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More Against Grains

October 31, 2006 10:36 AM

Grains contain gluten, a protein that blocks the absorption of nutrients in the small intestine. Our early ancestors did not eat grains, they were too far down the list in terms of optimal foraging strategy. High value sources like meat dominated all other sources. Then come nuts, honey and sources of fat such as insects. Wild plants then become optimal, of which the damaging and difficult to process grains would have been near the bottom.

Many of us suffer from celiac disease. I don't think it is so much a disease as a natural response in individuals whose genetic make-up is closer to the hunter gatherer origins. These individuals would be from areas that were late to adapt to cultured agriculture. It takes time to weed out gluten intolerant individuals from the gene pool and late-adopting cultures have not had sufficient time. Now it turns out that gluten intolerance is 1. more wide-spread than previously thought, and 2. more damaging than noted.

Primarily, it was thought that the damage to the intestines predominated in celiac disease, indicated by cramping, weight loss, and chronic diarrhea). Now it is know to be responsible for osteoporosis, joint pain, and depression (all linked, perhaps, to the gluten and phytic acid in the grains and their interference with mineral and protein metabolism).

But, there is more. Nutrients are critical to the brain. Celiac disease is now implicated in cognitive decline (Mayo Clinic writing in the Archives of Neurology). The average age of onset was 64, but that is because the study was seeking progressive decline. It could begin much earlier in life than that, especially to a child who is exposed to wheat, rye, barley or oat frequently. This means every bowl of cereal or snack offers new exposure. Amnesia and loss of motor control were also exhibited, as was neuropathy. A pretty bad list of effects.

It is known that when you are exposed to a substance you do not tolerate well, there is an immune response followed by a release of stress hormones, including adrenalin. The "rush" from the hormones can cause you to become semi-addicted to the very substance you cannot tolerate. Hence, if you get a high from eating a bagel or bowl of spaghetti, it is likely a sign that you are gluten intolerant and looking for that adrenalin rush.

If you feel like you are giving up good feelings by eating the Evolutionary Fitness Way, it seems you may be gluten intolerant. If you are, your intestines and brain will pay the price if you indulge that "need" to jump that donut or inhale that bag of chips. Every body is a little grain intolerant; the price you pay for that rush is not just the fat and insulin insensitivity. Your nervous system pays too. You will end up less smart. And your joints may hurt too.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (10)

New Hollywood Math?

Peter Bart, the editor of Variety, has a slightly biased but nonetheless realistic comment on investors in the movie business in this Suits vs. superstars.

It is not the indiosyncratic behavior of Hollywood superstars that is the issue. It is that they are paid so much and bring too little to the production value and content of a movie to justify their pay. And, they bear too little risk. Investors bear too much risk and receive too little for it.

Now the firings are beginning, but they do not touch the superstars. Only Tom Cruise has lost his deal. ostensibly over his off-screen behavior, but equally over his pay and the return this leaves for the studio. Profit margins in the movies are low; they are in the range of 4 to 10 percent in a business that is so risky the returns ought to be far higher.

Hollywood has been used to keeping money among members of the club and also to accepting money from outsiders and keeping that too. It does seem to be changing, but see my other posts on hedges and Hollywood.

Bart is right that executives are over-paid too. Someday, someone will write the paper that shows how hard it is to distinguish between luck and talent among corporate executives as I showed in my book for actors and directors.

LINK · The Movie Business · Comments (0)

Answers

October 26, 2006 05:24 PM

There were a few questions about my Lactate Play post. I am on a big project, so I only have a moment, but the questions are easy to answer.

Yes, a workout depletes muscle glycogen and produces lactate. The question is how do you work out with glycogen depleted muscles? You don't and you can't. Your body will regenerate muscle glycogen, sometimes within minutes or seconds. Even after a playfully hard workout, thet depletion only lasts a matter of hours. Muscle glycogen is so important for emergency fight or flight responses that the body wastes no time in repleting lost stores. Just don't guzzle the "repletion drinks" or you will shut down the gene expression activated by the transitory depletion caused by the work out. It is part of the evolved adaptation to lactate producing work.

Alactic work outs are designed to produce strong neural patterns and power. They cannot be truly alactic because the kind of work involved must produce lactate. But, you do so few reps and keep the muscle fresh so that you do not get neural fatigue and you strongly challenge your ability to produce power.

Recall that I do them as a series of "one reps". Do one rep at a challenging weight. Put the weight down and rest momentarily. Then do it again. Repeat up to 5 times. But stop if you feel even a bit tired or if the movement is not quick and in perfect form.

Training to fatigue and poor form trains the nervous system into poor patterns.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (5)

Complexity in Physiology and Medicine

October 24, 2006 04:09 PM

You may know by now that complexity is part of Evolutionary Fitness. It is a blend of the Stone Age with High Tech. The old part is our genes and how they were shaped by evolutionary forces. The new part is the science of complexity. These topics fuse naturally because our ancestors were adaptive and lived in an uncertain world; thus we were made by evolutionary forces to live in a complex and challenging world. Virtually all deep research in physiology relies on complexity.

I have argued often here that averages and thinking based on averages distorts medical decisions. Virtually all distributions of physiological variables that are used to assess health or illness are non-normal distributions and fall into the stable Paretian class.

Now there is a new book on Complexity in Medicine that develops that vision. This is the second prong of a new kind of medicine, one that combines Evolutionary Medicine with Complexity Medicine.

LINK · Complex Systems ~ · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Uncertainty · Comments (3)

Metabolic Pathways and Gene Expression

I talk a lot about this topic when I mention that "genes are not destiny" (to remind you that even identical twins can differ enormously in their physiology based on what they do and eat and how that triggers gene expression; see my Twins post) and about muscle gene expression induced by activity and diet (through glycogen content of the muscle) or intermittent fasting (which triggers repair genetic programs).

I have been particularly interested in the role of lactate in gene expression and have pointed out that muscle lactic acid induces the expression of FT muscle fibers. Oxygen induces expression of ST muscle fibers. This is how the muscle "knows" how to remodel itself to adapt to the stress induced by anerobic or aerobic work. I also argued that anerobic-fueled movement is primal relative to aerobic-fueled movement which came along much later in evolution.

Now there is this very interesting article in the Journal of Neuroscience, summarized in this link to the BrainAtlas.org page (a great resource) Genetic Expression in Brain Regions and Metabolic Pathwarys. Note how strongly the motor areas of the brain become differentiated from even the closely related somatosensory areas through the genetic response to the metabolism of lactate. I think this is an ancient adaptation that profoundly shapes the human response to anerobic activity. Primal creatures that moved produced lactate through anerobic metabolism (as do we humans). Lactate metabolism became the signal to express motor areas of the brain to control movement.

If I had to summarize the theory of movement in Evolutionary Fitness, it is to engage in lactate play. That is, to be playfully active in such a manner as to transiently produce lactate or lactic acid. This produces the "burn" you feel when you are doing something that tests your limits. Transient means you don't go deeply into the burn or you damage the muscle tissues and may down regulate motor unit and motor cortex gene expression.

Lactate burns. I have a skin humectant, ammonium lactate, that I sometimes use in the dry climate of Southern Utah. If I put it on my face, it burns just like a muscle close to its limit.

Burn, but just a little and make it intermittent, not regular. Work out to express lactate first and string the intervals together in such a way as to develop strength endurance. The Power Law system is the model of this kind of deep ancestral dynamics.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (6)

The Physics of "Splash Entry"

October 22, 2006 10:21 AM

From Paul Robinson, a physics teacher at San Mateo High School, this article in the SF Chronicle on Bonds' prowess for hitting it into the Bay. Why can't more teachers be this way? What a pleasure it must be for students to have such a passionate teacher.

Paul has this to add to the story: " I agree with you--hitters like Barry Bonds are not good home run hitters because of steroids. He is an extremely talented hitter. We study the physics of home runs (and so-called "Splash Hits") in my physics classes. Although controversial now, I bet time and history will prove us both right."

Bonds does pull the ball more than most hitters. Adair (The Physics of Baseball) showed that the pull hit right down the line will travel farthest. I think the shorter bat he uses, 33 inches I think, and maple wood, and the smaller diameter contribute to the distance he gets. The smaller bat diameter puts more bite on the ball at contact and imparts more backspin. The shorter bat can reach more acceleration through the hitting area than a longer bat.

As he goes through the hitting area, the bat is is extending through the zone rather than rotating off it. His wrists are more on line with the plane of the bat and he strikes the ball with a wrist movement more like you would use if you were driving a stake with a sledge hammer. That is to say, his wrists are in line with his right forearm and break well after contact. He throws the bat head through the contact zone with his left hand and his wrists do not break until after the ball strike. He releases the bat with his left hand and then the right hand turns over which takes the bat to his high follow through as the bat comes off the hitting plane (this spares the rotator cuff). This is the swing Charlie Lau taught and his son Charlie Lau Jr. continues to teach. Lau Jr. also tutored ARod's swing.

LINK · Sports · Comments (3)

Hollywood and Wall Street

October 14, 2006 12:25 PM

Hollywood and Wall Street are getting together again NYT. The lure of Hollywood as an investment is the dazzlilng variance of returns. That is also the source of much pain. Most movies will do poorly, a few will earn most of the returns. If you could only predict the outcome, you could earn absolutely stunning returns.

But nobody can do the predictions. There is no formula. Returns in Hollywood are harder to predict than earthquakes or stock market returns. How can a Wall Street analyst do what the science says you cannot do? They can't even do the simpler task of predicting the stock market.

Analysis works for Wall Street only when they are doing arbitrage. Most hedge funds don't do arbitrage any more, they act more like leveraged speculators. A portfolio is no protection because the variance rises with the number of films in the portfolio.

You won't see Warren Buffett doing these deals.

The key line in the article may be this one: "But the new investors are hoping that with enough analysis, they can avoid the fate of some of their predecessors."

That is a fool's goal.

LINK · The Movie Business · Comments (1)

Another Breakfast

A whole ham steak, a few slices of honeydo melon, and a bit of coffee. So easy to make and satisfying.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (3)

Edge Newsletter

October 12, 2006 10:22 AM

This is a superb edition of the Edge newsletter.

I am not a member of this group, though I am asked each year to submit something to the Edge World Question Center. Its organizer, the legendary book agent John Brockman, was my agent at one time for the book I ought to write on the movies. Something more popular and less equation-bound than Hollywood Economics. Maybe someday after Evolutionary Fitness. Right now, I am playing softball and getting ready for a week-long motorcycle ride starting this Sunday.

LINK · Everything · Comments (0)

Mental Obesity

October 11, 2006 10:24 AM

My reader Tim sent me this news article on Obesity and mental function.

But, I think these researchers are following the path of correlation rather than causation, as I argued in my last post on testosterone. They are looking for some mechanism through which abdominal obesity might affect cognition.

I would argue that metabolic disease produces both abdominal obesity and poor brain nutrition. The brain becomes insulin resistant, just as other organs in the body do, so metabolic disease produces abdominal obesity and poor cognition. This is what I mean by mental obesity, not a fat brain, but an insulin-resistant brain produced by an obese, insulin-resistant body.

My friend Robert, a prominent neural pyschiatrist, tells me that the areas of the brain that have the most insulin receptors, the hippocampus and the frontal cortex, are the same areas that show prominant degeneration in Alzheimer's disease. Insulin resistance in the brain means that these key areas are denied nutrition and are suffering a kind of sugar overload.

He hypothesizes that the amyloid proteins that now get so much attention in Alzheimer's research may be the product of insulin resistance in these key brain areas. The amyloid may even be an attempt to protect those delicate tissues from the damage of the underlying metabolic disease that is destroying them. (His argument in this case is not so different from the emerging view that cholesterol is not the cause of cardiovascular disease but evidence of the body's attempt to limit the damage caused by an underlying metabolic disease.)

This intriguing conjecture by an established scientist brings us back to the same hypothesis we often encounter in these simple, correlation studies. An underlying metabolic disease is the cause of both abdominal obesity and declining brain function. The relation between obesity and cognition is just a correlation.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (3)

Hormone Claims

October 10, 2006 04:33 PM

I have an advertisement in front of me that cites several studies to claim that by the time they are 60 years old, men typically produce 60% less testosterone than they did at age 20. Naturally, the ad is selling a product to increase testosterone level. The claim is based on the free or unbound testosterone hypothesis that purports to show that it is the unbound testosterone that is important to a man's body composition and virility rather than total testosterone.

I just happened to see my Urologist to discuss the results of my testosterone test that I previously only received by telephone from the nurse. He says the research literature shows that total testosterone is the key factor, not free testosterone. On this basis he had tested only my total testosterone. You know the level already if you have been here for long; it is 601. He said he had never seen a patient my age with such a high level and that he rarely sees young men at that level.

So, this stuff is all bunk about losing your hormones or sex drive when you get older. What we are seeing is two things: 1. Sedentary ageing does have devastating effects, but that is just the toll taken by a long period of sedentism, not ageing per se. That is what is showing up in these tests. 2. To sell you products, the companies find some exotic and likely meaningless measure and then tell you they have a product to address that. This gives some plausibility to a claim that would otherwise be false.

It would be beyond belief to say that there is a product to increase testosterone production, the lydig cells have only so much capacity and could be driven to exhaustion and collapse if pushed too hard by some stimulant (if there were one). So, the marketers have to find another way.

I think what the research is finding is a simple correlation: sedentary men with abdominal obesity have high levels of binding globules that bind some total testosterone (nobody seems to know the purpose of binding testosterone, how active it is, if and when it is released, or where it is transported to). These same men have low total testosterone, no energy, poor body composition, and low sex drive. A worn out, obese man on the verge of type 2 diabetes of any age will have low testosterone. The process centers around metabolic disease, not ageing.

It is not incidental that high total testosterone is considered to be protective of kidneys. Metabolic disease produces low testosterone and kidney damage, so there is a correlation between low testosterone and kidney damage, but it is not causative. They have the common cause of metabolic disease.

Ageing of the form we see in the West is not so natural. It is a disease of sedentism, over-feeding, and poor nutrition. Sedentism and diet-induced metabolic disease is the root cause of much of what we call ageing.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (6)

Sport Drinks On the Ropes

October 9, 2006 02:28 PM

Fluid replacement guidelines issued by, among others, the American College of Sports Medicine have always been questionable from an evolutionary perspective.

Now Professor Tim Noakes in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (2006, 40) says that the case against fluid replacement guidelines was proven over 20 years ago. A new study using telemetry to monitor hydration and temperature status found that the athletes own body adequately regulated temperature and found no relationship between hydration status and temperature. Temperature and measures of dehydration (sodium and urine concentration) stayed within normal ranges. Even large losses of fluid do not lead to heat illness.

As if the body would not protect itself given its sophisticated homeostatic mechanisms; mechanisms so complex they are still not fully understood. It is a grandious claim to say that research or sports products can improve these evolved homeostatic mechanisms that serve not only we homo sapiens, but all mammals.

Professor Noakes smacks down the guidelines as "linked to an extensive marketing campaign, directed by the sports drink industry."

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (2)

Countries and Hits

October 6, 2006 06:09 PM

I often find it interesting to see which countries land in high or low ranks on my site. We are only a few days into this month and the number of countries is only 82, but the top 30 are often the same. The most countries I have seen on the site is 117.

The United States only ranks 22, but Network and US Commercial should be added or nearly so into the mix. So, we are a primarily US group. The education group ranks very high and I am proud to say there are many scientists at universities who read the blog. There are many people from other countries in the hit parade. I am quite suprised by Finland's high rank and very proud to see the US Military (thanks guys and gals I would be with you if they would take me) ranks way up there.

But, Brazil above Japan, France, Italy, New Zealand, Denmark, Argentina, Mexico and Singapore? Who would have thought it? Then again, it is random so population or computer literacy are not all that matters. If it is true that Brazilians love fun, then why not? Evolutionary Fitness is one of the few ways you can be lean, muscular, and beautiful while having fun.

Top 30 of 82 Total Countries
# Hits Files KBytes Country
1 87130 38.99% 63406 39.55% 2846069 37.33% Network
2 58222 26.05% 42155 26.30% 2180133 28.59% US Commercial
3 36080 16.14% 25414 15.85% 1183906 15.53% Unresolved/Unknown
4 5646 2.53% 4504 2.81% 199509 2.62% US Educational
5 4246 1.90% 2930 1.83% 136506 1.79% United Kingdom
6 3841 1.72% 2745 1.71% 98509 1.29% Australia
7 3689 1.65% 2842 1.77% 111352 1.46% Canada
8 2822 1.26% 2421 1.51% 88259 1.16% Finland
9 1987 0.89% 1469 0.92% 71783 0.94% US Government
10 1661 0.74% 1086 0.68% 59845 0.78% US Military
11 1608 0.72% 1175 0.73% 52366 0.69% Sweden
12 1511 0.68% 1243 0.78% 65170 0.85% Netherlands
13 1479 0.66% 1335 0.83% 61545 0.81% Germany
14 1398 0.63% 726 0.45% 43458 0.57& Norway
15 1375 0.62% 1030 0.64% 53451 0.70% Non-Profit Organization
16 1098 0.49% 1011 0.63% 35424 0.46% United States
17 801 0.36% 642 0.40% 30001 0.39% Austria
18 786 0.35% 152 0.09% 3869 0.05% Russian Federation
19 686 0.31% 375 0.23% 15684 0.21% Brazil
20 611 0.27% 376 0.23% 36392 0.48% Japan
21 507 0.23% 490 0.31% 17145 0.22% France
22 488 0.22% 345 0.22% 17600 0.23% Italy
23 456 0.20% 394 0.25% 13184 0.17% New Zealand (Aotearoa)
24 329 0.15% 205 0.13% 9911 0.13% Denmark
25 308 0.14% 209 0.13% 15534 0.20% Argentina
26 304 0.14% 271 0.17% 15754 0.21% Mexico
27 297 0.13% 222 0.14% 11992 0.16% Singapore
28 291 0.13% 202 0.13% 11503 0.15% Old style Arpanet (arpa)
29 291 0.13% 264 0.16% 18737 0.25% Poland
30 273 0.12% 218 0.14% 10715 0.14% Israel

LINK · Everything · Comments (1)

Pure Steyn

Mark Steyn is so funny and so smart, he makes the authors of these pretentious books look like, well, pretentious fools.

Mark Skewers the Future-Casters.

I am ordering his book right now.

And another thing, his bottom-up approach is the basis for complex analysis, institutional economics, and Hayekian spontaneous order. The top-down guys, our "leaders", don't like it because it makes them more or less passengers, rather than planners and leaders, on a random flight into the future.

As I said on the Edge site: The future is over-forecasted and under-predicted.

LINK · Everything · Comments (1)

Two A Days and More Against "Repletion"

October 5, 2006 04:02 PM

You have seen this before regarding the gene expression that occurs during and after exercise and the effect of muscle glycogen on that expression. My earlier post discussed Pederson's research from a talk she gave (J. Applied Physiology 2005, 99, 6). Now there is more.

First, I used to see some guys at my old gym doing two workouts a day, trying to get bigger. That is not a bad idea so long as you go into the second work out without fully repleting the muscle glycogen drained in the first. It seems that muscle gene expression is up-regulated when muscle is low in glycogen stores. The first work out drains glycogen and sets up better gene expression in the second, but with a big IF. You must not replentish the glycogen between work outs. The problem is that everybody does because they believe in the "window of opportunity" theory of glycogen replentishment and eat and guzzle glucose and protein drinks between work outs to get ready for the next one. This is a big mistake, but you already knew that.

Many genes are activated by exercise in muscle that has low glycogen content; two of them are PGC-1, the gene involved in muscle recovery and PDK4, a regulator of fat oxidation in muscle. These are two good things to have going on and low glycogen is a key that turns them on or up. In addition, RNA and protein synthesis are activated with acute exercise of the sort we Evolutionary Fitters do in muscle that is low in glycogen. We assure low glycogen by exercising on an empty stomach and by not gulping down protein drinks, sports drinks, or over-eating.

Pederson's work also showed that in exercise to failure the leg with the low glycogen stores was the LAST to fail. In that leg, biopsies revealed oxidative genes for mitochondrial enzymes were increased. Less glycogen, more dependance on fat oxidation as a source of energy rather than glycogen. Makes sense. Another hit against the carb loading idea.

And, finally, cytokines, the signalling factors to the immune system and metabolic pathways, are altered by exercise in low glycogen muscle. IL-6 is released and increases fat metabolism (Keller, FASEB Journal 2001).

An evolutionary perspective makes all this seem so natural. Glycogen would be exhausted in an ancestor who either died or escaped. If he escaped, he had to shift energy metabolism to fat since glycogen stores are low after a major, acute effort. Gene expression and cytokine signalling are just some of the things that make that possible.

And you thought you had to do cardio in the "fat burning zone" to burn fat. At least that is what everybody is told. I am beginning to think that almost everything people are told about exercise is wrong. It is time for a new theory or science of exercise and diet. I am trying.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (3)

What is so hard about breakfast?

October 4, 2006 09:39 PM

I just lost the picture but you should have seen my beautiful breakfast this morning. Three eggs, with only two yolks, blended with crab, fresh salsa, and chopped green onions. Sprinkled with bits of flakes of hot dried chiles (the long red ones you see in Thai dishes). Lots of fresh red grapes on the plate to give color and a refreshing contrast. A bit of coffee and it was a pure delight. I blended the ingredients as in an omelette and cooked it in a skillet, making sure to have some browning for firmness and color contrast. I cook largely by color and texture.

If you are still doing cereal, grow up. It is better to skip breakfast than to eat that hazardous waste.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (16)

How Much is Too Much?

Mark Sisson responds to questions about simple carbohydrates and sugars.

"Great questions from Darwinian and DemecJ02. How do we judge carbohydrate intake? That carbo loading reference had to do with the fact that athletes try to add extra glycogen (stored glucose) before an endurance event to extend the performance window. They do this by consuming extra carbohydrates in the days prior to the event. Unfortunately, since the liver can only hold 100 grams of glycogen and the muscles can only hold 250 to 400 grams, any loading effect ultimately delivers relatively small performance gains. You are far better off training your body to more efficiently burn fats at relatively higher outputs. My point here is that even an athlete fully depleted of glycogen (as after a long hard workout) really only needs 600 grams of carbohydrate over the next 24 hours to maximize storage. It doesn’t take that much. Yet I see average non-athletic citizens eating that amount – and more - daily. Clearly, these folks are not burning off their glycogen stores, so they are consuming hundreds of excess carbohydrate grams each day – well beyond what their actual requirements are. The result is more and bigger fat cells.

So as DemecJ02 asks: how much is too much? A lot depends on your activity level. But looking at an evolutionary model, some researchers claim that our ancestors consumed only 80-100 grams per day of carbohydrate, most of which was locked in a fibrous matrix, so we can call it “complex carbohydrate.” When you consider that the body has four ways of making or preserving glucose, but only one way of getting rid of the excess, you begin to see that maybe historically glucose was a scarce, yet precious commodity – not easy to find and requiring multiple back-up or redundant systems in the body to retain it as glycogen.

Cut to modern man who has adopted sugar and processed simple carbs as his number one source of calories, largely because it is so prevalent and cheap. This presents that huge problem of disposal and, hence, the fat storage solution. Ironically, people on a restricted 2,000 calorie-a-day diet will still heed the advice of guys like Drs. John McDougall or Dean Ornish and take in 80% (1600 calories or 400 grams) a day of carbs. That’s still WAY more than we were designed to handle. Consequently, these people become “skinny fat.”

So what is the right amount of carbohydrate? I don’t know…but I do know that, unless you are an active athlete, it’s not 400 grams a day. It’s not 300 grams a day. It’s probably 150-200 grams a day maximum. And most of that should be in the form of vegetables. Not grains, potatoes, sugars, breads, pastas, desserts, soft drinks or even that now-popular “juicing”. You should get most of your carbs from veggies and you’ll be healthier, more satisfied, have more stable energy throughout the day and you’ll be more “regular.”

If you are an athlete, or fancy yourself one such that you train more than an hour a day, you’ll get more energy from higher amounts of carbs, but you’ll pay a price in greater oxidative damage. Like anything in life, it becomes a cost/benefit analysis. Are bragging rights today more important than excellent health in 20 years? Your call." Mark

And here is my two cents on the topic.

A couple of other points: 1. Juicing breaks the fiber matrix holding the carbohydrate in the plant and raises the glycemic index substantially. 2. The total glycemic load is important as well this is just the index times the total amount consumed. Even a low index food can create a large insulin spike if the load is large. The Asians PaleoGal mentions eat small amounts and, thus, bear a low glycemic load even when they eat a high glycemic food such as rice. 3. The research on carb loading is still lousy and unsettled. How can ramping up insulin levels do any good at all to an endurance athlete? It makes them susceptable to bonking and leaves their fat stores under-utilized. 4. The very long events that lead participants to ingest carbs during the event (small amounts during the work is very different from loading before the event) are the only ones for whom small, frequent ingestion may be beneficial (for the event, not for your life) are ones you should not be doing anyway. 5. Check your insulin level. If you don't know what it is you don't know if you are eating correctly, no matter what your intakes of energy sources. Know and follow your insulin level and your body will tell you what you need to know about your carb intake.

A high carb diet is pro-inflammatory, turns off muscle gene expression, promotes muscle apoptosis (suicide), and raises triglycerides. It promotes insulin resistance and the cascade of events that ruin your metabolic fitness. Most modern diseases, even Alzheimer's, are metabolic in origin. Art

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (7)

Fat Cells as Disposal Sites for Toxins

October 3, 2006 10:00 AM

Mark Sisson expands my discussion of fat as an adaptive response to sugar overload. It is not a store against future famine as Mark points out and I make clear in my paper "Why We Get Fat" (link above under Research). I think the "thrifty gene" idea is nonsense. If you go around with your liver full of glucose and never empty your muscle cells of glycogen, what is the body to do with the glucose overload most people carry? Grow your fat colony to take up the load and push your metabolic rate up acutely to burn it off at a high cost to your stress hormone levels.

Mark says, "Art, I was thinking about your fat cell analysis in this post. Insightful as always. I’d like to add a thought or two if I may.

Evolution is all about adaptation – to the environment, to circumstances, to stress and even (or especially) to food. In this context of adaptation, it’s truly amazing how “inventive” the human body has become in finding novel (and perhaps heretofore uncontemplated) ways to repair damage we do to ourselves through our diets and other lifestyle indiscretions. And most of these changes are less than a few hundred years old, which makes the adaptations even more remarkable. Let’s use cholesterol as an example. It’s actually very beneficial. Among other duties, it’s a necessary component of every cell membrane and it’s involved in hormone production. The body makes about 1400 mg a day just to keep up. Now let’s take a stressful lifestyle, add in a bad diet and lack of exercise and we get an inflammatory process in the arteries that causes lesions. This inflammation problem is completely unrelated to amounts or types of cholesterol. Nevertheless, the ever-inventive human body adapts to this inflammation sequence by using cholesterol as a band-aid to cover up the lesions until healing can take place – which, of course, almost never happens since the silly human continues to live the same pro-inflammatory lifestyle. Eventually, the cholesterol band-aids harden (sclerosis), narrow the arteries and sometimes break off causing a heart attack. Of course, we blame the cholesterol for all this and embark on a national campaign to rid the body of this important substance instead of focusing on the foods (and other stresses) that promote inflammation in the first place.

Now let’s consider fat. For years we believed fat was nothing more than nature’s way of storing extra calories for some future famine. That would be a handy little adaptation in and of itself if that’s all it was. But when you do the math, you see that it doesn’t require a lot of fat to survive or even migrate for long periods. A 165-pound person with only 13% body fat has 21.45 pounds of fat. Being generous and assuming that you need a minimum 3% just to carry on basic survival functions, that leaves 10% or 16.5 pounds of fat to live off. At 3500 calories per pound of fat and 100 calories per mile walking, you’d theoretically have enough fat to survive weeks and migrate several hundred miles. So maybe fat has another purpose, and this is where Art’s description of fat as a toxic waste site (my words) comes in. Modern man has so thoroughly altered his foods to focus on simple carbohydrates (sugars) that we now consume hundreds of excess grams of it every day.

As Art has explained, the body recognizes excess sugar (glucose) as a toxic load – and remember, it doesn’t take a whole lot of it to be excessive – and the body starts the adaptive process of secreting insulin to take sugar out of the bloodstream and deposit it into the muscles. Two problems arise immediately: first, there’s not a lot of room in those muscles. Ask any athlete who’s ever tried to carbo load for an event. Secondly, most people aren’t athletes and have lost significant utility of their muscle through atrophy, further diminishing storage. Furthermore, they don’t burn off the already-stored glycogen because they don’t exercise. But here’s where the body has become so elegantly adaptive once again. It creates little storage facilities in the form of additional fat cells. Not because it’s trying to store calories for some future famine, as modern medicine might have you believe, but because it’s trying to find novel and effective ways to rid the body of this very toxic glucose excess. And it’s a pretty good solution. Insulin allows glucose access to these fat cells which grow larger and more numerous over time. Problem is, it’s always one step behind, so the fat cells fill up just as the muscle filled up, leaving excess glucose in the bloodstream after the next high carb or high calorie meal until more fat cells can be made. And so the spiral continues as 40 million Americans are headed towards type 2 diabetes.

As we have seen so often on this site, an evolutionary analysis can usually provide unique insights not always available in modern medical literature."

Mark Sisson

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Type 2 Diabetes Part 2: Food Imagination

October 2, 2006 12:06 PM

I often hear from people who struggle with their weight the question "What can I eat? You have eliminated everything I eat (and secretely love) by telling me to avoid candy, desserts, rice, beans, pasta, bread, potatoes, soft drinks, juice, cereal and packaged foods."

They have lost their food imagination; their eating patterns are so habitual and self-reinforcing that they cannot begin to see how they will eat if they drop these unhealthful patterns. Restaurants and super markets reinforce their utter dependence on prepared, high carb, starchy foods and their metabolism deepens the dependence. This is because their high insulin levels make them crave the very things, starches and sugars, that elevate their insulin still higher. It is a positive feedback loop that must end in gross obesity and ill health, type 2 diabetes being the road stop on the way to kidney damage, heart disease, and generalized inflammation.

What is so hard about thinking of other ways to eat? Commericalism pushes you farther into the destructive dependence on prepared foods and all that sweet stuff. Carbohydrate is infinitely malleable; it is like plastic and can be shaped and colored and transformed into things that bear no resemblance to food. Social practices push you farther down that line. Look at the aisles in the store. Most of them are devoted to prepared foods and drinks. Confused health information pushes you farther down the destructive chain. Is there any credibility to the often-repeated claim that you must avoid fats and focus on carbohydrate as your major energy source? Not to anyone who looks at the evidence in the real world and even in the scientific literature about the exploding waist lines all over the world as the commercialized American diet gains scope on traditional foods.

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Comment Problems

Sorry about the bad behavior of the comments section. I thought it might just be my browser (Safari) and OS (Mac OS X), but it seems to be universal. On the one hand, it increases hit counts when people do comment by loading unnecessary pages. On the other, it discourages comments and decreases hits. Hard to tell what the net effect is, but it ought to be fixed and will be "real soon now" after, well, you don't want to see the list.

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