Kresser On Statins

"To summarize:

• The only population that statins extend life in are men under 80 years of age with pre-existing heart disease.
• In men under 80 without pre-existing heart disease, men over 80 with or without heart disease, and women of any age with or without heart disease, statins have not been shown to extend lifespan.
• Statins do reduce the risk of cardiovascular events in all populations. A heart attack or stroke can have a significant, negative impact on quality of life—particularly in the elderly—so this benefit should not be discounted.
• However, the reductions in cardiovascular events are often more modest than most assume; 60 people with high cholesterol but no heart disease would need to be treated for 5 years to prevent a single heart attack, and 268 people would need to be treated for 5 years to prevent a single stroke.
• Statins have been shown to cause a number of side effects, such as muscle pain and cognitive problems, and they are probably more common than currently estimated due to under-reporting."

http://chriskresser.com/the-diet-heart-myth-cholesterol-and-saturated-fat-are-not-the-enemy

The article is a remarkably readable review of a tough topic. Biggest takeaway - statins are the best evidence available that "cholesterol" is the agent of heart disease. If statins don't actually reduce heart disease, the case that "high cholesterol" is the cause of arterial disease has next to no evidence as support.

Even if statins were proof of the cholesterol = causation issue, there's still no proof, and nearly no evidence, that reducing consumption of saturated fat (and replacing it with other fats or carbs) will result in less heart disease or "lower cholesterol".  The opposite is more likely for most of us.  

Classic CrossFit Quote

But I'm not sure it is true. We do what others will not because it feels good.

Why it feels good to some and not others, I do not know.

Hero WOD: Brehm

TUESDAY 130514

"Brehm"

For time:
15 foot Rope climb, 10 ascents
225 pound Back squat, 20 reps
30 Handstand push-ups
Row 40 calories

U.S. Army Sergeant Dale G. Brehm, 23, of Turlock, California, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, based in Fort Lewis, Washington, died on March 18, 2006, when he came under small arms fire from enemy forces during combat operations in Ar Ramadi, Iraq. He is survived by his wife Raini, father William, stepmother Linda, and mother Laura Williams.

Fair winds and following seas on your journey warrior!

Fake Health Food

I have eaten this product before, and like it.  It makes a great snack, and I loved the idea that I was enjoying something that was providing nutrients I wanted.  Then I read the label (mistake?!).

The label revealed I was oogling farm raised atlantic salmon, with the pink color added. 

That means it is fed the same corn or soy based "food" that most cattle are fed, and thus, it doesn't have the awesome omega-3s that wild caught fish accumulate from a natural diet/life cycle. 

It claims to have omega-3s, but chances are that is only added, perhaps via flax seeds or some other short chain omega 3 product.  In other words, it's nothing I need.

This is how it goes - if one is just starting a carb restriction voyage, this food would be a great choice.  But as I move towards better choices over time, it's just OK to eat food like this; it adds little but it doesn't hurt anything, either.

The industrial food chain delivers high quanities of food with marginal nutritional value at a ridiculously low cost (measured against time spent to obtain it) - and high quantities of so called food that is unsafe in almost any dosage.  Moving from one end of that spectrum to the other is significant.

Men's Health or Not, Part 3

You see an order of wings, but your endothelium sees an enemy. "Saturated fatty acids are perceived as abnormal, so the immune cells try to clean them up," says Mansoor Amiji, Ph.D., chairman of the department of pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern University in Boston and a researcher of treatments for endothelial dysfunction. "Instead, the cells cause more inflammation and wind up doing damage." Before you grab any packaged food off the supermarket shelf, check the label and then do a little math. Multiply the number of saturated fat grams by 9 to determine the number of calories the fat contributes. Now divide that by total calories. If saturated fat accounts for more than 10 percent of the food's calories, put the package back on the shelf.
http://www.menshealth.com/health/new-heart-threat/page/2

Another head scratcher, scientifically speaking, but one that allows for some elaboration of one of the counter intuitive points about fat in the blood vice fat in the diet.  To get more of one, you need less of the other, but not in the way you might think.

As the authors point out in the "Art and Science of Low Carb Living", it appears that fat in the blood (triglycerides and chylomicrons) are a much better predictor of disease than is fat in the diet. Counter intuitively, the best way to keep fat levels in the blood low is to avoid over-consumption of carbohydrates. Which is to say, getting more calories as fat and less as carbs can results in less fat in your blood.

"Well, Paul, please tell me how that's possible?!?!" I thought you'd never ask!

When you OD on carbs, your body gets busy stuffing the resulting blood glucose anywhere it can - it's like when company catches you by surprise and you have to find a closet for all of the crap you left lying around; think EMERGENCY!  With the help of insulin, some sugar goes to muscles with room for glycogen, some goes to top off your liver's glucose battery, but most has to be converted to fat in the liver.  This process results in production of a saturated fat which is produced as a triglyceride (three fatty acid strings bound by a sugar molecule).  The triglyceride is moved around in the blood in a VLDL boat launched from the liver.  The VLDL will dump the trigs as soon as possible and become a small, dense LDL (some folks say lots of small, dense LDL is a "high risk marker" for arterial disease, but since high levels of small dense LDL correlates with high triglycerides and low HDL, it would seem to be just another correlate with carbohydrate overdose), but since the liver is working hard to make them, the relative levels stay high.  In a high insulin environment, the body will not allow fat back out of cells and cannot make ketones from fat (thus a person eating this way chronically becomes dependent on eating carbs to make enough sugar for the brain).  It is likely that this high insulin, high fat condition in the blood is an element of leptin resistance, meaning many of the satiety loops of the body will be dis-regulated towards increased hunger.

If on the other hand you are chomping down pork rinds, salad with MCT/olive oil/vinegar dressing, veggies with butter and sirloin all day, your liver will not make any additional fat.  Instead, since your are keeping your carb intake to a tolerable amount, your body will run itself quite nicely on fat.  Some fats you eat will convert to storage (monounsaturates will, for example, as will long chain saturates), while others will go up in smoke as fuel quickly (short and medium chain saturated fats, for example, butter, coconut oil, and MCT oil).  But the body can easily store and burn fats in this kind of environment, and much of the fat is oxidized to CO2 and water very quickly.  As a result, those on a low carb, high fat diet have the lowest triglycerides - the least amount of fats in their blood - and should have the least risk of the awful sounding fate described by the Men's Health author above.

Low carb is not for everyone, and not everyone will thrive on a high animal fat diet - but MOST do and nearly all will do better in the short term than those on the SAD.  Eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/wheat.

"Lowering" Cholesterol and "Wishing on the Moon" - Which Is More Effective?

The answer to that question is - we don't know.  Perhaps neither!
After over 40 years of telling you that lowering cholesterol is good for you, your government - NIH, surgeon general or USDA - has yet to prove it. Folks die every day with "low" cholesterol, and many with "high" cholesterol live for a long time and with good health.  If you are counting on this very poor health correlate, you should probably rethink your strategy.

However, the foods in this article are good choices - beef, pistachios, almonds, and small amounts of tomato juice - aside from their so called cholesterol lowering properties.  They are blood sugar neutral and nutrient dense.  Hunt and gather yourself some of this soon!
http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/cholesterol-fighting-foods

Kresser on Wheat

The BLUF:  if you have real celiac disease, you know how destructive wheat consumption is for your health.  For the rest of us, the impact still be significant and negative.
"Celiac disease (CD) was initially described in the first century A.D. by a Greek physician named Aretaeus of Cappadocia. (1) But neither Aretaeus nor anyone else knew that CD is caused by an autoimmune reaction to gluten, a protein in wheat. That didn't become clear until 1950 - several centuries later - when Dr. Willem Dicke, a Dutch pediatrician, conclusively proved that gluten was the culprit. (2) Dicke's discovery saved millions of children and adults from the perils of untreated celiac disease, including malnutrition, stunted growth, cancer, severe neurological and psychiatric illness and even death.

"Since then, the mainstream view of gluten intolerance has been relatively black or white: Either you have celiac disease, in which case even a small amount of gluten will send you running to the bathroom in three seconds flat, or you don't, and you can chug down beer and bagels without fear. This "all-or-nothing" view has led to some doctors telling patients that suspect they're sensitive to gluten but test negative for CD that they're simply imagining an affliction that doesn't exist."

"It turns out those doctors are wrong."

Chris continues:
"Here's the crucial thing to understand: Celiac disease is characterized by an immune response to a specific epitope of gliadin (alpha-gliadin) and a specific type of transglutaminase (tTG-2). But we now know that people can (and do) react to several other components of wheat and gluten - including other epitopes of gliadin (beta, gamma, omega), glutenin, WGA and deamidated gliadin - as well as other types of transglutaminase, including type 3 (primarily found in the skin) and type 6 (primarily found in the brain). (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)"

This article is a must read if you have any mysterious health issues. Read on to learn why you might benefit from a gluten free challenge, and how to complete one.