as bad as studio executives who pick movies; they don't know anything. Nassim Taleb has written a nice paper showing how literature can be modeled as luck. It is available as a pdf file on his web site Taleb. Look over this interesting page and then click on "The Roots of Unfairness: the Black Swan in Arts and Literature."

Yours truly is cited in the paper and Nassim and I have had many phone and email exchanges. We shall meet when he comes out to Las Vegas to interview me for his new book. I used Nassim's Fooled by Randomness as a kind of text for my Economics of Extreme Events course at UCI. We are supposedly writing a paper together on how to use financial instruments to reduce the huge uncertainty actors face.

His work is wonderfully out of the box and deep. His Empirica hedge fund may have the most sophisticated approach to arbitrage of any. Many funds work on leverage more than on the underlying prices and probability distributions (if we even know them). This was clearly shown in the collapse of Long Term Capital Management nicely documented in Lowenstein's, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management. One of our readers, Mark, tells me that most hedge funds use the Sharpe Ratio, which is problematic because the probability distribution of stock returns has a volatile and possibly non-existent variance and the ratio fails to detect skew in returns. Since about 80% of returns are in about 5% of trading periods, owing to large moves in the stocks, the Sharpe Ratio, in its ignorance of skew, fails as a decision criterion.

Nassim tells me there are only three of us doing this sort of thing: Mandelbrot, Taleb his ownself (as Dan Jenkins would say), and me.

Black Swan is the name Taleb gives to kurtosis, the large impact of improbable events. In literature, the outliers are taken there by chance and non-linear dynamics. I have shown this in detail for the movies. A combination of chance and an expansive non-linear feedback where audience growth relates positively to size takes movies to extreme outcomes. In this dynamic, the statistical attractor is approached through bifurcations onto hit and bomb paths and the Stable-Levy distribution is the attractor. This results in a winner take all outcome, something we see in the internet, the movies, and in so much of life. The distribution also has an infinite variance, so anything can happen.

Fractals and scaling...

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Bandwidth

The site might be hitting bandwidth limits on my server. I have a pretty inexpensive setup and I think its limit may be 1.5 GB which we hit yesterday with over 8,000 hits as we went well over 120,000 total hits.

What's next Oprah?

I'm not sure I deserve this attention. From now on, no more reports about hits. Just let me know if you have server delays.

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Oh Oh, Sun is Good for You. Never Mind...

May 23, 2005 07:46 PM

Gildna Radner used to go into this terrific rant on Saturday Night Live. Then, someone would make an obvious correction to show she was completely confused and she would say "Never Mind."

Now the medical community looks like Gilda (who, unfortunately, died of cancer). We have had that discussion already, and I also warned of the frailty of epidemiological studies. Now we have the Never Mind correction.

Check this link to a Harvard researcher's latest findings (by the way, I wouldn't go there for economics or political findings; the place smells these days of PC and other frailties). Sunshine and Cancer: Never Mind.

I don't make it a practice to reference other sites (who reference others who reference them; the curious blog circle) as I don't want to stay up with the news or point you to places that you can find yourself. I am not trying to build links to this site by linking to others who link to me, the Google Paradox: link or die. Besides, you may have other interests. But, this one was too good to pass up.

Vitamin D is so essential, as I argued before, that the body finds multiple ways to make and deliver it to itself.

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The Human Branch

Vegans sometimes argue that during the bulk of the evolutionary history of hominids vegetables were the primarily or only source of food. That seems to be true of many hominids, but it is not true of humans or even chimpanzees and baboons. Up until about 2-3 million years ago, hominids did feed mostly on plants.

Note where A. boisei and A. robustus split from the human branch of the hominid family; about 2.5 million years ago when humans began eating meat. Boisei and Robustus were vegetarians. They are gone, a dead end in the hominid family.

Dental isotopes of Neanderthals show them to be just below the wolf in their carnivory. Almost obligatory carnivores. Neanderthals passed from the scene about 35,000 years ago. Cro Magnon (homo sapiens sapiens) dentition reveals just less than this level of carnivory, and they are the predecessors to us all.

In Evolution and Nutrition, Crawford argues that the human brain requires more fatty acids (EPA and DHA in particular) than can be produced by a human consuming only plants. We, and other carnivores, rely upon other animals as a source of these brain-essential fatty acids. (Children raised on very low fat diets may have diminished brain development.)

Aiello argues that humans traded stomach tissue for brain tissue. Both tissues metabolize energy at about the same rate. When the human stomach diminished because we had access to high density nutrients and fatty acids in the tissues of prey, the metabolic costs of some stomach tissue could be allocated to brain tissue. This is the expensive tissue hypothesis.

Does that mean you can't be a vegan? Of course not, many are. There also are many vegan dropouts with sad stories to tell. Remarkably, I have been told by vegan students that potato chips are an acceptable food and they consume them avidly. Its your choice, but you have to be sophisticated to be a well-nourished vegan.

Our vegetables today are not as nutritious as when our ancestors consumed them, so that presents problems. On the other hand, the meat we usually buy is far from what our ancestors ate too. Too much saturated fat, trans fats, hormones, and antibiotics.

Hard choices.

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Intermittent training and muscle mass

May 22, 2005 04:05 PM

Lots of questions. I hope you will not be offended it I cannot get to yours. I don't aspire to be a guru and there are so many complexities and unknowns in most genuine questions that I would be foolish to say I know the answers.

One that is on many minds is how can you build muscle size training intermittently? We have many prime examples of those who can. I put myself in this category, but nothing like Mike Menzter and Dorian Yates. You can get Dorian's book, though I have not tracked it down and don't own it myself. But, if it is size you are after there isn't a better source than this powerful man.

Steroids, you say? I don't know, but he was hugely strong and thick. Not what I want to be. He hurt himself training far beyond what any of us would or should want to do. Note, he did not develop diabetes like the Olympic Scull Champion and hasn't died of fibrillation, like another Olympic Scull champion out on a jog. He retired for reasons I do not know, but what he did was to do intermittent, very heavy duty training (VHT). He also rested a lot and walked for miles around London. I took long walks while in London during his prime with the faint thought I might run into him.

Mike Mentzer trained Dorian for a time, when he was in the US. I just missed him one day at my old gym MetRX. I would have liked to talk to him a bit.

Mike, as most will know, preached Heavy Duty, a book I used in my comeback from a serious knee surgery and my real return to harder training around 1980. But, Mike was following Arthur Jones, who argued for this type of training for many years. In spite of the fact that no textbooks or sports association training recommendations espouse the Jones/Heavy Duty approach, it is supported by a careful reading of the best research (see below for more on this).

Ellington Darden is a proponent of Jones' ideas and has a recent book out on it. But, there is little new in it and it has, what are surely the publisher's outlandish claims on the cover ("Gain 18 Pounds of Muscle in [I forget, I threw the book away] 2 or 3 weeks). This guy could do much better, but publishing today is all about Instant This and Overnight That.

But, Jones and others who taught this style were preceded by, among others, Milo the Greek wrestler who lifted a bull each day from calf to full grown. Just one hugely difficult lift each day (some of this is legend of course). The strong men of the 18th and 19th Centuries were often butchers or beer truck drivers. They did just a few extremely heavy lifts a few times a week. Otherwise, they were just trimming beef or driving horse drawn wagons. Just like Dorian's training in his latter days: a couple of VHT workouts a week and then a lot of rest and easy walking. This is not far from the evolutionary pattern of the hunt as we know it. A long trek, intense, dangerous, and dramatic stalking and killing of the prey, then the extremely hard work of butchering, followed by the heavy carry back to camp. And, then easy days and feasting before it begins again.

The most heavily muscled man I ever met worked as the boss at the Pillsbury Dough Company warehouse. He picked up 100 pound sacks of flour like they were nothing. I got a summer job, even though he was going to hire someone else, by picking a sack up and throwing it over the pile of sacks on the floor (I was an Olympic weight lifter at the time).

What did he do? He unloaded a few freight cars a week, quickly and explosively like a powerful man would do, not like a weak man would do. He didn't take a sack and schlepp it out of the car and into the warehouse. He threw it, like I did (though I could never match his distance; I was only 16-17 at the time).

We could do a railroad car in a few hours. Then, the rest of the week was pretty easy, just filling small orders (still a bit hard) and then the next car to unload quickly. This was pure power work (modern power lifting is not correctly named, it is strength lifting, not power lifting since explosiveness and time are not considerations).

That job helped to set my course as I was very powerful by the time the summer was over. I was playing American Legion Baseball at the time and beginning to attract the attention of scouts because I was hitting the ball over the lights with all the explosive power I gained from tossing 100 pound sacks.

Every young male should have a chance to do this kind of work for a summer. It would change lives and bodies. If I could, I would set up a summer camp like this where kids would do hard, explosive work twice a week and just have easy fun activities on other days. This is how I work out my grandson.

As for Arthur Jones...

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Over 100,000

May 21, 2005 02:59 PM

I'll just note briefly that today we went over 100,000 hits and are getting more than 5000 hits per day for the past week. This in a bit less than 2 months of operation.

I never dreamed this would happen. Then, again, I only wanted to get myself going on the book and really didn't try to form any expectations of readership for the blog. Kind of amazing though.

Thanks to Dave for the suggestion of in-progress publication of the book. I know that would speed it up a lot. I also have published enough books to know that I don't want to first do a proposal and then the book. The editors try to control your content; they would probably try to make Evolutionary Fitness into a diet book. I will look into putting the book up in draft, chapter by chapter as it progresses with something like an RSS feed. To do this, I would have to sell the book as a subscription where you get the ongoing document and its final version for a single payment.

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Son of Jogger

Part of an email from someone I know who has been following the blog.

"I gave up 10 years of jogging 6 years ago when my father (a 30 year 40 mile a week jogger) joined the list of jogging heart attack casualties at age 60, so this, too, is a fascinating subject to me."

The data keep piling up. But, I can find no really definitive, or even good, published research on jogging and mortality. Rat experiments are almost rigged since they stick one in a sterile environment and then let the other one run on a treadmill.

The rats don't jog, by the way, they run in a frisky and playful way, not the hum-drum, steady pace of a human jogger. Rats, and other wild animals, express a superfast twitch muscle protein that humans don't. I am sure the genes are there somewhere, but they are turned off by another gene cascade or borrowed for some other purpose in humans. If you want to create a super athlete, then find a way to turn on this gene. The problem is that such a human would rip out all his tendons.

The rat studies are too short in time to see the longer term effects where, eventually, the chaos may be trained out of the rat's heart as the FT fiber ebbs away. I doubt this will happen because rats refuse to jog the way a human will force himself/herself to do. The human following the Soviet model of top-down mind control against the signals of the body could slowly ebb the FT away.

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A New Entry Coming

May 20, 2005 08:47 PM

I am working on a new entry where I will try to distill some of my long experience and knowledge for not aging. I regard aging as a disease, not a normal condition and I will try to relate a bit of this theory and the principles it implies.

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A Mature Male...

I haven't been to the gym for a while, owing to other things I had and wanted to do. I work out randomly anyway, so this was not a concern for me. I do from 2 to 4 workouts a week, but nobody is counting and I thrive on the intermittency in my activities as I do in my eating.

It was about 2:45 and there were only a handful of young males in the weight room and a few females upstairs on the treadmills and those other industrial machines that people use to grind their bodies and brains down.

I was in a tank top and shorts because it is hot today. The jaws just dropped from these young males as they saw a mature male who has worked out all his life. None of them are cut and symmetrical; they all are smooth and working out their biceps, triceps, or pecs. I can say that I looked shredded compared to them and there was a muscle balance, density and symmetry that they could only achieve from a life time in the gym. And, they would have to do the right thing.

Relative to me (I hope this doesn't sound egotistical, I am trying to be clinical), the young men looked smooth (too much pizza or coke and french fries? probably just plain poor eating), out of balance, and non-athletic. When I do an exercise, muscles and tendons and cuts just seem to jump out of my body. I am thick and slender at the same time.

All these young guys have is some pump that they create with endless and mind-killing sets of repetitions of the same exercises. They aren't symmetrical. Females see this at a glance. A body builder who is focused on, say, arms, is not functional and is probably a bit narcissitic. He certainly has only appearance rather than function in mind. Females don't go for this.

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John Lott on Levitt...

May 19, 2005 08:48 PM

John Lott, whose honesty and scholarship I respect a lot, tells me that Levitt (Freakonomics) is not all that hot. He does like the questions he asks, but has problems with his statistics, plain truthfulness, and non-liberal (in the classic libertarian concept of liberalism. Modern liberals are not liberal, they are authoritarian) point of view.

I take this seriously because no one's research but John's has been subject to so much vitriole and erroneous criticism. Maybe I can convince John to do a review of Levitt's book.

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Condensed Evolutionary Fitness

I am trying to figure out how to make a condensed version of Evolutionary Fitness available, probably for a small fee in a PDF document that can be downloaded from this site.

This would be an expanded and updated version of the (it may be famous by now) Essay that started it all.

Would you be interested?

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (33)

Sorry Officer, I was just increasing my BDNF...

Didier Sornette is one of my favorite physicists, not that I know that many. He is athletic and enormously productive in research and publications. He is French, but I don't hold that against him and find him to be completely genuine and stimulating. In fact, every French person I have met I have liked; it is their political leaders who are reprehensible (I no longer buy Michellin tires and sometimes regret the Cartier I bought for my wife). His book, Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences (Springer-Verlag), is a (soon to be) classic. I learned a lot from it. Most economists will ignore it.

We hit it off instantly after I invited him to give a lecture at UCI, and we always arranged to meet whenever he came over to the campus from his home at UCLA, where he is Professor of Physics in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences.

He took to Evolutionary Fitness instantly and told me this story. He was taking the French Ecole Exams that this hierarchically organized country he lived in uses to place individuals in University. He placed second in the nation in the year he took the exam, if I recall correctly.

But, he did something unusual in attaining this highly ranked position. He worked out every day during the week-long, grueling exams. His fellow test-takers told him he was crazy. But, was he?

No, his work outs increased his BDNF. This is Brain Derived Neuroprotective Factor. The other test-takers let their stress hormones control their brain and thoughts. They did not do as well. Didier kicked in the exams because he has a great brain and because he protected it during the stressful exams by working out and releasing BDNF.

Stress hormones are neurotoxic (they kill brain cells). What Didier did was to quench these hormones and, in their place, stimulate BDNF. I worked out during my qualifying exams for my Ph.D. (I work out all the time anyway and this was not going to be an exception for me. So, I did the same thing Didier did during this, otherwise, stressful period.)

How does this relate to traffic tickets? Well, one time when Didier came over to see me he rode over from UCLA to UCI (about 60 miles) on a big Kawasaki Ninja 1100. He has a smaller dirt bike in France, where he is Director of some Institute for part of the year. So, he rides as I do.

What does this show about the things we share in common? Well, during his trip over to UCI he did a burst to a pretty high speed on the 405 freeway (a mean feat). Had he been ticketed, he might have used the excuse I used for the title of this entry. He was stimulating the production of brain derived neuroprotective factors (BDNF).

My bike isn't as fast as a big Ninja, but it hauls over dirt like nothing else. As I came back from my ride on Monday, I hit a speed I won't specify against a strong head and side wind. That was all my bike could do, as it is tall and not wind-smoothed (it is a dirt bike after all and that is why I love it) and I am tall and wide in the exposed shoulder area. It was easy and safe. I much prefer to ride fast when there is a bit more risk in the dirt.

Why do apparently smart and sophisticated people do these kinds of things? Ancient life was a mystery and full of risk. Nothing is safe. But, it is great to stimulate the production of BDNF. It is good for your soul and might protect you from the trivial aspects of modern life.

We owe our brains to the complexity and risk of the evolutionary environment.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (2)

Diet Drinks make you...

Diet drinks might make you light in the head. They do contain a lot of Phenylalanine - Aspartame and foreign proteins that might mimic essential proteins and neurotransmiters. You might get thinking problems if you drink this stufff.

And then, there are the incentives. If you manage an unhealthful drink (financially), what do you say to a graduating class at Whatever Unversity (where do they get these people? Answer: the people in the booking area have no clue about anything and are wholly tuned into what is "hot" or current or whatever the current campus philosphy is. The Chancellor can't watch everybody and may be a nut in her/his ownself.)

Here is an example. It is the speech (or light-weight and vapid opinion) of a PepsiCo Vice President. Vapid Pepsi Brains

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Fat Report

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know I have been using a trainer, Mark Leatherman, now and then to watch my form and help me do negatives. We are both teaching one another and refining workouts that will be sensational in my book.

Mark's wife read some material I gave him and became an overnight Evolutionary Fitness devotee. She has lost 7 pounds in the past 3 weeks, just about the ideal rate of loss. Her workouts haven't changed all that much as Mark has a similar training style to mine. They only made some simple changes to her work outs to incorporate some EF technology.

What really changed is how she eats. She eats Evolutionary Fitness (PaleoMed) style now. She loves the fat loss (though some is probably water) and feels a lot better. Her waist/hip ratio is moving in the direction of the evolutionary ideal. It works for females as well as for males.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (5)

Review of Freakonomics

I am posting Michael Shermer's book review of Freakonmics: What the Numbers Can Reveal, by Levitt and Dubner.

A couple of comments first. What is freakonomics? A badly chosen word or neologism I would say to characterize something that is important. Freak events are really events that are unusual and they have large consequences. They are far out on the probability tail or what I call extreme events. This is a neglected area in economics and most social science, not because it has to be though. I taught a course during my last two years at UCI called The Economics of Extreme Events that focused on some of the same kinds of issues Levitt handles so skillfully. In fact, my analysis of the movie industry is pretty much a showing of how events far out into the probability tails determine what goes on and what you see in the averages and other more recognizable statistics that everyone seems to focus on.

These extreme events tell us far more than averages or other simple statistics and they occur in areas where variance increases with sample size and may not exist. These tend to be areas of human performance where incentives, technique, and wonkish specialization combine with ability to push performance beyond past levels. Or, maybe there is some cheating going on as well as Levitt shows for teachers and student scores.

I plan to read the book soon.

Here is the text of Shermer's review:

"In a quarter-century of serious cycling I have heard all the rumors about performance enhancing drugs, from stimulants in the 1970s, to steroids in the 1980s, to blood boosters like Erythropoietin (EPO) in the 1990s. A friend who knows my penchant for exposing fraud suggested I track the winners’ speeds from the Tour de France to note the increase after 1991, the year he says EPO was introduced. Since my friend won the Tour three times, I figured it was worth checking.

From 1949–1962, the Tour winner’s average was 34.7 kilometers per hour.

From 1963–1976, the winner’s average increased to 35.4 kph, a 2% difference.

From 1977–1990, the winner’s average increased another 2% to 36.2 kph.

From 1991–2004, the winner’s average speed jumped to 39.5 kph, a 9% increase.

Something happened in the 1990s to trigger such a leap in speed.
EPO? Maybe. But there are other factors. Composite materials led to lighter and stronger bikes. Clothing was more aerodynamic. Nutrition and training were more scientific. The racing field grew in size, from an average of about 120 in the 50s, to about 190 in the 90s (more riders accentuates drafting and increases speeds on the numerous flat stages). The race was shortened by almost a thousand kilometers over the past half century. And with sizable increases in prize monies, sponsorships, and endorsements that came with the Tour’s elevated international fame (especially in America) in the 1980s (when my friend, who helped to instigate these changes, was racing), the selection pool of elite bicycle racers deepened, thereby elevating the average quality (and thus speed) of the Tour as a whole.

Are these factors enough to account for the statistical spike in the 90s? Additional tests could resolve the matter, such as comparing the split times on crucial mountain stages between top riders and average riders, pre- and post-1991, under the presumption that the top riders would be employing the best performance enhancing drugs under the direction of the most knowledgeable sports physicians. A significant difference between top riders but not between average riders, pre- and post-1991, would be compelling evidence of artificial performance enhancement.

My model and inspiration for this exercise in data comparison came from Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago who is shaking up his profession by employing standard methods from the social sciences to very nonstandard questions from the real world. A 2003 article in the New York Times Magazine about Levitt by journalist Stephen Dubner led to their collaboration on a book with the improbable title Freakonomics (so named for the freaky subjects they explore). An expanded version of that essay, Freakonomics was primarily written by Dubner and is a hodge-podge of Levitts polymathic interests. Although the authors eschew any central theme, I took from it two messages:

Science can answer the broadest range of questions (even freakish ones) about human behavior.

Incentives and motivations are intimately linked in driving human behavior.
For example, Levitt devised a clever algorithm to analyze data from Chicago public schools to reveal that some teachers were helping their students cheat on state exams by filling in answers to later harder questions in a very predictable fashion (always the same block of correct answers). Further, there was a spike in the scores one year, followed by a decline to earlier performance levels. Retests on these same students proved that they did not know the answers to those harder questions. The teachers were fired.

In a related computation, Levitt discovered that Sumo wrestlers were fixing some of their matches. In order to rise in rank and earn more money, a wrestler must finish a tournament of 15 matches with a winning record. Levitt found a pattern of cheating whenever a 7-7 wrestler (with a lot to gain) was pitted against an 8-6 wrestler (with little to lose) on the final bout of a tournament. A 7-7 wrestler’s predicted win percentage against an 8-6 opponent is 48.7%, whereas the actual win percentage was 79.6%. The next time these two wrestlers met when there was nothing at stake, however, the 7-7 wrestlers won only 40 percent of the rematches. “The most logical explanation,” Levitt concludes, “is that the wrestlers made a quid pro quo agreement: you let me win today, when I really need the victory, and Ill let you win the next time.”

Levitt has also exposed real estate agents who sell their own homes for much higher prices than the homes of their clients; and he discovered that although top echelon drug dealers are wealthy, the vast majority live with their mothers because the pay works out to only seven bucks an hour.

Levitt’s most controversial computation to date involves the dramatic drop in crime rates in the 1990s. The reason, he says, was not tougher gun control laws, capital punishment, decreasing unemployment, or a stronger economy. The cause was Roe v. Wade. Research shows that children born into impoverished and adverse environments are more likely to grow up to become criminals. After Roe v. Wade, millions of poor, single, teenage women had abortions instead of future potential criminals; 20 years later the pool of potential criminals had shrunk, along with the crime rate. Levitt’s syllogistic logic is as follows: “Unwantedness leads to high crime; abortion leads to less unwantedness; abortion leads to less crime.” Of course, Levitt is quick to add that the solution is not more abortions, but “providing better environments for those children at greatest risk for future crime.”

Correlation does not always mean causation, and explaining crime is an extremely complex and multivariate problem. Nevertheless, Levitt shows that the five states that legalized abortion two years before Roe v. Wade witnessed a crime fall earlier than the other 48 states. Further, those states with the highest abortion rates in the 1970s experienced the greatest fall in crime in the 1990s, and the entire decline in crime was among the post-Roe younger age group, not among older groups.

More generally, and as an further test of his hypothesis, Levitt demonstrates that shrinking the pool of criminals decreases the rate of crime through three additional factors: increased rates of imprisonment accounts for a third of the drop in crime (compared to capital punishment, which accounts for only 1/25th of the decrease), increased number of police (who remove criminals from the system) accounts for 10% of the crime drop, and the bursting of the crack cocaine bubble caused profits to collapse along with the incentive to sell it (and thus the accompanying violence declined), accounting for another 15% of the crime plunge.

The kind of statistical tools that Levitt employs are simple yet elegant. He cuts to the core of a question, and he picks problems that are damn interesting, even if some of them seem trivial. All social scientists should read this book and ask themselves if the problems they are working on are as interesting or important as those in this superb work, and if they are using the best available methods for understanding them."

Subscribe to eSkeptic by sending an email to join-skeptics@lyris.net. Unsubscribe by sending an email to leave-skeptics@lyris.net. Contact us at skepticmag@aol.com. Contents are Copyright © 2005 Michael Shermer, the Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, eSkeptic newsletter. Permission to print, distribute, and post with proper citation and acknowledgment. This webpage is coded by Rocketday Arts to W3C compliant XHTML 1.1, adhering to accessibility guidelines set forth by the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative and US Section 508. www.skeptic.com

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Webots

May 18, 2005 08:07 PM

I notice that MSNBot is hitting this page about twice as many times as Google and using about 3 times the bandwidth.

Microsoft looks to be working hard on its search engine and putting its robot out there a lot more extensively (extent of search) and intensively (depth of search).

I wonder where this is going? Is the war of search engines on? I hope so. I was a very early user of Google, but now I think that link power is more an indicator of celebrity and innanity than it was back then.

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Neotony

Neotony is the retention of juvenile traits in the mature adult. This is a good thing in humans, as we retain more of our playful, inquisitive, juvenile traits as we age. Thus, a Kolmogorov (Russian mathematician) can create a whole new way of looking at complex statistical processes well into his 70's. I feel as intellectually creative as I ever have. And ask my grandchildren how playful I am; they come running out of the house every time I drop by. Papa means play.

So I have nothing against neotony, except tonight I saw an example of it gone wild. I got back from a more than 300 mile motorcycle ride today (about 200 asphalt and 100 dirt). Bonnie was not in a good state. So, at her urging, we had some frozen vegetables with our shared steak tonight. Big mistake.

I really was surprised. We had frozen succotash, probably a North American Indian dish. The corn kernels were pale and about one half the size of kernels I remember from the last time I ate a frozen vegetable. I have no clue when this was, but it has to have been 30 years ago.

What happened? The corn is neotonized; what I had to eat was a juvenile version of the plant in arrested development. In human terms, I would say the corn was about a 12 year old version of a plant that you might eat at age 30.

The peas were so small they were just nothing. The green beans were a little better. At least they had some color, but no texture.

It was mush when it was supposed to the succotash. The dish itself is a poor choice for nutrition and the frozen version couldn't appeal to anyone. No wonder kids won't eat their vegetables and most adults won't either.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (5)

Hits

May 17, 2005 07:50 PM

It is hard to believe the hit count went over 80,000 today. Watch out Pamela Anderson.

Anyway, thanks and it has been easy and fun. I intend to finish the book with this bit of inspiration, not to try to make money from the blog (I can do much better consulting). Yet, it is tempting to accept a few ads.

What do you think?

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Morning workouts

Alexander asks a question on when to work out.

"Is a morning workout more due to lifestyle/preference or is there some reasoning that suggests we workout better on an empty stomach?"

Then he makes this wonderful observation: "The only link I can think of (between activity on an empty stomach in the morning) is the evolutionary one. That is that most of the day's activity must have happened during hunting/foraging and that prior to it food was either unavailable, or severely limited to feed the whole family (I assume that HGs would eat in groups) and waiting to be consumed along with the day's hunt."

First, morning workouts. For me they work better, I can get to the gym more reliably, and they set up my day as they make me relaxed and comfortable to be working at a desk (when I used to do that as a Professor). But, there are some physiological reasons as well. You can go at it a bit harder on an empty stomach. I find it hard to work out hard in the afternoon any time after a meal.

On a more physiological note. Body builders in the old days used to carry a bucket to throw up in during their workouts. There is a reason for this, which was not known at the time. If you release large amounts of hGH (growth hormone) you can become nauseous. It would be better not to have food there to regurgitate when you do work out hard enough to become nauseous (I almost always have a slight feeling of nausea sometime during a workout). So, a fasting overnight workout may avoid these problems.

But, an even better reason for morning workouts is physiological. The overnight fast releases hGH and the morning workout is a nice bonus to this hGH. So, you metabolize fat at a high rate during and after the workout. Arnold says morning workouts are best and I agree. But that doesn't keep me from working out whenever I feel like it.

A caution: when you work out in the morning you have to let your heart get used to the load. It is a bit of a shock, which is good but only up to a point. So, build the load to let your heart adapt. A lot of people die every morning going to the bathroom. Their hearts have not gotten going and they strain to eliminate and close their glottus, particularly if they are constipated. This denies blood to the heart and they keel over. Constipation can kill.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (8)

Our First Ride Together

Sunday was the first day my grandson, Corey, and I rode our motorcycles together. Though his dad and I were primarily there to teach him to ride his new adventure motorcycle, he wanted so much for us to ride together. So, I brought my KTM along and we rode down the valley and back together. Here we are returning.

Is there anything better than to teach a child to share something you love to do? We will do many more of these rides together.

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Suntans and meals

A little storm here over my apparent approval of a suntan. And a little controversy over whether my meals are "evolutionary".

The latter is easy. We do live in today's world and have available foods our ancestors could not have eaten. Most of these are based on the four starchy crops that supply about 60% of the world's calories. The idea of evolutionary eating, and it is a model to guide thinking more than a prescription, is to try to avoid foods that are far removed from natural plant and animal sources. I have called my diet PaleoMed because it has a big Mediterranean component in the olives, olive oil, and spices.

Remember, Evolutionary Fitness is a fusion of the Stone Age with the High Tech; it is not an attempt to mimic a lost lifeway. It is a Darwinian approach to life, health and fitness that is fully grounded in the modern science of complex physiological systems.

As for suntans.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (8)

Sadly Watching a Marine go Soft

May 16, 2005 04:23 PM

I think our Marines are about as tough and brave as anyone can be. Our Community Manager is a retired Marine. When I first saw him about 2 years ago, he was tan and lean and had a shaved head. He looked terrific; erect and leather tough.

What happened to him I wondered when he came by my house last week. He was pale, kind of softish with too much tissue hanging out everywhere, and limping. I asked him why he was limping. He pulled or tore a hamstring doing a 10K. This is his third tear in 2 years.

I knew he had been doing Triathlons for the past 2 years, but I hadn't seen him up close for some time and I was more sad than surprised to see how he looked.

The tan is gone because he trains indoors, riding the stationary bike, logging miles on the treadmill, and swimming laps in the indoor pool. The hamstring tears have been nagging because he won't stop training or doing events. So, he has a more or less constant limp.

Why the fat? He eats the kind of junk runners have been taught to rely on. He does all the Carboload meals preceding each event. (Does anybody still believe loading works? Apparently, but the belief is bogus. Only a depleted muscle from over-training requires any thing like a load. And the CHO load ramps up insulin, blood sugar, and stress hormones.) He eats every kind of CHO you can lay your hands on, potato chips are consumed in large quantities. (Does he know about trans fatty acids?) He may permanently damage his hypothalmic-pituitary-adrenal axis.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (8)

Evolutionary Fitness Eating

Ok, the meals section has been so popular I have decided to add a chapter to the book on, not just nutrition and recipes, but on eating patterns (which are at least as important). This is one way your comments are helping to shape the book to be more useful to readers.

This is lunch today. Cut chicken strips over lettuce, red cabbage (one of the best foods), olives, green onions, and pine nuts. Olive oil and balsamic vinegar with basil. The often-present Budweiser beer (far better than soft drinks, iced tea, or whatever other people drink).

I cook or prepare meals by color and texture, as you can see by now. The dark colors signal high antioxidant content. Texture is fiber, usually in watery plants so that it is water-soluable fiber.

Some will say it is a small lunch. That's OK with me. It was filling because it had so much texture and flavor.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (7)

More Meals

May 15, 2005 07:32 PM

For some people eating the Evolutionary Fitness Way is hard to impossible. They cannot imagine a meal without bread or rice or potatoes or "name your favorite starchy carbohydrate".

I like to post these meals as examples of how to improvise and basically gather in your own house. This one was totally improvised as neither my wife nor I had been to the store in a while.

I was hungry as I had just finished the softball tournament with The Worst Team in the History of the Universe and hadn't eaten lunch in several days. So this was a large meal, as you can see by the picture and I was not able to eat it all at a single sitting. I never eat until I am stuffed. I finished the meal the next day as part of my lunch along with some other leftovers.

So, we had what appeared to be no food in the house and I went looking around. I came up with a half a can of olives, a whole 303 jar of artichoke hearts, a can of good ol' Trader Joe's salmon, a big hunk of ginger, and a small yellow squash. One whole tomato and a whole avocado. I grilled the squash and artichokes and then tossed everything together with pine nuts. It was great.

The day after this meal we ate at a friend's barbeque in the early afternoon. Hot dogs, hamburgers, a few fresh sliced celery and carrot sticks, and tons of the usual potato chips, tortilla chips, dips and all that. Cokes and other soft drinks, along with some wine or beer. I was amazed at how many people drank Cokes, not Diet (which is not really much better), but the real thing. I really am out of it, as they say, because I tend to think no smart person drinks this stuff.

After the meal, a tray of brownies was passed around, followed by chocolate chip cookies, and then a tray of lemon something or other. My wife and I are the only ones who did not eat any of these items. Again, I was amazed anyone eats this stuff. Every one there but my wife and I has a weight problem, varying from moderate, to more than moderate, to only just emerging. These are all sucessful, sort of college to JC-level educated people. How can they know so little about food?

Mexican, Greek Salmon...

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (5)

Sport as open society

May 14, 2005 11:43 AM

The playing field is a place where performance is readily observed. It was so among our ancestors, where games were a prominant part of life. On the field, one can exhibit good genes and women can judge their potential mates. It is no accident that men love to compete in games and women admire great athletes.

With our information age it is now possible to have the images of the best performances in the world right before us. Unfortunately, this means that good performances on the playing field among our peers are easily overshadowed in comparison to the great performances we can see by just turning on our television sets. This is a problem for both sexes when these hyper performances and appearances become models for ourselves. It is easy to feel that you don't measure up when you compare your performance, your publications, or your appearance with the elite of the entire world.

In the small band setting of nearly all of human existence, this was a very small problem. In fact, you would take great pride in having a super performer in your band as it enhanced your survival. Today, it can be a burden to see hyperperformance or great looking people if you feel you don't measure up. They aren't in your small band and they are of no help to you and do nothing to enhance your survival.

The way I approach this is to take pleasure in the heights to which human performance can be taken through refinement and specialization.

LINK · Sports · Comments (4)

Drinking Battery Acid

May 13, 2005 08:51 PM

Again, I loved the comments.

I have already argued against sports and soft drinks. It turns out they are not so "soft" as some are almost as acidic as battery acid.

Here are some acid contents of popular drinks. High acidity means low PH. Water is neutral at PH 7. The rest are really low, with some drinks coming in close to battery acid (PH 1). Not only do these drinks dissolve your teeth, they deplete calcium from your skeleton.

This is from "Stop the pop! How to reduce decay”, Northwest Dentistry, Vol 80, No 2.

ACID AMOUNT Per 12 ounces

Pure water 7.00 (neutral)

Diet Coke 3.39

Gatorade 2.95

Hawaiian
Punch 2.82

Coca Cola 2.53

Battery Acid 1.00

Some sports drinks are bad. The University of Maryland found the drinks that dissolved the most enamel are: KMX sports drink, Snapple lemonade, Red Bull, Gatorade lemon-lime, Powerade Arctic Shatter, Arizona Iced Tea, Fanta Orange, and finally Pepsi and Coca Cola. KMX sports drink caused 10 times more damage to enamel than Coke.

It is also true that low PH makes your mouth more hospitable to germs. Dental infections are one of the prime sources of cardiovasular disease. In fact, cardiovascular disease has the classic pattern of a pathogenic disease. A sharp rise, peak, and then a fall as the host and the pathogen accommodate to one another. Chlamydia is almost always found in the tissues of atherosclerotic blood vessels. Remember, they found that uclers are caused by a bacteria, Helicobacter Pylori, when they thought for many years it was tension, and blah, blah, blah (name your doctor's pet disease).

It is entirely likely that a good deal of cardiovascular disease is pathogenic and, indirectly, inflammatory. The inflammation may come from the immune system trying to kill the pathogen and Chlamydia is a promising candidate. Statins, the seemingly drug of choice in cardiovascular disease, turns out to be a powerful anti inflammatory. Their ability to lower cholesterol (doubtful) may be secondary to their anti inflammatory effect.

Keep your teeth and gums healthy, it may prevent cardiovascular and other diseases.

Hunter gatherers retain their skeletal mass into their old age. They have very strong teeth and have been known to bite through iron nails with no damage to their teeth. Their teeth are sometimes tools, and strong ones at that. They are also powerful weapons.

Don't dip your teeth in battery acid and don't drink any of this stuff.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (1)

Joggers have no power

May 12, 2005 08:22 PM

I am enjoying the comments as much as I am writing this blog.

I have been playing in a softball tournament these past two days; tomorrow is the final day. Too bad I am playing on the worst team in the history of the Universe, but I am still having fun and observing how physiology and performance go together. I won't discuss our playing (dismal, 0 and 4) or my hitting (9 for 12, with one home run and an intentional walk in the last inning with two runners on base), or my fielding (sparkling at my first time at short stop). What I do want to mention is the way long-term activities condition the body's make up and performance.

One of our players is a long-term jogger; he runs nearly every day, has done quite a few marathons, and does many 10Ks and so on. He is more slender than most of the other players, this too is an accommodation that is not all that impressive (more later).

He has no power. He cannot generate enough bat speed to get the ball out of the infield, and he is tall, about 6'4".

He has no speed. He runs the bases like he is jogging and cannot sprint. I had to hold him up at third base when many of our slow players could have made it home. They, at least can sprint. He can't. I think he could run the bases nearly all day at his jogging speed. But, he is incapable of sprinting.

Why is this so? And is this a good thing?

It isn't a good thing, but it is common among long distance runners. They are weak and can generate little power. I recall reading a study (sorry no reference here, I am a bit busy) that tested marathon runners in vertical leap. They couldn't even jump 2 feet.

There are many reasons why long distance running, if that is all one does, leaves a physiology that is not capable of generating high, or rapid force.

How then are joggers slender? They are not slender, they simply have no muscle mass; they are weak and their muscles are primarily slow twitch fiber. In spite of their slender appearance, joggers are not lean. The average body fat content of jogging club members was 22 percent. Anything above 13% is deleterious. Now I recognize there is sample selection bias here as the members of the club may be there because they are fat and trying to lose weight. Either it is not working (true) or they are fat and will soon leave jogging.

A long-term jogger's muscle tissue is primarity ST fiber. ST fiber does not gain mass (hypertrophy) and the cells are small so the vascular system can supply the cells during aerobic activities. FT fiber does enlarge, far more than ST fiber. Joggers have more fat and less muscle than other people.

Their hearts are no more healthy and Jorge's fine comment amplifies my points on that issue. Plainly, they have too little metabolic head room in their hearts, a signal that also tells us that this is true of other physiologic systems.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (9)

Scull of Doom?

May 11, 2005 05:02 PM

This MASS Scull is a thing of beauty. But, some push even this swift and lovely thing too far. Two who had great success with this lovely device also had tragic consequences. Grace Kelly's brother was an Olympic champion in the single-manned scull. Sir Redgrave was also a many time Olympic champion in the scull.

Grace Kelly's brother died of atrial fibrillation while out on a jog. Sir Redgrave was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 35. What is going on here?

Actually, many joggers die; it is one of the more lethal things to do. When I pass a jogger in my car or motorcyle, I am always tempted to say, "Slow down and live." Jogging seems to train the chaos out of the heart beat; an adaptive heart is one that is driven by many, decentralized controllers or clocks. So, it has no central scale because it has clocks on different frequencies driving the beat. You can recognize a healthy heart beat from the random intervals between beats. In fact, the distribution for these beat intervals is a Levy Stable distribution, as are so many other things in nature and financial markets.

A heart going through congestive heart failure is too metronomic in its beat; the intervals are too regular. Both Kelly and Redgrave probably trained a lot of the adaptive chaos out of their hearts through the highly ritualized, repetitive, and metronomic training they followed. I hate to say that I fear Redgrave will also have heart problems in the future.

I suppose it is hard to be the brother of a famous sister and one has to find some way to clamber up the hil of success. But, the feverish pursuit of fame in the scull is a hard task and a dangerous one.

LINK · Endurance Training: Death, Injury, and Risk ~ · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (8)

Do You Want to Live Forever?

May 10, 2005 07:56 PM

The actress Sandahl Bergman has a line in one of my favorite (and the only one I like) of Arnold Schwartenzegger's movies, Conan the Barbarian. Just before she, Arnold and an actor who appears to be Arnold's buddy from their euro-brick-laying and body building days, Franco Columbo (tuns out, it isn't him but another actor, see comment below), leap via rope down a deep drop into the snake pit, her character speaks the line. Just as she jumps, leading the men into the pit she says "Do you want to live forever?"

This has an easy answer: no. I want to live on my terms only and as long as I choose to.

I am reflecting on this because I see my mother and wife being drawn into the modern medical system where they increasingly feel like pawns or passive victims. I treat doctors like consultants; tell me your opinion of the options and I will choose. Give me some references to the literature and I will read them and see what I think.

Really good doctors, who actually have time to read the medical literature (I think few do as I give them references all the time in my consultations with them), will accept this and be good natured about it. Insecure doctors will bristle at the very act of questioning their authority. At the same time, they will only give you references from their medical school days since they have so little time to keep up since then.

I am not blaming them for their situation, only for their hubris in thinking what they learned in medical school or think they have distilled as knowledge from the small sample of their own patients is Truth.

I can say that I have only had one good doctor over my relatively long life. He was an admirable skeptic, as I am, and would accept a diagnosis only if it had strong evidence to support it. Even then, he got it wrong often enough that I did not do what he suggested. Most medical conditions of an acute form heal themselves in 3 weeks. Chronic diseases can only be moderated, not managed, and one has to deal with them on your own terms, not the doctor's.

The body can't work any faster than 3 weeks to destroy invading pathogens without triggering severe auto-immune diseases where the collateral damage caused by your immune system becomes a disease in itself. But, there are enough virulent modern forms of diseases around that I wouldn't fool around if I thought I had one.

I have actually stopped seeing doctors for the last 4 years. My health parameters are wonderful and I have been blessed with good health and the brains to live a life that is conducive to excellent health. But I do live a life that is very different from how many people live. I will not check into a hospital without a clear understanding that I will leave whenever I wish to. I have both a living will and a medical power of attorney that strictly limit what these people and others, if you remember the Terry Schiavo matter, can do to me or for me (but really for themselves and their own self-image as wonderful human beings).

I am living a one horse shay model of life, as economists call it. A one horse shay lasts a finite time, but in perfect condition until it falls completely apart all at once. This is an easy model to write capital value equations for, but it is the best model for living as well. I live to push the curve upward and outward, but not to extend the upper bound of the curve. That, I feel, is not possible, but for extreme interventions that I do not wish to approve. My comments on the television show Can You Really Extend Your Life? (see the earlier link) say it all. You can't push the upper limit of life with current technology and if there were such technology why would you want to live this way?

Do you really want to live forever?

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Evolutionary Fitness Talk

May 9, 2005 06:00 PM

Here are the slides of my talk to the University Forum at UCI. The power law shown here is the signature of nature's strategy of organization and one humans followed for millenia. It is one I follow today. Note the frequency versus intensity scaling and the lack of a central tendancy. The mean is not a good indicator of the typical activity, in fact the mode is over at the far left where languid ease is the rule. The variance is infinite, which is the same thing as saying it does not exist. Constant variation but within a pattern of constained novelty is the human condition until very recently. The talk was very popular, though I have some doubt many people got enough of the content to follow these strategies. The most heartening comment was from a retired professor of chemistry who said, "if you don't write this book it will be a crime." Students in my health class more or less said the same thing. So, I am finally writing it.

The talk is a brief discussion of my strategies for living a healthful and enjoyable life. It is a pdf file, so use your reader to view it. Slides of University Forum Talk on Evolutionary Fitness

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Olympic Diets and Diabetes

Simon Fellows has sent us an interesting story about one of Britain's top Olympic athletes. Steve Redgrave won 4 consecutive Olympic Gold Medals in rowing. His training was arduous and his diet atrocious. Have a look at how he fueled himself to handle the volume of training he seemed to think necessary to achieve his goals and then see why he became a Type 2 diabetic by the age of 35. This in spite of the high activity level.

The 6000 calories he consumed a day is not so much more than I ate for years when I was training a bit harder than I do now. I was around 5000 calories. (Little known secret, intense, intermittent training burns calories at from 6 to 8 times higher than steady state, aerobic training and has a far better hormone response. We are now getting into my special technology for which you will have to see the book). Lumberjacks expend about 8000 calories a day, back when they chopped and sawed instead of driving big machines. The Ache' hunter gathers of Paraguay expend something like 4000 to 5000 calories a day. Even slightly built, nomadic herders living at high altitude expend close to this level. None of these people consume the dangerous junk Redgrave did to fuel the activity. The Ache' do it on meat and fat, along with high energy tubers.

Remember, specialized professional athletes do weird things. Part of it is ignorance, part is staying with what works. For the most part, they are wonks, wholly into themselves and their goals. Marriages and friends tend to suffer in their determination to achieve their goals.

In particular, the endurance athletes follow almost ritualistic training routines and peculiar diets. Lance Armstrong's cancer likely had much to do with the poor antioxidant content of the high caloric density and sugary content of his diet. His aerobic capacity is phenomenal, but this form of metabolism produces abundant free radicals and the sugary diet promotes further free radical damage. Free radicals (ROS) damage cellular DNA and are one of the prime promoters of cancer. They shorten life too, as the ROS delete the ends of the telomeres. The length of the telomeres determines how many times the cell can divide, the Hayflick limit. When the strand of telomeres is gone, the cell dies. Finally, Armstrong's diet is one reason why his skin is rather thick in spite of his somewhat gaunt appearance.

If you read Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works, you will see that geniuses are the same way. Like these athletes, they have the basic stuff and talent; but what sets them apart is their accomplishments, which are gained through an amazing discipline and inner drive. Usually to the exclusion of other things. It is not in their talent, but in their achievements that they truly stand out. For that to happen, they have to be wonks at what they do. Golf is particularly demanding in this regard. Pro golfers, like Tiger and Vijay, are somewhat obsessive --- they are pure golf wonks.

Here is part of the content of the arti