More Exercise, Less Mortality. "?"

""Exercise may be as good as drugs for heart disease, diabetesDec. 14, 2013 at 2:01 AM

Dec. 14 (UPI) -- A meta-analysis found exercise may be as effective as drugs in helping patients with strokes, diabetes and heart disease, British and U.S. researchers say.

Researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Harvard Medical School, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute in Boston and Stanford University School of Medicine in California conducted a meta-analysis of 305 research projects involving 340,000 patients diagnosed with one of four diseases: heart disease, chronic heart failure, stroke or pre-diabetes.

The researchers compared the mortality rates of those prescribed medication for common serious health conditions, with 57 studies involving 15,000 volunteers enrolled in exercise programs.

The findings, published in the British Medical Journal, found medication worked best for those with heart failure, but physical activity was at least as effective as the drugs which were normally prescribed for borderline diabetes, heart disease and might be better for stroke.

Although exercise seemed to be more effective than drug interventions in stroke rehabilitation, and diuretics seemed to be more effective than exercise interventions in heart failure treatment, these findings should be interpreted with caution given the scarceness of data and the different settings involved, the researchers wrote in the study.

Despite research suggesting regular physical activity could be "quite potent" in improving survival odds, but until more studies are done, patients should not stop taking their medications without taking medical advice, the researchers warned.""

These study results are very interesting.  The confounders:  What type of exercise?  How did they control for factors such as: those who eat the worst, highest carb diets, will feel the worst and will have the greatest inflammation, and so will likely exercise least.  IOW - the study would not detest that perhaps those who work out more often are the ones who already eat better than those who do not work out.  

In my experience, exercise if of minimal benefit if one's interest is simply fat loss.  To get the fat off your belly, you have to change how you eat.  But exercise is GREAT if you want to feel better, live better, and absolutely essential if you want to have a chance to end this ride on your own terms.

This abstract was forwarded to me by Dr. Lowell Gerber, you can learn about his fascinating cardiology practice here:

www.youngerleanerme.com

Crossfit Masters - Inspired and Inspiring!

Mike Eades, On Target

When I was a kid, I loved my maternal grandfather so much it hurt. He got sick once, and I started worrying that he might die. (He was in his mid sixties at the time, but he seemed old as a rock to me.) I stressed over the loss of him mightily. And must have looked really down in the mouth. Finally he asked me what was wrong. Why was I moping around? I told him that I was worried that he might die. He said to me, ‘Mike, don’t worry about that. I’m going to live until you’re way up in college.’ (He actually made it until I was 30.) I can’t tell you how much relief flooded over my young self on hearing those words. (It never occurred to me, of course, that he really couldn’t predict such a thing, but since I trusted him implicitly, I was assured of his long survival.)

I know my grandchildren feel the same about me. So, I don’t want to live a long time just so I’ll be around to watch them grow up – I want to live a long time so I’ll be there for them.

Thinking this way helps keep things in perspective, and it makes it a whole lot easier to avoid eating what I shouldn’t eat.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/meditating-in-the-garden-of-self-loathing/

Brilliant post by Dr. Eades, and thanks to him.  I recommend you read the entire post.  We are all swimming in this pool in one way or another. 

"Better today than yesterday, better tomorrow than today."

CrossFit: Coach thyself — 4 tips on how to build good form and improve technique | PT365

Big gyms and good coaches are nice, Werner says, but you can do a lot to learn and refine basic technique on your on own, or with buddies in your unit.

“In the military especially, you typically have groups of guys working out together. They can do a very nice job of coaching each other. You don’t have to have an expert, outside coach,” he says. “Those are handy when you can get them, but not mandatory.”

Some of Werner’s tips to help you get started.

Train each other

Film yourself

Pay attention to the details 

Listen to the warning signs 

http://blogs.militarytimes.com/pt365/2013/12/11/crossfit-coach-thyself-4-tips-on-how-to-build-good-form-and-improve-technique/

This is a great little write up, I recommend you read it all.

I've met Dave, he used CrossFit to rebuild himself.  He's a very intense, very awesome gentleman.  I was in his gym when it was just transitioning to a new location - awesome to hear he has 500 members!

Notes to a Friend

It's invaluable to have a doc you can trust and yet, doctors have been saying cholesterol and fat intake is the problem in our diet, and that is factually incorrect. The medical profession lost their authority when they abandoned science, which never confirmed that cholesterol CAUSED heart disease.  Cholesterol is a weak predictor of disease, there is almost no benefit to mortality reduction from fat restriction.  The benefits of carb restriction are no longer disputable. I don't know how to help you except to say doctors are as human as any of us, and they no longer have access to more info than you and I do. I know you want to trust your doctor. I would to.

There are two things that may affect the "want a cookie" experience.  One is falling blood sugar - that probably triggers a habitual need for something to stop that from proceeding to blood sugar crash.  That's part of the sugar addiction cycle.  The other part is just an association to pleasure.  The unconscious mind (UCM) always wants to feel pleasure, avoid pain, that is what it does for you.  If cookies distract from pain (and think of the whole cookie eating experience is loaded with guilt, pleasure, surprise, taste, disappointment if its a bad one, etc - these are all great distractions), anytime the UCM can get away from pain by having you eat a cookie.  Obviously that's a short term win, long term loss for "net pain."  

In either case, the way to attenuate the impulse is to have something you can eat that does not derail your blood sugar, but that you like.  This can take a while to find since it's so different for each person.  I use coconut/macadamia nut in a spoon, or coconut and sunflower seeds.  When I'm as lean as I am now, I use coconut on dark chocolate (70% or more).  Sometimes, an egg or avocado will do it (avocado, with salt and champagne vinegar).  Bacon is good too!  Anything that is high in fat and tastes good to you will work.  Over time, this does two things.  One, you don't pit yourself against your hunger or your UCM - that's a losing formula.  Two, you dilute the association between pleasure and cookies.  Three, by not eating cookies it gives your liver time to heal and start processing carbs like it is supposed to

Q: Why would blood sugar be an issue when I'm eating good food?
A:  Hard to know.  Possibly - body expects a sugar bomb every time you eat, prepares by pumping insulin.  That's just a body habit like pavlov's dog, it will stop after eating "right" for long enough

There's a whole part of physiology that goes wrong for folks who eat carbs and especially sugar habitually.  Fat burning enzymes are a use it or lose it prospect, just like everything else in the body.  Your muscles and other tissues run well on fat except for the brain and a few other tissues.  When you don't use fat burning enzymes, the stores of these enzymes decrease.  Then, when you don't eat for a while, you can't convert to fat burning for very long.  The trick to get these stores back up to normal is to deprive your body of exogenous sugar for long enough that the body has to run on fat and rebuild the stores of enzymes in the process.  This can take 1-3 weeks.  It can also feel bad - plus, as you reduce your carb intake, your chronic insulin levels go down, and that allows your tissues to flush excess fluids.  That cycle means you can get low on electrolytes like potassium, sodium and magnesium.  Even moderate dehydration can make a person hungry.  As you eat for health, initially, you have to deliberately drink more water with electrolytes (Smart Water is a good commercial product that does this).  

This is why the "extreme" low carb diets work especially well for reversing metabolic syndrome/diabetes - they keep blood sugar levels so low for so long that the body regains insulin sensitivity, and the liver can get rid of excess liver fat.  This allows the liver to regain insulin sensitivity too.  However, the dehydration/electrolytes issue can be very uncomfortable.  I wouldn't necessarily recommend this for you - your body needs the break from carbs so it can heal, but the heart rhythm issues could be worse in the short term due to electrolyte fluctuations.  You'd need to sip smart water all day long.  Once you get through the 3 week fat burning adaptation period, the appetite regulation, blood sugar regulation, better sleep, rapid weight loss (and all while eating a high fat snack anytime you feel hungry or just feel an impulse to eat) is amazing.  But it's super hard to do by yourself or if you have other demands (work, for example).  Much easier if you are doing this with others.  This is why CF can work so well for lifestyle change - community.

Part of the reason this is important to know is it explains why the idea of no bread no beans no corn tortillas seems so hard - you probably cannot burn fat so you have a true metabolic need for exogenous carbs.  That doesn't always have to be that way, getting fat adapted changes that.

Eat meat, vegetables, nuts/seeds, little fruit/starch, no sugar/wheat, and all the fat you can shove down your pie hole.

American Council on Exercise study: CrossFit Works! | PT365

“You look at the intensity of CrossFit and it’s off the charts,” says lead researcher John P. Porcari, head of the university’s Clinical Exercise Physiology program. While workouts were completed in less than 12 minutes, subjects still burned an average of 115.8 calories while nearly maxing out VO2  measurements and spiking blood lactate to more than three times the average.

“The thing we’ve seen with a lot of these workouts is you go flat-out as fast as you can, but then your form falls apart. You really need to be technically correct with a lot of these exercises or else you’re going to get hurt,” Porcari says. “And it’s nice to be competitive with other CrossFitters, but at what point are you pushing yourself outside the realm of safety?”

The findings are certainly no surprise to Dave Werner.

“For those two WODs, 80 percent of VO2 Max sounds about right,” Werner says. “That means those guys are pushing nearly as a hard as they can.”

http://blogs.militarytimes.com/pt365/2013/12/06/american-council-on-exercise-study-crossfit-works/

The interesting thing about the technique comment is, that while it's all true, it's not the simple thing that one would think.  Technique is never perfect, and you can get a lot of fitness from CrossFit with some fairly rotten technique.  Better technique is better, but doing it "wrong" is better than not doing it at all.  

Why Dirt Matters to Your Health | Soil Quality

Dr. Miller cites research in her article that all point in the same direction—healthy "living" soils make for food with better nutrient content. And by "living," I mean soils that are teeming with microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and microscopic roundworms called nematodes.

Far from being scourges to be avoided at all cost, microorganisms are an essential component of life. We now understand that it is the cooperationbetween these microorganisms, the soil's biome, and the plants' roots, called rhizosphere that is ultimately responsible for allowing the plant to absorb nutrients from the soil in which it's grown.

Insects and weeds also have their place in this circle of life. According to soil scientist Dr. Arden Andersen, insects are nature's garbage collectors. Thanks to their specialized digestive systems, which differ from ours, they remove that which is not fit for us to eat—things we cannot digest.

And weeds are nature's way of evolving the soil—it's an intermediate plant that mobilizes nutrients in order to alter the soil, making it more suitable for the next evolutionary level of plants to grow in it.

Once you understand this natural cycle, it allows you to address food quality, weeds, insects, and plant disease at its point of origination, without ever resorting to chemical herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, synthetic fertilizers, or genetic engineering.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/12/23/soil-quality.aspx?e_cid=20131223Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20131223Z1&et_cid=DM37600&et_rid=376552673

Understanding about the bugs - in your gut and in the soil your food comes from - is going to be the next wave in understanding how to be a thriving human being.