Exercise and LIVE

In this study, researchers looked at tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interleukin-6 (IL-6), C-reactive protein (CRP), and leptin as chronic inflammation markers.

Leptin is known primarily for its role in appetite suppression, but it can also show inflammation, and these two roles are related.

In this study, subjects showed a 29% decrease in TNF-α, 33% decrease in CRP, and an 18% decrease in leptin after resistance training for 12 weeks.

The control group showed no similar change. Knitting and general socializing didn't alter the inflammatory proteins.

IL-6: A different story
Unlike the other inflammatory markers studied, there was no overall change in IL-6. However, IL-6 is a bit of a special case. That's because, depending on where it originates, it can be either pro-inflammatory (i.e. it increases inflammation) or an anti-inflammatory (i.e. it reduces inflammation).

IL-6 deriving from immune cells (macrophages) is pro-inflammatory, while IL-6 from muscle cells (myocytes) is anti-inflammatory. Contracting muscles (as in exercise) produce IL-6 that is anti-inflammatory, causing a huge spike in muscle-produced IL-6.

In this study, exercisers showed a 40-60% increase in IL-6 immediately after exercise, which was expected. But training for 12 weeks didn't result in an overall change.

Here's another interesting result: There was also a 20% increase in IL-10 (interleukin-10), an anti-inflammatory protein.

Quick recap.

Inflammatory markers: decrease

•TNF-α: 29% less
•CRP: 33% less
•Leptin: 18% less
Anti-inflammatory marker: increase

•IL-10: 20% more
Another cool finding:

There was an inverse relationship between strength and inflammation. The stronger the women were, the lower their CRP and leptin.

Conclusion
Understanding how chronic inflammation works and how to stop it is crucial, because chronic inflammation is at the root of most lifestyle disease, from Alzheimer's to cancer to stroke to everything in between.

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/research-review-inflammation-exercise

In other words, exercise is to have a good long and active life, exercise is to feel good.  Don't exercise to burn calories, be active and exercise to be alive while you are living.

CFJ: The Benchmark WODs

The workouts of the first group, Angie, Barbara, and Chelsea, are super simple (being comprised entirely of common calisthenics), very tough, dramatically reinforce the pull-up, and yet each presents a different metabolic challenge.
Angie and Barbara, contain pull-ups, push-ups, sit-ups, and squats. Chelsea contains pull-ups, push-ups, and squats but no sit-ups.
For each of these three workouts the pull-ups clearly present the greatest challenge. And, in the workouts' aftermath, most athletes expressed surprise at their significant lat, rear delt, and biceps soreness. At CrossFit the pull-up is sacrosanct and everyone needs more. Angie, Barbara, and Chelsea support these values and aims.
http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/13_03_Benchmark_Workouts.pdf

I don't know how many times I have read this article, but I am always surprised to find how much I forgot when re-reading the original CFJ articles.  Good stuff!

T NATION | Most Beneficial Exercises

http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/most_beneficial_exercises

Interesting article - I most appreciate his "economy of movement" point.  Everything you do in the gym has a cost, just as not doing it has a cost.  Being keen on the outcome desired is everything, as is knowing how to get it with the least time spent.

Attia: If You Want Better Answers, Ask Better Questions

The wrong question is being asked.  “Is sugar toxic?” is a silly question.  Why?  Because it lacks context.  Is water toxic? Is oxygen toxic? These are equally silly questions, I hope you’ll appreciate.  Both oxygen and water are essential for life (sugar, by the way, is not).  But both oxygen and water are toxic – yes, lethal – at high enough doses.

What did the APAP example teach us?  For starters, don’t confuse acute toxicity with chronic toxicity.  Let’s posit that no one has died from acute toxicity due to massive sugar ingestion.  But, what about chronic toxicity?  Can eating a lot of sugar, over a long enough period of time, kill you (presumably, through a metabolic disease like diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, or heart disease)?

Even among a healthy population (i.e., people without overt liver disease), toxicity is a distribution function.  What’s toxic to one person may not be toxic to the next.  This is true of APAP and it’s true of sugar.  It’s true of most things I can think of, actually, including tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. Ever wonder why “only” about one in six smokers dies of small cell lung cancer? Maybe it’s the same reason some people (e.g., me) get metabolically deranged from even modest doses of sugar, while others (e.g., Jill, my wife) can mainline the stuff and not appear to suffer many adverse effects.

I posit that Jill and I are both outliers on the distribution of susceptibility, probably driven mostly by genetic difference (rather than, say, exercise as we both exercise a lot).   So, I offer you a framework to consider this question.  I know some of you just want an answer to the question, Is sugar toxic or not? But I hope this slightly more nuanced response can help you figure out what you should be asking: Are you like me? Like Jill? Or like an Average Joe somewhere in between us?

http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/is-sugar-toxic

In Attia style, he examines the snot out of this issue, covering terms, concepts and research on the topic.  If you read the whole post, you'll be smarter or at least feel like you are.  I like his conclusion - if your body is healthy, you feel great, and life is too good to be true, the dose of sugar you are on is likely not toxic.  If you are hungry, carry too much fat, have a nasty lipid profile (and/or gout, hypertension, or high pain levels), you are probably eating too much sugar.  As Taubes describes in "Good Calories Bad Calories", we were relatively healthy when average annual consumption of sugar was 20 pounds per capita - that was back in the days when sugar was costly and a treat vice a staple of the US/Western diet.  Now, at 100 pounds annually or more, many of us are ingesting toxic levels of sugar.  

Taubes in Scientific American

In the September 2013 issue of Scientific American, the topic is nutrition.  One of my heroes in the nutrition science wars is Gary Taubes, and he authored an article in this magazine.

Taubes frames up the critical debate about how to be healthy and lean between two camps -
1. Calories in, calories out, or "a calorie is a calorie", or "just eat less and move more", which is essentially a moral story - "people get fat because they are gluttonous and lazy."
2.  The carbohydrate or alternative hypothesis, or the "hormone hypothesis of obesity" - consumption of excess carbohydrate leads to a cycle of high blood sugar leading to high insulin levels which biases the body towards storage of ingested carbs as fat, but also makes us hungry and makes us feel lethargic.    In other words, "People feel lethargic, and accumulate body fat, because they induce hormone dis-equilibrium through excess carbohydrate consumption."

There are folks in both camps who are quite persuasive, but of course, that's the rub - if the science on the matter was conclusive, there would be no need to persuasiveness!  Let me provide what I see as the main lines of argument from the two camps:

The laws of thermodynamics are clear - for a body to gain or lose energy (aka fat which is stored energy), the body must ingest more energy than is expended, or ingest more energy than is expended.  In other words, it is a simple matter of mathematics - reduce caloric intake and increase caloric expenditure to induce an energy imbalance.  Anyone who is gaining weight, or cannot lose unwanted weight, is simply too lazy or too gluttonous.
And, we get sick because being fat makes us sick, so diseases such as insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and ultimately type II diabetes result from the obesity created by an energy imbalance that lazy, gluttonous populations routinely create for themselves.

Some things that might be worth considering to fully consider this perspective:
-Just because a gram of fat creates 9kcal of energy when combusted in a bomb calorimeter, does that mean it always adds 9 kcal of energy to our bodies every time we eat a gram of fat?  Ditto for carbs and protein - do we really know how many of the potential units of energy we receive from each gram of the various macronutrients we ingest?  Interestingly, there's an article in the same Scientific American which seems to indicate the answer is "no".  In other words, a potential calorie in food is not always a calorie of energy in the body.
-If a "calorie is a calorie" is such a simple matter of mathematics, why in all of the studies done on such matters has no one every lost the forecast amount?
-If a "calorie is a calorie" is in fact the guiding principle of fat loss, we are all screwed; if we miss our calorie calculation each day by 20 kcal, which for me would be an error of less than 1%, we will gain a pound of fat per year.  Considered from this perspective, as Taubes has pointed out, it's a miracle we are not all carrying the spare tire.
-All fat people are not sick; why?  Some people who are relatively skinny are sick in the same way as sick fat people (loss of glycemic control); why?
-In many intervention studies which test low carb v. high carb diets, folks on a carb restricted diet spontaneously reduce caloric intake.  In correlation with carbohydrate restriction, many sick people begin to get well before they get lean; gout, hypertension, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disorder, for example, can be reduced in as few as 3 days of carb restriction.
-We can observe that folks accumulate excess fat differently.  For example, endomorphs always have more sub-cutaneous fat than ectomorphs - if fat accumulation is just a matter of calories in, calories out, why do bodies allocate fat differently based on phenotypes?
-Why do pregnant ladies and people in puberty eat more?  Certainly no one would suggest their appetites changed because they became lazy and gluttonous.
-How is it that we could have such excess "energy" stored as fat, but still feel hunger?
-How could we interpret the well known phenomenon of caloric restriction over time leading to the "starvation effect", in which the metabolism slows, and fat re-accumulation is nearly inevitable?

Here are some answers which may be tested via Taubes' NuSI - the Nutrition Science Initiative, which was founded to test these two hypotheses - to see if science, despite the incredible challenges of doing it well on the human animal, can point to one or the other as more correct for more people.
-Sick fat people are those who have glycemic dis-regulation, healthy fat people have not lost glycemic regulation, because they are not insulin resistant.  Why these people are fat isn't clear, it could be they ate too many carbs for a time and now are at a "maintenance intake" of carbs but not a fat loss intake.  However, it is possible to discern a healthy fat person from a sick fat person just by looking (at least in some cases) at their faces.  You can see this in the "Biggest Loser", as the contestants all arrive with their fat, sick faces but soon their faces shift to the "healthy but fat" face.  If you've seen that show, you know what I mean.
-How come I could eat anything I wanted when young but now I can't?
I think this question may be where fructose comes into play. There's some evidence that fructose pushes us over the edge into insulin resistance, by essentially forcing the liver to work too hard processing fructose, so that it cannot do what insulin commands it to do.  As the body secretes more insulin to get the liver into gear, other cells in the body risk damage due their responsiveness to insulin.  They seem to protect themselves through insulin resistance.  That creates a re-inforcing loop for insulin and blood sugar levels that seems to drive us towards metabolic syndrome.  Metabolic syndrome leads to everything bad - diabetes which then is a predictor for gout, hypertension, stroke, alzheimer's, heart attack, etc.

One way or the other, due to Taubes' passion and his unrelenting focus on how much the existing science does not answer, but could, I think Gary will end up fundamentally changing how science and nutrition are pursued in our lifetimes.  We may be only a year or two away from preliminary results from NuSI's first experiments.  That's amazing!

The stakes are enormous. Between the insanity in the way our government tries to provide and regulate health care, and the remarkable and accelerated pace that our population is getting sick, and the vast array of medications that our health care system will provide to people to keep them alive while sick; our health care system is wrecking the fiscal health of our federal government.

Every day, I see and confront an amazing amount of mis-information about what a "healthy" diet is or is not.  If the science could get us to the point of all knowing what makes us sick, it would be an incredible step forward. Go Gary go!

Confessions of a Low Carb, Paleolithic Model Advocate

Here's the truth, which I freely confess.

I drink raw cow's milk, in violation of USDA recommendations.
I never take multi vitamins.
I avoid flax seeds and flax seed oils, "heart healthy" industrially produced polyunsaturated fats, wheat germ, cholesterol lowering oatmeal, and heart healthy whole grains for the same reason I avoid rat poison.
I don't really care what my cholesterol numbers are, because if they were high I wouldn't try to lower them.
I eat eggs most days, unless I'm not hungry, then I throw out the whites but eat the yolks.
I eat chocolate 5 days a week, and drink bourbon every other day.
I add salt to food and water.
Fat, mostly saturated, makes up 60-80% of my caloric intake.
Just to make sure I get enough saturated fat, I add butter to my coffee, and I look at veggies as a good way to eat more butter.  Butter like cheese, strait up, as a snack?  Guilty!
I also supplement with coconut oil - sometimes for cooking, sometimes with dark chocolate or nuts. Man is that good!
I eat red meat and "artery clogging saturated animal fats" like it is going out of style, which it used to be, by the way.  I mean I'm knocking back stuff like bacon or sausage or hamburger, every day.
I eat processed foods like salami and sausage whenever I like.
I eat veggies once per day at most.
I generally eat fruit a max of once per day, except in summer time when I enjoy it a bit more.
Have no idea how many calories per day I consume - more than 2400, less than 3000, most days, based on a two week sample I made three years ago.  Whatever.  I eat when I'm hungry.  I eat a little extra when I train hard.  Sometimes I eat for fun, but mostly just for hunger or because I know after 10-14 hours, I need food.
I drink coffee - a minimum of five cups/day, and load most of those cups with heavy cream.
I smoke cigars when I want one.
You know that "most important meal of the day"?  I almost never eat breakfast.
On a typical week I may never exceed 100g/day of carbohydrate, or perhaps I do but only once.
I brush my teeth once per day, max, and never floss.

What kind of carnage am I wreaking on my health, appearance, and performance?

Well, I'm 49 years old, I'm six feet, 2 inches tall and weight 205 pounds.  At 42 years of age, I was 225 and weaker than I am now.  I could not tell you last time I had a cavity, it has been since 1997 at least.  I have shifted from being a sugar craver who couldn't walk past a doughnut to being a sugar agnostic. I get sick sometimes, but it is unusual.

I never do cardio and I have no idea how many calories I burn when I work out, because I could not care less about burning calories.  I work out to develop the physical capacities I would like to have or improve.

I train with barbells several times a week but I have no idea how many inches my arms or legs are, I never feel the pump and don't measure my success in terms of the mass of muscles.
On any given day, you could tell me to:
Run 6 miles
Deadlift 375+
Compete in the CrossFit Games Open WODs in top 30% in the world for my age, and top 50% for any age
Do a pullup - with 75+ pounds
Box jump 40+ inches
Clean 225 pounds
Climb that rope hands only, or climb that rope 25 times for time
I could most likely do it.  If I couldn't do it that day, I could do it within a week with a few practice sessions.

The changes I've experienced since I learned my way of eating - high fat, high nutrition, low carb, and moderate protein - include near elimination of IBS (pun intended), my teeth feel better, harder and cleaner, I have reduced my ibuprophen intake from an average of 1600mg/day to perhaps a monthly dose after a mis-step that sets my knee off.  I used to inhale steroids to keep my nasal passages closed at night, now I just remember how nice it is to not have to do that.  My ear canals are not chronically irritated, and I'm not spending the extra fifty cents for the dandruff shampoo.

My blood pressure runs about 120/70, much better than when I was a college athlete. My triglycerides vary between 25 and 75, HDL is around 70, and LDL is estimated at 114 (meaning it is actually lower given my triglycerides), with a total cholesterol around 200.  Waist tapes out around 36 inches, and body fat percent is 10-12 percent (who really knows this anyway).

Am I trying to brag about being a bad ass?  I would if I could, but in the CrossFit world, I'm just another athlete, there's nothing I can brag about.  I'm more interested in making a point, as dramatically as I can for today, that they've been lying to you.

They said you need low fat, high carbs and compulsively high cardio.  They said cut back on cholesterol, move more, eat less, and eat whole grains.  It is just not the truth for most folks.  Most of you need fat for fuel with a little protein and some high quality vegetables.  If you are already skinny, eat more carbs if you like them.  Ratchet way back on fructose intake (meaning sugars, which are generally 50% fructose), and if you want to lose your belly, also cut out the beer.  You don't need to move more and eat less, you need to eat real food (or as the man Sean Croxton puts it, JERF: Just eat real food).

The best advice you've ever received about health and diet was never proved by science - because good science is so hard to do on humans that it has not been done.  We're feeling around in the dark.  The best you can do is eat a certain way long enough to evaluate the effect, and refine from there.  There is one thing you can bank on though - no one with out of control blood sugar is healthy.  There are folks with low cholesterol who die young every day, and there are folks with "high" cholesterol who live long and well.  There are folks with too much body fat who live long and well, and those who are "skinny" who die young from vascular diseases and cancer.  The common denominator for most if not all of these who are not heathy is they have wrecked their glycemic control, generally from eating too many carbs, or too many carbs in combination with too much sugar.

So should you be an unapologetic low carb paleo model eating whacko like I am?  I don't know.  It's up to you to decide.  Give it a shot.  See if you like not being hungry, and see if you belly gets smaller and your blood sugars get under control.  See if you feel good, and perform well.  If these things line up  you will have run the best and most scientific test that can be run for your own health and well being.

Processed Food

I saw this loaf of no kidding "whole grain" bread in the local superstore last night.  Most of the 

"experts" will at the same time encourage you to avoid processed foods (they are the latest iteration of "the devil"), but eat all the "whole grains" you can stuff into your pie hole.  

Well, I'm still waiting for their explanation for why this isn't a processed food.  

Because you know, I know, and anyone with an IQ above the average lineman's jersey number knows you will never eat this crap as a bud from a wheat plant.  And the reason every culture since the start of agriculture removed the part of the wheat that is removed to make "refined wheat" is that it goes bad, quickly.  IOW - the whole part of the whole grains has a shelf life that is short, so if you want it to be edible at all on a supermarket shelf you have to preserve through processing.  

And after a lot of searching I can still find no credible explanation for why whole grains are such a great thing to eat - the claimed benefit in glycemic load?  Mythical, as any glycemic index chart will show.  There's some crazy stuff in the nutrition world, and the whole grain issues is right up there at the top of the list of what is bass ackwards.

Disclaimer - if you like this stuff and enjoy how it makes you feel, good for you.  My intended audience is those folks who want to make a change because they are no longer happy with how they feel or look or perform.  No offense intended to those of you who are happy processed whole grain gluttons.