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Goalies and FT
July 26, 2005 04:09 PM
I do recall a female student, a goalie on the soccer team, who took several of my classes at UCI who was featured in a research paper for the FT work outs she was trained with. This is consistent with the listing in Table 1 of Paul Chek's article linked in my previous post. A soccer goalie relies 80% on short term (probably FTx, which is purely glycolytic) and 20% on intermediate term (FTb, which is oxidative and glycolytic) energy pathways.
She looked great and was a very good student too.
Aside from cross country sking and long distance running there are few sports where performance depends on long-term energy sources. As I said, their basic function is to restore the fast and intermediate sources. This implies that we are "made" for intermittent energy bursts as so many of our sports require. This is not an accident, sports mimic ancestral energy rhythms. That is why they are fun and beneficial. But, you would never train for any of these sports, but the pure distance ones (and you shouldn't) by slow endurance running.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (5)
Anaerobic and Aerobic Contribution in Sports
Paul Chek is one of the very best trainers. I have several of his books. In his article Cardio Training: Paul Chek's Perspective on Dr. Mercola's web site, which I have read for years, Paul has a table adapted from Siff, et al Supertraining showing the contributions of the three important energy pathways in sports. Scroll down to Table 1 and see just how much aerobic training is overrated in sports. As all good exercise scientists know, the aerobic system recharges the anaerobic system. I think that is its primary function.
Chek also rightly notes the modest cardio demands of ancestral life. Humans are highly energy efficient in walking, but fairly inefficient when they run. So, our ancestors most likely were walkers and sprinters. The Ache walk and trot and then sprint when they are hunting peccaries in the forest. Pretty much like a lot of sports, basketball and baseball come to mind.
This is a power law pattern of effort and frequency, of which I have written before. Tennis is almost a perfect power law sport. The length of time once the ball is put into service until the conclusion of the point, taken over the course of a game is a perfect power law. Most points are decided quickly, fewer intermediately, and a few are very long. Recall the Venus v. Sharapova point that went about 100 plays before it was decided. But most points were over fairly soon. The frequency of the time intervals declines as the length of the interval increases by about f = t^(-alpha). The value of alpha is around 1.7 I recall.
As to aerobics and heart health, I, as you know, am very skeptical. Dudley White was President Dwight Eisenhower's physician. He long ago noted the absence of cardiovascular disease among Americans, and other populations, until sometime in the 1950s. Hunter gatherers do not suffer from cardiovascular disease when they live in their original ways. When they move into cities and live the Western Way, they soon develop diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
One of the mysteries is why cardiovascular disease developed so rapidly in the US from 1950 or 1960 on. Some blame vegetable oil, others starches and processed foods. All seem to be at least participants in the process. On the other hand, cardio disease shows the pattern typical of a new pathogen taking up a new host. Since the early sharp rise there has been some dampening of the disease and rates are now a bit lower than at their peak. This is a classic pathogen/host invasion and then accomodation, much like small pox behaved among early farmers 10,000 years ago.
Dr. Le Fanu has an intriguing hypothesis that this pattern may be due to chlamydia bacteria invading the vascular system. I won't go into that here, but it is consistent with the dramatic rise, peak, and then decline that is fairly typical of an pathogenic invasion and then accomodation. In other words, it could be a pathogen, or any of the other sources that people speculate about, such as vegetable oil, saturated fat, starches, processed food, etc. Problem is, there is nothing aerobic exercise is going to do about any of these.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (1)
Heart Beats and Lifetimes
July 24, 2005 11:07 AM
My post on Lance and his low heart beat elicited some surprise from commenters. There are disadvantages and even dangers in having a very low heart beat. I pointed out that a very low pulse makes one vulnerable to fainting because slight pressurization of the venal cavity that surrounds the heart stems the flow of blood to it and this in turn denies blood to the brain. So, if you choke or pressurize your chest, say, on a lift, you deny blood to your brain and you faint. Fainting is a protective measure for your brain. By falling prone you lower the column of blood your heart must support and save your brain which can fry in moments if denied blood and the oxygen it carries.
Though the fainting is protective, it doesn't prevent damage completely. The momentary denial of oxygen that caused you to faint does a bit of damage. Then when the blood returns it induces reperfusion ROS (reactive oxygen species) damage. At a very low pulse, the brain may live close to this denial/reperfusion injury boundary.
There surely is a healthy range of the human heart beat, though no one knows what its limits are. When my wife's heart beat got down near 32 her doctor was quite worried. An extremely low pulse can indicate congestive heart failure. On the other hand, an extremely high pulse, if continued over a period of time, can be a sign of something wrong, though the high pulse is not likely to overstress a strong heart.
What really seems to matter is the complexity of the heart rate. People talk about their pulse as though it were a clock or a metronome. This is far from true. The pulse rate or the intervals between beats are random. The statistical distribution of the intervals between beats is, you guessed it if you are a regular reader, a fractal distribution. It has a high variance and no characteristic scale or size of the interval. This has led the Ari Goldberger team at the Reyes Lab at Harvard to develop diagnostic tests of the heart based on their complexity measures.
A healthy heart has a high complexity measure, which is usually taken to be the fractal dimension. The complexity measure is (inversely) related to the exponent of the power law (here they are again, power laws are the organizational pattern of Nature). If I recall correctly, the exponent is around 1.2 to 1.5. These are, by the way, the exponents that you get in the distributions of movie revenues and extreme events in the stock market. Congestive heart failure, for example, dramatically reduces the complexity of the heart beat.
Advocates of aerobic exercise always seem to point to their low resting pulse as a benefit.
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Adventure Riding
July 23, 2005 07:32 PM
I am off to Ouray, Colorado next week to ride in the KTM Rocky Mountain Raid. Next month I turn 68 and we are doing some things that I love to do, but with the comfort and safety that keeps my wife, Bonnie, assured.
I can't explain it, but riding over mountain trails is something I just love to do. One reason, I think, is that I don't think. I do spend a lot of time thinking, so this is a true relief. On a trail you use your evolved and very effective fast processing mental mode to move safely and gracefully over an unknown trail. The focus is intense, but it is a non-thinking focus that strongly integrates mental processing and movement.
For me, there is a calmness and focus that I find hard to get in any other activity. I know my blood pressure drops when I turn onto a dirt trail and look far into the distance. Something like this must have been true of our ancestors when they go onto the trail to hunt, scavenge, forage for plants, or move camp.
I have long believed that modern life is cognitively deprived relative to the intensely stimulating life of our ancestors. This is the way I have found to capture this high processing, non-thinking, physical action mode of behavior that must have been a very large component of ancient life. The barrenness of modern life in this kind of mental/physical activity is one of the many reasons that there is a high demand for entertainment and mental stimulants and depressors such as alcohol and drugs.
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LINK · Adventure Motorcycling · Comments (2)
Lance
July 20, 2005 05:01 PM
Does anyone but me think that Lance Armstrong looks old for his brief 34 years of life?
He is on the verge of a historic victory and it is a tribute to his genes, his determination and the science behind him. Yet, he has a potentially troubled future ahead of him. For one thing, he will be too rich and too famous. And, he has sacrificed much to get where he is; a marriage and his family, and a serious bout with cancer. When he retires, he will be but 34 and his future cannot possibly be as dramatic and accomplished as his past. Bicycle racing doesn't have the historical tradition of golf, baseball, or boxing. Five years from now, he will not be remembered well. Only Babe Ruth, Joe Dimaggio, Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Joe Louis and Henry Johnson will be remembered for the ages. And that is because they are in sports that constantly remind you of their history.
Lance's resting pulse is 32, below any I have seen. Runners who have a low pulse rate are apt to black out at the slightest provocation. President Bush, whose pulse was about 42 when he was running, fainted when he choked on a corn chip. (He has quit running because of chronic knee problems, a common problem for these kinds of repetitive sports that permit too little recovery from wear and tear.] Even a momentary interuption of oxygen and blood flow is enough to make you black out when you have a very low pulse.
At a pulse rate as low as Armstrong's (and other distance athletes), blood flows slowly and the brain is vulnerable to ischemic damage (deprivation of blood flow and ROS damage) and then reperfusion injury when the blood flow surges (this is a potent source of ROS). [Check the archives if you don't know what ROS stands for. And look at the archives anyway because there is a lot of stuff in there that I often get questions about.] Armstrong had brain cancer, among other locations through his body. Alternating ischemia with reperfusion injury is an easy way to harm your brain. The blood flow surge from his resting pulse of 32 to his maximum pulse of 200 is enormous and a potent source of ischemic and reperfusion injury to the brain and other tissues.
Lance makes 600 watts at his VO2 max. I can easily make 600 watts, but it is beyond my VO2 max, meaning I am tapping into my anaerobic resources more than he is. Still, at twice his age I am easily able to generate power near his level for brief intervals, which is all that is needed for an easy life in this energetically undemanding modern life.
I admire accomplishment, but the sacrifices made to get there interfere with a life that is satisfying. The window through which accomplishment is seen in sports is very narrow and much falls out of our view if we admire the image that is presented in the media (think OJ when you hear this).
Great accomplishment is not greatness. In fact, it is often a wonkishness and insecurity that drives some to high athletic accomplishment, often to the detriment of their lives and of those around them. So, my hat is off to Lance, but is this any way to spend a life?
LINK · Everything · Comments (10)
Ascending or Descending Sets?
July 19, 2005 01:31 PM
So, which is the best way to hit the FT and ST fibers? Dr. Hatfield recommends that you start heavy and end light over your sets. The theory is that the FT fibers fatigue faster and then you move on to the ST fibers with lighter weight and more reps. These used to be called drop sets.
Others suggest that you use isometric contraction against elastic cords (see my earlier post) to tire the ST and then recruit FT fibers as the exertion is prolonged.
There is no doubt each of these approaches works. I use both techniques. So, why do I have a preferred technique?
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Leptin, Insulin and Brains
The brief BBC article that Chris alerted us to is another in a line of research on hormones related to obesity are implicated in brain disfunction.
The article very briefly notes that leptin potentiates learning in the brain, meaning it creates a degree of flexibility in the neuronal wiring so that new connections can be made in learning. Obese people do not learn new information at a rate comparable to others (no wonder the BBC puts this as suffering from obesity, as though it is not related to their own behavior. What a dumbed down organization this has become. British taxpayers should revolt and take their money away. I doubt the BBC could survive without subsidy even in the wasteland that we see as broadcasting today.)
Of course, obese individuals are leptin-resistant and it should be no surprise that the brain along with other organs becomes resistant. The same thing is true of insulin; obese individuals are both leptin- and insulin-resistant. Thus, they suffer a strange form of brain malnourishment. Their bodies are awash in food substances, if you consider french fries food that is, and yet their brains resist the action of insulin that would open pathways to the brain to these nutrients. It is also known that fasting and exercise increase brain derived neuroprotective factors. The obese do not fast and do not exercise, so they gain no benefits from these protective mechanisms. Followers of Evolutionary Fitness do reap these benefits from BDNPFs and from their high insulin and leptin (but not political) sensitivity.
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Animism, Physics, and Psychology
July 18, 2005 01:54 PM
Interesting comments on primitive beliefs.
A book called The Dawn of Belief tries to tackle this subject of stone age or just a bit later beliefs. I haven't read it.
I think a good deal of the animistic beliefs of Stone Age people is a form of primitive physics, trying to understand cause and effect.
Another form of animism comes from using the mirror neurons to play a bit of game theory to anticipate the movements of animals. It seems natural to attribute conscious thought to the animal in order to try to predict its actions. That is what I would call a model. If it works the modeler may try to attribute the reasoning to the creature. But, that is just a confusion.
Children have a primitive physics and psychology that seems to invest moving things with a kind of "thing that makes it move". According to child physics a cloud moves through the sky by some kind of conscious intention. They seem to believe that someone must be directing the action. This is, of course, a long way from granting an afterlife to this driver of movement.
A good deal of what is called folk psychology has this flavor too. "The Devil made me do it." I am thinking of Flip Wilson when I say that. Folk psychology also errors in attributing one's own modeling of another person's actions to that person. It confuses what is going on in your head in trying to model that other person with what that other person is thinking or doing. They may not be thinking at all and may have no motives other than some kind of situated action.
At a deeper level it seems that people invest more sentience in things than they need to. The flocking of birds is often used as an example of conscious coordination between the birds, forming a pattern behind a leader. This is far from what is true which is that a few simple rules of movement are enough.
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Feeling Better
July 16, 2005 11:23 AM
I am glad to say that my wife is feeling better. We met some old friends in Las Vegas for lunch and to make a stop at Trader Joe's for their smoked salmon. We left right away as neither of us likes Las Vegas.
Tom Saving, who is shown in the picture with his wife Barbara, is one of my oldest friends. We were colleagues together at Texas A&M University, where we wrote many papers together and founded RRC, a research company. Tom is the Director of the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M and was recently approved by Congress for a second term on the Social Security Board of Trustees. (I have never seen him in shorts before.)
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Many Cultures, One Physiology
July 15, 2005 07:20 PM
Since we have people from 60 countries now reading the website I wanted to note the degree to which we share a common physiology even though our cultures, diet, and activities are different. Our beliefs, which are so prominent in our political ideologies and policies matter not in these more fundamental processes which are universal to culture, belief, political ideology, sex, ethnicity and all the other things that politicians and shallow political commentators try to sell as motivators of our actions and beliefs.
Current knowledge seems to place the source of our mitochondrial DNA to a single human female ancestor who lived some 70,000 to 120,000 years ago. The male source of our DNA is more obscure and may never be identified. Adam and Eve almost surely did not live together and probably did not live in the same time frame. The DNA sequences are stochastic and evolve from their own starting points, each line to its own, and where they may go no one can know (nobody knows anything, in the movies, or about these things).
There may have been a further narrowing of the human gene pool.
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Depth of the Energy Landscape
July 13, 2005 06:19 AM
If you think about your activities and their variation as a landscape that is very rugged, with peaks and valleys of all sizes, you have a good model of the kind of variation that I advocate. Think of a Paleo ancestor who would have had to engage in very intense activity in his/her fight or flight response, or even just in a week of treking, hunting, butchering, building shelter by hand, and so on. And, in contrast, his/her hours of leisure would have been many and the rhythm of work tied to the natural variation of the day and season. Our ancestors also would have a depth of sleep and rest quite unlike we are able to achieve.
Their low blood pressure, as shown by all primitive groups, was surely a result of the variation of active and deeply restful periods. The depth of their sleep, even though watchful and quickly alert if needed, would drop their blood pressure. Their biorhthyms are tuned to a natural world.
So, I often evaluate my day in energy terms; by how far did my hardest exertion exceed my deepest rest. This depth should vary and be all over the map, but it must have real depth. Day light is a time for peaks and evening and night are a time for valleys in the energy landscape. Without the depth there is no signal to the internal environment and we lose touch.
Our hormonal systems must have strong patterns to synchronize with one another. In many ways, the way we live puts our hormones at odds with one another and the loss of coordination begins the aging cascade.
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (6)
Half a Million
July 12, 2005 05:13 PM
A milestone was reached today as we passed a half a million total hits in just under 120 days of operation. This month we are getting more than ten thousand hits a day. Ah, if hits were nickels.
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Internal and External States
In the previous post, I discussed alternating between anabolic and catabolic states. I suggested this alternation was natural because humans were coupled to a rhthmic and complex metabolic landscape (peaks and valleys in energy intake and expenditure).
In ancient times energy was expended during daylight and rest occured during the night. Activity and rest were synchronized to the day/night pattern. When I claimed that a lot of our intelligence is "out there" in the world, I am referring to the way the brain and our biological clocks synchronize with external patterns so that internal and external rhythms are similar.
Today, any pattern is likely; food intake occurs throughout the day and night. Rest occurs at any time too. Activity has little or no diurnal pattern; many office workers are more likely to be active in the dark than in day light. The brain can no longer rely on the external world as a synchronizer of internal rhythms; it loses touch and there is a breakdown of coordination between the external and internal worlds.
And thus is the alternation of anabolic and catabolic states lost.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (2)
Altering Anabolic and Catabolic States
July 11, 2005 04:19 PM
A reader has asked which is best, eating every other day or compressing the fed state to 10 hours or less. This later strategy means compressing all your meals into a narrow time window of 12, 10 or less hours and eating nothing for the remaining 12 or 14 hours.
We first have to identify the prime factor in either of these eating patterns relative to a more conventional eating style. What is a conventional eating style? It depends on your daily pattern and pretty much on whether you are overweight or not.
Overtly obese individuals have a typical pattern of eating: many meals and snacks during the day, a high fat content of the meals, and a shifting of calories toward the later hours of the day, particularly during the dark hours. Body builders follow a similar pattern, though their intake is more uniform over all 24 hours of the day; some get up at night to eat so as to stay in the anabolic state (a fed state with high insulin and net protein positive balance) and avoid entering the catabolic state (the opposite of the anabolic state). The overweight and body builders tend to share a common strategy (or failure) of eating many meals a day.
Both have problems. The obese have many and body builders manage to avoid some of them because they have such high activity levels. But, they both tend to die of similar diseases, diseases of metabolism.
The characteristic that links both these sets of individuals (the obese and the body builders of the serious type) is that they both lack variation between the anabolic and catabolic states. They have a flattened and somewhat uniform metabolic state. The obese do little and eat steadily so that they seldom vary their metabolic state; they are almost always in the anabolic (growth) state.
Body builders who fixate on maintaining a positive protein (nitrogen) balance only enter the catabolic state when they work out. Fortunately, they tend to work out often and long, so they do enter the catabolic state for that period of time. But they ingest a meal soon after the work out and then go back into the anabolic state.
This is bad.
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Spam
July 7, 2005 08:28 PM
Well all web sites have it and now a spammer has come to this one.
I have set all kinds of filters for trackbacks and spam email and some of it still gets through.
But, you know what? I trust my readers and, aside from refining the filters to cut the junk, I'm not going to do more. I have a book to write that is more important.
I have confidence that you will ignore those spam mails that get through. It isn't worth my time trying to protect you when you have already shown your sophistication by visiting this site. [Nice line and I really do think it is true. But, my compliment is to you, not me.]
LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (5)
Fruit
I have gotten a lot of questions or comments about fruit lately. It is almost against the Evolutionary Fitness Way to respond to them, but I want to make a few points.
First, most people frame a question according to the answer they expect. So, some of the questions are framed as though there is a contradiction or conflict between my views and someone else's. Just because the question is framed this way, doesn't mean that it should be answered according to that frame.
That is why I am posting this rather than answering a specific question. I don't think the questions are framed right.
Second, the questions seem to be seeking an answer to the question: what is optimal? No one knows, but you know better than anyone else if you look at the right information. All I am interested in doing is in setting out a model that lets anyone look at their own results and make some evaluations that may lead to better outcomes. But, nothing is certain.
Third, fruit contains lots of nutrients and minerals. Watermelon, for example, contains precursors to and significant amounts of glutathione, the premium antioxidant. So, you get benefits for your calories. It is empty calories that are the scourge of our eating. And we are vulnerable to calories in this form because they almost mainstream into our blood, giving a lift to those who are living on their blood sugar and their muscle mass to make more of it.
So, the question is: what are the benefits of fruit relative to the calories they contain. They happen to be relatively high, at least compared to most foods you might eat.
But, quantity matters. Even with a low caloric density, fruit in large quantities will increase blood glucose (the load behind the density is high). So, how much should you eat? That depends on you and your activities.
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Muscles as Fuel
Hope you like the new site design. I sure do.
Dr. Rosedale, of whom you have heard before here, has a brief discussion on Dr. Mercola's web site about why many people are using their muscles as a source of fuel because they eat too much sugar and sugar-like foods. This includes the body builders who eat 4 or more times per day if they fall back on easy to prepare foods or protein drinks and bars.
Eating fat and sugary or starchy foods at the same time is a particularly bad practice. Eating sugar and protein together, a common practice of body builders, is not much better. Both the fat and the protein are directed to fat stores when sugar is available since it is the preferred fuel because it is so important to the brain. You've heard of this before in my Living LIFO post.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (6)
Free Spectrum
July 6, 2005 05:08 PM
Back in 1969 with several coauthors (a lawyer, an engineer, and two fellow economists) I published a paper in the Stanford Law Review showing how a market would allocate the electromagnetic spectrum. Our most difficult task was to show how you could define and enforce property rights in the spectrum. This is the bandwidth on which radio, microwave, satellites and many other communications technologies rely to transmit information. In this paper, we were following up on a suggestion by Ronald Coase (Nobel laureate in economics).
We were almost laughed at by critics who said it was technologically impossible and politically naive, but we got the last laugh. A lot of the criticisms came from people whose jobs depended on the system as it was then. And many Congressional fortunes depended on the allocation system (including Lyndon Johnson's fortune).
None of those criticisms held up and they didn't deter us from doing our article because I never thought you should restrict science or policy considerations to things that seem doable in the political arena. Ideas are far more powerful than current opinion or what is politically doable.
Spectrum auctions have come to the US, New Zealand and other countries and it has brought in billions to governments. By now the FCC license is tradeable and resembles an enforceable property right. In instances where property in spectrum were created in other countries, they pretty much use our definition.
So, in an edition celebrating the "let-the-market-do-it" research in spectrum allocation, the Journal of Law and Economics asked me to say where we are and where we need to be in a market for spectrum. No need to go into that here, but one of the things I did stress was to let the unused spectrum be used temporarily and without interference to its resident licensee by others. Roaming computers would "sniff out" unused spectrum, of which there is plenty, and essentially find free bandwidth for others to use.
Well now it is happening.
Read More »LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (3)
Junk Mail
This site is being hit by a gambling site. I have enabled comment registration to screen the site and trackback pings are off now.
No loss to any of us. If you have a TypeKey code you can use it to go right past the screening. If not, don't worry the comment will get through though it may be delayed briefly.
Your comment will go through a screening service and I will only delete commercial sources that are trying to use the site and us for their benefit.
Of course, no one here would ever use or buy a service from these abusers of the internet freedom of speech.
Since we are now well over 400,000 hits I suppose this had to happen.
LINK · Everything · Comments (1)
Four Meals a Day
July 5, 2005 12:24 PM
A lot of people eat four or more meals a day. My trainer does and my former golf teacher does (he had been a competitive body builder). People who snack all the time eat at least four times a day.
Such eating is claimed to maintain a moderate level of insulin, to prevent insulin spikes, and to mimic what hunter-gathers did. It is also supposed to keep you in positive nitrogen balance if you are trying to gain muscle.
I think it is a pretty bad idea for several reasons.
1. It is a hassle. It is hard enough to eat three meals that you prepare well with fresh ingredients. Four is just too hard to do.
2. It is so time-consuming that you are always rushing meals. This gives you no leisure at your meal time to enjoy the meal or your company. Usually, you have no company when you eat like this.
3. You will eat poor foods. It is too demanding to do otherwise. You will end up eating protein drinks and bars and all manner of other poor food. Too little fiber, too few plant-based phytochemicals, and your meals will have a rather high glycemic index.
4. While it is important to avoid insulin spikes (they are by far the most damaging) it is not so good to have a continuous infusion of insulin in your system. They can produce atherosclerosis in lab animals by infusing insulin continuously. Not a good thing for your blood vessels I suspect.
5. Your basal insulin level will rise as a consequence of maintaining a constant level in your blood stream This is not good at all.
6. You constantly have food in your stomach. How can you do anything demanding in this condition? You can't. And your stomach suffers from not having a break from continuous work; the mucosal lining breaks down and this is sometimes called diabetic stomach since some diabetics have to eat often to maintain their blood glucose levels.
7. You never experience hunger, a powerful trigger of gene expression that turns on DNA repair and heat shock proteins. So, your maintenance program is seldom activated.
8. You will, in general, have more fat mass than if you ate every other day and maintained the same body weight.
9. There isn't any evidence that this form of eating promotes health or the growth of lean muscle mass.
10. You weaken the growth hormone response you get from exercise and when you fall into REM sleep.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (15)
Pasta Horrors
July 3, 2005 04:36 PM
This is a bit personal since it applies to my wife, but it is something I think I should share with you for all of our sakes. The lessons apply to all persons, with or without diabetes.
We have been here many times before in our 20 years of living with her Type 1 (autoimmune, not the fat induced form of) diabetes. And so have we with our son for a bit longer (both are Type 1 diabetics). Protecting their health is the main reason I learned so much about metabolism.
My wife craves pasta once in a while (her family went out to Italian dinners every Sunday and part of it may be psychological; what isn't?).
And we pay the price.
Now pasta is supposed to be good for you, right? Not a chance, according to the research and our own long and troubled experience with it.
She has been on a new insulin regime (Lantus for long acting and Humalog for quick acting insulin --- these are among the new insulin analogues created by altering the amino acid sequence in the insulin molecule and charging three times as much for it). Her blood sugars have been picture perfect, like a role of 100s three times a day and day after day.
Last night she wanted pasta. I warned her and she knows it isn't a good thing to do. But, I am not a dictator and she has her history and tastes. So she had some. A fairly small serving.
Today was a horror. She had to do extra insulin to "cover" her high blood glucose reading in the morning. A lot extra. She had given herself extra insulin with the meal, but it didn't come close to covering the glucose load in the pasta. Recall, it is the glycemic index and the load behind it and pasta is heavy on load and rather high on glycemic index too.
She ended up with an insulin reaction in the supermarket and somehow managed to find her way home in a fog. I got home just in time. She was wandering about the house and trying to test her blood glucose with the meter. She couldn't get it to work. How she got home is hard to understand. She is a good driver and just could not collect her thoughts well enough to understand, since her brain was bonking, that she had to take a glucose tablet to feed her brain.
What a waste and how dangerous, all because of this (to me) strange carbohydrate craving. She could have eaten a dozen donuts and not have had such a serious problem. Then again, she could have made it easy on her and me by having what I had for dinner, a lettuce, bok choy, red cabbage, olives, and salmon salad.
She has sworn, never again. But, like all humans, she has hyperbolic tastes and she will fall again, as she has before. I just hope I am there to fix it when it happens.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (11)
What Wasn't Said
July 1, 2005 08:28 PM
In the prior post on Pathways to Fat, there was a remarkable statement that went without notice. One of the most important things it said about cholesterol was that the body has a specialized sensor for it so it can get rid of it when it is present in food.
Small wonder it was not emphasized in the article for it challenges claims that cholesterol in the diet is a source of blood cholesterol.
I repeat here the quote with emphasis on the relevant part: "From the point of view of evolution, an animal capable of linking its ability to sense cholesterol with its ability to store fat may have had a survival advantage. An adult mammal has virtually no need for dietary cholesterol because its body can synthesize enough on its own. But LXRs give an animal the ability to sense the cholesterol component of a high-fat diet and get rid of it, while retaining the fat and storing it for times of deprivation.".
But, enough of this cholesterol stuff.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (2)
High Intensity Comes Through Again
This time the result is for high intensity exercise and stress. The earlier McMasters University study High Intensity Works showed brief, high intensity exercise was more effective than more moderate exercise of longer duration. Clarence Bass has a nice discussion of this study and a message from one of our readers has a link to more research on this point.
This one you needn't read because you already know of the effect of high intensity activity on hormone drives if you have been looking around this site much.
Here is the link for those of you who want to see a summary of the study High Intensity Exercise and Stress.
Actually, there is a double effect if you lower stress; you eat less and sleep better and, thus, invoke other mechanisms in addition to the effect of the exercise on body composition.
Why are these studies now beginning to surface on higher intensity exercise? It takes a while to move away from the moderate, aerobic focus which has a long history in fitness research. As I have said, this research is easier to do. But, it also seems to have something to do with the way things are in science. A few papers get notice and researchers start to ask questions. And they see the publicity one can get by finally looking critically at the old paradigm.
LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (1)
Pathways to Fat
It looks like two different pathways are linked through a cholesterol sensing protein and the linkage makes clear that the body's ability to store fat depends on cross talk between the pathways. When the body senses cholesterol in the diet it activates a fat storage program. LXR is the protein that governs the cross talk between these pathways.
I am largely protected from this cross talk between cholesterol and fat storage because: 1. I radically trim fat from meat and eat the cheapest, lowest fat cuts. This reduces the cholesterol. 2. I grill the meat over an open grate and fire so that the fat runs away from the meat. This sheds cholesterol with the fat. 3. I eat game often, which has low cholesterol. 4. I eat sea food often too and it has little cholesterol. 4. I eat relatively small portions of meat and plenty of bulky vegetables. [I have already broken down our 2 year old disposal, wearing it out on melon skins and tough vegetables. I went out today and bought a one horsepower disposal, the most powerful model I could find. For more on the roughage I throw at my poor disposal see my Three Day Food Diary in the Archives.]
I should say that in just the last day or two I have read of several mechanisms that are claimed to promote obesity; LXR, hyperexcitable brain cells that alarm us to awake from sleep, the "thrifty gene" in several incarnations, insulin, cortsol, and leptin. The list goes on with new additions coming at a high rate.
With so many pathways to obesity, you begin to suspect one of two things.
1. Finding one is where the money is. If you are a scientist and you find a path that some pharmacuetical intervention may alter, you are rich.
2. Evolution seems to have designed redundant pathways to fat storage. This is a bit unusual, I think, for redundancy is expensive and evolutionary structures only show redundancy when it really matters.
Why would fat storage be so important in the evolutionary environment? I tried to answer this in my Why We Get Fat article in the Archives.
A final comment. It is curious that so little research is done on the gene expression triggered by energy expenditure and how these pathways govern fat storage. It is pretty much a no-brainer that energy expenditure has declined by about 45% over the past two decades. Caloric intake has held fairly steady until just recently, where it has begun to explode as a result of soft drink and juice consumption and more eating outside the home. Do we need more research on the energy intake/expenditure part of the equation? I think so.
But, then we have the Lazy Overeater Theorem from my paper. Or, to put it more kindly, the evolutionary rule of energy conservation: Don't Waste Energy -- Eat it when you can and don't spend it if you don't have to. Modern life offers the ease and wealth to give expression to this innate human trait.
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